The mainstream news media was all hepped up yesterday to declare Super Tuesday as the event that cinched the nominations of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, a bias they confirmed by rapidly calling the most obvious states for their heroes: Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas (Trump over Cruz 32.7-30.5%), Tennessee, Virginia (Trump over Rubio 34.7-31.9%), and Massachusetts (Clinton over Sanders -%). Then not much else broke as they expected. Everyone expected Cruz to take Texas (over Trump 43.8-26.7%), but he also won Oklahoma and Alaska. Finally, Marco Rubio won in Minnesota (over Cruz 36.5-29.0%, with Trump at 21.3%, how lowest share of the night).

Sanders was a shoe-in for Vermont (86.1-13.6%; Trump prevailed over Kasich there 32.7-30.4%), but he also won impressively in Minnesota (61.6-38.4%) and Colorado (58.9-40.4%), and surprisingly in Oklahoma (51.9-41.5% -- 538's polls and models favored Sanders there, but I didn't really believe them). Clinton won blowouts across the south, sweeping Virginia (64.3-35.2%) and Arkansas (66.3-29.7%) and four states she has no prayer of winning in the fall (she got 65.2% in Texas, 66.1% in Tennessee, 71.3% in Georgia, and 77.6% in Alabama). The only close contest was in Massachusetts, which she won 50.1-48.7%. That seems like a state Sanders should have won (and needed to win to have a shot at the nomination), but having lived there, one thing I recall is that the state harbors some of the most reactionary Democrats in the north, if not the whole country. I don't know how significant that was, but it's something you wouldn't be aware of unless you lived there.

It seems pretty clear that Clinton will win the nomination: she's running a little ahead of 538's targets, accumulating a majority of popularly elected delegates, plus she has that huge superdelegate advantage. She also appears to be headed toward some big wins in March primaries: 538's polling averages show her winning handsomely in Michigan (60.7-36.3%), Florida (66.8-29.8%), Illinois (65.5-30.4%), North Carolina (59.7-36.8%), and Ohio (60.1-37.6%). Sanders' next best chance is April 5 in Wisconsin, where polling is close to tied. I'm not seeing any polling for the March 5 caucuses in Louisiana, Kansas, and Nebraska, or March 6 for Maine. I expect Kansas and Nebraska to be close, and Maine to tilt to Sanders, so he may get some good news before the bad. At some point I think Sanders needs to pivot his campaign toward retaking Congress -- say thanks for supporting him by campaigning for his supporters, which would allow him to stay on the campaign trail until November, and build up a party which would pull Clinton to the left.

Trump didn't top 50% anywhere (he came close in Massachusetts with 49.3%, followed by 43.4% in Alabama, 38.9% in Tennessee, 38.8% in Georgia, but took less than 35% in his owner wins, bottoming out in Minnesota). And Trump wound up with less than half of the delegates (319 vs. 369 for the not-so-united opposition). He's still the frontrunner and may still be on track to the nomination, but he's not exactly blowing everyone else away. The best you can say for his chances is that no one else looks to have a chance. Kasich finished second in Vermont (close) and Massachusetts (distant, Trump winning 49.3-18.0%). Presumably he'll hang around for Ohio, where he's polling a few points behind Trump. A win there might give him a shot at a broken/brokered convention, as establishment favorite Rubio continues to falter: he won Minnesota, and came in second in Virginia (close) and Georgia (distant), but he specializes in thirds -- eight of them, everywhere else. Carson's best state was Alabama (10.2%), which netted him 0 delegates. Today he conceded that he sees no 'path forward' for his campaign, but rather than suspending it he'll just fade into occlusion (like the last Shiite Imam). Presumably his voters will gravitate toward Trump (if they don't follow their leader into occlusion).

That leaves Cruz, who'd like establishment conservatives to realize that he's their last chance to stop Trump -- something that it's safe to say isn't going to happen, if only because many of them despise Cruz even more viscerally than they do Trump. They may, after all, worry that Trump isn't a true conservative, but Cruz is so true he makes their carefully worded rationalizations look like a cruel joke. And while they may not wish to admit it, Trump at least is thoroughly corruptible, with a substantial personal stake in his fortune. Cruz, on the other hand, has the air of a true believer, the sort of fanatic who in his extremism could bring them all down. (Hence Rubio: never in history has a candidate so completely looked the part of a tool of his donors' interests. No wonder he's their favorite.)

Some links:

• FiveThirtyEight: Super Tuesday: Live Coverage and Results: Start at the bottom if you want to follow the night minute-by-minute, the bottom having a lot of background data (since it started before any new data came in). Only some of this avalanche of info is useful, but note, for instance, at 6:53PM someone asked about Rubio's polls, and Harry Enten answered: "The two states where [Rubio] has been competitive, according to data I've seen, are Minnesota and Utah." That was before Rubio won Minnesota. Also suggests that if he was going to win anywhere, that would be it, and winning there doesn't suggest he's going to win anywhere else (well, except Utah, maybe).

• Nate Silver: Can Republicans Still Take the Nomination From Trump? Main thing I take away here is that the picture will become much clearer after March 15, when winner-take-all primaries in Florida and Ohio can shift the delegate counts dramatically. Currently 538 has Kasich slightly ahead of Trump in terms of "chance of winning" Ohio (41-39%), but the poll data tilts the other way: Trump (30.1%), Kasich (27.4%), Rubio (21.6%), Cruz (18.8%). Trump is doing a little better in Florida, with 41.4% polling average, vs. Rubio (35.2%), Cruz (12.4%), and Kasich (8.5%). If Trump wins both, I don't see how he can fail to take the nomination.

  By the way, the other polling averages for March primaries: Michigan (March 8): Trump 38.4%, Rubio 24.9%, Cruz 17.4%, Kasich 15.1%; Illinois (March 15): Trump 37.3%, Rubio 29.4%, Cruz 16.8%, Kasich 13.1%; North Carolina (March 15): Trump 31.3%, Rubio 29.0%, Cruz 21.8%, Kasich 12.9%; Arizona (March 22): no average, but latest poll shows Trump 35%, Rubio 23%, Cruz 14%, Kasich 7%. Trump is also leading polls for April primaries in Wisconsin, New York, and Pennsylvania. Nothing on smaller states, but March 5 could be a good day for Cruz with caucuses in Louisiana, Kansas, and Nebraska (contiguous, as they are, with three of his four wins: Texas, Oklahoma, and Iowa).

• Clare Malone: If You Want to Understand What's Roiling the 2016 Election, Go to Oklahoma: This was written a couple days before the election, when Sanders upset Clinton, and Cruz pulled ahead of Trump. It's been a long time since anyone has brought up Oklahoma's early-19th-century populist past, but when you're looking for explanations, it's always handy to grasp at straws.

• Nate Silver: Don't Assume Conservatives Will Rally Behind Trump: Another piece from before the election. Useful mostly because it looks back at the history of partisan abandonment ("share of party's voters voting against its presidential candidate"), something Democrats have done more often than Republicans (indeed, aside from 1964 Republican defections appear to have mostly gone to third party candidates. But note that 2012 had the lowest total figure (8+7) since the chart starts up in 1952, and 2004 had the second lowest (11+7) -- one can argue that after a lot of party-jumping from 1952-1996 we've entered a new period of stability. Sure, Trump could change that, both by losing Republicans and by drawing Democrats. Perhaps Sanders also (conversely, of course). But I don't expect many Republicans to cross over and vote Democratic -- just too much pent-up hatred to swallow that pill. And thus far I haven't heard any credible talk of a third party candidate meant to torpedo Trump support among Republicans, even at the cost of throwing the presidency to Hillary Clinton. (Bloomberg maybe, but he seems far more animated by Sanders than Trump, which makes sense given where his billions come from.) That leaves, who? The Republicans are a party of lemmings. They'll follow anyone off the cliff.

• Amanda Girard: How Hillary Clinton's Super Tuesday 'Win' Relied on Dismal Voter Turnout: Some numbers here. Sanders has been hoping that high voter turnout will boost his chances. Most of the numbers I've seen are down from 2008 (Clinton v. Obama), but that's a pretty high bar. The chart does suggest that Sanders do relatively well where the turnout is relatively high: turnout in the five states Sanders won or barely lost (Massachusetts) was down 8.8%; in the six southern states Clinton won by landslides, turnout was down 32.7%. That really just corresponds to the adage that competitive races draw more interest. On the other hand, Republican turnout has generally been high higher this year, which probably has more to do with the competitiveness of the races (and the obscene amounts of money spent on them) than a net shift to the GOP.

• Martin Wolf: Donald Trump embodies how great republics meet their end: Intellectual mischief, introducing the phrase "pluto-populism" ("the marriage of plutocracy with rightwing populism" -- the more common historical term for this is "fascism").

• Kevin Drumm: Will Conservatives Do the Right Thing in November?: Uh, no: even though focus groups have long cautioned conservatives against over-the-top racism (while identifying all manner of viable"dog whistles"), deep down the only thing conservatives really care about is their money, and they'll do whatever it takes to grab the political clout they need to keep their good thing going. I got a kick out of this quote from Bret Stephens complaining about how unfairly conservatives have been maligned for trading on racism:

  It would be terrible to think that the left was right about the right all these years. Nativist bigotries must not be allowed to become the animating spirit of the Republican Party. If Donald Trump becomes the candidate, he will not win the presidency, but he will help vindicate the left's ugly indictment. It will be left to decent conservatives to pick up the pieces -- and what's left of the party.

  That's a real knee-slapper, "decent conservatives." I won't deny that there are decent people who identify with conservatism, mostly because the movement flatters them for their personal virtues -- most of which I approve of and share in -- and they take that as some sort of tribal identity. But the conservative movement doesn't stop there. It takes advantage of their decency and isolation and uses that to promote the wealth of a very few at the expense of nearly everyone else.

• Colbert Rips Trump's KKK Fumble: 'This is the Easiest Question in Politics!': It should be pretty pro forma by now for Republicans to disavow David Duke and the KKK -- it's not like they haven't had to do it before -- but somehow Trump hesitated. I saw a meme on Facebook from The Other 98% -- somehow Facebook has made it impossible to share their photos anywhere else (or at least I haven't figured out how to do it). The text reads: "Donald Trump eagerly attacks Muslims, Mexicans, journalists, newspapers, scientists, women who aren't pretty enough for him, women who breastfeed, people who are taken prisoner, Macy's, Apple, fat people, thirsty people, handicapped people and the Pope . . . but he has to be careful and do more research before he criticizes the KKK."

• Peter Beinart: Why Liberals Should Vote for Marco Rubio: OK, this is bizarre, but Beinart has quite a history of thinking himself into ridiculous positions, like when he supported the Bush invasion of Iraq, then wrote a book blaming the Bush team's conservatism for fucking it all up (The Good Fight: Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again). He admits that Marco Rubio "would be a terrible president" but considers Trump so odious that he's urging Democrats to abandon their party, forgoing the non-trivial differences between Clinton and Sanders, to vote for a guy who's only taken seriously because conservative pundits can't think of anyone better to back. He even offers three reasons why voting for Rubio is a dumb idea, yet his paranoia about Trump is so great he dismisses them out of hand. He even suggests liberals should help out by donating money to Rubio's campaign, as if they'd make a material difference compared to the billionaires already bankrolling Rubio. And he has a "plan B" if liberal largesse doesn't tilt the nomination to Rubio: convince your conservative buddies to vote for Hillary Clinton. That at least isn't so far fetched: some are already gravitating to Clinton because they view her as an even-more-trigger-happy Commander in Chief.

  Not sure whether that factors into Beinart's thinking: regardless of how hawkish Clinton is, the GOP "establishment" candidates -- Kasich as well as Rubio -- have staked out even more reckless neocon positions than Clinton, Cruz, or Trump. Indeed, one of Beinart's charges against Trump is how he's "praised Vladimir Putin": going soft on Putin seems to violate one of the "norms that both decent liberals and decent conservatives cherish." He concludes: "Across the ideological divide, it's time to close ranks." Effectively, he's saying that none of the differences between Rubio and Clinton (let alone Sanders) matter. In truth, Beinart comes off as such a smug and complacentliberal elitist it's hard to read this without thinking, hey, this guy deserves Trump. Of course, why should we suffer because he's a dolt? I can see going soft on Clinton because bad as she is she isn't nearly as awful as any conceivable Republican. I can see differences between those Republicans, but none that make me want to pick one, let alone try to influence the Republican primary to pick the least evil one. Nor am I even sure that Trump is the most evil: Rubio and Kasich are clearly more pro-war, and Cruz is more prone to blow up the government lest it ever help people in need. My biggest worry about Trump isn't that he'll be much worse than Rubio. It's that he'll prove more effective campaigning against a corporate shill and shameless hawk like Clinton.

• Derek Thompson: How Donald Trump Can Beat Hillary Clinton: To wit:

  But here's the problem: If Trump doesn't care about policy and his appeal truly transcends issues, what's stopping him from becoming a starkly different person in the general election, the same way he's morphed, with convenient timing, from a moderate businessman -- supportive of Canadian health care, a friend of Democrats, an admirer of Hillary Clinton -- to a nationalist demagogue?

  Trump's most famous skill is self-promotion through bloviation. But his most underrated skill is he is a terrific panderer. He will say anything he thinks people want to hear, but he'll say it in a way that makes his pandering look like an act of courage. The ingenious subtext of much of his messaging is: "Nobody wants to hear this hard truth, but here it is: you're right!" [ . . . ]

  Trump is also positioned to offer a devastating critique of Hillary Clinton -- that she never wins: She tried to pass health care reform. Biggest disaster I ever saw in Washington. Biggest I ever saw. And that's saying a lot. She wanted us to go into Iraq and then into Libya. Look at that mess. Worst decision in foreign policy history. Worst. NAFTA, prisons, welfare reform. You know that story about King Midas? Where he touches something and it turns to gold? Hillary's the opposite. Everything she touches blows up. She's a disaster.

  Is it really so hard to imagine Trump peddling a populist message that keeps the Great Wall of America (he can't disavow that wall), dials down on the dog-whistle rhetoric toward Hispanics and Muslims, and goes hard at the economic and cultural insecurity of the middle class by promising them a gorgeous new fleet of protectionist trade deals, a big beautiful tax cut, and all the social spending they've come to love? Pay Less, Keep More, Win, Win, Win. It will be a incredible six months of populist pandering. And what's worse: If it produces results and he rises in the polls, the political media will paint Trump as a rapidly maturing centrist.

  The word Thompson keeps using about Trump is "authentic." George Burns used to be quoted as saying "the secret to acting is sincerity -- if you can fake that, you've got it made." Trump's figured out how to fake authenticity, and that's likely to cause Clinton fits (not that she isn't unskilled at faking sincerity).

Kansas held both Democratic and Republican Party caucuses yesterday. Both had record turnouts, in many cases forcing voters to wait in line for hours. Still the caucus format is so inconvenient that at most 10% of the number of people who will vote in November showed up. I suppose you could argue that that means only the hard core fanatics showed up. You could go further and point out that both caucuses were won by the party's extremists -- Cruz and Sanders -- with both trouncing national favorites (Trump and Clinton) by more than 20 points. Still, while a primary might have narrowed the outcomes, I seriously doubt if it would have overturned either winner.

The Republican caucus was a big show here in Wichita, with most (or maybe all) registered Republicans required to head downtown to the Century II Auditorium, where the voting took place after speeches in favor of the candidates. Cruz and Trump represented themselves in person. Marco Rubio was AWOL, his slot filled in by local Congressman (and Bill Kristol favorite) Mike Pompeo. Trump was singled out for a counter-demonstration, and had some hecklers removed from the caucus. When the votes were counted, the results were: Cruz 48.2%, Trump 23.3%, Rubio 16.7%, Kasich 10.7%, out of about 72,000 votes (Romney got 689,000 votes in 2012).

The Democratic caucuses were organized by State Senate district. We attended the 25th, at the SEIU union hall on west Douglas. The 25th district covers the near west side of Wichita, between the Arkansas River and the flood control ditch from 25th North to Pawnee (23rd South), plus Riverside (the area between the Little Arkansas River and the big one -- this is where we live) and a chunk of south Wichita from the river east to Hillside, bounded by Kellogg (downtown) on the north and Pawnee on the south (this is the area I grew up in). The district is represented by creepy Republican Michael O'Donnell -- a "preacher's kid" who long lived rent-free thanks to his father's church, and who is best known for authoring a bill passed last year which placed many restrictions on what welfare recipients could do with their money (including a restriction that they couldn't draw more than $25 at a time from an ATM), but who was most recently in the news for providing beer to a party of underaged "campaign supporters."

The district is mostly working class, overwhelmingly white -- Wichita is still pretty segregated, and the Republicans who drew up the Senate district map worked hard to put every black person they could find into the 29th district -- the result is that Sedgwick County has only one Democrat in the state senate, compared to 7-9 Republicans (some suburban and rural slivers overlap into other counties). The district was formerly represented by Jean Schodorf, a liberal Republican who was ousted by O'Donnell in the 2012 GOP primary purge. He will be opposed this year by Lynn Rogers, a popular school board member who recently switched parties, so I think he has a good chance to flip the district (until they redraw it -- Republicans control the state senate 32-8).

We managed to park about three blocks from the caucus site, and spent a little more than an hour in line to get into the building. By that time, they had decided to run a primary instead of a caucus as they couldn't fit a tenth of the people who turned out into the hall. We saw a couple dozen people we knew (including a couple carrying Hillary signs), and many hundreds we didn't (a great many with Bernie signs or stickers). When we got in, I was chagrined to find that my name wasn't on the voter roll, so I had to register. (Being Democrats, they didn't require ID or proof of citizenship, so I'm not sure how my registration will set with the Voter Suppression Bureau -- or whatever they call it these days. I've been registered here since 1999, but changed from independent to Democrat for the 2008 caucus, so it's possible that the party change didn't stick).

The final vote total was 67.7% Sanders, 32.3% Clinton, with 41,000 votes cast (Obama got almost 440,000 in 2012). I've looked around for more local election results, but haven't found much yet. I do know that the 4th Congressional District, which includes Wichita and mostly rural counties southeast to Montgomery (Independence and Coffeyville), broke 70-30% for Sanders -- the highest of any Kansas Congressional District. There's a good chance my caucus went 75-80% for Sanders. It's likely blacks in Kansas broke for Hillary: I saw few, but those who did have signs supported Hillary. Sanders got 81.4% in Lawrence (where Cruz only got 37% and Rubio beat Trump 20-18%), but (as I recall) the 3rd District was the closest, so Hillary must have done better in Wyandotte (largely black) and/or Johnson (KC suburban) counties.

The 4th was also Cruz's top congressional district. He slumped a bit in the 3rd (suburban Kansas City, Lawrence) and, a bigger surprise, in the 1st, represented by his most prominent booster in the state, Tim Huelskamp. Good chance Huelskamp's endorsement actually cost Cruz votes: Huelskamp is much hated in the most Republican district in the state, mostly by farmers who don't appreciate his efforts to wipe out the government gravy train. Not a good day for other prominent endorsers either: Gov. Brownback, Sen. Roberts, and Rep. Pompeo all threw their political weight behind Rubio, who came in a distant third, performing well below his statewide average in Pompeo's district. The top Trump supporters -- Kris Kobach (ALEC) and Phil Ruffin (Wichita's other billionaire, like Trump a casino mogul) -- had no discernible effect. One might also add Clinton-backer Jill Docking, possibly the best known Democrat in the state -- she lost a couple statewide races, but bears the name of two former governors and a state office building in Topeka.

[PS: Here are some figures by Congressional District: Cruz got 58% in the 4th, 49% in the 1st, 46% in the 2nd, and 42% in the 3rd. Rubio led Trump in the 3rd 22-20%, but with Pompeo's help trailed in the 4th 13-22%. Kasich got 15% in the 3rd, only 6% in the 4th. Sanders did best in the 2nd District (Topeka) with 72%, followed by 70% in the 4th, 69% in the 1st, and 62% in the 3rd.]

Sanders also won in Nebraska (57.1-42.9%), while Clinton mopped up in Louisiana (71.1-23.2%). Evidently Clinton finished the day with a slight increase in her delegate edge. Maine votes today, and should go to Sanders. [PS: That indeed happened, Sanders leading 64.2-35.6%.] Michigan and Mississippi vote on Tuesday -- Michigan should be an indicator of whether the Sanders campaign is looking up or down. Recent polls there favor Clinton (60-36%, 57-40%, 55-44%; 538's weighted average is 57.1-37.2%), but Michigan Democrats have been known to think out of the box -- George Wallace and Jesse Jackson are former winners -- and the last-minute focus there will be intense. (Trump is a heavy favorite on the Republican side, leading Cruz 37.0-21.4% with Kasich above Rubio 20.7-18.4%.)

Trump won primaries yesterday in Kentucky (35.3-31.6% over Cruz, with Rubio at 16.4% and Kasich 14.4%) and Louisiana (41.4-37.8% over Cruz, with Rubio way out at 11.2% and Kasich half that), while Cruz solidly beat Trump in Maine (45.9-32.6%, Kasich over Rubio 12.2-8.0%). The latter was a surprise to me: Cruz had done very poorly in New England thus far, and Maine is about the last place in the nation where moderate Republicans have any traction. May be worth noting that turnout in Maine was extremely low (18382 votes vs. 292276 for Romney in 2012, so 6.3% -- about half the ratio in Kansas).

For more on this round, see 538's How the States Voted on Semi-Super Saturday. They are very impressed by Cruz, at least as unimpressed by Rubio, and quick to dismiss Sanders. You also get things like:

The Republican race is quite challenging to model demographically, and also isn't all that well-explained by ideology. So I expect that personality really might have something to do with it. Is it a coincidence that some of Trump's worst performances so far are in"nice" states like Minnesota and Kansas, and that his best is in neurotic, loud Massachusetts?

My first reaction to the first line was that there's no division in the Republican party either demographically or ideologically, but then the third line made me think of one: Catholics, especially those who got worked up over race and left the Democratic Party for Reagan. Massachusetts, which Reagan won in 1984, was ground zero for them, but Kansas and Minnesota have far fewer Catholics and a lot less urban/suburban race panic. They are also states where the Republican Party has never made much effort to pander to racism -- I suppose you could say that was "nice" of them, but they didn't really have the need in Kansas, nor the opportunity in Minnesota. Of course, we don't really need to define this group as Catholic: the more generic term is racist, and Trump does very well in those ranks.

One thing that 538 does point out is that Carson's votes seem to be going to Cruz, not Trump. I think he's right there, especially in Kansas, where Carson is very highly regarded and would probably have pulled 10% were he still in the race. They also note that while Trump led Louisiana in early ballots, Cruz may have gotten more votes on primary day than Trump.

Some scattered links this week:

• Jeffrey Toobin: Looking Back: The New Yorker's legal expert, author of two books on the Supreme Court -- The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court (2007), and The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court (2012) -- considers the legacy of the late Antonin Scalia and gets to the point quick:

  Antonin Scalia, who died this month, after nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy. Fortunately, he mostly failed. Belligerent with his colleagues, dismissive of his critics, nostalgic for a world where outsiders knew their place and stayed there, Scalia represents a perfect model for everything that President Obama should avoid in a successor. The great Justices of the Supreme Court have always looked forward; their words both anticipated and helped shape the nation that the United States was becoming. Chief Justice John Marshall read the new Constitution to allow for a vibrant and progressive federal government. Louis Brandeis understood the need for that government to regulate an industrializing economy. Earl Warren saw that segregation was poison in the modern world. Scalia, in contrast, looked backward. [ . . . ]

  Scalia described himself as an advocate of judicial restraint, who believed that the courts should defer to the democratically elected branches of government. In reality, he lunged at opportunities to overrule the work of Presidents and of legislators, especially Democrats. Scalia helped gut the Voting Rights Act, overturn McCain-Feingold and other campaign-finance rules, and, in his last official act, block President Obama's climate-change regulations. Scalia's reputation, like the Supreme Court's, is also stained by his role in the majority in Bush v. Gore. His oft-repeated advice to critics of the decision was "Get over it."

  Toobin has a follow-up piece, The Company Scalia Kept, including an overdose of the wit and wisdom of Scalia's hunting buddy, C. Allen Foster ("when the last duck comes flying over with a sign around his neck 'I am the last duck,' I will shoot it"). Also post-mortem is Jedediah Purdy: Scalia's Contradictory Originalism, which treats Scalia's signature rationale with more respect than I can muster. I've felt "originalism" was nothing more than Scalia's way of echoing Pope Urban's "Deus vult" -- a cheap way of selling anything that enters his wretched mind (although effective only if you think Scalia, like the pope, is infallible).

• Nate Silver: Republican Voters Kind of Hate All Their Choices: My first thought was, not as much as I hate them, but then I remembered that we're talking about Republicans, who seem to have a boundless capacity for hating other people -- so why not themselves? One chart here shows that in in the 2012 primary season, Republicans were more likely to have at least a "satisfied" view of Romney (63%) than of Santorum (55%) or Gingrich (52%). The current leader is Rubio (53%), followed by Cruz (51%) and Trump (49%). Another chart puts Trump's 49% well below that of all but one previous nominee or major candidate since 2004: Ron Paul in 2012 was lower; Cruz, Gingrich, and Rubio were the next lowest, behind Huckabee (2008), Santorum (2012), and Edwards (57% in 2004). Another chart shows that the 2008 race between Obama and Clinton was less divisive: Clinton led 71-69 -- the main difference was that while Clinton never dropped below 58 (in Mississippi), Obama had lower scores in a few states that turned hard against him in the general election: West Virginia (43), Kentucky (43), Arkansas (47), Oklahoma (49), and Tennessee (51). Clinton's figure this year is even higher at 78, while Sanders is well behind at 62 -- still high enough to suggest he would do a better job of uniting the party than any of the current batch of Republicans.

  No More Mister Nice Blog has a piece which looks beyond Rubio's bare margin in acceptability, arguing there's not much to it: Cruz is the other Trump, and Rubio continues to be friendzoned. The argument is basically that Trump and Cruz, as militant outsiders, are more acceptable to each other's bases than an obvious corporate tool like Rubio would be to either's. The result is that if a brokered convention hands the nomination to Rubio, a big chunk of Cruz and/or Trump supporters would go home or break loose or otherwise wreck the Republican Party.

• Stephem M Walt: It's Time to Abandon the Pursuit for Great Leaders: From Napoleon to Donald Trump, the track record of investing great power in a charismatic individual has been lousy (in Walt's words, "always a mistake"). The Germans had a word for this, Führerprinzip, which has since become as discredited as it deserves to be. That's one example Walt doesn't bother with, for the problem is not just the higher you fly the harder you fall (surely no one can argue about Napoleon in any other terms), but that Great Leaders may not even be possible any more (and that may be for the better). Walt surveys the recent wreckage:

  I suspect the appeal of the Great Leader also reflects the present shortcomings of existing democratic institutions in Europe and North America, the transparent hypocrisy of most career politicians, and the colorlessness of many current office-holders. If you strip away the well-scripted pageantry that tries to make presidents and prime ministers seem all-powerful and all knowing, today's democratic leaders are not a very inspiring bunch. I mean, seriously: whatever their political skills may be, can one really admire an undisciplined skirt-chaser like Bill Clinton, an insensitive, privileged bumbler like George W. Bush, or an unprincipled opportunist like Tony Blair? Does listening to David Cameron or François Hollande fill you with confidence and patriotic zeal? I still retain a certain regard for Barack Obama, who is both thoughtful and devoid of obvious character defects, but nobody is talking about him being a "transformational" president anymore. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton's lackluster performance on the campaign trail and the clown show that is the Republican primary season is just reinforcing the American public's sense that none of these people are sincere, serious, genuinely interested in the public's welfare, or deserving or admiration or respect. Instead, they're mostly out for themselves, and they would say and do almost anything if they thought it would get them elected. And if that is in fact the case (and many people clearly believe it is), then a buffoon like Trump or a grumpy outsider like Bernie Sanders are going to look appealing by comparison.

  Leaving aside the irrelevant sidepoint of whether Sanders is grumpy, the obvious follow-up points are that lacking any policy goals that in any way bear up under scrutiny, the Republican primaries have turned into a forum on leadership posturing, may the greatest of the great prevail (although it's not clear to me how this hasn't ruled Rubio out yet). Meanwhile Clinton has developed (or should I say was given?) the counter, that it is not the president but America that is great, a blessing she will surely shepherd and sustain. From where I stand, all this adds up to is a culture of narcissism -- the last thing in the world we should look to our political leaders to fix.

  Still, I'm haunted by Trump's "make America great again" -- the nagging question being, when was America ever really great? Indeed, what could that possibly mean? Sure, empires from Rome to Brittania to Nazi Germany have exulted in their brutal power while lavishing their elites with the spoils of war, but hardly any of their gains trickled down to the masses, and every last one sowed the seeds of its own destruction. What's so great about that? For that matter, what's so good? The difference is not just rhetoric: back when Lyndon Johnson was president, he had an argument with Bill Moyers over what to call his programs to lift the poor out of poverty and broaden the middle class. Moyers wanted to call this vision the Good Society, but Johnson insisted on cranking up the superlatives, giving us the Great Society. Problem is, while it's easy to think of lots of things that would make most lives better, no one could really envision what it would take to make them great. By overselling his programs, burdening them with grand gestures and empty rhetoric, he undermined them. (Same for his War on Poverty, which he actually did a much better job of executing than his Vietnam War, but which could never be won as definitively as Americans had come to expect from WWII.)

  Perhaps Sanders seems grumpy because he's stuck thinking about real problems and viable solutions instead of engaging in the great national ego stroke of our collective and/or individual greatness?

Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted:

• Martin Longman: Clinton and Libya: Especially useful for a handful of links within the text, including early pieces Longman wrote on why intervening in Libya was a bad idea and a two-part New York Times "The Libya Gamble" piece, Hillary Clinton, 'Smart Power' and a Dictator's Fall and A New Libya, With 'Very Little Time Left'.

• DR Tucker: In Like Flint: Live-Blogging the Democratic Debate in Michigan: Pretty detailed notes on who said what. I have little patience for watching these things, but reports like this impress you with the generally high caliber of thinking as well as basic decency that goes into the Democratic debates. Sure can't say the same about the Republicans.

Partial draft on Libya-Syria, couldn't work my way out of this in time:

Martin Longman: Clinton and Libya: Libya and Syria both erupted in Arab Spring demonstrations in early 2011. Both nations were ruled by governments which the US had long regarded as antagonistic (not always so, but that was certainly the default prejudice). Both were headed by strongmen, who ruled through a combination of brute force and tribal favoritism, and they responded to popular demonstrations with brutal repressive force. In both cases the clashes rapidly became militarized with some factions within the established military breaking away. In both cases the opposition was joined by jihadi-oriented islamists, whose anti-American stance muddied initial anti-regime biases in the US. While both conflicts had much in common, a few differences led the US to react differently to them. Actually, there were a range of reactions and proposals within the US government, with Obama deciding to go with the interventionists in Libya and against them (at least initially) in Syria. Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State at the time, and generally sided with the hawks. She largely got her way in Libya: the US intervened and in fairly short order Gaddafi's offensive was halted and unwound, Gaddafi was killed, and his government was dismantled. It turned out that overthrowing Gaddafi left a vacuum that soon evolved into a civil war that continues today, so it's no longer easy to view Libya as any kind of success for US policy.

Meanwhile, the initial revolts in Syria degenerated into prolonged and indecisive civil war. Obama resisted the interventionists at first, who continued to coo into his ear that if only we could step in we could put an end to the bloodshed (you know, doing so would be a humanitarian act). The US approved small scale programs to aid and abet anti-government rebels, but such programs were ineffective and only served to extend the war. The US got more active when a former anti-American group in Iraq mutated into ISIS, setting up an "Islamic State" that spanned northwestern Iraq and parts of eastern Syria. The American reaction at that point became kneejerk, so the haphazard opposition to Assad was supplemented by a more direct war against Assad's chief adversaries. The US has often been misguided in its foreign alliances, but it's hard to think of a previous case where it's acted with such unthinking callousness. Aside from her initial impulse to intervene in Syria, Clinton has at least been on the sidelines.

Music: Current count 26363 [26339] rated (+24), 413 [410] unrated (+3).

