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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Farewell and Godspeed, Mr. President [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-16
We begin today with Alys Davies of BBC News and her overview of last night’s farewell address delivered by President Joe Biden from the Oval Office.
Speaking from the Oval Office where his family had gathered to watch, he touted his single-term administration's record, referencing job creation, infrastructure spending, healthcare, leading the country out of the pandemic, and making the US a safer country. He added, however, that "it will take time to feel the full impact of all we've done together, but the seeds are planted, and they'll grow and they'll bloom for decades to come". Biden wished Donald Trump's incoming administration success, but then issued a series of pointed warnings, with the president stating "so much is at stake right now". On climate change, he said "powerful forces want to wield their unchecked influence to eliminate the steps we've taken to tackle the climate crisis to serve their own interests for power and profit". On misinformation, Biden warned that "Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power".
Anthony L. Fisher of MSNBC liked Biden’s overt allusion to the 1961 farewell address of President Eisenhower by mentioning and defining the “tech-industrial complex.”
Biden warned of “the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex” and of “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people.” He said, “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.” It was a clear echo of President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address to the nation — during which the former supreme commander of the Allied forces in World War II presciently warned his fellow Americans about the growing “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex.”He didn’t name names, but it’s safe to assume one of the people Biden likened to “robber barons” is Elon Musk — who spent over a quarter-billion dollars on Trump’s campaign, who personally led the charge to kill a Republican-negotiated spending deal last month, who is already influencing policy in a way that benefits his businesses and who reportedly will have his own office in Trump’s White House. Using the phrase “tech-industrial complex” was most likely a conscious choice by Biden’s speechwriters — a direct response to Musk and his MAGA allies, who said the Biden administration’s jawboning of social media companies during the Covid pandemic made them leaders of a “censorship industrial complex.” (Those same self-styled free speech warriors have been curiously silent about jawboning of social media and tech companies by Trump’s pick for chair of the Federal Communication Commission just last month.)
Jess Bidgood of The New York Times says that in terms of domestic policy, progressives, on the whole, were surprisingly pleased with the Biden Administration.
Comparing a one-term president to F.D.R. might be a little like comparing me, your humble newsletter writer, to Shakespeare or Robert Caro. But it’s an example of the kind of lofty praise for Biden that has been emanating from a corner of his party that would have seemed unimaginable for much of his career: the left. “When it comes to domestic policy, President Biden probably would go down as one of the most effective presidents that centered the working class,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, told me this afternoon, although she added that she disagreed deeply with him on foreign policy issues such as the war in Gaza. [...] Biden’s allies point to the trillions of dollars his administration pumped into recovering from the coronavirus pandemic, rebuilding infrastructure and addressing climate change, and to his push to re-industrialize the nation with measures like the CHIPs bill. He was the first sitting president to join workers on a picket line; he canceled student loan debt for five million borrowers; and his administration took aggressive steps to curb corporate power.
Harry Litman writes for The New Republic that criticism of outgoing Attorney General Merrick Garland for slow-walking the Trump cases is unwarranted.
The storyline that Garland let moss grow on the investigation—some say until Jack Smith came aboard, others until the work of the January 6 committee embarrassed the department—doesn’t gibe with even the publicly available evidence, which likely will be supplemented over time with details that we still don’t know. Within days of being sworn in as attorney general on March 11, 2021, Garland gathered prosecutors from several divisions working on any aspect of the Trump investigations and instructed them to “follow the connective tissue upward”—i.e., to follow the money in pursuit of connections between the January 6 marauders and Team Trump. Garland charged the entire team to proceed without restrictions, even if it led to Trump. The money line of investigation didn’t bear fruit, but it made sense to pursue. More important for the Garland critics, it shows that Garland and his deputy, Lisa Monaco, were focused on the Trump trail from day one. Critics also argue that Garland merely piggybacked on the January 6 committee’s work, implying that the panel’s efforts spurred the DOJ into action and that its investigative work was derivative. Not so. Documents cited in the January 6 indictment were not included in the committee’s report. Furthermore, as Marcy Wheeler has documented, before Smith came aboard, the Department obtained phones seized for the indictment—including those of Boris Epshteyn and Mike Roman.
