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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 6 months

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House Republicans pass Israel funding bill.

Against that fluid backdrop, House Republicans passed a non-serious supplemental funding bill that ties support for Israel to a proportionate reduction in funding for the IRS. See Talking Points Memo, House Passes Dead-On-Arrival, Poison-Pilled Israel Aid Bill.

Speaker Mike Johnson mocked a Congressional Budget Office report that said the $14 billion cut to the IRS budget (over ten years) would reduce revenue by $49 billion and increase the deficit by $24 billion.

Mike Johnson pretended to be confused by the CBO’s math, saying

Only in Washington when you cut spending do they call it an increase in the deficit.

Speaker Johnson’s limited understanding of math may be explained by the fact that his financial disclosures for the last seven years have failed to list a checking account. So, to put the CBO’s analysis in simple terms for Johnson, the IRS’s annual budget is $14 billion and it collects $4.9 trillion in revenue each year. If Republicans “cut spending” by eliminating the IRS’s entire annual budget, that “cut” would increase the deficit by $4.9 trillion. See how easy that is?

But Speaker Johnson does not appear to be interested in facts—or truth. He just hired as his press spokesperson Raj Shah, who served as the Fox “brand protection” expert during the period that Fox News anchors were spreading falsehoods about alleged widespread fraud in the 2020 election. See The Daily Beast, Speaker Mike Johnson Hires Raj Shah, the Perfect Flack to Push More Election Lies.

Emails show that Shah was internally questioning (or mocking) the positions taken by Fox anchors and guests while simultaneously defending and promoting those anchors. Shah was terminated by Fox in the aftermath of its $787 million defamation loss to Dominion Voting Systems.

Hiring a press spokesperson who defended Fox against the Big Lie is an inauspicious start for a Speaker best known for taking the lead on a brief in the Supreme Court arguing to overturn the 2020 election.

Why the flare-up in Trump's civil trial matters.

Trump's lawyers and Judge Engoron got into an argument during the trial on Thursday. The argument matters because it shows that Trump has hired lawyers who are unsuitable for defending him in the upcoming federal trial on election interference.

During trial proceedings on Thursday, Trump's attorney, Christopher Kise objected to questioning of Eric Trump. After making his objection, Kise said snidely to Judge Engoron, “Maybe you should ask your law clerk first [before ruling on the objection].” See Business Insider, Angry NY Fraud-Trial Judge Accuses Trump Lawyer of Misogyny in Court.

There was more back and forth, including an accusation by Judge Engoron that Kise’s comment was motivated by misogyny.

No lawyer—or rather, no good lawyer—would ever attack a judge by suggesting that the judge is inappropriately relying on their law clerk. No good lawyer would ever attack a judge in open court by suggesting that the judge is not competent to preside over the proceedings.

Before Kise began working for Trump, Kise had a decent reputation. He was a partner in a respected national law firm. He served as the Solicitor General of Florida. But his association with Trump has apparently caused him to adopt Trump's rude, abusive, offensive behavior.

Kise’s disrespect to Judge Engoron may be what Kise thinks Trump wants (or needs), but it will not go well in federal court before Judge Chutkan. The misconduct of an attorney should not prejudice their client’s defense, but if Kise continues such behavior, it is difficult to see how he will not undermine Trump's already weak defense in the election interference case.

Nancy Pelosi takes on “No Labels.”

“No Labels” is a stalking horse for Donald Trump. It seeks to run a hopeless third-party bid that will siphon votes from Joe Biden, forcing a “contingent election” in the House that will elect Donald Trump. No Labels is not a political party and, therefore, is not required by law to disclose donors—like all other political parties. But what little is known about its backers is that it is sponsored by Republican megadonors. See Mother Jones, No Labels Exposed: Here’s a List of Donors Funding Its Effort To Disrupt the 2024 Race.

DO NOT FALL FOR the No Labels lies about wanting a “unity ticket.” It seeks to elect Donald Trump. Period. Full stop.

Nancy Pelosi has recently come out against No Labels in a big way. See Politico, Pelosi launches an all-out attack against No Labels. Per Politico, Pelosi said,

[No Labels is perilous to our democracy. I hesitate to [call them] “No Labels” because they do have labels. They’re called no taxes for the rich. No child tax credit for children. They’re called let’s undo the Affordable Care Act. When they jeopardize the reelection of Joe Biden as president of the United States, I can no longer remain silent. No Labels is perilous to our democracy. I hesitate to [call them] “No Labels” because they do have labels. They’re called no taxes for the rich. No child tax credit for children. They’re called let’s undo the Affordable Care Act. When they jeopardize the reelection of Joe Biden as president of the United States, I can no longer remain silent.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

#Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter #House Republicans #No Labels.

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truck-fump · 18 days

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Fact checking <b>Trump</b> and Johnson's election integrity announcement | CNN Politics

New Post has been published on https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/12/politics/fact-check-trump-johnson-elections/index.html&ct=ga&cd=CAIyGjUzM2UwMTY5ZmFhZTIwMGQ6Y29tOmVuOlVT&usg=AOvVaw0wgzZ-wBwSAs99vlvh7dgX

Fact checking Trump and Johnson's election integrity announcement | CNN Politics

Former President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson raised concerns Friday about the integrity of US elections, in a joint appearance at …

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lenbryant · 3 months

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(Krugman-LongPost) Can America Survive a Party of Saboteurs?

Almost four years have passed since Congress approved and Donald Trump signed a huge relief bill designed to limit the financial hardship created by the Covid-19 pandemic. The CARES Act did its job. Although around 25 millionAmericans temporarily lost their jobs — with the job losses mainly caused by fear of infection rather than officially mandated shutdowns — there was far less monetary pain than you might have expected given the magnitude of the public health crisis.

In fact, according to a Federal Reserve survey, the percentage of Americans “doing at least OK financially” was actually higher in July 2020 than it had been before the pandemic, presumably because for many people, government aid, including one-time checks and greatly enhanced unemployment benefits, more than made up for lost jobs and business.

