JUNE – JULY 2022: “I DON’T FUCKING CARE THAT THEY HAVE WEAPONS”

7.27 Fort Ticonderoga

7.9 Axios: “What comes after neoliberalism? The answer, according to Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, is “productivism” — a new consensus, seen across the political spectrum, that ditches globalism and laissez-faire capitalism for something more local and state-directed. Why it matters: Productivism is a broad enough church to cover both Donald Trump and Joe Biden — and also Boris Johnson, across the pond. That might give pause to would-be productivists: Both Trump and Johnson failed to get re-elected, and that’s a real possibility for Biden, too. The big picture: As Gary Gerstle explains in his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, economic orthodoxy tends to cut across party lines. The welfare state of Franklin Roosevelt‘s New Deal was embraced by conservatives such as Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, who even went so far as to support a universal basic income. The neoliberalism of Reagan and Thatcher was similarly embraced by liberals including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in the U.S., and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in the U.K. What’s next: Productivism, says Rodrik, “puts less faith in markets, is suspicious of large corporations, emphasizes production and investment over finance, and revitalizing local communities over globalization.” Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods — pointedly kept in place by Biden, even though removing them would aid him in the fight against inflation — are productivist. So are Biden’s attacks on corporate profiteering. The catch: While Keynesianism and neoliberalism both had strong academic underpinnings, productivism is more of a grab bag of populist intuitions. While one or two of those ideas might find support from the likes of Rodrik, there’s no overarching or particularly coherent theory here. The bottom line: “There are signs of a major reorientation toward an economic policy framework that is rooted in production, work, and localism instead of finance, consumerism, and globalism,” writes Rodrik. That could be bad news for Wall Street writ large, and good news for small and local businesses, especially if they have the ear of their local politicians.

7.9 Thor Love and Thunder

7.8 Tony Sirico dies at 79.

7.8 Shawn McCreesh in New York: ”There’s nobody more fun to get spun by than Lis Smith. A hard-rockin’, quick-draw political operative who, in her own telling, loves “some good trench warfare” and “to roll around in the mud,” she became famous for making Mayor Pete semi-plausible as a presidential candidate. She has a sharp answer for everything, and an unnerving nerviness. And yet … is she really tearing up when I ask her about working for Governor Cuomo during his ​​auto-da-fé last year? “It’s hard for me to talk about,” she said, clenching her teeth and a bottle of Bud Light last Friday night at Barrow’s Pub, a dive bar near her apartment in the West Village. We were there to discuss Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story, her new book out Tuesday, July 19, which ends with her time attempting to advise Cuomo on communications. Not that he was listening. She knew going in that the job was “notoriously an exercise in masochism,” and contends that she got played by Cuomo. “He’s someone I cared for, I loved, I trusted, I viewed as a mentor, a father figure, and it breaks my heart,” she said, lower lip quivering. After the first blush of accusations against Cuomo, she’d stuck around because he swore he’d merely been “stupid” and that nothing else would emerge. The ground kept shifting as more women came forward. As Smith writes, “America’s governor was quickly turning into America’s asshole.” The eventual attorney general’s report on his sleazy behavior was the coup de Cuomo.”

7.8 David Fickling and Ruth Pollard in Bloomberg: ‘The world is getting dangerously hot. When combined with moisture, high temperatures defeat the body’s ability to cool down through sweating. After just a few hours with humid heat above 95 degrees Fahrenheit, even healthy people with unlimited shade and water will die of heatstroke. “As the climate warms, conditions once experienced only in saunas and deep mineshafts are rapidly becoming the open-air reality for hundreds of millions of people, who have no escape to air conditioning or cooler climes.”

7.8 Shinzo Abe, former prime minister of Japan, assassinated.

7.7 James Caan dies at 82.

7.7 Tim Kreider in the Times: “People are enervated not just by the Sisyphean pointlessness of their individual labors but also by the fact that they’re working in and for a society in which, increasingly, they have zero faith or investment. The future their elders are preparing to bequeath to them is one that reflects the fondest hopes of the same ignorant bigots a lot of them fled their hometowns to escape. American conservatism, which is demographically terminal and knows it, is acting like a moribund billionaire adding sadistic codicils to his will.”

