I suppose you have to read the whole thing to get the true flavor of the situation, but here’s the latest from Afghanistan:

In September, the Taliban briefly seized Kunduz, the first city to fall since the demise of its regime, prompting the U.S. military to dispatch Special Operations troops and stage airstrikes to help the Afghan security forces retake control.

Now, the insurgents are on the doorsteps of several provincial capitals, applying more pressure on urban areas than in any year of the conflict. The clashes in Helmand have reflected the Taliban strategy that led to the takeover of Kunduz — seizing surrounding districts before moving in on the provincial capital. Already, the Taliban are in the enclave of Ba­baji, within the borders of Helmand’s capital, Lashkar Gah.

….Afghans, including senior military officials, no longer even pretend that they can fight the Taliban effectively on their own. “When the foreigners were here, we had plenty of facilities and equipment,” said 1st Lt. Naseer Ahmad Sahel, 30, a civil-order police company commander who was wounded last month in a firefight in Marja. “There were 100 cameras overlooking Marja alone.”

Faqir, the commander of the 215th Corps, said, “We don’t have the air support that we should have.”

There isn’t a single country from Libya to Afghanistan where American military intervention has succeeded, nor a single country where American military training has been anything but a disaster. We can’t do counterinsurgency on our own, and the troops we’ve tried to train are too divided in their loyalties to be effective.

But we’re supposed to believe that if only we’d picked a side in the Syrian civil war two years ago, that would have made all the difference? Or that if only we’d kept a few thousand more troops in Iraq for a few more years, ISIS never would have become a threat? Spare me. How many times does Lucy have to pull away the football before Charlie Brown finally figures out what’s going on?

The long holiday weekend will probably be light on news for me to blog about—no Saturday night Democratic debates this week!—so I figured I’d make another pitch and give you an update on our December fundraising campaign.

As I  wrote a couple weeks ago, Monika and Clara put together an interesting piece on the state of paying for journalism in the digital age and how our model of reader support makes us pretty darn unique. Here’s an excerpt:

December is a really critical fundraising month for nonprofits like us. But, like you, we are kind of tired of the usual gimmicks that get trotted out around this time—HELP! We’ll go dark if you don’t pitch in! It’s actually true (more on that later), but it doesn’t really appeal to your intelligence.

So we had this idea: What if we tried something different? What if we actually showed you how the sausage is made: transparently explaining the challenges of paying for journalism in the digital age and going into detail about how reader support makes Mother Jones possible?

We want you to understand what reader support is—donations of all sizes, subscriptions, even telling your friends about us—and how it fits into our budget. We think being transparent about the challenges publishers face will make it more compelling for you to support Mother Jones. The first step is this December fundraising campaign.

Our target for December is $200,000. If everyone who visits the site this month gives 2.5 cents, we’re done. If everyone who visits today gives 40 cents, we’re done. If 40,000 people—less than 2 percent of our monthly visitors—each give the price of a latte, we’re done.  Are you one of them?

Well, the good news is that they say it seems to be working. I mean, 40,000 people haven’t donated the price of a latte yet—but as of Wednesday afternoon, 2,979 people had donated an average gift of $41.77 (10 lattes?) for a total of $124,428 raised this month. They also say it’s going to be a nail-biter, and we’re quite literally banking on last-minute donations coming in over the next week to get us over the hump.

And this is the part I find really fascinating—understanding how the internet works for fundraising and where all of those donations are coming from. Between my first post and my experiment interjecting some asks into my GOP debate live blog two weeks ago, the good folks who read this page have donated $6,296, or 5 percent of the total. Not too shabby at all.

Emails to our newsletter subscribers are typically the workhorse, and this year they’ve raised 29 percent of the revenue. Not far behind it, the two “donate” links you see at the top of every page have raised 24%, and those “overlay” ads that appear over the top of our articles when you visit the site have raised 21 percent. Monika and Clara’s piece accounts for 16 percent. Those are the big sources of donations. Facebook and Twitter? A bit here and there, but not so much—and not that different than Jeb Bush’s campaign: So full of promise on day one, but stuck in the low single digits.

I’m delighted to know the folks who read this blog donate more than Facebook and the Twitterverse—and the truth is, several of you have probably made donations through one of those other ways listed above. So thanks to everyone who has already donated.

If you haven’t made a tax-deductible, year-end gift yet, please consider doing so now via credit card or PayPal—we don’t want to let Facebook or Twitter catch us, do we?