Furthermore, fears that generous aid during the pandemic would undermine America’s work ethic — that adults would leave the labor force and never come back — proved totally wrong. A new paper from the San Francisco Fed is titled “Why Is Prime-Age Labor Force Participation So High?” It notes that Americans between 25 and 54 are more likely to be in the work force now than they were at any time since the early 2000s.

So the CARES Act was a huge policy success. But given recent political developments, I’ve found myself thinking: What would have happened if Democrats in 2020 had behaved like Republicans in 2024?

Imagine an alternative history in which Joe Biden, who was already by then the strong favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination, had urged Democrats in Congress not to pass a relief bill — the same way Trump has bullied Republicans into voting against a border security bill — because he believed that reducing Americans’ misery might help Trump get re-elected.

Imagine a history in which Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House at the time, had behaved like Mike Johnson, the current Republican speaker, and prevented a bill attempting to address an urgent national priority from coming to the floor.

It seems clear that the CARES Act did, in fact, help Republicans politically. It’s true that they lost the White House in 2020, but by a less decisive margin than many expected, and that while Democrats did gain control of the Senate, they did so by the smallest possible margin. Republicans surely would have done much worse if Trump had been presiding over a full-scale Covid-induced depression.

And the G.O.P. is still, to this day, benefiting from that 2020 Covid relief package. Republicans constantly boast about how good the economy was under Trump, which is peculiar given that Trump was the first president since Herbert Hoover to leave the White House with fewer Americans employed than when he moved in. The trick here is that they pretend 2020 never happened — a sleight of hand that only works because federal aid allowed so many Americans to emerge from the pandemic slump in good financial shape.

Now, my imaginary history didn’t happen and couldn’t have happened. For one thing, Pelosi isn’t that kind of politician. She’s partisan, of course, but has never as far as I know engaged in political extortion by holding the well-being of the nation hostage. For example, in 2019, she shepherded a bipartisan agreement to suspend the debt ceiling, averting a potential financial crisis, with a deal that Trump himself conceded contained “no poison pills.”

Even if Pelosi herself had wanted to engage in economic sabotage, her colleagues almost certainly would have refused to go along.

But Trump’s Republicans (and recent events have confirmed that Trump really does own the G.O.P.) are everything the Democrats of 2020 weren’t. They’ve rejected a border security and foreign aid bill that they themselves demandedand then negotiated, one that was far harsher than Democrats would have wanted. And they aren’t even trying to hide their naked cynicism. They want to block a border deal, even one that gives them almost everything they want, because any deal might limit their ability to attack President Biden over the issue.

Oh, and a significant fraction of Republicans, Trump included, would prefer to block aid to Ukraine because, by all appearances, Vladimir Putin is their kind of guy, and they’re content to see him steamroll his democratic neighbor.

Biden is clearly planning to make Republican sabotage a major issue in the 2024 campaign — akin to the way Harry Truman ran against the “do-nothing Congress” in 1948 — with the extra edge that this time Republicans are more or less openly trying to damage American interests for political gain. Whether this strategy will work remains to be seen.

But even if it does work, and Biden wins — even if Democrats were to regain full control of Congress — I’m worried about the future. One of America’s two major political parties is now dedicated to achieving power at all costs, and will try to make the nation ungovernable when a Democrat sits in the White House. How long can our democracy survive under these conditions?

Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a distinguished professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman

#refrigerator magnet #krugman #paul krugman #nytimes #politics #maga me sick

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kamreadsandrecs · 7 months

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by Adam Kirsch

In Elif Batuman’s 2022 novel Either/Or, the narrator, Selin, goes to her college library to look for Prozac Nation, the 1994 memoir by Elizabeth Wurtzel. Both of Harvard’s copies are checked out, so instead she reads reviews of the book, including Michiko Kakutani’s in the New York Times, which Batuman quotes:

“Ms. Wurtzel’s self-important whining” made Ms. Kakutani “want to shake the author, and remind her that there are far worse fates than growing up during the 70’s in New York and going to Harvard.”

It’s a typically canny moment in a novel that strives to seem artless. Batuman clearly recognizes that every criticism of Wurtzel’s bestseller—narcissism, privilege, triviality—could be applied to Either/Or and its predecessor, The Idiot, right down to the authors’ shared Harvard pedigree. Yet her protagonist resists the identification, in large part because she doesn’t see herself as Wurtzel’s contemporary. Wurtzel was born in 1967 and Batuman in 1977. This makes both of them members of Generation X, which includes those born between 1965 and 1980. But Selin insists that the ten-year gap matters: “Generation X: that was the people who were going around being alternative when I was in middle school.”

I was born in 1976, and the closer we products of the Seventies get to fifty, the clearer it becomes to me that Batuman is right about the divide—especially when it comes to literature. In pop culture, the Gen X canon had been firmly established by the mid-Nineties: Nirvana’s Nevermind appeared in 1991, the movie Reality Bites in 1994, Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill in 1995. Douglas Coupland’s book Generation X, which popularized the term, was published in 1991. And the novel that defined the literary generation, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996, when David Foster Wallace was about to turn thirty-four—technically making him a baby boomer.

Batuman was a college sophomore in 1996, presumably experiencing many of the things that happen to Selin in Either/Or. But by the time she began to fictionalize those events twenty years later, she joined a group of writers who defined themselves, ethically and aesthetically, in opposition to the older representatives of Generation X. For all their literary and biographical differences, writers like Nicole Krauss, Teju Cole, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, and Tao Lin share some basic assumptions and aversions—including a deep skepticism toward anyone who claims to speak for a generation, or for any entity larger than the self.

That skepticism is apparent in the title of Zadie Smith’s new novel, The Fraud. Smith’s precocious success—her first book, White Teeth, was published in 2000, when she was twenty-four—can make it easy to think of her as a contemporary of Wallace and Wurtzel. In fact she was born in 1975, two years before Batuman, and her sensibility as a writer is connected to her generational predicament.

