E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Israel’s election has made the path to a two-state solution even rockier:
The failure of the left is a commentary on the mood of Israelis who have largely given up hope for accommodation with Palestinians. The country’s electorate is often seen as divided among hawks, doves and “security hawks,” essentially Israel’s swing voters. Unlike the conventional hawks, the security hawks are open to reaching agreement with Palestinians if they see doing so as consistent with Israel’s safety. They move right when they see such an accord as impossible.
This has created a kind of vicious cycle: If Palestinian leaders cannot deliver a deal palatable to Israelis, Israeli voters lose hope in its possibility and look for someone who can manage endless conflict. Netanyahu is on the verge of becoming Israel’s longest-serving prime minister by being viewed as that man.
But the lurch to the right in Israel further hardens views on the Palestinian side. Virtually everything Netanyahu does makes conciliation even less likely. His end-of-campaign pledge to annex Jewish settlements on the West Bank would, if carried out, be “the final death knell for a two-state process,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism in the United States. “That has to distress anybody who wants a democratic Jewish state and a two-state solution.”
For pro-Israel liberals, the election will aggravate a growing estrangement. “We’re walking a very delicate tightrope,” Jacobs said during an interview. “We are deeply committed to the state of Israel, to its founding promise, and we see policies that are quite antithetical to us and to that promise.” Within the Democratic Party, an already fractious debate will become even more heated.
Netanyahu’s full-throated embrace of the far right’s extreme agenda has placed him on a dangerous track that is not in the interest of Israel, the Palestinians or the United States. As longtime supporters of a strong U.S.-Israel relationship, we are deeply concerned about recent developments. If enacted, these policies would fundamentally change the character of Israel, undermine basic Palestinian human rights and violate long-held policies and values adopted by U.S. presidents of both parties to achieve a future two-state solution that enables Israelis and Palestinians to live in peace and dignity alongside each other. That’s why Congress cannot afford to look the other way.
Netanyahu has demonstrated increasing disregard for international law and human rights — accelerating construction for thousands of settler housing units in the West Bank, allowing the forcible removal of Arab families from their homes in East Jerusalem and sanctioning violence against Palestinians in the occupied territories. He has also aligned himself with openly racist factions that have supported the removal of Palestinians from the occupied territories. In this context, his recently announced pledge to annex all settlements in the West Bank can be viewed only as the first step toward a West Bank with enclaves of stateless Palestinians or of a greater Israel without Palestinians.
These developments have not taken place in a vacuum. They have been recklessly aided and abetted by President Trump, whose indiscriminate support for Netanyahu and the Israeli far right has been characterized by total disregard for long-standing U.S. policy, international law and regional stability.
(Both Democrats, Van Hollen represents Maryland in the U.S. Senate, while Connolly represents Virginia’s 11th Congressional District in the House of Representatives.)
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—Trump’s Other Base. In preparation for 2020, the president is focused on the minority vote:
It is worth remembering that in 2016, after years of the racist birtherism attack against President Barack Obama, after calling Mexicans rapists and murderers and after promising over and over to build the wall, Trump still won 28 percent of the Hispanic vote, 27 percent of the Asian vote and 8 percent of the black vote, according to exit polls.
(It is important to note that in the cases where data is available, more minority men voted for Trump than women. Among black men, 13 percent voted from Trump compared with only 4 percent among black women, and among Hispanic men, 32 percent voted for Trump compared with only 25 percent among Hispanic women.)
Trump wants to hold these numbers if not inch up a percent or two.
He has multiple strategies to do that among black people, especially black men.
Bill McKibben at The Guardian writes—Glaciers and Arctic ice are vanishing. Time to get radical before it's too late:
Forget “early warning signs” and “canaries in coalmines” – we’re now well into the middle of the climate change era, with its epic reshaping of our home planet. Monday’s news, from two separate studies, made it clear that the frozen portions of the Earth are now in violent and dramatic flux.[...]
What it means, I think, is that no one should be shocked when Extinction Rebellion activists engage in mass civil disobedience. No one should be annoyed when school kids start leaving class en masse. No one should be surprised that Green New Deal advocates are now calling for dramatic overhaul of American society. In fact we should be deeply grateful: these activists, and the scientists producing these reports, are the only people on the planet who seem to understand the scale of the problem.