7.7 Boris Johnson resigns. Johnson: “Them’s the breaks.”

7.6 Tom McTague in The Atlantic:  “What Britain has is a prime minister with instincts, sometimes good, sometimes bad, who almost as a point of principle refuses ever to temper or abrogate them in any way. These same instincts now look as though they will cost Johnson his job. He continually disregards official advice, and attempts to bypass the rules or ignores them altogether, seeing them as little more than officialdom’s devices to control him. … This is the great paradox about Johnson: He is both the most self-aware political leader I’ve come across, a leader who seems to genuinely reflect on his character flaws, and the one who seems most determined to do absolutely nothing about them. And so Britain bounces from scandal to scandal, instinct to instinct, without direction or purpose, unmoored and ungoverned.”

7.6 Elvis. Much to LIKe.

7.6 Andrey Mir in “The Medium Is the Menace” in City Journal:  “Instant gratification for online activity drives the user engagement that Internet platforms require to be profitable. But when practiced almost eight hours per day (the time spent by an average American online), this behavior also forms a habit—a neuro-disposition, adjusted to certain interactions with the world. The brain rewires itself …Digital natives are fit for their new environment but not for the old one. Coaches complain that teenagers are unable to hold a hockey stick or do pull-ups. Digital natives’ peripheral vision—required for safety in physical space—is deteriorating. With these deficits come advantages in the digital realm. The eye is adjusting to tunnel vision—a digital native can see on-screen details that a digital immigrant can’t see. When playing video games, digital immigrants still instinctively dodge bullets or blows, but digital natives do not. Their bodies don’t perceive an imaginary digital threat as a real one, which is only logical. Their sensorium has readjusted to ignore fake digital threats that simulate physical ones. No need for an instinctive fear of heights or trauma: in the digital world, even death can be overcome by re-spawning. Yet what will happen when millions of young people with poor grip strength, peripheral blindness, and no instinctive fear of collision start, say, driving cars? Will media evolution be there in time to replace drivers with autopilots in self-driving vehicles?”

7.4 The Twins perform the first 8-5 triple play in MLB history

7.4 A shooter kills 7 at an Independence Day parade in Highland Park IL

7.3 Taika Wititi, quoted in the Times, ” Thor is  a rich kid from outer space who’s trapped in the ghetto.”

6.30 Ezra Klein in the Times: “The argument Alito makes throughout his opinion is simple: The court can err. When it has erred, it must correct itself. Make all the fancy arguments about stare decisis you want, but if a decision is wrong, then it’s wrong, and it must be revisited. To take his perspective for a moment: There is something maddening about being appointed to a seat on the land’s highest court but told to leave standing the decisions you and four of your colleagues consider most noxious. On some level, he is right. Stare decisis makes little sense. The problem is that, without it, the Supreme Court itself makes even less sense. It is just nine costumed political appointees looking for the votes they need to get the outcomes they want.”

6.30 The stock market ends its worst six month period since 1970.

6.29 Liz Cheney in a speech at the Reagan Library: ”Republicans cannot be Both loyal to Donald trump and loyal to the constitution ” Also, “Let me also say this to the little girls and the young women who are watching tonight: these days, for the most part, men are running the world and it is really not going that well.”