Smith’s latest book is, most obviously, a response to the paradoxical populism of the late 2010s, in which the grievances of “ordinary people” found champions in elite figures such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. Rather than write about current events, however, Smith has elected to refract them into a story about the Tichborne case, a now-forgotten episode that convulsed Victorian England in the 1870s.

In particular, Smith is interested in how the case challenges the views of her protagonist, Eliza Touchet. Eliza is a woman with the sharp judgment and keen perceptions of a novelist, though her era has deprived her of the opportunity to exercise those gifts. Her surname—pronounced in the French style, touché—evokes her taste for intellectual combat. But she has spent her life in a supportive role, serving variously as housekeeper and bedmate to her cousin William Harrison Ainsworth, a man of letters who churns out mediocre historical romances by the yard. (Like most of the novel’s characters, Ainsworth and Touchet are based on real-life historical figures.)

Now middle-aged, Eliza finds herself drawn into public life by the Tichborne saga, which has divided the nation and her household as bitterly as any of today’s political controversies. Like all good celebrity trials, the case had many supporting players and intricate subplots, but at heart it was a question of identity: Was the man known as “the Claimant” really Roger Tichborne, an aristocrat believed to have died in a shipwreck some fifteen years earlier? Or was he Arthur Orton, a cockney butcher who had emigrated to Australia, caught wind of the reward on offer from Roger’s grief-stricken mother, and seized the chance of a lifetime? In the end, a jury decided that he was Orton, and instead of inheriting a country estate he wound up in a jail cell. What fascinates Smith, though, is the way the Tichborne case became a political cause, energizing a movement that took justice for “Sir Roger” to be in some way related to justice for the common man.

Eliza is a right-minded progressive who was active in the abolitionist movement in the 1830s. Proud of her judgment, she sees many problems with the Claimant’s story and finds it incredible that anyone could believe him. To her dismay, however, she lives with someone who does. William’s new wife, Sarah, formerly his servant, sees the Claimant as a victim of the same establishment that lorded over her own working-class family. The more she is informed of the problems with the Claimant’s argument, the more obdurate she becomes: “HE AIN’T CALLED ARTHUR ORTON IS HE,” she yells, “THEM WHO SAY HE’S ORTON ARE LYING.”

What Smith is dramatizing, of course, is the experience of so many liberal intellectuals over the past decade who had believed themselves to be on the side of “the people” only to find that, whether the issue was Brexit or Trump or COVID-19 protocols, the people were unwilling to heed their guidance, and in fact loathed them for it. It is in order to get to the bottom of this phenomenon that Eliza keeps attending the Tichborne trial, in much the same spirit that many liberal journalists reported from Trump rallies. Things get even more complicated when she befriends a witness for the defense, Mr. Bogle, who is among the Claimant’s main supporters even though he began his life as a slave on a Jamaica plantation managed by Edward Tichborne, the Claimant’s supposed father.

Though much of the novel deals with the case and the history of slavery in Britain’s Caribbean colonies, it is first and foremost the story of Eliza Touchet, and how her exposure to the trial alters her sense of the world and of herself. “The purpose of life was to keep one’s mind open,” she reflects, and it is this ability to see things from another perspective that makes her a novelist manqué.

Open-mindedness, even to the point of moral ambiguity, is one of the chief values Smith shares with her literary contemporaries. These writers grew up during a period of heightened tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, then took their first steps toward adult consciousness just as the Cold War concluded. They came of age in the brief period that Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history.”

Fukuyama’s description, famously premature though it was, still captures something crucial about the context in which the children of the Seventies began to think and write. While the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe is sometimes remembered as the “Revolutions of 1989,” the mood it created in the West was hardly revolutionary. After 1989, there was little of the “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” sentiment that had animated Wordsworth during the French Revolution. Instead, the ambient sense that history was moving steadily in the right direction encouraged writers to see politics as less urgent, and less morally serious, than inward experience.

In the fiction that defined the pre-9/11 era, political phenomena tended to assume cartoon form. Wallace’s Infinite Jest features an organization of Quebecois separatists called Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents—that is, the Wheelchair Assassins. In Smith’s White Teeth, one of the main characters joins a militant group named KEVIN, for Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation. The attacks on the Twin Towers and the war on terror would put an end to jokes like these, but for a decade or so it was possible to see ideological extremism as a relic fit for spoofing—as with KGB Bar, a popular New York literary venue that opened in 1993.

For the young writers of that era, the most important battles were not being fought abroad but at home, and within themselves. Their enemies were the forces of cynicism and indifference that Wallace depicted in Infinite Jest, set in a near-future America stupefied by consumerism, mass entertainment, and addictive substances. The great balancing act of Wallace’s fiction was to truthfully represent this stupor while holding open the possibility that one could recover from it, the way the residents of the novel’s Ennet House manage to recover from their addictions. This dialectical mission is responsible for the spiraling self-consciousness that is the most distinctive (and, to some readers, the most annoying) aspect of his writing.

Dave Eggers set himself an analogous challenge in his 2000 memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Writing about a childhood tragedy—the nearly simultaneous deaths from cancer of his mother and father, which left the young Eggers with custody of his eight-year-old brother—he aimed to do full justice to his despair while still insisting on the validity of hope. “This did not happen to us for naught, I can assure you,” he writes,

there is no logic to that, there is logic only in assuming that we suffered for a reason. Just give us our due. I am bursting with the hopes of a generation, their hopes surge through me, threaten to burst my hardened heart!

By the end of the millennium, this was the familiar voice of Generation X. Loquacious and self-involved, its ironic grandiosity barely concealed a sincere grandiosity about its moral mission, which was to defeat despair and foster genuine human connection. Jonathan Franzen, Wallace’s realist rival, titled a book of essays How to Be Alone, and for these writers, loneliness was the great problem that literature was created to solve. “If writing was the medium of communication within the community of childhood, it makes sense that when writers grow up they continue to find writing vital to their sense of connectedness,” Franzen wrote in his much-discussed essay “Perchance to Dream,” published in these pages in 1996. Eggers seems to have taken this idea literally, creating a nonprofit, 826 Valencia, that advertises writing mentorship for underserved students as a way of “building community” and rectifying inequality.

