Month: February 2022

According to journalists at the New York Times, the Biden administration began receiving intelligence about Putin’s plan to invade Ukraine back in October. Here was their initial calculation:

The White House acknowledged from the start that its campaign to stop Mr. Putin might not actually prevent Russia from invading Ukraine. But at the very least, White House officials say, Mr. Biden exposed Mr. Putin and his true intentions, which helped unite, at least for now, the at-times fractious NATO alliance.

The administration’s response included three critical decisions:

1. Share intelligence far more broadly with allies than was typical…The idea was to avoid disagreements about tough economic sanctions by ensuring that everyone knew what the United States knew about Mr. Putin’s actions.

2. Publicly release intelligence information aimed at preventing Mr. Putin from employing his usual denials to divide his adversaries.

3. Send Ukraine more weapons, including Javelin anti-tank missiles, and deploy more troops to other countries in Eastern Europe as a show of solidarity with Ukraine and to reassure nervous allies on NATO’s eastern flank.

Number one was especially significant.

European and American intelligence officials said that Mr. Putin initially believed Europe and the United States would remain divided and unwilling to impose strong sanctions, particularly in the defense of Ukraine. He thought that he could build up a significant force and then either attack Ukraine or extract concessions from Kyiv, without much unified opposition from Europe, the officials said.

“According to our assessment, at the end of summer, Putin likely gave instructions to prepare for military options against Ukraine,” said Mikk Marran, the director general of the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service. “And in autumn 2021, we detected the attitude of President Putin: He felt the West was weak and the issue of Ukraine needed to be fixed.”…

But Mr. Putin’s assessment ended up being a miscalculation, according to American and European officials. As the United States shared more intelligence both with NATO and individual allies, the positions hardened against Russia. The Eastern European intelligence official said that Mr. Putin’s timetable for an attack might well have been pushed back in the face of the unexpected cohesion among the allies.

Number two was based on an awareness of Putin’s pattern of spreading disinformation to confuse the public.

“Our theory has been that putting true information into the public domain, which was bearing out in real time because everybody can see what they’re actually doing, was the best way to prevent the Russians and what they always do, which is to try to control the narrative with disinformation,” a senior administration official recalled recently.

As the authors go on to note, this is why it’s a good idea to elect a president who actually knows what they’re doing.

In some ways, Mr. Biden was distinctly prepared for the moment. Having visited Ukraine a half-dozen times over the last decade, he knows the country better than any other American president…Aides also said Mr. Biden’s long history with Mr. Putin made him less susceptible to the Russian president’s tactics.

In the end, Biden’s initial assessment that these tactics might not be able to prevent Putin from invading Ukraine was accurate. On Monday the Russian president gave a speech that one analyst characterized as going “full Blofeld” (those not familiar with James Bond films can check out the significance of that comparison here).

As a former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin has spent decades crafting an image of being sly and manipulative. But that isn’t what he portrayed in that speech. Here is how his demeanor was described by Tom Nichols:

Putin’s slumped posture and deadened affect led me to suspect that he is not as stable as we would hope. He had the presence not of a confident president, but of a surly adolescent caught in a misadventure, rolling his eyes at the stupid adults who do not understand how cruel the world has been to him…Even discounting Putin’s delivery, the speech was, in many places, simply unhinged.

How does a tyrant, who is accustomed to absolute power, react when his plans are thwarted? He throws the kind of hissy fit we see from “a surly adolescent caught in a misadventure.”

The thing about Putin’s hissy fit of rage is that he exposed his real intentions for all the world to see. A couple of tweets from analysts in real time captured them.

https://twitter.com/matthewtkrause/status/1495838422917074944

Putin is attacking the legitimacy of Ukraine as an independent state.

Period. Full stop. That’s what this crisis has always been about.

— Susan Glasser (@sbg1) February 21, 2022

When Putin ended the speech by recognizing two breakaway regions, Donetsk and Luhansk, the reaction from our allies was swift. The European Union unanimously approved Russian sanctions, with Germany putting a stop to the Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Members of the G7 have also promised to impose sanctions on Russia, along with several Asian allies.

NEW: The Biden admin has support from three Asian partners for severe sanctions and export controls against Russia.

