1.31 Two of Trump’s political action committees, Save America leadership PAC and the Make America Great Again PAC, spent $55.6 million on legal bills in 2023, according to campaign filings.
1.31 Eric Klinenberg in The New York Times: “The very different people I spoke with that year all had one thing in common: a feeling that in the wake of Covid, all the larger institutions they had been taught to trust had failed them. At the most precarious times in their lives, they found there was no system in place to help. Nearly four years later, the situation is, if anything, worse.”
1.31 Larry David on Bill Simmons’s podcast: “Here’s my problem with stadiums in general now. I went to a game at SoFi. I’ll never go back there. You have to scream to just talk to the person next to you. There’s so much noise coming from the loudspeaker. It’s crazy. And then the guy, the P.A. guy, WHO’S HOUSE IS THIS?!?! You’re assaulted. Your senses are assaulted and you can’t watch the game.”
1.30 Chris Churchill in the Albany Times Union: “The Department of Justice announced that its investigation of sexual harassment claims lodged against Andrew Cuomo found that New York’s former governor subjected at least 13 female state employees to a “sexually hostile work environment.” That would seem, at first glance, to be a significant and damning finding. But hold on, because the so-called investigation doesn’t seem to have included any actual investigating. Cuomo wasn’t interviewed by the agency as part of a probe that supposedly began more than two years ago, during the summer of 2021, and neither were prominent members of his staff. Federal investigators also neglected to interview Brittany Commisso, a former aide who lodged perhaps the most significant allegation against the former governor, claiming he groped her in the Executive Mansion. As I write this, it isn’t clear that the Justice Department interviewed anybody at all. And its report on its findings consists only of an agreement with Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration that is disturbingly vague and bereft of details. As my colleague Brendan J. Lyons reported, the Justice Department investigation was based largely on that report from the state attorney general’s office — the one concluding that Cuomo sexually harassed or acted inappropriately with 11 women, the one that brought his abrupt resignation. Cuomo’s attorney, Rita Glavin, calls that report “deeply flawed, inaccurate, biased and misleading.” Even if Glavin overstates the case, I think it’s fair to conclude that the attorney general’s report was hardly a flawless and politically pure document. (Remember that Attorney General Letitia James announced a run for governor, obviously unsuccessful, two months after Cuomo resigned.) That means the Justice Department probe, conducted by its Civil Rights Division, should have included its own digging instead of lazily relying on the work of another office. The Justice Department is, after all, the Justice Department. It’s the big dog on the playground. It has enormous power. Its words carry weight. I hate to be a fuddy-duddy, but if the Justice Department is going to accuse a person of something, I would expect its investigators to have bothered to interview the person being accused. I mean, sure, Andrew Cuomo is not the world’s most sympathetic person, but he deserves basic due process.”
1.30 Chita Rivera dies at 91.
1.29 Jessica Bennett in the Times: “What makes what Ms. Carroll did so remarkable is that she was, of course, worth less in the eyes of the world now than she was in her prime. . . . The chutzpah required, after all of that, and in the face of both her biological reality and a culture that most certainly doesn’t look kindly on women her age, to still insist she was worth something … it was ballsy enough to be almost Trumpian. Until, of course, you appreciate that a fight over the financial value of a reputation at age 80 is really less about your earnings and more about your dignity. If age has in some ways been a hurdle for Ms. Carroll to overcome in this case, I’d like to think that it was also age that let her see it through to this conclusion. That it was age and wisdom and the confidence that comes along with it that allowed her to make the genuinely audacious claim that an 80-year-old woman still has good, creative, vivacious, maybe even profitable years ahead of her. “I couldn’t have done it back then,” she once told me, of coming forward sooner. “I didn’t have the guts.” But now? “It was just time. It was time,” she testified.
1.29 Paul Krugman in the Times: “MAGA isn’t driven by reality. It is, instead, driven by dystopian visions unrelated to real experience. . . .Republican political strategy depends largely on frightening voters who are personally doing relatively well not just according to official statistics but also by their own accounts, by telling them that terrible things are happening to other people. This is most obvious when it comes to the U.S. economy, which had a very good — indeed, almost miraculously good — 2023. Economic growth not only defied widespread predictions of an imminent recession but also hugely exceeded expectations; inflation has plunged and is more or less where the Federal Reserve wants it to be. And people are feeling it in their lives: 63 percent of surveyed Americans said that their financial situation is good or very good. Yet out on the stump a few days ago, Nikki Haley declared that “we’ve got an economy in shambles and inflation that’s out of control.” And it’s likely that the Republicans who heard her believed her. According to a YouGov poll, almost 72 percent of Republicans said that our 3-2 economy — roughly 3 percent growth and 2 percent inflation — is getting worse, while only a little over 6 percent said that it’s getting better. . . .But the world — especially MAGAworld — isn’t rational.”
