Here’s an odd anniversary: Four days after Cher divorced Sonny Bono, she married Gregg Allman. Come back to this blog in nine days to find out what happened next.
Birthdays start with Florence Ballard of the Supremes …
It’s time for Donald Trump to tell himself the words he’s most famous for: “You’re fired!”
Amid speculation of a 2024 run and talk of a Grover Cleveland replay, there’s an inescapable drawback looming over a third Trump bid for the White House: obsolescence. Without meaning to, Mr. Trump has proved himself expendable.
Mr. Trump’s candidacy and presidency were, ironically, his 15th season of “The Apprentice.” Intentionally or not, he educated young Republicans in countering Democrats and resisting a predominantly hostile media. Contrast Mr. Trump’s pugnacious 2016 run with the weak-kneed timidity of the McCain and Romney campaigns. It is no wonder a new generation of Republicans found the experience novel and instructive. Unwittingly, Mr. Trump himself became the most persuasive argument for his stepping aside.
You don’t have to be Elizabeth Barrett Browning to count the ways another shot at the White House would be bad for Mr. Trump. His brand will be irreparably damaged if he suffers another loss. He will always claim the 2020 election was stolen and forever maintain his status as a winner. But should he be defeated in the 2024 general election (or, even more embarrassingly, the primary), he can’t cry foul again. Nobody likes a sore loser—especially a two-time loser.
It is much wiser for Mr. Trump to play the role of kingmaker. He can throw his bombastic support behind a younger candidate who shares his Republican bona fides with little risk to himself. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is an obvious choice. In 2024, assuming he is re-elected this November, Mr. DeSantis will have six years of political seasoning since his election in 2018.
He is far more palatable than Mr. Trump and unencumbered by the former president’s rough edges, mean tweets and pettiness. Yet Mr. DeSantis has the fortitude to endure harsh criticism without caving in, as his management of the pandemic and the “Don’t Say Gay” controversy demonstrate.
It is hard to think of a more suitable apprentice for Mr. Trump. But there are other capable 2024 flag-bearers, among them Nikki Haley, Gov. Kristi Noem and Mike Pompeo, all consonant with Mr. Trump’s political beliefs but still independent thinkers. Any would be a worthy successor but not a slavish clone.Mr. Trump can win a second term without putting his name on the ballot. No matter which successor gets the nod, it’s time for Mr. Trump to step aside and tell that person, “You’re hired!”
A Biden win (God forbid) or a Trump win in 2024 would make them instant lame ducks. Either way, do we really want a president who is pushing 80?
There was a definite horn rock theme today in 1968, as proven by number seven …
… six …
… two …
… and one on the charts:
Today in 1971, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were sentenced on drug charges. And, of course, you could replace “1971” with any year and Jagger’ and Richards’ names with practically any rock musician’s name of those days.
Or other people: Today in 2000, Eminem’s mother sued her son for defamation from the line “My mother smokes more dope than I do” from his “My Name Is.”
Birthdays start with LeRoy Anderson, whose first work was the theme music for many afternoon movies, but who is best known for his second work (with which I point out that Christmas is less than six months away):
Over now to MSNBC, that glorified test of the emergency broadcast system between Fox News and the Big Bang Theory reruns you want to fall asleep to. The Supreme Court on Friday announced it had overturned Roe v. Wade, upending fifty years of abortion law. And the mood on America’s favorite left-of-left cable network was, er, punchy.
It began with Lawrence O’Donnell, who demanded that his audience “never forget the GOP presidents who overturned Roe” (in case Donald Trump was at risk of slipping your mind). After lying that George W. Bush hadn’t won the popular vote before appointing Sam Alito (Bush beat John Kerry by three million votes in 2004, then nominated Alito in 2005), O’Donnell sighed that he was profoundly disappointed. “I spent most of my life in awe of the Supreme Court,” he intoned. Yet today the Court “is not reflexively worthy of respect.”
One imagines Amy Coney Barrett running down the hall: “You guys! We just lost Lawrence O’Donnell!” And certainly the Court has desecrated itself forever by not doing what O’Donnell would have liked it to do. O’Donnell then went on to patronize Clarence Thomas for disagreeing with Roe while being black and married to a white woman. Thus did MSNBC give the country exactly what it needed: a lecture on race from a white guy from Boston.
