April 18, 2024

Fascism is not Patriotism: Why have we read a hundred times more about Joe's age than Donald's Caesarism?

https://washingtonspectator.org/fascism-is-not-patriotism/





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Growing up politically as a progressive Democrat, I never called conservative Republicans “fascist”, a) because they weren’t and b) because it sounded alarmist if not naive, the prevailing view being “only Hitler was Hitler.” That was and still is literally true…yet hopelessly dated since ignoring Donald Trump’s chesty Caesarism is now what’s truly naive. Which raises three separate though related questions: What’s the evidence that he’s an American Fascist? Should the mainstream media finally concede that should be a newsworthy part of the 2024 contest? And will branding him as one repel a small but decisive number of Independent voters to conclude, “Enough!”? There are of course avalanches of solo articles detailing Trump’s astonishing rhetoric, scandals and prosecutions. But in each instance, he belligerently “doubles down” — which by definition means there’s no depth he won’t descend to — and quickly offers up dog-ate-my-homework excuses: “It was a joke??Hillary and Joe are worse…what about Hunter?…that’s taken out of context…I never read Mein Kampf…Black prosecutors are racists!…that was A.I., not me…Trump Derangement Syndrome!…Witch Hunt!“ His calculation is apparently to isolate and disparage all criticism and indictments so they appear at worst to be aberrations and obscure how his whole is-worse-than-the-sum-of-his-parts, as if a pointillist were judged by only a few dabs of color rather than the entirely of the work. Which in Trump’s case would reveal a portrait far closer to Orban than Obama.

It’s tempting to respond to his rotating evasions with John McEnroe-worthy contempt: “You. Cannot. Be. Serious!” But in the current context of close polls and monumental stakes, mere indignation might allow him to keep escaping accountability through a combination of scandal fatigue, Trump judges, his base of delirious ideologues and credulous abettors, and GOP leaders paying tribute to Trump by shrugging off his predations. Add to that TeamTrump’s expectation that the Fourth Estate will just keep bothsides-ing every controversary due, in Molly Jong-Fast’s insight, to its “normalcy bias.” With his rants dominating coverage and polls barely budging after a year of startling news cycles, Democrats need more passionate language and memorable story lines to move the needle. Brian Klass in his best-selling Fluke, urges advocates to use “schemas… psychological tools to distill vast amounts of information into easily maintained categories.” Lincoln embraced his “rail splitter” moniker; Lenin took over Russia at the end of World War I with the penetrating slogan, “Land. Bread. Peace”; recent Republicans get it too, from Nixon’s “Silent Majority” to Reagan’s “Welfare Queen” to “Make America Great Again” and recently the rage over “Age.” What new schema could help keep Democrats on offense and the GOP on-the-ropes? One would be to portray Trump as a “fascist”, despite or perhaps because of how much of the media dismiss that truth as taboo.

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April 18, 2024

Will a constitutional promise to protect the right to vote get buried again? An appeals court in DC is about to tell us.

https://prospect.org/justice/2024-04-18-reviving-unenforced-amendment-voting-rights/



Sometimes a potentially seismic shift in the law is masked by opaque and technical legalese. So it was last week, when a federal court of appeals in Washington struggled to decide whether a nongovernmental organization that seeks to improve democratic elections was sufficiently injured—making it eligible for so-called standing to sue—to have its day in court to enforce a never-used provision of the Constitution. The 435 seats in the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states according to their population as determined by the decennial census. If the NGO is successful, some of those apportioned seats could be taken away from states that prevent citizens from exercising their right to vote. But though this possibility has been outlined in the Constitution for 156 years, most everything about this case, which attempts to actually utilize it, is uncertain.

The setting was as unusual as the case. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has a tradition of occasionally holding proceedings in one of the District’s six law schools instead of its downtown courthouse. The students at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law who followed the burst of questions posed by three well-prepared judges were exposed to a potential decision that could end the case on technical grounds or, if allowed to go to trial, not only change the political control of the House of Representatives but also dramatically alter the composition of the Electoral College. The case was brought by Citizens for Constitutional Integrity and its members to force the Census Bureau to reapportion representatives in the House. As I’ve written before in the Prospect, Citizens’ lawyer Jared Pettinato argues that Section 2 of the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, requires the number of representatives be reallotted from states that burden the franchise, say with ID laws or other restrictions, whether or not they impact only minority voters.

