9.30 What the Constitution Means To Me, at Capital Rep.
9.30 The Washington Post: “Thumbing through the tanned pages of centuries-old records in the basement of the British Library, Nicholas Radburn came across an illustration that took him aback. A crown resembling the iconic St. Edward’s headpiece from British coronations sat atop the letters S and C, apparently a stylized reference to the slave-trading South Sea Company. The accompanying text, written in 1715, declared that this was “the Mark henceforward, to be put upon the Bodys of the Negros to be sold & Dipos’d of in the Spanish West Indies,” under a contract between Britain’s late Queen Anne and Spain’s King Philip V. . . . “This clearly demonstrates the close connection between the crown,” Radburn said, “be it Queen Anne personally or the institution more broadly — with the South Sea Company and its activities, in this case, enslaving and branding people.”
9.29 Dianne Feinstein dies at 90.
9.28 Michael Gambon dies at 82.
9.27 Ronald Acuña Jr. of the Atlanta Braves becomes the first player to have at least 40 homers and 70 stolen bases in a single season.
9.27 Nikki Haley to Vivek Ramaswamy in the Republican presidential debate: “Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber.”
9.26 Brooks Robinson dies at 86. In 1977, sportswriter Gordon Beard spoke at a dinner marking Robinson’s retirement. “In New York,” Beard said, “they named a candy bar after Reggie Jackson. Here in Baltimore, we name our children after Brooks Robinson.”
9.26 New York judge Arthur F. Engoron rules that Donald J. Trump persistently committed fraud by inflating the value of his assets, and strips the former president of control over some of his signature New York properties. Attorney General Letitia James had argued that Trump inflated the value of his properties by as much as $2.2 billion and is seeking a penalty of about $250 million. Justice Engoron wrote that the annual financial statements that Mr. Trump submitted to banks and insurance companies “clearly contain fraudulent valuations that defendants used in business.” Lora Kelley in The Atlantic: “[S]mmary judgment is unusual, legal experts told me: The judge essentially determined that it was so clear that Trump had committed fraud that it wasn’t worth wasting time at a trial figuring that part out. . . .[T]he judge’s decision was distinctly zingy and personal. Responding to Trump’s team’s claims that the suit wasn’t valid, Judge Engoron said that he had already rejected their arguments, and that he was reminded of the “time-loop in the film Groundhog Day.” In a footnote, he quoted a Chico Marx line from Duck Soup: “Well, who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”
9.26 The Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general sue Amazon.com, Inc. alleging that the online retail and technology company is a monopolist that uses a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power. The FTC and its state partners say Amazon’s actions allow it to stop rivals and sellers from lowering prices, degrade quality for shoppers, overcharge sellers, stifle innovation, and prevent rivals from fairly competing against Amazon.
9.25 David McCallum dies at 90.
9.24 The Dolphins beat the Broncos 70-20, scoring the second highest point total in NFL histor.
9.24 The odious Paul Gosar says `The homosexual-promoting-BLM-activist Chairman of the military joint chiefs.. . .deviant Milley was coordinating with Nancy Pelosi to hurt President Trump, and treasonously working behind Trump’s back. In a better society, quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung,”
9.24 Neal Katyal on MSNBC: “I don’t think Mr. Bone Spurs is in any posiiton to criticize any member of our military, let alone a war hero like Gen. Milley.”
9.22 Trump on Truth Social says Milley is “a Woke train wreck who, if the Fake News reporting is correct, was actually dealing with China to give them a heads up on the thinking of the President. This is an act so egregious that in times gone by, the punishment would have been death.”
9.22 Sen. Robert Menendez is indicted for bribery.
9.23 Rupert Murdoch, 92, announces that he will step down as chairman of Fox Corp. and News Corp. in November. His son Lachlan will become the sole chairman of both firms.