Elsewhere in the blunderdome came Chris Hayes, MSNBC’s leading man, who in a monologue on Friday set about systematically undermining the whole of the English language. Abortion, which isn’t mentioned in any of our founding documents? “A right enshrined in the Constitution as intimate as any right one could imagine.” Efforts to extend human rights to the unborn? “The forces of reaction.” Allowing state legislatures to vote on abortion law? “A brutal day for American democracy.”
Hayes is like one of those dorky kids who struts around calling people “malefactors” and “ne’er-do-wells” even though he clearly he has no idea what any of those words mean. Yet it’s his use of “democracy” that’s especially telling. Strictly speaking, “democracy” means simply that the people get to decide, either directly or through their elected representatives — as they now will on abortion. Yet for progressives, “democracy” has taken on more of a folk definition. Just as Orwell said the word fascism “has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable,’” so too does “democracy” now have no meaning except as something that makes an MSNBC contributor feel all peachy on the inside. So: lawless abortion, etc.
This debauching of our language admittedly runs both ways (a “Republican” is now one who thinks Donald Trump should maybe be king?). Yet flipping “democracy” to mean “judicial authoritarianism” might be a whole new level of doublespeak altogether. And it really is curious just how many words have had to be blurred in order to keep the abortion boat afloat: “fetus,” “procedure,” “late-term,” “constitutional right,” “choice.” If this much of your thinking is based on not thinking, it may be time to turn the critical gaze inward for a while.
Yet there’s a bigger problem at MSNBC than just vocabulary: its sense of smug superiority. Remember when Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election? The network spent months pompously declaring that the GOP was dead. Then, when that same GOP stubbornly refused to die, when Trump was elected in 2016, MSNBC leaned hard into the Russiagate conspiracy. It wasn’t the conservatism or the populism! This was a Putin snow job, and once it was corrected, they would be back driving the agenda once again.
This same sense of inevitability has pervaded their abortion coverage, which is why MSNBC and their kith and kin may be more responsible for Dobbs than anyone else. They refined pro-choice smugness into televised narcotic. Not only did they fail to seriously engage with the arguments put forward by the other side — fetal personhood, the weakness of constitutional “penumbras,” etc. — their complacency lurched them even further to the extreme. “Shout your abortion!” they cried. “Scrub ‘rare’ from ‘safe, legal, and rare’!” Why not? The other side was just a bunch of theocratic Neanderthals, practically self-refuting.
Even after the Dobbs arguments back in December, which saw the conservative justices all but skywrite “THE VIABILITY STANDARD IS BULLS–T” above the Supreme Court, they still couldn’t quite believe the knuckle-draggers were about to pull it off. Now, they’re making the same mistake again, assuring themselves it’s just a matter of time. Republicans will pay in the midterms! Will they though? Polls have consistently found that decisive majorities support something like the Mississippi law at issue in Dobbs, which bans abortions after fifteen weeks. And are the intricacies of abortion really going to trump the pain of $5 a gallon gas?
So it is that we return to MSNBC for one last ray of insight. On Saturday, a deranged individual named Elie Mystal screamed that Biden ought to make abortions available at federal facilities — and surely he should. Democrats, here’s your game-changer: third-trimester abortions at every post office. And then, when you get shellacked in November, when you lose both houses of Congress, just remember this: the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards frantic attempts to normalize the gruesome.
So the media might have unwittingly produced a result the media opposed? That hasn’t happened since the November 2016 election, thanks to Hillary Clinton’s “Deplorables.”
During the past decade, a critique of neoliberalism has become widespread in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. During the 1970s, the argument goes, many Democrats espoused the pro-market, antigovernment views long associated with opposition to the New Deal and the modern welfare state. In the name of efficiency, growth and lower prices, the Carter administration deregulated airlines, trucking and other sectors. The Clinton administration espoused free trade and the unfettered flow of capital across national boundaries. In response to the Great Recession, President Obama’s economic advisers focused on the health of giant banks and tolerated a grindingly slow recovery.
