Derecka Purnell at The Guardian writes—A black woman was shot and killed by police in her house. We need real justice:
Last month, a judge sentenced former Dallas Police Officer Amber Guyger to 10 years in prison for entering the wrong apartment in her building and killing Botham Jean, her neighbor. Lee Merritt, the Jean family attorney, boasted: “This is a victory for black people in America. It is a signal that the tide is going to change here. Police officers are going to be held accountable for their actions, and we believe that will begin to change policing culture all over the world.”
But it would not. Guyger’s conviction didn’t even change police culture near Dallas. Before the ink could dry on the sentencing papers, a Fort Worth police officer entered into Atatiana Jefferson’s home. He shot and killed her within seconds. She was playing video games with her nephew. A neighbor called a non-emergency number for a wellness check because Atatiana’s door was open late at night. In 2013, Fort Worth police also killed a man in his own garage during a wellness check. The officers were not prosecuted.
Merritt and some activists have issued calls for “more justice.” I understand this impulse. After a police killing, prison is something, and that something can feel like justice when the other option seems like nothing. People understandably want police officers to be punished for killing black people. They also hope that prison will send a warning message to other officers that they cannot get away with murder. But that’s not how policing works. If we want black people, or anybody, to be safe from police violence, then we must first be clear about one thing: prison is not justice. It is punishment, and contrary to popular belief, sending more cops to prison may not make other black people safe.
Cop convictions are increasing, but cop killings roughly remain constant.
Adam Taylor at The Washington Post writes—John Bolton’s revenge will be bittersweet:
For almost a year and a half, John Bolton was among the most powerful government officials on Earth. A detail-oriented bureaucratic operator, Bolton got to push his hard-line views on issues such as Iran and North Korea on President Trump, the easily distracted political novice.
But ironically, it turns out Bolton may be more powerful outside the White House than in it. A little over a month ago, Bolton was fired as White House national security adviser; now, he is poised to play a central role in a scandal that embroiled Trump and his allies, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani.
Fiona Hill, formerly the White House’s top adviser on Russia, this week told House investigators looking into the impeachment of Trump that Giuliani ran a shadow foreign policy in Ukraine designed to personally benefit the president. According to those with knowledge of her testimony, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose details of her deposition, Hill recounted a number of moments when Bolton, her direct superior at the White House, had angrily objected. [...]
There is now speculation about whether Bolton could be called to testify to impeachment investigators and if he were to talk, what he might reveal. He has no reason to hold back: Bolton left the office on bad terms — publicly disputing whether he was fired at all — and he has already privately criticized Trump.
Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer writes—Getting rid of Trump won’t end the war against press freedom in America:
You could practically hear the wails of umbrage and despair if you logged onto Twitter Sunday night. The New York Times had just broken the story of another and-you-thought-you-could-no-longer-be-outraged-in-2019-America outrages .
This time, it was a kind of a snuff video depicting a deep-faked Donald Trump violently gunning down his “enemies,” which were mostly memes of news orgs like NPR or ABC (with the occasional Hollywood star and the already-dead John McCain tossed in for good measure) amid church pews, crudely mimicking the kind of all-American mass shooting that the real world Donald Trump has done nothing to stop. It was made by a Trump supporter and shown at a Trump hotel to a conference of right-wing supporters, including Donald Trump Jr.
If you’d been in a coma these last four or five years, the video would have been a stroke-inducing shock. For the rest of us, this just seemed like the inevitable rock bottom of an American president who understood that ginning up hatred of the elite news media out in the Heartland was the only path for a failed-real-estate-developer-turned-reality-TV star to improbably reach the White House. Since 2015, the nation has grown uncomfortably numb to a president borrowing from Joseph Stalin to brand journalists as “enemies of the people,” making a kind of Two Minutes Hate against the press pool a focal point of his Nuremberg-style rallies, and ending press briefings through his anonymous press secretary, in its affirmation of the public’s right not to know.
Patti Davis is the author, most recently, of the novel The Wrong Side of Night and the daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. At The Washington Post she writes—The rules are different for politicians’ children. I should know:
In 1981, when my father’s administration was still young, I was asked to come in and read for Ron Howard, who was directing a movie called “Night Shift.” They sent me the script, and my agent told me I had a very good chance of getting the role. That comment stayed with me like a splinter under my skin. I’d had a few minor TV roles, but I was hardly an accomplished actress, and frankly the only reason I was pursuing acting at all was that, apart from having a song on an Eagles album, my writing career hadn’t taken off and I needed to make a living. Acting was the only other thing I knew how to do. But a role in a Ron Howard film? I was very certain that it had everything to do with the fact that my father was president and nothing to do with my barely noticeable work on “Love Boat” and a few other shows.