Rated count is down this week. I can't think of any particular reasons, other than that I'm getting tired and/or lazy. A lot of records stayed in the changer longer than usual. About three-quarters of the records (18 below) are 2016 releases. I didn't consciously decide to move on so much as I started running out of 2015 releases to chase down. I'm not sure how much remains unsearched of the Ye Wei Blog list, but I only see two albums from there listed below (Youth Worship is recommended to people who like that sort of thing -- I called it alt/indie but it's got a heavier sonic depth without being punkish).

The live Drive-By Truckers album is one I had been avoiding, partly as redundant but mostly because I didn't want to invest three-plus hours in a sitting. It only got one spin, but I never regretted a minute of it. Then I went back and listened to two early albums I had missed, and a best-of I probably shouldn't have bothered with. I haven't been all that happy with the group's later ATO albums, but all the source albums on New West are superb, each worth having in its own right. The problem with Greatest Hits is that I've hardly ever heard such an album that elevates less over its source material. I wound up giving it two extra plays to see whether I should knock it down, but in the end didn't. Still, not the place to start.

The Meridian Brothers compilation, a 2013 release, was featured in Robert Christgau's latest Expert Witness along with two Tom Zé albums -- one old news here (Troplicália Lixo Lógico, an A- from 2012) and a newer one (Vira Lata Na Via Láctea, from 2014), I'm listening to as I'm writing this -- and a long list of HMs from Latin America (or wherever Sidestepper comes from). That list went back as far as 2010 (Anibal Velasquez) but didn't mention two more recent Meridian Brothers albums on Soundway. I can recommend the one album on his HM list I had heard:Haiti Direct: Big Band, Mini Jazz & Twoubadou Sounds, 1960-1978 (an A- in 2014). The Rough Guides continue to drive me crazy. I slogged my way through Psychedelic Salsa [B+(**)] andPsychedelic Samba [B+(***)] a while back, but hadn't notice any of the three he reviewed.

I jotted down a list of more/less recent Latin American albums I had noticed and recommended but Christgau hadn't reviewed. Thought I'd share that with you here:

• The Gabriel Alegria Afro-Peruvian Sextet: 10 (2015, Zoho) [***]
• Bomba Estereo: Elegancia Tropical (2013, Soundway) [A-]
• Bomba Estereo: Amancer (Sony Music Latina) [***]
• Fabiano Do Nascimento: Danca Dos Tempos (2015, Now-Again) [A-]
• Fumaca Preta: Fumaca Preta (2014, Soundway) [A-]
• Aurelio Martinez: Landini (2014, Real World) [***]
• Ondatropica: Ondatropica (2012, Soundway) [A-]
• Sao Paulo Underground: Tres Cabecas Loucuras (2011, Cuneiform) [A-]
• Sonzeira: Brasil Bam Bam Bam (2014, Talkin' Loud/Virgin) [***]
• Tribu Baharu: Pa'l Mas Exigente Bailador (2015, self-released) [A-]
• Mati Zundel: Amazonico Gravitante (2012, Waxploitation/ZZK) [A-]
• Cartagena! Curro Fuentes and the Big Band Cumbia and Descarga Sound of Colombia 1962-72 (2011, Soundway) [A]
• Jukebox Mambo: Rumba and Afro-Latin Accented Rhythm and Blues 1949-1960 (Jazzman) [***]
• Palenque Palenque! Champeta Criolla and Afro Roots in Colombia 1975-91 (Soundway) [A-]
• The Rough Guide to Psychedelic Samba (2015, World Music Network) [***]

Of course, I'm no expert. I only find out about these discs by accident, don't have much back catalogue to compare to (even compared to, say, African music), don't follow Spanish or Portuguese. There are probably more albums I have misfiled somewhere else, like under jazz or electronica. (I had Fumaca Preta filed under Europe -- its leader is described as Portuguese-Venezuelan.) I skipped over most Latin jazz. I also used 2010 as a cutoff date -- there's a good deal more on older lists.

New records rated this week:

• Steve Barta: Symphonic Arrangement: Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano Trio (2015 [2016], Steve Barta Music): [cd]: B
• Rich Brown: Abeng (2015 [2016], self-released): [cd]: B+(**)
• Cowboys & Frenchmen: Rodeo (2015, Outside In Music): [cdr]: B+(*)
• The Drive-By Truckers: It's Great to Be Alive! (2014 [2015], ATO, 3CD): [r]: A-
• Moppa Elliott: Still Up in the Air (2015 [2016], Hot Cup): [cd]: B+(**)
• David Fiuczynski: Flam! Blam! Pan-Asian MicroJam (2015 [2016], Rare Noise): [cdr]: B
• Socrates Garcia Latin Jazz Orchestra: Back Home (2015 [2016], Summit): [cd]: B
• Lafayette Harris Jr.: Hangin' With the Big Boys (2013 [2016], Airmen): [cd]: B+(***)
• Joseph Howell: Time Made to Swing (2015 [2016], Summit): [cd]: B+(***)
• Krakauer's Ancestral Groove: Checkpoint (2015 [2016], Table Pounding): [cd]: B+(***)
• Julian Lage: Arclight (2015 [2016], Mack Avenue): [cd]: B+(*)
• Los Bosnáis: Nordeste (2015, Elefant, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Kirk MacDonald: Symmetry (2013 [2016], Addo): [cd]: B+(*)
• Meridian Brothers: Los Suicidas (2015, Soundway, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• Dave Miller: Old Door Phantoms (2015 [2016], Ears & Eyes): [cd]: B-
• Christian Perez: Anima Mundi (2015 [2016], CPM): [cd]: B
• Richard Poole/Marilyn Crispell/Gary Peacock: In Motion (2014 [2016], Intakt): [cdr]: B+(***)
• Alfredo Rodriguez: Tocororo (2015 [2016], Mack Avenue/Qwest): [cd]: B+(**)
• Sidestepper: Supernatural Love (2016, Real World): [r]: B+(*)
• The U.S. Army Blues: Live at Blues Alley (2015 [2016], self-released): [cd]: C
• Youth Worship: LP1 (2015, Self Harm): [r]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• Cheryl Bentyne: Lost Love Songs (2003-11 [2016], Summit): [cd]: B+(***)
• DJ Katapila: Trotro (2009 [2016], Awesome Tapes From Africa): [r]: B+(***)
• Meridian Brothers: Devoción (Works 2005-2011) (2005-11 [2013], Staubgold): [r]: A-

Old music rated this week:

• Drive-By Truckers: Gangstabilly (1998, Soul Dump): [r]: B+(***)
• Drive-By Truckers: Alabama Ass Whuppin' (1999 [2000], Second Heaven): [r]: B+(***)
• Drive-By Truckers: Ugly Buildings, Whores, and Politicians: Greatest Hits 1998-2009 (1998-2009 [2011], New West): [r]: A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Cheryl Bentyne: Lost Love Songs (Summit)
• Renato Braz: Saudade (Living Music): June 7
• Andy Brown Quartet: Direct Call (Delmark)
• Rex Cadwallader/Mike Aseta/Arti Dixson/Tiffany Jackson: A Balm in Gilead (Stanza USA): May 6
• Taylor Cook: The Cook Book (self-released): March 18
• Patrick Cornelius: While We're Still Young (Whirlwind)
• The Dominican Jazz Project (Summit)
• Danny Green Trio: Altered Narratives (OA2)
• Lafayette Harris Jr.: Hangin' With the Big Boys (Airmen): May 6
• Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra With Wynton Marsalis: The Abyssinian Mass (Blue Engine, 2CD+DVD): March 18
• Gabriela Martina: No White Shoes (self-released)
• Never Group: Zhenya Strigalev (Whirlwind)
• Roberta Piket: One for Marian: Celebrating Marian McPartland (Thirteenth Note): advance, June 10
• Leslie Pintchik: True North (Pintch Hard): March 25
• Henry Threadgill Zooid: Old Locks and Irregular Verbs (Pi): April 1
• Marcos Varela: San Ygnacio (Origin): March 18
• Jeff Williams: Outlier (Whirlwind)

The Wichita Eagle was a veritable catalog of horrors yesterday. I'm working off hard copy, but if you hurry you might find the URIs online atKansas.com. Here are some of the things that caught my eye (or nose, as the case may be).

• Page 1: Wichita school district officials will consider staff cuts. This story has gone around the block several times before. When Sam Brownback was elected governor in 2010, he passed a state income tax cut, promising it would act as "a shot of adrenaline" straight into the heart of the Kansas economy. (To reduce his credibility, he even hired Arthur Laffer to study and recommend the cut.) The most notable thing about the cut wasn't that it favored the already rich: it zeroed out all income taxes on "small business owners," i.e., those with "Chapter S" businesses, e.g., Wichita billionaires Charles Koch and Phil Ruffin. The result was that tax revenues fell far short of spending, so Brownback tried balancing the books with spending cuts, while the state legislature raised taxes on sales and "sins" (like tobacco) -- Kansas now has the highest sales tax on food in the country, and it's even higher in many counties since they've been encouraged to levy their own sales taxes (as opposed to, say, property taxes). So state and local government have been severely pinched for five years now.

  To complicate matters, there's a clause in the Kansas state constitution which says that the state government has a responsibility to provide adequate funding for local school districts. Many school districts have repeatedly sued the state for failing to honor the constitution, and the Kansas Supreme Court has repeatedly sided with them, ordering the state to pony up more money. A couple years back the legislature came up with what they called a "block funding" scheme to satisfy a court order, which promptly was challenged and ruled unconstitutional. This year the legislature is considering various bills to replace the sitting Supreme Court with one more to their liking. (To be fair, the Justices have been remiss in dying, like Antonin Scalia had the decency to do, so Brownback hasn't had much opportunity to leave his mark, as he has done to virtually every corner of the state.)

• Page 1: Westar seeking rate hike for homes, cuts for businesses: Wester is the local electric company, formerly known as Kansas Gas & Electric before it got conglomerated. Like most electric companies, they are a natural monopoly, and as such are regulated by a state utility board. Every year Westar asks for ridiculous rate increases, and every year they get beat down to something slightly less ridiculous. However, Brownback has managed to restaff that board with crony appointments, and sometime last year then decided to fire the staff that reviews the rate proposals and rededicate themselves to fighting against federal government regulation of utilities, leaving those utilities free to gouge Kansas consumers. Well, it turns out that Westar is taking full advantage of this "regulatory capture" and proposing a 31% increase in residential electric rates. They're willing to give some of this increase back in the form of rate cuts to large business users -- after all, you can't be too grateful to "job creators" in Kansas -- but that looks pretty paltry by comparison. Like I said, normally when you read about rate increase proposals, you know it's a game and most of the hit will be knocked down, but this time it's different: the "regulators" having surrendered, there is no one to stand up for Kansas consumers, so the predators will feast.

• Page 2: Police: Hutch students planned to detonate pipe bombs in school: Juveniles, ages 14 and 15, no names released.

• Page 2: Hesston police chief: 'I am not a hero': There was a mass shooting at the Excel factory in Hesston (a small, mostly Mennonite, town less than an hour north of Wichita) a week or two ago. The shooter killed three and wounded more than a dozen, before the police chief fatally wounded the shooter. Needless to say, another triumph for gun rights in Kansas.

• Page 5: Kansas bills seek to reduce early-term birth costs: Kansas has its own privatized Medicaid service ("KanCare"), which costs the state a lot of money. The legislature has been looking for ways to trim costs, so they hired someone to study the situation, and they've come up with long lists of ways to reduce costs by denying services they regard as inessential. One of these is to outlaw cesarean deliveries of premature babies (any under 39 weeks). Presumably there is still some way to establish a medical necessity, but this adds a whole new layer of legal interference with women's reproductive care. (Of course, a more effective way to save money would be to allow, or even encourage, covered women to opt for abortions, but it's taboo to even mention that in the state legislature.) Another proposed law would "require physicians to offer birth risk factor screenings for women in the first trimester to determine whether a pregnant woman uses tobacco, consumers alcohol, abuses substances, suffers from depression or is a victim of domestic violence." (No info on what happens if she does.)

• Page 6: Old Town shooting a test of new chief's approach to policing: Another mass shooting, the first since Wichita got a new Chief of Police a few weeks ago.

• Page 6: 4 people shot to death in KCK; fifth killing in mid-Missouri may be linked: Kansas City, Kansas. Shooting deaths there hardly ever get reported here, so I guess 4 must be the magic number.

• Page 6: Trump wins Mich., Miss.; Democrats split states: So, Tuesday's presidential primary election results get buried deep in the paper, a single column about eight inches long, under a head no larger than "Prepaid card users, under scrutiny, find tax refunds frozen" and "Drug in Sharapova case used by Soviet troops in 1980s." The night's big story, barely mentioned, was Bernie Sanders' surprise upset of Hillary Clinton in Michigan (a state 538 gave her a 21-point poll advantage and a 99% chance of winning). On the other hand, they make no mention of Trump's third win in Hawaii, or Cruz's solo win in Idaho, or that Marco Rubio got zero delegates from those states.

• Page 12: Sports Authority default ripples through sporting-goods industry: One store in Wichita, now shuttered, employees sacked. Another overleveraged chain bites the dust.

• Page 13: Two Sedgwick County officials back measure that would restrict property tax increases: Not enough for Sedgwick County Commissioners Jim Howell and Karl Peterjohn to not pass property tax increases, they want to use their limited time in office to lobby the state legislature to prohibit future tax increases -- otherwise, like, future county commissioners might try to use county and local government to, like, do things for people.

• Page 13 (Opinion): Cal Thomas: Culture beast to blame for Trump's rise: Nearly everything in this column is absurdly wrong, but my eyes were drawn to this paragraph:

  On the other side of the political fence, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton feed into the entitlement mentality that the government exists to give you stuff and take care of you. Democrats have exploited race and class for political advantage, deepening the divide between whites and blacks (and increasingly Hispanics), as well as the three classes -- poor, middle class and wealthy. If the left really cared about African-Americans, wouldn't that core Democratic constituency be better off now than they have ever been, given the amount of money spent on social programs supposedly created to improve their lot in life?

  First point: the United States government does exist to "give us stuff" (the wording in the US Constitution is "promote the general welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty"). What Thomas calls an"entitlement mentality" is what most of us think of as the basic rights of citizenship -- one of which is that we elect, and therefore effectively own, the government. If the government is ours, why shouldn't we use it for our own benefit? Where Sanders and (even) Clinton run afoul of Thomas is that they encourage us to take advantage of our own citizenship and use our votes to increase "the general welfare." On the surface, it's hard to understand how people like Thomas can even write this nonsense, but that they can gives you an idea of how completely they are enclosed in the right-wing media bubble.

  Second point: Thomas remains a captive of one of the right wing's oldest and deepest cons: the notion that helping people hurts them. Conservatives love this con because they hate sharing: it makes them feel especially virtuous, and if the disadvantaged fall for it they might go away blaming themselves for a system that is rigged against them. A corollary to this point is the belief that liberal efforts to improve the general welfare of Afro-Americans have only hurt them (and that the Democrats are hypocrites or just plain cruel for pursuing such policies). The problem with this point and corollary is not just that they're cynical and self-serving: it's that they're flat out falsehoods. The fact is that most Afro-Americans are much better off now than they were before the Great Society programs, before the Civil Rights laws, before the New Deal. It's certainly true that much more could be done, that there is much room for improvement, but you can't begin to justify an argument that those programs haven't helped. (As I'm writing this, one example of this is the full-color Berkshire Hathaway ad on the opposite page, showing showing a prosperous-looking black couple talking to a real estate agent in front of some rather upscale suburban housing. Ads like that didn't exist when I was a child. You can readily find examples elsewhere. For example, this piece was written to dispell misconceptions Sanders' supporters may have about blacks, but could enlighten Thomas as well.)

  Third point: blaming the Democrats for exploiting "race and class for political advantage" and "deepening the divide between whites and blacks (and increasingly Hispanics)" is, well, obscene. Class exists because one group owns property and makes its income from rents and profits, and another only makes a living by selling its labor, and that difference puts those two classes in conflict with one another. Political parties didn't invent capitalism; they arose because of it. What Thomas is really saying is that it would be good for his side if the other side never talked about class conflict. Race complicates this only a little bit: most Afro-Americans came to America as slaves, were held as such until 1865, and even after emancipation were discriminated against in ways designed to maintain them as a low-wage labor pool. Slaveholders, in turn, used the ever-present threat of slave revolts to organize poor white militias, a division that persists to this day, undermining class solidarity which could improve the lot of both black and white working classes. Similar divisions have long existed between native and immigrant workers -- again something that owners have often exploited to increase their advantages in class struggle.

  Thomas is not objecting to class, racial, or ethnic divisions -- indeed, he views them as immutable, the very foundation of his ideal conservative order. What he objects to is any possibility that the people not favored by his ideal hierarchy should become conscious and realize that change is possible -- that the general welfare can, in fact, becomg more general.

• Page 13: Letters to the Editor: One letter points out the value of burying electrical lines rather than the cheaper (and much more outage-prone) stringing of lines from poles -- perhaps something that could be added to Sanders' infrasructure program, but that's hard to do when the power grid is trusted to predators like Westar. One letter touted Sanders' supporters, and two more had praise for Ted Cruz. Consider this paragraph:

  Beck opined that unless Republicans quit their infighting and unite behind a principled Republican conservative such as Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, they will lose the election to an unworthy Democrat, who will follow President Obama's job-killing policies.

  It still shocks me when I find people so totally ignorant of the facts. GW Bush was the job killer, winding up with negative job growth after eight years after his short-term housing bubble gains were wiped out when the bubble burst. Obama, on the other hand, has seen America steadily add jobs after an initial dip bequeathed by Bush, and the net result as been sharply positive (despite a loss in public sector jobs thanks to Republican slagging on government spending, especially at the state and local level -- remember Brownback?). In fact, ever since WWII Democratic presidents have average over twice the growth rates of Republicans (despite huge increases in deficit spending by Reagan and the Bushes). I'll leave it to you to look up the numbers, but believe me, the differences are huge.

  There is also a letter on Trump:

  Trump is what the base of the Republican Party has been clamoring for -- nay, demanding -- for decades and has given an outlet to racists, bigots and misogynists who blame political correctness on their inability to practice these openly. So why is the party surprised?

  Well, because Republicans' capacity for self-delusion is boundless -- almost as great as their knack for passing the buck (for example, see Bobby Jindal Blames President Obama for Donald Trump's Rise; it's really pretty galling how easily Republicans fling about "job-killing," especially with "Obamacare" -- but never with job-massacres like NAFTA or TPP). Leaving Trump aside for the moment, I've seen Ted Cruz talk passionately about stagnating wages, and then in the next breath proposing to abolish the IRS to solve the problem. How is that supposed to work? If the federal government has no facility for collecting taxes, how can it afford to do anything, much less encircle the globe in military bases armed to the hilt with state-of-the-art weapons systems? Without future tax income the federal government won't even be able to borrow money. Printing more money doesn't begin to solve the problem. And then what happens to the 20-25% of the workforce who lose their government jobs? And the millions more who lose Social Security and Medicare? You know, I hate taxes too, but I can't pretend nothing bad will happen if you abolish the IRS.

  As for Trump, Republicans have plenty of reason to be embarrassed by him, but the actual complaints coming from people like Thomas and Jindal and everyone from Glenn Beck and Bill Kristol to David Brooks and Mitt Romney boil down to two points: one is that Trump deviates from (and is not seen as a true believer in) the conservative dogma that right-wingers have spent millions (possibly billions) of dollars drumming into the movement, and the other is that Trump isn't wholly dependent on said right-wingers -- so they fear he's liable to go off script.

For many years we suffered bad politicians with bad ideas and somehow muddled through. Even now, people my age are more likely to die quietly than to see their world descend into dystopia. But I have little faith now that young people today will be able to muddle through even as we did. Throughout much of my lifetime the left tried to organize on the basis of helping other people -- something noble but when push came to shove not exactly dependable. But with the Sanders campaign what I see is young people mobilizing to defend themselves against a future full of peril. Meanwhile, when you look at newsdays like the above, that peril appears not just as something looming like global warming but as something frightfully urgent.

A couple quick links on the election:

• FiveThirtyEight: What Went Down in the March 8 Presidential Primaries: Live blog from the night, closed out before anything from Hawaii reported, so not really the whole night. They spent a lot of time patting themselves on the back for nailing the Republican contests, and more time complaining about the bad polling data that screwed up their 99% prediction of a Clinton win in Michigan. For more of the latter, their Carl Bialik added a post-mortem, Why the Polls Missed Bernie Sanders's Michigan Upset. The reason that makes the most sense to me was that Sanders really hit the right notes with the Flint debate and the Detroit town hall events, although that's too subjective for these guys (they complain about not having any post-event polls, an excuse they also used with Cruz in Iowa). The one I don't believe at all is that over-confident Clinton supporters switched to the Republican primary to stop Trump. That doesn't make sense on any level, and exit polls tell us that only 4% of identified Democrats crossed over anyway so it couldn't have been much of an effect (sure, 4% would have tilted the election to Clinton, but I really suspect that most of that 4% crossed to vote for Trump, not against him, and I doubt that Trump-leaning Democrats would have preferred Clinton over Sanders -- unless they were super hawkish).

• Nate Silver: Marco Rubio Never Had a Base: Rubio finished below the delegate threshold in all four Republican primaries on Tuesday, so he wound up with zero delegates. He trailed Kasich (and Cruz) in Michigan, so wound up fourth there. He significantly underperformed expectations in all four states. He's trailing in 538's poll average in his home state of Florida to Trump 30.6-39.9% (or 24.7-40.2%, depending on which chart you use; his best recent polls are 30-38% and 32-42%, but others are 22-42%, 20-43%, and 22-45%). He's dropped from 2nd to 3rd in all recent polls in North Carolina. He's still a bit better in Illinois (20.4%), but that reflects more on Trump (33.0%) and Cruz (19.5%). Silver has some ideas on why Rubio hasn't done well, but they don't go far toward explaining why he's tanked so much lately. I'd say it's basically because he's a placeholder -- a way of saying "none of the above." Let's face it, no one really likes him, even if they think they should. Silver trots out one revealing bit of data: Rubio's best districts so far are all very Democratic. Good chance what those voters like about Rubio is that they see him as someone they may be able to slip him past a more liberal electorate. Sure, he's a phony, but their phony, and no one doubts that if he wins he'll do as he's told.

  This is probably as good a place as any to mention two popular memes that came out of Super Tuesday and intensified this week. One is the proposition that if conservatives really want to stop Trump, the only choice they have left is to back Cruz. Sure, he's possibly the most toxic politician in America right now, but with him you get the whole package: a doctrinaire conservative even more principled (i.e., extreme) than Rubio and Kasich, and a guy who appeals to the basest instincts of the party base (much like Trump minus the flim flam). The second is that Rubio should cut a deal where he withdraws, throws his support to Cruz, and joins the ticket as Cruz's vice president. It's amusing to think that Rubio thinks he has supporters so loyal that now they would follow him into Cruz's arms when it was Cruz (and Trump) that drove them to Rubio in the first place. He's a politician with no intrinsic appeal, and it's good that's becoming obvious to everyone.

  If you want to read more, there's Gary Legum: The Marco Rubio post-mortem: How a supposedly ready-made GOP nominee crashed and burned.

• Bill Curry: It should be over for Hillary: Party elites and MSNBC can't proper her up after Bernie's Michigan miracle: Few people remember this but when Eugene McCarthy ran against Lyndon Johnson in 1968, McCarthy actually lost to Johnson in New Hampshire. Nonetheless, that he came as close as he did rattled Johnson so severely that he dropped out of the race almost immediately. He could see that McCarthy would keep gaining traction, and while he could almost certainly have still won at the convention -- Hubert Humphrey in fact did without running in a single Democratic primary -- he didn't want to go out like that. I think of this not only because it was one of my formative political experiences but because Hillary Clinton started this campaign in every bit as dominant a perch as Johnson had in 1968. Her nomination was so pre-ordained that virtually no mainstream Democrat even considered a run against her. (Martin O'Malley ran a very half-hearted campaign, having positioned himself as Hillary's backup plan. Sanders and Lincoln Chafee weren't even Democrats, and Jim Webb wasn't much of one.) So why does Clinton, unlike Johnson, truck on after repeated primaries -- both in 2008 where she kept her losing campaign going all the way to the convention, and so far in 2016 -- reveal her to be a flawed and vulnerable candidate? Could just be hunger, but could also be a sense of entitlement. One thing it certainly involves is a willingness to win ugly, especially if that's the only way she can do it. Curry points out some of the obvious problems. A couple paragraphs, the first from a section headed "The old politics is over," the second from the end:

  I often talk to Democrats who don't know Obama chose not to raise the minimum wage as president even though he had the votes for it; that he was willing to cut Medicare and Social Security and chose not to prosecute Wall Street crimes or pursue ethics reforms in government. They don't know he dropped the public option or the aid he promised homeowners victimized by mortgage lenders. They don't know and don't want to know. Their affection for Bill and Barack -- and their fear of Republicans -- run too deep. [ . . . ]

  In the end, thinking only tactically makes you a bad tactician. When revolution's in the air polls, money and ads mean far less. Reporters who know nothing else can't conceive how voters choosing among a democratic socialist, a pay-to-play politician and a fascist might pick door number one. They bought Hillary's myth of inevitability, but as Lawrence of Arabia told Prince Ali in the desert, nothing is written. If Democratic voters really use their heads, they'll see through the tactical arguments just like the voters of Michigan did -- and then walk into voting booths all over America and vote their hearts. Then there will be change.

  The first paragraph reminds me of disappointment: that voting for Obama in 2008 was a vote for change, but in fact what we got was a president and administration that was dedicated to preserving the liberal-conservative tradition in America, to not rocking the boat and not changing anything -- in short, the sort of business-as-usual administration we expected from Clinton. Looking back, it's easy to see that we could have done much worse, but we also could have done better. Now we're being offered the same-old, same-old we rejected in 2008, and we're being told first that it's inevitable -- that one is proving flimsy -- and that Clinton is the only one able to stave off the barbarian hordes. I saw David Corn on TV last night arguing that Hillary's been "tested by fire" over thirty years, while Sanders has never had to face the sort of assaults the Republicans will surely bring against him if he's the nominee. Still, it's not as if Hillary hasn't been burnt a few times along the way, and he overlooks that Sanders has actually held elective office for thirty-some years, whereas Hillary only served one unfinished Senate term, one that was gift-wrapped for her in a safe state. Maybe Sanders is tougher than the pundits think. Maybe he just has less unsavory laundry to air out.

  Curry also wrote Hillary's inevitability lie: Why the media and party elites are rushing to nominate the weakest candidate.

• Andy Schmookler: Who Is the Better Bet to Beat Trump, Hillary or Bernie?: Doesn't offer a clear cut argument for Sanders, but the argument for Hillary isn't very clear cut either. (Curry, by the way, subtitled the piece above "She's the one Dem even Trump beats.")

• Charles Pierce: Why Bernie Won Michigan: One reason was that Clinton tried to claim Sanders' vote against the TARP fund bank bailout bill was a vote against the later auto industry bailout that Obama worked out using TARP funds:

  But, as I talked to more and more people around Flint, I got the sense that the resonance of the exchange was not what HRC and her campaign thought it would be. The UAW members I talked to clearly considered HRC's use of the auto bailout against Sanders to be at best a half-truth, and a cynical attempt to win their support, and they were offended by what they saw as a glib attempt to turn the state's economic devastation into a campaign weapon. These were people who watched the auto industry flee this city and this state, and they knew full well how close the country's remaining auto industry came to falling apart completely in 2008 and 2009. They knew this issue because they'd lived it, and they saw through what the HRC campaign was trying to do with the issue.

  Pierce also has a piece about Clinton trying to red bait Sanders over old comments he made about Cuba and Nicaragua: Bernie Sanders Said Something We Weren't Ready to Hear Last Night:

  The pundits are right that Sanders' statements back in the 1980s are fertile ground for conservative ratfcking -- look how easy it was for HRC to turn them around on him -- and likely would be used to make a meal out of him in a general election. The biggest problem that Sanders has here, though, is that he told a truth that we're still not prepared to hear. That Elliott Abrams has not been fitted with a leper's bell yet is proof enough of that.

  Still, I can't help but think that Obama has painted himself red, white and blue in patriotic homilies, fervently striving to steer any attention away from the fact that as a black American he might have had a somewhat more nuanced view of this country's legacy in the world. Note that I'm not saying he does, but no matter what he's said or done it hasn't cut any mustard with the rabid right, who have spent the last eight years frantically trying to deny that he's even a real American. So what crime is Sanders committing here by admitting the truth, and offering lessons from history as a guide for future policy? Merely that he will be attacked for not parroting common myths. But isn't the fact that he hasn't been pilloried yet for embracing Socialism at least a suggestion that the sanctities of the high priests are slipping? What ultimately undermines Obama and Clinton here is the widespread (and I'm pretty sure unfounded) belief that they are not sincere. But by not falling for the homilies, Sanders is showing that he is sincere, honest, truthful, and trustworthy -- and when he doesn't get hurt by doing so, that starts to free us from the dead weight of retrograde ideas. I have to admit, I myself always cringe when I hear Sanders' line about "a political revolution." I consider myself well to his left, and I would never use the r-word, partly to be circumspect but mostly because I don't consider it a real or even particularly desirable possibility. But then a funny thing happens every time I hear the line: applause. And I have to admit, I'm not the sort of political purist who makes a fuss against something worthwhile that seems to be working.

• Sarah Leonard: Which Women Support Hillary (and Which Women Can't Afford To): I saw this piece a while back (posted Feb. 17), and the title resonated through the Kansas caucuses and into Michigan.

Could go on much longer, but let's close with a Matt Taibbi tweet:

Struggling to find the comp for that Trump victory speech. Ron Jeremy meets Stalin?

If anyone out there is too culturally illiterate to get the point, Ron Jeremy is a pudgy porn actor with modest skills as a comic, perhaps best known for waging swordfights with his erect penis. Stalin was head of the Soviet Union from 1929-1953, during which time he had nearly all of his political opponents killed off, some after elaborate show trials, at least one by an icepick-wielding assassin. He was famed for giving marathon speeches, frequently interrupted by long stretches of applause. It's been observed that the reason the applause lasted so long was that no one wanted to be seen as the first person to stop clapping. Sorry if you flash on both images next time you hear Trump speak, but I know I will.

Not much time for my usual weekly survey, but I did find a few pieces on the Donald Trump/Fascism axis, and for your convenience I've added a bit of forecasting for Tuesday's elections at the bottom.

• Josh Marshall: Someone Will Die: Reflecting on recent incidents at Trump rallies, violent and merely threatening or maybe just disruptive:

  For all the talk about Mussolini, let alone Hitler, George Wallace is the best analog in the last century of American politics -- the mix of class politics and racist incitement, the same sort of orchestrated ratcheting up of conflict between supporters and protestors. As all of this has unfolded over the course of the day there have been numerous instances of Trump supporters calling for protestors to "go back to Africa" and another on video calling on them to "go to fucking Auschwitz."

  Is the man invoking Nazi concentration camps in that video an anti-Semite or just a ramped hater in a frenzy of provocation? I'm not sure we know. And as I'll argue in a moment, in a climate of incitement and crowd action, it doesn't necessarily matter.

  It may sound like hyperbole. But this is the kind of climate of agitation and violence where someone will end up getting severely injured or killed. I do not say that lightly.

  Actually, more than Wallace this reminds me of the Rolling Stones at Altamont, hiring Hell's Angels for "security" then playing "Sympathy for the Devil" as they killed a fan. That's the sort of thing that happens when a cavalier attitude toward violence makes it cool.

  I'll add that I don't particularly approve of protesting at Trump events. That's partly because I don't regard him as in any way unique in the Republican Party today -- he's certainly not the "worst of the worst" policy-wise, although he does seem to be the most careless and cavalier regarding the racist violence they all more or less pander to. I do understand that the people who protest Trump are concerned to nip his attitude in the bud, and to make it clear that his kind of incivility will always be challenged in America today -- although I also think it's hard to make that point in the heat of a rally. But also I think there's a fuzzy line where protest becomes harrassment -- indeed, I think anti-abortion activists often cross that line -- and I worry it might backfire. Marshall concludes:

  The climate Trump is creating at his events is one that not only disinhibits people who normally act within acceptable societal norms. He is drawing in, like moths to a flame, those who most want to act out on their animosities, drives and beliefs. It is the kind of climate where someone will eventually get killed.

  I'm reminded that one of the defining characteristics of fascism is how readily, in the very early days in Italy and Germany, fascists resorted to violence against people they regarded as enemies (which is to say pretty much everyone).

• David Atkins: Donald Trump is Merely the Symptom. The Republican Party Itself is the Disease: We on the left have long had an acute sense of the smell of fascism -- possibly the most basic definition is that fascists are the people who want to kill you, so we're talking less about political theory than existential anxiety. It's long been clear to me that there are elements of fascism in the American right, but I've been more focused on the anti-democratic manipulations of the elites than on the swelling tide of hatred they've stirred up. Still, interesting to read this:

  We no longer have to speculate whether fascism, in Sinclair Lewis' famous words, would come to America wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. We already know what its beginnings look like in the form of Trump rallies, which are carrying an increasingly violent, overtly racist, authoritarian aura strongly reminiscent of the 1930s in Germany or Italy.

  Those comparisons were once the province of liberal activists or traffic-seeking headline writers. No longer. The incipient racist violence has reached such a fever pitch that a Trump rally in Chicago had to be canceled entirely. It's one thing to talk in theoretical or strictly political terms about Trump's authoritarian behavior, his effect on the Republican Party generally or the potential feasibility of Trump's policy proposals. But the influence of Trumpism on the country is already so obviously toxic and dangerous that it must be called out and mitigated before people start getting seriously hurt or killed.

  That's not the fault of Donald Trump. It's the fault of the GOP itself, for three main reasons.

  First, the Republican Party abandoned the notion of shared truths and shared reality. They set up an alternative media empire and convinced their voters that every set of authorities from journalists to scientists were eggheaded liberals not to be trusted. They peddled conspiracy theories and contrafactual dogmas of all stripes -- from the notion that climate scientists were all lying about global warming in order to get more grant money, to the notion that tax cuts for the rich grow the economy and pay for themselves. Their base became convinced that no one could be trusted except for the loudest and angriest voices who told them exactly what they wanted to hear. Fox News, talk radio and the Drudge Report became the only trusted media sources. But at a certain point those outlets stopped becoming the media arm of the Republican Party; instead, the Republican Party became the legislative arm of those media outlets. It should come as no surprise that when the Republican establishment seemed unable to deliver on its promises to their voters, conspiracy theory peddlers new and old from Breitbart to Drudge would turn on the establishment and convince the GOP masses that Fox News was the new CNN, just another liberal arm of the media not to be trusted.

  Second is, of course, the Southern Strategy of exploiting racial resentment. That worked just fine for Republicans while whites were the dominant majority under no particular threat. It was a great way to win elections in much of the country while discounting voters who couldn't do them much damage. As long as the rhetoric remained, in Lee Atwater's words, "abstract" enough, the tensions created wouldn't boil over into anything much more damaging than the slow, quiet destruction of generations of minority communities via legislatively enforced instituional racism. But as whites have become a smaller and smaller part of the electorate, that Southern Strategy has not only cost the GOP elections by throwing away the minority vote; it has also heightened the fears and tensions of the formerly dominant white voters it courts. What was once quiet and comfortable racism has become a loud and violent cry of angst. That, again, isn't Donald Trump's fault. It's the Republican Party's.

  Third and most important is the effect of conservative economics. For decades laissez-faire objectivism has hurt mostly the poorest and least educated communities in America. Due mostly to institutional racism, those have tended in the past to be communities of color. The deregulated economy simply didn't need their labor so it tossed them aside, leaving squalor and a host of social problems in its wake. This was convenient for those peddling racist theories, as it laid the blame for drug and family problems in those communities directly on the individuals involved -- and by extension on their racial background.

  I would phrase these last two points slightly differently. Republicans not only swept up white southerners who had grown up as the supposedly top dogs in a racially segregated society. They also appealed to new suburbanites in the north, again white, many Catholic, many moving up the economic ladder, hoping (among other things) to escape what they viewed as the decay of the (increasingly black) central cities. These were the so-called Reagan Democrats, and they were recruited through ploys as tinged with racism as the Southern Strategy.

  I would also point out that Republican economic orthodoxy did more to destroy the middle class than it did to pillage the already poor. They used a two-prong strategy to slide their agenda past an unwary and somewhat oblivious base: on the one hand, they convinced their target voters that the were only for those other people and that real Americans like themselves didn't need to be propped up by the government -- indeed, they made it a point of pride that they weren't; on the other, they made it possible for their audience to live beyond their means by offering credit so things like education and housing, previously "affordable" thanks to government programs, could still be had. They realized that most people don't recognize a declining standard of living until it smacks them in the face, and even then they assured you that your misfortune was you own damn fault -- not something government could (let alone should) help you out with.

  Tuned up a bit, this is pretty accurate, but still missing a key fourth point: war. You may think that war's good for "absolutely nothing," but it's proven very useful for Republicans. For one thing it creates a false unity of us-against-them, which they can exploit with God-and-country shtick; it undermines democracy, which they fear and dread anyway; more importantly, it debases the value of human life, elevating killing to a patriotic act, and tempting us to think that the solution to all our problems is to kill supposed enemies; needless to add, it also opens up incredible opportunities for graft; it forestalls any pressure to collaboratively work on worldwide problems, to shift from competition to cooperation. It also turns out that it's been pretty easy to sucker Democrats into supporting war, which both saddles them with insupportable costs and alienates them from their base.

• Michael Tomasky: The Dangerous Election: Written before "Super Tuesday" this has some details that have been overtaken by events -- one certainly wouldn't write about Rubio's nomination path today -- but it's worth quoting his own three-item explanation for Trump's domination of the Republican Party (it is both more succinct and more narrowly political than Atkins'):

  The fury that led to Trump's rise has three main sources. It begins with talk radio, especially Rush Limbaugh, and all the conservative media -- Fox News and, now, numerous blogs and websites and even hotly followed Twitter and Instagram feeds -- that have for years served up a steady series of stories aimed at riling up conservatives. It has produced a campaign politics that is by now almost wholly one of splenetic affect and gesture. If you've watched any of the debates, you've seen it. The lines that get by far the biggest applause rarely have anything to do with any vision for the country save military strength and victory; they are execrations against what Barack Obama has done to America and what Hillary Clinton plans to do to it.

  A second important factor has been the post-Citizens United elevation of megarich donors like the Koch brothers and Las Vegas's Sheldon Adelson to the level of virtual party king-makers. The Kochs downplay the extent of their political spending, but whether it's $250 million or much more than that, it's an enormous sum, and they and Adelson and the others exist almost as a third political party.

  When one family and its allies control that much money, and those running want it spent supporting them (although Trump has matched them), what candidate is going to take a position counter to that family and the network of which it is a part? The Kochs are known, for example, to be implacably opposed to any recognition that man-made climate change is a real danger. So no Republican candidate will buck that. [ . . . ]

  This fear of losing a primary from the right is the third factor that has created today's GOP, and it is frequently overlooked in the political media. [ . . . ]

  Few Americans understand just how central this reality is to our current dysfunction. All the pressure Republicans feel is from the right, although they seldom say so -- no Republican fears a challenge from the center, because there are few voters and no money there. And this phenomenon has no antipode on the Democratic side, because there exists no effective group of left-wing multimillionaires willing to finance primary campaigns against Democrats who depart from doctrine. Very few Democrats have to worry about such challenges. Republicans everywhere do.

  This creates an ethos of purity whose impact on the presidential race is obvious. The clearest example concerns Rubio and his position on immigration. He supported the bipartisan bill the Senate passed in 2013. He obviously did so because he calculated that the bill would pass both houses and he would be seen as a great leader. But the base rebelled against it, and so now Rubio has reversed himself on the question of a path to citizenship for undocumented aliens and taken a number of other positions that are designed to mollify the base but would surely be hard to explain away in a general election were he to become the nominee -- no rape and incest exceptions on abortion, abolition of the federal minimum wage, and more.

• Bob Dreyfuss: Will the Donald Rally the Militias and the Right-to-Carry Movement?: OK, that makes three straight pieces on Donald Trump and fascism, a subject we'll have to call "trending." This one consults Richard J Evans' The Coming of the Third Reich -- premature antifascist that I am, that occurred to me more than a decade ago, but I have to admit I never got around to reading the book:

  If you decide to read the book, try doing what I did: in two columns in your head draw up a list of similarities and differences between the United States today and Weimar Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s.

  In this edgy moment in America, the similarities, of course, tend to jump out at you. As Trump repeatedly pledges to restore American greatness, so Hitler promised to avenge Germany's humiliation in World War I. As Trump urges his followers, especially the white working class, to blame their troubles on Mexican immigrants and Muslims, so Hitler whipped up an anti-Semitic brew. As Trump -- ironically, for a billionaire -- attacks Wall Street and corporate lobbyists for rigging the economy and making puppets out of politicians, so Hitler railed against Wall Street and the City of London, along with their local allies in Germany, for burdening his country with a massive post-World War I, Versailles Treaty-imposed reparations debt and for backing the Weimar Republic's feckless center-right parties. (Think: the Republican Party today.) As with Trump's China-bashing comments and his threats to murder the relatives of Islamist terrorists while taking over Iraq's oil reserves, Hitler too appealed to an atavistic, reckless sort of ultra-nationalism.

  He finds some differences too, but expects American fascism to be uniquely American.

• Corey Robin: This is why the right hates Donald Trump: He doesn't question their core beliefs, but they still see the danger:

  Trump hasn't dared touch a lot of the orthodoxy of the right, including its penchant for tax cuts, which is the keystone of the conservative counterrevolution, as everyone from Howard Jarvis to George W. Bush understood. But without the fear of the left -- listening to the Republican debates, you'd never know the candidates were even concerned about their opposition, so focused is their fratricidal gaze -- Trump is free to indulge the more luxurious hostilities of the right.

  And this, in the end, may be why Trump is so dangerous. Without the left, no one has any idea when his animus will take flight and where it will land. While counterrevolutionaries have always made established elites nervous, those elites could be assured that the wild Quixotism of a Burke or a Pat Buchanan would serve their cause. As today's Republicans and their allies in the media have made clear, they have no idea if Trump won't turn on them, too. Like Joe McCarthy in his senescence, Trump might try to gut the GOP. At least McCarthy had a real left to battle; Trump doesn't.

  Trump is dangerous, then, not because he is an aberration from conservatism but because he is its emblem. He's a threat not because the movement he aspires to lead is so strong but because the one he will lead is so weak. It's weak not because it has failed but because it has succeeded.

  This doesn't make an obvious lot of sense, but we can unpack a few things here. The best evidence of the weakness of the left is how much politicians like Clinton and Obama remain in thrall to still hegemonic parts of the conservative mindset, even as the so-called conservative movement has moved on to even more dysfunctional hysteria. Or maybe the best evidence is how alien Sanders' programs seem to the Clinton (and Obama) worldview, even though they'd be little more than common sense in any social democracy in western Europe. On the other hand, the conservative movement has greatly weakened since Reagan, at least in the sense that nothing they do works (unless you consider obstruction and fraud forms of art). I've long assumed that the right hates Trump because they fear that if given power he would abandon their batshit theories for compromises that might at least muddle through, and that that would undermine the hegemony of key ideas they've invested so much money and effort in. Or to put it slightly differently, they may just fear that he wouldn't follow orders like the political hacks who've spearheaded the party for the last few decades. I suspect in this they're giving him too much credit.

• Bill Clinton's odious presidency: Thomas Frank on the real history of the '90s: The history should be familiar. The conclusion:

  Some got bailouts, others got "zero tolerance." There was really no contradiction between these things. Lenience and forgiveness and joyous creativity for Wall Street bankers while another group gets a biblical-style beatdown -- these things actually fit together quite nicely. Indeed, the ascendance of the first group requires that the second be lowered gradually into hell. When you take Clintonism all together, it makes sense, and the sense it makes has to do with social class. What the poor get is discipline; what the professionals get is endless indulgence.

  I don't necessarily agree with the argument that financialization requires dismantling the safety net, although history does show us that once the bankers got their bailout, they weren't bothered that nobody else did. The bigger point, I think, is that the Clintons went to elite colleges and spent all their lives rubbing shoulders with the rich and super-rich and that rubbed off on them. Whereas in politics they were ready to do whatever was expedient, in their personal lives they always yearned to be one with the rich, and they were pretty successful at that. I also think the same can be said for Obama, which is a big part of why he worked so hard to avoid upsetting the status quo.

By the way, here are the latest poll projections at 538, for Tuesday's primaries. First, Democrats:

• Florida: Clinton 67.6%, Sanders 29.4%. Best Sanders poll 34%.
• Illinois: Clinton 56.2%, Sanders 40.8%. Latest polls show Sanders +2 (YouGov, 3/9-11) and Clinton +6 (3/4-10), so this has tightened up a lot; all earlier polls Clinton +19 or more (two early March polls have Clinton +37 and +42). Nonetheless, 538 gives Clinton a 95% chance of winning.
• North Carolina: Clinton 63.0%, Sanders 33.7%. Best Sanders poll 37%.
• Ohio: Clinton 58.9%, Sanders 38.4%. Latest polls are +9 and +20 for Clinton; Sanders led one poll in February, but his best recent poll is 43%.

Clinton is likely to sweep, but Sanders has a real upset chance in Illinois, and a more remote one in Ohio. I wouldn't be surprised if Sanders beats his polling averages in all four states.

For Republicans:

• Florida: Trump 39.9%, Rubio 30.6%, Cruz 17.2%, Kasich 10.1%. Rubio's best poll is 32%, but other recent polls give him 22% and 20%. 538 gives Trump a 85% chance of winning.
• Illinois: Trump 32.1%, Rubio 27.1%, Cruz 21.1%, Kasich 17.4%. Trump has led every poll there since last July, when Walker was the front runner, but 538 doesn't give any of the polls much weight.
• North Carolina: Trump 36.4%, Cruz 28.8%, Rubio 20.3%, Kasich 12.5%. Latest, highly weighted poll shows Trump over Cruz 41-27%.
• Ohio: Kasich 37.8%, Trump 31.8%, Cruz 20.9%, Rubio 7.7%. Latest poll shows a Kasich-Trump tie at 33%, with Cruz at his highest polling number ever, 27%. Two previous polls show Kasich +6 and +5 leads, but everything before that favored Trump.

Florida and Ohio are "winner take all" states, so the stop Trump effort has to stop him there. Kasich is done if he loses Ohio, and Rubio is done if he loses Florida. Cruz isn't likely to have much good news, but he can rationalize away his losses -- especially if Rubio is eliminated.

Music: Current count 26384 [26363] rated (+21), 411 [413] unrated (-2).

Rated count dropped further (was 24 last week). Next week will most likely be lower still, at least if I manage to spend any substantial amount of time working on my sister's house. Not sure what happened last week. I suspect both interest and listening time were down as I'm coming off my 2015 wrap up efforts but not paying much attention to 2016. Still, relatively high share of recommended records this week. The Tom Zé was recommended by Christgau the previous week, but it took me a while to find it on Rhapsody. (The other Zé record Christgau liked, Tropicália Lixo Lógico, was an A- back in 2012.) BJ the Chicago Kid and Wussy were tips from Michael Tatum (although Christgau wasted no time certifying Wussy). Threadgill was the most obvious prospect in the incoming queue, aside from vault discoveries from Thad Jones/Mel Lewis and Larry Young (still pending).

Two HMs came close. The Kendrick Lamar dump is mostly up to snuff, maybe even genius, but I kept stumbling on some dull stretches that should have been edited out -- although doing so would have cut the"album" well under 30 minutes. The Danny Green record grew on me despite my usual disinterest in piano trios and dislike for string quartets. I rarely fall for postbop jazz that lush, but it almost became the exception -- indeed, might have had I stuck with it longer.

I'll also note that the Loretta Lynn record is likely to be much enjoyed by fans, although it doesn't really add much. The concept there is to do for her what Rick Rubin did for Johnny Cash in his final years: to capture his voice on a vast songbook that may (or may not) enhance his legacy. That worked mostly because Cash had such a unique voice. Lynn's voice isn't in that rarefied league, although she's sounding remarkably good here, and she's got a lot more production support than Cash had. John Carter Cash co-produced, along with Lynn's daughter, and I hear they have 200+ songs recorded since 2007, so I expect we'll be hearing a lot more from them -- perhaps part of the reason I managed to curb my initial enthusiasm.

Also bothered to listen to five Rough Guide releases -- a couple were Christgau HMs, but the best of the batch was a pick back in 2009 (fun fact: I also have 2001's The Rough Guide to Merengue and Bachata and 2006's The Rough Guide to Merengue at A-). Most I tried to track down the source dates for, with the usual mixed results. The label's compilers usually have good ears, but I've long been irritated by their shoddy documentation -- wouldn't you think that a company that publishes books would take that more seriously? Working off Rhapsody is even more frustrating, as I can only imagine how bad the booklets might be.

John Morthland, one of the finest rock critics to emerge in the golden age of the art, died last week. It came as a complete shock to me, partly because only a couple months ago he sought me out with a Facebook friend request -- I was honored. I met him in the 1970s when I moved to New York. He had recently moved to New York himself from working at Creem in Michigan, along with Lester Bangs and Georgia Christgau. I didn't run into him much, but after he moved to Austin in the mid-1980s Georgia would occasionally mention him, and I wound up corresponding with him a bit. Sometime around 2003 I even managed to drive through Austin, and looked him up and had lunch. He asked if I was still strictly into rock, and I told him that I had mostly moved on, much as he had -- in fact, hisThe Best of Country Music guide book helped me out a lot (although I grew up close enough to country music it wasn't much of a leap; when it was cut out, I bought a stack of his book and handed them out as presents; one thing I probed him on was doing a website around his book, but he didn't have any interest in going back there). He was a very kind and generous person, an encyclopedic mind which he shared freely. His passing is a real loss.

I meant to collect more links, but for now I'll just go with his Rockcritics.com interview. Also Katy Vine's memoir, from Texas Monthly.

New records rated this week:

• B.J. the Chicago Kid: In My Mind (2016, Motown): [r]: A-
• Renato Braz: Saudade (2005-15 [2016], Living Music): [cd]: C
• Andy Brown Quartet: Direct Call (2015 [2016], Delmark): [cd]: B
• Patrick Cornelius: While We're Still Young (2014 [2016], Whirlwind): [cd]: B+(*)
• The Dominican Jazz Project: The Dominican Jazz Project (2015 [2016], Summit): [cd]: B+(*)
• Danny Green Trio: Altered Narratives (2015 [2016], OA2): [cd]: B+(***)
• Kendrick Lamar: Untitled Unmastered (2013-16 [2016], Top Dawg Entertainment): [r]: B+(***)
• Tom Lellis: The Flow (2015 [2016], Beamtime): [r]: C-
• Loretta Lynn: Full Circle (2016, Legacy): [r]: B+(**)
• Roberta Piket: One for Marian: Celebrating Marian McPartland (2015 [2016], Thirteenth Note): [cdr]: B+(*)
• Leslie Pintchik: True North (2015 [2016], Pintch Hard): [cd]: B+(***)
• Logan Richardson: Shift (2013 [2016], Blue Note): [r]: B+(*)
• Henry Threadgill Ensemble Double Up: Old Locks and Irregular Verbs (2015 [2016], Pi): [cd]: A-
• Wussy: Forever Sounds (2016, Shake It): [r]: A-
• Tom Zé: Vira Lata Na Via Láctea (2014, self-released): [r]: A-

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• William Hooker: Light: The Early Years 1975-1989 (1975-89 [2016], NoBusiness, 4CD): [cd]: A-
• Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra: All My Yesterdays (1966 [2016], Resonance, 2CD): [cd]: A-
• The Rough Guide to Cumbia [Second Edition] (1975-2012 [2013], World Music Network): [r]: B+(***)
• The Rough Guide to Latin Disco (1975-2014 [2015], World Music Network): [r]: B+(*)
• The Rough Guide to Merengue Dance ([2009], World Music Network): [r]: A-
• The Rough Guide to Psychedelic Cumbia (1969-2014 [2015], World Music Network): [r]: B+(***)
• The Rough Guide to the Best Arabic Music You've Never Heard (2008-14 [2015], World Music Network): [r]: B

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Raul Agraz: Between Brothers (OA2): March 18
• Cristina Braga & Brandenburger Symphoniker: Whisper (Enja): May 6
• Oguz Buyukberber/Tobias Klein: Reverse Camouflage (TryTone)
• Julian Hartwell: The Julian Hartwell Project (self-released)
• Pram Trio: Saga Thirteen (self-released)
• Ratatet: Arctic (Ridgeway): March 11
• Scptt Reeves Jazz Orchestra: Portraits and Places (Origin): March 18

Music: Current count 26400 [26384] rated (+16), 411 [411] unrated (-0).

Rated count continues to plummet: after averaging 39 in February, March's totals are 24, 21, and now 16. Last week I made up for the shortfall by finding seven A- records, but this week I didn't come up with any (can't remember when the last time that happened was, other than weeks I shut down for travel). Best I can do is six high HMs, with Jeff Williams probably the closest call. Maybe Larry Young'sIn Paris should get extra credit for its huge booklet?

Main reason for falling short is that I've been out of the house, trying to help my sister fix up our late parents old house so she can move in. That should give me something practical to do over the next several weeks. Nonetheless, the incoming queue has slowed down to the point where I'm still keeping pace. I do have some download links I can tap into, but I don't count them before they hatch, and I haven't felt much energy for dealing with the hassle.

I'll post a Rhapsody Streamnotes some time before the end of the month, even though it's likely to be a short one -- only have 85 capsules at present.

New records rated this week:

• Raul Agraz: Between Brothers (2013-15 [2016], OA2): [cd]: B
• Ehud Asherie: Shuffle Along (2015 [2016], Blue Heron): [cd]: B+(***)
• Kenny Barron Trio: Book of Intuition (2015 [2016], Impulse): [r]: B+(**)
• Oguz Buyukberber/Tobias Klein: Reverse Camouflage (2015 [2016], TryTone): [cd]: B+(**)
• Taylor Cook: The Cook Book (2015 [2016], self-released): [cd]: B
• Hanami: The Only Way to Float Free (2015 [2016], Ears & Eyes): [cdr]: B+(***)
• Julian Hartwell: The Julian Hartwell Project (2015, self-released): [cd]: B+(**)
• Hendrik Meurkens: Harmonicus Rex (2010 [2016], Height Advantage): [cd]: B+(*)
• Willie Nelson: Summertime: Willie Nelson Sings Gershwin (2016, Legacy): [r]: B+(*)
• Ratatet: Arctic (2015 [2016], Ridgeway): [cd]: B
• Scott Reeves Jazz Orchestra: Portraits and Places (2015 [2016], Origin): [cd]: B-
• Rihanna: Anti (2016, Roc Nation): [r]: B+(**)
• Zhenya Strigalev: Never Group (2015 [2016], Whirlwind): [cd]: B+(**)
• Jeff Williams: Outlier (2015 [2016], Whirlwind): [cd]: B+(***)
• La Yegros: Magnetismo (2016, Soundway): [r]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• Larry Young: In Paris: The ORTF Recordings (1964-65 [2016], Resonance, 2CD): [cd]: B+(***)

Old music rated this week:

• Nathan Davis: Happy Girl (1965 [2006], MPS): [r]: B+(*)
• The Larry Young Trio: Testifying (1960 [1992], New Jazz/OJC): [r]: B+(***)
• Larry Young: Groove Street (1962 [1995], Prestige/OJC): [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Ehud Asherie: Shuffle Along (Blue Heron): April 8
• Florian Egli Weird Beard: Everything Moves (Intakt): advance, April
• Marty Elkins: Walkin' by the River (Nagel Heyer)
• Darren English: Imagine Nation (Hot Shoe)
• Piere Favre: Drum Sights (Intakt): advance, April
• Jeff Guthery: Black Paintings (self-released): May 6
• The Hughes-Smith Quintet: Ever Up & Onward (self-released)

We finally got around to seeing the movie Spotlight (A-) on Wednesday afternoon. When we came out of the theatre in west Wichita, the sky to the west was extremely dark but mostly featureless, and the wind was blowing hard from the south. Looked very ominous, but not like the squall lines and thunderstorms we're used to seeing. Turns out that what we were seeing was smoke from wildfires to our southwest: at the time, about 72,000 acres had burned from the Oklahoma border to near Medicine Lodge, and there were two smaller fires to the northwest in Reno and Harvey counties. The next day the wind turned around to the north, which cleared the smoke from Wichita but expanded the wildfire to more than 400,000 acres (625 square miles). Here's a report on Anderson Creek fire in Oklahoma and Kansas. The fire is still burning as I write this, although reports are that it is no longer expanding.

Winters are typically dry in south-central Kansas, and high winds are common, so this is the prime season for grass fires. (A large chunk of south-central Kansas was subject of a red flag warning back on February 8.) Still, this year has been dryer than normal, and much warmer, which set the stage for what is already the largest wildfire in Kansas history. The area is very sparsely populated, the farms more used to pasture cattle than to grow wheat. No cause has been determined (although we can rule out lightning). I've seen lots of reports about cattle (and deer) but nothing yet about oil wells, which are fairly common in the most heavily fracked (and recently most earthquake-prone) part of the state. (Most wells collect oil in adjacent tanks, so I'd be surprised if a few didn't contribute to the fire.)

I also ran across this report on a 160-acre fire near Salina caused by gun nuts shooting at exploding targets:

Exploding targets consist of two ingredients that when mixed by the end user create an explosive when shot by a high-velocity projectile. They have caused many fires since they became more popular in recent years, have been banned in some areas, and caused the death of one person. In June, 2013 a man attending a bachelor-bachelorette party in Minnesota was killed after shrapnel from the device struck him in the abdomen causing his death. The Missoulian reported that two years ago a woman in Ohio had her hand nearly blown off while taking a cellphone video of a man firing at an exploding target placed in a refrigerator about 150 feet away.

You'd think that natural selection would start to limit this kind of stupidity, and evidently it works very slow.

Meanwhile, Governor Brownback declared two counties to be disaster areas. That leaves him 103 counties short, but if he declared disasters everywhere he has caused them he'd have to commit to fixing some of the problems he's caused. That would cost money, and require that someone in power care, so no chance of that.

Bernie Sanders won all three Democratic caucuses on Saturday, by landslides, with 69.8% in Hawaii, 72.7% in Washington, and 81.6% in Alaska. When Kansas voted back on March 5, Sanders' 67.7% share here was his second largest total (after Vermont), but he has since done better in Idaho (78.0%), Utah (79.3%), and yesterday's trio. Next up is Wisconsin on April 5, Wyoming on April 9, and New York on April 19. 538's polling average favors Clinton in Wisconsin 55.6-42.1%, and much more dubious polling has Clinton ahead in New York 67.4-24.3% (only one poll in March, a 71-23% outlier; three previous polls had Clinton +21, going back to September). Nothing on Wyoming, but Sanders has won four (of four) abutting states (Montana and South Dakota haven't voted yet).

If you care about such things, Cruz is heavily favored to win Wisconsin (polling average 42.8-32.2-22.4%, Trump ahead of Kasich), while Trump is ahead in New York (limited polling: 58.8-11.6-2.8%, which would give him his first majority win, but Kasich's share strikes me as way low). The Republicans have already done Wyoming, with Cruz winning.

Not much time for this, but some quick scattered links this week:

• Franklin Foer: Donald Trump Hates Women: E.g.:

  Humiliating women by decrying their ugliness is an almost recreational pastime for Trump. When the New York Times columnist Gail Collins described him as a "financially embittered thousandaire," he sent her a copy of the column with her picture circled. "The Face of a Dog!" he scrawled over her visage. This is the tack he took with Carly Fiorina, when he described her facial appearance as essentially disqualifying her from the presidency. It's the method he's used to denounce Cher, Bette Midler, Angelina Jolie, and Rosie O'Donnell -- "fat ass,""slob,""extremely unattractive," etc. -- when they had the temerity to criticize him. The joy he takes in humiliating women is not something he even bothers to disguise. He told the journalist Timothy L. O'Brien, "My favorite part [of the movie Pulp Fiction] is when Sam has his gun out in the diner and he tells the guy to tell his girlfriend to shut up. Tell that bitch to be cool. Say: 'Bitch be cool.' I love those lines." Or as he elegantly summed up his view to New York magazine in the early '90s, "Women, you have to treat them like shit."

  Also see: Nancy LeTourneau: The Nexus of Trump's Racism/Sexism: Dominance. She quotes Foer and various others, including Rebecca Traister, whose summed up her reflections on Trump (and Cruz) as The Election and the Death Throes of White Male Power. While I don't disagree with the general point, pieces like this tempt me to point out that Trumpism isn't the only common response to economic and/or social decline by whites (even males). Said group also makes up a substantial slice of support for Bernie Sanders' campaign -- and I doubt that any white males who've backed Sanders have done so expecting him to restore lost white/male privileges, or to deny the benefits he's campaigned for to blacks, Latinos, and/or women.

  Meanwhile, I suppose this is where I should file links like Mary Elizabeth Williams: Donald Trump despises women: Mocking Heidi Cruz's looks is a new low in this grotesque sausage-waving campaign and Gary Legum: Trump vs. Cruz: How the National Enquirer became a battleground in the GOP primary

• David Kurtz: What Just Happened in North Carolina?: Quotes a reader, who was more on the ball than TPM:

  In a span of 12 hours, the GOP political leadership of this state [North Carolina] called the General Assembly back to Raleigh for a special session, introduced legislation written by leadership and not previously made available to members or the public, held "hearings" on that legislation, passed it through both chambers of the legislature, and it was signed by the GOP Governor.

  The special legislation was called, ostensibly, to prevent an ordinance passed last month by the Charlotte City Council, from going into effect on April 1. That ordinance would have expanded the city's LGBT anti-discrimination ordinance, and would have allowed transgendered people to use public restrooms that corresponds with their gender identity.

  But the legislation introduced and passed into law by the General Assembly yesterday didn't simply roll back that ordinance. It implemented a detailed state-wide regulation of public restrooms, and limited a person's use of those restrooms to only those restrooms that correspond with one's "biological sex," defined in the new state law as the sex identified on one's birth certificate. [ . . . ]

  But wait, there's more. The legislation also expressly states that there can be no statutory or common law private right of action to enforce the state's anti-discrimination statutes in the state courts. So if a NC resident is the victim of racial discrimination in housing or employment, for example, that person is now entirely barred from going to state court to get an injunction, or to get damages of any kind. The new law completely defangs the state's anti-discrimination statute, rendering it entirely unenforceable by the citizens of the state.

  For more, see Caitlin MacNeal: NC's Sweeping Anti-Gay Law Goes Way Beyond Targeting LGBTs. The US prides itself on a unique system of "checks and balances," but this is the clearest example yet of what can happen when voters cede complete political control to one party, at least if that party is of one mind -- in North Carolina that would be Art Pope, who personally spent millions electing that legislative majority and governor. (Of course, it's still possible that the courts will throw this law out, but the Republicans are working that angle too.) Also note two key things: the speed, intended to produce a fait accompli before there could be any public discussion let alone organized opposition; also how the bill's used the "emergency" to push through extra measures that most likely couldn't have stood on their own.

  Also in the captured red state category: Amanda Marcotte: Mike Pence's sadistic abortion law: Indiana passes draconian anti-choice bill geared towards humiliating and bankrupting women who have abortions.

• Caitlin MacNeal: AIPAC Denounces Trump Criticism of Obama's Relationship With Israel: Trump's actual speech to AIPAC contained nothing but red meat for Israel's bloodthirsty right wing, yet somehow he managed to offend at least one important faction in the lobby's leadership -- perhaps the one that realizes that Obama is still president, and that while he hasn't been the perfect lackey of their dreams, he has still treated pretty generously. AIPAC's annual conference provided an opportunity for all aspiring American politicians to show their colors and salute the flag of the Jewish State. And once again pretty much everyone played their assigned role as expected -- indeed, Hillary Clinton was second to none in her obsequiousness, which may be why she has a fair number of AIPAC's high rollers backing her. I doubt that they really minded what Trump said in his speech -- I heard the thing, and he certainly didn't lack for applause -- so their worries have more to do with what he's said elsewhere. And even there it's probably not so much that he's promised to be a "neutral" peacemaker (hard to take that seriously) or that he doesn't think the US should spend so much on military aid to the 4th (or 5th) largest military power on earth (more possible, but still not likely) as in his slogan about "making America great again" -- as opposed to being a big country in thrall to its little "ally."

