Left Jabs

By now, we’ve had a whole week to absorb what we might call the “Great Cave,” and its rather stunning ripple effects. We’ve watched the story morph from a devastating betrayal by Democrats to a devastating train wreck for Republicans, all in just a few news cycles. At every point I’ve tried to make sense of what’s happened, though it hardly seems to matter anymore. The effect has overtaken the cause. But here, nonetheless, is my take. Yes, it’s all speculation on my part, and we may never get the whole story, but still. When it first came out that eight senators — seven Democrats, one independent — were voting with Republicans to end the shutdown, the howls of agony could be heard coast-to-coast. And for good reason. It appeared that these senators were cravenly accepting defeat, just as victory seemed in their grasp. But was it really? Victory would have meant, more than anything else, saving the Obamacare subsidies, whose expiration will soon push health in...

  I n the run-up to last Tuesday’s election, it was hard to avoid the overpaid pundits repeating the oldest and laziest clichés in the pundit handbook: “Democrats need to move to the center.” “Democrats are out of touch with voters.” “Democrats can’t just talk about Trump and expect to win.” As it turns out, they don’t, they’re not, and they most definitely can, respectively. But while the election blew those clichés to bits, the “Democrats-in-disarray” story remains a staple of modern journalism. In the week since the election the same pundits, not content to have been wrong before it, have moved on to stories with headlines like “ Mamdani’s Victory Is Less Significant Than You Think” and “Election Wins Tuesday Won’t Ease a Divided Democratic Party’s Troubles.” One of the more obvious purveyors of this slop has been, no surprise, the New York Times , which is trying desperately to gin up a Democrat-versus-Democrat narrative to carry them into the next ele...

  I was sitting on my porch, in what has traditionally been a working-class suburb of Detroit. I was handing out candy to trick-or-treaters, some of whom were dressed as the Grim Reaper. I couldn’t help thinking how appropriate. How predictive of what could happen to many of their parents when the sun went down on Halloween, then dawned the next morning on the real horrors that Republicans have just inflicted on the American population. We’ve been waiting for that population to wake up and smell the fascism for forty years at least. But as of this week, the stink is unmistakable, and the wake-up call is grim indeed. As of this week, two simultaneous catastrophes — both man made and totally unnecessary — descend upon us, and the destruction being wrought by Republicans can no longer be shrugged off, even by Republicans. As of this week — barring some deal that is not now in sight — SNAP payments will be suspended, dooming many millions of people to serious ...

  I remember thinking that I should have brought more cash to Buenos Aires. It’s not that I intended to spend any more money on the vacation than I’d planned. It’s just that there were these nice young men, seemingly on every corner, offering me triple the official exchange rate for any American dollars in my wallet. If we’d thought to bring a few thousand in cash, a lot of our vacation could have been paid for. This was a dozen years ago, but little has changed. The Argentine peso has long been a poster child for unstable currencies, and outrageous inflation has been a fact of life for much of modern history. This is why those young men were so eager to swap pesos — which would be worth less the next day — for dollars that would presumably hold their value for a while. Now Trump has offered to do basically the same thing, but on a far grander scale. He’s promising a $20 billion “currency swap” with the Argentine government. Just as I did, he’s swapping good...

  J ohn Bolton is once again in the spotlight. For two decades we’ve been charmed by his Cold War-style bellicosity. And now he joins James Comey and Leticia James as the first real targets of Trump’s vendetta indictments. But unlike the Comey and James cases — which are end-to-end bullshit and everybody knows it — Bolton’s day in court will be more complicated. There is, in fact, a real case against him, and he might actually be facing prison time. Try to resist the schadenfreude. Yes, the indictment is a textbook example of politically motivated. Yes, Trump publicly ordered his pet attorney general, Pam Bondi, to make it happen, which is wildly illegal. Yes, Trump has publicly castigated Bolton, which was once a surefire way to get a case thrown out of court. But apparently, a case can be politically motivated and still be competently put-together, a rarity in the Bondi DOJ. And that’s a problem for Bolton. It was just a few months ago I was writing abo...

  I recently talked to a lawyer of my acquaintance, whose practice is focused on educational institutions. She represents schools and universities in their relations with the Department of Education, and she does her best to keep her clients compliant with that department’s many regulations. She felt the need to add, somewhat sheepishly, that she wasn’t sure those regulations were still in force, or whether the Department of Education, as she’s known it, even exists. As the junta keeps tampering with the gears of the federal government, we’re all left wondering what happens when the rules are no longer there. In the same week that I talked to her, the six grand inquisitors on the Supreme Court were happy to overturn a lower court ruling, thereby giving the green light to major “workforce reductions” in the Department of Education. 1,400 or so employees — people responsible for regulating schools — were subsequently laid off, a good chunk of them just last week...