Paul Krugman last week on Republican contempt for people who work for a living:

As usual, Republicans seek to afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable, but they don’t treat all Americans with a given income the same. Instead, their bill — on which we don’t have full details, but whose shape is clear — hugely privileges owners, whether of businesses or of financial assets, over those who simply work for a living.

And this privileging of nonwage income isn’t an accident. Modern Republicans exalt “job creators,” that is, people who own businesses directly or indirectly via their stockholdings. Meanwhile, they show implicit contempt for mere employees.

Because mere employees are losers.

Cutting corporate taxes is hugely unpopular; even Republicans are almost as likely to say they should be raised as to say they should be lowered. The Bush tax cuts, at least initially, had wide (though unjustified) popular support; but the public overwhelmingly disapproves of the current Republican plan.

But Republicans don’t seem able to help themselves: Their disdain for ordinary working Americans as opposed to investors, heirs, and business owners runs so deep that they can’t contain it.

When I realized the extent to which G.O.P. tax plans were going to favor business owners over ordinary workers, I found myself remembering what happened in 2012, when Eric Cantor — then the House majority leader — tried to celebrate Labor Day. He put out a tweet for the occasion that somehow failed to mention workers at all, instead praising those who have “built a business and earned their own success.”

On Labor Day.

You couldn’t make it up.

It’s not only that the tax bill is designed to make the rich richer and everyone else poorer – it’s also that they passed it without even reading it. They voted yes without knowing what they were saying yes to. Wouldn’t you think Knowing What They Are Saying Yes To would be right at the very heart of their job, which is after all to legislate? Isn’t it a pretty gross dereliction of duty for legislators to sign legislation sight unseen? Isn’t that an obvious occasion to shout hoarsely YOU HAD ONE JOB?

It’s discomfortingly similar to driving a train without bothering to slow down for curves.

In its great haste, the “world’s greatest deliberative body” held no hearings or debate on tax reform. The Senate’s Republicans made sloppy math mistakes, crossed out and rewrote whole sections of the bill by hand at the 11th hour and forced a vote on it before anyone could conceivably read it.

That should not be how any of this works. It’s more like a bank heist than legislation – except it’s a bank heist in reverse: it’s banks heisting the 99% of their customers who aren’t billionaires.

The link between the heedlessly negligent style and anti-redistributive substance of recent Republican lawmaking is easy to overlook. The key is the libertarian idea, woven into the right’s ideological DNA, that redistribution is the exploitation of the “makers” by the “takers.” It immediately follows that democracy, which enables and legitimizes this exploitation, is itself an engine of injustice. As the novelist Ayn Rand put it, under democracy “one’s work, one’s property, one’s mind, and one’s life are at the mercy of any gang that may muster the vote of a majority.”

What’s missing there? The fact that the ability to profit from “one’s work, one’s property, one’s mind” depends on that “gang” – to buy the stuff, to make the stuff, to staff the police and the courts that protect the stuff. Without the “gang” the work and the mind may be their own reward but they don’t make anybody rich.

In the 20th century, and in particular after World War II, with voting rights and Soviet Communism on the march, the risk that wealthy democracies might redistribute their way to serfdom had never seemed more real. Radical libertarian thinkers like Rand and Murray Rothbard (who would be a muse to both Charles Koch and Ron Paul) responded with a theory of absolute property rights that morally criminalized taxation and narrowed the scope of legitimate government action and democratic discretion nearly to nothing. “What is the State anyway but organized banditry?” Rothbard asked. “What is taxation but theft on a gigantic, unchecked scale?”

What is profit but organized banditry and theft? It cuts both ways. Radical libertarians should try moving to a desert island and seeing how much profit they can make there. Wealth is absolutely dependent on a vast complicated system full of people, so it’s far from self-evidently unfair for those who prosper from the system to pay back a hefty sum.

[T]he idea that there is an inherent tension between democracy and the integrity of property rights is wildly misguided. The liberal-democratic state is a relatively recent historical innovation, and our best accounts of the transition from autocracy to democracy points to the role of democratic political inclusion in protecting property rights.

Exactly.