Singapore, Japan, and Taiwan have signed on for restrictive export controls on tech-starved Russia over a further Ukraine invasion.https://t.co/yiU4QSiqJQ

— Jack Detsch (@JackDetsch) February 22, 2022

Even China, a Russian ally, finds itself walking a tightrope.

“China wants to preserve its ties with Moscow, abide by its principles and avoid harming relations with the United States and the European Union,” said Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “Navigating this crisis may be one of the toughest diplomatic challenges that [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping has had to face.”

The kind of unity Biden has nurtured in response to Russia’s aggression is the “new world order” that Putin despises as a threat to his vision of a return to the Great Power politics of the 19th Century. Those are the two world views battling it out over the situation in Ukraine right now. While the new world order might not be effective in stopping a madman like Putin from invading his neighbor, we can hope that it forestalls a World War III.

One third of the Justices on the Supreme Court were nominated by President Trump, but this hasn’t bought him the kind of loyalty he expects. On Tuesday, the Court refused to hear his appeal seeking to deny the U.S. House of Representatives January 6 investigatory committee the White House records they seek.

The court had previously rejected Trump’s emergency request to block the National Archives from turning over the materials while the court considered whether to take up the case. The documents Trump was trying to block in court are already in the hands of the House Select Committee investigating January 6.

Tuesday’s order — which included no further explanation of why the court was not taking up the case — means that the lower court decisions approving the release of the documents will stand.

Trump’s Justices didn’t give him the courtesy of an explanation, and you have to scroll down 18 pages into the order to even find the case.  The effort to conceal facts from Congress just isn’t working.

Tuesday’s development formally ends Trump’s legal effort to stymie lawmakers’ efforts to obtain a batch of schedules, call logs, emails and other requested documents that the committee says could illuminate key circumstances surrounding the deadly Capitol riot.

It’s a lot harder to obstruct justice when you’re not occupying the White House.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta shot down Trump’s claim of “absolute immunity” from multiple lawsuits that have been brought by House Democrats and police officers accusing him of inciting last year’s insurrection.

The Biden administration also stepped in last week and once again rejected Trump’s attempts to shield certain White House records from the Committee. In a letter to National Archivist David Ferriero, White House counsel Dana Remus said Biden denied his predecessor’s executive privilege claim over White House visitor logs, which the Committee is seeking in its investigation into last year’s Capitol attack.

Trump is not going to have much success with a stonewalling strategy, but he still has the advantage that most Republicans support him and therefore most Republicans will make excuses for him irrespective of the law, or historic norms, or compelling testimony and factual evidentiary presentations of his crimes. In other words, if Trump did it, it must be okay. If Trump did it, then no one should give him a hard time about it.

If anyone gives him a hard time, like say the leadership of Ukraine, then most Trump supporters will back Ukraine being wiped off the map. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are wiped out of the party for participating in the January 6 committee investigation.

There appears to be no help for this. But at least we’ll get a fairly complete and accurate historical  record, and maybe it will survive the coming fascist takeover after the midterms. Could be, maybe, one day they’ll be a proper reckoning.

In October 2019, the New York Times published a chilling story about the Russian Air Force bombing hospitals in Syria in order to crush the resistance to President Bashar al-Assad. A report from the U.N. published in July 2020 said that the bombings – which also hit schools and marketplaces – amounted to a war crime.

That is what was happening on the ground in Syria when Trump announced that he was pulling U.S. troops out of the country, a decision that would effectively cede control of the area to the Syrian government and Russia.

It was during a meeting with congressional leaders at the time that the photo above was taken. The House had just passed a resolution to rebuke Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria and Democrats were challenging the president to explain his strategy.

Why, [Pelosi] asked, did he withdraw U.S. troops from Syria — a geopolitical calculation that allowed a toehold in northern Syria for Russian President Vladimir Putin?

Why, she asked with lawmakers and aides watching and a White House photographer snapping away, do “all roads lead to Putin”?

By then, Trump had spent years kowtowing to the Russian president. In Helsinki, he had publicly sided with Putin over U.S. intelligence in dismissing the possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and suggested that it would be “appropriate” for Russia to rejoin the Group of Seven richest countries — reversing the 2014 expulsion after Russia invaded Ukraine.

All of that is important to keep in mind as Russia once again dominates the headlines. While an invasion of Ukraine remains imminent, Republicans are ignoring history and, as Sen. Ted Cruz recently demonstrated, seem intent on blaming Biden for Russia’s actions, claiming that it is the current president who is weak and feckless.