Not our political leaders. Obviously not Trump, but even most of the theoretically engaged premiers and presidents let themselves constantly be distracted by much smaller questions. (Brexit would seem like a silly charade at the best of times; at the moment it seems actively obscene). Not our business leaders, who make occasional greenwashing noises but continue passively belonging to organizations like the Chamber of Commerce that continue to fight serious change. Not those pension fund trustees still clinging to fossil fuel stocks even as they lose money.
The respectable have punted; so now it’s up to the scruffy, the young, the marginal, the angry to do the necessary work. Their discipline and good humor and profound nonviolence are remarkable, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Greta Thunberg. They are what’s left of our fighting chance.
Meehan Crist at The New Republic writes—Down to Earth. Why is the story of climate catastrophe so hard to tell?
How do you talk about an emergency when it seems as if no one is listening? For years, journalists, scientists, and activists concerned with the ongoing horror of climate catastrophe have faced this problem. Arguably the most important issue of our time, climate change is a known ratings killer. If you aren’t already a victim of climate-related disaster, the issue can feel far away, and many readers find the unrelenting rise of global warming too disturbing, or simply too overwhelming, to contemplate. “No one wants to read about climate,” a literary agent once told me, “It’s too depressing.”
For journalists, scientists, activists, and those engaged in “climate communication”—a burgeoning field dedicated to understanding how information about climate change moves through cultural systems—the question of how to tell engaging stories remains open and urgent. Climate change is huge, abstract, and wickedly complex, so it resists the kind of easy narrative that might make it stick in a reader’s mind or suggest concrete policy. By comparison, stories about the threat of nuclear Armageddon, humanity’s other recent existential menace, have been far easier to tell, because the danger literally lay in the hands of a few men with red buttons. Some voices have broken through to mass audiences—Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein—mostly in expository styles geared toward sharing information and analysis. But where, at least in nonfiction, are the storytellers who can sing songs of impending doom, who can bring the horror that is already upon us into focus, and help us see our own places within it?
Two recent articles tried new ways of talking about the emergency at hand, and appeared to resonate with readers.
Edward Kleinbard at the Los Angeles Times writes—The law is clear on disclosing Trump’s tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee:
The relevant law here is neither obscure nor unclear. If most citizens were previously unaware of tax code section 6103, that’s because they’ve not been in a position to invoke it. But for those to whom it is relevant — law enforcement agencies, state tax authorities, committees of Congress, and others — it is straightforward.
The statute permits the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee to request any tax return, provided — and this is important — he ensures the privacy of the return. The entire committee, for example, can access a return only when meeting in private (“executive”) session. An unauthorized public release is a felony. Chairman Neal is not looking to collect the Trump tax returns simply so he can publish them on the committee’s website.
A request motivated only by Neal’s idle curiosity could, perhaps, be resisted. But Neal’s request plainly relates to his committee’s oversight of the IRS, and in particular whether the IRS is following its own procedures in auditing the president’s returns. Given the tremendous pressure that an IRS agent might feel when reviewing a president’s tax situation, this oversight is urgently required. Because the president insists that his pre-election returns are still under audit, the oversight must extend to them as well.
Radley Balko at The Washington Post writes—21 more studies showing racial disparities in the criminal justice system:
Last September, I put up a post listing more than 120 studies demonstrating racial bias in the criminal-justice system. The studies covered nearly every nook and cranny of our carceral system — from police to prosecutors to prisons; from misdemeanor offenses to the death penalty; from sentencing to parole; and from youth offenses to plea bargaining to clemency. The post also included nine studies I could find that suggested racial bias was not a factor in some part of the criminal-justice system,
I also asked readers to send me any studies I missed, and I promised that I’d keep the list up to date as new studies came along. So here is our first update. I’ll both list the new studies here, and add them to the master list. [...]
- While black youths make up 14 percent of the youth population, a 2018 study found that they make up 53 percent of minors transferred to adult court for offenses against persons, despite the fact that white and black youth make up nearly an equal percentage of youth charged with such offenses. [...]
