Lev Radin/Pacific Press via ZUMA

Just to get this off my chest, I hope I don’t have to sit through too many rounds of griping from various slightly different factions of the progressive movement about how impeachment has been handled well or badly by Nancy Pelosi and, more generally, by Democrats in Congress. Whatever else you can say, none of this is their fault.

It’s the fault of a Republican Party that went over the edge of partisan rage and destruction long ago. They’re the ones who tried at every turn to prevent President Obama from rescuing the economy after he took office. They’re the ones who were willing to die on the hill of protecting tax cuts for the rich. They’re the ones who have relentlessly gerrymandered and suppressed the black vote because that’s good for Republicans. They’re the ones who spent years trying to tar Hillary Clinton over Benghazi. They’re the ones who stonewalled the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. They’re the ones who got so caught up in their own loathing of Hillary Clinton that they turned away from the pussy tape and voted for Trump anyway. They’re the ones who spent their first year in office desperately trying to take away health care for the poor and working classes.

Democrats don’t always cover themselves in glory. But Trump is in office because the Republican Party put him there, and he’s gotten away with everything so far because the Republican Party has let him. No one should ever forget that.

Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly via ZUMA

Well, Nancy Pelosi has given us our formal impeachment inquiry. And the Senate has voted unanimously to ask the Director of National Intelligence to hand over the whistleblower complaint. The official response from Donald Trump is “PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!” The official response from the Trumpbot crowd is that Hunter Biden is the real scandal. The official response from the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger crowd is that we’d all be taking this a lot more seriously if Democrats hadn’t been so mean to Trump all along.

On a side note, this should make it easier for Congress to subpoena Trump’s tax returns, shouldn’t it? The Treasury Department has been arguing that Congress doesn’t really have any legislative purpose behind the request, but an impeachment inquiry is unquestionably a legislative purpose. It’s hard to see how they can hold out much longer, or how a court could rule in their favor.

I suppose one of the big questions going forward is how to frame the eventual impeachment charges. Should the House issue multiple articles of impeachment (Comey firing, Stormy Daniels, Ukraine, etc.) and hold extensive hearings on them? Or should they focus tightly on Ukraine and try to get through this fairly quickly? I’m tentatively in favor of the latter. Not only is time short, but Ukrainegate is a nice, bright line. Republicans have already made it clear that they’ll fight all the other stuff, and it’s not clear the public would have a problem with that. But Ukraine? This is so plainly corrupt and impeachable that it’s hard to see how anyone can defend it. The best you can do, I suppose, is to say it’s bad but doesn’t rise to the level of impeachable. And that’s pretty weak tea.

Continuing our series of soothing, serene photos, this is possibly the most amiable dog ever. I was sitting on the ground taking pictures of something else when he saw me and immedately came waddling my way. He never stopped or hesitated. He just made a very slow beeline for my lap, plonked himself down, and started snerfling while I rubbed his tummy. I have a feeling that if it had been up to him, I would still be in Colombia in that exact spot to this day.

Ommm.

Brittany Murray/SCNG via ZUMA

Sean Reardon has some interesting new research on the black-white achievement gap in primary school today. It’s mostly contained in Table 5 of his report, which is a little hard to read, but here it is:

Even after controlling for economic status, attendance at a school with a big racial attendance gap (i.e., heavily black or heavily white) leads to big differences in black-white achievement scores (0.610). However, once you control for differences in school poverty, the effect goes away (0.013).

What’s left is a big effect in exposure to poor schoolmates (0.924). In other words, this confirms what we’ve known for a long time about the effect of concentrated poverty. If a black student goes go to a school that’s heavily black but middle class, it’s no big deal. But if a black student goes to a school that’s heavily poor, he’s doomed.

Needless to say, schools that are heavily black tend to also be heavily poor, so this effect can be hard to tease out without careful study. Nonetheless, Reardon is clear:

Using scores from hundreds of millions of tests taken in the last decade by students in thousands of school districts, we find a very strong link between racial school segregation and academic achievement gaps. More segregated school systems have larger achievement gaps, on average, and their gaps grow faster during elementary and middle schools than in less segregated ones.

….Why is this? We find that the association between racial school segregation and achievement gaps appears to operate entirely through differences in exposure to poor schoolmates….Racial segregation matters, therefore, because it concentrates black and Hispanic students in high-poverty schools, not because of the racial composition of their schools, per se.

If you want to take away any good news from this, here’s a glimmer of hope: If the problem really is class more than race, then we can make a case for desegregating our schools based on class. According to Reardon, this would actually be more effective, and it’s probably slightly less incendiary than desegregation plans based on race.

This is, to be clear, only the slightest glimmer of hope. Parents of middle-class kids will probably resist integration with poor kids just as much as parents of white kids resist integration with poor kids. But you never know. Anything that turns down the dial a bit could be helpful.

Phase 7 coming right up!

I am currently at the United Nations representing our Country, but have authorized the release tomorrow of the complete, fully declassified and unredacted transcript of my phone conversation with President Zelensky of Ukraine….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 24, 2019

I have no doubt that this call will not include any explicit threats. It won’t have to. And in any case, there’s still the whistleblower complaint, which alleges a pattern of misconduct from Trump. We need to see that too.