In 1870, the Census Bureau attempted to collect disfranchisement statistics. But much to the frustration of Republican congressmembers, who wanted to keep former Confederate states from gaining members even though they stopped freed slaves from voting, the Bureau didn’t have the expertise or resources to make the count. In the decades that followed, efforts to use Section 2 to protect the right to vote foundered due to lack of political will in Congress and standing to sue requirements from the judiciary. Citizens for Constitutional Integrity’s lawyer, Pettinato, is a former Department of Justice attorney. He knows the ins and outs of standing law from the perspective of both the government and private litigants. He strongly believes the trial court, which dismissed the case last year, made a fatal error in applying the standing doctrine. (Full disclosure: As a lawyer who brought a Section 2 case in the 1960s, I was invited by him to sit at the counsel table during the argument.)

Pettinato admitted that he was delighted when he learned he would argue before three judges nominated by Democratic presidents. But he refused to betray even a hint of optimism about the ultimate result. Even though Wisconsin had used an ID law to block over 300,000 potential voters, leading an expert he had retained to conclude that the states of New York or Pennsylvania would regain at least one representative lost after the 2020 census, the government responded that the shift was purely speculative, a position that has usually been accepted by the courts in most previous efforts to enforce Section 2. Sarah J. Clark, the DOJ lawyer representing the Census Bureau, a former law clerk for the very court she was in front of, took the position that, despite the Wisconsin statistics, Citizens for Constitutional Integrity failed to really show that any states would necessarily gain an additional representative as a result. She also argued that the Bureau wasn’t authorized by statute to collect data about state efforts to restrict voters.

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April 18, 2024

Our Uniquely American Drug Shortages

https://prospect.org/health/2024-04-17-our-uniquely-american-drug-shortages/



Last week, the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) announced that the United States has the largest number of medicines in short supply in the history of its survey, which dates back to 2001. As of the end of March, 323 drugs were in shortage, disrupting treatment for patients and in many cases risking prolonged injury or death. The news was accompanied by the usual parade of ignorance. “Health care is the US’s most highly regulated, socialist industry and shortages are endemic under socialism so the pattern fits,” mused libertarian Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University about a system where every single pharmaceutical manufacturer (save for a nascent effort in California) is private and for-profit, and pretty much every provider too (unless you believe the convenient fiction that “nonprofit” hospitals are not adopting that status as a tax dodge).

Tabarrok pivoted to an elaborate story about the Drug Enforcement Administration and Adderall. It’s true that some drugs on the controlled substances list, which include attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) drugs and opioids, experience shortages because of tight limits on production. (I can’t imagine why.) It’s simply not true that this has much to do with our drug shortage problem. ASHP states explicitly that controlled substances account for just 12 percent of all active shortages, and two-thirds of pharmacists surveyed by ASHP say that ADHD shortages have minimal or no impact. The vast majority of drug shortages are actually in generics; about half of them are sterile injectable drugs. In other words, we’re talking about older, routine medications that hospitals use, not what you pick up at your local pharmacy. They’re cheap and relatively easy to produce. Companies just haven’t found it worth the effort to do so.

We know the reason why, though you will almost never see it mentioned in drive-by stories about this topic. It has to do with middlemen who have made manufacturing generic injectable drugs unprofitable, magnifying the risk of shortages by artificially reducing supply. The problem, in other words, is the exact opposite of the libertarian fable. The problem is America’s kleptocratic version of laissez-faire capitalism. I wrote about this years ago for my book Monopolized, focusing on a shortage of sodium chloride IVs, literally salt and water in a bag. Half of the nation’s IV supply is made by one company with two facilities in Puerto Rico, and at the time, everyone attributed the shortage to Hurricane Maria knocking out power on the island in 2017. But the shortage list included IV bags four years before the hurricane, and if you go to ASHP’s list today, you will still find sodium chloride IV bags on there, along with many other simple injectables, like dextrose, which is sugar and water. Decades-old chemotherapy drugs and antibiotics are also often in short supply. Hospitals buy drugs through middlemen known as group purchasing organizations, or GPOs. The idea sounds intuitive: If hospitals band together to purchase supplies, they could earn volume discounts and save money that could be put into patient care.