The Editorial Board of The New York Times concludes in its opinion on Brunei's Royal Barbarity and Hypocrisy:
An intriguing aspect of Brunei’s barbarous Shariah laws is that if they were to be really enforced, a few of the sultan’s ridiculously wealthy, jet-setting kin would be leading candidates for death by stoning. Adultery is one of the crimes for which the archaic penalty is prescribed under the stern laws that went into effect on April 3 — along with sex between men, abortion and rape — and tabloids around the world have accumulated plenty of evidence against some Bruneian royals.
Such royal hypocrisy may seem to be the norm among autocratic rulers sitting atop oceans of oil who place no limits on their own dissolute lifestyles and yet impose cruel Islamic law on their subjects. And tiny Brunei, a country roughly the size of Delaware that shares the island of Borneo with Malaysia and Indonesia, might not seem worth getting worked up about.
Yet it is, for several reasons. First is that “this is the way we do it” is no longer a viable excuse for cruelty and barbarism anywhere. The world has gone way past times when witches were burned, homosexuals castrated or adulterers branded, and Brunei has signed (but not yet ratified) the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. [...]
That celebrities are taking action is good, but governments and multinationals that do business with the wealthy sultanate have an obligation to look for ways to persuade Sultan Hassanal and other beneficiaries of Brunei’s oil riches that they best quickly bring their laws into compliance with their human rights obligations and abandon vicious punishments for blameless behavior.
Thomas B. Edsall at The New York Times writes—How Far Left Is Too Far Left for 2020 Democrats? Or is that question beside the point in the Trump era?
Gallup data shows the steady ascendance within Democratic ranks of self-identified ideological liberals and a parallel decline in the share of Democrats who say they are moderate or conservative. From 1973 to 2018, as I have noted before, the percentage of Democrats who say they are liberal has grown from 25 to 51 percent, while the share of moderates has fallen from 48 to 31 percent, and the share of conservatives has dropped from 25 to 13 percent.
A 2014 Pew study showed a steady process of ideological consolidation among both Republicans and Democrats since 1994, although consolidation accelerated most rapidly on the left:
The share of Democrats who are liberal on all or most value dimensions has nearly doubled from just 30 percent in 1994 to 56 percent today. The share who are consistently liberal has quadrupled from just 5 percent to 23 percent over the past 20 years.
In a reflection of their importance in primaries, “consistently liberal” Democrats turned out in elections at a 70 percent rate, compared with 47 percent for “mostly liberal” Democrats and 41 percent for Democrats with “mixed views,” according to Pew data.
These and other trends, according to Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the liberal New America think tank, represent the changing the mind-set of the Democratic electorate.
Kleinbard, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law, was chief of staff for Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation from 2007-09.
Andrew Gawthorpe at The Guardian writes—Obama's message to Democrats was not timidity but focus on priorities:
Over the weekend, Barack Obama offered some advice on how Democrats can maximize their chances. In the most-quoted part of his remarks, the former president warned liberals against being overly rigid and setting up “circular firing
As a clear warning to the party’s progressive wing, this section of his remarks made most of the headlines. But Obama didn’t stop there. He also warned progressives of the risk of giving too much away. What was also needed, he said, was “reflection and deliberation” on which principles were too important to be compromised. Rather than counseling timidity, his remarks were most of all a call for progressives to set priorities and plan realistically for how to obtain them.
Democrats need to heed both parts of Obama’s warning. We are currently in what has been called the “Twitter primary”, in which the candidates are trying to appeal to (and fundraise from) a relatively small number of highly connected and ideologically motivated voters. To do so, they have laid out a stunning array of progressive policy proposals, from Medicare for All to abolishing the electoral college. These policies are excellent at motivating the party base, and the achievement of any of them would be a major progressive achievement. But these policies aren’t all guaranteed to appeal to the wider electorate, and they are also far too ambitious to all be accomplished in a single presidency.
squads” which took aim at other Democrats who strayed from “purity on the issues”.
Ed Kilgore at New York magazine writes—How to Break the Highest Glass Ceiling in America:
Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 presidential contest was obviously a terrible blow to the high expectations that she would finally shatter the “glass ceiling” preventing women from the highest public office in the land. But the hangover from that defeat is arguably worse: Many Democrats are so convinced that sexism was at the root of her defeat that they are terrifiedto nominate another woman — or at least another woman superficially like HRC — in 2020. And it’s not just a whispered fear, as the New York Times discovered when it explored this subject recently:
Joyce Cusack would love to see a woman as president in her lifetime. But she is not sure it should happen in 2020.
