1.22 Trump: “She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way. She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart. . . .Apart from her inappropriate statements, the service was a very boring and uninspiring one. She is not very good at her job! She and her church owe the public an apology!”
1.21 Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, during a prayer service at Washington’s National Cathedral: “Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives.. . . I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land.”
1.21 C.C. Sabathia, Ichiro and Billy Wagner elected to Hall of Fame. are going to the playoffs. At a game Dave Jensen and I attended at Citi Field on September 20, 2015, Sabathia beat the Mets. Here he strikes out Yoenis Cespedes.
1.21 Garth Hudson dies at 87.
1.21 Jules Feiffer dies at 95.
1.20 George Will, quoting Stephen Kotkin, of Stanford’s Hoover Institution. In a conversation , conversing Justin Vogt of Foreign Affairs, Kotkin expressed impatience with those who say of Trump, “That’s not who we are.” Kotkin asked, “Who’s the ‘we’?” Trump, he said, is not an alien who landed from some other planet: “This is somebody the American people voted for who reflects something deep and abiding about American culture. Think of all the worlds that he has inhabited and that lifted him up. Pro wrestling. Reality TV. Casinos and gambling, which are no longer just in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, but everywhere, embedded in daily life. Celebrity culture. Social media. All of that looks to me like America. And yes, so does fraud, and brazen lying, and the P.T. Barnum, carnival barker stuff. But there is an audience, and not a small one, for where Trump came from and who he is.”
1.20 Trump signs a letter to the United Nations withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement.
1.20 Trump issues executive order ending birthright citizenshio for children born in the United States to immigrants who lack legal status.
1.20 Trump signs a proclamation issuing a “complete and unconditional pardon” to all but 14 people convicted for any offenses related to the attack at the Capitol as his first term drew to a close. He cut short the sentences for the other 14 — nine members of the Oath Keepers and five members of the Proud Boys. That means everyone prosecuted by the Justice Department, from the plotters imprisoned for seditious conspiracy and felons convicted of assaulting police officers to those who merely trespassed on the restricted grounds on Jan. 6, 2021, will soon be released from incarceration, if they were still in federal custody.
1.20 Trump inaugurated.
1.20 Cecile Richards dies at 67.
1.20 Biden pardons Fauci, Milley, Liz Cheney, et al.
1.19 Great pileated woodpecker pays us a visit.
1.19 Bills defeat Ravens 27-25.
1.19 David Brooks in the Times: “Love him or hate him, Trump is the most consequential president since Ronald Reagan. He does represent a fundamental shift in our national politics. It’s a turn away from rule by the educated class to rule by people who think the educated class is self-serving and incompetent. It’s a turn away from the postwar internationalism and back toward mercantilist nationalism. It’s a turn away from classical liberalism toward something semi-post-liberal. Disruption is clearly the point for Trump.I don’t believe Trump or the people around him understand much about how government operates; I don’t think they understand how hard it is to create effective change. I think they will destroy or degrade the institutions they mean to disrupt.”
1.17 Franklin Foer in The Atlantic: “Biden’s obituary will be stalked by the counterfactual: What if he hadn’t made the selfish decision to run for reelection? What if he had passed the torch a year or even six months earlier? That makes for a grim parlor game. The way that events unfolded—his catastrophic debate performance, the stark clarity with which the nation came to understand his geriatric state–-beggars belief. Why didn’t Democrats stage an intervention earlier? Why didn’t his aides stop him from running?”
1.17 Alex Nedeljkovicof the Penguins becomes the first goalie in NHL history to notch a goal and an assist in a single game.
1.16 David Lynch dies at 78.
1.16 Bob Uecker dies at 90. “I must be in the front row.”
1.15 Joe Biden, in his farewell address: “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. . . .[There is a ] tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers to our country.”
