Left Jabs

  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...

T he Rapture has always struck me as the quintessence of religious crankery, right up there with snake handling and speaking in tongues. How does anyone get to a mindset where they’re absolutely positive that Jesus will be coming around this week and whisking them off to heaven? If you’re not familiar with the Rapture — or with Armageddon, the Second Coming, and the whole End Times theology — let’s bring you up to speed a bit. An Australian writer named Dan Foster has an excellent article on the subject, written from his own experience. Raised in a “Rapture culture,” he says he suffered from “Rapture anxiety” as a child. He defines the Rapture as: …a belief held by many evangelicals. It describes a sudden moment when all Christians, living and dead, will be taken up into heaven. According to this view, the faithful will escape the world before a long period of disaster and suffering begins for everyone left behind. The theology is based, loosely, on the B...