6.28 Ginny, Molly and I are on the winning team on Library Trivia Night.

6.28 Hutchinson: “As a staffer that works to always represent the administration to the best of my ability and to showcase the good things that [Trump] had done for the country, I remember feeling frustrated, disappointed, and really, it felt personal, I was really sad. As an American, I was disgusted. It was unpatriotic, it was un-American. We were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie. Seeing that tweet [Trump’s tweet about Pence] come up and knowing what was happening on the Hill … I still struggle to work through the emotions of that.
6.28 Cassidy Hutchinson testifies before the 1/6 committee. Among the incendiary revelations: The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers were mentioned during White House planning for 1/6; Hutchinson quoted Meadows as saying “things might get real, real bad on January 6”; Trump knew that people in the crowd at the Elipse were armed, and she overheard him saying, “I don’t f- – -ing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me.  Take the fucking mags [metal detectors] away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here” Later, she said that Trump wanted them to march to the Capitol after his speech. Also, Trump wanted to lead the mob to the Capitol, and when he was denied by the Secret Service, Hutchinson said that she had been told that Trump said “I’m the f- – -ing president, take me up the Capitol now,” then tried to grab the steering wheel. Robert Engel, the head of Trump’s security detail, grabbed his arm and said, “Sir, you need to take your hand off the steering wheel. We’re going back to the West Wing. We’re not going to the Capitol.” With his free hand, Trump “lunged” at Engel and Ornato gestured toward his clavicles, suggesting Trump went for Engel’s throat. Later, at the White House, as the rioters chanted “Hang Mike Pence”, Meadows and Cipollone talked to Trump. Afterwards, Cipollone pressed Meadows to get the president to call off his bloodthirsty supporters. “You heard him, Pat, he thinks Mike deserves it,” Hutchinson quoted Meadows telling Cipollone about what the two men just heard from Trump. “He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.” Also, we learned that Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows asked for pardons, and Liz Cheney alleged witnesses are being pressured over their testimony.
6.26 The Colorado Avalanche defeat the Tampa Bay Lightning 2-1, and win the Stanley Cup 4 games to 2.

6.25 Noah Feldman in Bloomberg:  “It is no exaggeration to say that the Dobbs decision. . . .is an act of institutional suicide for the Supreme Court. The legitimacy of the modern court depends on its capacity to protect the vulnerable by limiting how the majority can infringe on basic rights to liberty and equality. The Dobbs majority not only takes the court out of that business. It holds that the court should never have expanded the protection of liberty and equality in the first place. The most basic argument of the Dobbs decision is that, in 1868, states did not consider abortion a fundamental right. That is accurate, as the magisterial dissent, co-authored by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, acknowledges. But in 1868, there was also no clearly established right to contraception. There were no Miranda rights to protect arrestees. There was no right to choose your own sexual partner, let alone to marry the person you love. And there is no definitive historical evidence that the people who ratified the 14th Amendment thought that doing so prohibited segregation. If you take Dobbs’s logic seriously, all the landmark decisions establishing these rights are wrong.

6.24 Susan Matthews in Slate:  “Overturning Roe has been the right’s explicit plan all along, and its fate had been clear since the country watched the Senate confirm Amy Coney Barrett as the third justice nominated by Donald Trump to the bench fewer than two months before the presidential election. This was after Republicans—led by Mitch McConnell—held a court seat open for nearly a year before a presidential election on the grounds that American voters should get to decide who is on the Supreme Court. There have been plenty of explanations of the shenanigans the party had to pull to seat these justices, plenty of pieces that break down the structural imperfections of our political system. The upshot of all of this is that a set of people put in power by a minority of Americans will get to make the rules for everybody now, and today we are learning what those rules are going to be.”

6.24 Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:  “For the first time in constitutional history, the United States Supreme Court took a fundamental constitutionally protected right away from half the population, a right around which generations of women and families have ordered their lives. Make no mistake, the same court that just 24 hours earlier had determined that the decision to carry a gun on the streets is such an essential aspect of personal liberty that states may not be permitted to regulate it has now declared that decisions about abortion, miscarriage, contraception, economic survival, child-rearing, and intimate family matters are worthy of zero solicitude. None. In their view of liberty, women were worthy of zero solicitude at the founding, and remain unworthy of it today. As Mark Joseph Stern notes, women will suffer. Some will be refused treatment for miscarriages, and some will be turned away from emergency rooms. Some will be hunted down, spied on, and prosecuted for seeking health care, medication, and autonomy. The majority glibly tells us that because the harms to these people are unknowable, they are not urgent—or at the very least, less urgent than the harms faced by people who would like to see more guns in public spaces. But ordinary Americans do not think these harms are trivial.”