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that, just as all of that has been unfolding, right wing media outlets have been pretending that Durham’s investigation has proven that the whole Trump-Russia collusion story was a hoax. For example, Gregg Jarrett of Fox News recently published a piece titled “Hillary Clinton was the mastermind behind the Trump-Russia collusion hoax and may never face justice.”

Make no mistake –it was Clinton who invented the elaborate collusion hoax, financed it, and directed the process by which it was circulated to the media and the FBI. Her false claims were then disseminated by a cadre of cronies and dirty-tricksters working secretly in the shadows.

That confluence of lies is what passes for conventional wisdom on the right these days. Of course, to get there, they have to dismiss all of the evidence of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia that were identified by Robert Mueller, as well as the 10 counts of obstruction of justice the special counsel documented.

But even more importantly, they have to dismiss the bipartisan findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation. Here is how Mark Mazzettii described their final report:

A sprawling report released Tuesday by a Republican-controlled Senate panel that spent three years investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election laid out an extensive web of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Kremlin officials and other Russians, including at least one intelligence officer and others tied to the country’s spy services…

It provided a bipartisan Senate imprimatur for an extraordinary set of facts: The Russian government disrupted an American election to help Mr. Trump become president, Russian intelligence services viewed members of the Trump campaign as easily manipulated, and some of Mr. Trump’s advisers were eager for the help from an American adversary…

…the report showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied to the Kremlin — including a longstanding associate of the onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, whom the report identified as a “Russian intelligence officer.”

Signing off on those findings was the chair of the committee, Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), along with the other Republican members: Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL), Jim Risch (R-Idaho), Susan Collins (R- Maine), Roy Blunt (R- MO), Tom Cotton (R-AR), John Cornyn (R-TX), and Ben Sasse (R-NE).

In addition to what was reported publicly, all of those Republicans had access to the classified information that was eventually redacted from the report. Regardless of whether the evidence met the legal standard of a coordinated conspiracy, they saw proof that Putin interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump become president and that there was an extensive web of contacts between the Trump campaign and Kremlin officials. In other words, there was no “hoax,” and they know it.

I suppose it should come as no surprise that the same people who want to re-write U.S. history in order to make it more “comfortable” for them are the same folks that are currently engaged in an attempt to re-write the history of Trump’s relationship with Russia. But Speaker Pelosi nailed it when she said that, when it comes to the former guy, “all roads lead to Putin.”

Harry Eaten of CNN argues that the Republicans are about to absolutely thrash the Democrats in the midterm elections, and it will be far worse than the polls suggest.

Most polls you’re looking at right now are likely underestimating Republicans’ position heading into the midterm election cycle. It’s not that the polls are “wrong.” Rather, it’s that most polls at this point are asking all registered voters who they’re going to vote for in November, when it’s likely only a distinct subset of voters who will cast a ballot.

The voters who will actually turn out for the fall election are likely going to be disproportionately Republican based on current polling data and history.

On the other hand, David Siders of Politico points to the infighting and dysfunction in the Wisconsin Republican Party, and wonders if the GOP’s enormous advantage will actually materialize. It could be that too many conservative voters stay home either because they don’t believe the elections will be fair or because they’re angry with their candidates for not doing enough to make the elections fair.

It’s an unusual level of dysfunction for a state party that not so long ago was regarded as a model for conservatism nationally. And it may have disastrous implications for the party in the fall of what otherwise looks like a favorable year for Republicans across the electoral map, undercutting fundraising and turnout efforts in the GOP’s bid to reelect Sen. Ron Johnson and to unseat the state’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers…

…The upheaval in Wisconsin is, in part, a reflection of primary politics that are unusually contentious nearly everywhere this year. And it’s an expression of near-universal anger among rank-and-file Republicans about Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020.

This puts the Democrats in an unusual and mostly unenviable position. The saner the establishment Republicans act, the more the Republican base will be disinclined to vote. That’s seems like a win-win, except that sane Republicans are going to lose in primary elections. If we think today’s GOP is frightening, just wait until we see their eventual slates of contenders for office. The Republicans should win if big if they’re united, and they’ll only be united if the establishment is cast out by the base before the general election. In other words, losing is going be worse in the end than it appears now.