1.29 Monica Hesse in the Post: “I don’t think that Donald Trump is actually as sexist as he seems to be. I think that what often gets interpreted as sexism is in fact a flagrant disregard for humanity in general, which is so unparalleled in American political history that we don’t have the vocabulary to describe it. Sexism, we have a vocabulary for. My scenario is actually a worse scenario. Sexism is endemic, but on an individual level it’s curable: All it takes is for one decent person to recognize the error of their behaviors and the flaws in their thoughts, and to put a good-faith effort into changing course. Whatever Donald Trump is, it’s not endemic. It’s singular. It could only be changed if he wanted it to, and he’s shown no indication that he wants to behave any way other than how he’s already spent seven years behaving. Trump might pick a female running mate. Trump might have been found liable — 
again — for defamation in the Carroll trial. Neither act really says much about how he feels toward women. They say 
much more about what a deeply wounded megalomaniac thinks of himself/herself, and what he/she is willing to elevate or ruin to stay on top.”
1.27 Abandoning the dreary gray skies of eastern New York for the dreary gray skies of western Vermont, we visited Hildene, the summer home Robert Todd Lincoln in Manchester, a suitably nice hut for a presidential son/Secretary of War/railroad titan. In Shaftsbury, we saw the Stone House of Robert Frost, the place where he wrote Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening. We then saw the imposing monument to the Battle of Bennington, where in 1777 Col. John Stark inspired his American troops by saying “There are your enemies, the Red Coats and the Tories. They are ours, or this night Molly Stark sleeps a widow!” (Pretty good wordsmith: Stark, a Granite State man, also wrote `Live free or die: Death is not the worst of all evils.’) We then capped the trip with some excellent fish and chips at a place called Lil Britain in Bennington.
1.26 A jury ordered Donald Trump to pay $83.3 million damages to the writer E. Jean Carroll for defaming her after she accused him in 2019 of raping her.
1.21 The Chiefs oust the Bills 27-14. Chris Branch in The Athletic: “To be a Bills fan is to exist in a state of simple agony. A cycle, repeating itself over and over: hope then pain, hope then pain, with a few missed field goals in between. There are cruel endings, and then there is a Buffalo playoff exit.”
1.21 Washington Post: [F]ealty to Trump has alarmed some in the GOP and beyond. Researchers at the University of Chicago have found that, amid sinking trust in democratic institutions, millions of Americans believe “the use of force” is justified to prevent Trump’s prosecution and to return him to the White House. Such “radical” support for Trump is on the rise, said political science professor Robert Pape, who directs the group behind the surveys. Many people who study political violence are worried about a 2024 repeat of the kind of chaos that unfolded on Jan. 6, 2021, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in outrage over Trump’s loss.“What we have and what we can measure is the raw kindling that is combustible,” Pape said. “What we can’t predict are the matches that political leaders can throw on that kindling.”
1.21 EJ Dionne in The Washington Post: While there is certainly polarization between our parties, the primary cause of the deep distemper in American politics is the polarization within the Republican Party. Trump’s apparent dominance distracts from what the behavior of elected GOP politicians in Washington teaches us day after day: The party is a mess.