The problem, critics allege, is that these policies ignore disadvantaged Americans who do not benefit from broad market-driven policies. Markets, they say, are indifferent to equitable outcomes. The focus on aggregate growth comes at the expense of fairness, which requires benefits and opportunities targeted to marginalized groups. Through regulations and wealth transfers, government must lean against markets to achieve acceptable results.
In this narrative of the past half-century, critics often mark the Clinton administration as the moment when establishment Democrats capitulated to the ideology of the unfettered market. Poor and working-class Americans paid the price, they charge, with lower pay, diminished job security, and the collapse of entire sectors exposed to trade competition.
The historical record tells a different story.
Begin with the economic aggregates. During eight years of the Clinton administration, annual real growth in gross domestic product averaged a robust 3.8% while inflation was restrained, averaging 2.6%. Payrolls increased by 22.9 million—nearly 239,000 a month, the fastest on record for a two-term presidency. (Monthly job growth during the Reagan administration averaged 168,000.) Unemployment fell from 7.3% in January 1993 to 3.8% in April 2000 before rising slightly to 4.2% at the end of President Clinton’s second term. Adjusted for inflation, real median household income rose by 13.9%.
Mr. Clinton inherited a substantial budget deficit. Despite this, one group of administration officials, headed by Labor Secretary Robert Reich, urged him to propose a major stimulus package to accelerate economic growth and reduce unemployment more quickly. He refused, focusing instead on reducing inflation and interest rates to create the conditions for long-term growth. (I worked in the White House at the time but had no role in economic policy.) During the administration, federal spending as a share of GDP fell from 21.2% to 17.5%, and federal debt as a share of GDP fell from 61.4% to 54.9%.
What about the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Mr. Clinton pushed through Congress over the objections of a majority of his own party in the House? Didn’t it eviscerate the manufacturing sector? No doubt the agreement reduced jobs in some areas, but manufacturing jobs increased during Mr. Clinton’s eight years. The collapse occurred during George W. Bush’s administration, when 4.5 million manufacturing jobs disappeared and have never been regained. (Manufacturing employment in April 2022 is about where it was when Mr. Bush left office 13 years ago.)
What about the poor? The poverty rate declined during the Clinton administration by nearly one quarter, from 15.1% to 11.3%, near its historic low. And it declined even faster among minorities—by 8.1 percentage points for Hispanics and 10.9 points for blacks.
What about the distribution of gains from economic growth? Income gains for working-class households equaled the national average, and gains for the working poor rose even faster. White households gained an average of 13.9%, but minorities gained even more: 22.0% for Hispanics and 31.5% for blacks.
In sum, during the heyday of neoliberalism, Americans weren’t forced to choose between high growth and low inflation or between aggregate growth and fairness for the poor, working class and minorities. This helps explain why Mr. Clinton’s job approval stood at 65% when he left office.
We can’t go back to the 1990s, but there are lessons from the past. Deregulation can go too far, but so can regulation. The market doesn’t automatically produce acceptable results for society, but neither does government. In these and other respects, policy makers need to find a reasonable balance, the location of which depends on ever-changing circumstances. No algorithm can substitute for good judgment guided by study and common sense.
In our effort to respond to the pandemic generously and humanely, we lost our balance. We have learned the hard way that demand doesn’t automatically create its own supply and that bad things happen when too much money chases too few goods. As we struggle to regain equilibrium, the critics of neoliberalism have much to learn from an administration whose economic performance will be hard to beat.
Today in 1975, David Bowie found “Fame”:
Today in 1978, the UN named Kansas ambassadors of goodwill:
Two birthdays today are from the same group: Drummer Bobby Harrison was born two years before bassist Dave Knights of Procol Harum:
The Supreme Court ruling that came down on Friday overturning Roe v. Wade is essentially the same opinion as the draft that was leaked in early May; Justice Samuel Alito’s responses to the other justices’ concurrences and dissents are basically the only changes. One thing of note is that, while the vote to uphold the Mississippi law that precipitated the case (and which banned abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy) was 6-3, the vote to strike down Roe altogether was 5-4: Chief Justice John Roberts was alone in voting to uphold the Mississippi law while retaining the Roe principle of a constitutional right to abortion.