It’s really this desire for survival and unity that’s pushing so many establishment Republicans to cave to the insanity, and that capitulation will bring the worst of all worlds.

Meanwhile, it appears that our Presidents Day gift will be the launch of Trump’s social media app, Truth Social, which will become available in the Apple App Store on Monday. So, our long national nightmare of being constantly subjected to Trump’s toxic commentary is set to resume. Today is our last day of peace.

There are countless wildcards, including the resumption of the Cold War or even the outbreak of World War Three, which could greatly influence the midterm elections, but it’s more certain that Trump’s legal woes will play a huge role. He must be exposed and marginalized as aggressively as possible, and every effort to hold him accountable must be made before voters go to the polls.

If he emerges as the triumphant and unquestioned leader of an ascendant Republican Party, we’re done as a country.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Sedona, Arizona scene. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I’ll start at the top with this week’s changes. I have repainted the sky, now seen in a lighter shade of blue. Out in front, I have repainted that left side shrub and repainted the broken bits of rock in the foreground. In the midground, I have done some repainted of the foliage.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

As we await an announcement about who President Biden will nominate to the Supreme Court, it is worth remembering how, in just over one year, he has worked to reshape the make-up of the federal courts.

Nearly 30% of Biden’s nominees to the federal bench have been public defenders, 24% have been civil rights lawyers and 8% labor attorneys. By the end of his first year, Biden had won confirmation of 40 judges, the most since President Ronald Reagan. Of those, 80% are women and 53% are people of color, according to the White House.

Biden’s nominee to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Nina Morrison, has a particularly unique background.

Nina has been an attorney at the Innocence Project (“IP”) since 2002, where she helped lead the IP’s growth from a small, law-school based legal clinic to a national criminal justice reform organization. To date, Nina has served as lead or co-counsel for approximately thirty innocent prisoners who were freed from prison or death row based on DNA or other newly discovered evidence. In her role as Senior Litigation Counsel, Nina also leads the IP’s initiatives on prosecutorial accountability and reform. She frequently advises prosecutors, judges, and defense counsel about how to prevent wrongful convictions and improve prosecutorial practices…

Before joining the Innocence Project, Nina was an attorney with the firm of Emery Cuti Brinckerhoff & Abady PC, specializing in civil rights litigation. From 1992 to 1995 she was an investigator with the California Appellate Project, which represents California’s death row inmates in post-conviction proceedings.

The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck to use DNA testing to exonerate those who had been wrongfully convicted of a crime. To date, 375 people in the United States – who had served an average of 14 years each in prison – have been exonerated by DNA testing. But as Philip Bump pointed out, freeing those who have been wrongfully convicted is only one side of the coin.

There are two positive effects that follow from allowing an innocent person to be freed from prison following an improper conviction. The most obvious is that the innocent person is now free, able to reconstruct his or her life as much as is possible. Less obvious is that it also allows the system to actually find the criminal who committed the crime in the first place.

Bump talked to Tricia Rojo Bushnell, president of the Innocence Network, and further learned that, of those 375 exonerations, “the actual perpetrator was identified in 165 cases.” What’s more, she told him that “Those people, because they were not convicted in the cases the wrong person was, went on to be convicted of 154 additional violent crimes, including 83 sexual assaults, 36 murders and 35 other types of violent crimes.”

In other words, ensuring that the guilty person is convicted of a crime is one of many ways that we can be smart on crime – making someone like Morrison an excellent choice to serve on the U.S. District Court.

But at Morrison’s confirmation hearing before the Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Senators Cruz, Cotton, and Hawley demonstrated that they’d rather be dumb on crime. Those three senators disdainfully grilled Morrison about her past work, writings, and associations. Hawley summed things up by stating that he wouldn’t support any Biden judicial nominees who are “soft on crime and soft on criminals.” Similarly, Cruz said that “Your nomination is part of a pattern from this administration, and Democrats in the Senate, if they follow their pattern, will vote to [confirm] yet another judge who will let more violent criminals go.”