If sincerity and connection were the greatest virtues for these writers, the greatest sin was “snark.” That word gained literary currency thanks to a manifesto by Heidi Julavits in the first issue of The Believer, the magazine she co-founded in 2003 with the novelist Vendela Vida (Eggers’s wife) and the writer Ed Park. The title of the essay—“Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!”—like the title of the magazine, insisted that literature was an essentially moral enterprise, a matter of goodness, courage, and love. To demur from this vision was to reveal a smallness of soul that Julavits called snark: “wit for wit’s sake—or, hostility for hostility’s sake,” a “hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt.” For Kafka, a book was an axe for the frozen sea within; for the older cohort of Gen X writers, it was more like a hacksaw to cut through the barred cell of cynicism.

This was the environment—quiescent in politics, self-consciously sincere in literature—in which Smith and her contemporaries came of age. Just as they started to publish their first books, however, the stopped clock of history resumed with a vengeance. It is unnecessary to list the series of political and geopolitical shocks that have occurred since 2000. For the millennial generation, adulthood has been defined by apocalyptic fears, political frenzy, and glimpses of utopia, whether in Chicago’s Grant Park on election night 2008 or in New York’s Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street in 2011.

The children of the Seventies tend to feel out of place in this new world. It’s not that they naïvely looked forward to a future of peace and harmony and are offended to find that it has not materialized. It is rather that their literary gaze was fixed within at an early age, and they continue to believe that the most authentic way to write about history is as the deteriorating climate through which the self moves.

The self, meanwhile, they approach with mistrust—a reaction against the heart-on-sleeve sincerity of their elders. Many of them have turned to autofiction, a genre which is often criticized as narcissistic—a way of shrinking the world to fit into the four walls of the writer’s room. In fact, it has served these writers as an antidote to the grandiosity of memoir, which tends to falsify in the direction of self-flattery—as this generation learned from the spectacular implosion of James Frey’s 2003 bestseller, A Million Little Pieces. By admitting from the outset that it is not telling the truth about the author’s life, autofiction makes it possible to emphasize the moral ambiguities that memoir has to apologize for or hide. That makes it useful for writers who are not in search of goodness, neither within themselves nor in political movements.

For Sheila Heti, this resistance to goodness takes the form of artistic introspection, which busier people tend to judge as selfish and idle. In How Should a Person Be?, from 2010, a character named Sheila has dinner with a young theater director named Ben, who has just returned with a friend from South Africa. “It was just such a crushing awakening of the colossal injustice of the way our world works economically,” he says of their trip, that he now wonders whether his work as a theater director—“a very narcissistic activity”—is morally justifiable. Yet nothing could be more narcissistic, in Heti’s telling, than such moral preening, and Sheila instinctively resists it. “They are so serious. They lectured me about my lack of morality,” she complains. She loathes the idea of having “to wear on the outside one’s curiosity, one’s pity, one’s guilt,” when art is concerned with what happens inside, which can only be observed with effort and in private. “It’s time to stop asking questions of other people,” she tells herself. “It is time to just go into a cocoon and spin your soul.”

Teju Cole’s 2011 novel Open City offers a more ambivalent version of the same idea. Julius, the narrator, can’t justify his aesthetic self-absorption on the grounds that he is an artist, as Sheila does, since he is a psychiatrist. It’s an ironic choice of profession for a man we come to know as guarded and aloof. Cole builds a portrait of Julius through his daily interactions with other people, like the taxi driver whose cab he enters gruffly. “The way you came into my car without saying hello, that was bad,” the driver rebukes him. “Hey, I’m African just like you, why you do this?” Julius apologizes for this small breach of solidarity, but insincerely: “I wasn’t sorry at all. I was in no mood for people who tried to lay claims on me.”

Indeed, for most of the novel he is alone, meditating in Sebaldian fashion on the atrocities of history as he takes long walks through Manhattan. When, during a trip to Brussels, he meets a man who wants to intervene in history—Farouq, a young Moroccan intellectual who declares that “America is a version of Al-Qaeda”—Julius is decidedly unimpressed:

There was something powerful about him, a seething intelligence, something that wanted to believe itself indomitable. But he was one of the thwarted ones. His script would stay in proportion.

Open City can’t be said to endorse Julius’s aesthetic solipsism. On the contrary, the last chapter finds him trapped on a fire escape outside Carnegie Hall in the rain, a striking symbol of a man isolated by culture. Just moments before, he had been united with the rest of the audience in Mahlerian rapture; now, he reflects, “my fellow concertgoers went about their lives oblivious to my plight,” as he tries to avoid slipping and falling to his death. The scene is Cole’s acknowledgment that aesthetic consciousness remains passive and solipsistic even when experienced in common, and that danger demands a different kind of solidarity—one that is active, ethical, even political. Yet Cole conjures Julius’s aristocratic fatalism in such intimate detail that the “Rejoice! Believe!” approach—to literature, and to life—can only appear childish.

Writers of this cohort do sometimes try to imagine a better world, but they tend to do so in terms that are metaphysical rather than political, moving at one bound from the fallen present to some kind of messianic future. In her 2022 novel Pure Colour, Heti tells the story of a woman named Mira whose grief over her father’s death prompts her to speculate about what Judaism calls the world to come. In Heti’s vision, this is not a place to which the soul repairs after death, nor is it some kind of revolutionary political arrangement; rather, it is an entirely new world that God will one day create to replace the one we live in, which she calls “the first draft of existence.”

The hardest thing to accept, for Heti’s protagonist, is that the end of our world will mean the disappearance of art. “Art would never leave us like a father dying,” Mira says. “In a way, it would always remain.” But over the course of Pure Colour, she comes to accept that even art is transitory. In a profoundly self-accusing passage, she concludes that a better world might even require the disappearance of art, since

art is preserved on hearts of ice. It is only those with icebox hearts and icebox hands who have the coldness of soul equal to the task of keeping art fresh for the centuries, preserved in the freezer of their hearts and minds.

