It’s that most wonderful time of the month, when I’ve got a few gift links to The New York Times that I haven’t used and I want to share them with my readers. These links will turn into pumpkins at midnight, which is appropriate on Halloween. (That is, they’d turn into unshareable pumpkins for me. Now that I’ve shared them, you should be able to use them indefinitely.) So please enjoy.
“The Debate Dividing the Supreme Court’s Liberal Justices,”by Jodi Kantor. This is by far the most significant of the three, and it’s absolutely fascinating. Kantor’s major thrust is that Justice Elena Kagan is trying to stick with her longstanding approach of being conciliatory in the hopes of occasionally pulling Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett to her side, whereas Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has put the right-wing majority on blast.
Donald Trump is wreaking so much havoc and engaging in so much corruption that it’s hard to stay focused. But I urge all of us to keep our eye on this: He is killing civilians from Venezuela and Colombia in the Caribbean and, now, in the Pacific. The number is up to 43 victims.
Charlie Savage, who is one of The New York Times’ most perceptive reporters, has written a news analysis that places Trump’s actions in perspective. With Trump’s apologists perpetually engaging in whatabout-whatabout-whatabout, Savage notes that Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush went out of their way to come up with legal justifications for drone strikes against Al Qaeda (in Obama’s case) and for torturing terrorism suspects (in Bush’s).
You may not like what Obama and Bush did (I certainly don’t), but the point is that they understood the rule of law had to be asserted, even if they were paying it little more than lip service. By contrast, Trump is just killing people who may or may not be drug smugglers and who have the right to be arrested and tried, not “blown apart, burned alive or drowned,” as Savage puts it. He writes:
Every modern president has occasionally taken some aggressive policy step based on a stretched or disputed legal interpretation. But in the past, they and their aides made a point to develop substantive legal theories and to meet public and congressional expectations to explain why they thought their actions were lawful, even if not everyone agreed.
Savage adds: “In peacetime, targeting civilians — even suspected criminals — who pose no threat of imminent violence is considered murder. In an armed conflict, it is a war crime.”
Trump might ponder that one of his favorite former dictators, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, is on trial before the International Court of Justice in The Hague for accusations that he was involved in dozens of killings in an attempt to crack down on illegal drugs.
You don’t have to draw a convoluted analogy. Trump is doing exactly the same thing that Duterte is accused of doing, and he’s reveling in it publicly. It is the worst thing he’s done as president, and that’s saying a lot.
Did Donald Trump get excited about sending troops into Portland, Oregon, because he was watching 5-year-old footage on Fox News depicting violence in the streets? It would appear that the answer is yes.
Independent journalist Philip Bump, part of the Washington Post diaspora, reported that Fox ran B-roll from Portland during segments with Homeland Security official Tricia McLaughlin and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Sept. 27 showing a violent protest in Portland that included fires, what appears to be tear gas, and demonstrators squaring off with law enforcement. But the footage is dated June 2020. Who knows if Trump was paying attention?
Bump offers this as well:
In an interview with NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor, he described a conversation he’d had with Oregon’s governor.
“I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different,’” Trump said of the conversation. “They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place … it looks like terrible.”
Well, yes, Man Who Has Access to the Breadth of Federal Intelligence Gathering. What you saw on TV was in fact not what was happening at the moment in Portland.
Mike Masnick writes at TechDirt, “The President of the United States — who has access to better intelligence than anyone on Earth — is moving to deploy military forces against American citizens based on what he saw on TV and what his ‘people’ told him, without bothering to verify whether any of it was real.” Masnick adds:
So half of this story is that we have a mad king who will fall for anything he sees on Fox News without bothering to first find out whether it’s true or not.
That’s terrifying!
But the other part is that his “people” around him are clearly abusing the senile President to take advantage of the situation to play out their own violent fantasies.
Alicia Victoria Lozano of NBC News reports that Trump activated 200 National Guard troops on Friday in order to respond to the non-existent violence. City and state officials sued to stop the deployment, and a ruling is expected later today.
Jill Lepore at the 2023 Kentucky Author Forum. Photo (cc) by uoflphoto3.
Over the weekend I finished the audio version of Jill Lepore’s monumental survey of American history, “These Truths,” published in 2018. At 960 pages or, in my case, 29 hours, the book is a major commitment, but it’s well worth it.