  Some other AIPAC-related links:

  • Philip Weiss: AIPAC apologizes for Trump, but cheers Cruz for vow to destroy Iran deal
  • Cat J Zavis: Hillary leads to more war: Her latest speech on Israel is just the newest horrific example
  • Kate Miranda: What if Bernie Sanders had delivered his speech at AIPAC?
  • Philip Weiss: Trump 'has no business being president' because he would be 'neutral' to Israel -- Clinton tells AIPAC
  • Richard Silverstein: AIPAC: Kashering Trump

  You can also Read the speech Bernie Sanders planned to give to AIPAC. Doesn't go nearly as far as I'd like, but wouldn't have gone over well at AIPAC (see the link above). Also see: Richard Silverstein: Bernie Finally Addresses Israel-Palestine.

• Eamon Murphy: 'Do we get to win this time?': Trump foreign policy appeal based on revenge for Iraq War failure: The notion that the American military's persistent failure to win wars -- in the sense of achieving initial intentions; I'm more inclined to argue that all sides in war invariably lose, so the concept of winning is excluded by definition -- is caused by civilian leaders holding the soldiers back is America's own peculiar version of the Dolchstoßlegende (the stab-in-the-back myth). Trump's embrace of this theory is one more thing he shares with past generations of fascists, a minor one unless his own ego is so huge that he thinks his leadership genius will turn the tide.

  Though the public may feel burned by what was undeniably a wasteful war launched on trumped-up pretexts, withdrawal is always unacceptable, on patriotic grounds -- a sentiment at least as old as the overseas U.S. empire. ("American valor has easily triumphed in both sea and land," declared Senator David Hill, an advocate of annexing the Philippines, in 1898, "and the American flag floats over newly acquired territory -- never, as it is fondly hoped, to be lowered again.") The advent of ISIS compounded this problem, mocking official claims that American arms had achieved some measure of progress in Iraq. The resultant agony was epitomized by a January 2014 New York Times story, "Falluja's Fall Stuns Marines Who Fought There": completely ignoring Iraqi suffering, the reporter rendered vividly the anguish of veterans at the city's takeover by Sunni insurgents, which left them "transfixed, disbelieving and appalled," and was "a gut punch to the morale of the Marine Corps and painful for a lot of families who are saying, 'I thought my son died for a reason.'"

  So what is to be done? If invading Iraq was a costly mistake, how can we keep fighting there? But if we paid so dearly for it, how can we not?

• Richard Silverstein: Identities of IDF Soldier Who Executed Unarmed Palestinian -- and His Commanding Officer -- Exposed: You've probably read about stabbing incidents in Israel/Palestine, where typically Jewish victims receive light injuries, often treated at the scene, and Palestinian assailants are usually shot dead. You may be expected to think that the shooting was necessary to disarm fanatic knife-wielders, but this is a case where the Palestinian was executed after being disarmed, and this case is not unique or all that exceptional (aside from the video).

  The shooter later told investigators that he shot a-Sharif because he was "moving," and was afraid he would detonate a suicide vest. The victim is seen clearly on the video and he has no suicide vest. Nor does his Shapira seem to sense danger as he stands near the wounded man speaking on the telephone.

  Let no one think of this is a one-off aberration. Palestinians are executed in the same fashion virtually every day. Nor are these summary executions a product of Israeli policy over the past few months alone. Such murders go all the way back to the 2002 incident I described above. The murderers are rewarded for their callousness as Levy has been, by being a respected member of the Knesset.

• Stephen M Walt: Monsters of Our Own Imaginings: A big news story last week was the terror bombing in Brussels, which unlike other big bombings last week (e.g., in Baghdad and Lahore) was meant to scare us and/or was used to promote further reinforcement of the war against ISIS (see More US Combat Troops Headed to Iraq Soon -- no, we don't get any say in the matter; how could we when Brussels is on TV 24/7?). Walt says, sure, this is a serious problem, but let's not get hysterical, and offers four key points. The fourth is the most important: "Terrorists cannot deeat us; we can only defeat ourselves."

  The bottom line: Terrorism is not really the problem; the problem is how we respond to it. My first thought when I heard the news from Brussels, I'm sorry to say, was "Brexit," meaning my worry that this act of violence might irrationally bolster support for the United Kingdom leaving the EU, thereby dealing that already-struggling experiment another body blow. It might also boost the political fortunes of xenophobes in other Western countries, further poisoning the political climate in Europe. It is also worth noting that presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have already offered up idiotic proposals of their own (such as Cruz's call for stepped-up police patrols in Muslim neighborhoods in the United States), steps that would give the Islamic State a new propaganda victory. But these developments would be entirely our own doing, and we have no one to blame but ourselves if we try to fight extremism by abandoning our own values and becoming more like them.

  Does anyone really fail to understand that Brussels was attacked because it's the headquarters of NATO and NATO is engaged in killing Muslims in a broad swath from Afghanistan to Libya but especially in the parts of Iraq and Syria ISIS is trying to govern? But who actually says that? Hardly anyone, because doing so would imply that the most effective way to safeguard Europe and America against terrorism would be to withdraw from the fruitless wars the US and Europe (and proxies like the Saudis who epitomize "Islamic extremism") have been waging. Walt prays for leaders who understand the "value the calm resolution in the face of danger or adversity" without noting that (a) that's a fair description of Barack Obama, and (b) Obama still hasn't managed to end the wars his predecessors started. Granted, replacing Obama with Trump or Cruz could result in even more counterproductive acts -- their proposals to "police Muslim neighborhoods" (are there any?) and otherwise harass Muslims seem deliberately designed to radicalize US Muslims, even worse than their reckless escalation abroad.

  Walt's exemplars are WWII heroes -- he even asks "what would Churchill say?" which is like asking the proverbial stopped clock for the time -- but his list includes one name who did successfully face a colonial quagmire not unlike the present situation: Charles DeGaulle, who stood up to enormous pressure and withdrew French forces from Algeria.

  Also see: Tom Engelhardt: Don't Blame It All on Donald Trump, or "Entering Uncharted Territory in Washington," which points out how far "grown ups" like Obama have already veered toward creating a world where terrorism will long be a fact of life. Engelhardt cites a news story from the last week or two (I forget exactly), when the US "killed 150 more or less nobodies (except to those who knew them) and maybe even a top leader or two in a country most Americans couldn't locate on a map" (Somalia):

  The essential explanation offered for the Somali strike, for instance, is that the U.S. had a small set of advisers stationed with African Union forces in that country and it was just faintly possible that those guerrilla graduates might soon prepare to attack some of those forces (and hence U.S. military personnel). It seems that if the U.S. puts advisers in place anywhere on the planet -- and any day of any year they are now in scores of countries -- that's excuse enough to validate acts of war based on the "imminent" threat of their attack. [ . . . ]

  When was it, by the way, that "the people" agreed that the president could appoint himself assassin-in-chief, muster his legal beagles to write new "law" that covered any future acts of his (including the killing of American citizens), and year after year dispatch what essentially is his own private fleet of killer drones to knock off thousands of people across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa? Weirdly enough, after almost 14 years of this sort of behavior, with ample evidence that such strikes don't suppress the movements Washington loathes (and often only fan the flames of resentment and revenge that help them spread), neither the current president and his top officials, nor any of the candidates for his office have the slightest intention of ever grounding those drones.

  And when exactly did the people say that, within the country's vast standing military, which now garrisons much of the planet, a force of nearly 70,000 Special Operations personnel should be birthed, or that it should conduct covert missions globally, essentially accountable only to the president (if him)? And what I find strangest of all is that few in our world find such developments strange at all.

• Brief links:

  • William Astore: America's Post-Democratic Military

  • David Atkins: Republicans Don't Care What Works; whereas "moderate" Democrats will drop any principle if the polls don't support it (and some that actually do poll well), e.g. On Marijuana, the American People Agree with the "Radical" Left, not the So-Called Centrists.

  • Patrick Cockburn: How Politicians Duck the Blame for Terrorism

  • Branko Marcetic: Neocon War Hawks Want Hillary Clinton Over Donald Trump. No Surprise -- They've Always Backed Her.

  • Adam Hochschild: The Oilman Who Loved Dictators: Cites Jane Mayer's book Dark Money on how Fred Koch, sire of the dynasty that's working so hard to undermine American democracy, got his start building oil refineries for Hitler and Stalin, but Hochschild's main subject is Torkild Rieber of Texaco, who blatantly broke America's neutrality laws to ship oil to Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Adapted from Hochschild's new book, Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.

  • Paul Krugman: Return of the Undeserving Poor -- a meme that's never actually gone away among right-wing "thinkers" (Michael B Katz wrote an important book on this in 1989 (revised in 2013), The Undeserving Poor: America's Enduring Confrontation With Poverty, although William Ryan had figured most of this out in his 1971 Blaming the Victim -- and Trump Didn't Put the Con in Conservatism.

  • No More Mr Nice Blog: Dear David Brooks: The "Post-Trump" GOP Will Be Exactly Like the Pre-Trump GOP, Only Trumpier, and Trump Will Lose, but I Don't See a GOP Crack-Up Coming:

    Members of the right-wing rank-and-file just want someone or something to hate, and they're not picky: Show them a clip of George W. Bush standing on the 9/11 rubble with a bullhorn and they'll cheer. Show them a clip of Trump denouncing W for lying about Iraq WMDs and they'll cheer. They don't know what they believe. They just want enemies.

  • Sandy Vargas: A Successful Fight for Universal All-Day Kindergarten in Minnesota: This is a far cry from free college, but shows that a state government (legislature and governor) controlled by Democrats can get something worthwhile (albeit modest) done -- as opposed to the Republicans in states like North Carolina and Kansas.

Music: Current count 26420 [26400] rated (+20), 410 [411] unrated (-1).

Another short week, but at least I found a few recommendables this week, thanks, I must admit, to slipstreaming other critics. You can read more substantive reviews of Kendrick Lamar's 2010 mixtape and Anderson Paak's new one (also HM Kyle) by Robert Christgau, of Bonnie Raitt (and BJ the Chicago Kid -- a tip he fed me a couple weeks ago) by Michael Tatum, and Audio One by Tim Niland. Tatum also has an excellent review of Hamilton (a record he likes a lot and I rather admire, although I'll mention that I was blown away by Daveed Diggs' Small Things to a Giant), a Willie Nelson review I don't buy at all (his awkward avoidance of any hint of swing couldn't keep other versions -- I've heard thousands -- from crowding my mind; above all Ella and Louis Again), and a cursory HM for Lyrics Born's Real People, my (and Laura's) favorite album of 2015.

I suppose I need to revisit Rihanna's Anti, which I gave two stars to a couple weeks back, before Tatum's A- and Christgau's A. (I had Erykah Badu's You Caint Use My Phone, A- by Tatum and two stars by Christgau, as an A- back in December. Tatum also reviews Archy Marshall's A New Place 2 Drown, an A- for me in February.) Hopefully by the time I post Rhapsody Streamnotes, no later than the end of the month.

Aside from two advances from the Swiss label Intakt, one of the worst weeks for the new jazz queue ever. One problem is that the queue got down to one record before I added in this week's haul. (Audio One was sampled from Bandcamp, as were the Borah Bergman and Paal Nilssen-Love albums.) Got email from the publicist today that the Vijay Iyer-Wadada Leo Smith album A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke is "out NOW." Not a high water mark in either catalog, but the only ECM record I've been able to play in my CD player for several years now, so I suppose it's worth a mention. Reminds me I have more ECM links to download -- most promising is a new record by Nik Bärtsch.

Thought I'd go back and catch up on the old Bonnie Raitt records I had missed (including three Christgau A-). Her debut was pretty good, but it seemed somewhat less than several contemporary groups she evoked -- e.g., Delaney & Bonnie, Joy of Cooking -- and for that matter the two albums she followed it with (Give It Up and Takin' My Time). I didn't get much out of the others, although with Longing in Their Hearts (1994) still missing I decided to give The Best of the Capitol Years a chance, and it makes a pretty good case for her MOR period.

I'm not sure why I've never cared much for Raitt, given how pivotal my one brief encounter with her had been (this would have been in 1973, or maybe 1972). Carl Boggs was a Poli Sci professor at Washington University, a lefty and a big fan. He came up with the idea of hiring Raitt to do a concert meant to be a benefit for paying down legal bills of one of the guys arrested for burning down the Wash U ROTC building before I got there. I was in a student group called Notes on Everyday Life -- we published a very underground tabloid -- so he used us to get the concert staged on campus. I had little to do with this other than filing the paper work, and almost missed the concert: I hooked up with my first girl the night before (or was it two?) and we only got out of bed to make the show, so I was pretty dazed that night. But I'm pretty sure it was the first concert I ever went to, not that I remember any of it. We went to the the party at Boggs' house afterwards. I saw Raitt there -- in fact, almost smashed into her -- but was far too shy to even say hello. (She was probably the first celebrity I had ever gotten that close to. What I remember was her looking very tired, and short.) That may also have been the first time I smoked pot -- I was very late getting to any of these milestones. When the party pooped out, we wound up getting breakfast with eight or ten others. Then my girlfriend and I went back to her house, to bed. Had these events played out in different order I might have credited Raitt for turning me into a human being. As it was, she was at most a distraction. I only listened to her albums much after the fact.

New records rated this week:

• Anderson .Paak: Malibu (2016, OBE/Steel Wool/ArtClub/Empire): [r]: A-
• Audio One: What Thomas Bernhard Saw (2014 [2015], Audiographic): [bc]: A-
• Cristina Braga & Brandenburger Symphoniker: Whisper (2015 [2016], Enja): [cd]: B-
• Rex Cadwallader/Mike Aseta/Arti Dixson/Tiffany Jackson: A Balm in Gilead (2015 [2016], Stanza USA): [cd]: B-
• Florian Egli Weird Beard: Everything Moves (2014 [2016], Intakt): [cdr]: B+(***)
• Darren English: Imagine Nation (2014 [2016], Hot Shoe): [cd]: B+(*)
• Piere Favre: DrumSights NOW (2015 [2016], Intakt): [cdr]: B+(***)
• Jeff Guthery: Black Paintings (2015 [2016], self-released): [cd]: B-
• The James Hughes/Jimmy Smith Quintet: Ever Up & Onward (2015 [2016], self-released): [cd]: B+(*)
• Kyle: Smyle (2015, Indie Pop): [r]: B+(***)
• Gabriela Martina: No White Shoes (2015 [2016], self-released): [cd]: B
• Naked Truth: Avian Thug (2015 [2016], Rare Noise): [cdr]: B+(*)
• Pram Trio: Saga Thirteen (2015 [2016], self-released): [cd]: B+(*)
• Bonnie Raitt: Dig In Deep (2016, Redwing): [r]: A-
• Marcos Varela: San Ygnacio (2012 [2016], Origin): [cd]: B
• Michiyo Yagi/Lasse Marhaug/Paal Nilssen-Love: Angular Mass (2011 [2015], PNL): [bc]: B
• Michiyo Yagi/Joe McPhee/Paal Nilssen-Love/Lasse Marhaug: Soul Stream (2013 [2015], PNL): [bc]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• Borah Bergman/Peter Brötzmann/Frode Gjerstad: Left (1996 [2016], Not Two): [bc]: B+(**)

Old music rated this week:

• Anderson .Paak: Venice (2014, OBE/Steel Wool): [r]: B+(**)
• Kendrick Lamar: Overly Dedicated (2010, Top Dawg Entertainment): [r]: A-
• Bonnie Raitt: Bonnie Raitt (1971, Warner Brothers): [r]: B+(***)
• Bonnie Raitt: Streetlights (1974, Warner Brothers): [r]: B
• Bonnie Raitt: The Glow (1979, Warner Brothers): [r]: B
• Bonnie Raitt: Green Light (1982, Warner Brothers): [r]: B+(**)
• Bonnie Raitt: Nine Lives (1986, Warner Brothers): [r]: B-
• Bonnie Raitt: Road Tested (1995, Capitol, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
• Bonnie Raitt: The Best of Bonnie Raitt on Capitol 1989-2003 (1989-2003 [2003], Capitol): [r]: A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• The Ian Carey Quintet + 1: Interview Music (Kabocha): April 8
• Eli Degibri: Cliff Hangin' (Blujazz)
• Matt Lavelle's 12 Houses: Solidarity (Unseen Rain): May 6
• Steven Lugerner: Jacknife: The Music of Jackie McLean (Primary): April 22
• Kat Parra: Songbook of the Americas (Jazzma): April 29
• Rocco John Quartet: Embrace the Change (Unseen Rain): May 6
• Sirius Quartet: Paths Become Lines (Autentico): April 13
• Steve Wiest and Phröntrange: The High Road (Blujazz)
• Christopher Zuar Orchestra: Musings (Sunnyside): April 1

Slowed down this month, but looking at the list I don't think I have much to apologize for: 120 records is the fewest this year, and the elapsed time is the longest between columns in quite some while, but neither by much. Of the 91 new records, 73 are 2016 releases, so 80.2%. I don't think I ever consciously decided to move on, but I ran out of 2015 CDs some time back (OK, I still have a cassette tape I can't play, and that Kansas reunion album), and I've been keeping my dwindling new jazz queue close to empty.

I'm still not doing any serious 2016 prospecting. I do have am2016 file but it's mostly tracking what I've heard (or unpacked), with only a handful of unheard items added to remind myself to look them up. This is a big cutback from them2015 file, which I updated every week from AMG and other release sources, then added stragglers from EOY lists (the lines difference is 7250 to 320). In the near future I expect to add Jason Gubbels's first quarter list, and maybe some other more/less trusted sources (I have been listening to almost everything Robert Christgau and Michael Tatum have recommended, aside from the Kanye West mixtape that snuck past me).

The Old Music section continues to be haphazard, with most records picked up as background when I was considering new (or in the case of Larry Young new-old, which featured Nathan Davis) work. I suppose Horace Parlan is an exception: my favorite Parlan album is the 1977 duo he did with Archie Shepp, Goin' Home, and when I noticed it on Rhapsody I had brief hopes that I might find more albums on the Steeplechase label. That didn't really work out, but I did find a couple old Blue Notes I wanted to check out.

Most of these are short notes/reviews based on streaming records from Rhapsody (other sources are noted in brackets). They are snap judgments based on one or two plays, accumulated since my last post along these lines, back on February 25. Past reviews and more information are availablehere (7920 records).

Recent Releases

Raul Agraz: Between Brothers (2013-15 [2016], OA2): Trumpet player, from Venezuela, first album, long list of musicians but recorded over several sessions -- the song-by-song credits average about nine per cut (not counting the extra strings). Latin big band, doesn't strike me as special.B [cd]

Melissa Aldana: Back Home (2015 [2016], Wommusic): Tenor saxophonist, won a Monk prize which got her a record out on Concord, well regarded in 2014 and not without merit. But I prefer this fairly mainstream sax trio, with Pablo Menares on bass and Jochen Rueckert on drums. Nothing especially fancy, four originals, two pieces each from the band, Kurt Weill's "My Ship."B+(***) [cdr]

Anderson .Paak: Malibu (2016, OBE/Steel Wool/ArtClub/Empire): Brandon Paak Anderson, who previously did business as Breezy Lovejoy, from Oxnard, CA. Second album, sings and raps, the beats skewed out a bit stoned. Seems to have worked as a "marijuana farmer" some while back, then did a stint as homeless, so he can do down and out and get through it somehow.A-

Ehud Asherie: Shuffle Along (2015 [2016], Blue Heron): Pianist, born in Israel but moved to Italy when he was three, then to New York at nine, where he hung around Smalls and took lessons from Frank Hewitt. Career has moved from bop to swing, and takes a further step back here with his "solo piano interpretations from [Eubie] Blake and [Noble] Sissle's 1921 Broadway musical" -- best known for "I'm Just Wild About Harry," given two treatments here.B+(***) [cd]

Audio One: What Thomas Bernhard Saw (2014 [2015], Audiographic): Ten-piece Ken Vandermark group, third album for this project. With all the alumni, I'm tempted to describe this more of a souped-up Vandermark 5 (Dave Rempis and Mars Williams join in on reeds, Jeb Bishop returns on trombone, and Tim Daisy is the drummer) than a big band project per se, The four Vandermark dedications are tightly conceived even though they each expand to 15-20 minutes. Band includes cornet (Josh Berman), another sax (Nick Mazzarella), vibes (Jason Adasiewicz), viola (Jen Paulson), and bass (Nick Maori, both acoustic and electric).A- [bc]

Kenny Barron Trio: Book of Intuition (2015 [2016], Impulse): Pianist, now in his 70s, has many dozens of albums since 1973, also a very distinguished career as an educator. Trio with Kiyoshi Kitagawa (bass) and Johnathan Blake (drums).B+(**)

Steve Barta: Symphonic Arrangement: Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano Trio (2015 [2016], Steve Barta Music): Cover recalls composer-pianist Claude Bolling's original 1975 album (headlined by flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal). Barta rearranged, giving the leads to Hubert Laws (flute) and Jeffrey Biegel (piano). Not something I care enough to compare versions of, but it passed by pleasantly enough.B [cd]

B.J. the Chicago Kid: In My Mind (2016, Motown): AMG says "Contemporary R&B" -- means Bryan James Sledge sings in a context more or less defined by hip-hop, although the son of church choir directors and the former backup for Stevie Wonder also has much fondness for the sweet ballad. Sprawling album, runs over an hour and could use some editing, but if I listened to it enough to figure out where I might forget why.A-

Michael Blake: Fulfillment (2016, Songlines): Tenor saxophonist (sometimes soprano), from Canada but based in New York, recorded this "conceptual" project -- a suite based on "a tragic immigration incident in Vancouver in 1914, when a Japanese freighter carrying several hundred East Indian immigrants (almost all Sikh) was turned away using exclusionist, racist laws." Recorded with a Vancouver-based group -- JP Carter, Peggy Lee, Chris Gestrin, Ron Samworth, André Lachance, Dylan van der Schyff -- the lyrics may help detail the story but disrupt the flow, which can be quite dramatic without them. B+(*)

Cristina Braga & Brandenburger Symphoniker: Whisper (2015 [2016], Enja): Brazilian harpist with the Orquesta Sinfónica do Teatro Municipal do Rio de Janeiro, also sings, backed by Modern Samba Quartet and a German symphony orchestra, with guitarist-vocalist Dado Villa-Lobos as a "special guest." Brazilian pop with serious classical airs, not a direction I'm inclined to favor.B- [cd]

Renato Braz: Saudade (2005-15 [2016], Living Music): Brazilian crooner, plays guitar but isn't credited with writing these songs -- cue in the usual suspects -- but aside from the live "bonus track" at the end they all sound like mopey ballads to me. Recorded over a decade, guest spots for Dori Caymmi and Ivan Lins, various bands including the Paul Winter Consort and the Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble.C [cd]

Andy Brown Quartet: Direct Call (2015 [2016], Delmark): Guitarist from Chicago, had a solo album last year, follows it up with piano trio-plus-guitar (no horns), Jeremy Kahn the pianist. Swing lines -- starts with "The Jeep Is Jumpin'" -- keep it nice and unthreatening.B+(*) [cd]

Rich Brown: Abeng (2015 [2016], self-released): Electric bassist, based in Toronto, album has a logo for Canada Council for the Arts but no label ID. Luis Deniz shows impressive range on alto sax, backed by Chris Donnelly or Robi Boros on piano, drums, extra percussion, with phat bass tones everywhere.B+(**) [cd]

Oguz Buyukberber/Tobias Klein: Reverse Camouflage (2015 [2016], TryTone): Clarinet duets, both musicians also switching off to bass or contrabass clarinets. Both are based in the Netherlands, the former born in Turkey, the latter in Germany and better known for ICP Orchestra. Avant, tone can get on your nerves at points.B+(**) [cd]

Rex Cadwallader/Mike Aseta/Arti Dixson/Tiffany Jackson: A Balm in Gilead (2015 [2016], Stanza USA): Piano-bass-drums trio plus soprano diva, intentional culture clash as the trio busts up mostly trad ballads while the singer puts them into a shrill straitjacket. Title song, "Deep River,""This Little Light of Mine,""Motherless Child,""Elijah Rock,""Every Time I Feel the Spirit," couple more, feathered out a bit by five "Trialogue" pieces, where the singer shuts up while the trio does something interesting. I can't stand opera, but get her sense of flow. Not something I enjoy.B- [cd]

Taylor Cook: The Cook Book (2015 [2016], self-released): Saxophone player from British Columbia, based in Toronto, employs some twenty musicians to spice up his schmaltz, not always to good effect. Still, I always enjoy "On the Sunny Side of the Street."B [cd]

Patrick Cornelius: While We're Still Young (2014 [2016], Whirlwind): Alto saxophonist (also soprano and flute), has a handful of records since 2006, this one a rather fancy postbop octet, mostly name players who do a lot of bobbing and weaving.B+(*) [cd]

Cowboys & Frenchmen: Rodeo (2015, Outside In Music): Postbop quintet, led by two saxophonists (Owen Broder and Ethan Helm), with piano, bass, drums, the group named after a short film by David Lynch.B+(*) [cdr]

Tim Daisy: Relucent: Music for Marimba, Radios and Turntables (2016, Relay): Chicago drummer, the last in the Vandermark 5 and a regular in post-V5 groups with Vandermark and/or Dave Rempis. This is solo, a tape collage of soft percussion and ambient sound. Not much, really.B [bc]

Dawes: All Your Favorite Bands (2015, Hub): Well, don't know about you, but all my favorite bands are much better than this Poco wannabe. (What? You don't remember Poco?)B-

Daveed Diggs: Small Things to a Giant (2012 [2015], Deathbomb Arc): Rapper from Oakland, came up in the underground group Clipping; first album on his own, a real tour de force, smart and snappy with rapidfire raps, the speed and dexterity which won him a Grammy for the roles of Thomas Jefferson and Marquis de Lafayette inHamilton, but even more impressive as himself.A- [bc]

The Dominican Jazz Project (2015 [2016], Summit): Pianist Stephen Anderson seems to have been the catalyst if not the leader here, connecting with various musicians on visits to the Dominican Republic, like Guillo Carias (clavietta), Sandy Gabriel (tenor/soprano sax), Guy Frömeta (drums), and Carlos Luis (vocals, guitar). A mixed bag with multiple appeals. B+(*) [cd]

Drive-By Truckers: It's Great to Be Alive! (2014 [2015], ATO, 3CD): I put this off on the theory that 3:16:13 of anything is too much to pay attention to streaming -- which didn't keep my ears from perking up for the line that goes, "and all them politicians, they all lyin' sacks of shit" (I was writing about Donald Trump at the moment, although it could just as easily have been Marco Rubio, or Hillary Clinton). A couple decades worth of songs, redundant if you've followed them, but terrific as background noise, nicely unified by the live sound and occasional patter. On separate discs I imagine the length will only become more tolerable.A-

Florian Egli Weird Beard: Everything Moves (2014 [2016], Intakt): Swiss quartet, has a previous album without the leader-saxophonist's name on the cover. Egli is backed by guitar (Dave Gisler), electric bass, and drums. Most compelling when they put a litle rock muscle into the rhythm, but the first word in the booklet is "Gelassenheit" -- serenity.B+(***) [cdr]

Marty Elkins: Walkin' by the River (2014 [2016], Nagel Heyer): Standards singer, from New Jersey, third album, with guitarist Howard Alden swinging, both piano (Steve Ash) and organ (Joel Diamond), and a stellar turn by Jon-Erik Kelso on trumpet.B+(***) [cd]

Moppa Elliott: Still Up in the Air (2015 [2016], Hot Cup): Solo bass album by the leader-composer behind Mostly Other People Do the Killing, easily the most consistently awesome jazz group of the past decade. The pieces are all called "Sequence" and some number up to fourteen, but not the complete set.B+(**) [cd]

Darren English: Imagine Nation (2014 [2016], Hot Shoe): Trumpet player, first album, leads a hot boppish quartet with Kenny Banks Jr. on piano, sometimes adding Greg Tardy on sax, switching up on two tracks where Carmen Bradford sings standards ("What a Little Moonlight Can Do" and "Skylark"). Brings two extra trumpets in for the finale, a mad race through "Cherokee."B+(*) [cd]

Piere Favre: DrumSights NOW (2015 [2016], Intakt): Drummer, from Switzerland, will turn 80 next year, old enough to have played with Albert Nicholas in the 1950s but best known (in my household at least) for three superb duo albums with pianist Irène Schweizer. His own discography has several albums with drum quartets, so I imagine he sees DrumSights as a successor group to his Singing Drums. Joined here by Chris Jaeger, Markus Lauterberg, and Valeria Zangger, the group plays as one -- which makes this seductive album slightly less than the sum of its parts. B+(***) [cdr]

David Fiuczynski: Flam! Blam! Pan-Asian MicroJam (2015 [2016], Rare Noise): Guitarist, nicknamed "The Fuze" as if his music was fusion enough. Has close to ten albums since 2000, including group efforts as Screaming Headless Torsos. Goes for exotica here, including microtonal keyboards, a Chinese oboe and percussion, and three cuts with alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa. Should be interesting, but nothing quite works out right.B [cdr]

Socrates Garcia Latin Jazz Orchestra: Back Home (2015 [2016], Summit): Composer-arranger-guitarist, from Dominican Republic, teaches at University of Northern Colorado, leads a big band with the usual horns and extra guitar and percussion through a set of originals, concluding with his three-part "Dominican Suite for Jazz Orchestra."B [cd]

Danny Green Trio: Altered Narratives (2015 [2016], OA2): Pianist, from Southern California, fourth album since 2009, plays postbop with classical touches and a little Latin tinge. Augments his trio here with a string quartet for the middle cuts, expanding the sound so much I initially suspected an orchestra. Not the sort of thing I'm disposed to like much, but his sweep and flow is remarkable and the sensation just overwhelms you.B+(***) [cd]

Jeff Guthery: Black Paintings (2015 [2016], self-released): Drummer, inspired by Goya paintings, backed by several jazz notables -- Kenny Werner, George Garzone, Bruno Råberg, David Fiuczynski -- and the East Coast Scoring Orchestra giving it a distinctly euroclassical air, maybe something Nutcracker-ish (at least when Garzone isn't soloing). B- [cd]

Hanami: The Only Way to Float Free (2015 [2016], Ears & Eyes): Chicago quartet, guitarist Andrew Trim wrote all the pieces and effectively leads, flanked by two horns -- Jason Stein on bass clarinet and Mai Sugimoto on alto sax and clarinet. Charles Rumback is the drummer.B+(***) [cdr]

Lafayette Harris Jr.: Hangin' With the Big Boys (2013 [2016], Airmen): Pianist, mainstream guy with a soul and funk background, nearly ten albums since 1993. Opens with two covers, then six originals, one by his alto saxophonist Caleb Curtis, and two more covers. The "big boys" include Houston Person -- tenor sax on five cuts -- Antoine Drye on trumpet, and three vocals by Jazzmeia Horn and/or Noël Simoné Whippler. Nice, relaxed, soulful set -- Person's marvelous solo on "The Very Thought of You" bumped this up a notch.B+(**) [cd]

Julian Hartwell: The Julian Hartwell Project (2015, self-released): Pianist, first album, hype sheet clearly attributes the album to the titular group but I usually go with the name leader. High octane octet: sax, trumpet, trombone, two basses, guitar, drums, a lot of firepower for a high energy postbop set.B+(**) [cd]

Joseph Howell: Time Made to Swing (2015 [2016], Summit): Clarinetist, from California, second album, quartet with accordion (Cory Pesaturo), bass, and drums. Standards, starts with "On the Sunny Side of the Street" then veers into Parker ("Confirmation") and Monk ("Let's Cool One"). High energy, the accordion beefs up the sound, the clarinet races.B+(***) [cd]

The James Hughes/Jimmy Smith Quintet: Ever Up & Onward (2015 [2016], self-released): Hughes (alto/tenor/soprano sax) and Smith (trumpet, cornet, flugelhorn) lead a hard bop quintet with Phil Kelly on piano, fifty-some years after the genre's heyday. Still can't call it retro, since it's pretty much the baseline postbop is built on, just without the cleverness that sometimes passes for innovation.B+(*) [cd]