1.19 Sports Illustrated lays off most of its staff.
1.16 Brian Klass in The Atlantic: The world feels like it’s falling apart—faster and more unexpectedly than ever before. The frenetic uncertainty of modern life requires new words, such as doomscrolling, to describe the passive, addictive consumption of bad news about a seemingly never-ending supply of calamity. The pace of shocks seems to be accelerating. Economists, politicians, pundits, and political scientists offer few explanations and seem just as walloped as everyone else. To understand why this is happening—and what to do about it—calls for a combination of science and social science, drawing lessons from chaos theory, evolutionary biology, and physics. Edward Lorenz was a weatherman during World War II, tasked with forecasting cloud cover before American bombing raids in the Pacific. But meteorology in those days was largely guesswork and produced only crude predictions. After the war ended, Lorenz decided to try to unlock the secrets of the weather using more sophisticated methods and harnessing the nascent power of computing. He created a simplified, miniature world on his LGP-30 computer: Instead of the millions of different variables that affect weather systems in the real world, his model had just 12 variables. One day, Lorenz decided to rerun a simulation he’d done earlier. To save time, he decided to start midway through, plugging in the data points from the prior snapshot. He figured that so long as he set the variables at the same levels, the weather patterns would be repeated just as they were before: same conditions, same outcomes. But something strange happened instead. The weather in his rerun simulation was different in every way. After a lot of scowling over the data, Lorenz realized what had happened. His computer printouts had rounded data to three decimal places. If, for example, the exact wind speed was 3.506127 miles an hour, the printout displayed it as 3.506 miles an hour. When he plugged the slightly truncated values from the printouts back into the simulation, he was always off by a tiny amount (in this case, just 0.000127 miles an hour). These seemingly meaningless alterations—these tiny rounding errors—were producing major changes. That observation led Lorenz to a breakthrough discovery. Minuscule changes could make enormous differences: Raising the temperature one-millionth of a degree could morph the weather two months later from clear blue skies into a torrential downpour, even a hurricane. Lorenz’s findings were the origin of the “butterfly effect” concept—the notion that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could trigger a tornado in Texas—and, ultimately, of chaos theory. They also explain why meteorologists are still unable to forecast the weather beyond a short time frame with much accuracy; if any calculation is off by a tiny amount, the longer-term forecast will be useless. Chaos theory is employed almost exclusively in science and in the study of dynamical systems: the unpredictable motion of particles, the arbitrary movement of smoke, seemingly random turbulence in the oceans. But humans are subject to the same laws of physics, so chaos theory affects societies and lives, not just weather. A close look at any major historical event—or at the history of the species—reveals instantly that humans are the puppets of small, seemingly arbitrary or accidental events.
1.16 McKay Coppins in The Atlantic: “The glut of attention in 2016 desensitized the nation to Trump, the relative dearth in the past year has turned him into an abstraction. The major cable-news networks don’t take his speeches live like they used to, afraid that they’ll be accused of amplifying his lies. He’s skipped every GOP primary debate. And since Twitter banned him in January 2021, his daily fulminations have remained siloed in his own obscure social-media network, Truth Social. These days, Trump exists in many Americans’ minds as a hazy silhouette—formed by preconceived notions and outdated impressions—rather than as an actual person who’s telling the country every day who he is and what he plans to do with a second term.”
1.15 With 96 percent of the vote tallied in the frigid Iowa caucuses, Trump accrued 51 percent of the vote, more than his next two rivals combined. Ron DeSantis narrowly edged out Nikki Haley for second place.
1.11 Liz Cheney on The View: “There are some conservatives who are trying to make this claim that somehow Biden is a bigger risk than Trump. My view is I disagree with a lot of Joe Biden’s policies. We can survive bad policies. We cannot survive torching the Constitution.”
1.11 Quotes from Trump‘s summation at his civil fraud trial in New York: “The facts are: The financial statements are perfect, there are no witnesses against us. The banks got all their money paid back. They were great loans. . . .The banks got all their money. They’re as happy as can be. . . .This was a political witch hunt. … We should receive damages. . . .We have a situation where I’m an innocent man, I’ve been persecuted by somebody running for office, and I think you have to go outside the bounds. . . .[Tish James] hates Trump and uses Trump to get elected. . . .What’s happened here, sir, is a fraud on me. They want to make sure that I don’t win again, and this is partially election interference. . . .I know this is boring to you.”
1.11 Chris Christie drops out of race. Christie on Haley: “She’s going to get smoked. You and I both know–she’s not up to this.”
1.11 After 24 seasons and six Super Bowl victories in nine appearances, the Patriots part ways with Bill Belichick.1.10 In Croton-On-Hudson for the unveiling of Dr. Greg Schmidt Way. Later, dinner at 10520 with Greg, Susan, Tim, Cathy and Ginny.
1.10 1.10 Pete Carroll will no longer serve as Seahawks head coach.
1.9 Trump‘s lawyers argue in federal court that he could not be prosecuted for assassinating a political opponent if he weren’t impeached and convicted first.
1.9 Edward Jay Epstein dies at 88.
1.7 Joan Acolcella dies at 78. “I’m not sure I know exactly what my style is—your style is like your face, after a while you don’t really know what it is anymore.”
1.6 At a small but lively Remember January 6th Pro Democracy rally with friends Cathy Gallagher and Tim Hart. Afterwards, we rewarded our patriotism with lunch at the Albany War Room.
