MichaelHolmans is in the midst of a computer reset, so this morning's breakfast offering comes from the American side of the Atlantic. For more punditry, head over to Mark Sumner’s Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: UnPresidented Edition.
Our breakfast this morning honors Kellogg’s (@KelloggCompany), which is leading an advertisers' boycott of Breitbart News. The company has previously (per Wikipedia) funded a substantial youth project on white privilege and institutional racism, called on President Obama and President-Elect Trump to support the Paris Climate Agreement, promoted “Climate Smart Agriculture” for its grain producers and reducing water usage and overall waste in its manufacturing plants, and donated to activists opposing voter-ID laws.
(Historical note: Kellogg’s started life as an early health food company, back when new techniques for further refining the life out of flour was the new rage, and eating whole grains was something only lefty hippies (and Sylvester Graham, of graham cracker fame) did. They weren’t called “lefty hippies” then; they were Seventh Day Adventists and the radical Quaker spin-off “Congregational and Progressive Friends.”)
On to more serious matters. As people have seen from my (probably boringly) repetitious comments, one of the most important places where we all can have a meaningful influence is in the upcoming fights over confirmation of Trump’s nominees for Cabinet and sub-Cabinet positions. This is one of the checks-and-balances wisely embedded in the Constitution, and needs to be fully exploited. Can we defeat all of them? It seems too much to hope for — but every one who gets defeated, or withdraws under aggressive questioning, the better the next year or two or four will be. The hearings won’t happen until January, but the hearings and public narrative are being shaped now. So this is a perfect time to be vocal. The Nation magazine has a petition and more suggestions on how to contact your two Senators. That’s the key — they want to hear from their own constituents, so you call and politely say, “I’m a Kansas City voter and would like to urge the Senator to. . . .”
I’m seeing a lot of articles in the mainstream media describing the problems with Trump’s slate of nominees. That’s encouraging.
David Brock’s pro-Hillary Super PAC has announced it’s working with some former Clinton aides to dig out as much opposition research as they can find on the nominees — past statements, voting records, tax documents, and business ties (including those reported in Russian-language sources) — to pass along to Senate committee members.
I was going to go into detail here on all the nominees (and the Democratic Senators who are taking the lead in opposing them), but instead will make it a separate diary, hoping to attract more readers. There are a couple of other front page diaries announced for later today on the same topic, so I’ll wait and see what they have to say, and post mine later — will link to it in the afternoon or evening threads.
@DanaHoule, one of the few people I read on Twitter, linked to a fascinating thread connecting Trump’s business connections (and the obvious intent not to divest) and Russian connections. I recommend the whole thread. (If you’re not “on” Twitter, it doesn’t matter; just click on this and you can read the whole thread, just not respond.)
Dickenson’s key observation is that in every other interaction Trump’s entire posturing is as the super-dominant super-alpha male — but with Putin, it’s utterly servile, not the competitive attempt to out-alpha-male the other alpha-male that one might expect. The question is why — and how long will it take to sleuth out.
Another take on the same topic:
Harvard Constitutional Law professor Larry Tribe has tweeted this:
For those interested in a thoughtful piece, with historical perspective that strikes me as sound, about the role of the Electoral College in 1789 and now, I recommend this from Salon. Short version: Like much else in politics, it was inserted late in the Constitutional drafting process as a compromise to solve a particular problem, and later Hamilton wrote an elegant justification for it that didn’t discuss the dilemma they’d actually been trying to resolve; and 200+ years of experience can’t be ignored when thinking about its role today. (That, by the way, is what liberals have been arguing for decades now on every other issue, contrary to Scalia’s “original intent” interpretations of the Constitution. We have to, in order to make the 1865 Equal Protection Clause, for example, apply to same-sex marriage, which was nowhere in the the thinking of anyone in 1865.)
We live in interesting times. But then, as a historian, I think most times are interesting, and that the real living happens in between the “historically significant” “newsworthy” events — in the cups of coffee and tea, the small favors we do for each other, the care for the sick and elderly and young children, the daily work, the writing and songs and art, the changing seasons of weather and the changing seasons of our lives. For those who follow the Christian liturgical calendar, this is the season of Advent, a time of expectant waiting (which anyone who’s been through that last month of pregnancy knows so well), in optimism not in dread. For those who follow a pagan calendar, we in the northern hemisphere are approaching the moment of turning, when the daylight begins to get longer and brighter, heralding the return of spring.
Here’s my favorite “Turning” song: