Category: Quick Hits

Despite getting little attention over the weekend, the Panama Papers document leak received a substantial amount of mainstream media attention on Monday (at least online). Fortune, the BBC, USA Today, NBC, the Washington Post, and any number of other Very Serious Media Outlets are running with it now, which is a victory by proxy for the kinds of non-mainstream outlets that began pushing hard on the story as early as Saturday evening. The story is unlikely to have much staying power in the U.S., though, and may even fade faster than expected in Europe and the rest of the world due to the nature of the underlying issue.

The first problem with getting U.
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S. media to cover this extensively is that no major American figures are (yet) involved. It's awfully difficult to get Americans to care about our own politics let alone elected officials in other countries. "Oh man, I can't believe Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugson did that!" is a phrase no American news consumer or media personality has ever used or will ever use.
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Another problem is the fact that outrage fatigue and general cynicism make it difficult to muster much enthusiasm for scandals that confirm what we already know (or very strongly suspect) about the world – in this case, namely that the rich and powerful live in a separate world that operates under its own exclusive rules and they squirrel their money away in proverbial Swiss Bank Accounts so they don't have to pay taxes like some nouveau riche suburban desk commando with an MBA. Is it fair? Of course not. Is anyone really surprised to learn that this is in fact what has been going on? I doubt it.

Clearly it's an important issue and one that validates a lot of what we already know to be part of the deep systemic social and economic inequality built into our system and our way of life. But therein lies the problem; if everyone is already assuming that water is wet, the headline announcing that discovery is going to fall flat. We openly allow corporations to get away with offshoring their money in this country, and if they're People anyway, why would we be surprised to learn that the elites who control them do exactly the same thing with their personal finances?

I'm not saying nobody should care. I'm saying it isn't entirely surprising that nobody seems too up-in-arms over the revelations.
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It's nice to learn that our suspicions are correct, but beyond that it fits seamlessly into the worldview most half-smart people have long since held.

If you're looking for interesting non-fiction reads you could do substantially worse than Vincent Cannato's American Passage: The History of Ellis Island. It gives a good historical overview of the island itself but, more interestingly, a tour through 19th and early 20th Century nativist / anti-immigration movements in American politics.

The striking thing is to compare historical examples to the modern equivalent on full-throated display through the Trump campaign. The rhetoric of anti-immigration rabble-rousing has not changed in 150 years. Not one bit. A simple ctrl-F find and replace for the relevant nouns – Irish, Italian, Oriental, Mexican, A-rab, etc. – would fit the material seamlessly into any period in American history. And this is true across classes as well, from the highbrow arguments about "stock" and "moral tone" from your Henry Cabot Lodge / National Review types to quasi-economic "They Took Our Jorbs" rhetoric to the lowest kind of racism and xenophobia. The modern anti-immigration movement is the latest iteration of an ideology that hasn't had a new idea in two centuries. If the "terrorist" angle feels new, refresh your memory on what "anarchist" meant in the context of Gilded Age politics.

Most ideas evolve over time, if only incrementally. You almost have to admire the immutability of xenophobic rhetoric. Almost. It's like the Rock of Gibraltar of being an asshole.

In political science, 2016 will go down as the election in which the political parties – which used to exercise unchallenged control over the nomination – have seen their control of the process decline to near zero.
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With the withdrawal of Marco Rubio the GOP field is down to Kasich (who isn't going to win anything other than Ohio), Ted Cruz (who literally everyone hates), and a frontrunner about whom establishment Republicans are literally kept awake at night trying to think of ways to prevent him from winning.

On the Democratic side the party establishment is on the verge of getting exactly what it wants, of course. It is difficult to say whether that is because of the influence of the party or spurious to it; perhaps Bernie Sanders wouldn't have the juice to win the nomination regardless of whether the party supported him explicitly.

At least on the GOP side it is fair to say that the heavy hitters have had no influence on the outcome this year.
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The Koch Brothers' candidate didn't even make it to Iowa. Sheldon Adelson swung and missed, as did the other big money men who poured money into failing Bush and Rubio campaigns, among others. Republicans with the highest name recognition, people like Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, and John McCain, have done everything but beg party voters to reject Trump.
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The RNC has not lifted a finger to assist him but has given considerable support to other campaigns that have failed. The diminution of party influence, which began with the Democratic Party after the debacle of 1968, seems to have crossed the partisan aisle to reach its zenith.
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When I have to watch cable news networks present and "discuss" polling results I feel the way doctors must feel when they watch E.R. or lawyers would feel watching a cut rate Law & Order knockoff courtroom procedural show. The urge to yell "THAT'S NOT HOW THAT WORKS" at the TV screen borders on overwhelming at times.