6.24 The Dissent: “We cannot understand how anyone can be confident that today’s opinion will be the last of its kind,” the dissenters write. You are not overreacting, they say, if you have understood that “a State can of course impose criminal penalties on abortion providers, including lengthy prison sentences” and that “perhaps, in the wake of today’s decision, a state law will criminalize the woman’s conduct too, incarcerating or fining her for daring to seek or obtain an abortion.” You do not mistake the logical next steps when you worry that, as the dissenters put it, “after this decision, some States may block women from traveling out of State to obtain abortions, or even from receiving abortion medications from out of State. Some may criminalize efforts, including the provision of information or funding, to help women gain access to other States’ abortion services.” You are correct to worry about birth control: “The Court may face questions about the application of abortion regulations to medical care most people view as quite different from abortion. What about the morning-after pill? IUDs? In vitro fertilization? And how about the use of dilation and evacuation or medication for miscarriage management?”

6.24 The Supreme Court overturns Roe, nullifying a decision approved by approximately 2/3 of the population, and removing a Constitutional right from a majority of the population. Biden:  “We need to restore the protections of Roe as law of the land. We need to elect officials who will do that. This fall, Roe is on the ballot.” Clarence Thomas, in a concurring opinion: “justices “hould reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. . . we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.”

6.22 One night after hitting two 3-run homers and driving in eight runs,  Ohtani struck out 13 batters in a 5–0 win over the Royals. Ohtani thus became the first player in MLB history to record a 13-strikeout game as a pitcher and an eight-RBI game as a hitter–and did so on consecutive nights.

6.22 Tom McNichol in The Atlantic: “Trump and his people have made it clear that democracy is a meaningless word. They want what they want and they will hurt anyone who gets in their way. Their goal is to make public service a hazardous undertaking, to create an environment in which people working on elections—their fellow American citizens—fear for their lives if they don’t cough up the results they want. These unhinged bullies are telling other Americans that it is not safe to defy them at the ballot box, whether you’re a top elected official or a rank-and-file volunteer—or even if you’re the vice president of the United States, as Mike Pence learned while hiding from the mob on January 6. This is obscene.” 

6.21 The House Jan. 6 committee laid out today the extent of former President Trump and his allies’ campaign to pressure election officials to act on their false claims of voter fraud. Conservative Republican witnesses — Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, top Georgia elections official Gabriel Sterling and a host of Trump associates testifying behind closed doors — provided damning testimony that showed Trump was directly involved in  asking the RNC to help coordinate false sets of electors. Bowers: “I do not want to be a winner by cheating. I will not play with laws I swore allegiance to.” Bowers recalled Giuliani telling him, ″’We’ve got lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence.’And I don’t know if that was a gaffe or maybe he didn’t think through what he said, but both myself and others in my group … both remember that specifically, and afterwards we kind of laughed about it.” The committee also heard from poll workers who were vilified after Trump falsely accused them of vote rigging.  Shaye Moss:  “It’s turned my life upside down. I no longer give out my business card. I don’t transfer calls. I don’t want anyone knowing my name. … I’ve gained about 60 pounds. I just don’t do nothing anymore. I don’t want to go anywhere. I second-guess everything that I do. It’s affected my life in a major way. In every way. All because of lies. For me doing my job. Same thing I’ve been doing forever.” Ruby Freeman: “There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere. Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you? The president of the United States is supposed to represent every American. Not to target one.”