Tao Lin’s unnerving, affectless autofiction leaves a rather different impression than Heti’s, and he has sometimes been identified as a voice from the next generation, the millennials. But his 2021 novel Leave Society shows him thinking along similar lines as the children of the Seventies. In Taipei, from 2013, Lin’s alter ego is named Paul, and he spends most of the novel joylessly eating in restaurants and taking mood-altering drugs. In Leave Society he is named Li, but he is recognizably the same person, perched on a knife-edge between extreme sensitivity and neurotic withdrawal. In the interim, he has decided that the cure for his troubles, and the world’s, lies in purging the body of the toxins that infiltrate it from every direction.

Like Heti, Lin anticipates a great erasure. All of recorded history, he writes, has been merely a “brief, fallible transition . . . from matter into the imagination.” Sometime soon we will emerge into a universe that bears no resemblance to the one we know. Writers, Lin concludes, participate in this process not by working for social change but by reforming the self. “Li disliked trying to change others,” Lin writes, and believed that “people who are concerned about evil and injustice in the world should begin the campaign against those things at their nearest source—themselves.”

One way or another, writers in this cohort all acknowledge the same injunction—even the ones who struggle against it. In his new book of poems, The Lights, Ben Lerner strives to elaborate an idea of redemption that is both private and social:

I don’t know any songs, but won’t withdraw. I am dreaming the pathetic dream of a pathos capable of redescription, so that corporate personhood becomes more than legal fiction. A dream in prose of poetry, a long dream of waking.

The dream of uniting the sophistication of art with the straightforwardness of justice also animates Lerner’s fiction, where it often takes the form of rueful comedy. In 10:04, the narrator cooks dinner for an Occupy Wall Street protester, but when asked how often he has been to Zuccotti Park, he dodges the question. His activism is limited to cooking, which he pompously describes as a way of being “a producer and not a consumer alone of those substances necessary for sustenance and growth within my immediate community.” That the dream never becomes more than a dream betrays Lerner’s similarity to Lin, Heti, and Cole, who frankly acknowledge the hiatus between art and justice, though without celebrating it.

Zadie Smith has always been too deeply rooted in the social comedy of the English novel to embrace autofiction, yet she also registers this disconnect, as can be seen in the way her influences have shifted over time. When it was first published, White Teeth was compared to Infinite Jest and Don DeLillo’s Underworld as a work of what James Wood called “hysterical realism.” The book’s arch humor, proliferating plot, and penchant for exaggeration owe much to the author Wood identified as the “parent” of that genre: Charles Dickens.

When Smith says that a woman “needed no bra—she was independent, even of gravity,” she is borrowing Dickens’s technique of making characters so intensely themselves that their essence saturates everything around them—as when he writes of the nouveau riche Veneerings, in Our Mutual Friend, that “their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new.” Dickens is a guest star in The Fraud, appearing at several of William Ainsworth’s dinner parties, and the news of his death prompts Eliza Touchet to offer an apt tribute: “She knew she lived in an age of things . . . and Charles had been the poet of things.”

But Dickens, who at another point in the novel is gently disparaged for his moralizing “sermons,” is no longer the presiding genius of Smith’s fiction. (Smith wrote in a recent essay that her first principle in taking up the historical novel was “no Dickens,” and she expressed a wry disappointment that he had forced his way into the proceedings.) Her 2005 novel, On Beauty, was a reimagining of E. M. Forster’s Howards End, and while her style has continued to evolve from book to book, Forster’s influence has been clear ever since, in everything from her preference for short chapters to her belief in “keep[ing] one’s mind open.”

Smith’s affinity for Forster owes something to their analogous historical situations. An Edwardian liberal who lived into the age of fascism and communism, Forster defended his values—“tolerance, good temper and sympathy,” as he put it in the 1939 essay “What I Believe”—with something of a guilty conscience, recognizing that the militant younger generation regarded them as “bourgeois luxuries.”

At the end of The Fraud, Eliza encounters Mr. Bogle’s son Henry, who has grown disgusted with his father’s quietism and become a political radical. He reproaches her for being more interested in understanding injustice than in doing something about it, proclaiming:

By God, don’t you see that what young men hunger for today is not “improvement” or “charity” or any of the watchwords of your Ladies’ Societies. They hunger for truth! For truth itself! For justice!

This certainty and urgency is the opposite of keeping one’s mind open, and while Mrs. Touchet—and Smith—aren’t prepared to say that it is wrong, they are certain that it’s not for them: “This essential and daily battle of life he had described was one she could no more envisage living herself than she could imagine crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a hot air balloon.”

Whether they style themselves as humanists or aesthetes, realists or visionaries, the most powerful writers who were born in the Seventies share this basic aloofness. To the next generation, the millennials, their disengagement from the collective struggle may seem reprehensible. For me, as I suspect is the case for many readers my age, it is part of what makes them such reliable guides to understanding, if not the times we live in, then at least the disjunction between the times and the self that must try to negotiate them.

#zadie smith #writing #books

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kammartinez · 8 months

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by Adam Kirsch

There was something powerful about him, a seething intelligence, something that wanted to believe itself indomitable. But he was one of the thwarted ones. His script would stay in proportion.

#zadie smith #books #writing

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worstuspresidentbracket · 9 months

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Who's the Worst President in the History of the United States?

[Image description: A clip from The Simpsons. Homer is cheerfully telling a sad Bart, "The Worst President in US history so far". End image description.]

What's going on? You know how these brackets work! I've matched up all 45 presidents of the United States of America by a random generator, and I'll be making 1v1 polls for each matchup. The loser gets eliminated, the winner moves on to the next matchup. The ultimate winner is crowned the WORST PRESIDENT.