9.21 Washington Post: “Even in places where air conditioning has been standard for decades, including the US (where, according to the International Energy Agency, more than 90 percent of households have artificial cooling), how the technology intersects with fundamental feelings about safety and well-being is changing. Older Americans, who can still recall the preternatural cool of movie theaters as a rare escape from the tedious heat of summer, must now consider the physical stress of hot weather as a significant determinant of mortality. Summers now last longer — well past the autumnal equinox in many places — and as hot weather spreads to more clement regions, schools must consider the effects on learning without air conditioning. A 2020 study predicted that if temperatures in the contiguous United States rise as predicted, by 2050 students will learn on average 10 percent less each year. The effects are cumulative, and students without AC in their schools, who often live in cooler regions of the country, are the most vulnerable.’’
9.20 Mitch McConnell: “I’m not a fan of government shutdowns. I’ve seen a few of them over the years. They never have produced a policy change, and they’ve always been a loser for Republicans politically.”
9.20 Dinner with Ginny at Innovo in Latham
9.20 US national debt passes $33 trillion
9.18 Tom Nichols in The Atlantic: “This is not a normal election. (We haven’t had one of those in almost a decade now.) The GOP is not a normal political organization; the party withdrew into itself years ago and has now emerged from its rotting chrysalis as a nihilistic, seditionist movement in thrall to Trump. And Trump is not a normal candidate: He regularly expresses his intention to attack the American system and has made so many threats in so many different directions that we’ve lost track. Yet millions of Americans simply accept such behavior as Trump being Trump, much as they did in 2016.’’
9.17 Accompanying a review of a book about Ms. magazine, this photo of an early editorial meeting.
9.17 Giants beat the Cardinals 31-28, after trailing as late as the third period by 28-7. The last time the Giants overcame a 21 point deficit to win was Oct. 30, 1949, when they overcame a 28-7 hole at halftime against the Chicago Cardinals, before surging to a 41-38 victory.
9.17 Thomas L. Friedman in the Times: “What Putin is doing in Ukraine is not just reckless, not just a war of choice, not just an invasion in a class of its own for overreach, mendacity, immorality and incompetence, all wrapped in a farrago of lies. What he is doing is evil. He has trumped up any number of shifting justifications — one day it was removing a Nazi regime in power in Kyiv, the next it was preventing NATO expansion, the next it was fending off a Western cultural invasion of Russia — for what ultimately was a personal flight of fancy that now requires his superpower army turning to North Korea for help. It’s like the biggest bank in town having to ask the local pawnshop for a loan. So much for Putin’s bare-chested virility. . . .Putin lately has stopped even bothering to justify the war — maybe because even he is too embarrassed to utter aloud the nihilism that his actions scream: If I can’t have Ukraine, I’ll make sure Ukrainians can’t have it, either. “This is not a war in which the aggressor has some vision, some outline of the future. Rather, on the contrary, for them, everything is black, formless, and the only thing that matters is force,” says Timothy Snyder, the Yale historian. . . .[Now] I understand even better . . .something that the former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski observed almost 30 years ago: “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.”. . . .I say this without any hyperbole: Ukraine is a game-changing country for the West, for better or for worse depending on the war’s outcome. Its integration into the European Union and NATO someday would constitute a power shift that could rival the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification.’’
9.16 David A. Graham in The Atlantic: “In both Benghazi and the Biden impeachment, by contrast, it isn’t entirely clear what precisely the misconduct is. In the Benghazi investigation, everyone agreed that something bad had happened—Americans died. But Republicans had no clear theory of why that was Clinton’s fault. In the Biden case, a consensus has emerged that Hunter Biden engaged in brazenly unethical behavior (separate from his legal woes in the United States), but that doesn’t amount to wrongdoing on his father’s part. McCarthy’s stated rationales for the impeachment inquiry are flimsy, unproven, and incorrect, as the journalists Philip Bump and Luke Broadwater have explained. Nonetheless, Republicans seem absolutely certain that Biden is wildly corrupt, and they would prove it if only they could get all the pieces of the investigation to come together, and if only they could find their witnesses, and if only those witnesses weren’t facing federal charges, and so on. This is a view propounded not just by the far right in Congress, but also by prominent voices in the supposedly sober and serious conservative press. Well, perhaps: Evidence of serious misconduct by Joe Biden might still turn up, but for the time being, the exercise looks like a transparent attempt to hurt Biden’s chances at reelection. Much like Benghazi.”