Cornel West decided it would be a good idea to pick a fight with Ta-Nehisi Coates for not being…well, enough like Cornel West.

It started on Sunday, when Mr. West published an article in The Guardian calling Mr. Coates “the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle,” and accusing him of “fetishizing white supremacy” while ignoring “Wall Street greed, U.S. imperial crimes or black elite indifference to poverty.”

It’s a pretty crappy article, frankly. There’s no argument, just a lot of assertion:

Coates rightly highlights the vicious legacy of white supremacy – past and present. He sees it everywhere and ever reminds us of its plundering effects. Unfortunately, he hardly keeps track of our fightback, and never connects this ugly legacy to the predatory capitalist practices, imperial policies (of war, occupation, detention, assassination) or the black elite’s refusal to confront poverty, patriarchy or transphobia.

In short, Coates fetishizes white supremacy. He makes it almighty, magical and unremovable. What concerns me is his narrative of “defiance”. For Coates, defiance is narrowly aesthetic – a personal commitment to writing with no connection to collective action. It generates crocodile tears of neoliberals who have no intention of sharing power or giving up privilege.

See what I mean? It’s just word-stringing…and not always even good word-stringing:

The disagreements between Coates and I are substantive and serious. It would be wrong to construe my quest for truth and justice as motivated by pettiness. Must every serious critique be reduced to a vicious takedown or an ugly act of hatred? Can we not acknowledge that there are deep disagreements among us with our very lives and destinies at stake? Is it even possible to downplay career moves and personal insecurities in order to highlight our clashing and conflicting ways of viewing the cold and cruel world we inhabit?

I dunno, but he could at least have caught that howler in the first sentence.

Back to the Times:

Late on Monday, Mr. Coates, who had more than 1.25 million Twitter followers as of earlier this month, tweeted, “Peace, y’all. I’m out. I didn’t get in it for this.” And at some point after that, he deleted his account.

So that’s productive.

This got on a lot of people’s nerves today:

ATTENTION CISGENDER PEOPLE.

Can you imagine what it's like leaving your home in constant fear of assault, harassment and ridicule? This is what trans people experience every day of their lives. Help our trans siblings. Read this thread and share, please. https://t.co/LDixnSrhLJ

— ryan john butcher (@ryanjohnbutcher) December 18, 2017

Ryan John Butcher

ATTENTION CISGENDER PEOPLE.

Can you imagine what it’s like leaving your home in constant fear of assault, harassment and ridicule? This is what trans people experience every day of their lives. Help our trans siblings. Read this thread and share, please.

Says clueless dude to “CISGENDER PEOPLE” which of course includes women, who don’t need to “imagine” what it’s like leaving your home in constant fear of assault, harassment and ridicule, since that’s their daily reality during at least some part of their lives. If they’re mouthy and opinionated, it’s full time all their lives.

have you not been paying attention to the #MeToo??
This is what women have been experiencing all our lives.
In India women are regualrly raped and beaten on public transport
In Saudi they cant even leave their homes without a man.
What did you think womanhood was like?

— TheWitchesAreBack (@ThatFemale66) December 19, 2017

Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor:

The House just passed the disgraceful Trump-Republican tax bill, enacting large and permanent tax cuts for corporations (that is, the richest 1 percent who own 40 percent of all shares of stock), and temporary cuts for individuals (the lion’s share going to the richest 1 tenth of 1 percent). The Senate is expected to approve it tonight or tomorrow, and Trump will sign it into law before Christmas.

A decade from now, according the nonpartisan analysts, the top 1% will have received 83% of the gains from this tax cut, and the richest 0.1% will get 60% of the gains. But 13 million Americans will have lost health coverage, the national debt will be $1.5 trillion larger, and Republicans will use the debt as an excuse to target Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.

Never before in American history has this much money been transferred from the poor and middle class to the rich. Shame on the Republicans and on Trump. We must, as the saying goes, throw these bums out.

Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California:

I just voted NO on the Republican tax plan. Here’s why:

Since their failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, President Trump and Republicans in Congress have desperately sought a legislative accomplishment — a “win” to show voters that with control of both the House and Senate and the Presidency, they could get something done.

