This is the altar of the Basilica del Santo Cristo in Ubaté, just after mass has concluded. Churches in Colombia—the ones I visited, anyway—typically look like this, lighter-hued and more colorful than I’m used to from European churches and cathedrals. It’s a very striking look.
Back in 1974 Congress subpoenaed various documents from President Nixon, including, most famously, the tapes of his Oval Office conversations. Nixon refused to hand them over, but the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that he had to comply. A couple of weeks later Nixon resigned.
For a while, that was that: the court had spoken, and presidents had to comply with congressional subpoenas for use in a criminal trial. A generalized interest in confidentiality was not enough to override a legitimate judicial need.
This was a landmark case, but the Trump administration says it’s hokum:
DEVELOPING Trump Justice Dept. asks U.S. judge to reject House Judiciary Committee request for Mueller grand jury materials, argues courts in 1974 wrongly gave Congress the Watergate grand jury ‘roadmap’ that led to President Nixon’s impeachment.
— Spencer Hsu (@hsu_spencer) October 8, 2019
“Wow, O.K.,” responded U.S. Chief District Judge Beryl A. Howell of Washington, D.C., sounding unpersuaded. “As I said, the department is taking an extraordinary position in this case.”
— Spencer Hsu (@hsu_spencer) October 8, 2019
Apparently the Trump argument is that the grand jury materials would be really helpful to the Democrats pressing for impeachment, so they should be held back. Judge Howell seems unpersuaded, but I’m sure the Trumpies don’t care. She’s just an Obama flunky anyway and obviously prejudiced against them. They’ll just appeal, and then appeal again. The point here is mainly to take up lots of time, not to actually win the case.
AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
You may recall that Gordon Sondland is a key figure in the Ukrainegate scandal. Sondland is our ambassador to the EU, but he’s not a career diplomat. He was rewarded with the job because he’s a big Trump donor and loyalist.
There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s traditional for high-profile US ambassadors to be political donors. And in this case it’s good for Trump: Sondland is surely likely to put a favorable spin on things when he testifies about Ukraine in front of three House committee. In fact, his lawyer said he was eager to testify voluntarily, and he had flown back from Brussels to appear this morning.
But at the last minute his appearance was squashed by the State Department. Why? Executive privilege? Lack of time to properly prepare? Concern over the possible release of classified material? Nope:
I would love to send Ambassador Sondland, a really good man and great American, to testify, but unfortunately he would be testifying before a totally compromised kangaroo court, where Republican’s rights have been taken away, and true facts are not allowed out for the public….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 8, 2019
That’s right: Trump has ordered Sondland not to appear before the House because he thinks the House investigation is totally unfair. That’s a new one! And one of Trump’s most loyal spear carriers in the House completely agrees:
“The way [Schiff] treated Volker last week, that treatment is the reason why the State Department and the White House said we’re not going to subject Ambassador Sondland to the same treatment,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the ranking member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, told reporters.
“Ambassador Volker was not giving them the answers that they were leading Ambassador Volker to conclude,” said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), another of the president’s allies on Capitol Hill. “This president did not hold aid to try to influence a foreign country to do anything.”
Actually, Volker gave them a whole lot of the answers they were looking for. Details here. Nonetheless, Sen. Lindsey Graham was also on the president’s side:
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), one of the president’s closest allies, said on Twitter it was “time for the Senate to inquire about corruption and other improprieties involving Ukraine.” He said that he would offer Mr. Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, “the opportunity to come before the Senate Judiciary Committee to inform the committee of his concerns.”
Translation: Forget about Trump’s actual corruption, we should be more concerned with hearing about made-up conspiracy theories regarding Ukraine and Democrats. And who better to provide that kind of thing than Rudy Giuliani?
For the record, our ambassador to Ukraine thought it was clear that we were holding up military aid to Ukraine until they agreed to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden. This was also the understanding of Sen. Ron Johnson after he talked to Sondland. And it was certainly mighty suspicious that Trump held up the Ukraine aid and then instructed his aides to lie to Congress about why he was doing it. Still, Trump has totally denied that he did anything wrong, so that should be that. Right? Why bother investigating any further, especially in front of a committee run by Democrats who are clearly total hacks and completely unfair?
It’s too bad Democrats were unaware of this defense back in the day. It sure would have cut short a lot of unpleasantness. The next stop, I suppose, is a subpoena, which the White House will ignore and which Democrats will take to court. That should burn off several months of time and prevent any impeachment vote this year. Or so they hope.
There’s no special hook for this post. I was browsing around on Andrew Gelman’s blog and happened to come across these charts that he drew a couple of years ago. The subject is deaths of despair.
Anne Case and Angus Deaton famously found that the death rate of middle-aged whites had started to increase around the year 2000, and the media mostly reported this as a problem with middle-aged white men. Case and Deaton looked at causes of death and explained the increase as a sudden rise in “deaths of despair”: that is, a lot more deaths caused by suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol problems.
But it turned out that Case and Deaton worked in age buckets (i.e., 25-35, 35-45, etc.) and hadn’t controlled for the fact that the average age within those buckets was steadily increasing. They also didn’t disaggregate by gender or region. When Gelman and Jonathan Auerbach did that, here’s what they found:
The upper left is the original chart for middle-aged whites. The next chart breaks it out by gender and finds that men suffered a brief bump around 2000, which turned around a few years laters and and ended up back where it started. Women, by contrast, saw their death rates steadily climb during the entire period.