9.16 The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation: “Jann Wenner has been removed from the board of directors.’’
9.15 Jann Wenner on his review of Mick Jagger’s album, but probably speaking for his entire life: “I confess: I probably went too far. So what? I’m entitled. ‘’
9.15 In an interview in the Times, Jann Wenner explains why he chose no women or people of color for his book “The Masters’’: “It’s not that they’re not creative geniuses. It’s not that they’re inarticulate, although, go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest. You know, Joni [Mitchell] was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll. She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test. Not by her work, not by other interviews she did. The people I interviewed were the kind of philosophers of rock. Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right? I suppose when you use a word as broad as “masters,” the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level.”
9.15 Trump at the a Pray Vote Stand Summit in Washington: “We have a man who is totally corrupt and the worst president in the history of our country, who is cognitively impaired … we would be in World War 2 very quickly if we’re going to be relying on this man.”
9.15 Fernando Botero dies at 91.
9.15 Our attempt to see Willie Nelson gets smoked out.
9.14 Mitt Romney, quoted in The Atlantic: “A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” Romney on the Senators who supported the Big Lie: “They know better!” he told me. “Josh Hawley is one of the smartest people in the Senate, if not the smartest, and Ted Cruz could give him a run for his money.” They were too smart, Romney believed, to actually think that Trump had won the 2020 election. Hawley and Cruz “were making a calculation,” Romney told me, “that put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution.” From the article: “Perhaps Romney’s most surprising discovery upon entering the Senate was that his disgust with Trump was not unique among his Republican colleagues. “Almost without exception,” he told me, “they shared my view of the president.” In public, of course, they played their parts as Trump loyalists, often contorting themselves rhetorically to defend the president’s most indefensible behavior. But in private, they ridiculed his ignorance, rolled their eyes at his antics, and made incisive observations about his warped, toddlerlike psyche. Romney recalled one senior Republican senator frankly admitting, “He has none of the qualities you would want in a president, and all of the qualities you wouldn’t.”
9.14 Hunter Biden indicted.
9.13 Jonathan Chait in New York: “Whataboutism is the main point of impeaching Biden. This whole exercise is intended to use Hunter Biden’s ordinary corruption to legitimize Trump’s extraordinary corruption. We don’t need to pretend otherwise.’’
9.13 Paul Waldman on MSNBC.com: “Left without much evidence of substantive age-related difficulties, the press discussion of the issue has grown abstract. The focus has shifted from facts to political implications, just as it did with Clinton’s emails. Biden is “facing questions about his age and stamina” and “confronted with widespread concerns over his age,” journalists tell us. Pollsters now regularly include questions about Biden’s age in campaign polls; news organizations then report on those polls and ask the president himself about it; however predictable his answer (“I feel good”), it becomes fodder for another round of stories on the issue. Long before the 2016 election, it became clear that Clinton hadn’t committed any transgressions more serious than the kind many others have been guilty of — including her two Republican predecessors as secretaries of state. So reporters found refuge in discussions of imagery and politics. Pundits insisted that some voters, somewhere, were just asking questions. It didn’t matter whether Clinton had done anything disqualifying, but whether there was a perception that she had done something disqualifying. Likewise, reporters are now asking not “Is Biden too old?” but “Will voters think Biden is too old?” The answer is: “Yes, they’ll think that, especially if you keep telling them that they ought to be wondering whether Biden is too old.”
9.12 House begins bogus Biden impeachment inquiry.
9.12 David Ignatius in the Washington Post: “I don’t think Biden and Vice President Harris should run for reelection. It’s painful to say that, given my admiration for much of what they have accomplished. But if he and Harris campaign together in 2024, I think Biden risks undoing his greatest achievement — which was stopping Trump. Biden wrote his political testament in his inaugural address: “When our days are through, our children and our children’s children will say of us: They gave their best, they did their duty, they healed a broken land.” Mr. President, maybe this is that moment when duty has been served.”