On the other hand, Dean Obeidallah writes for his Substack, “The Dean’s Report,” that AG Garland should have appointed a special counsel for the Trump cases as soon as he was sworn into office in 2021.
How Trump is not in prison for these crimes is one of the gravest injustices of our lifetimes. But the only reason—and I mean only reason---Trump is not being held accountable is because Garland delayed the investigation into Trump for more than one year after the Jan. 6 attack. I have written and slammed Garland’s delay many times in the past beginning in 2022 and continuing to literally today. As we learned from NY Times reporting in July 2022, Garland had not focused on Trump’s role in the attempted coup and Jan. 6 attack until former White House staffer Cassidy Hutchinson testified publicly before the House Jan 6 committee. That testimony in June 2022 tying Trump directly to the attack reportedly finally “jolted” Garland and the DOJ into action to examine Trump’s role. (It’s impossible to believe DOJ with their vast resources were unaware of these facts until that testimony.) [...] Trump was not holding rallies to simply spend time out of the house, he was obviously running for President in 2024! That is why Garland should have swiftly appointed a special counsel after being sworn in. As a reminder, it took Smith only nine months from his appointment to charge Trump. That means if Garland had appointed a Special Counsel when he took office--even with the GOP Supreme Court delaying the case-Trump is on trial in late 2023/early 2024 and convicted based on the tsunami of evidence against him.
Peter Wehner of The Atlantic says that the relative indifference being paid to the Jack Smith final report on the tacky shoe salesman’s criminal activities is evidence of the country’s overall indifference, especially in light of the election results.
But the fact that the incoming president was indicted on charges that constitute the most serious attack by a chief executive against American democracy in our history may not be the most notable thing about this story. The most notable thing is that, already, more Americans seem to be discussing the Los Angeles fires, Babygirl, and Pete Hegseth’s nomination to be secretary of defense than Smith’s report. Within a matter of days, the report, which very few people will read, will be more or less forgotten. I understand why. The central role Trump played in the effort to violently overturn the election has been known for four years, so the core findings of the special counsel’s report are hardly news. In addition, much of the public has been worn down by the relentless intensity of the Trump era. MAGA world may draw energy and meaning from incessant conflict; the rest of us do not. After a particularly crude and ugly campaign, most people want to take a break from politics, including those whose vocation is politics. Nor are most Americans, including fierce Trump critics, particularly interested in relitigating the past. Trump was a known commodity to voters; his maliciousness and corrupt character were on display virtually every day. And yet, Trump won the popular vote—the first Republican to do so in two decades—and he easily won the Electoral College. Trump’s ethic represents the American ethic, at least for now.
Hamilton Nolan writes for his “How Things Work” Substack that someday in the future, Americans will have to give up on one of their most cherished myths.
The estimates for the direct cost of the Los Angeles fires, which are still burning, range from $20 billion to $50 billion, though California’s governor says they may end up being the most expensive disaster in US history when the full damages are tallied. Six of the ten most expensive wildland fires in American history happened in the past decade, and six of the ten most expensive disasters in American history (most of them storms) happened in the past decade as well. Those records are sure to become even more lopsided in the near future. Globally, disasters caused $320 billion in damages in 2024, a third higher than in 2023. The year that just ended was the hottest one on record. That is another record that won’t last long. The world has exceeded the 1.5-degree level of warming above preindustrial levels that was once viewed as a hard limit by climate activists. News of that failure came at the same time that CEOs of America’s most powerful finance companies were busy announcing that they are withdrawing from the UN climate coalition they all rushed to join when joining was viewed as something that came with political benefits. From LA to Wall Street, everybody is watching which way the winds are blowing. [...] For Americans, the hardest part of what is coming is going to be giving up on the grand American myth of infinite material abundance. The classic vision of the American dream—the house, the yard, the driveway with a big car for everyone—is going to have to go away, by necessity. It will not go quietly. Americans regard these things not as temporary byproducts of a particular age of global capitalism that cannot last, but rather as human rights. Much of the confounding Trumpian tendency to celebrate big trucks and more oil drilling and other things we know are bad for us is simply a child’s gut reaction to being told that we cannot have that lollipop, after all. Politically speaking, we are in the tantrum phase of the climate transition. This is understandable, on an emotional level; the sweet promise of abundance has long been the thing that soothed the public’s disgust with inequality. But we can’t allow ourselves to linger in this period. The longer we wallow in resentment and denial, the longer we put off the hard work of adaptation, and the more difficult and costly the adaptation becomes. Every time you see a politician telling voters they can damn well have a big McMansion with icy air conditioning and a Ford F-450 and cheap gas and a new highway to reach their new suburban development, take a moment to imagine how those voters will feel when the AC bills skyrocket, and the gas prices soar, and the heat kills the grass, and the overloaded electrical grid flickers, and the defunded public services mean that there is no one to come save them when the trees catch fire. We are not doing anyone any favors by denying reality.