[Image description: a March-madness style bracket with all 35 US Presidents]

What are the rules? 1. Vote for the one you DISLIKE. You want people you like to lose and be eliminated. 2. Submitting reasons to vote will be published! Help convince others to your side--either to vote for someone you hate or leave someone you like alone! 3. Your reasons for disliking a president are your own. If you just hate their haircut, fair enough. However, we recommend you look at their policies, values, and actions in things like supporting slavery, limiting social and economic mobility, contributing to the prison-industrial complex, US imperialism and neo-imperialism, and more! 3b. Because the above will be in basically every post, they will not be tagged. If they are triggers for you, we recommend you simply block this block. No hard feelings, we promise. 4. If you submit propaganda, make sure it's true. There are lots of random myths about presidents floating around. I'll do my best to fact check, but do a quick Google before you hit submit, please!

Who are the contestants? All 45 presidents of the United States of America, including current president Joe Biden. Here are links to a short biography and a list of achievements of each, in chronological order. Submitted comments will also be added

George Washington (1789-1797)

John Adams (1797-1801)

Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809)

James Madison (1809-1817)

James Monroe (1817-1825)

John Quincy Adams (1825-1829)

Andrew Jackson (1829-1832)

Martin Van Buren (1837-1841)

William Henry Harrison (1841)

John Tyler (1841-1845)

James K. Polk (1845-1849)

Zachary Taylor (1849-1850)

Millard Fillmore (1850-1853)

Franklin Pierce (1853-1857)

James Buchanan (1857-1861)

Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865)

Andrew Johnson (1865-1869)

Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877)

Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-1881)

James A. Garfield (1881)

Chester A. Arthur (1881-1885)

Gover Cleveland (1885-1889; 1893-1897)

Benjamin Harrison (1889-1893)

William McKinley (1897-1901)

Theodore 'Teddy' Roosevelt (1901-1909)

William Howard Taft (1909-1913)

Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921)

Warren G. Harding (1921-1923)

Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929)

Herbert Hoover (1929-1933)

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945)

Harry S. Truman (1945-1953)

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1952-1961)

John F. Kennedy (1961-1963)

Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969)

Richard Nixon (1969-1974)

Gerald Ford (1974-1977)

Jimmy Carter (1977-1981)

Ronald Reagan (1981-1989)

George H. W. Bush (1989-1993)

Bill Clinton (1993-2001)

George W. Bush (2001-2009)

Barack Obama (2009-2017)

Donald Trump (2017-2021)

Joe Biden (2021-incumbent)

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tomorrowusa · 2 months

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I know that Trump spewing bullshit is not exactly news. But since he's now responsible for blocking border reform through his Congressional minions, his hypocritical and blatantly dishonest rantings on Thursday need to be examined.

Some of his words were too conspiratorially vague to definitively fact-check. For example, Trump spoke of migrants as “entire columns of fighting-age men” and said “they look like warriors to me; something’s going on, and it’s bad” – winking at a baseless narrative about foreign adversaries using migration to surreptitiously assemble some sort of enemy force in the US. He said he thinks unnamed people are allowing migrants into the country because “they’re looking for votes,” faintly echoing his previous false claim about migrants being signed up to vote in the 2024 election – and declining to explain that non-citizens cannot vote in federal, state and almost all local elections (though some migrants might potentially receive citizenship years down the road). Trump also spoke of the US being “overrun” by a “new form” of crime he called “Biden migrant crime.” He made that claim though early data suggests that in 2023 the US was at or around its lowest violent crime rate in more than 50 years amid a sharp decline in homicides; though there were cases of undocumented people committing crimes during his own presidency; and though, despite some recent cases in which undocumented people are accused of serious offenses, research has found no connection between immigration and crime - and sometimes that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than people born in the US.

But wait, there's more!

Facts First: There is no evidence for Trump’s claim that jails “throughout the world” are being emptied out so that prisoners can travel to the US as migrants, nor for his claim that foreign leaders are also emptying out mental health facilities for this purpose. Last year, Trump’s campaign was unable to provide any evidence for his narrower claim at the time that South American countries in particular were emptying their mental health facilities to somehow dump patients upon the US. Representatives for two anti-immigration organizations told CNN at the time they had not heard of anything that would corroborate Trump’s story, as did three experts at organizations favorable toward immigration. CNN’s own search did not produce any evidence. The website FactCheck.org also found nothing.

People from other countries may be wondering whether somebody let Trump out of an asylum for narcissistic prevaricators in the US.

The bottom line is that Trump is blocking border reform just so he can hold photo-ops and rant incoherently about migrants until Election Day. Because of this, we can now accurately call it the Trump border crisis.

Yep, whenever writing about this situation (Tumblr or elsewhere), use the hashtag: #Trump Border Crisis

#donald trump #trump border crisis #more falsehoods #trump lies again 🥱#trump's incoherent rant at the mexican border #trump orders his dupes in congress to scuttle border reform #house republicans block border reform #fact check #“maga mike” johnson #election 2024 #vote blue no matter who

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timomaraus · 1 year

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April 5, 2023

NY Times Donald Trump had called for protesters to converge on Manhattan, but the crowds were mostly journalists (Editor's Note: To be fair, many journalists have been protesting Donald Trump for quite a while now.)

CNN CNN fact-checks Trump's Mar-a-Lago speech following arraignment (Editor's Note: At this point, fact-checking a Trump speech is just an effort to find any fact in it, not to call out the lies.)

CNN Here's why Michael Cohen says he should be believed over Trump (Editor's Note: Boy, that's a battle between all-star Boy Scouts right there.)

CNN How a baseball raffle led to one couple's bundle of joy (Editor's Note: At some point it must have involved, in the words of Hall of Fame announcer Dave Neihaus, "a grand salami!")

CNN Johnson & Johnson is again trying to use bankruptcy to settle talc cases for $8.9 billion (Editor's Note: "We're bankrupt, but we do have $9B laying around to pay for this.")

Washington Post Sutherland Springs victims, U.S. reach tentative $144.5 million settlement (Editor's Note: Nothing against the poor families of those killed in yet another senseless shooting spree, but it does seem amazing that not only are we unable to get reasonable gun control, we also have our tax dollars going to victims of the lack of gun control.)