During his questioning, Cotton brought up a case from Arkansas involving Ledell Lee, who was executed in 2017 for the 1993 murder of a 26-year-old woman, Debra Reese. But four years after he was executed, a different man’s DNA was found on the murder weapon, which had not been previously tested. Morrison, who has taken on Lee’s sister as a client, noted that there was “compelling evidence” that he might have been innocent of the crime. In response, Cotton threw up his hands and declared: “Compelling evidence that the court somehow overlooked for 20 years?” As Charles Pierce noted:

To hell with legislative research, has Cotton seen a movie in the past 20 years? Has he watched the news? Innocent people have been walking out of prisons after decades of mistaken incarceration.

I would remind you that Senator Cotton is the one who thinks that we have an “under-incarceration problem” in this country and recently stated that the minimal criminal justice reforms of the First Step Act were “the worst mistake of the Trump administration.”

Keeping innocent people locked up for crimes they didn’t commit, while letting the actual perpetrators remain free to harm more victims, isn’t just a matter of being dumb on crime…it’s immoral. This country should have nothing but disdain for these three senators.

As I noted previously, Ron Brownstein has written about a small group of data analysts – primarily David Shor, Ruy Teixeira, and Stanley Greenberg – who are suggesting that Democrats should harken back to the strategies proposed by the Democratic Leadership Council and largely adopted by Bill Clinton in the 1990s. As such, Brownstein refers to these analysts as “neo-New Democrats.”

The main message of the neo-New Democrats is that their party must do a better job of winning back the support of working class Americans. Recently Stanley Greenberg, who worked for the Clinton campaign and administration, has written a piece about how they should go about doing that. In it, he contrasts the positioning of Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. About the former he writes:

In 1992, Clinton sought to win the support of both white and Black working families, pointing to their shared economic struggles and sense of grievance that hardworking people like themselves were not getting heard by government. He told them that “we need fundamental change, not more of the same,” and promised to raise taxes on CEOs while reassuring working-class voters of all races on crime and welfare.

What Greenberg doesn’t mention is that, after following through on some of those promises, this happened in 2015:

Former President Bill Clinton on Wednesday disavowed part of the anti-crime legislation that he long considered one of his top accomplishments, concluding that it went too far in sending even minor criminals to prison “for way too long.”

Addressing a convention of the N.A.A.C.P. a day after President Obama called for a wholesale overhaul of the criminal justice system, Mr. Clinton embraced the idea. He agreed that the law he enacted in 1994 played a significant part in warping sentencing standards and leading to an era of mass incarceration.

“I signed a bill that made the problem worse,” Mr. Clinton said. “And I want to admit it.”

The other thing Greenberg didn’t mention is that, during Clinton’s two terms in office, he negotiated over 300 trade agreements, including the ratification of NAFTA. Trade agreements have been used by both the left and the right to stir up anger among working class voters as the reason so many jobs have been shipped overseas.

Nevertheless, Greenberg makes it clear that he blames President Obama for the loss of support from working class voters.

Many analysts believe racism explains almost everything…But that misses how the Obama administration’s economic policy failed all working people…

The Obama years were the critical juncture when Democratic leaders stopped seeing the working class and feeling its despair and anger. They stopped advocating for workers against corporate excess and stopped challenging the exceptional corruption that allowed billionaires and Wall Street to dominate politics. The result is that the Democratic Party has lost touch with all working people, including its own base.

Since Greenberg focused on Clinton’s rhetoric rather than actual policies, it might be helpful to take a look at some of Obama’s rhetoric to analyze the accuracy of that statement. In one of his most famous speeches during the 2008 campaign, Obama addressed the controversy over statements made by Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Often overlooked was this passage:

Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race.

Their experience is the immigrant experience. As far as they’re concerned, no one handed them anything, they built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pensions dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and they feel their dreams slipping away…

And just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze: a corporate culture rife with inside dealing and questionable accounting practices and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.

And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns, this, too, widens the racial divide and blocks the path to understanding.

The man who would become this country’s first African American president articulated how the resentments of white Americans were “grounded in legitimate concerns.”

After passing the stimulus bill, the Affordable Care Act, and the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform package, Obama turned his focus towards income inequality in 2011. He proposed the American Jobs Act, which was, of course, obstructed by Republicans. But he also gave several speeches about the need to address what he called “the defining issue of our time.” One example was his speech on fiscal policy in April 2011 which took on the most recent Republican budget proposal.

In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. That’s who needs to pay less taxes?

They [Republicans] want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that’s paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs. That’s not right. And it’s not going to happen as long as I’m President.

This vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America…There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don’t think there’s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill. That’s not a vision of the America I know.

But the defining speech came when Obama travelled to Osawatomie, KS where, 100 years ago, Republican President Teddy Roosevelt gave a speech about a “New Nationalism.” Here’s just a bit of what Obama said that day:

Today, we’re still home to the world’s most productive workers. We’re still home to the world’s most innovative companies. But for most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded. Long before the recession hit, hard work stopped paying off for too many people. Fewer and fewer of the folks who contributed to the success of our economy actually benefited from that success. Those at the very top grew wealthier from their incomes and their investments — wealthier than ever before. But everybody else struggled with costs that were growing and paychecks that weren’t — and too many families found themselves racking up more and more debt just to keep up….

But, Osawatomie, this is not just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. Because what’s at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, secure their retirement.

And then there was the speech Obama made at an Associated Press Luncheon in April 2012.

In the face of all these challenges, we’re going to have to answer a central question as a nation: What, if anything, can we do to restore a sense of security for people who are willing to work hard and act responsibly in this country? Can we succeed as a country where a shrinking number of people do exceedingly well, while a growing number struggle to get by? Or are we better off when everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules?

This is not just another run-of-the-mill political debate. I’ve said it’s the defining issue of our time, and I believe it. It’s why I ran in 2008. It’s what my presidency has been about. It’s why I’m running again. I believe this is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and I can’t remember a time when the choice between competing visions of our future has been so unambiguously clear.

Finally, here’s what Obama said during a speech on economic mobility in December 2013:

But we know that people’s frustrations run deeper than these most recent political battles. Their frustration is rooted in their own daily battles — to make ends meet, to pay for college, buy a home, save for retirement. It’s rooted in the nagging sense that no matter how hard they work, the deck is stacked against them. And it’s rooted in the fear that their kids won’t be better off than they were. They may not follow the constant back-and-forth in Washington or all the policy details, but they experience in a very personal way the relentless, decades-long trend that I want to spend some time talking about today. And that is a dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility that has jeopardized middle-class America’s basic bargain — that if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead.

I believe this is the defining challenge of our time: Making sure our economy works for every working American. It’s why I ran for President. It was at the center of last year’s campaign. It drives everything I do in this office.

When Obama said that this is the reason he ran for president, that claim is backed up by something Michelle Obama wrote in her book “Becoming.”

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

It is certainly valid to critique Obama for saying the quiet parts out loud. But that statement was incredibly prescient about the way rural Americans have been manipulated – particularly by the likes of Donald Trump.

Many working class voters probably never heard about these speeches because they weren’t highlighted in the media. But that’s no excuse for the ignorance of someone like Stanley Greenberg. Either he didn’t pay much attention during Obama’s presidency, or he is simply dismissing this focus from the former president because it doesn’t fit the narrative he’s trying to sell. Either way, he’s going to need to look at something other than Obama’s economic policies/rhetoric to explain why working class voters have been leaving the Democratic Party since the 1980s.

I enjoyed M.T. Anderson’s opinion piece in the New York Times. The basic idea is that in the aftermath of the Black Death in Europe during the 14th-Century, the survivors suffered from both inflation and a massive manpower shortage. The workers and farmhands couldn’t afford necessities, but they suddenly had a lot of bargaining power since their labor was in high demand. As a result, they started agitating for better pay and working conditions.

The result was an outbreak of real savagery on both sides. Nobles were slaughtered; they’re estates burned to the ground, while the nobles responded in kind with wanton slaughter and a spate of new laws tying laborers to the land. The point being that sometimes you can’t go back to the past. Things had changed after the Black Death and perhaps they’ll change after the COVID-19 crisis subsides, too. There are real dangers involved if we don’t anticipate these changes and handle them in the right way.

Naturally, you can try to fit any square peg into a round hole, and complaining about income inequality is a perennial endeavor. But there are similarities here. We do have very high inflation, and companies really are having difficulty with staffing. A lot of people are dropping out of the traditional job market and refusing to play by the old rules. Things are also badly out of whack, and nowhere is this more clear than in the real estate market where mortgages and rents are simply unaffordable.

We’re also seeing a lot more division and populism than we’re used to, and our institutions are struggling to fulfill their basic responsibilities. Under the circumstances, we could see some very insistent demands for change that our met with equally determined efforts to keep things largely as they were before the pandemic hit. In a way, we’ve been fighting this kind of battle in the culture wars for decades now, but it could take on a more financial flavor.

Looking back, the nobles had some difficult problems to solve with their fields lying fallow. There was no magic trick that would create missing manpower or restore the profitability of their estates. They were going to suffer one way or the other, and they chose violence as the solution. It didn’t work out, but I’m not sure there was a way to avoid it. The changes that needed to happen involved too much disruption of the status quo and with no centralized government to carry out such a program, the nobles were stuck trying to compete with their neighbors and find any way to bring in the harvest.

And, of course, everyone, regardless of status, was ultimately reliant on the success of those harvests.

The social safety net is really about assuring that we’re not reliant on the profitability of our employers. A good system severs this relationship in both directions. The employers aren’t reliant on low wages (or serfdom) to make a buck, and aren’t hit with wage costs so high that inflation is the result.

It’s really about making sure people’s needs are met, and that’s not happening right now because elites aren’t taking the problems seriously enough and aren’t willing to entertain changes that might be disruptive.

The good thing is we have enough centralized power to actually make changes that will take effect and stick. But I’m afraid basic human nature hasn’t changed much since the 14th-Century. All I know is if someone doesn’t take a leadership role with the elites and get them to think outside the box, we could be headed to some perilous times.

When the press briefly had the opportunity to talk to Lee Harvey Oswald on the night of the assassination, he said he didn’t know what his arrest was all about. He denied shooting President Kennedy. He said he worked in the building (from which at least most of the shots originated) and had naturally been in the building for that reason. He also said, “I’m just a patsy.” It wasn’t a confession. It wasn’t a well-concocted cover story. But it also quite likely was at least highly misleading if not an outright lie. He definitely knew more than he was letting on, but how do I know that?

The answer is the alleged murder weapon. It’s not in dispute that a World War Two-era Italian 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano bolt-action rifle was recovered in the “Sniper’s Nest” on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. The rifle had Oswald’s palm print on it, according to the FBI, and it was purchased by mail order from a Chicago sporting goods company. The purchaser was A. Hiddell, a known alias of Oswald’s.

The name of “Alek James Hidell” was on a Selective Serv­ice notice of classification and a Marine Corps certificate of service, both found in Oswald’s wallet when he was arrested, according to the Warren Com­mission, which investigated the assassination. On the Selective Service card was Oswald’s pho­tograph, with the signature “Alek J. Hidell” in what the commission said was his writ­ing.

The rifle with which the com­mission says President Kennedy was shot was ordered and shipped by mail in the name of “A. Hidell,” of Dallas. Oswald’s New Orleans post‐office box listed “A. J. Hidell” as entitled to receive mail. In Oswald’s Dallas effects was a vaccination certificate signed by “Dr. A. J. Hideel,” a variation the com­mission said was an Oswald forgery…

…Oswald’s wife. Marina, testi­fied that he had compelled her to write the name “Hidell” as chapter president on member­ship cards of a fictitious Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans, ostensibly favor­ing the cause of Premier Fidel Castro. She called this “foolish­ness,’” and suggested “Hidell is merely an altered Fidel.” – New York Times, November 1, 1964

One could easily go down a rabbit hole trying to figure out why Oswald was using an alias, but here is what I want you to consider, because it’s been bothering me. If Oswald were the assassin he really could not have thought he’d get away with the crime. After all, he left the murder weapon at the scene. Now, admittedly, there wasn’t much alternative. He couldn’t have strolled unnoticed out of the building carrying a rifle. But it was a simple matter to trace the weapon back to him, and he would have known that. The fact that he was carrying papers linking him to the alias used to purchase the weapon just made this task that much easier, but his P.O. Box was all the evidence the FBI needed.

Here’s what Oswald did immediately after Kennedy was shot at 12:30 pm. He walked down to the second floor where he was confronted at gunpoint by a police man. Informed that Oswald was an employee, the police man continued up to the higher floors. Oswald got a soda from the break room and left the building at 12:33. He initially got on a bus before disembarking and hailing a cab. He went to his rooming house, got some things, and then allegedly shot and killed a Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit on the street before heading to a movie theater where he was arrested.

It’s a strange tale, and it really makes little sense.