Earlier this year, the news was full of reports about cities in which the murder rate had increased 30, 40, even 50 percent since 2014. Was it the fault of Ferguson, which prompted so much anti-police animus that cops started pulling back, afraid to do their jobs for fear of being the target of angry mobs and the evening news?

That’s a hard question to answer, but the first order of business is to figure out if the murder rate has really gone up in the first place. The FBI won’t have official figures for a long time (they’re still working on 2013), but a couple of months ago the Brennan Center took a crack at this and estimated that the murder rate for all of America’s largest cities was up 11 percent this year. That’s a lot less scary than 50 percent, but it’s still a pretty sizeable increase. Heather Mac Donald is unhappy that liberals are trying to downplay it:

Good policing over the past two decades produced an extraordinary 50% drop in crime. America isn’t going to give all that back in one year. The relevant question: What is the current trend? If this year’s homicide and shooting outbreak continues, those 1990s violent crime levels will return sooner than anyone could have imagined.

….Cops making arrests in urban areas are routinely surrounded by bystanders, who swear at them and interfere with the arrests. The media and many politicians decry as racist law-enforcement tools like pedestrian stops and broken-windows policing—the proven method of stopping major crimes by going after minor ones.

….To acknowledge the Ferguson effect would be tantamount to acknowledging that police matter, especially when the family and other informal social controls break down. Trillions of dollars of welfare spending over the past 50 years failed to protect inner-city residents from rising predation. Only the policing revolution of the 1990s succeeded in curbing urban violence, saving thousands of lives. As the data show, that achievement is now in jeopardy.

First things first: no one thinks that “good policing” is responsible for the massive drop in violent crime over the past two decades. It may be part of the reason, but it’s certainly not the whole reason, or even the main reason. And pedestrian stops and broken windows are the subject of intense controversy. They’re the farthest thing from “proven” you can imagine. This is true whether or not you believe that gasoline lead played a role in the big crime drop of the 1990s. MacDonald is engaging in absurdities when she suggests otherwise.

Nor have “family and other informal social controls” broken down. Not in any way that affects the crime rate, anyway. The evidence against this hypothesis is overwhelming. It needs to die a decent death.

Finally, it’s worth noting that because the number of murders is relatively small, it’s not unusual to see fairly large annual changes. We won’t know for years whether the murder rate really went up 11 percent in 2015, but even if it did, it wouldn’t be that surprising. Between 1985 and 2012, the FBI recorded five years in which the murder rate in America’s largest cities increased or decreased by more than 10 percent.

That said, an 11 percent spike is still substantial. If it’s real and persistent, it deserves attention. No one should pretend that it’s just a “modest” increase or a “small blip.”

My recommendation: Both sides should cool it. Mac Donald is right to be concerned that this year’s increase could be bad news if it marks the beginning of a trend. We should keep a close eye on violent crime data—not just murder rates—over the next year or two. At the same time, liberals are right to be skeptical that the “Ferguson effect” is a long-term problem. Most likely, everyone will either adjust to it or forget about it by this time next year. And both sides should be concerned about finding the right policing balance in an era of ubiquitous cell phones and body cams.

Waiting too long to acknowledge a problem can sometimes be disastrous, but a few months is a pretty short time and murder is a pretty small sample set to draw any firm conclusions from. Everyone should calm down a bit and wait to see what the next year or two bring.

UPDATE: New York City has been ground zero for a lot of “Ferguson effect” changes. Since the middle of last year we’ve seen protests over Eric Garner’s death; the end of the stop-and-frisk program; several police murders; and a deliberate slowdown in police activity. But today the New York Times reports that the murder rate is up only slightly and overall violent crime (murder, rape, robbery, assault) is down significantly since the end of 2013. In other words, let’s all wait a bit for more concrete statistics before we hit the panic button.

In a blog post about an entirely different subject, Jay Nordlinger says this about Donald Trump:

I am reminded of how the Left and Right can blend — although it’s pretty much impossible to locate Trump politically. Is he Left or Right or in between?

This has long been a common observation, but is it really true anymore? A few months ago, for example, I wrote that Trump didn’t favor a flat tax. But that’s true of most Republicans. And now that Trump has actually released a tax plan, we know his tax notions are entirely orthodox these days. Ditto for Planned Parenthood, which Trump is now on board with defunding completely. Ditto again for his short-lived support for an assault weapons ban.