As I laid out in a Bulwark essay last month, I am a moderate pro-choicer—that is, one who is fine with some restrictions on abortion, particularly later in the pregnancy. I believe that both female bodily autonomy and the value of fetal life in the womb, especially in the later stages of pregnancy, are principles worthy of respect.
Pro-choicers are wrong to depict pro-lifers as misogynists or subservient “handmaids”; pro-lifers are wrong to depict pro-choice Americans as libertines who hate babies. Pro-lifers often make little effort to understand why an unwanted pregnancy can feel like an intolerable imposition on one’s liberty even if one is fine with giving the child away for adoption after birth. And pro-choicers often make little effort to understand why pro-lifers find it appallingly hypocritical that the value of fetal life—right down to whether one calls it a “baby” or a ”fetus”—is determined solely by whether it is “wanted” or not.
All of which is to say that I would have much preferred if Roberts had been able to peel either Gorsuch or Kavanaugh off the conservative majority. And even leaving aside the welfare of women, I think the country would have been much better off without (another) political firestorm.
So what comes next? On Friday, The Bulwark ran a fine piece by AEI’s Brent Orrell on what pro-lifers should do post-Roe to promote a genuine “culture of life” in America and support women, families, and children. I would also urge pro-lifers, as they think about how to follow up on this long-desired policy victory, to keep two important limiting principles in mind.
First, Republicans and conservatives must remain serious about their commitment to federalism. That means not seeking to impose a national law in Congress restricting abortion, but leaving abortion laws up to the states. It also means not attempting to ban out-of-state travel for the purposes of getting an abortion. Such bans, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh indicated in his concurrent opinion, would be an unconstitutional infringement on the freedom of interstate travel. Both abortion-rights states and private charities can pitch in to ensure that low-income women have access to such travel.
Second, officials in states that institute a near-total ban even on first-trimester abortion procedures may be tempted also to ban the use of the “abortion pill,” mifepristone (RU-486). They should resist the temptation. Not only would enacting such a ban invite a new fight with the federal government (“States may not ban Mifepristone based on disagreement with the FDA’s expert judgment about its safety and efficacy,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland on Friday) but implementing it would be very difficult, since its enforcement would likely involve an aggressive campaign to stop or track the mail delivery. In practice, a ban on abortion pills would require a Communist Romania-level police state.
And what about the other side? Although some pro-choicers have been calling for Congress to codify Roe nationwide, it seems unlikely that Democrats have the votes to do so. Besides, a national law protecting abortion would still leave abortion rights at the mercy of political shifts (what one Congress can do today, another Congress can undo tomorrow) and even open the door to a push for a national abortion ban.
Instead, as pro-choicers increasingly turn their attention to fighting against abortion restrictions at the state level, I want to make one very short-term, one long-term, and one very long-term suggestion for pro-choicers.
In the short term, pro-choicers should focus on assistance to women in states with “trigger laws”—abortion-restrictive laws already in place, just waiting the overturning of Roe to be activated—who are suddenly having to deal with clinics closing and abortion appointments canceled.
In the longer term, pro-choice activists should grapple with the question of whether to expend massive political capital by trying to restore some semblance of the Roe status quo nationwide or to settle for a compromise: for instance, to live with abortion restrictions in some states as long as (1) they do not have time horizons that are too short (would the 15-week ban in some states be more acceptable than the 6-week ban in Ohio?); (2) they include reasonable exceptions permitting abortions when the life of the mother is endangered and in cases of rape and incest; (3) they do not interfere with interstate travel; and (4) they do not involve intrusive policing of abortion-pill use.
In the still longer term, the pro-choice camp must get much more aggressive about promoting (and facilitating access to) birth control. Lack of such access is one of the reasons abortion rates are much higher among black and Hispanic women than among white women. It’s all very well to talk about systemic inequities, but more outreach to make sure that low-income women not only have options for free or low-cost birth control but also know about those options is absolutely essential.
Those who think that the Roe v. Wade reaction is going to swing the midterm elections are mistaken. Whatever people feel about abortion rights, they are not on most people’s short list of political priorities, and those who think abortion rights are one of their most important issues already vote Democrat. This election will be decided by what more often than not decides national elections — how people feel about the economy (as Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush can tell you).
