That used to be the mantra. Now nobody mentions it. Trump should not be allowed to claim that he had the best economy the world has ever seen. It wasn’t bad, at least until the pandemic, which he made worse.His trade policies were destructive and he was basically riding on the belated recovery of the Obama years. But this one is better. Way better. Trump is testing his ability to persuade people to once again believe him or their lying eyes. It certainly works very well on the cult and no doubt will be successful. The question is whether or not he has the power to make people who don’t support him believe the same. A lot of that depends on the media. If they step up we might be ok.
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I don’t know that we can afford to be ecstatically optimistic but it is important to hear the positive case for the Democrats. It’s demoralizing to watch the news and constantly be told that Biden is toast. So here’s Simon Rosenberg’s final 2023 Hopium Chronicle. It’s New Year’s Eve. Enjoy it. The hard work starts day after tomorrow: A Positive, Upbeat End to 2023 – Dow in record territory. Inflation running below the Fed target rate. Interest rates coming down next year. GDP growth 4.9% last quarter, looking close to 3% for this one. Best job market since the 1960s. The lowest uninsured rate in history. Crime has fallen across the US this year, rents are coming down too. Consumer sentiment is spiking. Wage growth, prime age worker participation rate and new business formation are all in historically elevated territory. Best recovery in the G7. US setting records for domestic oil and renewable production. $130b in student debt forgiven. The good news just keeps coming. Democrats are also seeing improvement in national polling. A majority of the independent polls taken in recent weeks have Biden tied or ahead.
Sometimes animals save us as we save them They need us and we need them: Some say they were first brought in to take out the rats. Others contend they wandered in on their own. What everyone can agree on — including those who have lived or worked at Chile’s largest prison the longest — is that the cats were here first. For decades, they have walked along the prison’s high walls, sunbathed on the metal roof and skittered between cells crowded with 10 men each. To prison officials, they were a peculiarity of sorts, and mostly ignored. The cats kept multiplying into the hundreds. Then prison officials realized something else: The feline residents were not only good for the rat problem. They were also good for the inmates. “They’re our companions,” said Carlos Nuñez, a balding prisoner showing off a 2-year-old tabby he named Feita, or Ugly, from behind prison bars. While caring for multiple cats during his 14-year sentence for home burglary, he said he discovered their special essence, compared with, say, a cellmate or even a dog. “A cat makes you worry about it, feed it, take care of it, give it special attention,” he said.
Yes, they’ll howl. The Truth hurts. A couple of items this morning remind us what lies ahead. There’s dread and there’s hopium, depending on how one reads the tea leaves. Roy Edroso considers the rise of Unpopularism. Republicans have decided that their path to power is to give people what they don’t want: I talk a lot about abortion rights here for a bunch of reasons, but the relevant one here is the lengthening string of goose-eggs Republicans have suffered in the repro rights referenda that came after they destroyed Roe v Wade. Even in Kansas and Ohio they couldn’t win. Yes, a few right-wing pundits who survived Covid with their olfactories intact can smell the stink that isn’t issuing from Trump’s Depends, but they are the exceptions. Their pro-life palaver started as a sop to one specific religious constituency, but over time it has become the symbol of the Republican Party’s whole anti-choice, anti-consent, anti-democratic ethos.
Couldn’t say it better Happy New Year’s! Preview of November 6, 2024: (h/t @JuliusGoat@mastodon.social)
The historian Arno Mayer, who had such an influence on my work and eventually became a friend, has died at 97. He wrote books on everything from the French Revolution to the First World War to the Holocaust to the creation of the State of Israel. He was one of a cohort of brilliant scholars at Princeton University who made the study of history, in which I majored as an undergraduate in the 1980s, the most exciting discipline and department in the world. I have a tribute to him at the New Left Review. Some excerpts: Mayer liked to attribute his in-betweenness to being born Jewish in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The child of a marginal people in a […]
The new first principle of politics The Games of the XXXIII Olympiad take place in Paris in July 2024. The organizers periodically add new events and remove others from sports that have fallen out of use/favor. Not having checked to see if that’s happened for the upcoming Olympics, I have a suggestion for a new event. Credit where due, David Frum inspired the idea. Frum (indirectly) identifies in The Atlantic the dominant principle held by the Party of Trump: flexibility. “Flexibility is the first principle of politics,” Richard Nixon once advised a staffer and, hoo-boy, are Republicans flexible.* Frum provides a few examples where the Trump faithful nimbly pivot whenever it suits them. There’s a new first principle on the block. Point out where Republicans benefit from and leverage our system’s anti-majoritarian features to engineer for themselves permanent minority rule? We’re a republic, not a democracy. States rule that Donald Trump, post-insurrection, is ineligible under the 14th Amendment to hold public office in any capacity? Let the people decide!
Teach Yellow Dogs new tricks Even if a Democrat wins the White House in November 2024, we could a year from now be sitting on pins and needles wondering if Coup 2.0 is in the works. Watching the January 6, 2021 insurrection unfold may have been the most harrowing day in the lives of ordinary Americans who’ve never served in combat. One wonders if Trump country watched with beer and pretzels as if it was the Super Bowl halftime show. In any event, the Department of Justice, D.C. and Capitol Police, and nearby national guard units, will be anxious as well, and better prepared. There’s a lot to do between now and then. You help keep me/us sane by reading our daily rants. Thank you so very much for that and for your support. I don’t say it enough, thank God for readers: [T]his blog’s proprietor, began writing here New Year’s Day 2003 after attracting a following at Atrios’s blog. She wrote that being invited to write by Atrios was “kind of like having Eddie Van Halen invite you up on stage to join him in a guitar solo.” That’s how I felt when Digby invited me to join her in August 2014.
We’d better hope not Jack Smith’s office has been working over the holiday and they’ve dropped quite a filing responding to Trump’s claim of immunity. The consequences of the court granting it are dire: Special counsel Jack Smith warned in a new filing Saturday that ex-President Donald Trump’s bid for immunity could “license presidents to commit crimes to remain in office.” The brief lodged in the D.C. Court of Appeals came in response to the ex-president’s claims that he is immune to prosecution for his efforts to undo his 2020 defeat because he survived an impeachment proceeding in the Senate, and because his plotting fell within the powers and duties of his office. If these arguments—which District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected earlier this month—won out, a president could commit crimes freely so long as he threw up sufficient hurdles to keep two-thirds of U.S. senators from voting to remove him, Smith said.