Finally, looking only at women, there are no substantial increases in the Midwest, the West, or the Northeast. It’s all in the South, which had the highest death rate to begin with. Between 2000 and 2014, the death rate for middle-aged white women in the South went up from 0.31 percent to 0.37 percent.
It’s important to point out that the main problem reported by Case and Deaton remains powerful: even if most white Americans have experienced steady death rates (and life expectancies) since 2000, this compares poorly with the rest of the world, where life expectancies have continued to rise. There is obviously something bad going on that’s specific to the United States.
That said, the only group where death rates are literally rising are white women in the South. I’m mentioning this only because, to this day, I continue to see incorrect media references to this. If you’re comparing America to Europe, it’s fine to say that we’re performing worse across the board. But if you want to know where the biggest problem is, the answer is that it’s clearly focused on one specific group: middle-aged white women in the South.
A Kurdish refugee in northern Syria watches airstrikes in the city of Kobani.Dimitrios Chantzaras/NurPhoto/ZUMA
I’m sort of catching up on things, so tell me if I have this straight:
And . . . I guess that’s where we stand. This is one of the things I hate most about Trump. I happen to favor troop withdrawals from the Middle East, which makes the situation with the Kurds a genuinely tough one in my mind. Somehow, though, even when Trump does something I generally favor, he does it so stupidly and ham-handedly that it’s almost as if he’s trying to prove the hawks were right all along.
This was never going to be an easy situation to wind down, but there were certainly ways to do it without destroying America’s reputation as a reliable ally. As of today, however, it looks like that ship has sailed.
My M-protein number came back this afternoon, and it’s dropping quite nicely:
This is not quite a personal low, but at the rate it’s declining I might get there next month. Maybe. In any case, the Darzalex + Dex + Pomalyst triplet is working very well, and my doctor seems to be very keen on the idea of triplets.
The downside, of course, is that between the Dex and the Pom I’m pretty fatigued nearly all the time, my breathing is a little bit shallow, my taste buds are shot, and I occasionally have stomach problems. On the bright side, I’m alive and kicking and I may very well see Donald Trump impeached. What more could I ask for?
I visited the Long Beach aquarium this weekend but didn’t do very well on the picture-taking front. I guess I’ll consider it a practice run for a future visit.
However, I did get one or two good shots, including this one of some kids having a ball at the sea lion tank.
Last night I saw a TV ad blasting Democrats for trying to impeach Donald Trump. It made three points:
This is simple, straightforward, and true. Needless to say, the ad leaves out quite a bit. Like the fact that the prosecutor in question was brazenly corrupt. And that everyone from the IMF to the EU wanted him gone before they’d commit any more aid money to Ukraine. And his claims about why he was fired are laughable.
Nonetheless, those three bullet points are narrowly true. This is why it’s going to be hard to persuade Trump supporters to turn on Trump. We can’t fight this ad by saying it’s a lie. We can only fight it by adding more detail, and that’s a tough thing to do. Three bullet points are about all that even an honest but low-information voter has time for.
But we can flood the zone. It’s probably our only hope.
The LA Times reports today that the public perception of homelessness in Los Angeles is more accurate than the official happy talk:
The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority…said only 29% of the homeless population had either a mental illness or substance abuse disorder….The Times, however, found that about 67% had either a mental illness or a substance abuse disorder. Individually, substance abuse affects 46% of those living on the streets — more than three times the rate previously reported — and mental illness, including post-traumatic stress disorder, affects 51% of those living on the streets, according to the analysis.
But wait. Even the LAT analysis might be too optimistic. A study from the California Policy Lab at UCLA comes up with even higher numbers for the US homeless population:
These numbers, it turns out, aren’t really disputed. So why does it matter? Partly because the right policy response depends on a realistic assessment of the problem. If most of the homeless are just down on their luck and need a temporary place to stay, that calls for a particular kind of housing response. But if the vast majority are mentally ill or struggling with addiction, that calls for an entirely different response.
But that’s not all. I’ve made this point before and gotten raked over the coals for it, but if you want to solve the homeless problem you have to understand the public resistance to building local homeless shelters. Is it because most of us are self-centered assholes who refuse to help the poor if it means even the slightest inconvenience to our otherwise comfortable lives? If that’s the case, the right response might be education or guilt or just plain political bulldozing.
If the Times analysis and the UCLA report are correct, however, maybe local resistance is actually based on understandable concerns, not just free floating racism and assholery. Maybe families with children have good reason to be anxious about having addicts and the mentally ill wandering around their neighborhood. Maybe you would be too.
Social problems are hard to solve already, and they’re even harder to solve if we tell ourselves fairy tales and then insist that anyone who sees things differently is a horrible human being. That gets us nowhere, especially if it turns out that these folks have a more realistic view of the problem than we do and are therefore going to become even more stubborn if we try to tell them they’re wrong about things they can see with their own two eyes. Just a thought.
David Leonhardt presents us with a chart today based on data from a new book by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. It shows the effective total tax rate for all income levels in the United States. This includes all state, federal, and local taxes:
The effect of the latest Republican tax cut shows up in the 2018 line: the very richest Americans now pay a total effective tax rate of 23 percent. The poor and the middle classes, by contrast, pay about 25 percent. As you can see, the tax rate for the rich has been dropping steadily for half a century.
The federal income tax code, of course, remains progressive. But it’s no longer progressive enough to make up for payroll taxes and local sales taxes, which have always been regressive. As a result, conservatives have finally reached their dream of a flat tax by stealth. It makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, doesn’t it?
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