But there’s no real data on cost savings, and a lot of evidence that the market has devolved into monopoly dynamics. Three major GPOs (Vizient, Premier, and HealthTrust) control around $250 billion in health purchasing, roughly 90 percent of the entire market. This market consolidated further in 2021 when Vizient bought Intalere. Many of the remaining competitor GPOs use one of the Big Three as a purchasing partner. The Big Three GPOs use locked-in, sole-source contracts that require hospitals to purchase virtually the same amount from suppliers year after year. There is no alternative supplier for a hospital; they have to hope their GPO-selected supplier comes through. The GPOs perpetuate this because they skim an ever-increasing percentage of the product cost from suppliers, as a fee for inclusion on the guaranteed sale list. These fees are supposed to be capped, but “marketing” and other fees that are exempt from the cap are often layered on top. The hospitals also make out, with administrators paid what are known as “share-backs.” A safe harbor from anti-kickback laws passed in the 1980s preserves the scheme.

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April 18, 2024

The $6 Trillion Decision

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-04-15-6-trillion-dollar-decision-tax-policy/



Enormous amounts of presidential election messaging and coverage will unfurl between now and November 5. You will surely hear a lot about abortion, immigration, and inflation. You will hear about a fight for the future of American democracy. Even more likely, you’ll hear about polls, strategies to attract working-class and minority voters, or what one candidate said or tweeted or posted, or designated a surrogate to say or tweet or post. Oh, and court cases. Lots and lots of court cases. What you might not hear as much about are the stakes of the election’s outcome for all the money in the country. On Tax Day, of all days, it seems like a good time to lay that out. Nearly all of the provisions of the 2017 Trump tax cuts affecting individual tax returns expire at the end of 2025. Who is in control of the government at that time will depend, of course, on the outcome of the elections. The people then in charge will determine the next American tax policy, and economic and fiscal policy. Will we simply make permanent the Trump tax cuts, with all their attendant inequities?

Will we revert back to an Obama-era tax code that still has too many of the assumptions of Reagan-era tax policy embedded within it? Or will we use the moment to revolutionize tax policy and make a lasting break with the past four decades of trickle-down? The choice here will determine whether we use revenues generated by a new tax code for benefits for the American people, or forsake them in favor of shielding the wealthy and well-connected from paying their fair share. “The tax code is the last living thing of trickle-down economics,” said Elizabeth Pancotti, a former adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who is now director of special initiatives at Roosevelt Forward. Pancotti has a paper out today framing the looming expiration of the Trump tax cuts as an opportunity rather than a challenge. “If we can’t fix this, for all the strides we’ve made in Bidenomics, I’m not sure we can build something that lasts.” The Biden campaign has not been shy about raising these issues, though Trump kind of has. That contrast reveals the potential Democratic advantage on taxes, provided voters become aware of it. But taxes have not played a role in the basic narrative of the campaign, at least not commensurate with the impact they’ll have. As Pancotti says: “The stakes of this election are: Will Elon Musk pay more or less on his taxes in 2026?”



A FULL EXTENSION OF THE TRUMP TAX CUTS would cost somewhere between $250 billion and $350 billion every year, according to Steve Wamhoff, federal policy director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. This would increase the nation’s primary annual deficit (not including interest on the debt) by about one-third. By contrast, the tax proposals announced by President Biden would bring in an estimated $5 trillion over a ten-year period. About $3 trillion of that would be offset by his tax cuts on lower-income households. The Wall Street Journal puts the total difference between the two leading presidential candidates on tax policy at $6 trillion. It’s actually more than that. Trump and his allies have broader designs then just making his tax cuts permanent, including more tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. The expanded health insurance subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, which have led to the largest number of enrollees on the insurance exchanges in history, expire at the end of 2025. That will get folded into the debate.