“Are we ready in 2020? I really don’t think we are,” said Ms. Cusack, 75, a former Democratic National Committee member from Florida. Too many Americans may not want to “take another chance” on a female candidate, Ms. Cusack said, after Hillary Clinton was met with mistrust and even hostility in swing states.
Cusack’s hardly alone. As a 2018 Pew study showed, women seem to have internalized the Clinton defeat as being about sexism far more than men have.
Katha Pollitt at The Nation writes—How Women Are Made Invisible by Design. When a “generic male” is the measure of all things, women suffer the consequences:
It might not astonish you to learn that I keep an ongoing mental file on the annoyances, indignities, and even dangers to which women are subjected in daily life. As a small, five-foot-tall person of a certain age, for example, I seethe each time I struggle into one of the larger New York City taxis. They are high off the ground, and not all of them have those little steps by the door or hanging straps to help you hoist yourself up; plus the sliding doors are heavy and tend to stick.
New York is a city of women, to say nothing of seniors and people of all ages and ethnicities on the smaller side. Whose bright idea was it to order up a line of taxis fit for nimble giants? And while we’re on the subject, who replaced normal chairs in restaurants with tall stools that you have to awkwardly wiggle up onto? Why are podiums so high? And why does nobody offer you something to stand on so you can be seen over them?
I know what you’re thinking: It’s not about sex, it’s about height—and you, Katha, just happen to be short. That is true. But hello! Women on average are shorter than men, and once you get down to the really petite, they’re mostly women. And yes, I am aware that taxis and seating and podiums are not the most important problems in the world. But as the British writer Caroline Criado-Perez argues, they are symptoms of a much broader affliction. Her brilliant book, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, lays out in impressive detail the many ways that human beings are presumed to be male, as well as the wide-reaching effects of this distorted view of humanity.
Timothy Higginbotham at Jacobin writes—Bernie Is Pushing for Nothing Less Than Medicare for All, Again:
[On Wednesday], Bernie Sanders introduced the Medicare for All Act of 2019 into the Senate with fourteen co-sponsors. The single-payer proposal presents a clear alternative both to Donald Trump’s attempts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and the Democratic leadership’s stubborn insistenceon reforming it incrementally.
As with its 2017 version, the bill would cover all US residents under a single, public insurer, replacing the patchwork system we have today. It eliminates all premiums, co-pays, and deductibles while giving patients complete freedom of choice in doctor and hospital by doing away with network restrictions. And it covers a wide range of services including dental, vision, hearing, and reproductive care. [...]
The Medicare for All Act represents a kind of politics never yet realized in the United States: one that puts human needs over industry profits by guaranteeing universal benefits with no means-testing or exclusions.
This is the bill Sanders wants to sign into law as president. His current standing as the presidential frontrunner makes this an actual possibility, but also presents Sanders with a new set of challenges.
David Dayen at The New Republic writes—The Final Battle in Big Tech’s War to Dominate Your World. Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Google are fighting for unbroken control of American life:
All of these companies want to be WeChat—a Chinese app that combines messaging, video calls, social networking, games, shopping, and mobile payments—but for America, if not the world. It’s genuinely hard to pay with paper money in China, given the ubiquity of WeChat. The power of leveraging payment, commerce, communications, and entertainment makes Chinese users reliant on WeChat on a minute-by-minute basis.
And that’s what Big Tech’s war of all against all is about. Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook want to make it unable for users to live without them. They will fight to assemble the biggest network with the most users, and whoever reaches that pinnacle, their device or platform will become a necessary appendage for tens of millions of Americans—or maybe all of them.
You could see this devolving into a muddled stalemate, with each company holding a sliver of users. That wouldn’t necessarily be great, either, as users get locked into their own digital buddy and its integrated services, unable to fathom extricating themselves from the tangle. In the early days of the Internet, we heard about walled gardens; this would be a walled life.
What is sacrificed for the convenience of an always-on digital life partner? Choice, for one thing: Customers will be subject to the whims of a lone digital gatekeeper.