When CNN assaulted the data from their Nevada Caucus Entry Poll to declare "Trump wins Latino vote in Nevada" any freshman student in math, statistics, or survey research could tell you what's missing from this picture:

Gee those are some nice lookin' percentages. By the way, how many Latinos voted in the Nevada Republican caucus? Because I'm guessing it was about 80.

That's an exaggeration, of course, but common sense dictates that it isn't going to be very many, what with Barack Obama winning 76% of the Latino vote in Nevada in 2012. Furthermore the NV Caucuses were a legendary shitshow that descended into chaos in more than a few locations, so the question of the validity of those Entry Polls certainly cannot be assumed. Who showed up, who actually voted, and who was some asshole Trump supporter who thought it would be funny to pretend to be Latino are all open to interpretation. Given the low turnout in the NV Caucus overall and the small number of Latinos identified – about 100 – by the polling agency suggest that statewide no more than 2000 Latinos, an estimate that appears generous, participated.

Nevada has at least 750,000 voting-age Latino residents according to the Census Bureau. It might have been helpful to point this out when declaring that Trump "won" a tiny subset of a small polling sample, or perhaps to have one person working at the network on election day who has some idea of how numbers work. But who cares as long as it sounds alarming, right?

It appears that America is going full "Here, hold my beer. I'm gonna try somethin'…" with this election. After Tuesday it will be very, very hard for the non-Trump Republicans (and Bernie Sanders for that matter) to claim that they are in position to win the nomination. A chance remains on the GOP side if the entire party apparatus and its money men throw their heft behind one candidate. Unfortunately it appears like they cannot decide whether that candidate is Cruz or Rubio (hint: It's Rubio, but they're stupid).

The only thing that I find legitimately interesting about Trump as a candidate – not "Hey check out that flaming dumpster" interesting, not "How bad can Batman & Robin really be" interesting – is the way that he has paralyzed the media that just can't stop paying attention to him. They're ratings- and click-driven, so it's hardly a surprise that they do so. But our media have self-censored their coverage of politics in general and Republicans in particular to the point that they have literally no idea how to handle someone that lies as baldly and as often as Trump.

Our media has become a slick, well-organized Both Sides Are Valid machine. They have gotten into the habit of stenography to the point that they no longer appear to have a procedure in place for telling viewers when something is false. Twenty solid years of "We'll let the viewers decide" has culminated in a candidate who lies so outrageously that even he bursts into giggles half the time at his own bullshit and yet the media are paralyzed about how to challenge him or correct him. It isn't fair to say that one candidate is lying without also saying the same about the other, creating a vortex of False Equivalency and nonsense from which there is no escape.

By understanding their job as writing down what the candidates say or letting the candidates talk into the camera unchallenged and then passing that along to consumers, the media collectively – even Fox, if you can believe it – look like a deer in headlights as Trump maximizes his strategy of simply making shit up so quickly and in such quantity that the fact-checking couldn't keep pace even if it tried. And there is no real evidence that it's trying.

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If you're not sick of reading about Donald Trump yet – Can you believe it's only February and we have to do this for almost nine more months? – Matt Taibbi has a typically strong take on his appeal and why the Republican Party is getting everything it deserves this year. He isn't saying anything that readers here don't understand already, most likely, but he lays out the argument effectively: the image of the GOP as the party of the bankers and of the country club (clurb) set is inaccurate. Sure, those folks are Republicans.

But they would be a tiny minority in American politics if not for armies of angry, resentful, not terribly bright, and aging white people. That's the GOP. That's the bread and butter right there.

For every suburban Republican who loves tax cuts and the National Review there are a half-dozen of the people you see at a Trump rally. No matter how many times Republican elected officials and opinion leaders have tried to convince themselves otherwise, these people do not give one shit about Conservative Values or the principle of small government. They're angry and they've been convinced that government is to blame. That is about the extent to which they have opinions that could be called "political." The rest is simply nativism, the politics of blood. They just hate everyone different. It sounds like I'm oversimplifying that to insult them, but unfortunately that's all there is to it. They hate the gays, the liberals, the environmentalists and their "science", the Pope, the Jews, the blacks, the Mexicans, the Mormons, the young, the poor, and anything remotely "foreign" or unfamiliar (including, from the looks of his crowds, fruit and occasional exercise):

Yes, millions of people responded to (conservative) rhetoric for years. But that wasn't because of the principle itself, but because it was always coupled with the more effective politics of resentment: Big-government liberals are to blame for your problems.

