Monday Reading

 

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

We've recently heard from coup-adjacent Trump sycophants Sen. Lindsey Graham and Rep. Kevin McCarthy complaining about Democrats "politicizing" the January 6 insurrection.  Joel Mathis says we should do more politicizing, especially after January 6:

Politics, after all, is how we work out our collective problems. But it's a messy and sometimes ugly process, which makes charges of "politicization" so easy and potent: Regular Americans often don't like the way politics makes them feel. A USA Today poll taken last month found that for all our political polarization, nearly three-fourths of us would love for there to be less political hostility and more focus on finding common ground. 

That sounds lovely. Almost.

With rare exception, we don't start with common ground on big issues. We have to journey to meet there. Sometimes that doesn't happen, sometimes it does, and sometimes it occurs only after a years-long process of bickering and argument. Americans — humans! — have wildly disparate visions of what constitutes the common good and how to achieve it. We use politics to hash out those disagreements so that we can come to some mutually acceptable (or acceptable enough) resolution of our differences. To complain about the politicization of some issue or event, then, is often an attempt to silence that process — a way to shout "shut up!" from some ostensible moral high ground.

The release of text messages exchanged by Fox "News" blowhards and then-Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows before and during the January 6 insurrection opened the door to more revelations about just how much Dolt 45 relied on "advice" from right- wing talking heads, and what a problem it was for his staff:

Michael Pillsbury, an informal Trump adviser, said he realized how powerful Fox News was in Trump’s orbit when the former president began embracing Sidney Powell — an attorney promoting Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud — and other election fabulists after seeing them on Dobbs’s show. Pillsbury added that while it seemed obvious that many of the claims were patently false, Trump was inclined to believe them, in part because he was watching them on TV and had affection for Dobbs in particular.

“It taught me the power of the young producers at Fox, and Fox Business especially,” Pillsbury said. “These young producers who are in their mid-20s. They come out of the conservative movement, they‘ve never been in the government. They are presented with these reckless, fantastical accounts. And they believe them and put them on for ratings.”

Alyssa Farah, a former White House communications director, said the four most influential Fox hosts were Dobbs, Hannity, Igraham, and Pirro — and in the final year of the Trump administration, Hannity was the most influential. Other former top administration officials also mentioned Mark Levin, another Fox News host, and Maria Bartiromo, a Fox Business host, as two other network stars in regular touch with the White House.

From the point of view of the staff, Farah said, the goal was simply to “try to get ahead of what advice you thought he was going to be given by these people” because their unofficial counsel “could completely change his mind on something.”

An unqualified, deluded President being advised by unqualified, deluded entertainers:  what could possibly go wrong?

James Fallows wonders about coverage of inflation vs. improving job numbers:

Why does it matter that worsening inflation gets so much more play than dramatically improving job prospects?

—There’s an obvious national-politics answer, which is that this emphasis makes people “feel worse” than they should about overall economic trends. This in turn makes them feel more cynical and fatalistic about the chance of progress on any policy front. It’s related to the long-term pattern of U.S. crime rates going down, but fear of crime going up.

—For those in economist-land, there’s the intensifying discussion about the “transitory” versus the “persistent” nature of this moment’s inflation. And about how the relationship between unemployment and inflation rates has changed, since the era when I learned about the Phillips curve in grad-school economics courses long ago.

But to me, the “human” importance of the mismatch matters most, and it spills over into the media-related, political, and economic dimensions. The over-emphasis on inflation numbers, relative to employment trends, blurs the fact that while both are problems, for the people living through it unemployment is much worse.

Inflation erodes a family’s purchasing power. Unemployment eliminates it.

That makes a huge difference.

The James Webb Telescope achieved a major milestone on Saturday:

Work for the James Webb Space Telescope is just beginning.

On Saturday (Jan. 8), the new observatory, the largest space telescope ever built, successfully unfolded its final primary mirror segment to cap what NASA has billed as one of its most complicated deployments in space ever. The Webb mission team is now turning its attention to directing the telescope to its final destination, while getting key parts of the observatory online for its astronomy work.

Webb is expected to arrive at its "insertion location" by Jan. 23, putting it in place to fire its engines to glide to a "parking spot" called Earth-sun Lagrange Point 2 (L2) about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from our planet. If Webb gets to the right zone, it can use a minimum of fuel to stay in place thanks to a near-perfect alignment with the sun, Earth and moon. [snip]

As commissioning ends, Rigby said the team plans a set of "wow images" that are designed to show the telescope's capabilities. Those first targets have not yet been released to the media, but Rigby said the goal of these first pictures will be to "showcase all four science instruments and to really knock everybody's socks off."

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The first images will include things such as stars (to check for precise alignment) and the Large Magellanic Cloud (to assess the telescope's ability to render shades of luminosity, or inherent brightness), officials said during the press conference.

Following commissioning (which will take about six months) will be a preliminary five-month science operations period made up of "early release science programs", with a set of six categories of work ranging from planet formation to stellar physics.

Trust me, our socks will be ready to be knocked off!

Lastly, a visit over to Infidel 753's link round-up is strongly encouraged to appreciate the array of links  that he somehow manages to curate every week, in addition to his thoughtful essays.