Tim Nerenz:
Very few Americans understand the magnitude of the energy transition that politicians and activists demand, largely because the demanders have no clue and no curiosity when it comes to feasibility and practical limitations of their goals.
$10 trillion has been invested in renewable energy generation (solar, wind, biofuel) since 1990 and it has displaced 3% of fossil fuel dependence in the global energy mix.
Another $333 trillion would do the trick, but with world GDP of $85 trillion and energy investments (all sources) at $2 trillion per year, utopia is a more than a century away, best case.
The first doomsday prediction of man-made global warming catastrophe appeared in newspapers in 1924, with a dire warning of extinction within 40 years if something was not urgently done.
New extinction dates, tipping points, and points of no return have come and gone as each international conference, committee, commission, panel, and accord yields to the next one and the planet stubbornly refuses to comply.
Climate science is not “settled”; it has never been settled and never will be settled. There are more pieces missing in the puzzle than pieces which have been fitted.
To acknowledge this does not make us science deniers, it makes us science rememberers:
Dec 1973 – 20 years to ice age catastrophe, U.S. population will drop to 22 million by 2000.
May 1982 – final extinction in 20 years (UNEP Mostafa Tolba)
July 1989 – ten years to tipping point (UNEP Noel Brown)
May 1995 – twenty years to tipping point (Irish PM Robinson)
Jan 2006 – ten years to save the planet (Al Gore)
June 2007 – five years to tipping point (UN IPCC chief Pauchhari)
Jan 2009 – four years to save the world (NASA James Hansen)
July 2009 – eight years to save the world (Prince Charles)
Oct 2009 – 50 days to save the world (UK P.M. Gordon Brown)
Nov 2009 – ten years to tipping point (UK Telegraph)
n.d. 2009 – five years to save the world (AUS chief scientist)
Feb 2012 – four years to save the world (UN Foundation Wirth)
Sept 2012 – 100 million will die by 2030 (Reuters)
Jan 2013 – Greta Thunberg is born
April 2014 – 15 years to take action (Boston Globe)
May 2014 – 500 days to save the world (French FM Fabius)
n.d. 2019 – point of no return 2030 (AOC’s GND)
June 2022 – “less than a decade” to avoid catastrophe (UPenn Prof. Mann).Nuclear power and carbon capture technologies offer the most promising solutions to the problem of AGW, but the former is off limits and the latter’s R&D is woefully underfunded.
The Climate Lobby depends on a renewable resource of young and impressionables to replace the rememberers as we gain perspective over the years and dire predictions fail to materialize.
Climate alarmists warned that food shortages and starvation could come by the end of this century; the war in Ukraine and Western sanction response have cut in the front of the line. South Sudan is in crisis this summer – the canary in the coal mine.
There are many problems in the world, and AGW is one of them, but is not the most urgent.
For some reason, the Beatles’ “Sie Liebt Dich” got only to number 97 on the German charts:
The English translation did much better, yeah, yeah, yeah:
Today in 1968, Elvis Presley started taping his comeback special:
Today in 1989, The Who performed its rock opera “Tommy” at Radio City Music Hall in New York, their first complete performance of “Tommy” since 1972:
This would have never happened in the People’s Republic of Madison, but … in Milwaukee today in 1993, Don Henley dedicated “It’s Not Easy Being Green” to President Bill Clinton … and got booed.
My German side should appreciate this: Today in 1870, Richard Wagner premiered “Die Valkyrie”:
Today in 1964, the Beatles released their album “A Hard Day’s Night”:
Today in 1975, Sonny and Cher decided they didn’t got you (that is, them) babe anymore — they divorced, which meant it was no longer true that …
(Interestingly, at least to me: Sonny and Cher revived their CBS-TV show after their divorce. Also, Cher did a touching eulogy at Sonny Bono’s funeral.)
Today in 1990, eight Kansas and Oklahoma radio stations decided to boycott singer KD Lang because she didn’t have a constant craving for meat, to the point she did an anti-meat ad:
Birthdays start with Billy Davis Jr. of the Fifth Dimension:
Jean Knight, who was dismissive of …
Rindy Ross, the B-minor-favoring singer of Quarterflash:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 