Washington Post Lindsey Graham pleads for people to give Trump money after arraignment (Editor's Note: One thing you have to appreciate about Lindsey Graham is his rock-steady consistency For example: "Trump and I, we've had a helluva journey and I hate to see it end this way. Oh my god I hate it. Count me out. Enough is enough." Lindsey Graham, on the floor of the Senate, 1/6/21)

CNN Eating to much 'free sugar' has 45 negative health effects (Editor's Note: And if you think that's bad, you don't even want to know what happens when you eat the sugar you have to pay for.)

CNN Husband of former Scottish first minister arrested over party finances investigation (Editor's Note: If you're having to finance a party, it's a pretty good bet you're partying too hard.)

NY Times For Now, Trump and Allies Focus on Political Upside of a Criminal Case (Editor's Note: And this week's sign of the apocalypse is that people think there is a political upside to being charged with 34 felony accounts.)

NY Times How Brandon Johnson Made Up Ground and Won Chicago's Mayoral Race (Editor's Note: This could change the entire "Let's go Brandon" narrative.)

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debra2007-blog · 1 year

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Derek Johnson: “Why Donald Trump Is STILL Your President” https://welovetrump.com/2022/12/11/fact-check-please-why-donald-trump-is-still-your-president-2/

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 1 year

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SOCIAL SECURITY IS NOT GOING BANKRUPT

TCinLA

Just as Republicans are too fucking dumb to figure out that the raising the debt ceiling is about paying for things already done, and not about incurring new debt for new programs, they also fail to understand that Social Security is not welfare. It’s not an “entitlement.” It’s a “return on investment” made by working people throughout their working lives, to provide retirement income so we don’t have massive poverty among the elderly as was the case before 1935.

Both of sets of facts seem simple, but when you have to qualify for membership in the party by flunking the IQ test low enough to be below ambient room temperature, it may be too complex for those who failed reading comprehension in junior high to understand.

Every ten years or so, we have to suit up to defend Social Security from its Republican foes, who have been dead-set on destroying it since it first became law in 1935. You hjave to give them credit for persistence

Given the feral pre-adolescents who were elected to the House Republican caucus, this will be an ongoing fight for the next two year. And if the country is insane enough to reinstall Trump in the White House with a Senate and House majority, it will be the fight of fights for another four years.

Republicans always talk about the system being a “ponzi scheme” like Ron Dumber-that-Shit Johnson has been calling it; they talk about it being “insolvent” and headed for “bankruptcy.” Just to be clear, none of that is true. This is just scare talk designed to convince people that big cuts to the program are necessary and inevitable. It’s simply not true.

It doesn’t help that the over-educated, overpaid, under-intelligent, otherwise-unemployable trust fund babies of the DC Press Corpse either cannot or will not see through the flimflam of Republicans’ schemes to cut or dismantle Social Security.

We can thank Marjorie Traitor Goon and the rest of the feral kindergarten kids and their ridiculous antics at the State of the Union Speech for being such a public embarrassment that the event forced some of the MSM to do some fact-checking on what Biden had to say about Social Security and the Republican fever dream to kill it, and whattya know? They found out Biden was right. Not only that, but they have said so publicly, proving the truth of the old saw that even a blind pig can find a truffle.

Republican claim again and again that in X years, Social Security will become “insolvent.” Not true! Being generous to them as one is supposed to be when dealing with the mentally challenged, it’s possible to say that at best, it’s a totally misleading way to describe how the federal government pays for things.

Social Security and Medicare are funded by a payroll tax of approximately 15% on wage and salary income up to a statutory cap, which currently stands at $160,200. That tax is split between the employer and the employee (unless you are self employed, in which case you pay the whole thing). That tax funds both programs. A few generations ago, Congress increased the amount of tax to build a surplus in order to pay for the benefits going to the boomers. That’s the “trust fund.” Gubbermint Accounting and allowed Social Security to “lend” that the surplus funds to the rest of the federal government by purchasing government bonds. At current expenditure rates, the Trust Fund will run out of bonds to cash in the mid-2030s, according to current estimates.

This is when Social Security supposedly becomes “insolvent.”

That, however, is a meaningless term. The law says that the federal government has to pay its promised benefits and if they can’t all be paid by payroll taxes, the balance can and will be paid out of general revenues. This was the assumption about what would eventually happen back when the program was founded almost a century ago.

However, that doesn’t make the topic a non-issue. At the current level of taxation and expenditure, there will be a funding gap, but it’s not “insolvent.” This is just a budgetary issue to be resolved. It’s not “insolvent.” That’s just scare talk. Now, how can the funding gap be resolved? The remainder can be paid out of general revenue - the payments for income, corporate, capital gains and other taxes not tied to any specific program.

Alternatively, the payroll rate could simply be raised, but this is a bad idea both politically and economically, since the payroll tax is really regressive. An employee pays about 7.5% on the first dollar of income to $160,200. No deductions. Every dollar. In fact the employees are actually also paying the employer’s 78.5% because that’s money that goes to the cost of employing people that would otherwise go to the employee. Low- and middle-income workers who make less than the cap are paying a flat tax of 15% on every dollar they make.

The simpler and more equitable solution is just to raise the cap.

You can raise the income cap from $160k to say $200k or $250k. More equitably, you could leave it at $160k then have it kick back in at $500k, which would put most of the burden on very high income earners.

This of course is anathema to the feral pre-schoolers.

Republicans want to leave the rate where it is and start cutting benefits. That, however, is a question of societal values more than a question of economic. Income inequality is key on every front, as a matter of equity, since rising income inequality has been responsible for weakening Social Security financing. It’s simple: as more income is pushed into the higher tax brackets,that additional income has been removed from the Social Security tax base.

Republicans claim what they want do do is “strengthen” Social Security, and of course they will never kill it. And if you believe that, you should definitely go invest in cryptocurrency as a safe harbor for your hard-earned money.

South Dakota Republican Senator Mike Rounds Rounds said on CNN State Of The Union: “I kind of look at security the way I would at the Department of Defense and our defense spending. We’re never going to not fund defense.” He said that after admitting that Republicans want to fund Social Security year to year, which open the door every year to killing the program.