6.21 Tom McNichol in The Atlantic: “I think the Trump superfans are terrified of being wrong. I suspect they know that for many years they’ve made a terrible mistake—that Trump and his coterie took them to the cleaners and the cognitive dissonance is now rising to ear-splitting, chest-constricting levels. And so they will literally threaten to kill people like Kinzinger (among others) if that’s what it takes to silence the last feeble voice of reason inside themselves. We know from studies (and from experience as human beings) that being wrong makes us feel uncomfortable. It’s an actual physiological sensation, and when compounded by humiliation, it becomes intolerable. The ego cries out for either silence or assent. In the modern media environment, this fear expresses itself as a demand for the comfort of massive doses of self-justifying rage delivered through the Fox or Newsmax or OAN electronic EpiPen that stills the allergic reaction to truth and reason. These outlets are eager to oblige. It’s not you, the hosts assure the viewers. It’s them. You made the right decisions years ago and no matter how much it now seems that you were fooled and conned, you are on the side of right and justice.This therapy works for as long as the patient is glued to the television or computer screen. The moment someone like Bowers or Kinzinger or Liz Cheney appears and attacks the lie, the anxiety and embarrassment rise like reflux in the throat, and it must be stopped, even if it means threatening to kill the messenger. No one who truly believes they are right threatens to hurt anyone for expressing a contrary view. The snarling threat of violence never comes from people who calmly believe they are in the right. It is always the instant resort of the bully who feels the hot flush of shame rising in the cheeks and the cold rock of fear dropping in the pit of the stomach.

6.19 Maureen Dowd in the Times: “The fate of a sycophant is never a happy one. At first, you think that fawning over the boss is a good way to move forward. But when you are dealing with a narcissist — and narcissists are the ones who like to be surrounded by sycophants — you can never be unctuous enough. Narcissists are Grand Canyons of need. The more they are flattered, the more their appetite for flattery grows. That is the hard, almost fatal, lesson Pence learned on Jan. 6, when he finally stood up to Donald Trump after Trump asked for one teensy favor: Help destroy American democracy and all we stand for. Two new photos shown at a hearing of the House committee investigating Jan. 6 tell a shocking story — one of the most incredible in our nation’s history. In one, Karen Pence is protectively pulling a gold-fringed curtain shut in the vice president’s ceremonial office in the Capitol, off the Senate floor, as Pence — sitting beneath a large gilt mirror — stares off into space, probably wondering where it all went wrong. We learned this week that when the vice president fled down the stairs, followed by an Air Force officer carrying the nuclear launch codes, the marauding mob was a few feet from him. In a second picture, taken after Pence was brought to a secure location in an underground garage, his daughter Charlotte is anxiously watching him. He is holding a phone to his ear as he stares at another phone showing a video of Trump professing love for the crowd, which included some who carried baseball bats and zip ties and chanted “Hang Mike Pence!”  In the early afternoon, as the crowd tore down barricades and fought police, White House staffers worried things were “getting out of hand,” as Sarah Matthews, a Trump aide, testified. They thought that the president needed to tweet something immediately. At 2:24 p.m., they got a notification that the president had indeed tweeted. But it was not the calming tweet they had hoped for; it was one designed to drive the rioters into a frenzy. “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify,” Trump tweeted. “USA demands the truth!” As Matthews recalled in her deposition, “The situation was already bad, and so it felt like he was pouring gasoline on the fire by tweeting that.”

6.18 Ivy‘s birthday party

6.18 Mark Shields dies at 85

6.16 The Warriors beat the Celtics and won the NBA Championship, 4 game to 2.

6.16 Judge Michael Lutting: “America can withstand attacks on her democracy from without. She is helpless to withstand them from within. The relentless assaults on America and its democracy from within, such as January 6, which designedly call into question the very legitimacy of the institutions and instrumentalities of our democracy, are simply not contemplated by the Constitution of the United States and are therefore not provided for by that Great Charter for our governance. America is not in constitutional crisis until and unless the Constitution and the institutions and instrumentalities of our democracy are under withering, unsustainable, and unendurable attack from within. Then, and only then, is the constitutional order in hopeless constitutional disorder. Only then is America in peril.”

6.16 After the 1/6 attack, Eastman wrote to Rudy Giuliani: “I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works.”