That said, one thing I learned was that I already knew a lot about American history, so much of “These Truths” was familiar to me. There’s nothing startlingly revisionistic about it, but it nevertheless works as a skillfully executed and gracefully written overview of the past 500 years, from Columbus to Trump. I especially appreciated her extensive treatment of Black and women’s history.
Quincy City Hall, built in 1844. Photo (cc) 2019 by Antony-22.
Thomas Koch, the mayor of Quincy, Massachusetts, is under fire for blurting out on a radio talk show that the Catholic Church sexual-abuse crisis was a matter of “mostly homosexual issues, not pedophilia.”
Koch’s remarks, made on “NightSide with Dan Rea” on WBZ Radio, is just the latest controversy the mayor has jumped into, including a clearly unconstitutional plan to install two 10-foot statues of Catholic saints on public property at the city’s new public safety building (the subject of a New England Muzzle Award last May) and a 79% increase to his salary, from $159,000 to $285,000.
Adam Reilly of GBH News reports that Koch’s remarks on Dan Rea’s talk show came during a discussion of public antipathy toward religion, something that Koch and Rea both lamented. But when Rea brought up the “pedophile priest crisis,” Koch went off the rails. Reilly writes:
At that point Koch interjected, saying, “That was mostly homosexual issues, not pedophilia.” When Rea pushed back, saying there were lots of children and early teenagers who were impacted by abuse, Koch replied, “There were? Well, pedophilia’s a younger age than to me a teenager. But that’s another issue for another day. I [unintelligible] either at all, believe me.”
Reilly notes that Koch later apologized for his remarks:
Koch sent GBH News a statement after this article’s [initial] publication Thursday, saying that he had apologized directly to the local schools and LGBTQ+ community at a schools committee meeting Wednesday night. He said his comments were “ill-thought remarks” and he was caught off guard by the issue.
The incident prompted an editorial from the Boston Herald calling on Koch to resign (sub. req.), referring to his “insane lack of empathy,” adding:
On a basic human level, the mayor should be ashamed of himself. The crisis in the Catholic church will only truly heal when everyone acknowledges the institutional cancer that metastasized.
Meanwhile, Quincy voters will not have an opportunity to scale back Koch’s salary grab, which was approved earlier this year by the city council. Robert Bosworth reports for The Quincy Sun that a ballot measure to grant Koch a more modest 15% increase, to $183,000, fell short of the signature requirement. As a result, Simón Rios of WBUR observes, Koch will receive a higher salary than the mayors of Boston and New York City.
I awarded a Muzzle to Koch for pushing a plan to erect statues of two Catholic saints on public property after the ACLU of Massachusetts, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation sued the city on the grounds that it would violate the First Amendment separation of church and state. As Peter Blandino reported (sub. req.) for The Patriot Ledger of Quincy:
The statues depict St. Michael and St. Florian, the patron saints of policed officers and firefighters respectively. Plans for the statues, which have already been paid for at the price of $850,000, were developed by Quincy Mayor Thomas Koch and a close circle of advisors without informing residents or city councilors.
According to earlier reporting by Blandino, the statues had been criticized by at least one member of the city council as well as some local religious organizations. The ACLU voiced its objections as far back as February. But that didn’t stop Koch, who has insisted that the statues represent bravery, courage and service rather than religious messages.
The case was heard earlier this month in Norfolk Superior Court, reports Neal Riley of WBZ-TV. A ruling is expected soon.
A network of more than 1,200 websites better known for publishing so-called pink slime designed to look like legitimate local news is now branching out.
Kirk Carapezza reports for GBH News that Metric Media is flooding public colleges and universities in Massachusetts with public-records requests in order to find what its founder, Brian Timpone, calls “anti-American” classroom materials. The company is also seeking to learn the number of Chinese nationals enrolled as students at those institutions.
“There’s great public interest in what public universities are teaching students,” Timpone told Carapezza. “We want to see what they’re teaching and why.” Among the institutions that Metric Media has targeted are Salem State University, UMass Boston and Bridgewater State University.