And now, Phase 6:

President Trump said Tuesday that he held up American aid to Ukraine that has become the subject of furious controversy because European countries have not paid their fair share to support the country, and pointed to the fact that the money was eventually released as evidence that he had done nothing wrong.

Trump has now fessed up to everything: he did hold up the aid to Ukraine and he did ask Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son. But he had reasons! He held up the aid because of the cheapskate Europeans and he asked for the investigation because he was very worried about political corruption in the US.

All the pieces are in place. All we need now is the whistleblower complaint, a transcript of the phone call, and all the evidence underlying them. Should be a piece of cake since Trump obviously has nothing to hide.

UPDATE: Just for the record, the European Union says it has “mobilised more than €15 billion in grants and loans to support the reform process in Ukraine” since 2014. This includes €500 million disbursed late last year for 2019. According to High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini this is “the largest support package in the history of the European Union.”

This compares to US aid of about $1.2 billion over the same period plus about $1 billion in military aid. In other words, the EU has already provided Ukraine with about eight times as much aid as the US over the past five years and will provide more than the US in 2019 as well.

Smityuk Yuri/TASS via ZUMA

Japan has kept a very low profile vis-a-vis Donald Trump, in hopes that they could escape his wrath and maybe even cut a small trade deal. And they have! But there’s a hitch from President Deals:

For more than a year, Trump has threatened to slap tariffs on automobiles imported to the United States from Japan and Europe. He has said that Japan, for example, should make it cheaper for U.S. companies to send cars there, but an agreement has never been reached….The president last month said he had no plans “at this moment” to hit Japan with the controversial import taxes, but added: “It’s something I could do at a later date if I wanted to.”

Reasonably enough, Japan doesn’t want to conclude an agreement in other areas only to turn around and see that Trump decided one morning to destroy the Japanese car industry with 25 percent tariffs. So for the moment we’re at something of an impasse. Trump may not be very good at trade deals, but he’s an absolute master at those.

Is Juul a socially conscious company whose goal has always been to help adult cigarette smokers switch to a less harmful product? Are they shocked—shocked!—that anyone thinks they might have actually been targeting the teen market all along? A new study of Juul’s marketing history from researchers at Stanford University cuts through the bullshit:

JUUL’s advertising imagery in its first 6 months on the market was patently youth oriented. For the next 2 ½ years it was more muted, but the company’s advertising was widely distributed on social media channels frequented by youth, was amplified by hashtag extensions, and catalyzed by compensated influencers and affiliates.

….During its meteoric growth, JUUL posted a prodigious volume of advertisements via social media, promoted them via paid influencers, and distributed its messages to a wide community via hashtags. The credibility of JUUL leadership denials of youth targeting is undermined by their diligent efforts to expunge their social media history.

And of course there were the cigarette-inspired “sampling events” that Juul sponsored in cities around the country. They were obviously not aimed at adult smokers:

The events were always free and featured popular bands such as CHAPMAN, illumanti AMS, Mary Kwok and others. Other events were movie nights held on rooftops. One Los Angeles event, managed by Cinespia, was an all night “slumber party” held in Hollywood’s Forever Cemetery featuring movies such as: Can’t Hardly Wait, SCREAM, and Cruel Intentions. JUUL events continued well beyond its first year on the market.

This is why I hate Juul. It has nothing to do with the recent spate of deaths and lung ailments associated with vaping. Until very recently, when the vaping backlash forced them to change, Juul was marketed almost exclusively toward teens using methods and sophistication straight out of the cigarette playbook. Their goal, quite obviously, was to create another generation of nicotine addicts who would provide a reliable stream of income for years to come. After all, why else would Juul’s pods have twice the nicotine content of most other vaping brands? Why else would the delivery device be designed to appeal to the young and marketed largely through social media channels unknown to most adults? And why else would a cigarette company be willing to value an otherwise uninteresting $2 billion hardware company at $38 billion? You think the maker of Marlboros doesn’t understand how the marketing of nicotine addiction works?

The Washington Post adds yet another detail to Ukrainegate:

President Trump told his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to hold back almost $400 million in military aid for Ukraine at least a week before a phone call in which Trump is said to have pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate the son of former vice president Joe Biden, according to three senior administration officials.

….Administration officials were instructed to tell lawmakers that the delays were part of an “interagency process” but to give them no additional information — a pattern that continued for nearly two months, until the White House released the funds on the night of Sept. 11.

In short: as part of an attempt to extort a foreign country, Trump withheld military aid from them and then lied to Congress about why he was doing it.

Mitch McConnell, naturally, was saddened that Democrats were trying to “politicize” the matter.

And now we enter Phase 5:

Trump’s latest on the content of the Ukraine call: “I did not make a statement that ‘you have to do this or I’m not going to give you aid.’ I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that.”

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) September 23, 2019

Trump didn’t literally say “If you don’t investigate Biden you’ll never see a dime of American money.” He just made sure they understood. And that makes it all different.

Today is September 23, and I’ll note for the record that there is still virtually no breaking of ranks among Republicans over this. Mitt Romney and Susan Collins have expressed some modest concern, but that’s about it. It’s especially noteworthy that Republicans in Congress haven’t called for the whistleblower complaint to be released to Congress, as required by law. They care more about protecting Trump than they do about their own branch of government being shat on.