Elections, like criminal trials, are ultimately always about assigning blame.
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For a generation, conservative intellectuals have successfully pointed the finger at big-government-loving, whale-hugging liberals as the culprits behind American decline.
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Stupid people are short-sighted and for years nobody in the GOP appeared smart enough, or perhaps confident enough, to wonder aloud if leading the literal Mob around by throwing chunks of red meat toward it at regular intervals was going to become problematic. Ignorant rabble are not known for their logic, after all. It was inevitable that someone who has truly mastered the art of pandering to the lowest common denominator – America wooooo!

Fuck the Mexicans! Let's bomb the hell out of everything! – would come along and upstage them. No matter how expensive their suits look or how many Cato Institute quasi-intellectuals appear on Sunday talk shows spouting the tired right-wing talking points we can all recite by heart, what Trump is doing right now is exactly what the GOP has been doing for thirty years now. He's just much better at it than they are, and now they don't know what to do.

Today was a very long and exhausting day for me so I'm fighting sleep shortly before midnight. Going to have to bullet point the caucus results.

1. The Sanders-Clinton thing…we're gonna be here a while before this gets resolved. I don't mean Iowa; I mean the nomination. Sanders isn't going to go away and the non-trivial likelihood of Clinton getting indicted at some point is a little appreciated wild card. This could easily be going on in mid-May like we did in 2008.

2. Trump underperformed his poll numbers. Shocking, I know. No ground game. No real campaign. Just a hype machine. He looks like he's already bored with this too. Half-expected him to endorse Cruz during his yawner of a concession speech.

3. Speaking of rubes and dupes, how about Ben Carson flat-out stealing tens of millions of dollars under the false pretense of using it to run for president?
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Christ, he's not even pretending. "I'm gonna leave Iowa mid-afternoon on caucus day and also skip New Hampshire and South Carolina, but I'm totes still running. This is a real campaign. Swearsies." Coming soon to an insufferable syndicated radio station near you. (Called it on Nov. 4, by the way. I'll feed ya, baby birds.)

4. As our friends in Britain would say, I think we can conclude with confidence that an endorsement from Sarah Palin is worth fuck-all. They speak to the exact same audience. An audience of old, hard to look at, racist idiots with the maturity level of toddlers.

5. Speaking of trainwrecks, how terrible is Jeb!? He lost to frickin' Rand Paul. He barely beat Carly Fiorina, who in turn barely edged out a rabid muskrat from Davenport.
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He's urging supporters (who?) to "reset" his campaign, which he also urged them to do in early December when he was floundering like the post-BBQ turd that he is. So if you're keeping track this is his second "reset." Give it up and go back to shilling for fake charter schools. It's still difficult to believe that W. was the smarter one.

6. Jim Gilmore got 11 votes. Granted he hasn't run much of a campaign, but this SOB got on national TV a couple times (at the Kids Table debates) and raised half a million bucks (OK, it pales in comparison but it's still half a million bucks) and he got eleven votes?
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He finished behind other, for christ's sake. Jim Gilmore, the man who lost to Other.

7. There are about 7 Republicans who need to quit immediately but probably won't: Bush, Fiorina, Christie, Huckabee, Santorum, Kasich, and Carson. They're all wasting their time. But there's no real incentive to stop spending other people's money, is there? So until the money dries up, most of them will keep flailing. (Huckabee quit Monday night)

8. It's barely February and I'm already sick to death of talking about Donald Trump. Honestly I don't think I can do it for 10 more months, although I stand by my insistence that a Trump/Palin ticket would be worth its weight in comedic gold.

1. Before a brief appearance on local AM radio regarding the presidential primaries, the hosts told me a very interesting tidbit. This station has both Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh (syndicated, obviously, not live in studio) and loses money on both of them.
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Limbaugh in particular is poison to local advertisers, who specifically ask that their ads not run during his show.
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I asked, quite logically I thought, why the station maintains this arrangement if it actively loses money. Turns out that it is a defensive strategy, essentially, to prevent any other competing station in the broadcasting area from getting Beck or Limbaugh and using them as an anchor to establish a presence. Advertisers don't like them but they both continue to draw an audience (with an average age of about 70, they said off the cuff) and having them in syndication is more about denying that potential audience to other stations than it is about Beck/Limbaugh raking in dough. This is anecdotal; I wonder how widespread this arrangement of spite is among the many stations that carry these turds.