Vijay Iyer/Wadada Leo Smith: A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke (2015 [2016], ECM): Piano-trumpet duo, both major figures, so you'd expect something big. What you get, though, is pretty tepid, with the piano fading into the background as Smith does his slow-solo thing -- similar to his solo albums, perhaps toned down a bit with Manfred Eicher watching.B+(**) [cdr]

Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra With Wynton Marsalis: The Abyssinian Mass (2013 [2016], Blue Engine, 2CD): Featuring Damien Sneed, organist and conductor of Chorale Le Chateau, a red-robed vocal group which judging from the pictures outnumbers the big band by about five-to-one. Marsalis composed the music, drawing liberally on the gospel tradition and smattering the libretto with plagiarism fromThe Bible, and the Reverend Dr. Calvin O. Butts III adds some down home preaching. Where I grew up, mass meant something huge and heavy, and I can't say as I've encountered music so massive before. I try not to begrudge Christians their faith, but it can't be a good thing when it's reduced to two-plus hours of gloria in excelsis Deo, or in their down home vernacular, "glory to God in the highest." Comes in oversized packaging with a thick booklet and a DVD, all the better to remind you that in America generous donors are always willing to pay for trivialized amenities -- especially the kind that worship power.C- [cd]

Krakauer's Ancestral Groove: Checkpoint (2015 [2016], Table Pounding): Clarinetist David Krakauer, plays jazz with klezmer roots and branches: the rhythm generating a lot of energy and the clarinet threatening to screech. Band is built around electric guitar (Sheryl Bailey) and bass (Jerome Harris), and employs a sampler, plus a guest spot for Marc Ribot.B+(***) [cd]

Kyle: Smyle (2015, Indie Pop): Yet another singer-rapper from southern California, this one from Ventura. AMG lists this as his only album, then refers to another one (Beautiful Loser) -- maybe has something to do with also/previously calling himself Super Duper. Funny enough some pieces almost qualify as standup.B+(***)

Julian Lage: Arclight (2015 [2016], Mack Avenue): Guitarist, regarded as a Wunderkind, subject of a documentary at age 8, performed on the Grammy Awards at 13, joined the faculty at Stanford at 15. Still in his twenties, has continued to receive critical praise and plaudits although I'm not sure why. This is a trio with Scott Colley and Kenny Wollesen, originals with four covers, all nice stuff.B+(*) [cd]

Kendrick Lamar: Untitled Unmastered (2013-16 [2016], Top Dawg Entertainment): Eight tracks, no titles but recording dates, 34:06, presumably outtakes, sketches, throwaway experiments, released online because, well, what the hell? As someone who's never really got either of his widely accalimed studio masterpieces, I'm even more lost here. But nothing here is going to disabuse you of the notion he's a genius, even if it doesn't quite convince me.B+(***)

Tom Lellis: The Flow (2015 [2016], Beamtime): Jazz singer, AMG lists seven albums since 1979, plays keyboards but Dave Kikoski is the primary pianist here, leading a trio plus Jeremy Steig on flute and a long list of guests. Four originals, plus Lellis lyrics to several others -- mostly jazz pianists and his Brazilian heroes. Neither his voice nor his chops impress much as he slips and slides around too tricky melodies.C-

Charles Lloyd & the Marvels: I Long to See You (20B-15 [2016], Blue Note): Tenor saxophonist (also plays some flute), became very popular in the mid-1960s and continues to be one of the most highly regarded jazz musicians. Group here features guitarist Bill Frisell and steel guitarist Greg Leisz, along with Reuben Rogers on bass and Eric Harland on drums -- "Shenandoah" is a near-textbook example of Frisell's feel for Americana. Second half includes guest vocals by Willie Nelson and Norah Jones. Feels to me like he's coasting, but he does have entertaining friends.B+(**)

Los Bonsáis: Nordeste (2015, Elefant, EP): Noise-pop duo from Asturias in northwest Spain, soft shoegazey fuzz, attractive but not very substantial, especially as they squeeze ten songs into 14:28.B+(*)

Jon Lundbom & Big Five Chord: Make the Magic Happen (2015 [2016], Hot Cup, EP): Guitarist, band includes two saxes -- Jon Irabagon (alto) you know, Balto Exclamationpoint (tenor and his homemade"balto! saxophone") I don't recognize (although previous member Bryan Murray had also been credited with the less emphatic "balto saxophone") -- plus Moppa Elliott (bass) and Dan Monaghan (drums). Basically the same avant brew Lundbom has been mixing up since 2009 -- my pick is still the 2CD Liverevil (2014) -- so what's new this year (aside from the exclamation mark) is a marketing gimmick: the music is to be split up into four 30-minute digital EPs, the first out now, the others in April, June, and September. You can buy them "a la carte" or as part of a subscription, or you can pre-order a "beautifully packaged" 4CD box available September 30, which includes the downloads as they become available.B+(***) [cdr]

Jon Lundbom & Big Five Chord: Bring Their 'A' Game (2015 [2016], Hot Cup, EP): The second of this year's four EPs, available April 1 -- for promo purposes I got them both at the same time, popped both into the changer, and can't tell them apart. Would make a fine single album were they so inclined.B+(***) [cdr]

Loretta Lynn: Full Circle (2016, Legacy): Now 83, she hasn't produced albums with any regularity since the 1980s, with her latest comeback the Jack White-produced Van Lear Rose (2004). This one was organized by John Carter Cash and Patsy Lynn Reynolds. As with Cash's father, they set Loretta down several years ago to record the old songs, of which this is the first batch. She doesn't have as iconic a voice as Cash, but she's sounding pretty good here.B+(**)

Kirk MacDonald: Symmetry (2013 [2016], Addo): Tenor saxophonist, from Canada, not sure where but he has a dozen albums since 1990, most recorded in Toronto. Hard bop quintet with trumpet (Tom Harrell), piano (Brian Dickinson), bass (Neil Swainson), and drums (Dennis Mackrel). Unexceptional except for the trumpet player, who rewards whatever attention you can muster.B+(*) [cd]

Gabriela Martina: No White Shoes (2015 [2016], self-released): Singer-songwriter, born in Lucerne, Switzerland, studied at Berklee, based in Boston, first album (after an EP). All originals (except "A Night in Tunisia"), backed by guitar-piano-bass-drums with a splash of soprano sax and a dash of extra percussion.B [cd]

Meridian Brothers: Los Suicidas (2015, Soundway, EP): Colombian pseudo-group, principally Eldris Álvarez, here joined by organ player Jaime Llano Gonzalez, who works "foreign rhythms such as foxtrots or waltzes" into more traditional Colombian fare like cumbias, bambucos, and pasillos -- although not without raising the notion that it's all a bit odd. Eight cuts, 29:01.B+(**)

Hendrik Meurkens: Harmonicus Rex (2010 [2016], Height Advantage): Harmonica player, from Germany but mostly plays Latin jazz, originally made his mark playing vibraphone. This is fairly mainstream -- Jimmy Cobb is the drummer, with Dado Moroni on piano, Marcus Panascia on bass, and four spots each for Joe Magnarelli (trumpet/flugelhorn) and Anders Bostrum (alto flute). Nice showcase for his instrument.B+(*) [cd]

Dave Miller: Old Door Phantoms (2015 [2016], Ears & Eyes): Guitarist, first album, fusion thing with Fender bass (Matt Ulery), keyboards (Ben Boye), and drums (Quin Kirchner). The guitar is sometimes snazzy, but more often than not they rely on volume to try to get their point across (whatever it is).B- [cd]

Naked Truth: Avian Thug (2013 [2016], Rare Noise): Fusion quartet, not a "supergroup" but not unknowns either -- Graham Haynes (electrified cornet), Lorenzo Feliciati (electric bass, guitars), Roy Powell (organ, analog synths, prepared piano), and Pat Mastelotto (acoustic & electric drums). Some interesting wrinkles, but doesn't leave me thinking they've broken any ground.B+(*) [cdr]

Willie Nelson: Summertime: Willie Nelson Sings Gershwin (2016, Legacy): Generally a fine standards singer, mostly by sticking to basics and shying away from melodrama. Still, he has trouble getting the feel of these songs, his sly stutter far less pleasurable than, say, the broad showboating of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald -- their takes readily come to mind whenever I hear these songs, but I can think of hundreds of versions I prefer, if only because unlike Nelson's they swing. Duets with Cyndi Lauper and Sheryl Crow are low points.B

Angelika Niescier/Florian Weber: NYC Five (2015 [2016], Intakt): Polish alto saxophonist, half-dozen albums since 2002, teamed with the German pianist and a pick up band in New York: Ralph Alessi (trumpet), Christopher Tordini (bass), and Tyshawn Sorey (drums). Three tunes by each of the leaders, bursting with energy -- especially strong showing by Alessi.B+(***) [cdr]

Kat Parra: Songbook of the Americas (2016, JazzMa): Vocalist, based in San Francisco, fifth album, mostly does Latin standards, this albums mambos and cha-chas, boleros and tangos no exception. Some guests, including Tuck & Patti, help out (if you call their efforts help).B [cd]

Christian Perez: Anima Mundi (2015 [2016], CPM): Guitarist, from Argentina, mixes classical with Latin percussion and bandoneon, decorated by flute or piccolo.B [cd]

Roberta Piket: One for Marian: Celebrating Marian McPartland (2015 [2016], Thirteenth Note): Jazz pianist, early albums (from 1997) on mainstream labels, has more than a dozen. Makes sense she would take McPartland as a hero. She gets ample support here for a lush tribute: Steve Wilson (alto sax, flute), Virginia Mayhew (tenor sax, clarinet), Bill Mobley (trumpet, flugelhorn), Harvie S (bass), Billy Mintz (drums), with Karrin Allyson singing one tune.B+(*) [cdr]

Leslie Pintchik: True North (2015 [2016], Pintch Hard): Pianist, from Brooklyn, has a handful of albums since 2003, mainstream, with the usual touchstones (notably Bill Evans). Trio work is quite nice here, although most of it adds extra percussion from Satoshi Takeishi, so it's trio only in spirit. Also, about half of the tracks add horns -- Steve Wilson (alto/soprano sax), Ron Horton (trumpet/flugelhorn -- and they expand on the spirit.B+(***) [cd]

Alberto Pinton Noi Siamo: Resiliency (2015 [2016], Moserobie): Pinton's a multi-reed player from Venice, credited here with baritone sax, clarinet, and bass clarinet. "Noi siamo" is just Italian for "we are." Leads a quartet here with Niklas Barno (trumpet) Torbjorn Zetterberg (bass), and Konrad Agnas (drums), recorded live in Stockholm. A real barnburner.A- [cd]

Richard Poole/Marilyn Crispell/Gary Peacock: In Motion (2014 [2016], Intakt): Piano trio, drummer listed first for no reason I've figured out other than that he usually gets listed last -- in my database I find him so listed behind Patrick Battstone and Coat Cooke, and his discography has a few more examples. Aside from a Peacock standard, everything here is joint-credited, presumably improvised. No complaints about the drummer, but the others are more famous for good reasons, evident here even when they're not especially flashy.B+(***) [cdr]

Iggy Pop: Post Pop Depression (2016, Loma Vista): Band pictured and named on the cover, with Joshua Homme (Queens of the Stone Age) listed first. Singer comes through loud and clear, but everything else seems unsettled.B+(*)

Pram Trio: Saga Thirteen (2015 [2016], self-released): Piano trio: Jack Bodkin (piano), Mark Godfrey (bass), Eric West (drums). Godfrey and Bodkin split six compositions, total 30:51. the sort of thing that often gets marked EP these days.B+(*) [cd]

Quantic: The Western Transient: A New Constellation (2015, Tru Thoughts): British techno producer Will Holland, has a substantial stack of records. This one is kept at arms length as"Quantic Presents the Western Transient." Discogs lists this as"smooth jazz," which is too prejudicial, but the record doesn't put up much of a fight.B

Quttinirpaaq: Dead September (2015, Rural Isolation Project): Austin, TX noise group, name presumably derives from the Canadian national park, located on the northern tip of Ellesmere Island, as far north as you can go in Canada. Third album, sheets of guitar playing "bleeding-noise industrial electronic rock . . . sounds like punk rock thrown violently into a paper shredder with no fucks given." I bailed out four cuts in, so cut it some grade slack.C+

Bonnie Raitt: Dig In Deep (2016, Redwing): Her best in quite some while -- my database nominates 1973's Takin' My Time but I've missed things and reacted badly to Michael Tatum's nominee, 1991's Luck of the Draw. She hasn't aged in the manner of blues singers, but there's nothing urgent here -- she's clear and articulate and has learned to pace herself, making this seem so natural you'd think she's been doing it so well all along.A-

Ratatet: Arctic (2015 [2016], Ridgeway): Bay Area group: Paul Hanson (bassoon), John Gove (trombone), Dillon Vado (vibes), Greg Sankovich (keyboards), Jeff Denson (basses, vocals), Alan Hall (drums), with Hall the leader/composer/arranger. Another postbop variant, the instrumentation setting them apart.B [cd]

Scott Reeves Jazz Orchestra: Portraits and Places (2015 [2016], Origin): Big band, leader plays alto flugelhorn but that's rather beside the point. Steve Wilson gets a "featuring" credit on the cover, and there are a handful of names I recognize in the band, like pianist Jim Ridl and vocalist (2 cuts) Sara Serpa.B- [cd]

Logan Richardson: Shift (2013 [2016], Blue Note): Alto saxophonist, born in Kansas City but based in Paris, 2006 debut (aptly named Cerebral Flow) impressed me, but this is only his second album since -- a big label affair with big names in the band, especially Jason Moran (piano) and Pat Metheny (guitar). So much talent cannot be denied, but doesn't fit together all that well either. Cover song from Bruno Mars.B+(*)

Rihanna: Anti (2016, Roc Nation): Mostly crawl along, not a good sign for dance-pop or even bump-and-grind, though often the oblique rhythms suggest something interesting is lurking about, and occasionally I get hooked -- "Love on the Brain" never fails.A-

Alfredo Rodriguez: Tocororo (2015 [2016], Mack Avenue/Qwest): Cuban pianist, based in US since 2009, third album, co-produced by Quincy Jones. Many vocals, some pieces quite beguiling in an almost childish way.B+(**) [cd]

Sidestepper: Supernatural Love (2016, Real World): British producer Richard Blair, learned to love Latin music living in Colombia, and brought back that fondness for a more conventional electronica treatment.B+(*)

Sirius Quartet: Paths Become Lines (2015 [2016], Autentico): String quartet, "blending the precision of classical music and the energy of 'compromvisation,'" appeared on an album with Ivo Perelman I liked, well, more than this. Mostly grates on my ears, though some passages are interesting, and I don't doubt their chops.B+(*) [cd]

Gwen Stefani: This Is What the Truth Feels Like (2016, Interscope): Blonde bombshell singer, a cover favorite of Blender magazine back in the day, which included two 2000-02 albums fronting No Doubt, and two 2004-06 solo albums. A decade later this is her third album, done with four production teams and an average of four writers per song, which for a pop album with hip-hop touches is about par for the course. I can't say much for her old work, but pretty much every song here clicks for me.A-

Zhenya Strigalev: Never Group (2015 [2016], Whirlwind): Alto saxophonist, based in London, don't know if he's native. Has a couple previous albums, but this is the first I've heard of him, and I botched the credit/title during unpacking. Core group is a trio with Tim Lefebvre on bass and Eric Harland on drums, and several additional musicians have guest spots.B+(**) [cd]

Henry Threadgill Ensemble Double Up: Old Locks and Irregular Verbs (2015 [2016], Pi): Not a Zooid album (an error I made in unpacking). In fact, Threadgill doesn't play; he's only credited with composition (four pieces, called "Part One" through "Part Four"). The ensemble does double up on piano (Jason Moran and David Virelles), alto sax (Roman Filiu and Curtis MacDonald), and bass substitutes (Christopher Hoffman on cello and Jose Davila on tuba), but only one drummer (Craig Weinrib). Impressive group, way beyond the star pianists. The composer gives them plenty to chew on, and they come up with one surprise after another.A- [cd]

The U.S. Army Blues: Live at Blues Alley (2015 [2016], self-released): Aka The United States Army Band "Pershing's Own," commanded by Col. Thomas Rotondi, Jr. I suppose I should be more generous to America's premier exemplar of state socialism, especially when they do something that doesn't involve killing and mayhem, but the lavish production grates at me as much as the mediocre music. A full blown big band (actually overblown with a fifth trumpet). To turn the late Robert Sherrill's book title around, military music is to music as military justice is to justice.C [cd]

Marcos Varela: San Ygnacio (2012 [2016], Origin): Bassist, from Houston, first album, wrote two (of eleven) pieces, picking up a few more from the veteran band: George Cables (piano) and Billy Hart (drums) are the core, with other rotating in for a few cuts -- Logan Richardson (alto sax), Dayna Stephens (tenor sax), Clifton Anderson (trombone). Rowdy, upbeat postbop, caught me at a bad time.B [cd]

Vox Arcana: Caro's Song (2014 [2015], Relay): Chicago trio, sort of an avant chamber group with clarinet (James Falzone) and cello/electronics (Fred Lonberg-Holm) along with Tim Daisy forgoing his drums his recent fascination with marimba and radio sampling.B+(*) [bc]

Wildhoney: Sleep Through It (2015, Deranged): Baltimore shoegaze group, Lauren Shusterich the singer, with two guitarists (Joe Trainor, Marybeth Mareski), bass, and drums. LP length, 10 cuts -- not easily differentiated but they do have a coherent, shimmering sound -- 32:13.B+(*)

Wildhoney: Your Face Sideways (2015, Topshelf, EP): EP came out in October after their debut album in January, stretches six cuts to 25:57, but that's mostly due to the 12:29 "noise drone" at the end. Actually, my first thought was ethereal, but it's really too glossy for that, strangely attractive. First five songs could be one for all I could tell.B+(*)

Jeff Williams: Outlier (2015 [2016], Whirlwind): Drummer, British, has a half dozen albums since 1994. Quintet, with tenor sax (Josh Arcoleo), guitar (Phil Robson), piano/keyboards (Kit Downes), and bass (Sam Lasserson, both double and electric). I hear a lot of mainstream postbop that is expert but uninteresting, but this has some bite and resonance to it without breaking avant ground.B+(***) [cd]

Wussy: Forever Sounds (2016, Shake It): Cincinnati alt/indie band, active since 2005, leader Chuck Cleaver had a notable earlier band called the Ass Ponys but picked up a dimension adding Lisa Walker to the band. This comes off both denser and spacier than their average album, which is reliably meaty -- though I can't say as I'm picking up many lyrics this time. But then I've always been slow getting them.A-

Michiyo Yagi/Joe McPhee/Paal Nilssen-Love/Lasse Marhaug: Soul Stream (2013 [2015], PNL): On the drummer's label, but the key player is Yagi on Japanese instruments (an electric 21-string koto and a 17-string bass koto). McPhee adds ballad tones on pocket trumpet, alto and tenor sax, and Marhaug is responsible for electronics and "other objects," while the drummer has a fairly easy day.B+(*) [bc]

Michiyo Yagi/Lasse Marhaug/Paal Nilssen-Love: Angular Mass (2011 [2015], PNL): As above, minus Joe McPhee, which is to say this is like stripping off the human mask and revealing the wires and contraptions underneath, not just raw but murky and inconclusive as well.B [bc]

La Yegros: Magnetismo (2016, Soundway): Mariana Yegros, from Argentina, based in Buenos Aires and France, a foudner of something called "electro cumbia" -- evidently no longer a Colombian exclusive.B+(***)

Youth Worship: LP1 (2015, Self Harm): Alt/indie group from New York, first album, released between two EPs. Songs have a certain snappiness to them, and they bring more than the usual noise to the fore.B+(***)

Tom Zé: Vira Lata Na Via Láctea (2014, self-released): Brazilian singer-songwriter, well into his 70s, came to notice in the US when David Byrne compiled his early work into two volumes in hisBrazil Classics series. I never warmed to those volumes, with their disjointed rhythms and strange shape shifting, but I've enjoyed his later (more moderate, I think) work starting with 1998's Com Defeito de Fabricaçao, and this one continues in their vein, catchy despite its improbability.A-

Omri Ziegele Noisy Minority: Wrong Is Right (2015 [2016], Intakt): Alto saxophonist, from Switzerland, sixth album since 2002, his Zürich group Noisy Minority normally a trio with Jan Schlegel (electric bass) and Dieter Ulrich (drums, bugle), joined here by trombonist Ray Anderson -- adds another sonic layer, solo contrast, and (I suspect) some funk to the uneven grooves. A bit of spoken word early on suggests a direction they didn't take. A- [cdr]

Recent Reissues, Compilations, Vault Discoveries

Cheryl Bentyne: Lost Love Songs (2003-11 [2016], Summit): Standards singer, best known as part of Manhattan Transfer but has fifteen albums on her own. This one collects songs from three albums that only appeared in Japan: The Lights Still Burn (2003), Moonlight Serenade (2003), Songs of Our Time (2011). Torchy, gorgeous, "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" sticks in your head long after the record ends.B+(***) [cd]

Borah Bergman/Peter Brötzmann/Frode Gjerstad: Left (1996 [2016], Not Two): A remarkable avant pianist whose recording career spanned from 1975 nearly to his death in 2012, paired with two avant saxophonists in one of those live matches -- this one from the Molde International Jazz Festival -- that represent a typical day's creation until years later, once he's gone, it gains an air of poignancy.B+(**) [bc]

DJ Katapila: Trotro (2009 [2016], Awesome Tapes From Africa): DJ mixtape from Ghana, beats mostly from modern electronica but hot enough to pass muster in a land reknowned for rhythm, the vocals a bit on the squeaky side, which I suppose could mean they've been jacked up like everything else.B+(***)

William Hooker: Light: The Early Years 1975-1989 (1975-89 [2016], NoBusiness, 4CD): A trawl through the avant drummer's early oeuvre. First disc starts with him solo, a failed soul singer backed only by his own percussion. Then comes two monster pieces with saxophonists: a 26:48 trio with David Murray (1975), and a 19:27 duo with a young and even more visceral David S. Ware. Second disc is more obscure, ending with a 16:07 trio with two saxophonists (Jameel Moondoc and Hasaan Dawkins). Third jumps ahead to 1988, a previously unreleased trio with Roy Campbell on trumpet and Booker T. Williams on tenor sax. Fourth gives you a set with Lewis Barnes (trumpet) and Richard Keene (reeds) and a 16:18 drum solo. All avant, very underground, and while the horns make a lot of noise, there's very little filler -- I think just one cut with bass, no piano or guitar -- so the drums always ring clear.A- [cd]

Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra: All My Yesterdays (1966 [2016], Resonance, 2CD): Jones was a veteran bebop trumpet player, elder brother of Hank and Elvin, better known as a composer than for his chops although his early records are remarkable. Lewis was a big band drummer who came to prominence with Stan Kenton and Woody Herman. In 1966 they put together a big band to play regular gigs at New York's Village Vanguard, a band which survived leader deaths in 1986 and 1990. This goes back to the band's first gigs, and it's hard to exaggerate how vibrant they sound.A- [cd]

Meridian Brothers: Devoción (Works 2005-2011) (2005-11 [2013], Staubgold): Nominally a Colombian band, although this collection of early sides seems to be the solo work of Eblis Álvarez. It certainly doesn't sound like a group effort: the music barely supports the idiosyncratic vocals in something more credible as psychedelic than the stuff the Rough Guide folks uncover. Reminds Christgau of Tom Zé, and I can hear that. A-

The Rough Guide to Cumbia [Second Edition] (1975-2012 [2013], World Music Network, 2CD): Successor to the label's 2000 edition, a new batch of (mostly) old songs, the last two dating from 2008-10, most of the others hard to pin down (two also show up in compilations from 1960-76 and 1948-79, so they could be older than I'm sure of). The cumbias have a marvelous bounce, passed effortlessly from band to band. Also includes a "bonus CD":The Rough Guide to Los Corraleros De Majagual, an important cumbia group dating back to 1962.B+(***)

The Rough Guide to Latin Disco (1975-2014 [2015], World Music Network): At least these New York tracks are relatively easy to locate: two-thirds date from the 1975-80 disco heyday, with Joe Bataan and Salsoul Orchestra scoring two tracks each. The others date from 2002 forward. The disco feint has a whiff of sellout to it and never really scaled the heights of disco ecstasy, but not for lack of energy, or chops.B+(*)

The Rough Guide to Merengue Dance ([2009], World Music Network, 2CD): The national style of Dominican music, closer in feel to cumbia than to salsa -- the ubiquitous accordion has something to do with that. The difference getween "merengue" and"merengue dance" seems to be speed, though I can't imagine dancing to any of these barnburners, even before I got old and decrepit. No idea on dates: I decided to just kick back and enjoy this one. Bonus disc is Mambeao by Carlitos Almonte, one of the accordion wizards. Seems to be unavailable separately.A-

The Rough Guide to Psychedelic Cumbia (1969-2014 [2015], World Music Network): First few cuts seem to date from the 1970s or a bit earlier but then there's a big jump to recent (although I only tracked about half of the songs down, and even old ones are likely to have recent youtube videos. Never clear what "psychedelic" means, but these are mostly instrumental vamps with extra but not super fancy percussion.B+(***)

The Rough Guide to the Best Arabic Music You've Never Heard (2008-14 [2015], World Music Network): No artist names I recognize (admittedly, not a very high hurdle), but all appear to be relatively recent, and they range fairly widely over the Arabic-speaking world. Still, easier to pick out "you've never heard" than "the best" -- not least because it's hard to find a unifying theme here.B

Larry Young: In Paris: The ORTF Recordings (1964-65 [2016], Resonance, 2CD): Organ player, broke out of the soul jazz groove when he moved to Blue Note in 1965 -- his album Unity (with Woody Shaw, Joe Henderson, and Elvin Jones) is a masterpiece, one of those Penguin Guide crown recordings. These lavishly documented, previously unreleased recordings are transitional, most from a quartet led by tenor saxophonist Nathan Davis -- a Kansas City native who moved to Paris in 1963 -- with Shaw, in blistering form, and drummer Billy Brooks. Young keeps those cuts simmering, but you don't wind up with a very good sense of how. Also includes a couple earlier cuts with various French musicians, including one with Young playing piano.B+(***) [cd]

Old Music

Anderson .Paak: Venice (2014, OBE/Steel Wool): First album for the Afro-Korean-Californian singer/rapper, sorts out his sound on moderately interesting songs, mostly about sex.B+(**)

Nathan Davis: Happy Girl (1965 [2006], MPS): First album, basically the same group -- Woody Shaw (trumpet), Billy Brooks (drums) -- as on Larry Young's In Paris but with Young playing piano (less distinctively) and Jimmy Woode added at bass. Opens with a flute piece ("The Flute in the Blues").B+(*)

Drive-By Truckers: Gangstabilly (1998, Soul Dump): First album, with Patterson Hood doing most of the writing, Mike Cooley chipping in "Panties in Your Purse," both on guitar and vocals, plus pedal steel, upright bass, and drums, "the most country of any of our albums," although their attitude already cutting against the grain -- on the one hand, the hip-hop allusion of the title, on the other a song called "Demonic Possession" based on a Pat Buchanan speech (perhaps the one Molly Ivins thought "might have sounded better in the original German").B+(***)

Drive-By Truckers: Alabama Ass Whuppin' (1999 [2000], Second Heaven): Live album, recorded over several dates in Athens and Atlanta, Georgia; repeats five songs from their debut, three fromPizza Deliverance, adds three songs including a wicked tale about "The Avon Lady" and a breakneck cover of Jim Carroll's "People Who Died," also working a little Lynyrd Skynyrd into "Steve McQueen." I had my doubts on the song with too much Jesus (too little sex), but toward the end they aimed for "live and loud" and got there.B+(***)

Drive-By Truckers: Ugly Buildings, Whores, and Politicians: Greatest Hits 1998-2009 (1998-2009 [2011], New West): Not sure that any of these songs qualify as hits, but the seven source albums showed slow, steady progress up the charts, hitting 50 in 2006 and 37 in 2008 (figures topped by three later albums, the highest at 16). Nor is the band so hit-and-miss you need a compilation (I have six of those albums at A-, with Gangstabilly a very near miss). Nor am I sure this improves on any of the six (or for that matter the odds and sods collected as The Fine Print). But the songcraft is very much there.A-

Kendrick Lamar: Overly Dedicated (2010, Top Dawg Entertainment): First mixtape, a year before Section.80 turned enough ears to get him on my radar, but following four mixtapes as K-Dot, an alias he still self-refers to here. Maybe half of this seems generic to the craft, but the other half is so spry and bubbly it bursts the seams.A-

Horace Parlan: Movin' & Groovin' (1960, Blue Note): Pianist, worked with Sonny Stitt and later Charles Mingus in the 1950s, had a terrific run with Blue Note in the early 1960s, starting with this trio -- Sam Jones on bass, Al Harewood on drums.B+(**)

Horace Parlan: Up & Down (1961 [2009], Blue Note): The pianist leads a hard bop quintet here with Booker Ervin (tenor sax), Grant Green (guitar), George Tucker (bass), and Al Harewood (drums). Opens with the guitarist in fine form, but Ervin tends to go with the flow rather than blast out of it, as he would a couple years hence.B+(***)

Bonnie Raitt: Bonnie Raitt (1971, Warner Brothers): Had a show biz father and a pianist mother, raised a Quaker, went to Radcliffe and majored in social relations and African studies, took a semester off, was befriended by a blues promoter, learned to play bottle-neck, and was discovered opening for Fred McDowell. First album, two originals buried in the middle of a mess of blues although she led off with a Stephen Stills song the label might have figured for a single but didn't bother releasing.B+(***)

Bonnie Raitt: Streetlights (1974, Warner Brothers): Fourth album, Jerry Ragavoy producing, no original songs, no blues, wonder whether she/they would have touched John Prine's "Angel From Montgomery" had he not also been on WEA at the time (as were her opening songwriters, Joni Mitchell and James Taylor).B

Bonnie Raitt: The Glow (1979, Warner Brothers): Still kicked around from producer to producer, this time landing with Peter Asher -- not much of a roots/blues afficionado. Starts with two Isaac Hayes songs, not a bad move.B

Bonnie Raitt: Green Light (1982, Warner Brothers): I buy that she's having more fun here, mostly due to upbeat rockers -- some suggesting she's been listening to Dave Edmunds.B+(**)

Bonnie Raitt: Nine Lives (1986, Warner Brothers): Her last album for Warners, one that sat on the shelf a couple years before she recut half of it to make it more hit-worthy. Christgau, who cares much more about her than I do, regards it as her worst (runner up: 2002's Silver Lining). I find it perfectly ordinary -- something she's done several times.B-

Bonnie Raitt: Road Tested (1995, Capitol, 2CD): Only two (of nine) of her Warners albums went gold, but her first three albums for Capitol went platinum (2-7x) -- less familiar to me with Longing in Their Hearts not even on Rhapsody -- leading to the profit-taking of this live double, reclaiming large swathes of her early songbook. Strikes me as perfunctory, but does make a whole out of the parts.B+(**)

Bonnie Raitt: The Best of Bonnie Raitt on Capitol 1989-2003 (1989-2003 [2003], Capitol): First three albums went platinum, cashing in on all the hard work the past decade while Warners paired her with one ill-suited producer after another. I'm not a fan of those albums (at least of the two better-regarded ones I've heard), but looking back I have to admit that her Grammy-grabbing MOR move produced some exquisite schmaltz. This collection goes down so easy you scarcely notice it -- beyond the warm feeling it leaves you with. What you do notice are theRoad Tested remakes of old blues.A-

The Larry Young Trio: Testifying (1960 [1992], New Jazz/OJC): Organ player, born in Newark, first album, cut when he was still 19. Mostly trio with Thornel Schwartz (guitar) and Jimmie Smith (drums), plus two cuts with Joe Holiday on tenor sax. Two original pieces (plus Holiday's "Exercise for Chihuahuas"), standards and blues, not his breakthrough sound but impressive for the genre.B+(***)

Larry Young: Groove Street (1962 [1995], Prestige/OJC): Third album, 21 now, expands his trio -- Thornel Schwartz on guitar and Jimmie Smith on drums -- with Bill Leslie on tenor sax. Prestige was notorious for quickly cutting slapdash albums and I figure this was one, where the order of the day was "groove."B+(**)

Additional Consumer News:

Previous grades on artists in the old music section.