Today, in the headlong pursuit of something, anything that they could point to as a legislative success, they passed a massive tax cut for the wealthy that they would like to portray as “tax reform.” But this “win” comes as a terrible loss for the country. It is, in fact, a gift to GOP wealthy sponsors and lives up to none of the GOP promises about helping the middle class or simplifying the tax code. Instead, it is a highly partisan bill that was rushed through both chambers and benefits few families more than the President’s own.

I voted no on this bill because, simply put, it overwhelmingly benefits large corporations and families with large incomes and estates, while doing little for most families, especially those in California. This bill particularly hurts middle class families in states like mine, millions of which will get a whopping tax increase since their ability to deduct state and local taxes is reduced, along with the mortgage interest deduction.

The bill also repeals a key provision in the Affordable Care Act, which will lead to 13 million Americans losing insurance and millions more paying higher premiums. In other words, for any family or individual that may see a tax break, they’ll most likely be using that money to pay for higher healthcare costs.

To make matters worse, the $1.46 trillion cost to this bill will trigger massive automatic program cuts to social safety net programs like Medicare and Social Security. There is little doubt that having increased the deficit by trillions with this bill, Republicans will seek to pay back that money through such cuts to Medicare and Social Security. That is the other shoe which is now set to fall on middle class and working families.

President Trump promised a “giant tax cut for Christmas,” and there’s no question he delivered that – for himself and other real estate developers who can now use pass through income to great personal advantage and reward.

The great shame in all of this is that none of it is necessary. There was nothing precluding bipartisan legislation that would simplify the tax code, assist the middle class and small businesses and diminish our national debt. Nothing except a decision by the majority to railroad through a deceptive measure for their wealthy patrons instead.

So there was this train derailment not far from here yesterday, that dumped train cars all over the main north-south freeway for the West coast; it killed three passengers. The train was going 80 miles an hour as it went into a curve, where the speed limit was 30.

The revelation that a passenger train was speeding 50 miles per hour over the speed limit at the time of a fatal crash near Tacoma, Wash., has once again focused attention on Amtrak’s safety culture, the role of human error in rail accidents, and the need for technology that automatically slows trains that are going too fast.

Late Monday night, National Transportation Safety Board officials said that the train, bound from Seattle to Portland, Ore., was traveling at 80 miles per hour, on a curve with a limit of 30 miles per hour, when it jumped the tracks and careened into a busy highway and a stand of evergreens. At least three people were killed and about 100 were injured, officials said.

Yesterday afternoon, before the NTSB confirmation, it was already being reported that the train had apparently been going 80. News outlets also published the audio of the engineer’s call to emergency services, so we could hear him say “we were approaching the curve and then we were on the ground”…as if there were something surprising about that when the train was going 80. You don’t have to be a professional to know that trains can’t go 80 on curves, because they’re not agile enough.

The accident mirrored Amtrak’s worst disaster in recent years, in 2015, when a train derailed at more than 100 miles per hour in Philadelphia, on a curve posted at 50 miles per hour, killing eight people.

Train 501, carrying 77 passengers and seven crew members, derailed Monday morning, between Tacoma and Olympia, on the inaugural run of a new route for Amtrak’s Cascades service, where the tracks curve onto an overpass crossing Interstate 5. It was not clear how familiar the engineer was with that stretch of track, or whether that played a role in the crash.

Well oops. Wouldn’t you kind of hope all that would have been considered beforehand? “Oh, hey, new track, had we better maybe make sure the engineer knows where the curves are and knows to slow down when approaching them?” Do they not plan for these things?

Apparently not as much as they should.

Just last month, the N.T.S.B. reported that Amtrak had a “weak safety culture”. That conclusion stemmed from an investigation into a 2016 accident in Chester, Penn., that killed two track workers.

Federal law requires railroads, by the end of 2018, to have positive train control, which automatically slows trains if they are exceeding speed limits or approaching dangerous conditions. In its latest progress report to the railroad administration, Amtrak said it had installed positive train control on all 603 miles of track on the Northeast Corridor, from Washington to Boston.