So what’s left of Trump’s alleged populism? I count one thing:

• He doesn’t want to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Is there anything else left? He’s not stridently anti-gay, but he’s opposed to gay marriage nonetheless. Sort of Jeb Bush-ish. He refuses to say that he still supports affirmative action. His foreign policy is…um…a little hard to get a handle on, but it sure can’t be described as liberal these days. He claims to have opposed the Iraq War, but that’s just a lie—and ten years in the past anyway. He sometimes sounds a populist note on trade, but his real position is that he’s smarter than all the dimwits in Washington and could negotiate better terms than they do. He doesn’t seem to harbor any real leftish views on trade.

So really, his support for Social Security and Medicare is pretty much it for non-conservative heresies—and even there his position remains unclear. Does he mean that he doesn’t want to cut Social Security and Medicare at all, or does he mean he doesn’t want to cut them for people currently in the system? After all, the standard Republican position already protects Social Security and Medicare for anyone over age 55. But since Trump has declined to provide any further detail, we don’t really know what his position is.

Trump used to have a few more quasi-liberal positions, but the campaign has sanded them all down. Today, he’s just a really loud right-winger who understands that bashing Social Security and Medicare doesn’t win any votes. That’s it.

Hopper looks a bit Grinch-like in this photo, doesn’t she? That’s OK, though: it’s one of my favorite childhood books. May all your hearts grow three sizes today. Merry Christmas, everyone.

If the NFL can have a special Saturday edition of Thursday Night Football, then I can have a special Thursday edition of Friday Catblogging. This is my Christmas gift to all of you: catblogging a day early.

But there’s more! Today you get a movie. And not just any movie: in the spirit of the season, today’s movie brings ultimate cat fighting into your home. Be sure to note Hilbert’s stealthy, almost ninja-like paw movement at the beginning. I score it two takedowns for each, but Hilbert’s stunning surprise attack at the end threw Hopper out of the ring and won the bout. In the middle, you’ll notice that they fight like a couple of six-year-old girls. An hour after it was over, they both conked out and curled up together on the teal chair downstairs.

I am, of course, familiar with the hipster love of music on vinyl. But I didn’t know that cassette tapes were making a comeback too:

Many people over 30 remember cassettes, with nostalgia, if not some disdain….Go to any indie show and inevitably, among the T-shirts and knickknacks, there will be tapes. Some record labels are now cassette-only. The National Audio Co., America’s largest manufacturer of audiocassettes, reported that 2014 was its best year yet.

But before the revisionists completely rewrite my adolescence, let’s be clear about something: As a format for recorded sound, the cassette tape is a terrible piece of technology….Each time you play one it degrades. Bad sound gets worse. Casings crack in winter, melt in summer.

Craziness. The only reason anyone liked cassettes back in the day was because they were better than 8-track tapes. When I was in college, you could hardly turn a corner without hearing an earnest conversation about Maxell vs. TDK,¹ Dolby vs. Dolby C, chrome vs. metal, 60 minutes vs. 90 minutes.² But those conversations only existed because everyone also understood that cassette tapes fundamentally sucked. There was lots of innovation, but it was all just part of a desperate attempt to improve the sound of a format that was inherently lousy because the tape was just too damn narrow. There’s a limit to what you can do when you cram four audio tracks onto eighth-inch analog tape.

But lots of people today have forgotten about all that, I guess. Oh well. I’m pretty convinced that about 90 percent of the population couldn’t tell the difference between music played on half-inch reference tape and music played on a Teddy Ruxpin doll.³ So I suppose it doesn’t matter.

Still, cassettes? Seriously folks: a thumb drive is better in every conceivable way. Don’t get sucked in.

¹I was a Maxell guy. I have no idea why.

²No one who wanted to be taken seriously ever considered 120-minute cassettes. And for good reason: they were just too fragile.

³This quite likely includes me.

The folks at the Tax Policy Center have spurned my advice to spend more time with their families, instead spending their holiday weekends beavering away on an analysis of Donald Trump’s tax plan. And the important news is that it’s bigger, more energetic, and altogether more taxerrific than Jeb Bush’s weak-tea excuse for a tax plan. Bush would increase the national debt by 28 percentage points over the next decade. Trump kills it with a 39 point increase in red ink. Bush raises the federal deficit by $1 trillion in 2026. Trump goes big and increases it by $1.6 trillion. Bush’s plan costs $6.8 trillion over ten years. Trump’s plan clocks in at a budget-busting $9.5 trillion. And Bush reduces the tax rate of the super-rich by a meager 7.6 percent. Trump buries him by slashing tax rates for the Wall Street set by 12.5 percent.

