Pelosi won't even officially *criticize* Trump

Washington Post:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Wednesday ruled out a congressional censure of President Trump, a move some lawmakers have suggested as a less divisive alternative to launching impeachment proceedings. “No. I think censure is just a way out,” Pelosi told reporters. “If you’re going to go, you’ve got to go. In other words, if the goods are there, you must impeach, and censure is nice, but it is not commensurate with the violations of the Constitution, should we decide that’s the way to go.”

Great! Let's get the impeachment process started, then! Right?

On Wednesday, Pelosi cautioned against a scenario where Trump is impeached by the Democratic-led House only to be acquitted by the Republican-led Senate. “I don’t think you should have an inquiry unless you’re ready to impeach,” she said. “What I believe is that when we go forward, if we go forward, it has to go deep. It can’t be the Democrats impeach in the House; the Senate, in his view, exonerates. . . . This president must be held accountable."

Let's be clear: Pelosi is offering paralysis and prayers, essentially, as opposition to Trump's presidency.

She's made it clear that she believes the president is in violation of the law and Constitution, but won't impeach because Senate Republicans won't convict. Censure would be a half-measure, to be sure, but it would at least put Congress on record noting the president's transgressions and criticizing him for it. Pelosi says full measures are the only way to go, but won't pursue them or half-measures. That leaves Americans with nothing but an outlaw president and a Congress to feckless to face him head-on.

Me @TheWeek: Trump is not a nationalist

My latest:

The president claims to put "America first." But in the most important sense — defending the integrity of this country's governance and elections from foreign interference — the man is a good old-fashioned globalist. There is no such thing as a "sh--hole country" if Trump himself is the beneficiary; the president will do business with anybody willing to help him profit, personally or electorally.

Me @TheWeek: Elizabeth Warren's polarizing plan to make college free

My latest:

Today's rising student debt is largely a result of policy choices. The short version of the story is that student debt is rising because college tuition is rising — and college tuition is rising, in large part, because state legislatures across the country have slowly been abandoning their commitment to fund public colleges and universities.

The Great Recession is one of the villains of this story; it prompted legislatures to cut their funding commitments to higher education, and for the most part, those cuts were never restored. According to one analysis, state funding for public colleges and universities in 2018 was $7 billion below its 2008 levels — and that is after adjusting for inflation. One way public four-year institutions have stayed in business is by raising tuition by an average of 36 percent during that decade. It is no coincidence that student debt in the United States quadrupled, from $345 billion to nearly $1.4 trillion, between 2004 and 2017.

Today's young students aren't less responsible than their predecessors. They're just getting far less help.

Me @TheWeek: Reacting to the Mueller report

My take:

The Trump White House is just a high-level version of a sleazy pawn shop where the owner traffics in stolen goods. Everybody knows the owner is profiting from crime — including the owner — but as long as as he keeps his fingerprints off the precise moment the goods are stolen, he's allowed to keep making his living off the fruits of other people's wrongdoing. 

It may not be technically illegal. But it sure isn't right.

Please read the whole thing!

John Bolton's purple prose

Man, this is some speechwriting from John Bolton, announcing new sanctions on Cuba.

I have expected him to continue: "Who knows what evil lurks within? ONLY THE SHADOW KNOWS!"

Mueller preview: Maybe the president is innocent. So why does he keep acting like a thug?

There’s a reason so many people think Donald Trump is corrupt: He keeps giving them reason.

On Thursday, a redacted version of the Mueller report will be released to the public. Perhaps the president is right: Maybe the document will exonerate him of accusations of colluding with Russia to win the 2016 election, and maybe it will further offer reason to believe that Attorney General William Barr was correct when he decided not to pursue allegations the president obstructed justice by firing then-FBI Director James Comey.

It could happen.

But if that is the case, Trump and Barr have done the worst possible job laying the ground for the president’s innocence. Instead, they’ve seemingly done everything possible to make the release of the report look like a cover-up.

For example: The principles of transparency would usually suggest that the public — or, at least, the media — have a chance to look at the report and begin to digest its findings before Barr holds his press conference.

But that’s not the plan. As of Wednesday evening, Barr’s press conference is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. ET. The report is scheduled to come out 90 minutes later, at 11 a.m. ET. That means the attorney general’s time before the press is not designed to enable accountability or to answer any tough questions that arise from reading the report itself — it is, instead, a preemptive strike, a chance to start spinning the public before the public has a chance to see and hear the facts for itself.




The release of the Mueller report, in other words, seems expertly designed to raise suspicions instead of calm them.

It doesn’t help that Barr has taken weeks to release the report. It doesn’t help that the attorney general has been giving the Trump Administration a sneak preview of its findings. It doesn’t help that the president, who has spent weeks proclaiming Mueller’s investigation found him innocent, has in recent days waged an angry campaign criticizing its release. And it won’t help if the report released to the public appears to be overly redacted.

It’s reasonable to ask: Are these the actions of an innocent man running an honest administration?

If the president has somehow avoided committing a crime during the last two years, congratulations to him. But that falls short of the standard we typically expect of our leaders: We don’t expect them merely to avoid transgression, but also to avoid the very appearance of avoiding transgression. The reason is simple: Even the appearance of wrongdoing shakes the faith of citizens in their leaders and government. Americans don’t have to believe that their leaders are good men and women; they do deserve not to have to wonder constantly if those leaders are on the wrong side of the law.

No, it’s not always the case that where there is smoke, there is fire. But the president is constantly enveloped in a smog of lies: As of March 17, he had told more than 9,000 documented lies since ascending to the Oval Office.

With regard to the Mueller inquiry: He lied during the campaign about his business ties with Russia. He orchestrated a false press release about his son’s meetings with Russian officials. He tried suggesting there were listening devices in the Oval Office when he met Comey — there weren’t. At every step of public inquiry and official investigation, he has thrown a bundle of untruth in the path of those seeking the truth.

Simply put, he keeps acting like a thug. If the Mueller report does exonerate Donald Trump, that’s too bad. Sure, it’ll keep him out of court. But the public will keep having every reason to believe in his corruption.

Netflix Queue: The Highwaymen

Three thoughts about Netflix's The Highwaymen coming up after the trailer...

 

 • This is a Bonnie and Clyde movie that, for the most part, is lacking in Bonnie and Clyde: The filmmakers figure you've already seen the classic movie and there's no reason to compete with that. So it's the case that we literally don't see fully the faces of our fugitives until the very last seconds before they're ambushed by Texas lawmen in a hail of bullets. The story concentrates, in this case, on the hunters, played by a laconic Kevin Costner and his sidekick Woody Harrelson, playing Woody Harrelson.

 • Structurally, it plays out as a cross between the fantastic Hell or High Water and Unforgiven, but without having quite as much on its mind as either of those movies. Maybe the most potent theme is about how thrall to celebrity can turn regular people into monsters. After Bonnie and Clyde are killed, local townspeople are shown in a near-riot situation, plucking souvenirs from the criminals' bodies. 20,000 people attended Bonnie's funeral, we're told at the end of the movie; 15,000 went to Clyde's. The overall outlook borders on fascist: The masses are unruly and easily thrilled; the leaders are corrupt and phony. The only hope? Men with guns and blood on their hands.

• Still, it's a reasonable evening's entertainment. I realized, watching it, that you don't really find quiet adult-oriented crime dramas like this at the multiplex anymore — they're either indie movies (like Hell or High Water) or they're shunted off to cable channels and streaming services, as is the case here. Unforgiven, meanwhile, grossed $159 million in 1992 — kind of a big deal, and good for 11th for the year at the box office. Maybe that's possible today, but I kind of doubt it. Too bad.

FilmStruck is avenged! Long live Criterion Channel!

Criterion Channel finally launched today, a replacement for the late lamented FilmStruck. I've already watched my first movie. A few thoughts after the trailer...
 

 • Since FilmStruck's demise, I've made a concerted effort to build up my DVD collection with classic movies. I'm glad that Criterion is here, but I don't trust streaming services to have many of the movies I want when I want them. Big corporations that own the rights to those movies have already demonstrated that letting the public have access is a lesser concern, profit-wise, than promoting their more recent catalog. So I'm glad to have Criterion to expand and deepen my movie education. But I'm still buying DVDs.

 • My first movie on Criterion? Drive a Crooked Road, a tight little movie from the noir collection. It reminded me of Drive, only with Mickey Rooney (!?) in the Ryan Gosling role, and if everybody spent Drive talking about how short Ryan Gosling is. Also fun: It was written by Blake Edwards, whom I associate with kinda vulgar sex farces from the 1970s and '80s.

 • Good news on the kid front: Criterion has Godzilla movies. My son is very happy.

 

End of an era at the Lawrence Journal-World.

My motto is: "Journalism will never love you back." But I can't remember a time when I didn't love news and newspapers. Still do. I love my hometown paper, the Lawrence Journal-World.

The journalists of the LJW will be moving out of their beautiful downtown space by the end of the month, opting for smaller digs in North Lawrence at an old outlet mall. I was on staff in 2001 when we moved into this office - which had previously been the city's post office.

So I'm kind of sad about the move. I worked at LJW from 2000-2007, got to be a reporter, an editor, and the paper's first blogger. We shared the digs with 6News, a local cable TV outlet. I learned how to be a TV reporter, too.

I had so much fun. I think part of it was being the right age - late 20s and early 30s - but some of it was that it was the last possible moment to be optimistic and hopeful about working for a newspaper, as opposed to grimly determined.

The Great Recession set in shortly after I left, and newspapers haven't been the same since.

The Journal-World has passed to corporate ownership. The staff is smaller. It no longer prints its own papers. Things are different. But the folks left behind are still working like hell to cover their community.

They're led by editor and publisher Chad Lawhorn, who takes his share of criticism and jokes in the community, but who has worked like hell himself to keep the paper covering important stories in the community. The city doesn't know how lucky it is to have him.

This is the point where it's tempting to mark the moment with the -30-, but the Journal-World isn't ending -- just its residence at a particular spot downtown. The journalists are still working like hell. The headlines seen here? They were produced in different locations.

So. A moment of sadness perhaps. Time to acknowledge that times change, that the industry has changed, and that you can't go home again.

It was a great place to work. But there's still work to be done. So I wish my friends and former colleagues the best of luck in their new digs. There's news to cover!

(Many thanks to the staff of the LJW for letting me visit one last time. Y'all are awesome.)

What does it mean to ‘believe women?’

"Believing women" doesn't mean we have to accept accusations as evidence. So what might it mean in real life? 

• When a woman makes an accusation, it would mean pursuing all available lines of evidence to weigh the truth of her claims. In the matter of Brett Kavanaugh's SCOTUS nomination, it would mean calling Mark Judge, Kavanaugh's buddy, to testify under penalty of perjury. So far that's not happening. That the Senate Judiciary Committee is not taking such a step suggests they don't have much interest in trying, as best as we poor humans are capable, of making a genuine attempt to determine the truth of the matter. 

• When a woman's accusation is proven, the person convicted of abusing or assaulting her will be given more than a slap-on-the-wrist punishment. 

• And women a woman says she has been traumatized by sexual assault, we don't wave our hands and tell her to toughen up instead of being such a victim. 

None of this means accepting an accusation as evidence. What it does mean is taking the accusation seriously enough to learn the truth, and taking women seriously enough to deal seriously with the men who have assaulted them. 

Given the state of our arguments over Kavanaugh — and I truly don't know if he's guilty or innocent of the allegations, though I'm inclined to believe his accuser — I'd say we're not there yet.

AmGreatness' Chris Buskirk: Proof of rape is no bar to SCOTUS

At AmGreatness, Chris Buskirk shreds all the conservatives who think maybe a proven rapist shouldn't have a seat on the Supreme Court. I'll let him speak for himself:

National Review’s Jim Geraghty not only thinks that Ford’s claims should bar Kavanaugh from the Supreme Court, but he told Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic, who wrote she believes Ford despite the lack of evidence, that “it’s hard to see how he could remain a federal judge.” David French agreed that the allegations, if proven, should “mar him for life.” National Review OnlineEditor Charles C. W. Cooke agreed, adding that he doesn’t think that makes him “irrational or a Stalinist.”

 What's interesting is that Geraghty and French have both made their condemnation of Kavanaugh conditional: He doesn't get the seat if the rape allegations are proven. But both Geraghty and French have made clear they don't think the allegations have been proven. 

Geraghty:

But we’re still a long, long way from proving either accusation. Both allegations stem from the accuser’s memory of events of 35 or 36 years ago. In both cases, the accusers say they had been drinking alcohol before the actions; in both cases, the accusers admit they cannot recall key details.

French:

No wonder the Democrats are emphasizing that the Senate isn’t a court. They’re advancing claims that so far can’t possibly meet the lowest standard of proof.

For making such claims, Buskirk paints the duo as surrender monkeys.

"Yet, these are the people who represent themselves as “true conservatives.” They’re not and it’s time for actual conservatives to realize it and ignore them. What they really are is self-righteous moralizers and anti-social prigs."

In other words: If you think a proven rapist doesn't belong on the court, but think the allegation are unproven, you're a prig. And maybe that's the stance you have to take if the president you support so ardently has a sexual history so offensive and messy that there's no real defense of it: If you're not going to hold him to any moral standards, why would you impose those standards on any other person seeking high office?

(One thing I'll say about the folks at AmGreatness — full disclosure: some key people in it were once friends of mine, but I'm afraid that day has passed — is that they're not really into coalition building. There's never a sense of "reasonable people can disagree, and here's why I disagree." If you're even a little bit not on board the Trump Train, even if there's substantial overlap in your views an goals, you're the enemy.)

If Trumpist conservatives have any values aside from keeping brown people out of the United States and owning the libs, it's difficult to discern. It's not my fight, I guess, but I prefer the self-righteous moralizers to the nihilists.

Kavanaugh's high school yearbook: A textbook case of toxic masculinity

This is awful:

Brett Kavanaugh’s page in his high school yearbook offers a glimpse of the teenage years of the man who is now President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee: lots of football, plenty of drinking, parties at the beach. Among the reminiscences about sports and booze is a mysterious entry: “Renate Alumnius.” 

The word “Renate” appears at least 14 times in Georgetown Preparatory School’s 1983 yearbook, on individuals’ pages and in a group photo of nine football players, including Judge Kavanaugh, who were described as the “Renate Alumni.” It is a reference to Renate Schroeder, then a student at a nearby Catholic girls’ school. 

Two of Judge Kavanaugh’s classmates say the mentions of Renate were part of the football players’ unsubstantiated boasting about their conquests. 

(Snip)

“I learned about these yearbook pages only a few days ago,” Ms. Dolphin said in a statement to The New York Times. “I don’t know what ‘Renate Alumnus’ actually means. I can’t begin to comprehend what goes through the minds of 17-year-old boys who write such things, but the insinuation is horrible, hurtful and simply untrue. I pray their daughters are never treated this way. I will have no further comment.”

I don't know whether Kavanaugh is guilty or innocent of the sexual improprieties he is accused of. But I do know that this NYT story about his yearbook could be Exhibit A in a presentation of What We Mean When We Talk About Toxic Masculinity.

Listen to this:

Some of Judge Kavanaugh’s high school peers said there was a widespread culture at the time of objectifying women. 

“People claiming that they had sex with other people was not terribly unusual, and it was not terribly believable,” said William Fishburne, who was in Judge Kavanaugh’s graduating class and was a manager for the football team. “Not just Brett Kavanaugh and his particular group, but all the classmates in general. People would claim things they hadn’t done to sort of seem bigger than they were, older than they were.”

I don't think this is unusual. The "boys will be boys" defense practically writes itself. But that's why it's a problem! Letting a young woman's name be sullied for decades on the pages of a yearbook, preserved for all history, for the sake of a joke and boasting? Gross and wrong.

Brett Kavanaugh and Fox News

I wish Kavanaugh had chosen a less nakedly political outlet to do this interview. By choosing Fox News, it signals that partisanship will still be core to his identity as a judge. And it really only reaches the people inclined to support him. Our jurisprudence is screwed if federal judges, like our current president, decide they need only play to the GOP base in order to succeed.

Netflix Queue: Black Panther

Three thoughts about Black Panther after a family viewing:

* This was my second viewing - I first saw it when it was in the theaters. It was a better experience this time: I think when I originally saw it I was so primed by all the hype that it was difficult for me to enjoy the movie on its own terms. This time I just watched, and it was fun.

* The highlight of both viewings: Michael B. Jordan as Killmonger. There's something about Jordan's acting that confuses me. Often, it seems to me, his affect is sort of flat. And yet, when his characters meet their biggest challenge -- I'm thinking Creed, but also The Wire - I find myself immensely moved. I can't figure out what kind of alchemy is going on there, but maybe I don't have to.

* That said, I'm tiring out of Marvel movies. Even with Ryan Coogler in charge, the look of this movie was so much like others. Wakanda's capital city looks a lot like Asgard to me, and maybe that's just a function of CGI cartoonishness that infests every corner of the screen. I will give this movie something, though: It was about something - lots of things, actually - instead of a hunt for a McGuffin. The calories don't feel quite so empty. But that's faint praise for a movie that, for many people, looked and felt pretty important.

Regarding Melania

Dear Trump-resisting friends:

Don't let President Trump's overall awfulness bait you into silly conspiracy-mongering absent any proof.

You needn't furnish your opponents with easy ways to take swipes at your credibility. Tread carefully.

Sincerely, Joel

Yes, immigrants do democracy. (Or, why 'The Flight 93 Election' is wrong. Again.)

Remember "The Flight 93 Election?" It was the "intellectual" case for voting Trump, and one of its central conceits is that immigration is bad because brown people don't know how to do democracy.

The ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle. As does, of course, the U.S. population, which only serves to reinforce the two other causes outlined above. This is the core reason why the Left, the Democrats, and the bipartisan junta (categories distinct but very much overlapping) think they are on the cusp of a permanent victory that will forever obviate the need to pretend to respect democratic and constitutional niceties. Because they are.

There's a lot to unpack there, much of it scurrilous, but you get the idea.

Anyway, Cato's David Bier ran into the same argument and makes mincemeat of it. "While immigrants do have less experience with liberal democracy than Americans do, the recent wave of immigrants actually comes from much more democratic countries than earlier waves."

He concludes:

The bottom line is that although immigrants to the United States today are less likely to have experience with liberal democracies than Americans, they are much more likely to have lived in liberal democracies than the ancestors of most Americans when they first arrived here.

Today's immigrants have more experience with self-governance than did the immigrant grandparents of today's fusty white guys. Who knew?

Where have all the teenagers in the workforce gone? (Or, how I held three jobs when I was 20.)

They're trying to get into college instead.

A recent analysis by economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that an increased emphasis on education — and getting scholarships — had contributed to the decline in working teenagers, reflecting both the rising costs of education and the low wages most people that age can earn.

When I was 16, my dad told me it was time to get an after-school job. The days of my extracurricular activities were pretty much over — no more debate, no more football for me after my sophomore year, but I did spend about 20 hours a week carrying out groceries.

My dad was operating under the assumption he'd grown up under, that getting a job as a teen is a way to learn responsibility and, not incidentally, start paying for the fact that your life is becoming real expensive. (It's not just running-around money: Have you ever paid a teen boy's car insurance?)

These days, though, such a decision might've reduced my competitiveness getting into college. I made my way through on scholarships, loans, and work — my junior year I was a resident assistant, editor of the campus paper, and still carried out groceries. I also played in the pep band and carried a full load of classes. But I think even then, I was a rarity.

Today, a lot of the work I did then would be seen as competing with my education, I think, instead of enabling it. That's unfortunate: Learning to work was pretty important for me, and having a work ethic has served me well as a freelancer. Those skills never go out of style, but we're maybe not passing them on as well.

Republicans will always have Hillary Clinton to kick around

Vox: "Eleven House Republicans — Ron DeSantis, Andy Biggs, Dave Brat, Jeff Duncan, Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, Andy Harris, Jody Hice, Todd Rokita, Claudia Tenney, and Ted Yoho — have signed a joint letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions calling for the criminal prosecution of Hillary Clinton and a variety of other Obama administration appointees, career FBI officials, and even Trump appointee Dana Boente, who is currently the FBI’s general counsel."

Two things:

• Remember when President Obama refused to prosecute Bush-era torture suspects because he wanted the country to move forward? Republicans apparently don't, or don't care.

• One nice thing about Republican administrations is that the GOP jeremiad against Hillary Clinton used to take a few months off now and again. When she ran against Obama in 2008 there were even some "strange new respect" noises from the right. Those days are over. The jeremiad is eternal now. And why not? It keeps attention off what ... the Republican administration is doing.

Tennessee: A white state punishes a black city for not honoring the heroes of racism

NPR:

The city of Memphis could lose a quarter-million dollars as punishment for removing statues of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest and Confederate President Jefferson Davis last year. 

The Tennessee House of Representatives voted Tuesday to strip the money from next year's state budget. The sum had been earmarked to go toward planning for Memphis' bicentennial celebrations next year.

A key thing to understand here: Memphis is 63 percent black. Tennessee is 83 percent white.

What you have here is a white state punishing a black city for not honoring the heroes of racism. Disgusting.

Not even President Trump reliably speaks for President Trump.

Two stories in the New York Times this morning highlight a problem with the Trump presidency.

Actually, it's two problems, but they're related. The first is that no one but President Trump reliably speaks for President Trump.

President Trump was watching television on Sunday when he saw Nikki R. Haley, his ambassador to the United Nations, announce that he would impose fresh sanctions on Russia. The president grew angry, according to an official informed about the moment. As far as he was concerned, he had decided no such thing. 

The rift erupted into open conflict on Tuesday when a White House official blamed Ms. Haley’s statement about sanctions on “momentary confusion.” That prompted her to fire back, saying that she did not “get confused.” The public disagreement embarrassed Ms. Haley and reinforced questions about Mr. Trump’s foreign policy — and who speaks for his administration.

The second: Not even President Trump reliably speaks for President Trump:

After publicly flirting last week with having the United States rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership, President Trump appeared to rebuff the idea once and for all late Tuesday.

In a Twitter post at 10:49 p.m., Mr. Trump said that although Japan and South Korea would like the United States to join the 11 other nations in the multilateral trade agreement, he had no intention of doing so. The decision put an apparent end to a meandering trade policy in which Mr. Trump pulled out of the deal in his first week in office, before suggesting last week that he was having second thoughts.

 President Trump's statements are like the weather: If you don't like them, wait five minutes. Somebody will surely argue that this is a smart way of being president — keep everybody off guard — but it isn't. "Mercurial" is interesting in TV show characters, maybe. It's bad governance.

The Sinclair video: TV journalism (almost always) isn't journalism.

By now, you've probably seen this video:

 

  Deadspin explains:

Earlier this month, CNN’s Brian Stelter broke the news that Sinclair Broadcast Group, owner or operator of nearly 200 television stations in the U.S., would be forcing its news anchors to record a promo about “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country.” The script, which parrots Donald Trump’s oft-declarations of developments negative to his presidency as “fake news,” brought upheaval to newsrooms already dismayed with Sinclair’s consistent interference to bring right-wing propaganda to local television broadcasts.

The problem, though, isn't Sinclair-owned stations. The problem is this: TV news, for the most part, isn't news.

I spent part of my career in a combine TV-print newsroom, so I've produced my share of packages and short readers. The station I worked for was an exception to this rule — which,  I suspect, is part of why that station no longer has a newscast.

They say politics is show business for ugly people.  Well: TV news is show business for pretty people who can't act or sing.

How you can tell this is true at the national level: If cable news was news, you'd see a lot more taped pieces telling stories and explaining stories than you do. Instead, what you get is panel after panel debating the headlines and screaming about them. Check out this NYTMag story from last year for a detailed look at how making CNN isn't really any different from producing sports - which is entertainment - or, ahem, "The Apprentice."

It's different at the local level, but there's still a problem. It's long been understood that TV news focuses on crime and disaster to the exclusion of other types of news stories — "if it bleeds it leads" — and thus presents its audience with a distorted view of their communities. And they do it because it's easy:

Violent crimes such as murders, robberies, and rapes are newsworthy because of identifiable elements. These elements are ideal for the art of story telling: definable events between individuals are concrete rather than abstract; dramatic, conflict-filled and intense stories are seen as interesting; crime is seen as disrupting order and threatening the community; TV news emphasizes short, simple and verifiable stories; and crime is visual and may be easily videotaped.

Newspapers cover crime, too. But they also cover City Hall and the Planning Commission and those stories that require some level of expertise to tell and explain — stuff that's important to the community but lacking the show-biz drama or surveillance video of a robbery.

The recent assent of Sinclair changes the dynamic: Now local news doesn't even matter at a number of local stations. They're being Fox News-ified, turned into right-wing propaganda mills. That's ... not local news.

There are exceptions to all of this, of course. And when news is breaking -  the kind of stuff that has good video - TV news is a good place to in the first formative moments.

After that? There's a reason Dan Rather explained a complicated story by asking viewers to read a newspaper the next day. The problem? They probably didn't. We're a nation of people who think they're in the know, but aren't.  TV news is part of the problem.

The Taliban are using our technology. Because of course they are.

The American war in Syria may end soon. When did it start?

My last comments on the Kevin Williamson affair

Dear Atlantic: Hire David French instead

There've been debates in recent days about The Atlantic's decision to hire National Review's Kevin Williamson. Conservatives think (not without merit, I think) that every time a mainstream publication hires a conservative, liberals try to get that conservative fired.

On the other hand: Williamson is a dick. He's been a little bit racist,  a little bit snooty, and you'll forgive women for thinking his proposal to execute women who've had an abortion is-a non-starter. He's a talented provocateur, too smart and self-aware to let himself go Full-Blown Milo, but he also delights sticking a thumb in the eye of people who disagree with him.

I'm not going to say The Atlantic shouldn't hire Williamson. I will say there's a National Review voice they should've hired instead: David A. French.

There would still be complaints. Critics have long eyed his marriage with suspicion. He's religiously conservative on sexual matters. He's skeptical, even hostile to Black Lives Matter. There's not much about which I think he's right.

On the other hand, French is a writer who takes liberals and liberal arguments seriously. Which makes him a great writer for The Atlantic's audience: He's willing to explain his ideas, and why he thinks liberal ideas are wrong, and he's generally better at doing it without resorting to trollish, strawman arguments. And he's been willing to call out his side for its failures — something that might earn the trust of liberal readers.

I don't agree with French about much. A lot of liberals would no doubt protest his appointment. But he lacks Williamson's baggage, and possesses some virtues Williamson does not. If The Atlantic  is reconsidering Williamson's appointment, it could do much worse than to hire David A. French.

I'm not happy with how we debate each other these days.

Why Trumpian immigration enforcement isn't really conservative

I've heard about this before, but it still astonishes me:

Border Patrol officers are working without permission on private property and setting up checkpoints up to 100 miles away from the border under a little-known federal law that is being used more widely in the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration. 

Trump administration officials defend the government’s decades-old authority to search people and property, even without a warrant, far from the border. They call it a vital part of preventing weapons, terrorists and other people from illegally entering the United States. 

An estimated 200 million Americans live within 100 miles of the border, according to the A.C.L.U. At least 11 states — mostly in the Northeast and Florida — are either entirely or almost entirely in the 100-mile radius.

Conservatives talk about liberty and rule of law a lot, but what they're doing is giving police virtually unfettered power over much of the country. At the very least, they owe an accounting of how this squares with their limited government rhetoric.

The immorality of Trumpist immigration enforcement

I've suggested before that Trumpist immigration enforcement might be an act of injustice far worse than the offense of illegal immigration. We have two more examples this week of why it might be so.

First, we have the story of Jorge Garcia, a Detroit man being deported after 30 years in the United States. He was brought to the United States when he was 10; his deportation separates him from his wife and two children, all of them U.S. citizens. Please, read his story.

 Second, we have this atrocity:

US border patrol agents are routinely sabotaging water supplies left for migrants in the Arizona desert, condemning them to death, humanitarian groups have said. Travellers attempting to cross into the US from Mexico regularly die of dehydration, as well as exposure to extreme heat or cold, so aid groups leave water bottles and emergency stocks such as blankets at points throughout the Sonoran desert. A video released by the groups showed border patrol agents kicking over water bottles and pouring away their contents. A statement from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said it was aware of the footage and that it was filmed around six years ago.

In the first case, a family is destroyed and disrupted — no doubt causing ripple effects in the community — because a man was born on one side of the border but, through circumstances not of his making, lived on this side of the border. As best I can tell, his actual presence in the country was doing nobody harm. Which means the greater harm is done by deporting him.

In the second case, people are being condemned to death and suffering to thwart the possibility of them being on the wrong side of the line.
 

 My friends in favor of immigration restrictions believe that a country has a right to make rules about who gets to come in and who doesn't. They are correct. But that doesn't make these kinds of enforcement actions moral. We're condemning people to death for, in essence, not following bureaucratic rules. We're destroying families whose only offense was actually committed by an older generation — unless, of course, you want to start making the case that 10-year-olds are in control of where older relatives take them.

 That is wrong. It is a sin. It is a sin being carried out in our name.

Henry Olsen's conservative lesson that liberals should hear

I've made little secret of my disdain for the Trump-loving website American Greatness. Part of this, I guess, is personal: I know a couple of the people who run the site and, until about a year ago, thought that though they were conservative, they'd still avoid Trumpian nonsense. That was wrong. I'm still working that out.

But it's also the case that I think 99 percent of what happens at AmGreatness is mean-spirited and unreflective, so sure of itself and its own rightness, yet small in soul and generosity. "Greatness" seems to be defined almost as its inverse. I'm not a conservative, but I don't think that has to define conservatism or my friends. Yet, for the moment, it does.

One other problem: The central conceit of American Greatness, to my mind, is that "saving America" means an end to politics. Progressives are always plotting to destroy the country — as are NeverTrump conservatives and Mitch McConnell, apparently. And in a way, this makes sense: The surest route for people to back a clear charlatan like Donald Trump is to convince oneself that America is perpetually on the brink. One outcome of this: Writers at the sight veer, from time to time, into pondering how to make liberal criticism of Donald Trump punishable by law. In any case, the language of the typical AmGreatness article is one of preparing for Civil War.

AmGreatness also seems unable to define America in ways that include people of color to any significant degree.

An exception to all of this is the writings of Henry Olsen. He's a a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative. But his appearance at the site gives me hope, because he's counseling his Trump-loving fellows to, uh, maybe ease up on the war talk. Here's an excerpt from his latest that I think my left-of-center friends could well afford to hear:

There are many Americans who do not see our politics as a fight between good and evil. Their votes will determine which side, progressives or conservatives, wins the conflict. If we are in a Flight 93 moment, if we do need to fight to preserve American ideals, then it behooves conservatives to try to attract those people’s votes rather than to denigrate them as “squishes” or as other sorts of undesirables whose company we deign to keep. That requires more than shouting our own principles more loudly and more clearly. It means speaking in such a way that can appeal to these voters and invite them to be a part of our coalition. 

That does not mean abandoning principle. It does mean understanding how to talk with and attract people who do not necessarily share your core premises. That in turn requires some degree of toleration, some degree of kindness, some degree of inclusion. Is your neighbor who thinks abortion ought to be legal in the first trimester but not thereafter, your enemy or a potential ally? Is your co-worker who thinks everyone should have decent health coverage but doesn’t think the government should run the health care system a squish or a potential convert? These are the questions I want us to ask and answer, as I think these are the questions that answering can help determine victory or defeat.

Emphasis added. Olsen's clearly speaking to conservatives here, but again, liberals might consider what he says here.

Since the moment Donald Trump won, the sense I've heard from my lefty friends regarding anybody who voted for him boils down to: "Fuck 'em."  I get the impulse, but ultimately think it's wrong-headed. Why? Well, for one thing, we share a country with these folks: If we're not going to actually go to war with them, we need to figure out how to live with them. But also: We live in a democratic republic. To take power back means winning elections. That means it behooves liberals to try to attract those people’s votes rather than to denigrate them as “deplorables,” or writing them off altogether.

That does not mean abandoning principle. It really does not mean silently nodding along when your neighbor says racist things, in hopes you can still grab their vote. But as Olsen says: It does mean understanding how to talk with and attract people who do not necessarily share your core premises. That in turn requires some degree of toleration, some degree of kindness, some degree of inclusion.

I'd rather attempt that than live in a country where roughly half of us would be happy, more or less, to see the other half silenced — or even die. The task of winning minds is hard. Very hard. But it's the worthy way. I'm glad somebody on the Trumpist side seems to think so, too.

The 'other' Ferguson effect

Jesse Singal at NYMag says the murder rate is going up, for whites and blacks, for different reasons. And the researcher he talks to endorses a "Ferguson effect," but different from how it's usually defined. There's a crisis of police legitimacy that is enabling the bad guys.

The Ferguson effect is a thoroughly politicized concept at this point, because it contains an implicit rebuke of the protests that exploded in the wakes of the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, and other young black boys and men who have been unjustly killed by police. The thinking goes that all those angry, loud protesters are making it harder for police to do their jobs. 

But there’s another way of looking at this: It could be the case that yes, deteriorating relationships between communities and the police are helping drive the increased homicide rate, but that things go in the other direction. That is, some communities have come to view the police with such profound anger and fear that their members are less likely to seek out the assistance of law enforcement, and this is making it easier for people to get away with murder.

So how do we know which Ferguson effect might be causing the spike in murders?

A rather ingenious study lead-authored by Matthew Desmond, a MacArthur-winning sociologist at Harvard (and the author of the truly excellent 2016 book Evicted), lends some solid support to this hypothesis. As I explained in a study write-up, Desmond and his colleagues obtained detailed emergency-call data from the city of Milwaukee, and showed that after a horrific, high-profile event in which a group of police brutally assaulted a young black man, 911 calls appeared to be significantly depressed in black neighborhoods relative to what Desmond and his colleagues’ number-crunching suggests they should have been.

We need for the police to be seen as legitimate enforcers of law in the communities where they serve. It matters. But that legitimacy earned, and easily forfeit.

The other takeaway: White on white crime is a BIG driver of the rising murder rate.

Rosenfeld and his co-authors explain that increases in the white homicide and homicide-victimization rates are a big part of the story here — “the growth in the non-Hispanic white victimization rate was greater than in any year since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack.” In fact, according to some calculations Rosenfeld ran for me, the increase in the white murder rate drove a large chunk of the overall increase. “If white homicides had not increased from 2014 to 2016, the 2016 homicide rate would have dropped from 5.3 per 100,000 population [in 2016] to 4.8 per 100,000, 9.4% lower [than the actual rate],” he said in an email, meaning the overall trend would look quite different and less worrying.

It's hard to avoid the thought we're entering an ugly era.