I imagined the criticism I would get, the cruelty of people’s judgments, and I declined to even read for the part. Shelley Long was cast in the role, and she was brilliant. I could never have hit it out of the park like she did, but I made my choice out of fear, which is never a good idea.
Unfortunately, for political sons and daughters, the fear of how you will be perceived as you go about your life, as you pursue your dreams and goals, underlies everything. It’s a toxic way to live. You have to constantly second-guess yourself, as in, "If I were anyone else, this would be a great opportunity, but it’s probably just being offered because of who my father is, and even if it isn’t, it could look that way.”
The Trump offspring don’t seem weighed down by any of these considerations. They have used Donald Trump’s presidency as their own personal debit card. Donald Jr. and Eric Trump run their father’s business, which he apparently still profits from; Ivanka Trump has been racking up trademarks from China for her fashion line at the same time she works as an adviser to her father with an office in the West Wing. Jared Kushner has been bailed out of a massive debt by foreign money. The irony of Donald Trump calling Joe and Hunter Biden corrupt would be laughable if it weren’t so painful to watch.
At The New Yorker, Lizzie Widdicombe writes—How to Beat Trump, According to Experts on Middle-School Bullies:
Barbara Coloroso, the author of “The Bully, the Bullied, and the Bystander,” said that the first thing to remember is “don’t get in the mud” with the bully. Don’t resort to name-calling, as Ted Cruz did in 2016. (After Trump had mocked his wife, Cruz called Trump a “big-government liberal” and “a sniveling coward.”) “That’s a huge mistake,” Coloroso said. “You can’t do that with a bully. He will be better at name-calling.” Trump had already labelled Cruz “Lyin’ Ted,” and called him “a soft, weak little baby.” “Trump tries to draw people into his bullying so he can identify it as a conflict,” she said. She speculated that this might be a risk for Harris: “She’s used to being in prosecutorial mode. She’s got to move out of that.”
When tangling with Trump, Juvonen said, the most important thing to know is “it’s less about content and more about power.” This goes double for the brainier candidates, like Warren, who might be tempted to pick apart Trump’s arguments. “We can’t worry about the intellectual arguments here, which is really sad,” she said. “First and foremost, you have to shift the power dynamics.” She went on, “One of the best strategies for kids who get bullied is to use self-deprecating humor.” This defuses the bully’s insults, and, potentially, helps the nerdy kid seem a tiny bit subversive. Plus, telling jokes could throw an antagonist off balance.“Bullies have very vulnerable egos,” she said. “What gets them angry the most is when someone makes fun of them.”
How should the candidates respond when Trump calls them by an offensive nickname, like “Crazy Bernie” or “Pocahontas”? Coloroso recommended calling out the behavior, but not the person. “You say, ‘That comment was bigoted, sexist’—whatever. Identify the behavior. Then say, ‘Those comments are beneath the office of the Presidency.’ ”
Justin Gillis at The New York Times writes—The Steel Mill That Helped Build the American West Goes Green:
Sparks flew a hundred feet in the air. Bare metal shrieked as powerful jolts of electricity passed through a furnace that melts scrap — like old cars and tossed-out refrigerators — into puddles, turning them into shiny recycled steel.
As I watched recently, the great arc furnace at one of the nation’s most storied steel mills was sucking in more electrical power than any other machine in Colorado, produced in part at a plant a few miles away that burns Wyoming coal by the ton.
But the electrical supply for the mill is changing.
A huge solar farm, one of the largest in the country, is to be built here on the grounds of the Evraz Rocky Mountain Steel mill. In addition to producing power for the giant mill, the farm, Bighorn Solar, will supply homes and businesses across Colorado. So far as I can tell, Evraz Rocky Mountain will be the first steel mill in the world that can claim to be powered largely by solar energy.
The announcement at the plant a couple of weeks ago, by Gov. Jared Polis and other dignitaries, was a striking turn of events in the history of American industry.
Johanna Bozuwa at The Nation writes—Pulling the Plug on PG&E. California’s recent blackout shows how desperately we need to replace private utilities with community-controlled, publicly owned, green energy systems:
Earlier this month, nearly 2 million Californians were hurt by a “planned” power shutoff by Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), a private utility company. The shutoff was part of a botched wildfire management strategy to prevent transmission lines neglected by the company for years from catching fire. Customers received only 24 hours’ notice for a shutoff that lasted up to four days, during which grocery stores sat empty, cleared of basic supplies, and schools were closed. The residents of Paradise, California, displaced just one year ago by massive fires that destroyed their town and killed dozens, found themselves without electricity once again. Thirty thousand of those affected have medical needs that require access to electricity, putting them in harm’s way.