The United States of America’s voters as a collective “King Baby”...that was one of the bigger themes of this past election, IMO.
Chris Geidner of LawDork thinks that the Texas law mandating internet age-verification will probably be sent back to the Fifth Circuit so that proper scrutiny can be applied.
While crafting a majority opinion could be difficult, it appeared most likely that the answer to that question will be, as it has been, that strict scrutiny applies — a ruling that would make it difficult, but not impossible in this context, for Texas to defend the law when lower courts re-consider the question. In spite of decades of internet case law applying strict scrutiny to internet speech restrictions, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit last year held that the Texas law was only subject to rational basis review — the lowest level of review — based on a 1968 decision, Ginsberg v. New York, that preceded the internet. As such, it found that the law’s requirement that websites with more than one-third of their content being “sexual material harmful to minors” verify the age of visitors was likely constitutional. By the time the arguments in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton ended at the Supreme Court at a little past noon, however, it appeared that most of the court was ready, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson put it, to “just say, wrong standard, Fifth Circuit, and send it back” for review under the proper standard. (The exception could be Justice Sam Alito, perhaps naturally, who appeared most comfortable with the lower court’s decision.)
David Folkenflik of NPR reports on the continuing turmoil within the newsroom of The Washington Post.
The appointment of a new executive editor was botched. A killed presidential endorsement led hundreds of thousands of subscribers to cancel. Top reporters and editors left. Scandals involving Lewis' actions as a news executive years ago in the U.K. reemerged. A clear vision to secure the Post's financial future remains elusive. Frustration boiled over on Tuesday night. More than 400 Post journalists, including some editors, signed a petition asking Bezos to intervene. [...] The tech titan's business interests, including Amazon Web Services and the space company Blue Origin, receive billions of dollars from federal contracts. He's given $1 million toward Trump's inauguration costs and traveled to Mar-a-Lago with his fiancée to meet with the president-elect. Amazon Studios agreed to pay Melania Trump millions of dollars for a documentary project about her, according to Puck News. Come Monday, Bezos is expected to join Trump advisor Elon Musk and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg on the inauguration platform itself. After blocking publication of the Post's endorsement of Harris, Bezos admitted that he, with his many enterprises, was a "complexifier" for the paper. But he said those interests had nothing to do with his decision, instead pointing to plummeting public trust in the media.
Casey Newton writes for the “Platformer” Substack that prior to their Jan. 7 announcement of ending fact-checking on its platforms, Meta was already working behind the scenes to dismantle systems that prevented the spread of misinformation.
Behind the scenes, the company was also quietly dismantling a system to prevent the spread of misinformation. When the company announced on Jan. 7 that it would end its fact-checking partnerships, the company also instructed teams responsible for ranking content in the company’s apps to stop penalizing misinformation, according to sources and an internal document obtained by Platformer. The result is that the sort of viral hoaxes that ran roughshod over the platform during the 2016 US presidential election — “Pope Francis endorses Trump,” Pizzagate, and all the rest— are now just as eligible for free amplification on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads as true stories. In 2016, of course, Meta hadn’t yet invested huge sums in machine-learning classifiers that can spot when a piece of viral content is likely a hoax. But nine years later, after the company’s own analyses found that these classifiers could reduce the reach of these hoaxes by more than 90 percent, Meta is shutting them off. [...] In hindsight, this turned out to be the first step toward killing off Meta’s misinformation efforts: granting hoaxes a temporary window for expanded reach while they awaited fact checking.