Technically, what Rounds was suggested wasn’t cuts themselves, but the first step to cuts. If Republicans ever get the Senate majority back, they want to make funding Social Security a regular program that must be voted on. Republicans want kill Social Security through privatization and cuts, and they are telling anybody who listen that the goal is to harm the program. When he first ran for the Senate in 2010 Mike Lee told supporters: “It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up by the roots and get rid of it.”

Guess what happens after Republicans decide not to fund Social Security?

The program will die.

It’s not just that they have in favor of cutting or phasing out Social Security and Medicare for decades. They now demand that President Biden agree not to say this is what their policy is. Despite the fact Republicans have been demanding cuts and a phase out for decades and will continue to do so after the current burst of media attention abates, Biden must stop telling voters about this because Republicans have agreed to deny what their policy is.

Of course, the funny thing is how many Republicans can’t help restating their demand for cuts even while denying their demands for cuts. And they do it on camera!

There are so many examples of this it’s hard to know where to start. It’s a target-rich environment.

But here’ a few:

RonJohn denies President Biden’s claim Republicans want to cut Social Security. But immediately after saying this, he called Social Security a “legalized Ponzi scheme” and said Congress should no longer automatically pay Social Security benefits each year but rather decide each year whether to pay them and how much the benefit should be. “That doesn’t mean putting on the chopping block. That doesn’t mean cutting Social Security. But it does mean prioritizing lower priority spending.”

Majority Leader Steve “David Duke without the baggage” Scalise also denies President Biden’s claims that Republicans want to cut Social Security. But even while insisting the President was lying he endorsed yet more cuts. “We want to strengthen Social Security by ending a lot of those government checks to people staying at home rather than going to work.” He wants to put a “work requirement” on a retirement plan.

Senator Rick Scott proposed sunsetting every federal program, including Social Security and Medicare, after five years. He back that up after being called out on it by not only President biden but Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, which led to him saying on Friday in an op-ed that he certainly didn’t mean ending Social Security, Medicare, veteran’s benefits, or defense spending. It must have finally gotten through to him that pushing this is not the road to re-election as a senator representing the state with the highest percentage of voters being people who live in Social Security and use Medicare, not in 2024.

So what are the options? For years, the Republican policy of choice was converting Social Security into a 401k-like system of private accounts. Jurate’s 401k retirement was all Disney stock, which dropped in value 45% between December 2021 and November 2022, when Bob Iger came back and got rid of the genius he put in as CEO when he left two years ago. Since Iger’s return, the stock has gone back up 7%. Do you want to make year to year projections of how you can life and what you can do, based on the performance of the average moron sitting in the CEO’s corner office of whatever corporation your retirement has been invested in by a government directed by politicians for sale to the highest corporate bidder?

A 401k places all the risk on the individual rather than socializing the risk, which is the heart of what social insurance is. Social Security is a form of social insurance.

That’s typical Republican “Southernomics”: socialize risk and privatize profit.

In modern thinking, ideally you want to retire with three things: Social Security, savings in a 401k or other tax deferred system and a pension. Few people have pensions these days, so it mostly comes down to one and two. (There’s also the option I took: “What is this ‘retirement’ you speak of?”)

The other approach Republicans propose is to leave the structure as it is and reduce the benefits.

The usual Republican proposal is simply to increase the age of eligibility, which has some surface logic since people live longer than they did when Social Security was first created. It’s still a cut, since fewer years of eligibility means fewer total dollars you receive.

Another proposal, which Obama was dumb enough to chase after in search of his “grand bargain” with people who wanted him dead, back in 2011, is to change the formula that determines the annual increases which allow security benefits to keep up with the cost of living. There is some real debate about whether the current cost of living formula - “chained CPI” - is the most “accurate” way to calculate cost of living and purchasing power.

I think anyone reading this who is on Social Security now will agree with me that “chained CPI” (Consumer Price Index) does absolutely nothing about keeping Social Security benefits up with actual price increases for the things seniors actually buy - none of which are on the list of what is considered CPI, by the way.

The third broad category is “means testing.” Advocates of this idea like to point out that everyone would agree that Bill Gates doesn’t need his Social Security check, that this protects the people who really need it while saving a lot of money. This changes the perception of the program into something more like welfare, reducing support for it. Preserving broad based political support for the program is crucial to maintaining it. — as purely economic.

In practice of course, it has to apply to a lot more people than just Bill Gates, otherwise you’re not saving any money. It likely reserves the program for people who have no private savings or means of support and would be literally destitute or starving without their monthly check. That’s not how most people see Social Security. Ideally, it’s part of a mix of income sources that allow people to live comfortably if not lavishly during their retirement years. Regardless, a cut is a cut.

Fortunately, the White House is ignoring the Republican demands to stop accusing them of seeking cuts to Social Security and Medicare; President Biden has been doubling down on his attack on the feral bedwetters.

Republicans are convinced that finding alternative ways to reduce or end Social Security is a winner for next year’s campaign.

Current beneficiaries aren’t safe in GOP plans either. No cuts for anyone over, say, 55 fails to deal with the fact that Social Security is an inter-generational compact. If younger workers are told they will get lower benefits for the same tax contribution, support for current beneficiaries weakens. How do you feel about working the next 35 years at the current tax rate to support current beneficiaries when your own benefits will be cut dramatically?

Republicans are way too late trying to go the John Kerry route - “I was against it before I was for it” - and that will work as well for them as it did for him. Democrats should “beat them bloody” with every video of them saying what they really think, used in every campaign commercial. Mke them dread turning their TVs on.

The road to victory in 2024 is to remember that older voters are the most reliable voters and make sure they know in their bones what the Republican threat is.

If you want to save Social Security, elect Democratic majorities next year to pass a raise in the income cap, such as that proposed by eithe Senator Elisabeth Warren, whose planned increase would keep the current cap and then kick in at over $400,000, which is President Biden’s “red line” in his promise not to raise taxes on anyone with income under that level.

TCinLA

#TCinLA #political #Social Security #political writing #political cartoon

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