PG&E has been the region’s main electricity provider since 1852, and its history has been marred by mismanagement and corporate greed for decades. It was bailed out by the state in 2000 and again in 2018. In recent years, its blatant political capture, leading to scant regulation and little regard for the devastating effects of a changing climate, has Californians questioning if PG&E can reliably provide a core public service like electric power.
That skepticism is, in turn, fueling serious momentum for an alternative to the investor-owned model, in California and around the nation: a new, community-controlled, publicly owned energy system grounded in renewable energy, democratic governance, and decentralization.
What’s wrong with PG&E? It’s hard to know where to start.
Osita Nwanevu at The New Republic writes—The Night of the Mad Moderates:
It’s getting more difficult by the day to remember the vigor with which former Vice President Joe Biden jumped into the presidential race earlier this year. One of the important documents of that moment in the spring was a piece in Politico Magazine by Bill Scher titled ”Did The Left Misread the 2020 Democratic Primary?” To a not inconsiderable number of pundits, an obvious answer was taking shape, just a few weeks into Biden’s candidacy. “He has dominated the polls since he entered the race last month,” Scher wrote. “Before Biden announced, he was at a measly 29 percent in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, only 6 percentage points ahead of progressive favorite Bernie Sanders, who not all that long ago looked like a genuine co-front-runner. Since then, Biden has surged to 40 percent, kicking Sanders down to the mid-teens.”
Scher went on to explain that the threat of Trump’s reelection had made most of the primary electorate “more cautious and less radical,” a mindset favorable to Biden and at odds with assertions that a large share of Democrats were hungry for ambitious policy change. “It’s indisputable that such a faction exists among Democratic primary voters,” he wrote. “But if the left is wrong about its breadth, it will take more than a good clapback tweet for them to figure out what to do next.” In New York magazine, Jonathan Chait agreed. “Perhaps it was the party’s intelligentsia, not Biden, that was out of touch with the modern Democratic electorate,” he wrote. “The conclusion that Biden could not lead the post-Obama Democratic Party is the product of misplaced assumptions about the speed of its transformation. Yes, the party has moved left, but not nearly as far or as fast as everybody seemed to believe.”
This was a premature assertion for a variety of reasons, the simplest of which being math. The initial spike in Biden’s support following his announcement leveled off by mid-June, at which point polls clearly showed that the combined constituency for the race’s progressive standard bearers, Sanders and Warren, was as large or larger than Biden’s—without even counting the supporters of formerly moderate candidates who had taken from the 2016 election no small amount of encouragement to move leftward, such as Cory Booker and Kamala Harris.
John Lithgow at The New York Times writes—Trump Is a Bad President. He’s an Even Worse Entertainer:
As bad a president as Mr. Trump has been, he’s an even worse entertainer. He reads scripted lines like a panic-stricken schoolboy at a middle school assembly. He mangles every attempt at irony, self-mockery or, God forbid, an actual joke. He cravenly fills the hall for every rally with a hopped-up claque drawn from his hard-core base. And he can be grotesquely inappropriate at his public appearances, as when he babbled inanely about crowd size and margins of victory on recent condolence visits to Ohio and Texas after mass shootings in those states.
Pause for a moment and recall No-Drama Barack Obama. Remember when we would whine about how aloof and deliberative he was? Maybe there was some truth to that complaint but, wow, did that man know how to choose his moments.
Think about the time when, during his eulogy for the pastor Clementa Pinckney, slain in his Charleston, S.C., church in 2015, Mr. Obama began to softly sing “Amazing Grace.” Can you imagine a greater contrast or a sterner rebuke to the broad grin and upturned thumb of our current president after the Walmart shooting this past summer in El Paso?
It is dispiriting to watch the wretched excesses of Mr. Trump’s slapstick presidency and the rabid audience he commands. But there may be an upside to his crude performance art. His relentless lies, impulsive acts and gassy pronouncements have emboldened American journalists and quickened their senses.
Sarah Anderson at OtherWords writes—Where Is 'Line Worker Barbie'?
Mattel executives say they’re worried about girls developing “self-limiting beliefs,” resulting in a "dream gap" with boys.
So the giant toymaker rolled out an extensive line of “Career Dolls,” including Barbie pilots, firefighters, and robotic engineers, to inspire its young patrons. But there’s one career you won’t find in this line: the typical working woman on the Mattel payroll.
That median employee would be an Indonesian factory worker who earned just $5,489 in 2018. By contrast, Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz took home $18.7 million — 3,408 times more than his line workers.
Talk about a dream gap.
Mattel is just one of 50 U.S. corporations that paid their CEO more than 1,000 times more than their typical employee last year, according to a new Institute for Policy Studies report.