• Nathan Davis: London by Night (1987, DIW): B
• Drive-By Truckers: Pizza Deliverance (1999, Ghost Meat): A-
• Drive-By Truckers: Southern Rock Opera (2001, SDR): A-
• Drive-By Truckers: Decoration Day (2003, New West): A-
• Drive-By Truckers: The Dirty South (2004, New West): A-
• Drive-By Truckers: A Blessing and a Curse (2006, New West): A-
• Drive-By Truckers: Brighter Than Creation's Dark (2007 [2008], New West): A-
• Drive-By Truckers: The Fine Print: A Collection of Oddities and Rarities 2003-2008 (2003-08 [2009], New West): A-
• Drive-By Truckers: The Big To-Do (2010, ATO): B+(***)
• Drive-By Truckers: Go-Go Boots (2009-10 [2011], ATO/Red): A-
• Drive-By Truckers: English Oceans (2014, ATO): B+(**)
• Kendrick Lamar: Section.80 (2011, Top Dawg Entertainment): B+(**)
• Kendrick Lamar: Good Kid, MAAD City (2012, Aftermath): A-
• Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly (2015, Top Dawg/Aftermath/Intgerscope): A-
• Horace Parlan: On the Spur of the Moment (1961 [1998], Blue Note): A-
• Horace Parlan: Happy Frame of Mind (1963 [1988], Blue Note): A-
• Horace Parlan: Blue Parlan (1978 [1979], Steeplechase): B+
• Horace Parlan: Glad I Found You (1984, Steeplechase): B+
• Bonnie Raitt: Give It Up (1972, Warner Brothers): A
• Bonnie Raitt: Takin' My Time (1973, Warner Brothers): A-
• Bonnie Raitt: Home Plate (1975, Warner Brothers): B+
• Bonnie Raitt: Sweet Forgiveness (1977, Warner Brothers): B
• Bonnie Raitt: The Bonnie Raitt Collection (1971-86 [1990], Warner Brothers): B+
• Bonnie Raitt: Nick of Time (1989, Capitol): B
• Bonnie Raitt: Luck of the Draw (1991, Capitol): B-
• Bonnie Raitt: Fundamental (1998, Capitol): B+
• Bonnie Raitt: Silver Lining (2002, Capitol): B
• Bonnie Raitt: Souls Allike (2004 [2005], Capitol): B
• Bonnie Raitt: Slipstream (2012, Redwing): B+(**)
• Archie Shepp/Horace Parlan: Goin' Home (1977 [1985], Steeplechase): A
• Archie Shepp/Horace Parlan: Trouble in Mind (1980, Steeplechase): A-
• Larry Young: Young Blues (1960 [1994], New Jazz/OJC): B+
• Larry Young: Into Something (1964 [1998], Blue Note): B+
• Larry Young: Unity (1965 [1999], Blue Note): A
• Larry Young: Of Love and Peace (1966 [2004], Blue Note): A-
• Larry Young: Mother Ship (1969 [2003], Blue Note): B+
• Larry Young: The Art of Larry Young (1964-69 [1992], Blue Note): B

Notes

Everything streamed from Rhapsody, except as noted in brackets following the grade:

• [cd] based on physical cd
• [cdr] based on an advance or promo cd or cdr
• [bc] available at bandcamp.com
• [sc] available at soundcloud.com
• [os] some other stream source
• [dl] something I was able to download from the web; may be freely available, may be a bootleg someone made available, or may be a publicist promo

Started to work on this, then got so waylaid by allergies my brain froze up. Of course, trying to write about whether Trump is a fascist is a question that begs so much backtracking it's easy to get lost.

Worth noting here that the Wisconsin primary is Tuesday. Cruz has long been favored over Trump and Kasich: the latest 538 poll averages are 44.1-32.1-21.4%, and since it's mostly winner-take-all Trump is likely to fall short of the delegate count to stay on track for a first ballot win -- so expect some pundit talk about Trump stumbling, but Trump is a lock for a big win in New York on April 19, and has a good chance of scoring his first greater than 50% win there (538's poll average is 52.1-24.0-21.8%, with Cruz second and Kasich third).

More interesting is the Democratic primary, which 538 still gives to Clinton, but the poll averages have narrowed to 48.8-48.6%, with Sanders leading in five of the seven most recent polls. At this point I expect Sanders to win there, but it won't be a landslide. 538 is still showing Clinton with a huge lead in New York, 61.0-37.0%, but the last two polls there have Clinton +12 and +10, a far cry from the 71-23% outlier 538 still factors in. Clinton also has big leads in the other April primaries (65.9-30.5% in Pennsylvania, 70.6-27.0% in Maryland); also in California and New Jersey on June 7.

Some scattered links this week:

• Steve Coll: Global Trump:

  Trumpism is a posture, not a coherent platform. [ . . . ]

  Trump hasn't indicated that he would definitely pull out of treaty commitments to Europe and Asia. He seems to think that his threats and his pleas of poverty will soften up allies so that, once in the White House, he can close some of those great deals he often talks about. For"many, many years," he told the Times, the U.S. has been the "big stupid bully and we were systematically ripped off by everybody," providing military security without adequate compensation.

  Like a hammer viewing everything as a nail, Trump desperately wants to reconceive foreign relations as something that can be fixed by a flamboyant and shrewd deal maker -- i.e., by himself. He reminds me of a guy who was brought in to become CEO of a troubled company I used to work for. The company had racked up massive losses over several quarters, staving off bankruptcy only because they had sold a lot of bonds a few years earlier -- they didn't need the bonds but sold them"because they could" and just sat on the cash until they burned it all up. Anyhow, this new CEO (I don't even remember the name now) had the huge ego you get in jobs like that, so the first thing I decided to do was to renegotiate all of the company's supplier contracts, just because he figured he was a better negotiator than his predecessor. Turned out that he never successfully renegotiated a thing: all he did was piss off suppliers the company was already in arrears to, companies that no longer saw us as viable long-term customers. America isn't in as bad shape as my company was, but if Trump follows through and tries to shake down traditional allies, he's not likely to net much other than bad will. (Japan, for instance, pays us for defense because it's a pittance compared to our trade deficits. Maybe they'll pay a bit more, but the US market isn't what it used to be, nor is the US commitment to defend them.)

  Coll has a pretty rosy view of American military spending abroad -- surprising for someone who's mostly covered the Middle East for the last twenty-some years:

  Trump also argues that reduced defense spending abroad would free up funds for investment at home. We do need to rebuild bridges, airports, railways, and telecommunications. But defense spending isn't stopping us from doing so; the problem is the Republican anti-tax extremists in Congress, who refuse to either raise revenues or take advantage of historically low long-term interest rates. In all probability, the U.S. can afford its global-defense commitments indefinitely, and an open economy, renewed by immigration and innovation, should be able to continue to grow and to share the cost of securing free societies. The main obstacle to realizing this goal is not an exhausted imperial treasury. It is the collapse of the once-internationalist Republican Party into demagoguery, paralysis, and Trumpism.

  That, of course, is pretty much the Clinton position, one that argues that America is still great, has never been anything else. Such platitudes are baked into the Belt Area foreign/security policy professional class. They even seep into Stephen M Walt: No, @realDonaldTrump Is Not a Realist.

• Tierney Sneed: How Trump Ticked Off Anti-Abortion Groups by Trying to Prove His Creed: So Trump commits this gaffe, realizes his error (or more likely has it pointed out to him), and walks it back within hours.

  For months, the major concern the anti-abortion movement had with Donald Trump was that he was too wobbly on the issue. But on Wednesday, Trump staked out an abortion position so extreme that he blew up years of abortion foes' careful messaging.

  Trump's remark at an MSNBC town hall that an abortion ban should carry a punishment for women who seek out the procedure sent anti-abortion activists immediately scrambling to correct the damage.

  "Mr. Trump's comment today is completely out of touch with the pro-life movement and even more with women who have chosen such a sad thing as abortion," Jeanne Mancini, the president of March for Life Education and Defense Fund, said in a statement rushed out about an hour after Trump's remarks were first broadcast. "No pro-lifer would ever want to punish a woman who has chosen abortion. This is against the very nature of what we are about."

  In practical terms this should be treated as a wash -- like a muons which appears in a high-energy burst then vanishes within microseconds -- except that I think it shows two things:
  1. Trump understands the logic of the anti-abortion movement, which is about little more than punishing women (for sexual licentiousness, or getting raped, or just being poor), much as he understands punishment as the essential means of disciplining errant children and other rabble. No doubt being a major league misogynist helped Trump on this score.
  2. The much alleged "political correctness" police on the left are pikers compared to those who dictate orthodoxy on the right: the latter turned Trump around in hours, whereas Trump held firm on his assertions that"Mexicans are rapists" and his embrace of support from the KKK and outright Fascists. Sure, one might argue that this proves that the offenses he held firm on reflected deeply held beliefs, whereas his anti-abortion stance was never more than pure political opportunism. But I doubt he has any bedrock beliefs beyond his obsessions with the media spotlight and making money off that.

  Also see Here's How a Republican Is Supposed to Answer That Abortion Question Trump Flubbed, which shows how Ted Cruz handled the same question. The summary:

  See, Donald? That's how you do it. When someone asks you about abortion penalties after the overturn of Roe, here's what you do:

  You attack the questioner.

  You attack the media.

  You attack Barack Obama.

  You tell them what a swell pro-life person you are.

  You do everything except answer the question.

• Olivia Ward: Is Donald Trump actually a fascist? I'll add that leftists like myself are hypersensitive to fascist airs, and apply the label broadly to any right-winger who threatens violence, glories in empire, and/or seeks to reverse liberal progress (which they often decry as decadence and decay). Trump loosely qualifies, but so does Cruz and Kasich and most Republican activists, especially anyone who thinks America enjoyed a golden age under Calvin Coolidge or William McKinley (or Jefferson Davis). What makes Trump seem exceptional is the way he draws the sort of people who historically have supported fascism: racists, xenophobes, ultra-nationalists, those who want to use state power to enforce religious morality, those who hate unions, those who are contemptous of democracy (and other people), those who are prone to violence and hung up on patriarchy, those who feel the need to follow a charismatic and forceful leader. So it's not so much that Trump started out as a fascist as that by style and temperament he's been anointed as the Führer of the fascists, a role he hasn't shirked.

• Susan Sarandon Lives in a Very Small World: A not-very-smart critique of the "scandal" caused when Sarandon said that some Sanders supporters won't vote for Clinton against Trump, and that her own view was "I don't know. I'm going to see what happens." I wrote more about this piece then tore it up. Two points are that Sanders' popularity shows that there is much more quasi-left in America than anyone gave us credit for, and that transitioning from voting for one candidate who wants changes you want to another one who wants to defend the status quo (or somewhat mitigate the damage the goons on the other side are plotting) isn't likely to be smooth or automatic: perhaps if Clinton wins the nomination she should campaign for Sanders' supporters instead of veering to the right so to come off as slightly saner than Trump or Cruz, assuming everyone else will fall in line. At any rate, it's premature to worry about Sanders' supporters breaking ranks. As for the ad hominem attacks about Sarandon"living in a very small world," I think her political engagement is admirable and far-sighted, showing much more awareness of other people than is common in her tax bracket.

• Brief links:

  • Andrew J Bacevich: Ted Cruz Embodies the Degeneration of Foreign-Policy Conservatism

  • Russ Belville: Hillary's Supporters Really Sweating Over Bernie or Bust: Flowchart helps explain one-on-one polls, particularly that Sanders fares decisively better than Clinton against Kasich.

  • Zoë Carpenter: Women Are Already Punished for Trying to End Their Pregnancies

  • Matthew Duss: How Donald Trump Is Beating the Neoconservatives at Their Own Game

  • Thomas Frank: The Inequality Sweepstakes: From his new book, Listen, Liberal, or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, which I have a copy of next in line.

  • Jacob S Hacker/Paul Pierson: Why Trump Can't Break the GOP

  • Mike Konczal: 42 Trump Takes in 2000 Words

  • Jonathan Martin/Nate Cohn: Electoral Map Is a Reality Check to Donald Trump's Bid: One stat here is that the GOP frontrunner is viewed favorably by 19% and unfavorably by 57% -- an unprecedentedly miserable showing.

  • Mark Mazzetti: A CIA Grunt's Tale of the Fog of Secret War: On Douglas Laux, one of the geniuses who helped arm the "Syrian rebels."

  • Bill McKibben: Global Warming's Terrifying New Chemistry: Mostly on methane and fracking.

  • Robert Pollin: Bernie Sanders Will Make the Economy Great Again

  • Katha Pollitt: Half of the Abortion Clinics in Ohio Have Closed. And Kasich Is a 'Moderate'?

  • Olivier Roy: Radicalisation is not the result of failed integration

  • Nate Silver: It's Probably First Ballot or Bust for Donald Trump at the GOP Convention

  • Douglas Starr: Why Are Educators Learning How to Interrogate Their Students?

  • Benjamin Wallace-Wells: Sanders, Trump, and the Rise of the Non-Voters

  • George Zornick: Ted Cruz's Radical New Proposal: Patrol and 'Secure' Muslim Neighborhoods: "It's not clear what he even means," but it does make him sound like an asshole (which seems to be the desired effect).

Music: Current count 26446 [26420] rated (+26), 414 [410] unrated (+4).

Rated count up a bit this week, probably because I only spent one day and a couple nights working on my sister's house. Also because I wrapped up a Rhapsody Streamnotes. Still, short of the 30-milestone that constitutes a productive week. On the other hand, seasonal allergies hit with force, and I barely sleepwalked my way through yesterday's abbreviatedWeekend Roundup. But at least I had Jason Gubbels' unranked list of 40 recommendations, New Music 2016: First Quarter, to start wading through. Thus far everything I've checked out has been pretty good, although I've mostly left them at B+(***) -- aside from the Margo Price find, the closest of the HMs was the Heliocentrics album, where I talked myself out of an A- by re-reading my review. (An edit of my Willie Nelson review also resulted in downgrading Summertime. The Rihanna upgrade occurred after at least five replays.)

Not much new jazz coming in, and not much good among what does show up. I usually start the day with a CD from the queue, and several days I haven't had anything to follow it up with. Only seven actual CDs in the list below (and, OK, they're better than I remembered: 3 ***, 3 **, 1 *; as I recall, the previous week's CDs left a lot more to be desired, and today's mail doesn't look very promising). One big disappointment is that a month after I got the promo material by email I still haven't received the March package from Clean Feed. Mail is often slow from Portugal, but it would hugely bum me out if they drop me. (Not that I wouldn't look up what I could on Rhapsody.)

I did get an invite to vote in Downbeat's annual Critics Poll today. I've also gotten a record number of personal pleas to vote for them, something I'm pretty good at forgetting instantly. (I mind less when I get past-year lists from publicists because they help me identify things that fell through the cracks -- I don't think I've gotten any of them this year, but have in the past, and they're a regular year-end ritual.) I'll take the time to vote later this week -- I've never managed to plod through the ballot in just one day, so it's a big commitment -- and I'll publish an annotated ballot once I do. Aside from albums, which follow that aggravating April-March annual skew, this year's should be much like last year's ballot. I'd argue that having an extra three months to let the old calendar year (2015 in this case) settle down would be worth more than pretending we're already on top of the first quarter of 2016. (For that matter, the Readers Poll, which skews three months later, could also benefit from a settling-down period.)

Well, one ballot change is that since last year's HOF pick, Lee Konitz, finally won, George Russell will move up as my top pick. A second big annoyance about the poll is the HOF bottleneck. Downbeat has 141 inductees into its Hall of Fame (starting with Louis Armstrong in 1952). Compare this with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which has 312 inductees (749 people) since 1986. Now, you can argue that that's too many, and make a pretty good case by pointing to the 2016 crop (Cheap Trick, Chicago, Deep Purple, Steve Miller, and NWA). But fewer than five of the names in the Downbeat HOF (which basically expands at 2 per year, plus they've recently added a Veterans Committee which helps a bit) raise an eyebrow (rockers Frank Zappa and Jimi Hendrix, although I can't begrudge the latter; some others I wouldn't have voted for but can (sort of) understand -- Glenn Miller, Red Rodney, Maynard Ferguson, Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea, Michael Brecker, Pat Metheny), maybe a"veteran" who seems a bit obscure (Jimmy Blanton, Paul Chambers, Baby Dodds). On the other hand, just working from last year's ballot, the list of non-inductees includes: Han Bennink, Paul Bley, Anthony Braxton, Jaki Byard, Don Byas, Don Cherry, Jack DeJohnette, Jimmy Giuffre, Benny Golson, Grant Green, Dave Holland, Abdullah Ibrahim, Illinois Jacquet, John McLauglin, Tito Puente, Sam Rivers, Pharoah Sanders, Tomasz Stanko, Cedar Walton, Randy Weston, Phil Woods.

And that must mean that the following didn't even qualify for the ballot (and this list could grow much longer): Rashied Ali, Henry "Red" Allen, Mildred Bailey, Billy Bang, Chris Barber, Gato Barbieri, Chu Berry, Carla Bley, Ruby Braff, Cab Calloway, Sid Catlett, June Christy, Buck Clayton, Arnett Cobb, Cozy Cole, Vic Dickenson, Harry "Sweets" Eddison, Art Farmer, Tommy Flanagan, Bud Freeman, Slim Gaillard, Herb Geller, Lars Gullin, Al Haig, John Hicks, Budd Johnson, Leroy Jenkins, Wynton Kelly, Louis Jordan, Sheila Jordan, Eddie Lang, George Lewis (either/both), Albert Mangelsdorff, Misha Mengelberg, David Murray, Herbie Nichols, Anita O'Day, Evan Parker, William Parker, Houston Person, Louis Prima, Don Pullen, Don Redman, Charlie Rouse, Jimmy Rushing, Luis Russell, Alex von Schlippenbach, Irène Schweizer, Bud Shank, Sonny Sharrock, Archie Shepp, Stuff Smith, Horace Tapscott, Lucky Thompson, Stanley Turrentine, Mal Waldron, David S. Ware, Barney Wilen, Gerald Wilson. Just saying, a lot of (to use an old Downbeat phrase) talent deserving wider recognition.

RIP: Argentine saxophonist Gato Barbieri (1934-2016), and Ethiopian saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya (1935-2016).

New records rated this week:

• Ralph Alessi: Quiver (2014 [2016], ECM): [dl]: B+(***)
• Beauty School: Residual Ugly (2015, Humbler): [bc]: B+(*)
• Big Ups: Before a Million Universes (2016, Exploding/Tough Love): [r]: B+(***)
• Michael Blake: Fulfillment (2016, Songlines): [r]: B+(*)
• Bombino: Azel (2016, Partisan): [r]: B+(***)
• Jaimeo Brown Transcendence: Work Songs (2016, Motema): [r]: B+(***)
• The Ian Carey Quintet + 1: Interview Music (2015 [2016], Kabocha): [cd]: B+(***)
• Tim Daisy: Relucent: Music for Marimba, Radios and Turntables (2016, Relay): [bc]: B
• Stephen Davis/Ralph Alessi/Kris Davis: Sugar Blade (2015, Babel): [r]: B+(**)
• Eli Degibri: Cliff Hangin' (2014 [2016], Blujazz): [cd]: B+(*)
• Dressy Bessy: Kingsized (2016, Yep Roc): [r]: B+(**)
• Marty Elkins: Walkin' by the River (2014 [2016], Nagel Heyer): [cd]: B+(***)
• The Heliocentrics: From the Deep (2016, Now-Again): [r]: B+(***)
• Russ Johnson: Meeting Point (2014, Relay): [bc]: B+(**)
• La Sera: Music for Listening to Music To (2016, Polyvinyl): [r]: B+(**)
• Matt Lavelle's 12 Houses: Solidarity (2014 [2016], Unseen Rain): [cd]: B+(**)
• Steven Lugerner: Jacknife: The Music of Jackie McLean (2015 [2016], Primary): [cd]: B+(***)
• Iggy Pop: Post Pop Depression (2016, Loma Vista): [r]: B+(*)
• Margo Price: Midwest Farmer's Daughter (2016, Third Man): [r]: A-
• Rocco John Quartet: Embrace the Change (2015 [2016], Unseen Rain): [cd]: B+(**)
• Steel Bridge Trio: Different Clocks (2015, Relay): [bc]: B+(*)
• Gwen Stefani: This Is What the Truth Feels Like (2016, Interscope): [r]: A-
• Vox Arcana: Caro's Song (2014 [2015], Relay): [bc]: B+(*)
• Christopher Zuar Orchestra: Musings (2014 [2016], Sunnyside): [cd]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• Punk 45: Chaos in the City of Angels and Devils: Hollywood From X to Zero & Hardcore on the Beaches: Punk in Los Angeles 1977-81 (1977-81 [2016], Soul Jazz): [r]: B+(***)

Grade changes:

• Willie Nelson: Summertime: Willie Nelson Sings Gershwin (2016, Legacy): [r]: [was B+(*)] B
• Rihanna: Anti (2016, Roc Nation): [r]: [was B+(**)] A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Matt Cirscuolo: The Dialogue (Jazzeria): April 4
• The Jim Cullum Jazz Band/William Warfield: George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess Live (2016, Riverwalk Jazz, 2CD): June 1
• James Freeman: Echoes of Nature III (Edgetone)
• Roberto Magris: Need to Bring Out Love (JMood)
• Daniel Meron: Sky Begins (Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit): April 26
• Jane Monheit: The Songbook Sessions: Ella Fitzgerald (Emerald City)
• Noertker's Moxie & the Melancholics: Curious Worlds: The Art & Imagination of David Beck (Edgetone)
• Rent Romus/Teddy Rankin-Parker/Daniel Pearce: LiR (Edgetone)
• Ernie Watts Quartet: Wheel of Time (Flying Dolphin): April 15

I wanted to reply to this tweet byTom Carson, but no way to unpack so much misunderstanding in 144 characters:

Bernie is the lefty Goldwater, Hils is the lefty Nixon. I suspect I'll end up voting for Nixon, but I've seen this movie before.

First, very obvious point: left and right are never symmetric, let alone mirror images of one another. Granted, the core issue can be viewed as a continuum: people on the left believe that all people are fundamentally decent, that everyone shares equal rights and deserves respect and fairness, while people on the right hold that for civilization to exist and survive society must be organized as a hierarchy, with those favored by great wealth lording over the hapless masses, using whatever force is needed to maintain order. Unpack this a bit and you'll see that left and right are inhabited by fundamentally different kinds of people. So when you say "X is the lefty Y" the main thing you're saying is that X is so profoundly different from Y that analogies can only be superficial.

Even so, the only linkage I can imagine Carson making between Goldwater and Sanders is that he thinks Sanders, if nominated, will lose as badly this year as Goldwater did in 1964. Leaving that for the moment, it's hard to see much similarity -- even in the funhouse mirror of centrist punditry. Most obviously, Goldwater was extremely rigid in his adherence to principles -- most scandalously in his opposition to using the federal government to secure civil rights systematically denied by a dozen-plus state governments -- whereas Sanders has always been flexible and pragmatic (e.g., in supporting Obamacare even though he knew it wasn't the best, or even a very good, solution). And Goldwater was so fanatic in his opposition to Communism he couldn't be trusted not to start a thermonuclear war. Sanders elicits no such fears -- which isn't to deny that neocon warmongers fear him.

As for the Nixon-Clinton mashup, I reckon that the association here is that both are unscrupulous opportunists willing to say and do anything that seems to work to their personal advantage. No doubt that both Clintons have been opportunistic at times, often siding with rich and powerful interests against the very people they depend on for votes. Nothing unusual about that, but you have to question how far left they really are on the left-right line I plotted above. I don't really consider them lefties at all.

Still, for all the times the Clintons have been slagged as liars -- Christopher Hitchens' book on them was titled No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family -- I'm hard pressed to recall specific deceits (aside from the Lewinsky blow jobs, and blaming Arafat for the Camp David failure, the latter a big one), as opposed to grandstanding (like the Sista Souljah slam) or plain old bad policy choices (like NAFTA, or repealing Glass-Steagall). I don't doubt that the Clintons are greedy, ambitious, and vain -- willing to use office to get rich, and to use their wealth to build a political machine to seek further office. Still, the scandals that have dogged their rise have been remarkably hollow.

On the other hand, Nixon holds a unique place in American history, not just for bad policy and malign intentions but for actual crimes against American democracy as well as egregious crimes against world peace -- sure, the later have since become routinized and Nixon didn't invent them all, but the scope of his crimes was breathtaking -- and for a while shocking, although his obsession with winning at all costs and his cynicism at manipulating people's fears has since become baked into the American pie. If Carson wanted to pose a true conundrum, he might have posed a choice between the real right-wingers Goldwater and Nixon. I have no more answer there than I would have had if asked who is the best (in the sense of least awful) of this election's crop of Republican presidential aspirants.

Carson at least is right to place Nixon on the right, avoiding the recent revisionism trying to rehabilitate him as some kind of closet liberal. I suppose the main impetus behind this has been to show how far the right has stooped since Nixon's time, but doing so forgets (and forgives) the fact that the rotten impulses that have permeated today's right owe more to Nixon's craven realpolitik than to Goldwater's so-called principles.

If you do have to make predecessor analogies, you might try casting Trump as Nixon and Cruz as Goldwater. With the latter pair you at least know what you're up against and start organizing against it, although the prospect of itchy trigger fingers is always a threat. But with the Nixon-Trump pair, you don't know shit -- just that it's likely to be pretty nauseating and the sickness they sow is likely to return again as precedent, possibly for even worse.

I suspect that what worries Carson about Sanders has less to do with Goldwater's 1964 loss than McGovern's in 1972, thanks in no small part to Nixon's dirty tricks. McGovern wasn't fundamentally more liberal (let alone lefty) many other Democratic candidates -- Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Walter Mondale in 1984, Michael Dukakis in 1988, John Kerry in 2004, Barack Obama in 2008 -- but he lost bad, due I think to a combination of factors. One is that the media has always had it in for anyone who might rock the boat (Roosevelt was the exception, but he came along after the boat had already capsized, and Obama got something of a pass for the same reasons). McGovern also ran afoul of the Democratic Party's patronage-focused elites, especially their hawk faction, and also the rump Wallace voters -- all of whom chose Nixon's dirty tricks over the most decent and honest politician the Democrats ever nominated.

All those losses by self-avowed liberals -- a string that really starts with Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956 -- have left centrist pundits with the stunted thought that Americans refuse to lean left. If Sanders is further to the left than McGovern (or anyone else on that loser-laden list) what's to stop the entire establishment banding together to stop him? (Billionaire self-promoter Michael Bloomberg has already vowed to run a spoiler third-party campaign if Sanders is nominated.) That seems like a fair question, but I'm not sure the coincidences it is based on really supports the conclusion. Several things have changed since, say, McGovern won and lost:

1. The Cold War is not only over, it's rapidly becoming ancient history. Before 1990 the ideological struggle between capitalism and communism allowed the right to question the patriotism of anyone even remotely on the left, and more often than not Democrats joined in on the red baiting, often to their own detriment. Moreover, with continued abuse the old slurs have lost their potency.

2. The long period of post-WWII affluence left a large segment of the middle class basically feeling satisfied with their lot and to be hopeful of their future prospects, making it easier to identify with the system. The shift toward increasing inequality after 1980, and the subsequent hollowing out of the middle class, have finally reached a point where the system is no longer viewed as fair or hopeful -- and recognizing that loss of opportunity has finally become unavoidable for young adults.

3. The mass media of the post-WWII years, which did so much to homogenize public discourse, has fragmented into more limited but more partisan media, allowing each of us to customize our own bubble of information. This both pulls many of us in a more partisan way and leaves many others so poorly informed that they drop out of the political system.

4. Unlimited political spending has pushed the Republican Party far to the right, so they pose a much greater threat to our liberties, security, and well being than ever before. In fact, they threaten us so severely that it's becoming increasingly hard for centrist Democrats to break ranks, as many did against McGovern in 1972, not to mention William Jennings Bryan in 1896-1908.

These point don't guarantee that Sanders can defeat a full bore Republican assault, but they offer some reasons to think that he might do much better than McGovern did. The similarity to McGovern that I worry more about is Sanders' exceptional integrity and public spirit, which at least in McGovern's case was overwhelmed by Nixon's dark money and dirty tricks. The one thing we can be sure of is that in this year's election the Republicans and their dark money sponsors won't hesitate to go places Nixon only dreamed of. The voters could very well reject such tactics, but the Republicans have had no small measure of success thus far at manipulating people to vote against their own interests and desires.

Hillary Clinton has relied heavily on arguments that she's much more electable than Sanders is. The most common argument here is that she can attract a broader slice of the left-right spectrum, allowing her to pick up moderate/centrist voters Sanders can't reach while keeping the left captive, if only as the lesser evil. There are several problems with this formulation: most people don't fit comfortably, let alone mechanically, on a left-right axis, but bring other factors into play, including several where Clinton may compare poorly against Sanders -- for instance, integrity and credibility. Sanders has stood firm with his principles much more consistently than Clinton, and a good part of the reason for that is that he's much less tainted by association with private interests -- e.g., he's never spoken to Goldman-Sachs, much less for $650K. One thing that's clear from primary results so far is that Sanders has done much better among (presumably centrist) independents than Clinton has.

Indeed, in head-to-head polls Sanders regularly outperforms Clinton against virtually any Republican candidate, suggesting that for whatever reason Sanders is the more electable Democrat. Yet some Clinton supporters, even ones who admit to being closer to Sanders on the issues, persist in their belief that Clinton is more electable. Aside from ideology, the other reason they commonly give is the claim that Clinton has already had to face so many attacks from right-wingers that she has been thoroughly vetted, whereas Sanders has yet to feel the full fury of the Republican hate machine. That may be true but glosses over several things, including that Clinton has more points on which she is compromised, and that she's not exactly unscathed by all those attacks -- her unfavorability polls are exceptionally high.

On the other hand, I think there is one area where Clinton does have a substantial advantage over Sanders, and that is her ability to raise dark money and use it to underwrite the same sort of vicious mudslinging right-wingers can be counted on doing. So when the campaign gets dirty, as it's sure to do, she's arguably in a much better position to fight that kind of fight. Whether that's an argument in her favor is hard to say, but it's certainly a reasonable position -- the counter is that if Sanders could win without PACs and dark money that might help break the grip big money has on the political system, and our democracy would be much better for it.

Still, Clinton wooing big money donors and playing the dark money game won't be enough to make her Nixon, even a hypothetical lefty version. Nor will it make her a right-winger, even though it would indebt her to people who are on right of center, at least in terms of equality. And having done all of that, I wonder how much energy or will she is going to be able to muster to start to reverse the nation's long slide into oligarchy. At some point things get so bad that lesser evils don't cut it. If Sanders' popularity shows anything it's that many Democrats believe we've passed the point where yesterday's palliatives are all it takes.

It's normal for people to reach for historical analogies when trying to understand today's issues, but it can also lock you into illusions and blind you to opportunities. And sometimes produce outright absurdities. My original response to Carson's tweet just touched on one small aspect of this post, which is that real people don't necessarily gravitate toward the middle when faced with real choices:

Hell, even my George Wallace/George McGovern-voting mother knew one key thing about politics: never vote for Nixon.

Music: Current count 26475 [26446] rated (+29), 425 [414] unrated (+11).