Congress passed the law requiring positive train control in 2008, after the head-on collision of a commuter train and a freight train in Los Angeles killed 25 people. Railroads were supposed to have the system in place by 2015, but it became clear that many of them would not meet that deadline, the industry lobbied for more time, and Congress postponed the requirement by three years.

The Times includes a photo of the curve. I wouldn’t even call it a curve, it’s a damn corner.

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

The NTSB press release last month starts with a bang:

The National Transportation Safety Board determined Tuesday the April 3, 2016, derailment of Amtrak train 89 near Chester, Pennsylvania was caused by deficient safety management across many levels of Amtrak and the resultant  lack of a clear, consistent and accepted vision for safety.

A backhoe operator and a track supervisor were killed, and 39 people were injured when Amtrak train 89, traveling on the Northeast Corridor from Philadelphia to Washington on track 3, struck a backhoe at about 7:50 a.m. The train engineer saw equipment and people working on and near track 3 and initiated emergency braking that slowed the train from 106 mph to approximately 99 mph at the time of impact.

The NTSB also determined allowing a passenger train to travel at maximum authorized speed on unprotected track where workers were present, the absence of shunting devices, the foreman’s failure to conduct a job briefing at the start of the shift, all coupled with the numerous inconsistent views of safety and safety management throughout Amtrak, led to the accident.

Cause: human error.

Interesting. A couple of weeks ago Paul Ryan was saying ooh we need to cut the deficit, need to reduce all this spending on health care.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said Wednesday that congressional Republicans will aim next year to reduce spending on both federal health care and anti-poverty programs, citing the need to reduce America’s deficit.

“We’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit,” Ryan said during an appearance on Ross Kaminsky’s talk radio show. “… Frankly, it’s the health care entitlements that are the big drivers of our debt, so we spend more time on the health care entitlements — because that’s really where the problem lies, fiscally speaking.”

But a huge tax cut for the rich that is predicted to add a trillion dollars to Our Debt over the next decade…that is somehow not where the problem lies, fiscally speaking.

Ryan’s remarks add to the growing signs that top Republicans aim to cut government spending next year. Republicans are close to passing a tax bill nonpartisan analysts say would increase the deficit by at least $1 trillion over a decade. Trump recently called on Congress to move to cut welfare spending after the tax bill, and Senate Republicans have cited the need to reduce the national deficit while growing the economy.

It’s all rather stark, isn’t it.

Matt Damon is still busy telling us all how to talk about the problem of men preying on women in the workplace. He thinks we should talk more about the men in Hollywood who aren’t sexual predators. He also thinks he knows who they are and that they’re the vast majority.

Damon says not all the men in Hollywood are despicable.

“We’re in this watershed moment, and it’s great, but I think one thing that’s not being talked about is there are a whole s—load of guys — the preponderance of men I’ve worked with — who don’t do this kind of thing and whose lives aren’t going to be affected,” Damon told Business Insider while promoting his new movie, “Downsizing,” opening in theaters Friday.

That’s super-interesting but I have to wonder how he knows. I have to wonder how he thinks he knows. Does he think men tell everyone they harass and assault women?

“If I have to sign a sexual-harassment thing, I don’t care, I’ll sign it,” he said. “I would have signed it before. I don’t do that, and most of the people I know don’t do that.”

Because he would infallibly know it if they did.

Business Insider also asked Damon whether the current climate in Hollywood had made him more conscious of the people he’d work with on future projects. Would he back out of a movie if an actor, director, or producer had been accused of sexual misconduct?

“That always went into my thinking,” Damon said. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to work with somebody who — life’s too short for that. But the question of if somebody had allegations against them, you know, it would be a case-by-case basis. You go, ‘What’s the story here?'”

And then you tell yourself the answer, because you infallibly know which men harass women and which men don’t.

A headline:

27% of California adolescents say they are viewed as gender nonconforming, study finds

Hmm. How good are adolescents at sussing out what other people think of them? Adults aren’t all that good at it, even with experience and learning; I don’t think it’s the kind of thing adolescents are better at.

“The data show that more than one in four California youth express their gender in ways that go against the dominant stereotypes,” said lead author Bianca D.M. Wilson, the Rabbi Barbara Zacky Senior Scholar of Public Policy at the Williams Institute.

