Nearly fifteen years after we invaded, we’re still ‘winning.’
Jamie Crawford, “Taliban leader Mullah Mansour likely killed in airstrike, U.S. officials say,” CNN, May 21, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/21/politics/u-s-conducted-airstrike-against-taliban-leader-mullah-mansour/index.html
Updated for a Politico story analyzing recent poll data showing Donald Trump closing the gap between him and Hillary Clinton.[1]
There were a couple stories yesterday that didn’t quite make my cut for putting out one of these postings. They are included today.
It’s really starting to feel like this is the end for Bernie Sanders’ campaign. The outrage I’m seeing on social media from his supporters resembles that of neoconservatives in denial that their party is about to nominate Donald Trump. Sanders’ supporters are furious, and I think they have cause to be. But it’s always the same thing: The Other Guy Is Worse. So many of them, probably more of them than there even are neoconservatives, will indeed vote for Hillary Clinton.
Will this be enough to ensure her victory come November? I’m not so sure. For one thing, we really still don’t know what the FBI is going to decide about Clinton’s email server. The investigation is probably more serious than Clinton’s campaign makes it out to be.[2] There will be controversy no matter which decision the Department of Justice makes on an indictment.[3] And some folks, myself included, just aren’t buying arguments that Clinton shouldn’t be charged.[4] These claims simply don’t pass the smell test. And if they do indict her, it’s unclear how Democrats find their way out of this mess, if they even can.[5]
Another thing is Donald Trump appears to be closing the gap between him and Clinton. Part of this is that Republicans are coalescing around him in opposition to Clinton. It remains to be seen if Clinton will benefit similarly when and if she finally defeats Sanders, but for now, “[t]he Gallup data show Clinton sliding among Democrats: She dropped four points in the week between Gallup’s two most recent surveys.”[6] This is the thing: Trump won’t become any more unpopular than he already is. I think Clinton still has a lot to lose.
The real problem is that all of the arguments I’ve previously offered suggesting she cannot win against Trump really still stand. She’s a terrible and highly unpopular candidate. Even her supporters recognize this.[7] She has looked strong at least in part because the Republicans had not coalesced around a single candidate.[8] And the one thing that’s clear is that even for many of those Sanders’ supporters who vote for Clinton out of disdain for Trump, she is a distant second choice.
Kevin Gosztola, “Establishment Collectively Stunned To See Citizens Reject Rigged Democratic Primary,” Common Dreams, May 20, 2016, http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/05/20/establishment-collectively-stunned-see-citizens-reject-rigged-democratic-primary
Steven Shepard, “Why Donald Trump’s poll numbers are surging,” Politico, May 20, 2016, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/donald-trump-poll-surge-223419
The University of Missouri responded to the American Association of University Professors report on its firing of Melissa Click.[9] Some of their points are the same as what I posted in my blog entry. But not all of them.
Peter Schmidt, “AAUP Accuses U. of Missouri System of Violating Melissa Click’s Rights,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 19, 2016, http://chronicle.com/article/AAUP-Accuses-U-of-Missouri/236527
Uber is testing a self-driving car in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where driving conditions are more difficult[10] than those where I am aware of Google conducting its testing. Google has been testing in suburban places like Mountain View, California, and Chandler, Arizona. Pittsburgh is an actual city.
Andrew J . Hawkins, “Meet Uber’s first self-driving car,” Verge, May 19, 2016, http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/19/11711890/uber-first-image-self-driving-car-pittsburgh-ford-fusion
As William Rivers Pitt puts it, “Vegas will tell you all you need to know about how easy it is to run the table when the fix is in.”[1] It’s yet another episode in a rigged contest[2] that should make it crystal clear that the Democratic Party will not be a vehicle even for desperately needed change for the foreseeable future. Of course, I’ve been saying that for a while, since 2005, in fact, when I looked back at the 2004 Kerry-Edwards platform and saw how little difference there was between it and a Republican platform. But no, nobody believes me.
William Rivers Pitt, “Naked Politics: Sanders, Clinton and How to Win When You’re Losing,” Truthout, May 18, 2016, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/36090-naked-politics-sanders-clinton-and-how-to-win-when-you-re-losing
Updated for the Democratic National Committee discovering that Bernie Sanders’ supporters might not be so easily soothed.