Count up a bit, but that's mostly because I got into a run of listening to the legendary Dutch anarcho-punk group Ex, finding virtually all of their catalog easily accessible on Bandcamp. I discovered this cache when Ethiopian saxophonist Getatchew Merkuria (or Merkurya) died and I went off looking for his oldÉthiopiques volume -- one I had long hoped to listen to. I also recalled that he had done a live album with the Ex (one I thought I had heard, but evidently not), as well as an A- record with Either/Orchestra (Éthiopiques 20: Live in Addis). I've long been interested in Ex, but it hasn't been easy coming across their records. Before this binge, my ratings were:

• The Ex: Aural Guerrilla (1988, Fist Puppet): B+
• The Ex: Singles, Period: The Vinyl Years 1980-1990 (1980-90 [2005], Ex): A-
• The Ex: Instant (1995, Ex, 2CD): A-
• The Ex: Turn (2004, Touch & Go, 2CD): A-
• The Ex & Brass Unbound: Enormous Door (2013, Ex): A-

Perhaps I should also include some jazz-oriented records that guitarist Terrie Hessels (aka Terrie Ex) has done:

• Ab Baars/Terrie Ex: Hef (2002, Atavistic): B+
• Lean Left: The Ex Guitars Meet Nilssen-Love/Vandermark Duo, Volume 1: (2008 [2010], Smalltown Superjazz): A- -- Terrie Ex and Andy Moor
• Lean Left: The Ex Guitars Meet Nilssen-Love/Vandermark Duo, Volume 2 (2008 [2010], Smalltown Superjazz): B+(***)
• Offonoff: Slap and Tickle (2009, Smalltown Superjazz): B+(*) -- group with Massimo Pupillo and Paal Nilssen-Love
• Paal Nilssen-Love/Terrie Ex: Hurgu! (2013, PNL): B+(**)

This preoccupation with the Ex has taken up so much time (and I'm still a few records short of done) that I haven't done anything in recognition of the recent deaths of Merle Haggard and Tony Conrad. The one thought I have on Haggard is that I'll always be grateful to my old friend Harold Karabell for prodding me to look beyond Hag's "Fightin' Side" jingoism. I have 25 of his records graded in my database, which leaves me far short, especially on the early LPs, but that's still quite a few. As for Conrad, I'm looking at his Early Minimalism box still sitting on my unplayed shelf over a decade after a publicist generously sent it to me. Safe to say, he's due.

I also want to note the recent death of a non-musician here, Manfred Menking. Born in Germany (East Prussia) in 1934, he survived bombing in WWII, fled west in advance of the Soviet army in 1944. He studied to become a doctor, was offered a Fulbright scholarship to complete his pediatric residency in Ohio. In 1973 he moved to Wichita, where one of his patients was my nephew. He was devoted to peace, working with Physicians for Social Responsibility and Wichita's Peace and Social Justice Center -- where we met him shortly after moving here in 1999. He was charming, delightful, very kind. It was a pleasure to have known him.

There was an uptick of incoming mail last week. Most importantly the long-awaited package from Portugal arrived -- probably a replacement after I complained last week. Probably just a temporary blip, but with my general slowdown this is the first time in a long time I've felt behind.

I commented on a Tom Carson tweet a couple days ago. Carson responded in an email that Robert Christgau forwarded to me, part of which noted that I don't allow comments on the blog. I've been using a piece of blog software called Serendipity. It has a reasonably nice feature set, but having used it for more than a decade, I'm stuck with an older version (which I've hacked on a bit), and more importantly I've been stuck on a server that isn't up to handling the now large (and somewhat bloated) database. I tried turning comments on for a while, but I didn't get much valuable feedback, partly because people had trouble with the interface. Spambots, on the other hand, seemed to sail through, and the maintenance got to be too much. Then I ran into database performance problems, so I hacked what I called a "faux blog" in parallel to the Serendipity one, and I've been updating both for some time now. I use the latter for links I post, because it's more likely you'll be served the page, but it doesn't have some nice features, like RSS, of comments.

However, because the "faux blog" is just a collection of hand-edited web pages, I can insert comments into those pages. The only thing is that you have to email them to me, and I have to decide it's worth the trouble, and we all have to wait until I update the site (which usually happens when I have something new to post, or sometimes when I've screwed up and need to fix something fast).

So I've added Carson's letter and a rather long-winded response to my Candidate Analogies post. Not sure whether this will become standard ractice or is just a one-shot. I should note that I've bumped into Carson numerous times over the years. Back in the 1970s, he submitted an unassigned review of Brian Eno's Another Green World whichVoice music editor Christgau liked enough to consider running alongside the review he had assigned me to write. Carson was one of the organizers of the Christgau 60th birthday Festschrift, Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough, and he edited my piece there (A Rock& Roll Critic Is Something to Be). He also offered invaluable editing advice when I wrote a "mass letter" as the 2004 election approached -- let's see, where is that thing? Oh,here. I've only read him erratically -- a big compilation of his writings would be most welcome, or maybe several as his political writings are matched by his culture critique (he long did a TV column for Esquire) -- and he's usually not only a sharp thinker but has retained a rock critic's ear for hook lines: possibly the most radical thing I've ever read was his conclusion to an essay (which I can't find now) on 1945 pointing out that winning WWII was the worst thing that ever happened to the United States.

I should also mention his novel, Gilligan's Wake -- perhaps the only novel I've read since 2001, partly because I could imagine him writing it just for me -- or more precisely because he presented a vision of 20th century America in myriad dazzling details that I was uniquely prepared to appreciate. Perhaps too much Alger Hiss, and too kind to Bob Dole, but brilliance abounds -- one bit that seems perfect is Mary Ann's self-healing hymen, maintaining her virginity no matter how much she screws around, a knack shared with America, the only country in the world that can fuck you over while remaining as pure and innocent as ever.

I've been struggling to get anything read recently, only finishing Jane Mayer's invaluable Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right a couple days ago. I should write something about the book, which updates and deepens Max Blumenthal's 2009 book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party while paying particular attention to the Kochs and their financial and political networks, but no telling when I'll get around to it. Meanwhile, I came across Carson's review of Daniel Schulman's Koch family bio, Sons of Wichita, so thought I'd pass it along: The Brothers Koch: Family Drama and Disdain for Democracy.

New records rated this week:

• Africaine 808: Basar (2016, Golf Channel): [bc]: B+(***)
• Matt Criscuolo: The Dialogue (2016, Jazzeria): [cd]: B+(**)
• Jane Monheit: The Songbook Sessions: Ella Fitzgerald (2015 [2016], Emerald City): [cd]: B+(*)
• Pet Shop Boys: Super (2016, X2): [r]: A-
• Ernie Watts Quartet: Wheel of Time (2016, Flying Dolphin): [cd]: B+(**)
• Steve Wiest and Phröntrange: The High Road (2016, Blujazz): [cd]: B-

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• The Jim Cullum Jazz Band/William Warfield: George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess Live (1992 [2016], Riverwalk Jazz, 2CD): [cd]: B+(***)
• Soul Sok Sega: Sega Sounds From Mauritius 1973-1979 (1973-79 [2016], Strut): [r]: B+(***)

Old music rated this week:

• The Ex: Disturbing Domestic Peace (1980 [1992], Ex): [bc]: B+(**)
• The Ex: History Is What's Happening (1982, Ex): [bc]: A-
• The Ex: Tumult (1983 [1993], Ex): [bc]: B+(***)
• The Ex: Blueprints for a Blackout (1984 [1992], Ex): [bc]: B+(*)
• The Ex: Pokkeherrie (1985 [1995], Ex): B+(***)
• The Ex: 1936, the Spanish Revolution (1986, Ex, EP): [bc]: B+(**)
• The Ex: Too Many Cowboys (1986 [1987], Ex): [bc]: B+(***)
• The Ex: Hands Up! You're Free (1983-86 [1988], Ex): [bc]: A-
• The Ex: Joggers & Smoggers (1989, Ex, 2CD): [bc]: B+(*)
• The Ex: Dead Fish (1989 [2004], Ex, EP): [bc]: B+(*)
• The Ex + Tom Cora: Scrabbling at the Lock (1991, Ex): [bc]: B+(***)
• The Ex + Tom Cora: And the Weathermen Shrug Their Shoulders (1993, Ex): [bc]: B+(**)
• The Ex: Mudbird Shivers (1995, Ex): [bc]: B+(***)
• The Ex: Starters Alternators (1998, Touch & Go): [bc]: B+(**)
• Ex Orkest: Een Rondje Holland (2000 [2001], Ex): [bc]: B+(*)
• The Ex: Dizzy Spells (2000 [2001], Touch & Go): [bc]: A-
• Gétatchèw Mérkurya: Éthiopiques 14: Negus of Ethiopian Sax (1972 [2003], Buda Musique): [r]: A-
• Getatchew Merkuria/The Ex & Guests: Moa Anbessa (2006, Terp): [bc]: A-
• Getatchew Merkuria/The Ex & Friends: Y'Anbessaw Tezeta (1960-2012 [2012], Terp, 2CD): [bc]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Antonio Adolfo: Tropical Infinito (AAM): May 23
• Daria: Strawberry Fields Forever: Songs by the Beatles (OA2): April 15
• Matthew Fries: Parallel States (Xcappa): June 3
• Jean-Brice Godet Quartet: Mujô (Fou)
• Alexander Hawkins/Evan Parker: Leaps in Leicester (Clean Feed)
• Louis Heriveaux: Triadic Episode (Hot Shoe)
• Julie Kjaer 3: Dobbeltgaenger (Clean Feed)
• Roy Nathanson: Nearness and You (Clean Feed)
• New Zion w. Cyro: Sunshine Seas (Rare Noise): advance, April 20
• Phil Palombi: Detroit Lean (Xcappa): May 24
• Noah Preminger: Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground (self-released): May 6
• Restroy: Saturn Return (Milk Factory): May 6
• Eric Revis Trio: Crowded Solitudes (Clean Feed)
• Carol Saboya: Carolina (AAM): May 23
• Starlite Motel: Awosting Falls (Clean Feed)
• Yves Theiler Trio: Dance in a Triangle (Migros)
• Twenty One 4tet: Live at Zaal 100 (Clean Feed)
• WorldService Project: For King and Country (Rare Noise): advance, April 29

I started writing this up as a Weekend Roundup bullet item, but decided to let it stand [almost] on its own.

Tom Hayden: I Used to Support Bernie, but Then I Changed My Mind: The famed 1960s New Left radical, a founder of SDS, defendant at the Chicago 8/7 trial, and moderately successful California politician, explains:

I intend to vote for Hillary Clinton in the California primary for one fundamental reason. It has to do with race. My life since 1960 has been committed to the causes of African Americans, the Chicano movement, the labor movement, and freedom struggles in Vietnam, Cuba and Latin America. In the environmental movement I start from the premise of environmental justice for the poor and communities of color. My wife is a descendant of the Oglala Sioux, and my whole family is inter-racial.

What would cause me to turn my back on all those people who have shaped who I am? That would be a transgression on my personal code. I have been on too many freedom rides, too many marches, too many jail cells, and far too many gravesites to breach that trust. And I have been so tied to the women's movement that I cannot imagine scoffing at the chance to vote for a woman president. When I understood that the overwhelming consensus from those communities was for Hillary -- for instance the Congressional Black Caucus and Sacramento's Latino caucus -- that was the decisive factor for me. I am gratified with Bernie's increasing support from these communities of color, though it has appeared to be too little and too late. Bernie's campaign has had all the money in the world to invest in inner city organizing, starting 18 months ago. He chose to invest resources instead in white-majority regions at the expense of the Deep South and urban North.

I'm surprised to see Sanders depicted as having "all the money in the world," but checking Open Secrets I was even more surprised to see that he has managed to collect $139 million so far -- more than Ted Cruz ($119 million, including $52 million PAC money), still less than Hillary Clinton ($222 million, including $62 million PAC; Sanders has made a big point about not having a dark money PAC). Most of Sanders' money came in February ($42M) and March ($44M), well into the primary season. Until that happened, he was mostly dependent on volunteer efforts. I know, for instance, that he's had an active supporter group here in Wichita for over a year, and they would be pretty surprised to find he's rolling in all that money. They did, however, organize Sanders' second-largest victory margin to date -- although he's since won bigger elsewhere. As primary season unfolded, the money understandably went to critically competitive states. And Clinton, who started with (and still has) much more money, had somehow locked up the Deep South where most Democrats are black -- maybe she had made the investments Hayden charges Sanders with neglecting. (Still, isn't it interesting that a seasoned politician like Hayden sees money as the essential element in securing the loyalties of black and Latino votes? The implication is that those votes are tied to group elites in a way that approximates the old political machines.) And even more than cash, the big advantage that the Clintons brought into this election was a well-oiled patronage machine. The clearest evidence that established patronage matters is Clinton's 469-31 superdelegate lead. (Sanders' contributions have averaged $27-30, which works out to five million-plus donations though there are repeaters -- I know that my wife has donated $27 several times, probably putting her over $100 by now. Beyond her PAC money, Clinton has also gone after small donations, and claims more than one million donors. Sanders has more, "nearly two million donors" (Hillary Clinton Touts One Million Donors, While Bernie Sanders Approaches Two).

I've been somewhat mystified why Clinton enjoys such a large lead over Sanders among black voters. It's certainly not based on a sober examination of positions and issues, and I doubt if it has much to do with personal style. The best I've been able to come up with is that even with growing economic inequality and the decimation of the middle class all across America, most blacks have improved their lot, and see their solidarity with the Democratic Party as having helped them out. This isn't an unreasonable stance, and no doubt if/when Clinton wins she'll owe blacks and Latinos big time -- but she'll also owe bankers and the war industry, and in the end I suspect their investments will pay off better.

If Hayden was just a cog in the Democratic Party machine, I could see his choice: indeed, it would be as unremarkable as it's been for hundreds or thousands of Party hacks all across America. But Hayden was one of the most prominent figures in the New Left in the 1960s. One might argue that choosing Clinton over Sanders shows that he's not really much of a leftist, but more likely, I suspect, he's just proving one of the major critiques of the New Left: that it was run by people who came from privileged backgrounds and saw their role as to advocate for other people who had been denied their good fortune. That's not bad per se, but in practice shifted much of the left's focus from class to minority and identity issues like race (and sex and sexual orientation). They've done good work on all those fronts, but while they were off helping others the right smashed the unions that propped up the middle class and created vast inequality -- so much so that young people in America today have less reason to expect to live out their lives in comfort and freedom (e.g., free of debt) than any past generation for at least a century.

The upshot is that we have a guy who's spent more than fifty years working towards radical political change yet can't recognize it when it's actually happening, just because it's not coming from where he's been expecting it. The irony is that the Old Left that Hayden rejected had made the same mistake, expecting the working classes to rise up even after labor unions had won them middle-class jobs and social security, enough to buy homes (and cars, etc.) and send their kids to college and retire comfortably -- enough luxury they could even afford to look down on the less fortunate. Hayden, like much of the New Left, rebelled against the white working class as much as against the Old Left. I suspect that's because he was never of it, whereas those of us who grew up there were better able to notice when things went sour.

A few other quick links, limited to the elections. Next up is the New York primary, where 538's "projected results" favor Clinton 57.8-39.6%, although I only see one (of eight) April polls where she has that kind of margin -- 10-12% is typical. I don't expect Sanders to win, but wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be much closer. (Friends who watched here -- I didn't, but baked them some cookies -- tell me Sanders had a very good debate last night.) On the Republican side it's Trump-Kasich-Cruz: 52.9-24.4-20.4%. You'd think that Trump's first majority win plus a third-place Cruz finish would turn the post-Wisconsin punditry around, but I doubt it. (Although I see that Josh Marshall is already out front there.) Trump, by the way, is polling well ahead in the April 27 primaries (Connecticut, Maryland, Pennsylvania) -- as is Clinton (although Connecticut is closer, and a couple of Pennsylvania polls show her lead there down to +6 or +7).

By the way, while I was not listening to the debate, I somehow imagined Hillary saying:

Well, sure, I'm for everything that Senator Sanders is for, but I can assure you that under my administration none of that will actually get done, because I expect to spend the entire four years embroiled in one stupid scandal after another. And as I'm sure you're aware, no one -- certainly not Senator Sanders -- has more experience surviving stupid scandals than I.

Meanwhile, some brief links:

• Jeff Merkley: Why I'm Supporting Bernie Sanders: The first endorsement of Sanders by a US Senator (Merkley represents Oregon).

  I grew up in working-class Oregon. On a single income, my parents could buy a home, take a vacation and help pay for college. My father worked with his hands as a millwright and built a middle-class life for us.

  My parents believed in education and they believed in the United States. When I was young, my father took me to the grade school and told me that if I went through those doors, and worked hard, I could do just about anything because we lived in America. My dad was right.

  Years later, my family and I still live in the same working-class community I grew up in. But America has gone off track, and the outlook for the kids growing up there is a lot gloomier today than 40 years ago.

  Many middle-class Americans are working longer for less income than decades ago, even while big-ticket expenses like housing, health care and college have relentlessly pushed higher.

  It is not that America is less wealthy than 40 years ago -- quite the contrary. The problem is that our economy, both by accident and design, has become rigged to make a fortunate few very well off while leaving most Americans struggling to keep up.

  And as economic power has become more concentrated, so too has political power. Special interests, aided by their political and judicial allies, have exercised an ever-tighter grip on our political system, from the rise of unlimited, secret campaign spending to a voter suppression movement.

• David Jameson: Bernie Sanders Has His Own Shadowy Donors -- And They're Nurses: The Open Secrets page above shows that Sanders, despite his principled opposition to PACs, does have a tiny bit of "dark money" on his side (less than 1% of Clinton). This seems to be the explanation:

  In fairness to Sanders, there are differences between a super PAC like that of National Nurses United and one like Priorities USA, a group aligned with Clinton. Most of the money in the nurses super PAC likely comes from the dues that individual workers pay to their union, in small amounts each paycheck.

  In contrast, 98 percent of the money raised by Priorities USA Action in the second half of 2015 came from donors giving $100,000 or more, as The Huffington Post recently reported. And 90 percent of its money came from donors forking over at least $1 million.

• Dean Baker: Bernie Sanders: Enemy of the World's Poor?:

  A popular theme in the media in recent days is that the world's poor would face disaster if Bernie Sanders ended up in the White House.[1] The story is that Sanders would try to protect jobs for manufacturing workers in the United States. The loss of these jobs has been a major source of downward pressure on the wages and living standards of a large portion of the working class over the last four decades.

  While saving manufacturing jobs here may be good for U.S. workers, the media line is that by trying to block imports from the developing world, Sanders would be denying hundreds of millions of people their route out of poverty. This story may be comforting for elites in the U.S. and Senator Sanders' political opponents, but it defies basic economics and common sense.

  The article goes on to tear the argument apart. No need to repeat the critique here, but I have to ask who would even bother to credit credit this line of thinking? Are there really people who think that Americans are so well off the government should devote itself to subsidizing the world's poorer countries? And that the best way to do that is to encourage businesses to set up sweatshops abroad? Practically every poll every taken shows that the number one (and pretty much the only) government program that a huge majority of Americans want to cut is foreign aid. It doesn't happen because (a) foreign aid doesn't really amount to much, and (b) regardless of its effect on foreign countries (and their people) aid (including trade rules) benefits certain influential Americans (usually big corporations), sometimes to the detriment of other Americans (often workers, although you can equally cast the weakening of domestic labor markets as a benefit to business interests).

• Jason Horowitz: Bernie Sanders Campaign Suspends Jewish Outreach Coordinator for Vulgar Remarks About Netanyahu: The "vulgar remarks" were in a since-deleted Facebook post during the height of Netanyahu's Gaza slaughter last year. Those offended by the comments were were a couple of bigwigs who have never uttered a remotely critical word about Israel -- which is to say people whose touch with reality is sadly compromised. This sort of thing happens all the time to all sorts of candidates, and the standard reaction is to duck rather than fight -- even when the charge is baseless it's not something the candidate personally did and it's not something he or she wants to be distracted with. (One of the more famous examples I recall was when Obama's campaign fired Samantha Power for saying something rude about Hillary Clinton. Power was eventually given a prominent job in Obama's administration, in Clinton's State Department.) Worth noting that Sanders said some things in Thursday's debate that the Israel lobbyists would have found even more troubling (if not quite so conveniently objectionable):

  In Thursday night's debate, though, Mr. Sanders advocated a critical discussion of Israel that, while popular with his young liberal base, was unlikely to please the Jewish establishment figures who had sought to hold a common line on Israel in Democratic politics. Mr. Sanders criticized Mrs. Clinton's pro-Israel orthodoxy, called the Israeli army's use of arms against Palestinians "disproportionate" and argued that "we have to say that Netanyahu is not right all of the time."

• Charles Pierce: Bill Clinton Fundamentally Doesn't Understand What Black Lives Matter Is About:

  But this is the second election in a row in which he is turning out to be one of his wife's clumsiest surrogates. I would make the modest suggestion to him that This Is Not About You. If you want to defend your record, write another massively unreadable book. If you want someone to defend your record ably, ask your wife. She seems to know how to do it best.

  I've long wondered whether Hillary's chances of becoming president wouldn't have improved had she divorced Bill after leaving office in 2001. There are many things I don't look forward to should she win, but he is high on the list. (Of course, she could divorce him then, but I figure she figures at least he's a good earner.) Maybe whenThe Good Wife runs its course we'll get a tangentially related but expert opinion.

  Pierce also has a piece on Thursday's debate: We Saw Bernie Sanders' Greatest Weakness Last Night: "At leas, that's what the Clinton camp is hoping you'll believe this morning." The "weakness" was that he said something unapproved (and virtually unheard of) about the Israel-Palestinian conflict:

  As somebody who is 100% pro-Israel, in the long run -- and this is not going to be easy, God only knows, but in the long run if we are ever going to bring peace to that region which has seen so much hatred and so much war, we are going to have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity.

  As Pierce put it, "In response, HRC went full pander."

• John Judis: I am worried about Hillary Clinton again: After the debate:

  I don't understand why she can't put the Goldman, Sachs question behind her. I initially assumed that she either didn't have transcripts or that what she said was the usual milquetoast stuff politicians offer up. But her continued refusal to provide transcripts (which I now assume must exist) suggests that there must be something damning in them.

  I assume the transcripts will be anti-climactic. One's first reaction is likely to be: "Goldman Sachs is supposed to be smart about money, but they paid $650k for this?" If I was a shareholder I'd consider suing management. Maybe management could come back and explain that it wasn't just the speech they were buying, it was also a bribe. But wouldn't that make their lawyers a bit uneasy? Not to mention Clinton's lawyers. And doesn't the value of a bribe depreciate real fast when it becomes public knowledge. Perhaps better to say that part of the extraordinary value-added of a Clinton speech is its exclusivity. But why keep it exclusive unless, you know, it's some sort of, uh, favor? Judis goes on:

  I also think her refusal to answer straightforwardly questions about social security caps, carbon taxes, Libya and a $15 minimum wage makes her appear scripted at best. Like the Goldman non-answer, these kind of responses sow doubts about trust and credibility.

  For more along these lines: Anis Shivani: Half-truth Hillary finally exposed: This was the debate where Bernie Sanders changed the Democratic Party for good.

• Aaron Bycoffe: A Huge Number of GOP Leaders Aren't Endorsing This Year: Partly because so many of the candidates they endorsed early (e.g., Marco Rubio) were rejected by the base voters, and partly because no one wants to be associated with the finalists in the GOP's race to the bottom (well, except for Chris Christie).

Quickly, some scattered links this week:

• George Monbiot: Neoliberalism -- the ideology at the root of all our problems: The term is scarcely ever used in the US, where right-wing pundits insist that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (pictured at the top) are regarded as purely conservative folk heroes. Yet the term was coined at a 1938 conference featuring Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, who used it to articulate an extreme belief in free markets in opposition to "collectivism" -- a term they felt rounded up all the evil political movements of the era: nazism, communism, and most importantly social democracy. The term soon fell out of use: in the US the ideas mostly appealed to red-baiting right wingers who preferred to call themselves "conservatives"; in Britain, the term has mostly been picked up by its opponents, since it seems to tie together both the Conservative and Liberal parties, as well as describe where the "New Labour" party faction went so terribly wrong. Of course, the same ideas infected the Democratic Party, particularly through Carter's deregulation mania, Clinton's embrace of "free trade" deals and "small government," continuing through Obama (whose signature plans, like health care reform and a "cap-and-trade" greenhouse gas market were originally hatched in neoliberal "think tanks"). Still, I wonder if it isn't too pat to catalog every instance of self-serving capitalist greed and dignify it with an innocuous ideological label. Monbiot notes that neoliberal policy directives have failed so often their underlying theories have achieved zombie status, then complains that "The left has produced no new framework of economic thought for 80 years. This is why the zombie walks." The zombie walks because the rich have rigged the system. What we need isn't another framework; it's countervaling power.

  Much quotable here; this is just a sample:

  The greater the failure, the more extreme the ideology becomes. Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatise remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every organ of the public sector.

  Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending. But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and former left adopt similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of people have been shed from politics.

  Monbiot has a new book, How Did We Get Into This Mess? (Verso). He also cites another interesting title, Andrew Sayer:Why We Can't Afford the Rich (Policy Press, paperback in May). Also links to Paul Verhaeghe: Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us.

• Michael Specter: Life-Expectancy Inequality Grows in America:

  It will surprise nobody to learn that life expectancy increases with income. Coming, however, in the midst of a Presidential campaign in which the corrosive effects of income inequality have been a principal debate topic, the data and its implications for public policy are particularly striking: the richest one per cent of American men live 14.6 years longer on average than the poorest one per cent. For women, the average difference is a just over ten years.

  The gap appears to be growing fast. The researchers, led by Raj Chetty, a professor of economics at Stanford University, analyzed more than 1.4 billion federal tax returns, as well as mortality data from the Social Security Administration, from the years 2001 to 2014. In that period, the life expectancy of the richest five per cent of Americans increased by roughly three years. For the poorest five per cent, there was no increase.

• DR Tucker: Ship of Fools: The fourth down of five straight rants about "Bernie or Bust"-ers ("who still insist that under no circumstances will they vote for the 'corporatist' Hillary Clinton if she defeats Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination"). After five paragraphs of imagining Trumpian hell, he concludes:

  The inconvenient truth is that the "Bernie or Bust" crowd is indistinguishable from right-wing fundamentalists in their loathing of compromise and their refusal to recognize that sometimes people can make bad decisions in good faith. Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Al Gore are neither evil nor corrupt. Neither is Bernie Sanders, for that matter . . . but what does it say about those who only recognize morality in the latter, and malevolence in the former?

  First, he probably should have stopped at "evil" and not brought up "corrupt": if there's anything the Clintons have done consistently throughout their political careers, it's been to cozy up to moneyed interests -- be they Tyson and Walmart in Arkansas, or Goldman Sachs and Citibank in New York. Maybe it's legal for a company that was saved by billions of dollars of federal bailouts to pay you $650k for one little speech, but it's hard to say there's nothing corrupt about it. Second, are we really talking about compromises, or simply different goals? When the Clinton's concocted their health care scheme, were they backing off from a single-payer approach just enough to secure passage, or were they trying to pitch fat business opportunities to the insurance companies and HMOs? If you want an example of a compromise, take Sanders supporting Obama's ACA even though he clearly was aware of and wanted something better. I'm not saying that the Clintons don't compromise, let alone that they have no principles to compromise. But I do think it's fair to say that their principles and aims are very different from those of people who prefer Sanders. Probably very different from their own supporters too.

  It's pathetic that Tucker can't tell the difference between Sanders supporters and right-wing fundamentalists. Also that he doesn't recognize that most Sanders supporters aren't died-in-the-wool leftists. The least of Clinton's problems is that those "Bernie-or-bust"-ers will wind up voting for Jill Stein. Two much bigger problems are that Clinton won't campaign on anything that materially promises to help the lives of the voters who have been energized by Sanders' campaign and/or that she's already lost so much credibility that many people won't trust her. And again, her problem isn't with confirmed leftists, who are hypersensitive to the perils of fascism and accustomed to settling for "lesser evils." Her problem is the vast mass of Americans who can't tell the difference between the two parties, either because they're uninformed or because they're all too aware that changing the guard in Washington hasn't made any appreciable difference in their own lives.

  Worse still is Tucker's Running Up That Hill, where he urges the DNC to ban Sanders from speaking at the Democratic Convention:

  Why should Clinton genuflect to someone who a) explicitly said she doesn't have what it takes to be president, b) called for a primary challenge to the current Democratic President, and c) is not a Democrat?

  Speaking of concessions, a compelling case can be made that if Sanders suspends his campaign after losing badly in this Tuesday's New York Democratic primary, he should be excluded from speaking in any capacity at the Democratic convention. It would be rather divisive to give a prominent speaking position at that convention to someone who seems to believe that the Democratic Party has prostituted itself to economically powerful johns and contracted the social disease of"corporatism." If Sanders addressed the convention and repeated his campaign rhetoric, would he not offend convention attendees who regard certain elements of Sanders's shtick as a tone-deaf and tacky trashing of President Obama? [ . . . ] Those who are thinking dispassionately will not be offended by the exclusion of Sanders from the convention, and will understand the reasons why he wasn't invited to speak.

  Didn't the DNC try to suppress dissent (or do I mean democracy?) once before -- in 1968? As I recall, that didn't work out so well. A sane person would see the convention as an opportunity to bind the Party divided by the primaries back together, but Tucker seems to prefer laying waste to those who had challenged party orthodoxy, thereby exacerbating the split in the Party. I suppose he could point to Pat Buchanan's speech at the Republican Convention in 1992 as an example where such a concession backfired. (If you recall that speech, it's probably because Molly Ivins allowed that "it probably sounded better in the original German.") Nonetheless, I can't imagine Sanders following suit -- especially after the votes are counted -- unless Clinton follows Tucker's advice and pushes him out. And if she's that thin-skinned, she's unprepared for the job ahead.

  PS: I wouldn't have read these pieces had they not appeared in the otherwise admirableWashington Monthly blog, which Tucker has totally hijacked for his rants. Please bring back Katherine Geier.

• Corey Rubin: Magical Realism, and other neoliberal delusions: Among many other thoughts, this on the obsolescence of the DLC political style:

  Though I'm obviously pleased if Sanders beat Clinton in the debate, it's the other two victories that are most important to me. For those of us who are Sanders supporters, the issue has never really been Hillary Clinton but always the politics that she stands for. Even if Sanders ultimately loses the nomination, the fact that this may be the last one or two election cycles in which Clinton-style politics stands a chance: that for us is the real point of this whole thing.

  I'm always uncertain whether Clinton supporters have a comparable view. While there are some, like Jonathan Chait or Paul Starr, for whom that kind of politics is substantively attractive, and who will genuinely mourn its disappearance, most of Clinton's supporters seem to be more in synch with Sanders's politics. They say they like Bernie and agree with his politics; it's just not realistic, they say, to think that the American electorate will support that.

  Which makes these liberals' attraction to Clinton all the more puzzling. If it's all pure pragmatism for you -- despite your personal support for Bernie's positions, you think only her style of politics can win in the United States -- what are you going to do, the next election cycle, when there's no one, certainly no one of her talent or skills and level of organizational support, who's able to articulate that kind of politics?

• Daniel Larson: The Libyan War and Obama's 'Worst Mistake': When asked one of those self-flagellating questions, Obama offered that his worst mistake was "Probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya." I can think of several worse ones. One was not fixing the Bush tax cuts when he had the votes to do so right after the 2008 election. (Sure, I understand that he didn't do so because raising taxes in a recession would have seemed contractionary, and because he wanted to play up his bipartisanship, and because they were due to sunset in a few years anyway, but they would have cut into the swollen deficits that caused so much alarm, in turn leading to austerity cutbacks that really were contractionary. Moreover, he could have floated tax rebates to counter the increases short-term, so they would have been neutral or better while improving the long-term outlook.) Another was pretending that the US had succeeded in Iraq when his belated withdrawal was complete, which left him open to the charge that his withdrawal turned Bush's victory into the rise of ISIS. I could come up with a few dozen more before getting into Libya, where in retrospect the intervention has come to look like a worse decision than the aftermath. As Larson puts it:

  I don't think this was Obama's biggest mistake, but it is revealing that he remains convinced that this lack of post-Gaddafi planning is worse than the far greater error of intervening in Libya in the first place. As we saw last week, this has become the self-serving rallying cry of Libyan war supporters. The only error interventionists are capable of recognizing is that of doing "too little." They can't admit that the intervention itself is a mistake without fully acknowledging their bad judgment in supporting it. [ . . . ]

  Obama knew at the time that there was absolutely no political support in the U.S. or anywhere else for a prolonged mission in Libya. Promising not to start an open-ended mission in Libya is what made the war politically viable here at home. The public would tolerate bombing for eight months and then writing off the country, but there wouldn't be similar patience for a new occupation in yet another Muslim country with the costs and casualties that would likely entail.