A bipartisan deal that trades a modest expansion of the Child Tax Credit for the revival of expiring business tax measures, which passed the House this year but is unlikely to pass the Senate, will also likely be on the table. Put all that together and you have a tax battle royale, with a 13-figure sum of money on the line. The expiring Trump tax cut provisions can be sorted into three different buckets, Wamhoff said. First, there are changes for individuals and families, the kind of things that are very prominent on tax returns: the standard deduction, the deductions for state and local taxes (SALT), and the Child Tax Credit. The Trump tax cut actually expanded the CTC to $2,000 per child, and if nothing is done it will be cut in half to $1,000. (Democrats expanded the CTC in 2021 to as much as $3,600 per child, but that provision expired at the end of that year.) Second, you have cuts to taxes on “pass-through” business income, which is complicated but mostly affects individual business owners, who in general are the richest people in the country. And finally, you have the cut to the estate tax, which now exempts the first $13 million of estate holdings. Pancotti’s paper shows that the number of taxpayers subject to the estate tax fell from 28,000 in 1982 to 2,600 in 2021, a more than 90 percent reduction.

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April 18, 2024

Rage Against The Machine - Bulls On Parade (Official HD Video)

Label: Epic – 663152 7
Format: Vinyl, 7", 33 ⅓ RPM, Single, Limited Edition, Red
Country: UK
Released: 1 Apr 1996
Genre: Rock
Style: Hard Rock, Funk Metal

April 18, 2024

Tank - Red Skull Rock

Label: Kamaflage Records – KAM LP3
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Stereo
Country: UK
Released: Oct 1982
Genre: Rock
Style: Heavy Metal

April 18, 2024

Great light red bottles -- for warmer days

Now’s the time to give your wine rack a spring spruce up, says Will Lyons

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/six-great-light-red-bottles-for-warmer-days-qqmhw8r6t

https://archive.ph/McjH8



As you reorganise your wardrobe at this time of year, pushing sweaters to the back, so your wine rack needs a bit of rebalancing too. I’ll be replacing unctuous, full-bodied winter warmers such as Argentine malbec, Californian cabernet and Australian shiraz with vibrantly fruited reds that can be enjoyed on their own or with the light dishes that lend themselves to spring. In France they have a lovely expression for these wines — vin de soif, which loosely translates as “thirst quencher”: something good and honest that will wash down a salad niçoise and the like. France also has the best region to scour for them: Beaujolais, where the gamay grape thrives. The juicy, spicy 2022 Beaujolais-Villages by Louis Claude Desvignes (Berry Bros & Rudd, £15.50) will be near the top of my shopping list.



Spring also leads me to grape varieties such as pinot noir, with elegant notes of cherry to the fore. A good budget option is Morrisons’ 2022 Paul Mas Reserve Pinot Noir (£9.50), which is full of lovely summery flavour. I also enjoy the bright acidity and tart red fruit of cabernet franc from the Loire and further afield. The fragrant 2021 The Mira Cabernet Franc from Stellenbosch in South Africa (Museum Wines, £24.99) is a gem. Let’s not forget Spain either, where the garnacha grape can do a similar job. Lidl’s 2020 Agramont Old Vine Garnacha from Navarra (£6.49) is packed with lively raspberry and cranberry. Other, albeit more recondite, varieties to keep an eye out for include the exuberant, cherry-infused zweigelt grape popular in Austria (try M&S Found’s Zweigelt, £8.50) or the light, soft cinsault grape. An excellent example is the 2019 Domaine des Tourelles Vieilles Vignes from the Bekaa Valley in the Lebanon (WoodWinters, £19.50). Here are six more light reds to get spring off to a sprightly start.

April 18, 2024

Fish recipes by Catch, Giles Coren's best restaurant in the world

How to cook the fish and seafood that wowed our restaurant critic

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/fish-recipes-by-catch-weymouth-giles-coren-best-restaurant-in-world-dg6g2b6l6

https://archive.ph/uhvdP



It is hard not to feel a tiny bit envious of the residents of Weymouth in Dorset. Not only do they enjoy miles of glorious sand — the town holds the Sunday Times best beach award — but now they have Giles Coren’s favourite restaurant of all time as well. When our critic visited Catch at the Old Fish Market last month, it had him squealing like a tweenage girl. “Omigodomigodomigod, I think I just went to the best restaurant in the world,” he wrote in his review, before going on to praise the harbourside fish restaurant’s impeccable cooking, sourcing and “ridiculously” good-value set lunch. The man he ― and we ― have to thank is Mike Naidoo, formerly of Jason Atherton’s Pollen Street Social, who moved out of London with his pastry chef partner, Tija, to open Catch three years ago. Now he serves hyper-local tasting menus that change with the tides. His fish travels all of 10 yards from the day boats moored in the harbour to his first-floor restaurant above a fishmonger’s and includes mackerel fished off Chesil Beach, crab and lobster caught off Portland Bill, as well as gilt-head bream, plaice, bass and turbot. “When your produce is this fresh, you really don’t need to do that much to it,” the 37-year-old chef says.