But that’s a different claim. The claim in the headline is twice-meta – it’s a claim about 1 )what people say 2)other people think. It’s not a claim about how people express their gender.

Gender nonconforming refers to people whose behaviors and appearance defy the dominant cultural and societal stereotypes of their gender. The health interview survey measured gender expression by asking adolescents how they thought people at school viewed their physical expressions of femininity and masculinity. Youth who reported that people at school saw them as equally masculine and feminine were categorized as “androgynous.” Girls who thought they were seen as mostly or very masculine and boys who thought they were seen as mostly or very feminine were categorized as “highly gender nonconforming.”

There again: they’re confusing levels. Asking adolescents 1)how they thought 2)people at school viewed their physical expressions of femininity and masculinity is twice meta again. It’s not a question about how in fact the adolescents “express their gender.” Doing a thing is one level; how people see it is a second; what people say about what people see is a third. If you mush them all together you get mush.

Anyway. I’m still looking forward to the time when everyone realizes that “the dominant cultural and societal stereotypes of their gender” are surplus baggage and just throws them all out instead of trying to label either conformity to them or rebellion against them.

Twitter has started its “purge.” Among the purged: Trump’s buddy Jayda Fransen, source of the “look out, Moooslims!!” videos he retweeted.

The implementation of Twitter’s new rules was the latest attempt by technology companies to crack down on abuses of their platforms in the aftermath of Charlottesville’s bloody demonstration in August. Though Twitter’s announcement in a morning blog post did not make this connection explicit, companies have been scrambling for months to address allegations that their platforms had become breeding grounds for extremist groups.

Far-right political figures have been criticizing these moves as assaults on their rights to free speech, and some have called Twitter’s new policy part of an effort to “purge” them.

Rights to free speech≠rights to use other people’s free platforms. We can say Twitter or Facebook are using shit criteria for their decisions, but “rights” don’t come into it.

Among those whose accounts went offline Monday were three affiliated with the group Britain First, including its main account and those maintained by its leader, Paul Golding, and his deputy Jayda Fransen. It was her anti-Muslim posts last month that were retweeted by President Trump, a move that earned him sharp rebuke from British Prime Minister Theresa May.

And disgust from much of the planet.

Kozinski has retired.

Alex Kozinski, a high-profile federal court judge in California, is retiring after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment, prompting a formal inquiry.

In a statement on Monday, Mr. Kozinski, 67, said his family and friends had urged him to remain and defend himself, but that doing so would make it difficult to do his job well.

Kind of like the way his “jokes” and overtures made it difficult for his female colleagues and underlings to do their jobs well.

Citing a “broad sense of humor and a candid way of speaking to both male and female law clerks alike,” Mr. Kozinski, who served on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit for 32 years, also offered an apology to his accusers.

“It grieves me to learn that I caused any of my clerks to feel uncomfortable; this was never my intent,” he said. “For this I sincerely apologize.”

Yeah yeah yeah. Lenny Bruce, sexual revolution, freedom, feminists have no sense of humor, women are such a drag; we know. We’ve heard it, many times.

At least 15 women had accused Mr. Kozinski of subjecting them to unwanted sexual comments or physical contact, including kissing, hugging and groping, according to The Washington Post. The allegations spanned decades and included colleagues as well as women who met him at events.

Broad sense of humor! Stupid broads never get the joke.

This is not the first time that Mr. Kozinski has faced accusations of inappropriate behavior.

In 2008, The Los Angeles Times reported that he contributed to a website featuring sexually explicit photos and videos, including a photograph of naked women painted to look like cows.

Broad sense of humor! Stupid cows, they never get the joke.

Mr. Kozinski, a libertarian known for writing colorful opinions, was first appointed to the Ninth Circuit by President Ronald Reagan in 1985.

Colorful! Broad sense of humor! Fun guy!

Minnie Driver isn’t having it.

The actor Minnie Driver has told the Guardian that men “simply cannot understand what abuse is like on a daily level” and should not therefore attempt to differentiate or explain sexual misconduct against women.

And why can’t they understand it? Because they’re not on the receiving end of it.