9.12 Matt Bai in the Washington Post: “A problem with Democratic campaigns generally s the eggheaded idea that people will be happy with your policies if you just keep telling them how happy they ought to be. I’ve sometimes referred to this as the “turn up the volume” theory of campaigning. If you don’t like my music, I must not be playing it loud enough. In fact, pollsters will tell you that most people feel pretty good about their own economic situation — they just don’t much like the Biden agenda. Why? For one thing, most independent and conservative-leaning voters are conditioned to be deeply skeptical of large-scale government spending, period. (If you can’t understand why, then you probably didn’t grow up near a 20th-century housing project or a neighborhood cleaved by an interstate.) Second, these voters tend to think all these Democratic polices are mainly aimed at poorer and historically underrepresented people, rather than at the mostly White, middle-class voters who populate exurban and rural counties and who have plenty of thwarted aspirations of their own. I sympathize with the frustration Biden must feel. His public investments have been bold and forward-looking, by and large. And we know the economy has generally performed better and more fairly under Democratic presidents than under Republicans; this is a matter of statistics, not ideology. But the general insecurity people feel about the postindustrial economy is now a permanent feature of the political terrain. There’s probably not much any president can do to allay it. . . .[Biden shouldn’t] keep insisting that the economy is better than you think it is. Instead, he should talk more about the country’s long-term trajectory than about comforting statistics from the last quarter. Voters don’t really believe the economic realities in their lives will change much in the short term, anyway — they’re more interested in how your policies are going to change reality for their kids and grandkids. (Democrats told exactly that kind of overarching story when Obama won reelection in 2012 — even if it wasn’t Obama who did the explaining but his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton.)
9.11 On the season’s fourth play from scrimmage, the Jets’ Aaron Rogers tears his Achilles tendon, ending his season.
9.19 The Cowboys obliterate the Giants 40-0.
9.8 Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic: “We are living in a streaming paradox. As both an entertainment business model and a consumer experience, streaming has become a victim of its own success. It is a paradigm shift that is beloved for giving us more choice than ever before, while also making it harder to enjoy that abundance.”
9.8 Howard Chua-Eoan in Bloomberg: “The death of Elizabeth meant the accession of her son Charles to the throne. Today is that anniversary too. “What has astonished his subjects, and maybe disappointed royal-watching bloggers around the world, is how pleasantly uneventful and indeed dull Charles III’s reign has turned out to be,” says Max Hastings in his latest column. As heir, Charles was often inordinately critical (architecture, ecology) or just odd. But, a year into his monarchy, he is refreshingly boring and uncontroversial. Furthermore, says Max, “Camilla has proved the big success story of the new reign, to the surprise of those of us who doubted the wisdom of crowning the King’s longtime mistress.” Still, says Max, “None of the hard questions are being much asked, especially about the royal finances. They remained shrouded in secrecy, while Charles showed no sign of shedding any of his array of houses and palaces, other than a small farmhouse in Wales. With Britain’s economy in the doldrums, it seems extraordinary that nobody is making a fuss about the self-indulgence of the royal lifestyle, which we expected to be curtailed after the Queen’s death.” Maybe that’s why he’s behaving.”
9.6 Tom Nichols in The Atlantic: Donald Trump and many on the American right (including the national Republican Party) have made clear their plans to subvert America’s democratic institutions. They made continuous efforts to undermine the will of the voters at the state level, most notably in Georgia, after the 2020 presidential election, and then they tried to overrule the results at the national level by setting a mob on Congress on January 6, 2021. If Trump returns to the Oval Office, he and his underlings will set up a system designed to set up a series of cascading democratic failures from Washington to every locality they can reach. They intend to pack courts with judges who are loyal to Trump instead of to the Constitution. They want to destroy an independent federal civil service by making all major civil servants political appointees, which would allow the right to stuff every national agency with cronies at will. They want to neuter independent law-enforcement institutions such as the FBI, even if that means disbanding them. They will likely try to pare down the senior military ranks until the only remaining admirals and generals are men and women sworn not to the defense of the United States but to the defense of Donald Trump, even if that means employing military force against the American public.
9.4 Steve Harwell of Smashmouth dies at 56.
9.1 Visit from Cara, Connor and Ivy.
9.1 Jimmy Buffet dies at 76.