1.14 David Frum in The Atlantic: “In 2022, a prominent conservative intellectual proclaimed that the United States had entered a `post-Constitutional moment’: Our constitutional institutions, understandings, and practices have all been transformed, over decades, away from the words on the paper into a new arrangement—a new regime if you will—that pays only lip service to the old Constitution. That conservative was Russell Vought, one of the co-authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy plan, and now President-Elect Trump’s choice to be director of the Office of Management and Budget, which controls and coordinates all actions by the executive branch. The post-constitutional moment that Trump supporters once condemned has now become their opportunity. They have transgressed the most fundamental rule of a constitutional regime, the prohibition against political violence—and instead of suffering consequences, they have survived, profited, and returned to power.
1.14 Jack Smith releases final report of his investigation into Trump‘s efforts to overthrow the election. “The department’s view that the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a president is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the government’s proof or the merits of the prosecution, which the office stands fully behind. . . .Indeed, but for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.”
1.10 Charles Kupchan in The Atlantic: “The world is now in an interregnum. The old order—Pax Americana—is breaking down. Electorates across the West are in revolt as the industrial era’s social contract has given way to the socioeconomic insecurity of the digital age. Waves of immigration have sparked an angry ethno-nationalism that advantages ideological extremes. Power in the international system is shifting from West to East and North to South, undermining a global order that rested on the West’s material and ideological primacy. Russia and China are pushing back against a liberal order that they see as a mask for U.S. hegemony. Many in the global South have grown impatient with an international system they see as exploitative, inequitable, and unjust. Pax Americana is past its expiration date, but the United States won’t let go. Instead of beginning the hard work of figuring out what comes next, the Biden administration spent its four years defending the “liberal rules-based order” that emerged after World War II and seeking to turn back any and all challenges to it. The results are telling: disaffection at home and disorder abroad. The old is dying, the new cannot be born, and a great variety of morbid symptoms has appeared. In this context, Donald Trump could be a necessary agent of change. His “America First” brand of statecraft—transactional, neo-isolationist, unilateralist, and protectionist—breaks decisively from the liberal internationalist mold that has shaped the grand strategy of successive administrations since World War II. But though that mold may well need to be shattered, it will also need to be replaced. And Trump is more demolition man than architect. Instead of helping build a new and better international order, he may well bring down the old one and simply leave the world standing in the rubble.”
1.10 Revealed this week between Exits 10 and 11 of the Northway, this relic of the Adirondack Red Wings, a team that played in Glens Falls between 1979 and 1999.
1.10 Judge Juan Merchan sentenced Trump to an “unconditional discharge” as a result of his hush money case. Trump is now a convicted felon in the eyes of New York state law but will face no further penalties. Former assistant attorney general Jack Goldsmith: “What is extraordinary about Trump’s behavior and record is that the electorate does not care, as it once did, that a president pay public fealty to law and norms and other traditional expectations of the office. Trump has revolutionized how the public thinks about the presidency even before his second term has begun.” Indeed, he has not only moved the bar for the presidency, but is attempting to do the same for senior cabinet positions and other top officials.
1.9 CNN Business: Facebook is full of AI slop. X is full of “free thinkers” peddling conspiracies. Google’s search results are telling us to eat rocks. More and more, it feels like the internet has gone bad. There’s an increasingly popular theory about why: “enshittification.” The term, coined in 2022 by the author, journalist and activist Cory Doctorow, refers broadly to the deterioration of services (especially online) as a result of giant companies extracting maximum profits from their customers. In a 2023 essay for Wired, Doctorow laid out the basic arc of enshittification, or the process by which platforms die: “First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.” In other words: Products are good when they first hit the market, because companies need to lock in as many consumers as they can to achieve the huge scale they desire. Once everyone’s using the product, the company refocuses on creating value for business partners, padding its profit margins and letting the product corrode. Eventually, the company maxes out what it can extract from its business partners, too, and the whole thing fades into obsolescence. Once you wrap your head around the idea, you start to see enshittification all around — not only online, but across the economy, in services that have been picked over by private equity (see: vet clinics, nursing homes, prisons, countless other industries) or in the products peddled by highly concentrated industries (ahem, Boeing). The Australian dictionary Macquarie even crowned enshittification the 2024 word of the year, noting its power to capture “what many of us feel is happening to the world and to so many aspects of our lives at the moment.”