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—Democrats, Dream Big but Tell the Whole Truth:
I am not one of the nervous Nellies who believe that Democratic candidates shouldn’t dream big and pitch big, transformational ideas. I’m not one of those who believe that Democrats should negotiate with themselves, in advance of submitting a proposal, so that they present only incremental half measures in the name of practicality and perceived ability to implement.
“Dream smaller” is a dream killer. And, I believe, an election loser. “I have milquetoast policies that I can massage their way through a contemptuous Congress” is not a motivational message.
Moderate Democrats want to inch toward success; I’m open to the moonshots of the more progressive Democrats. [...]
Start with your grandest ideas, and any eventual compromise is likely to end up in the middle; start with middling ideas, and your compromise will end up as right-lite.
That is not acceptable to me. [...]
All that said, I still believe that the candidates with the biggest plans need to level with voters about how costly, painful and disruptive transformational changes are likely to be, at least in the short term.
Kate Aronoff at The Guardian writes—Shame on CNN and the New York Times moderators for ignoring the climate crisis:
The climate crisis was everywhere and nowhere to be found in Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential primary debate. American foreign policy – and wars in the Middle East, especially – are deeply bound up in the politics of oil, a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. The conflict in Syria discussed at length can be linked to historic droughts fueled by rising temperatures, which pushed many people off land they could no longer farm. The Wall Street banks Elizabeth Warren worked to regulate through the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—an agency Joe Biden took credit for creating—have funneled $1.9tn into the fossil fuel industry since the adoption of the Paris agreement. And the billionaires Bernie Sanders hopes to eliminate have some of the largest carbon footprints on Earth.
Given that it’s the context in which all politics over the coming century will play out, ever-accelerating climate impacts can already be found in virtually every policy field brought up on stage last night. Several candidates—Sanders, most frequently—used questions about them as a bridge to talk about rising temperatures and a Green New Deal. Debate moderators with CNN and The New York Times just couldn’t be bothered to mention it. [...]
After hosting a seven-hour town hall about the climate crisis several weeks back – inaccessible to anyone who didn’t have cable – CNN seems to have patted itself on the back for a job well done, having checked the box of having to talk about the potential end of human civilization. Devoting that much programming to an issue it hardly every discusses on air was laudable, but hardly a substitute for continuing to press candidates on how they plan to rapidly decarbonize the economy.
David Atkins at The Washington Monthly writes—Who is Trump Working For? We Deserve To Know:
Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds will likely go down as the greatest American foreign policy disaster since the invasion of Iraq. While the cost, destruction, death toll and moral miasma of the invasion of Iraq are unparalleled, the Kurdish betrayal is uniquely bad in a key way: America’s imperialist misadventures against perceived enemies are sadly commonplace, but rarely have we abandoned a longtime ally in such a shameful manner. The repercussions of doing so will resonate to the benefit of America’s foes for decades to come. [...]
We have to start asking who the president is working for, exactly. It’s not hyperbole to suspect that Trump may literally be compromised either by greed or blackmail, serving either as a knowing or unwitting asset of a hostile foreign power. Because nothing about this decision to betray the Kurds is on behalf of any American constituency.
Matt Ford at The New Republic writes—A Liberal Legal Movement Is Stirring at Last. A Supreme Court shortlist released on Tuesday marks the beginning of an effort to counter conservative judicial dominance:
Conservatives have long placed a higher priority on shaping the federal courts than their liberal adversaries. Demand Justice, a recently formed liberal group that focuses on judicial nominations, is trying to change that. On Tuesday, the organization unveiled its latest effort to influence the Democratic presidential candidates: a shortlist of almost three dozen potential Supreme Court nominees for them to draw upon, applying the same strategic thinking that organizations such as the Federalist Society has lent the Trump administration, to great effect.
Their list features 32 prominent liberal members of the legal community, only eight of whom currently hold judicial office. The rest are a diverse medley of litigators, legal scholars, civil servants, and elected officials. Many work for the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and other civil-rights-oriented legal groups. A few are already nationally prominent figures, such as The New Jim Crow author Michelle Alexander, Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson, and Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner. It’s easy to imagine a future Democratic president nominating most of them to the federal bench in some capacity.
“While Democrats play by the rules, Republicans are shredding the rule book, and the result is a partisan Supreme Court that works for corporations and the Republican Party and against everyone else,” Christopher Kang, Demand Justice’s chief counsel, said in a statement. “If we want to restore balance to our courts, we need to stop shying away from the fight for them and instead give progressives something to fight for: judges who have been bold, progressive champions who have been on the front lines advancing the law for our values.”