2. Conspiracy theory time. Is it possible that Donald Trump is actively trying to get himself out of the GOP nomination process at this point? His ego is so massive that I can't imagine how he will spin losing, if and when he does lose. The ideal scenario for him, it seems, is to get out before much if any actual voting takes place so he can claim essentially, "They didn't fire me; I quit." He seems like the willingness of his supporters to take anything he says in stride no matter how insane surprises even him. There isn't much room left in the neo-Bircher issue spectrum that he hasn't covered.
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Other than embracing explicit antisemitism or shouting the n-word during a live TV appearance I don't know what else he can do to try to offend people and actually succeed at this point. This theory is probably bunk but I see him as a petulant child with a short attention span who probably got into this race solely to draw attention to himself and now faces the challenge of finding a graceful exit given that he is losing interest and previously thought it impossible that he would do as well as he is polling given how asinine his entire persona and campaign are.

Putting Sarah Palin and Donald Trump together is so beautiful I can hardly stand it. It feels like a beautiful waking dream. "Now our cause is one," said the trailer trash fascist, less than 24 hours after her son was arrested for punching his girlfriend in the face. Marcel Duchamp could not script a better shitshow than a Trump-Palin campaign would inevitably be.

It's a natural fit given that both demagogues transparently hate their army of rubes and lead what is essentially America's version of Europe's far-right nationalist movement. If it isn't fascism proper it's close enough. Why not join forces to create the most cynical, meanest performance art piece the country has ever seen, elevated to near perfection by the fact that their supporters are not in on the gag?
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What is the limit to the amount you would pay to watch media outlets awkwardly take them seriously? Personally, I'm ready to drain my bank accounts to see the spectacle.

As an added bonus, Trump as the GOP nominee (which, again, remains an unlikely outcome but let's dream big for a second) with Palin's tongue attached to his O-ring would not only lose and lose big but they would also take the entire Republican Party down with them. They would do what the Civil War did to the Whigs and what Brian Mulroney did to the Progressive Conservatives in Canada.

That we would get to watch a moron who can't talk as the potential running mate of a man who acts like he is auditioning for the lead role in a Goebbels biopic is almost too sweet. "Icing on the cake" understates how wonderful that would be, unless the icing is made of 0 bills and 90 minute massage gift certificates.

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For the first time, I am a little excited about the 2016 Election. If you invited me to a demolition derby I'd have very little interest in going. If you invited me to a demolition derby where all of the vehicles had mounted rocket launchers and were driven by drunk men with neurological deficits that left them permanently without depth perception, wild horses wouldn't be enough to keep me away.

I haven't done this in ages – it must be years, and I'm too embarrassed and lazy to look – but here are a couple of interesting books I've gotten through lately.

Non-fiction, obviously. Nobody knows what kind of fiction anybody else will like.

1. Combat-Ready Kitchen: How the U.S. Military Shapes the Way You Eat (Anastacia Marx De Salcedo). Hold on, hold on. It's not about the military. It's essentially a history of processed food, the technologies of which have been driven almost entirely by war and the needs (and funding) of armies. Granola bars, canned protein, preservatives, dehydrated food, freeze drying, chocolate bars…they all came about largely due to efforts to solve the logistical problems of feeding large numbers of men with high calorie needs in a variety of locations and climates. All of the "military" food technology transitions seamlessly to the consumer market.
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The Army wanted bread that wouldn't go stale for months on end and it got it; now it's virtually impossible to find bread that doesn't have a bizarrely long shelf life. The author is kind of annoying in more than a few passages, obviously too eager to mine the thesaurus (Anyone who uses the word "leitmotif" in a sentence describing granola bars is trying too hard to let us know she went to, let's say Columbia) and the anecdotes about herself and her family add little, but overall it's a great read. The chapters on the Edible Bars of Matter revolution and the technology behind extended food freshness are worth it.

2. 1946: The Making of the Modern World (Victor Sebesteyn). Having previously read his 1989, it made sense to see his take on the other of the two pivotal and defining years of the 20th Century. America is drowning in World War II content – books, movies, games, etc. – but they all end with V-J Day. Yet what happened in the immediate aftermath is the really interesting stuff, not who shot who at the Battle of Somesuch. The author was born behind the Iron Curtain and, for my tastes, fills both 1989 and 1946 with way too many "Communism is bad, kids" reminders (We get it, we've seen the highlight reels of the tomahawk dunks of free market capitalism's victory, Victor) but is a thorough and very straightforward writer. Of particular interest was the considerable attention he pays to the issue of mass rape (and, less sinister, the frenzy of consensual fornication that coincided with it) in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Japan and Germany.
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Few authors, and fewer male authors, bother to include that among the admittedly lengthy list of horrors of the war. Attention is also devoted to areas beyond Europe in quantity, with thorough chapters on the partition of India, the establishment of Israel, the Chinese civil war, post-war Japan, and other non-Western subjects. You'll understand a lot more about the world as it looks today by the time you finish this.

If you're looking for books, those are books.