1.8 Fires ravage Los Angeles, destroy Pacific Palisades, force Hollywood to evaculate.
1.8 Derek Thompson in The Atlantic: “Every single demographic of Americans now spends significantly less time socializing than they did at the beginning of the 21st century, when some people already thought we were in a socializing crisis. Overall, Americans spend about 20 percent less time socializing than they did at the beginning of the century. For teenagers and for young Black men, it’s closer to 40 percent less time. This trend seems, by some accounts, to have accelerated during the pandemic. But as one economist pointed out to me, we were more alone in 2023 than we were in 2021.”
1.7 Mark Zuckerberg announces that Facebook will end fact-checking on its platform.
1.7 Peter Yarrow dies at 86.
1.6 Rachel Sugar in The Atlantic: A quiet monologue runs through my head at all times. It is this: dinner dinner dinner dinner. The thing about dinner is that you have to deal with it every single night. Figuring out what to eat is a pleasure until it becomes a constant low-grade grind. It’s not just the cooking that wears me down, but the meal planning and the grocery shopping and the soon-to-be-rotting produce sitting in my fridge. It is the time it sucks up during the week. It is the endless mental energy. Huh, I think, at 6 p.m., dicing onions. So we’re still doing this?
1.4 Ellen Cushing in The Atlantic: “America is in a party deficit. Only 4.1 percent of Americans attended or hosted a social event on an average weekend or holiday in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics; this is a 35 percent decrease since 2004. Last month, Party City, the country’s largest retailer of mylar balloons, goofy disposable plates, and other complements to raging, announced that it would close after years of flagging sales and looming debt. Adolescents are engaging in markedly fewer risky behaviors than they used to; Jude Ball, a psychologist who has extensively researched this phenomenon, told me recently that a major cause is just that teenagers are having fewer parties. Six months ago on Reddit, someone asked one of the saddest questions I’ve ever seen on the social platform, which is really saying something: “Did anybody else think there would be more parties?”’
1.2 James Carville in The Times: ``Mr. Trump won the popular vote by putting the economic anger of Americans front and center. If we focus on anything else, we risk falling farther into the abyss. Our messaging machine must sharply focus on opposing the unpopular Republican economic agenda that will live on past him. Vocally oppose the party, not the person or the extremism of his movement. I don’t always agree with Wall Street, but Jamie Dimon was right when he said that Democrats’ railing against “ultra-MAGA” was insulting and politically tone-deaf. Denouncing other Americans or their leader as miscreants is not going to win elections; focusing on their economic pain will, as will contesting the Republican economic agenda. There will be plenty to oppose. Our central message must revolve around opposing Republicans’ tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. It is deeply unpopular, and we know they want to do it again. And then we attack the rest. We know Republicans will most likely skyrocket everyday costs with slapstick tariffs; they will almost certainly attempt to slash the Affordable Care Act, raising premiums on the working class; and they will probably do next to nothing to curb the cost of prescription drugs. In a truly stunning display of inhumanity, the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, has already lacerated health care funding for Sept. 11 emergency workers and survivors. There will be much, much worse to come. But of course, opposition is only half the coin. While Democrats have next to no chance of passing a bold, progressive economic agenda in the next four years, what we can do is force Republicans to oppose us. We must be on the offensive with a wildly popular and populist economic agenda they cannot be for.Let’s start by forcing them to oppose a raise in the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Let’s make Roe v. Wade an economic messaging issue and force them to block our attempts to codify it into law. And let’s take back the immigration issue by making it an economic issue and force the G.O.P. to deny bipartisan reform that expedites entry for high-performing talent and for those who will bring business into our nation. This year the Democratic Party leadership must convene and publish a creative, popular and bold economic agenda and proactively take back our economic turf. Go big, go populist, stick to economic progress and force them to oppose what they cannot be for. In unison.”
1.1 Islamic State terrorist kills 12 in New Orleans.