1.5 A recent Economist/YouGov survey of 1,500 Americans’ reading habits found that 46 percent finished zero books last year and 5 percent read just one. A person who finishes 20-40 books per year “ranks among the top 10 to 15 percent of readers.” Those who read 50 or more books rank in the top 1 percent.
1.4 During Donald Trump’s presidency, his businesses received at least $7.8 million in payments from the foreign governments and officials of 20 countries, including China, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, according to Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. “What we have is essentially the tip of the iceberg,” Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia told reporters following the news. “This $7.8 million is just a small window ― obviously a significant amount of money, but a small window ― into what is likely a fairly large sum of money and gifts.”
1.4 Amanda Ripley in The Washington Post: “Humans carve the world cleanly in two when they feel threatened. There’s a right and a wrong, a good and an evil, an us and a them. In normal times, this behavior is most obvious in people with serious depression or borderline personality disorder. Psychologists call it “splitting.” These days, we see a lot of splitting by all kinds of people, from students to senators. “This fight is barbarism against civilization, good versus evil,” Sen. Ted Cruz said after the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. “The differences between the two sides are as stark as darkness and light.” In times of high anxiety, each new conflict gets framed this way, a galactic struggle against a dark lord. Complexity is intolerable; ambivalence is cowardly. During the racial justice protests in 2020, all cops were bastards — or so the slogan went. You were either a racist or an anti-racist. “There is no inbetween safe space of ‘not racist,’” Ibram X. Kendi wrote. Splitting is deeply comforting, down in your gut. It promises an escape hatch from chaos. If we read the right books and put up the right lawn signs, it whispers, “We can be safe here, on the side of good, far from them.” But like most cognitive distortions, splitting makes us feel worse after it makes us feel better. Bright lines have a way of hardening into prison bars. “When besieged, we tend to raise our mental drawbridges and shut out new information just when it is needed most,” Maggie Jackson writes in her new book, “Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure.” “The catch-22 is clear. We yearn for clarity when we know least about our predicament.” We also start to misidentify our enemies — and our heroes. We can’t integrate information that doesn’t fit the narrative. Every day, our blind spots grow. When splitting, people “get stuck in either the thesis or the antithesis,” psychologist Marsha M. Linehan wrote, “unable to move toward synthesis.”
1.4 Glynis Johns dies at 100.
1.4 Twenty-five percent of Americans say it is “probably” or “definitely” true that the FBI instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, a false concept promoted by right-wing media and repeatedly denied by federal law enforcement, according to a new Washington Post-University of Maryland poll. 34 percent of Republicans say the FBI organized and encouraged the insurrection, versus 30 percent of independents and 13 percent of Democrats.
1.3 John Ellis in News Items: Biden is now a weak horse. He’s no longer “young old,” as he was when he was vice president. He’s just old. He’s visibly frail and unsteady on his feet. He’s given to occasional “senior moments.” As the week progresses, he seems to become more verbally and physically “uncoordinated.” . . . .It is the conceit of Team Biden that he is the Democrat most capable of defeating former president Trump in the 2024 general election. There’s little, if any, evidence for this. Donald Trump defeated Donald Trump in 2020. Biden had little, if anything, to do with it. He was simply the net that caught the jumpers. They weren’t jumping to Biden. They were jumping from Trump. . . .Roughly three-quarters (72 percent) of the electorate would prefer that President Biden not seek re-election. It’s an astonishing number, made more so by the fact that two-thirds of Democrats would prefer someone other than Biden as their party’s 2024 presidential nominee. The Democrat “most capable of beating Trump” is the one most voters (and most Democrats) would like to be rid of. . . . This time around, Biden has no primary opposition, the power of incumbency, and an opponent whom a majority of Americans would also prefer to be rid of. Biden himself frames the coming election as follows: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.” If that’s how the electorate “frames” the choice, then Biden’s chances improve, markedly. If the election becomes a referendum on Biden, or his “effectiveness” (code for age), or inflation, or immigration, or all of the above, then Trump’s chances improve, markedly. . . . It’s important to remember which voters we’re talking about here. We are not talking about the 155 million or 165 million people who will vote in next year’s general election. Biden will win the popular vote handily, just as he did in 2020. What we’re talking about is maybe 400,000 voters, at the very most, in six or eight “battleground states,” who will determine the outcome of the election in the Electoral College. Lest anyone forget, in 2020 “just 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin separated Biden and Trump from a tie in the Electoral College.”
1.1 Katherine Miller in The New York Times: “The path toward [Trump’s] likely renomination feels relatively muted, as if the country were wandering through a mist, only to find ourselves back where we started, except older and wearier, and the candidates the same.”