Once again, Bush has brought a knife to a gun fight, and Trump has slapped him silly. This is why Trump is a winner. Merry Christmas, billionaires!

Today Jon Chait writes what must be about the millionth blog post explaining that nearly all conservative criticisms of Obamacare are wildly cherry-picked and intentionally deceptive. In fact, Obamacare is doing pretty well. Not that it matters. Nothing Chait says will have any effect because conservatives just don’t care. Obamacare is bad because it taxes rich people and provides health care to poor people. All the rest is just chaff.

Take this paragraph, for example. It’s about the Cadillac Tax, which partially removes the tax-exempt status of high-end health plans as a way of trying to rein in costs. It was supposed to take effect in 2018, but it’s now been moved out to 2020 because everyone¹ hates it:

As bad as this news is for Obamacare, it’s absolutely catastrophic for Obamacare replacements. Every Republican plan to replace Obamacare relies on the same financing mechanism: limiting or repealing the tax break for employer-sponsored insurance. The Cadillac Tax is a smaller, more painless version of this same policy. If both parties can’t abide a partial rollback of the tax break for the most expensive health plans, they’re never, ever going to go along with eliminating the entire tax break for all health plans. The conservatives cackling over the demise of the Cadillac Tax are delusional — it’s as if they’re watching the backlash against the Iraq War in 2008 with fingers tented, anticipating that this will encourage war-weary Americans to support a land invasion of Russia. The bipartisan support for maintaining the tax break for employer insurance will hurt Obamacare, but it can survive. The Republican plans to replace it would all be wiped out.

This would be a devastating point—if all these conservative plans were actually serious. They aren’t. Republicans haven’t the slightest intention of ever enacting any of them. Their opposition to the Cadillac Tax doesn’t show that they’re delusional, it just shows that they’ve never taken their own plans seriously and couldn’t care less if any of them ever see the light of day.

¹Except for health wonks. But nobody cares about them.

A friend draws my attention today to a piece by National Review editor Rich Lowry about—of course—the wild popularity of Donald Trump among tea partiers. Lowry waxes nostalgic for the early tea party days of 2010, when being a “constitutional conservative” was all the rage, and wonders where it all went:

Trump exists in a plane where there isn’t a Congress or a Constitution. There are no trade-offs or limits….He would deport the American-born children of illegal immigrants. He has mused about shutting down mosques and creating a database of Muslims. He praised FDR’s internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II.

You can be forgiven for thinking that in Trump’s world, constitutional niceties—indeed any constraints whatsoever—are for losers….For some on the right, clearly, the Constitution was an instrument rather than a principle. It was a means to stop Obama, and has been found lacking.

My friend snickers at Lowry’s use of some, which does a whole lot of heavy lifting here. Technically, though, 95 percent is still some, so this is accurate. But a wee bit misleading, no? Anyway, this leads Lowry into an argument that, really, Trump is just Obama 2.0:

Trump is a reaction to Obama’s weakness but also to his exaggerated view of executive power….Whereas Obama has a cool contempt for his political opponents and for limits on his power, Trump has a burning contempt for them. The affect is different; the attitude is the same.

….A hallmark of Obama’s governance has been to say that he lacks the power to act unilaterally on a given issue, and then do it anyway. Progressives have been perfectly willing to bless Obama’s post-constitutional government. Trump’s implicit promise is to respond in kind, and his supporters think it’s about time.

Uh huh. So far, Obama has done OK in the Supreme Court, but no matter. Tea partiers believe Obama goes to sleep each night not by counting sheep, but by counting bonfires of Constitutions. Or, as Lowry admits, they pretend to believe this. In reality, it’s just a handy way to oppose Obama’s liberal policies.

Now, it’s never been clear to me why you need this kind of charade. Why not just oppose Obama’s liberal policies because they’re no good? I suppose it’s mainly a palliative for the rubes, who don’t like to think of themselves as meanspirited folks who dislike paying taxes to help the less fortunate. Instead, they can complain that Obama’s policies are unconstitutional; or that he’s running up dangerous levels of debt; or that he’s turning America into sclerotic old Europe. That sounds a lot nicer.

Anyway, Lowry’s actual goal in this piece is to come up with conservative arguments against Trump. That’s the Lord’s work, even if “Obama 2.0” seems a little unlikely to catch on. What’s more, I seem to recall that he’s a cat person in an office jampacked with dog people. And Christmas is right around the corner. So I’ll call a truce. No more writing about Donald Trump until Christmas is over. We all deserve a break.