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April 18, 2024

Matt Gaetz's Ability to Survive Scandal Is Truly Trumpian

Much like Trump, the Florida congressman benefits from the fact that our outrage sensors are completely burnt-out.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/matt-gaetzs-ability-to-survive-scandal-is-truly-trumpian



“I’ll give you the truth why I’m not speaker,” Kevin McCarthy told a crowd assembled at Georgetown University this past Tuesday night. “It’s because one person, a member of Congress, wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old…”

Cue the record scratch.

In a normal world, that shocking allegation—leveled by a former Speaker of the House against a current member of the House, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL)—would have dominated news coverage for weeks. Instead, it barely elicited a yawn. To be sure, McCarthy later added, “Did he do it or not? I don’t know.” What is more, the Department of Justice dropped their investigation of Gaetz over a year ago, and Gaetz flatly denies the claims. On the other hand, the House Ethics Committee is still investigating, Gaetz’s close friend pleaded guilty to sex trafficking a minor, and McCarthy’s words seem to suggest he hasn’t ruled out the possibility it’s true.


Regardless, one would think McCarthy’s comments would have made a bigger splash. But we live in a post-Trump world, and particularly among the MAGA set, it takes a whole lot more than allegations like these to spark widespread furor. Our outrage receptors have been burned out. The GOP has, in the words of the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “defined decency down,” a phenomenon that aids any Republican caught up in a scandal. Since his election to the presidency, Trump has changed the culture of the GOP, normalizing bad behavior. He has also served as a magnet, attracting new scoundrels who might previously have thought politics was boring, or that they had too much baggage to run for political office.



In this regard, Gaetz’s alleged behavior makes him something of a microcosm of the Trump-era Republican Party. A recent profile in The Atlantic provides plenty of examples of this. First, unlike the old-school family values conservatism, Gaetz lets his freak flag fly, having allegedly shown his House colleagues nude pictures of his sexual conquests on the House floor, and having allegedly participated in a “Points Game” in the Florida legislature, where points were awarded based on which women a member slept with (married fellow members were worth more than lobbyists, for example). This is no longer your father’s Republican Party; the MAGA GOP is full of figures who are alleged to have engaged in some sordid stuff. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has a long list of cuckoo ravings that would be disqualifying for most pre-Trump Republicans. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) was caught on camera fondling her date at a Beetlejuice production. I could go on.

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April 18, 2024

Quentin Tarantino Scraps Film 'The Movie Critic,' Which Would've Been His Last

The director was seemingly in talks to reunite with Brat Pitt for the film

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/quentin-tarantino-scraps-movie-critic-film-1235006413/



Quentin Tarantino will no longer be making The Movie Critic, the film he previously said would be his last as a director. Variety confirmed Wednesday that the director had passed on the project, which would have been his 10th film, and revealed that sources said he wouldn’t be rewriting the project either.

Back in February, Brad Pitt had been supposedly tapped for the movie — the collaboration would have reconnected the actor-director duo after working together on 2009’s Inglorious Bastards and 2019’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. Movie Critic was reportedly set in 1977 and followed a movie critic who wrote reviews for a porn magazine. (It was rumored Pitt would have reprised a version of role as Cliff Booth from Once Upon a Time, per Variety.)

At Cannes last year, Tarantino refused to answer questions about the film, but said, “I can’t tell you guys [anything] until you see the movie. I’m tempted to do some of the character’s monologues right now, but I’m not going to. Maybe if there were less video cameras. You just have to wait and see.” Variety had also reported last September that Tarantino had gotten a $20.2 million subsidy from California for the film, which was identified as “#10” referring to the director’s 10th movie.

“I love shooting in California,” Tarantino said in a statement at the time. “I started directing movies here and it is only fitting that I shoot my final motion picture in the cinema capital of the world. There is nothing like shooting in my hometown; the crews are the best I’ve ever worked with, and the locations are amazing. The producers and I are thrilled to be making #10 in Los Angeles.” It’s unclear if he’ll use the approved subsidy for a different film.

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