Erin McCormick and Verónica García de León of the Guardian write an exclusive pointing to the increasing amounts of toxic waste sent from the U.S. to Canada and Mexico.
Exports of toxic waste, most of which is shipped to Mexico and Canada, have climbed 17% since 2018, US records show. And while sending it away for recycling and disposal is legal, some experts are concerned that more and more of America’s most dangerous discards are leaving the country. In the Monterrey metropolitan area in Mexico, the investigation has uncovered high levels of lead, cadmium, and arsenic in homes and schools around a plant that recycles toxic dust produced by the US steel industry. Other huge quantities of waste go to Mexico to battery-recycling plants that experts worry are fouling the air and exposing workers to dangerous heavy metals. In Quebec, Canada, children and adults who live near a smelter that processes electronic waste, including materials from Silicon Valley and other US locations, have been found to have high levels of arsenic in their fingernails. At another Quebec site, some of the toxic waste is buried in giant cells near a peat bog.
Ironic, to say the very least.
Chaim Levinson of Haaretz says that with an apparent cease-fire in the Gaza War, the incoming Trump Administration wants to focus on a regional agreement that includes Saudi Arabia.
Trump, as Bardugo pointed out, does indeed have a plan – a regional arrangement led by Saudi Arabia. Netanyahu has been given two options: to accept the outline gladly and willingly, or to accept it sadly and regretfully. Both lead to the same place. Too many foreign parties are involved in the deal that will be announced: Turkey, Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and, of course, the United States. None of those went into the thick of things just to have fighting resumed in a month, minus 30 hostages. Everybody is here for the grand deal. Right-wingers had better carefully listen to Wednesday's remarks by the incoming U.S. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz on Dan Senor's podcast. He called Saudi-Israeli normalization "a huge priority," saying: "It's the next round of the Abraham Accords. I've always kind of felt like this current administration shifted their language to call it normalization rather than what it is, which is, I think, a tremendous historic region-changing agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel," Waltz said, adding that this was why Iran sent Hamas to blow it up. "So, that is the objective," Waltz said, "Let's eliminate these terrorist organizations. And then let's start talking political solutions, economic solutions. I want to, by the end of President Trump's term, to be talking about infrastructure projects, water, rail, fiber, data centers."
One thing that Biden and Trump foreign policy had in common was getting to an Israel-Saudi Arabia deal.
Finally today, Timothy Garton Ash writes for the Guardian that global opinion polls show the fear of the incoming Trump Administration may be largely confined to Europe.
Russia and China are now revisionist great powers, which aim to change or overthrow the existing order, while middle powers like Turkey, Brazil and South Africa are happy to play with all sides. This is also a world of wars – in Ukraine, the Middle East and Sudan. Most Europeans carry on pretty much as if we still lived in late 20th-century peacetime, but the world around us increasingly resembles the late 19th-century Europe of fiercely competing great powers and empires writ large. For the geopolitical stage is now planetary, and most of the players are non-western states. Trump’s United States is likely to behave more like those other transactional great powers than like, say, Germany or Sweden. These harsh realities are illuminated by a 24-country global opinion poll just released by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). The survey is designed in collaboration with the Europe in a Changing World research project at Oxford University, which I have been involved in since its inception, and is the third we have done since 24 February 2022, when Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine ended the post-Wall era. Here are just a few findings that may have you spluttering into your coffee. Many people in the world beyond Europe welcome Trump’s arrival, saying it will be good for their country, for world peace, and specifically for achieving peace in Ukraine and the Middle East. Majorities believe all these things in India and Saudi Arabia, and majorities or pluralities – depending on the specific question – in China, Brazil, South Africa and Russia. In fact, Europe and South Korea (which, like Europe, is dependent for its security on the US) stand almost alone in the degree of their worry about the impact of Trump.
Try to have the best possible day everyone, no matter how difficult that day may be.
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