Driver was discussing comments by Matt Damon, whom she once dated and with whom she starred in the Oscar-winning 1997 film Good Will Hunting. In an interview with ABC News this week, Damon said alleged sexual misconduct by powerful men involved “a spectrum of behaviour”.

Blah blah blah pat on the butt blah blah rape blah.

He added that society was in a “watershed moment” and said it was “wonderful that women are feeling empowered to tell their stories and it’s totally necessary”. But he said: “We live in this culture of outrage and injury, that we’re going to have to correct enough to kind of go, ‘Wait a minute. None of us came here perfect.’”

Who’s “we,” Kemosabe? Who’s this “we” that’s going to have to correct? Where was this “we” when Harvey and Louis and Charlie were doing their thing?

In her first response to Damon, Driver wrote on Twitter: “Good God, seriously?

“Gosh it’s so interesting (profoundly unsurprising) how men with all these opinions about women’s differentiation between sexual misconduct, assault and rape reveal themselves to be utterly tone deaf and as a result, systemically part of the problem.”

Tone deaf and…maybe a little anxious? Possibly worried about their own position on that “spectrum of behavior”?

On Saturday, Driver told the Guardian: “I felt I desperately needed to say something. I’ve realised that most men, good men, the men that I love, there is a cut-off. They simply cannot understand what abuse is like on a daily level.

“I honestly think that until we get on the same page, you can’t tell a woman about their abuse. A man cannot do that. No one can. It is so individual and so personal, it’s galling when a powerful man steps up and starts dictating the terms, whether he intends it or not.”

It’s not his call, is it. It’s not Matt Damon’s call how “not perfect” Louis CK’s actions were.

Speaking to ABC, Damon compared allegations against Weinstein, Al Franken, Kevin Spacey and the comedian Louis CK, whom he commended for his remorseful response.

“That’s the sign of somebody who – well, we can work with that,” Damon said, adding: “I don’t know Louis CK. I’ve never met him. I’m a fan of his, but I don’t imagine he’s going to do those things again. You know what I mean? I imagine the price that he’s paid at this point is so beyond anything … ”

Ah there’s that “we” again. Who can work with that? Matt Damon can, apparently – well goody for him, but he’s not the only person who would have to “work with that,” is he. It’s nice that he doesn’t imagine Louis CK will do those things again, but he’s not one of the people LCK would be doing it to if he did do it again, is he. It’s touching that he thinks the price LCK has paid is so beyond anything, but on the other hand has he given much thought to the price LCK’s targets have paid without having creeped on anyone? Has he given any thought to that?

Driver argued that men should not be granted the power to interpret abuse inflicted on women without the risk of redoubling an injustice they can scarcely understand.

“I felt that what Matt Damon was saying was an Orwellian idea, we are all equal except that some us are more equal than others,” she said. “Put abuse in there … that all abuse is equal but some is worse.”

And men get to make the call.

“There is not a woman I know,” Driver said, “myself included, who has not experienced verbal abuse and sexual epithets their whole fucking life, right up to being manhandled and having my career threatened several times by men I wouldn’t sleep with.”

Let’s ask Matt Damon exactly how much that matters.

Jennifer Rubin on the intensifying efforts to disrupt the Russia investigation.

Nadler told me Friday morning in an email that it’s obvious the GOP’s tactic of choice in running interference for the president is now to smear the FBI. “The outlandish and irresponsible attacks by Republicans and Conservative media on the Department of Justice pose a significant threat to our national security and our fundamental democratic principles,” he said. “The Deputy Attorney General said unequivocally in our hearing that there is no good basis to fire the Special Counsel or to terminate his investigation. House Judiciary Republicans, on the other hand, certainly are enablers of President Trump’s worst instincts — attacks on the Justice Department, attacking the reputation of the FBI, disregarding statute, regulation, and common sense to try to force the Special Counsel to back off as the walls close in on the President.”

Some of them understand how terrible Trump is, and all of them ought to. The Republican party is for rich people and theocracy (an uneasy combination at times) but it’s not normally for open corruption and criminality, let alone corrupt criminal dictators of other countries fiddling our elections.

I hope they step back from the brink.