Even aside from the fatal confrontation with the Officer Tippit, Oswald seemed to be making efforts to avoid capture. He fled the scene, switched from a bus to a cab, and the cab dropped him off several blocks from his rooming house. But he didn’t really have a plan to get out of Dodge. Was his trip to the movie theater part of a pre-planned rendezvous (was he double-crossed) or a desperate improvisation after the unexpected incident with Tippit?

It’s no wonder that a million conspiracies bloomed in the wake of this story. Most of those conspiracies fail to take into account all the facts. If Oswald was set up to take the fall for the killing of the president, he was at least a witting participant to some plot, even if he didn’t know the true purpose. His gun was left at the scene and we know he was on that floor that day. If he brought the gun at someone else’s behest, what did he think it was for?

Theories like this lack surface plausibility, but then so does the idea that he could simply walk away from the crime with his gun sitting there and somehow insist on his innocence. If he had a plan to permanently evade capture, why is there no evidence for it? Where was he going to go? Was he just going to abandon his wife and child?

His behavior when arrested seems like genuine confusion, like he really didn’t know why he was a suspect. He comment about being a patsy suggests, however, that he knew he’d been set up. But how?

The evidence that Oswald was the lone shooter is suspect at best, but it’s virtually conclusive that he was the Book Depository shooter. The problem is that no one has explained what his plan was for after the shooting. If the gun were untraceable and he’d wiped the palm print off of it, he could have just remained in the building with the other employees. But if he knew he needed to escape, he must have had a place in mind where he’d go. And if he was put up to the assassination by someone else, maybe he was supposed to meet up with them so they could help him leave Dallas.

There are dozens of books that look at these questions in much greater detail than I’ve attempted here, but I haven’t really seen anything that satisfies my curiosity about Oswald’s post-assassination behavior. I want to know what he meant when he said he was a patsy. Was it just bullshit or did he mean it?

I’ve always had the nagging suspicion that it was a little of both. But he was gunned down before he could give us any better clues.

You might have missed this news from earlier in the month:

Delta Air Lines’ CEO Ed Bastian asked the U.S. Department of Justice to put convicted unruly travelers on a national “no-fly” list, the airline’s latest effort to deter aggressive behavior on flights that have surged during the pandemic.

Please note the key word “convicted” in the Delta CEO’s request. Mr. Bastion is talking about people who have enjoyed due process. Unruly airline passengers have been an increasing problem during the COVID-19 pandemic, with 72 percent of the 5,981 incidents in 2021 arising from non-mask compliance. In 350 of those cases, charges were filed. We’re still talking about a relatively limited number of people, all of them top of the class in the asshole category.

Now, the ‘no-fly’ list is not without its problems. There are real concerns about the transparency on how someone lands on the list, and further difficulties in how one can get themselves removed from it. And it’s true that the list was originally intended to stop terrorists from boarding planes. On the other hand, if you’re like me, it doesn’t take a whole lot to instill a jolt of terror on an airplane flight. Creaky landing gear or sudden turbulence will do the trick, and so will passengers who argue with the flight crew. If someone has been arrested and convicted of creating a disturbance on a flight, the airlines absolutely have the right not to take their business in the future. Maybe there should be some time limit or appeals process for the bans, but there really doesn’t need to be second chances when it comes to flight safety.

The concern here is really the request that the Department of Justice take the lead. If this were just airlines compiling the list themselves, there wouldn’t be quite so much controversy. However, mask non-compliance has become a badge of honor on the right and within the Republican Party, so now we have eight Republican senators (Cramer, Cruz, Hoeven, Lankford, Lee, Lummis, Rubio, and R. Scott)  writing a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland begging him to turn down the airline’s request.

They raise some valid concerns about the ‘no-fly’ list and I sympathize with several of their arguments. In particular, I do not want to see a slippery slope where there’s some political component to banning people from commercial air travel. The problem is that they see mask non-compliance as precisely this kind of improper political ban.

According to data from the Federal Aviation Administration2, the majority of recent infractions on airplanes has been in relation to the mask mandate from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). While we strongly condemn any violence towards airline workers, there is significant uncertainty around the efficacy of this mandate, as highlighted by the CEO of Southwest Airlines during a recent Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee hearing. Creating a federal ‘no-fly’ list for unruly passengers who are skeptical of this mandate would seemingly equate them to terrorists who seek to actively take the lives of Americans and perpetrate attacks on the homeland.