Marcus Walker, “IMF Proposal on Greece Sets Up Battle With Germany,” Wall Street Journal, May 17, 2016, http://www.wsj.com/articles/imf-wants-eurozone-debt-relief-for-greece-until-2040-1463468493
Ed O’Keefe and David Weigel, “Some conservatives are still plotting to stop Trump at the GOP convention,” Washington Post, May 16, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/some-conservatives-are-still-plotting-to-stop-trump-at-the-gop-convention/2016/05/16/117166ee-1954-11e6-9e16-2e5a123aac62_story.html
This really should be no surprise.[1]
Daniel Strauss, “Sanders sticks it to the Democratic Party,” Politico, May 17, 2016, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/bernie-sanders-democratic-party-223280
This was written by a foreign politician who may lean capitalist libertarian, but I found the article via a National Review columnist. The National Review, you may recall, very publicly denounced Donald Trump[1] and is now in a bit of a pickle because they also despise Hillary Clinton. But at this late date, it appears exceedingly unlikely there will be an independent candidate.[2] So they really are stuck.
Dan Hannan, “The real reason Donald Trump is unfit to be president,” Washington Examiner, May 16, 2016, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-real-reason-donald-trump-is-unfit-to-be-president/article/2591147
I finally managed to put my dissertation on line in HTML format. The PDF has been available for a while, but getting an HTML version was a bit more complicated. As I was going through, trying to catch as many of the conversion errors as I could, I found yet more typos. Typos that survived my own editing, my naive reader’s editing, and the APA editor’s editing.
I’ve left them in. This is meant, as closely as practicable to represent the dissertation as (gasp) published.
https://parts-unknown.org/drupal7/journal/2016/05/16/conservative-views-undocumented-migration
The PDF remains available here:
https://parts-unknown.org/drupal7/sites/default/files/dissertation-2015/Benfell%20dissertation.pdf
And I try to keep the whole mess somewhat updated here:
https://parts-unknown.org/drupal7/content/dissertation-work
The schools described in this article are no longer for-profit. A merger enabled them to achieve non-profit status. But the abuses are the same.
Sarah Lazare, “Meet the Ayn Rand Enthusiast Whose Private College Empire Reaps a Fortune From the Government,” Truthout, May 15, 2016, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36034-meet-the-ayn-rand-enthusiast-whose-private-college-empire-reaps-a-fortune-from-the-government
Robb Willer, Matthew Feinberg, and Rachel Wetts, “Threats to Racial Status Promote Tea Party Support Among White Americans,” Social Science Research Network, May 4, 2016, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2770186
Grio, “Scientists change Obama’s skin color to make white people support conservative politics,” May 15, 2016, http://thegrio.com/2016/05/15/scientists-change-obamas-skin-color-to-make-white-people-support-conservative-politics/
The headlines and the ledes I’m seeing even in the original Telegraph article deploy the words ‘Hitler’ and ‘Nazi’ while downplaying that what Boris Johnson actually did was cite the Third Reich as one of a number of failed attempts at European unification. Johnson didn’t even list Hitler first, so for the media to emphasize the Nazis, as they are doing, unfairly suggests that Johnson is guilty of hyperbole. One can agree with what Johnson says or disagree with it, and one can agree or disagree that the European Union is is a worthwhile or a doomed project, but how would the media have responded had Johnson omitted the Nazis from his list?
The former mayor of London, who is a keen classical scholar, argues that the past 2,000 years of European history have been characterised by repeated attempts to unify Europe under a single government in order to recover the continent’s lost “golden age” under the Romans.
“Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically,” he says.
“The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods.[1]
But there’s also something else for those of us in the U.S. to take note of: Johnson expresses outrage that “the top executives of big UK firms were earning 120 times [and now over 150 times] the average pay of the shop floor.”[2] In the U.S., that figure has approached 500 times.
Having said that, I should point out that Johnson is deploying what in the U.S. I would label an authoritarian populist argument. It demonizes central authority, emphasizes regulatory and immigration burdens, and appeals to working class concerns. Meanwhile, the arguments for remaining in the European Union appear to be classically neoliberal. This is a similar divide to the one seen in the 2016 U.S. election, where Donald Trump may well prevail.
Boris Johnson, “Of course our City fat cats love the EU – it’s why they earn so much,” Telegraph, May 15, 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/15/of-course-our-city-fat-cats-love-the-eu–its-why-they-earn-so-mu/
Jules Johnston, “Boris Johnson compares EU to Nazi superstate,” Politico, May 15, 2016, http://www.politico.eu/article/boris-johnson-compares-eu-to-nazi-superstate-brexit-ukip/
Tim Ross, “Boris Johnson: The EU wants a superstate, just as Hitler did,” Telegraph, May 15, 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/14/boris-johnson-the-eu-wants-a-superstate-just-as-hitler-did/
The bottom line appears to be that Republicans who despise Donald Trump have no credible alternative. And even those they approach are unwilling to accept the risks of an independent candidacy. That might be why they are capitulating even faster than I expected.
Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, “Inside the GOP effort to draft an independent candidate to derail Trump,” Washington Post, May 14, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-the-gop-effort-to-draft-an-independent-candidate-to-derail-trump/2016/05/14/1b04682e-1877-11e6-924d-838753295f9a_story.html
Sandra Vahtel, “I loved Uber as a passenger. Then I started working as a driver,” Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-vahtel-rider-turned-uber-driver-20160516-story.html
Agata Blaszczak-Boxe, “Underwater Finds Reveal Humans’ Long Presence in North America,” Smithsonian, May 13, 2016, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/science-nature/underwater-finds-reveal-humans-long-presenceth-america-180959103/
Robert Parry, “Neocons and Neolibs: How Dead Ideas Kill,” Common Dreams, May 13, 2016, http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/05/12/neocons-and-neolibs-how-dead-ideas-kill
Bridget Bowman and Niels Lesniewski, “Trump’s Charm Offensive Impresses Senate GOP,” Congressional Quarterly Roll Call, May 12, 2016, http://www.rollcall.com/news/senate-gop-leaders-talk-trump-meeting
Jonathan Swan, “Third-party effort fizzling out,” Hill, May 13, 2016, http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/279749-third-party-effort-fizzling-out
Yet more. I think even if Hillary Clinton escapes charges or if one accepts that Washington, D.C., has a culture of over-classification or even if one denies the legitimacy of the military-industrial and national security complexes that require so much material to be classified, one would still have to be appalled by her sheer negligence.
Julian Hattem, “Clinton abandoned secure line to use home phone, new email shows,” Hill, May 12, 2016, http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/279764-email-clinton-abandoned-secure-line-to-use-home-phone
I’m convinced that by sometime next year, we’ll be back to skyrocketing gasoline prices.
Summer Said, “Global Oil Glut to Shrink Despite Iranian Output Surge, IEA Says,” Wall Street Journal, May 12, 2016, http://www.wsj.com/articles/global-oil-markets-near-balance-despite-iran-exports-beating-expectations-says-iea-1463040029
I realize nobody, least of all the functionalist conservatives and neoconservatives who are going through stages of denial, believes me, but the guitar player and the choir are warming up for that rendition of Kumbayah. Democrats who think they see a break-up of the Republican Party ahead stupidly—they are always so god-damned stupid—confuse the shimmering of the roadway in the July heat with water.
Ben Kamisar, “Trump, Ryan signal unity,” Hill, May 12, 2016, http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/279675-trump-ryan-signal-unity
Thomas Frank, “None of the Bankers Think Hillary Clinton Believes Her Populism, a Financial Journalist Wrote,” Truthout, May 12, 2016, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/36010-none-of-the-bankers-think-hillary-clinton-believes-her-populism-a-financial-journalist-wrote
Now, the Justice Department worries about how they’re going to look, no matter which decision they make on a possible prosecution of Hillary Clinton.[1] Meanwhile, West Virginia shows where Donald Trump might win some Bernie Sanders supporters, largely on account of the economy.[2] Anybody with even half a brain could have foreseen all this. So I have yet another reason to refuse to align with Democrats: They are unbelievably, intolerably, and incorrigibly stupid.
Josh Gerstein, “FBI’s Comey: I feel ‘pressure’ to quickly finish Clinton email probe,” Politico, May 11, 2016, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/hillary-clinton-email-investigation-fbi-james-comey-223071
Julian Hattem, “Justice’s reputation hangs in balance of Clinton probe,” Hill, May 11, 2016, http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/279455-justices-reputation-hangs-in-balance-of-clinton-probe
Francine Kiefer, “Why West Virginia is making Democrats nervous,” Christian Science Monitor, May 11, 2016, http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2016/0511/Why-West-Virginia-is-making-Democrats-nervous-video
Jonathan Turley, “‘We Do Investigations Here At The FBI’: FBI Director Reportedly Contradicts Clinton On Email Investigation,” May 11, 2016, https://jonathanturley.org/2016/05/11/we-do-investigations-here-at-the-fbi-fbi-director-reportedly-contradicts-clinton-on-email-investigation/
Amy Davidson, “Sanders, Clinton, and the Not-So-Simple Case of West Virginia,” New Yorker, May 11, 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/sanders-clinton-and-the-not-so-simple-case-of-west-virginia