I was one of the people who Kirk interviewed, and as I told him, I was surprised to see Metric Media taking such a pro-active role. Timpone’s various media ventures over the years have been involved in passive, money-making operations such as publishing alleged local news produced by distant employees, some in the Philippines, as the public radio program “This American Life” reported way back in 2012.
In recent years, Metric Media pink-slime sites such as North Boston News (a travel tip for those of you who aren’t from around here: North Boston is not a place that actually exists) have been publishing weirdly irrelevant slop, perhaps produced by AI. If you look right now, for instance, North Boston News features repetitive pseudo-stories on school test scores, high school sports and gas prices.
In 2021, the Columbia Journalism Review published the results of an investigation that showed Metric Media has ties to a variety of right-wing interests.
The public-records law in Massachusetts is notoriously weak, yet teaching materials such as syllabuses and reading lists at public institutions are arguably covered by it. Since I teach at Northeastern University, a private institution, it’s not something I have to be concerned about. On the face of it, I’m not sure why the two should be treated differently.
In any case, it will be interesting to see what Metric Media does with this material. And by “interesting,” I don’t mean to suggest that it will be anything good.
First, though I’m deeply skeptical about the power of boycotts and protests, this one seems to have worked. A combination of cancellations, petitions, announcements by creatives that they would no longer work for Disney, and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner’s trash-talking his successor, Bob Iger (though not by name), apparently had a lot to do with the lifting of Kimmel’s suspension.
Second, there are a few factors that have yet to play out. FCC chair Brendan Carr, whose threat to Disney and to broadcasters that continued to carry Kimmel’s show is what started all this, lied on Monday by saying he had not threatened anyone. Well, if that’s what he’s claiming now and he’s sticking to it, then that’s good news.
But though Kimmel may be coming back to ABC, we have not yet heard a final decision from Nexstar or Sinclair, two giant broadcasting companies that together own about 25% of the country’s ABC affiliates. Nexstar is trying to pull off a merger with another media company and needs FCC approval.
Sinclair is controlled by right-wing interests, and the company went so far last week as to demand that Kimmel apologize for his mildly offensive monologue about Donald Trump and the late right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and make a sizable donation to Turning Point USA, the organization founded by Kirk.
George W. Bush in 2001. Public domain photo via the U.S. National Archives.
FCC chair Brendan Carr’s thuggish threat to crack down on media companies following late-night comedy host Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue about Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk differed from past instances only in that he said it out loud.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said in an appearance on a right-wing podcaster’s show. And Disney, Nexstar and Sinclair, all of which have significant regulatory issues before the FCC, wasted no time in making sure that Kimmel was banished from ABC’s airwaves.
Trump himself put it even more bluntly, saying that broadcasters who are “against me” should lose their licenses, reported Zoë Richards of NBC News.
The first comparison that comes to mind, naturally, is Richard Nixon’s threat in 1973 to take away the licenses of two Florida television stations owned by The Washington Post amid the paper’s dogged reporting on the Watergate scandal. “The difference here is that Nixon talked about the scheme only privately,” the Post’s Aaron Blake wrote about the scheme many years later.
On the afternoon that right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was murdered, three teenagers, including the shooter, were reported to be in critical condition following a school shooting in Evergreen, Colorado. The shooter later died.
The only difference between these two awful events is that we’ve become numb to gun violence aimed at our children. Indeed, the Colorado incident barely registered in the media, while Kirk’s assassination got front-page coverage and was virtually the only story on cable news Wednesday evening.
What can any of us say at a moment like this except that it was just another day in America? Oliver Darcy offers a rundown (sub. req.) of recent incidents involving political violence:
Acts of political extremism are surfacing with alarming regularity in this country. Paul Pelosi was brutally attacked in his own home. Trump survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last summer. Luigi Mangione was charged in December with killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare in what authorities described as a politically motivated act. In the spring, an arsonist set fire to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence and prosecutors later charged a suspect with attempted murder. In Minnesota over the summer, a man was charged after stalking Democrats and murdering House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband. Last month, a gunman sprayed more than 180 bullets at the Centers for Disease Control headquarters, killing a police officer. Each of the incidents were different, but together they paint an unsettling portrait: political violence is increasingly becoming the norm in America.
Darcy is correct in observing that the rise of politically motivated attacks is deeply disturbing. So is the ongoing epidemic of school shootings — not to mention mass gun violence in general. Let’s not forget the horror that unfolded in Lewiston, Maine, in October 2023, when a gunman killed 18 people and injured 13 more.