6.16 Axios: “Today’s Jan. 6 hearing revealed top Trump advisers privately knew the scheme to have Mike Pence unilaterally reject electors was legally unjustifiable. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows acknowledged to Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short “a couple times” that the VP “doesn’t have any broader role,” Short testified in a taped deposition. Rudy Giuliani admitted the same to White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, before saying the exact opposite during his speech at the Ellipse rally later that day, according to Herschmann’s testimony. Fox News host Sean Hannity texted Meadows on Dec. 31: “I do NOT see January 6 happening the way [Trump] is being told.” John Eastman — the architect of the plan — acknowledged to Pence’s counsel Greg Jacob that “we would lose 9-0” if the case were brought to the Supreme Court, according to Jacob. He also said he wouldn’t want Democratic vice presidents like Al Gore or Kamala Harris to have the power to decide the outcome of the election, before adding. “But I think you should do it today.”

6.15 Baseball Hall of Fame with Ginny, Rick and Shawn.

6.15 Dinner at Sea Smoke on Green Island with Ginny, Rick, Shawn and Molly

6.14 Washington Post: Through May, Republicans have chosen at least 108 candidates who have repeated lies about the theft of the 2020 election.

6.14 To Kill a Mockingbird at Proctor’s with Ginny and Rick

6.13 The second 1/6 hearing showed that Trump had been told repeatedly — including by his own attorney general — that his “big lie” about a fraudulent election was baseless. In video testimony, Barr described Trump as ‘detached from reality’ after the election. Barr said he told the president repeatedly that his claims of fraud were unfounded, but that there was “never an indication of interest in what the actual facts are.”  Barr said, “I thought, ‘Boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has, . . . become detached from reality, if he really believes this stuff.” Monday’s hearing opened with a vivid portrait of election night at the White House, describing how Trump rejected the cautionary advice from “Team Normal” to hold back on declaring victory.  Instead, he listened to Rudy Giuliani, who aides said was drunk that night, and was urging the president to claim victory and say the election was being stolen.  The committee described how Trump and his campaign aides used baseless claims of election fraud to convince the president’s supporters to send millions of dollars to something called the “Election Defense Fund.” According to the committee, Mr. Trump’s supporters donated $100 million in the first week after the election, apparently in the hopes that their money would help the president fight to overturn the results. But a committee investigator said there is no evidence that such a fund ever existed. Instead, millions of dollars flowed into a super PAC that the president set up on Nov. 9, just days after the election. According to the committee, that PAC sent $1 million to a charitable foundation run by Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff, and another $1 million to a political group that is run by several of his former staff members, including Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda.

6.11 Tampa Bay Lightning eliminate the New York Rangers, ending an exciting season that exceeded expectations.

6.9 Liz Cheney: “Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

6.9 First House 1/6 Committew hearing.  Chairman Bennie Thompson: “January 6th was the culmination of an attempted coup. A brazen attempt … to overthrow the government.” Liz Cheney: “Aware of the rioters’ chants to ‘hang Mike Pence,’ the President responded with this sentiment, ‘maybe our supporters have the right idea.’ Mike Pence ‘deserves’ it.” Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards, who suffered a traumatic brain injury that day: “I was slipping in people’s blood. It was carnage. It was chaos.” Bill Barr: “I told the president it was bullshit. I didn’t want to be a part of it.” Ivanka Trump: “I respected Attorney General Barr. I accepted what he was saying.”

6.7 Matthew McConaughey, in the White House Briefing Room, on Uvalde: “We also met Ana and Dani- — Danilo, the mom and the stepdad of nine-year-old Maite Rodriguez.  And Maite wanted to be a marine biologist.  She was already in contact with Corpus Christi University of A&M for her future college enrollment.  Nine years old. Maite cared for the environment so strongly that when the city asked her mother if they could release some balloons into the sky in her memory, her mom said, “Oh no, Maite wouldn’t want to litter.” Maite wore green high-top Converse with a heart she had hand-drawn on the right toe because they represented her love of nature. Camila has got these shoes.  Can you show these shoes, please? Wore these every day.  Green Converse with a heart on the right toe.  These are the same green Converse on her feet that turned out to be the only clear evidence that could identify her after the shooting.  How about that?”