The Charlie Kirk killing is different in that it has all the appearances of a political assassination; it took place in front of a large crowd of students at Utah Valley University; and the shooting was captured on video that then went viral on social media. One of the videos making the rounds was among the most graphic and disturbing I’ve seen.
Then, too, there was Kirk’s notoriety. He was about as famous as it is possible for a political figure to become without actually serving as an elected official or in a high government position. He was, as you no doubt know, notorious on the left, which led to a lot of offensive social media posts from people who ought to know better. MSNBC fired conservative-turned-liberal commentator Matthew Dowd after he walked right up to the edge of suggesting that Kirk got what he deserved. Dowd later apologized.
There’s really nothing to say at a time like this except that we have to do something about gun violence in this country, and that violence of any kind needs to be firmly condemned by all of us. Our thoughts today should be with Charlie Kirk and his family — as well as the families of the school shooting victims in Colorado, in addition to all the other victims of shootings, past and future.
“The Downfall of Mother Bank,” with Andrew Jackson holding a scroll that reads “Order for the Removal of the Public Money deposited in the United States Bank.” Via the Library of Congress.
The Federal Reserve Board was set up to be free from political interference so that it could engage in the uncertain art of steering the economy without regard to the needs and desires of elected officials. Board members are appointed by the president to staggered 14-year terms and confirmed by the Senate.
But now Donald Trump has threatened to end all that by claiming he has fired Fed Governor (as board members are known) Lisa Cook. Trump is paying lip service to the rule that says he can’t fire governors except for cause by accusing her of mortgage fraud. But not only has Cook not been formally charged with misconduct, there isn’t even an investigation under way.
Trump has also suggested that he might fire Fed board chair Jerome Powell, which he also lacks the authority to do. Even this Supreme Court said recently that the president’s authority does not extend to breeching the Fed’s independence.
The Fed regulates interest rates with an eye toward keeping inflation in check and unemployment low, two goals that are sometimes at odds with each other, which means the agency must aim for a delicate balance. Trump wants lower interest rates, in part to finance the massive increase in the federal debt that he’s presided over with tax cuts for the rich. As The Wall Street Journal puts it:
Both the central bank and the economy at large are entering unknown territory. Presidents have periodically criticized the Fed since its founding in 1913 and attempted to sway its decisions. But especially in recent decades, politicians have broadly recognized that an independent central bank is important because it has a free hand to make unpopular moves that preserve the economy’s long-run health.
There’s a historical analogy that’s worth keeping in mind. I’m currently reading Jill Lepore’s massive history of the United States, “These Truths.” As with Trump, Andrew Jackson didn’t like bankers telling him what to do, and in 1832 he refused to renew the charter of the Bank of the United States. Congress vetoed his action, and Jackson overrode its veto. Lepore describes what happened next:
Jackson’s bank veto unmoored the American economy. With the dissolution of the Bank of the United States, the stability it had provided, ballast in a ship’s hull, floated away. Proponents of the national bank had insisted on the need for federal regulation of paper currency. Jackson and his supporters, known as “gold-bugs,” would have rather had no paper money at all. In 1832, $59 million in paper bills was in circulation, in 1836, $140 million. Without the national bank’s regulatory force, very little metal backed up this blizzard of paper, American banks holding only $10.5 million in gold.
Moreover, Jackson’s irresponsible action led to a financial panic in 1837, just in time for the inauguration of his vice president and chosen successor, Martin Van Buren, who earned the nickname “Martin Van Ruin.” The panic set off a seven-year depression; it also led to the abolition of debtors’ prison and to bankruptcy reform. Van Buren was easily defeated for re-election in 1840 by the Whig candidate, William Henry Harrison.
If Trump follows through on turning the Fed into just another arm of MAGA, will similar economic calamities follow? As I write this, the market indexes are flat, which suggests that Wall Street isn’t too worried about Trump’s threat against Cook. But Jackson’s war on the national bank shows what can happen when economic expertise is thrown aside in favor of political expediency.
There’s a historical analogy that’s worth keeping in mind. I’m currently reading Jill Lepore’s massive history of the United States, 