  It was not an oversight by the intervening governments when they left Libya to its own devices. That was part of the plan, such as it was, from the very beginning. So it is hard to take Obama seriously when he faults himself for not committing the U.S. to a larger, costlier role in Libya when he and the other allied leaders deliberately decided against doing that. They made that decision because they wanted a low-risk intervention on the cheap, and they certainly weren't prepared to make a long-term commitment to police and rebuild Libya. But they were willing to help throw the country into chaos and to destabilize the surrounding region and declare victory when the regime change they supposedly weren't seeking had been achieved.

  One last point is that the US intervention didn't end when the bombing did. Obama may not have planned for the aftermath, but the CIA blundered in anyway, which is how that Benghazi! fiasco happened.

I want to close with a fairly long quote from Thomas Frank's new book, Listen, Liberal: Or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (pp. 89-91):

[Bill] Clinton's wandering political identity fascinated both his admirers and biographers, many of whom chose to explain it as a quest: Bill Clinton had to prove, to himself and the nation, that he was a genuine New Democrat. He had to grow into presidential maturity. And the way he had to do it was by somehow damaging or insulting traditional Democratic groups that represented the party's tradition of egalitarianism. Then we would know that the New Deal was really dead. Then we could be sure.

This became such a cherished idea among Clinton's campaign team that they had a catchphrase for it: "counter-scheduling." During the 1992 race, as though to compensate for his friend-of-the-little-guy economic theme, Clinton would confront and deliberately antagonize certain elements of the Democratic Party's traditional base in order to assure voters that "interest groups" would have no say in a New Democratic White House. As for those interest groups themselves, Clinton knew he could insult them with impunity. They had nowhere else to go, in the cherished logic of Democratic centralism.

The most famous target of Clinton's counter-scheduling strategy was the civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, the bête noir of centrists and the living embodiment of the poilitics the Democratic Leadership Council had set out to extinguish. At a 1992 meeting of Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, with Jackson sitting to his left, Clinton went out of his way to criticize a controversial rapper called Sister Souljah who had addressed the conference on the previous day. The exact circumstances of Clinton's insult have long been forgotten, but the fact of it has gone down in the annals of politicking as a stroke of genius, an example of the sort of thing that New Democrats should always be doing in order to discipline their party's base.

Once Clinton was in the White House, counter-scheduling mutated from a campaign tactic to a philosophy of government. At a retreat in the administration's early days, Bill's chief political adviser, Hillary Clinton, instructed White House officials how it was going to be done. As Carl Bernstein describes the scene, Hillary announced that the public must be made to understand that Bill was taking them on a"journey" and that he had a "vision" for what the administration was doing, a "story" that distinguished good from evil. The way to dramatize this story, the first lady continued (in Bernstein's telling), was to pick a fight with supporters.

You show people what you're willing to fight for, Hillary said, when you fight your friends -- by which, in this context, she clearly meant, When you make them your enemy.

NAFTA would become the first great test of this theory of the presidency, with Clinton defying not only organized labor but much of his own party in Congress. In one sense, it achieved the desired results. For New Democrats and for much of the press, NAFTA was Clinton's "finest hour," his "boldest action," an act befitting a real he-man of a president who showed he could stand up to labor and thereby assure the world that he was not a captive of traditional Democratic interests.

But there was also an important difference. NAFTA was not symbolism. With this deed, Clinton was not merely insulting an important constituency, as he had done with Jesse Jackson and Sister Souljah. With NAFTA he connived in that constituency's ruin. He assisted in the destruction of its economic power. He did his part to undermine his party's greatest ally, to ensure that labor would be too weak to organize workers from that point forward. Clinton made the problems of working people materially worse.

One effect of Clinton's NAFTA push was that the unions were unable to muster effective support for Clinton's signature health care bill. Then in 1994 the Republicans gained control of Congress and Clinton never again had to worry about the Democrats pushing some progressive reform through Congress. And by crippling the unions, Clinton was able to consolidate his control of the Democratic Party machine, something which kept Democrats weak in Congress (except for 2006-2010, when Howard Dean was Party Chairman) and set up Hillary's campaigns in 2008 and this year. (Sure, Obama beat Hillary in 2008, but welcomed her people into his team, got rid of Dean, and restored presidential crony control of the Party machinery, making Hillary a shoe-in this year -- at least until the rank-and-file weighed in.)

The bottom line here is that most people's interests should align with the Democrats -- they damn sure don't line up with the Republicans -- yet the Democrats don't get their votes, because party leaders like the Clintons, despite whatever they may promise during a campaign, cannot be trusted to support them.

Music: Current count 26515 [26475] rated (+40), 418 [425] unrated (-7).

Big bump in the rated count this week -- first time in well over a month to top 30 and did so by a bunch. Had a replenished jazz queue to work through, and until I got to the Clean Feeds they didn't require a lot of attention. Also noticed on Rhapsody a clutch of new records by artists I recognize as worth checking out (Hayes Carll, The Coathangers, Mayer Hawthorne, Parquet Courts, Sturgill Simpson, plus Kanye West finally appeared). Also had Jason Gubbels' list, and a couple Christgau Expert Witness columns (one on blues and another on alt-rock -- I had already written up Parquet Courts but not Coathangers or the new Tacocat, and my endorsement of Full Communism isn't just political).

Of the eight B+(***) records below, two were Christgau A- records (Tacocat, Kanye West). I gave up on them after two or three plays, without being certain more plays wouldn't help. Same thing for the Sturgill Simpson album, possibly an even better prospect. I'm having similar indecision with the new PJ Harvey, but save that for next week.

I voted in Downbeat's annual critics poll last week. I'm not going to do a separate post on this -- I was exhausted after it took more than 24 hours to I finish the 16 pages of ballots (with 50-some questions), on top of the usual aggravations and frustrations. Still, you can scan through my worksheet if you like. I suppose I should mention that I build each year's worksheet on the last, which helps with consistency (and jogs my increasingly damaged memory) but lets me get by without giving many questions much fresh thought. And this all the more true in categories I don't have any real thoughts -- fresh or received -- on, like Composer, Arranger, or various minor instruments (e.g., I almost never notice electric bass or keyboards, so trying to come up with three names there is even harder than trying to whittle down thirty or more luminaries on acoustic bass or piano).

I will mention that my HOF pick was George Russell. Downbeat's Hall is excessively restrictive and therefore woefully underpopulated, so there is a long list of worthies to pick from (and many more not even on Downbeat's prospect list). (By contrast, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is too large, not that the judges there have picked up all who deserve a slot.) Still, Russell is a giant among the uninducted, but he never has gotten the credit he deserves. For instance, when you think of Latin-Bebop, you recall Dizzy Gillespie (not the writer of"Cubana Be Cubana Bop"). When you think of modal jazz, you come up with Miles Davis and John Coltrane (not the guy who wrote the big book that showed how it is done). When you think of jazz workshops, you get Mingus (not Russell). Most likely you can't think of anyone who pioneered electronics in jazz. Or recall that Russell was the mentor of nearly a dozen important Scandinavian (mostly Norwegian) jazz musicians who started out in the early 1970s. When Russell returned from Norway, got a job at New England Conservatory where he was one of the architects of modern jazz education. The people who vote in Downbeat's Readers Poll are never going to put all that together, but you'd think that jazz critics would know at least this much.

Of course, many do, but they have other concerns, and the competition is stiff. It took Lee Konitz 65 years to get in last year, after finishing in the top three for nearly a decade -- leapfrogged many times recently by guys who finally got voters' attention the year before by dying (2006: Jackie McLean, 2007: Andrew Hill, 2009: Freddie Hubbard, 2011: Abbey Lincoln, 2012: Paul Motian, 2013: Charlie Haden, 2014: Jim Hall; Hank Jones won in 2008 then died in 2010; the only other living musician in this stretch was Muhal Richard Abrams in 2010; Russell died in 2009, got a boost then, but not enough). I have no idea who will win this year, but Paul Bley is probably the top choice among the recently deceased, and Anthony Braxton is the obvious pick among the living (and still very active).

I decided to write two names in, not so much because they were my next picks -- these rank lists are nowhere near that precise -- as hoping that they'll be picked up in future ballots: Mal Waldron and Jimmy Rushing. Waldron (1926-2002) is most famous as Billie Holiday's pianist, but he had a brilliant career as a leader and composer, made a remarkable move from postbop to avant-garde with his later group records like The Git Go and Crowd Scene, but perhaps his best records were duos with Steve Lacy, Marion Brown, and Jackie McLean (Left Alone '86). Rushing (1901-72) was the greatest of the Kansas City blues shouters, starting with Walter Page and Bennie Moten and following Count Basie to New York, where he cut many great albums -- a personal favorite from the year before he died is the out-of-print The You and Me That Used to Be.

This has nothing to do with music, but I should note and lament the passing of Dewane Hixon (1933-2016). He was a cousin, the oldest son of my mother's slightly older sister Edith. They moved from Oklahoma to Modesto, California in 1952, so we didn't see them much -- we drove to California in 1956; Edith, with two other sons (but I think not Dewane) came through Wichita around 1958. Dewane had a job working for an aircraft dealer and came to Wichita once for some training. He had a story about beating a traffic ticket when the cop stopped him and asked to see his pilot's license -- he whipped one out. I don't remember his father, Otis Hixon, who died from something heart-related in 1967, but relatives often said that Dewane reminded them of Otis, particularly as a practical joker. Dewane settled near Phoenix, and Edith moved there. After my mother died in 2000, we drove to Phoenix to see Edith, and spent quite a bit of time with Dewane. Edith died that December, at 89, the last of eight siblings. I went back to Phoenix two more times in the next few years. Always stopped to see Dewane, tell jokes, argue politics, and reminisce. He had a delivery service business, and was still working it last I heard last year. About half my cousins on my mother's side have passed now: all are older than me, the oldest survivor 90. Even stranger to lose that generation than my aunts and uncles before them.

Let me also note that I continue to be learn things from Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal, which I quoted from in yesterday's post. The next few pages after yesterday's quote add to the list of Bill Clinton's "counter-scheduling" practices -- the crime bill, welfare reform, the "grand bargain" he was working on with Newt Gingrich to privatize a big chunk of Social Security. Frank focuses on how these acts reflect a deeper shift in the Democratic Party from a working-class base to one based on well-to-do professionals, one that may be socially liberal but cares little about inequality. Thus far -- I've gotten to be a shamefully slow reader, as well as one who can only focus for a few pages at a time, so I'm only about half-way through a short book -- he hasn't drawn out the political conclusions: e.g., how by undermining traditional Democratic groups Clinton was able to capture the party for his own personal purposes, which include fronting his wife's candidacy. But given what Frank shows, that part is pretty obvious.

In some ways I find Frank's book even more shocking than Jane Mayer's Dark Money. If it was just the Kochs and their ilk that had set out to undermine American democracy, there would be plenty of popular reaction. But when you turn the opposition over to "leaders" like the Clintons, there's no telling what they won't surrender (supposedly to defend you).

Recommended music links:

• Milo Miles: Top 33 of 2015: And, yes, I added this to my EOY Aggregate (I previously had Milo's JCP ballot; only one dupe here: Maria Schneider).

New records rated this week:

• Hayes Carll: Lovers and Leavers (2016, Highway 87): [r]: B+(***)
• Cavern of Anti-Matter: Void Beats/Invocation Trex (2016, Duophonic): [r]: B+(***)
• Chimurenga Renaissance: Rize Vadzimu Rize (2014, Brick Lane): [r]: B+(*)
• Chimurenga Renaissance: Girlz With Gunz (2016, Glitterbeat, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• The Coathangers: Nosebleed Weekend (2016, Suicide Squeeze): [r]: A-
• Shemekia Copeland: Outskirts of Love (2015, Alligator): [r]: B+(*)
• Daria: Strawberry Fields Forever: Songs by the Beatles (2016, OA2): [cd]: B+(*)
• Flatbush Zombies: 3001: A Laced Odyssey (2016, Glorious Dead): [r]: B+(**)
• Michael Formanek/Ensemble Kolossus: The Distance (2014 [2016], ECM): [dl]: B+(***)
• James Freeman: Echoes of Nature III (2016, Edgetone): [cd]: B-
• Matthew Fries: Parallel States (2015 [2016], Xcappa): [cd]: B+(*)
• Alexander Hawkins/Evan Parker: Leaps in Leicester (2015 [2016], Clean Feed): [cd]: A-
• Jean-Brice Godet Quartet: Mujô (2013 [2016], Fou): [cd]: B+(***)
• Mayer Hawthorne: Man About Town (2016, Vagrant): [r]: B+(**)
• Kamaiyah: A Good Night in the Ghetto (2016, self-released): [r]: B+(**)
• Roberto Magris: Need to Bring Out Love (2016, JMood): [cdr]: B+(**)
• Daniel Meron: Sky Begins (2015 [2016], Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit): [cd]: B
• Moodymann: DJ-Kicks (2016, !K7): [r]: B+(**)
• Roy Nathanson: Nearness and You (2015 [2016], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(*)
• New Zion w. Cyro: Sunshine Seas (2016, Rare Noise): [cdr]: B+(**)
• Noertker's Moxie & the Melancholics: Curious Worlds: The Art & Imagination of David Beck (2016, Edgetone): [cd]: B+(*)
• Parquet Courts: Human Performance (2016, Rough Trade): [r]: A-
• Restroy: Saturn Return (2016, Milk Factory): [cd]: B+(*)
• Eric Revis Trio: Crowded Solitudes (2015 [2016], Clean Feed): [cd]: A-
• Rent Romus/Teddy Rankin-Parker/Daniel Pearce: LiR (2014 [2016], Edgetone): [cd]: B+(***)
• Mikael Seifu: Zelalem (2016, RVNG Intl, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Sturgill Simpson: A Sailor's Guide to the Earth (2016, Atlantic): [r]: B+(***)
• Esperanza Spalding: Emily's D+Evolution (2016, Concord): [r]: B
• Mavis Staples: Livin' on a High Note (2016, Anti-): [r]: B+(**)
• Starlite Motel: Awosting Falls (2014 [2016], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(*)
• Tacocat: Lost Time (2016, Hardly Art): [r]: B+(***)
• Twenty One 4tet: Live at Zaal 100 (2015 [2016], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(**)
• Kanye West: The Life of Pablo (2016, Def Jam/GOOD Music): [r]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• The Ex: The Ex at Bimhuis (1991-2015) (1991-2015 [2015], Ex, 2CD): [bc]: B+(***)
• Ella Fitzgerald: Jazz at the Philharmonic: The Ella Fitzgerald Set (1949-54 [2016], Verve): [r]: B+(*)
• The Rough Guide to Bottleneck Blues [Second Edition] (1926-40 [2016], World Music Network): [r]: B+(***)
• The Rough Guide to the Blues Songsters: Reborn and Remastered (1926-35 [2015], World Music Network): [r]: A-

Old music rated this week:

• The Ex: 30 (1980-2006 [2009], Ex, 2CD): [bc]: B+(***)
• The Ex: Catch My Shoe (2010, Ex): [bc]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Bobby Avey: Inhuman Wilderness (Inner Voice Jazz): June 24
• The Dynamic Les DeMerle Band: Comin' Home Baby (Origin)
• Nick Fraser: Starer (self-released): April 29
• Alex Goodman: Border Crossing (OA2): April 15
• Keefe Jackson/Jason Adasiewicz: Rows and Rows (Delmark)
• Scott Neumann/Tom Christensen: Spin Cycle (Sound Footing): May 6
• Sebastian Noelle: Shelter (Fresh Sound New Talent): advance, June 3
• The Oatmeal Jazz Combo: Instant Oats (LGY)
• Sonny Rollins: Holding the Stage: Road Shows Vol. 4 (1979-2012, Okeh)
• Nana Simopoulos: Skins (Na): June 20

The New York primaries were held last week. Hillary Clinton won a huge win with 58.0% of the vote, giving her 139 delegates to Bernie Sanders 108. On the Republican side, Donald Trump won with his first majority in a primary all year, a big one with 60.4% of the vote vs. 25.1% for John Kasich and 14.5% for that sworn enemy of "New York values" Ted Cruz. Trump got 89 delegates, Kasich 4, and Cruz 0, so this primary went a long ways to putting Trump back on track for a first ballot win at the Republican Convention. Still, it's worth noting that Trump only got 19.5% of the votes cast on Tuesday. Sanders got 28.4%, and Clinton got 39.2% -- together the Democrats got 67.7% of the total vote, a big change from earlier primaries where Republicans generally got more votes than Democrats.

I looked at 538's What Went Down in the New York Primaries, and one thing I checked was the Clinton-Sanders split by congressional district. What I found was that Clinton ran especially well in New York City, and was much stronger in districts represented by Democrats (she won 17 of 18, only losing around Albany). Sanders, on the other hand, won 5 (of 9) districts represented by Republicans, and did better than his state average in the other four (also in Democratic districts in Buffalo and Rochester, plus the 6th in Queens and the 18th in Westchester). What this suggests is that the party machine and its patronage network held firm for Clinton. Of course, one thing that helped the machine was that the primary was closed (way in advance of the vote), so independents, which Sanders has regularly won this year, often by large margins, couldn't vote.

I came out of this feeling pretty down, not so much because I expected a Sanders win -- I did think it might be closer, but knew Clinton had a lot of structural advantages there -- but because it underscored how difficult it's going to be to dislodge the Party's power structure. Sanders could win in Republican areas because he appealed especially to people deprived of power, but the Democrats so controlled New York City that the oligarchy -- especially the nabobs of Wall Street -- owned the Party. And what made matters worse for me was that while this smackdown was going on, I was reading Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, where his big point is that the Democrats ever since Carter had courted educated professionals (following Chris Hedges, he calls them the Liberal Class), often at the expense of the workers and unions who had previously been the most effective supporters of the Democratic Party -- the net effect is that the Democrats are as much in bed with big business as the Republicans, making them preferable only in that they'll try to defend certain liberties and civil rights, and work a bit less hard at destroying the middle class. That explains the sort of marginal differentiation that is supposed to convince us that we need Clinton to save the world from Trump or Cruz, even though there is no reason to think she'll even try to do the things that need to be done to reverse the increase in inequality and the rot in practically everything else. So while the horserace watchers saw New York as the primary that virtually cinched Clinton's nomination, it looked more to me like the end of any hope for change.

Next Tuesday's primaries promise to be more of the same. Clinton is favored in Connecticut (56.2-41.3%, closest poll Clinton +6), Maryland (63.3-33.9%, closest +13), and Pennsylvania (58.9-38.2%, closest +6); I don't see any polling on Delaware and Rhode Island, but I'd expect them to be similar to Maryland and Connecticut (although there is one Delaware poll with Clinton +7, suggesting much closer than Maryland). Trump is also expected to mop up: 45.2-31.7-21.3% in Connecticut (Kasich over Cruz), 40.3-30.6-27.1% in Maryland (Kasich over Cruz), and 41.1-29.4-27.4% in Pennsylvania (Cruz over Kasich -- looks like a second straight brutal week for Cruz).

Looking further ahead, Clinton should keep on winning: 52.7-44.4% in Indiana (May 3), 56.8-41.7% in California (June 7), 51.0-41.4% in New Jersey (also June 7). Trump continues to lead in the Republican races (with Cruz getting a bit closer): 38.1-37.5-22.2% (T-C-K) in Indiana, 41.9-33.5-23.4% (T-C-K) in California, and 50.4-23.4-17.2% (T-K-C) in New Jersey.

Meanwhile I have to share the following image. Just think, with three-hundred million people in America, this is the best we can do?

Back in 1776 there were only four million people in America, yet somehow we managed to find a wide range of capable leaders. Now we find that the only possible surrogate for one Clinton is another, and that the best the opposition party can come up with is their former party pal. Hard to see any significant differences among this crowd, yet both Trump and Clinton have managed to convince most of their followers that the other is the Devil incarnate, and those followers are hysterical as expected. Still, the odds of a comparably jovial post-election photo are pretty high -- especially if Clinton wins and reverts to form, serving the billionaire class.

Some scattered links this week:

• Gerald Friedman: Orthodox Economics Has Become a Place Where Visions Die and Hopes Are Banished: Subhed: "Why liberal economists dish out despair." Friedman was the economist who analyzed Bernie Sanders' platform and concluded that it would lead to a growth rate that the US economy hasn't seen in over fifty years. He was, in turn, attacked by economists like Christine Romer and Paul Krugman for suggesting that such growth rates were even possible. Basically, they regarded Friedman's calculations as proof that Sanders was fantasizing. (In fairness, a few economists like James Galbraith defended Friedman.) Much of interest here:

  There is, of course, a politics as well as a psychology to this economic theory. If nothing much can be done, if things are as good as they can be, it is irresponsible even to suggest to the general public that we try to do something about our economic ills. The role of economists and other policy elites (Paul Krugman is fond of the term "wonks") is to explain to the general public why they should be reconciled with stagnant incomes, and to rebuke those, like myself, who say otherwise before we raise false hopes that can only be disappointed. But this approach leaves liberals like Hillary Clinton with few policy options to offer in response to the siren call of demagogues like Donald Trump. And it makes the work of self-proclaimed "responsible" elite economists that much more pressing. They have to work even harder to persuade the public that nothing can be done to head off the challenge of Trump and other irresponsible politicians who capitalize on the electorate's appetite for change. They have to slap down critics like myself. "Responsible" elite economists have to keep the party of "good arithmetic" from overpromising at all costs.

  Were the orthodox classical economists correct, then of course their politics would follow. But what if they are wrong? What if government action could, in fact, raise growth rates or narrow disparities? What would be the expected value of a higher GDP growth rate? Would it be worth some academic debate, even if it leaked into the public realm? Might this debate even serve a socially useful function by giving voters an alternative to the xenophobic political economy of Donald Trump? Many Americans believe that government action can improve economic conditions, especially for workers, and many of these support Trump because they see him as the only candidate who is even willing to consider government action to help working Americans. These voters can look long and hard at the "responsible" Clinton platform for some policy, for any policy to raise growth rates and narrow income disparities. But they won't find it, because policy elites have closed their minds to the possibility of change.

  This reminds me that Krugman has repeatedly defended Democratic Party compromises (e.g., ACA, Dodd-Frank) as adequate and satisfactory (even if not ideal) solutions, while implying that little more can be done, and that when Sanders argues otherwise, he's out on some lark beyond anything that is economically possible. This gets me wondering whether there were any Keynesians during the 1930s, even after it had become clear that government spending was working to bring the economy out of the Great Depression, who could imagine what a radical expansion -- one aimed not just as restoring the pre-depression equilibrium but achieving a whole new level of prosperity -- might accomplish. That experiment was (perhaps unwittingly) done with the total mobilization for WWII. What Sanders is proposing goes way beyond repairing the damage done by Bush's bubble. What's lacking is political will, not the "laws of economics," and the net effect of Krugman's (and others') naysaying is to help suppress that political will.

  I don't doubt that there are long-term issues with sustaining economic growth, but it's also clear that the US economy is performing way below what it's capable of, and a crash program of public works -- not just to fix our sorely degraded infrastructure -- would make a big difference (even Krugman understands that much, although his argument doesn't go nearly as far as Sanders or Friedman). The infrastructure work would also move a huge current liability into the asset column, and would improve future productivity, but there's much more value to be gained from spending on public works. One area where Sanders may be overly optimistic is how to pay for this: it's not clear to me that simply "soaking the rich" with higher taxes will raise enough revenue (not that that's not worth doing in its own right), especially if one implements other reforms to reverse increasing inequality. Most likely we would need some sort of broad-based consumption tax (in addition to more progressive taxes on profits and estates), but that's almost a technical issue compared to the broader question of vision.

  I should also remind you of Philip Mirowski's big book, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (2013), which is largely about how mainstream economists throttled (well, more like strangled) any serious political change following a severe crisis which pretty clearly proved that their understanding of the economy was faulty.

• Emmett Rensin: The smug style in American liberalism: Much I agreed with here, and much that rubbed me the wrong way. I believe that good politics derives from respect for everyone, notably people who grew up differently from yourself, who consequently have different world views. However, that doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't disagree with some of those world views. It's just that the ones you should reject are the ones where respect isn't reciprocal or generalizable. Many people, for instance, think they should be privileged over other groups of people, and that is a creed that is based on disrespect for the unprivileged, that cannot be generalizable. We can all, for instance, settle for equality, which is what makes it such a fundamental principle of political society. Given all this, smugness is inappropriate and often counterproductive. Yet it is pretty much impossible to engage in political discourse without at some point appearing to someone as smug. And consequently, Rensin's examples are all over the range from sensible to outrageous. There are some ideas -- the gold standard, for instance, or creationism -- that are so indefensible many of us skip past re-litigating them and resort to derision, even if that leaves the impression of smugness. Similarly there are people -- e.g., Sen. Jim Inhofe on climate change (fresh on my mind because I read a quote from him today) -- who having repeatedly clung to indefensible positions have lost the right to be taken seriously, even though such instant rejection smacks of smugness. At some point you have to realize that it's not practical to re-argue everything from first principles every time it comes up (though it is useful to be able to cite someone who has thought the issue through). Still, I don't disagree with the following:

  It is impossible, in the long run, to cleave the desire to help people from the duty to respect them. It becomes all at once too easy to decide you know best, to never hear, much less ignore, protest to the contrary.

  At present, many of those most in need of the sort of help liberals believe they can provide despise liberalism, and are despised in turn. Is it surprising that with each decade, the "help" on offer drifts even further from the help these people need?

  Even if the two could be separated, would it be worth it? What kind of political movement is predicated on openly disdaining the very people it is advocating for?

  The smug style, at bottom, is a failure of empathy. Further: It is a failure to believe that empathy has any value at all. It is the notion that anybody worthy of liberal time and attention and respect must capitulate, immediately, to the Good Facts. [ . . . ]

  The smug style did not arise by accident, and it cannot be abolished with a little self-reproach. So long as liberals cannot find common cause with the larger section of the American working class, they will search for reasons to justify that failure. They will resent them. They will find, over and over, how easy it is to justify abandoning them further. They will choose the smug style.

  One thing that Rensin has stumbled onto here is that the relationship between liberalism and the working class has been fraught with difficulty throughout American history, perhaps only bound together by accident of the egalitarian words of the Declaration of Independence and the power shifts of the New Deal. Liberalism has always focused on individuals, defined as free and equal as opposed to the old orders of aristocracy (and peasantry or slavery). As such, liberals sought to advance people one-by-one based on merit, whereas socialists sought to "level up" the working class to share in the entire nation's wealth (mostly created by the labor of the working class). As such liberals -- Chris Hedges and Thomas Frank speak of a distinct "liberal class" rooted in highly educated professionals -- have tended to accept inequities, provided that opportunities were more or less equal -- all the more so in times of increased inequality, such as ours.

  Indeed, at this point I suspect that the only thing that keeps the liberal class and the working class -- which is a pretty fair first approximation of the Clinton-Sanders contest -- from splitting the Democratic Party in two is their shared horror at the prospect of Republican rule. It will be interesting to see whether the dominant liberal faction makes any serious nods toward the white working class (with Republicans like Trump and Cruz, blacks and Latinos are pretty much locked in).

• Yusef Munayyer: Wanted: A US Strategy in the Middle East:

  In 2006, as Israel and Hezbollah were engaged in what would be a 34­day war, the longest of any Arab­Israeli war since 1948, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reflected on the region's volatile dynamics calling them "the birth pangs of a new Middle East." She further stated, "We have to be certain that we are pushing forward to the new Middle East not back to the old one."

  Indeed, there was something new in the Middle East that Dr. Rice was observing then. For the first time, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan all seemed to align with Israel in the war and condemned Hezbollah in a very overt way. Earlier in the year, Al-Qaeda in Iraq launched the first major salvo in what became a sectarian war in Iraq when it bombed the Shi'a Al­Askari Mosque in Samarra. The Iraq war had made this regional realignment, which we have seen develop further in the years since, come into fruition.

  The invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the subsequent dismantlement of the Iraqi state had many devastating implications for the region. Perhaps most significant was the fact that it shattered any semblance of regional order in the Middle East and the long­standing modus vivendi between Riyadh and Tehran. Saddam had been a bulwark against Iran and a buffer that limited Iranian influence from reaching the Arab Gulf countries and the Levant. With Saddam gone, the US fired the starting pistol in a regional power struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Militias, insurgencies, sectarianism and bloodshed would characterize this power struggle.

  Today, more than a decade into this contest, the labor pains have subsided and a demon child called ISIS, nurtured from embryo to beast in the womb of a failed Iraqi state, has not only learned to walk but is running amok across the Middle East, North Africa and beyond.

  Munayyer's big point is that while the US thought it had all the power in the world, it had no real idea what it wanted to do with that power, and consequently wound up thrashing, unable to decide on goals, or even friends and enemies (actually, both camps tended to be defined by their opposite in ways that wound up contradicting one another). And in this context US power turned out to be far less than super (let alone hyper). Munayyer sees the 2003 invasion of Iraq as pivotal, but the 1990 war was nearly as bad, and the US had made a muddle of its strategy ever since Carter declared the Persian Gulf a "vital US interest," or Nixon looked to Saudi fundamentalism as a bulwark in the Cold War, or LBJ had no interest in brokering an end to the Arab-Israeli wars despite having friends on both sides. And all through America's Orientalists never showed the slightest interest in the welfare of the region's people, least of all their desires for free societies and modern economies.

Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted:

• Dean Baker: Patently Absurd Logic on Budget Deficits and Debt:Time did a cover story attempting to rile up hysteria about the federal deficit again, so Baker knocks it down plank by plank -- stuff you should already know by now, but I'm flad he's also talking about patents:

  There is one other point about treating the debt as a serious measure of generational equity. Interest payments on debt are just one of the ways in which the government makes commitments for the future. When the government grants patent and copyright monopolies, it is also making commitments that carry into the future. Patent and copyright monopolies allow the holders to charge prices for the protected items that are hugely higher than the free market price. They are in effect a tax that is privately collected by drug companies, software companies, the entertainment industry and others.

  These payments are in fact enormous relative to the interest burdens that get the deficit hawks so excited. In the case of prescription drugs alone, the difference between what we pay for patent protected drugs, compared to drugs being sold at free market prices, is in the neighborhood of $360 billion a year. That's equal to 2 percent of the GDP, twice the size of the current interest burden on the public debt.

• Jesse Eisinger: Why Haven't Bankers Been Punished? Just Read These Insider SEC Emails: Follows longtime SEC lawyer James Kidney. Ends with:

  Kidney became disillusioned. Upon retiring, in 2014, he gave an impassioned going-away speech, in which he called the SEC "an agency that polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors."

  In our conversations, Kidney reflected on why that might be. The oft-cited explanations -- campaign contributions and the allure of private-sector jobs to low-paid government lawyers -- have certainly played a role. But to Kidney, the driving force was something subtler. Over the course of three decades, the concept of the government as an active player had been tarnished in the minds of the public and the civil servants inside working inside the agency. In his view, regulatory capture is a psychological process in which officials become increasingly gun shy in the face of criticism from their bosses, Congress, and the industry the agency is supposed to oversee. Leads aren't pursued. Cases are never opened. Wall Street executives are not forced to explain their actions.

• Rebecca Gordon: Exhibit One in Any Future American War Crimes Trial: Author of a new book titled American Nuremberg: The US Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Previously wroteMainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States (2014, Oxford University Press). This excerpt focuses on the torture of Abu Zubaydah, which surely qualifies although I'd say that the decisions to invade and start decades-long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are far more serious crimes.

• William Hartung: What a Waste, the US Military: Given all the evil that the US military perpetrates, the fact that they do such a lousy job of managing their bloated allowance ranks rather low on in my view, but it's always worth a reminder that their lack of care and foresight starts at home, well before they use it to screw up the rest of the world.

• Matt Karp: Against Fortress Liberalism; Lily Geismer: Atari Democrats; Rick Perlstein: The Chicago School: three essays from Jacobin magazine, which we recently subscribed to. On the other hand, they also published a hatchet job by Jonah Walters on "hippie-hating hawk" Merle Haggard that totally misses the boat. (Kathleen Geier fumes here, and Eric Loomis gets down to brass tacks in a reply titled Walking on the Fighting Side of Me.)

• David Swanson: US Wars Are Not Waged Out of Generosity or for Democracy: Interview by Mark Karlin with the author of War Is a Lie, originally written in 2010 and now out in a 2nd edition paperback (Just World Books), and founder of theWorld Beyond War website.

  In 2006, Republicans believed they'd have to end the wars, and Democrats were elected to congressional majorities with that mandate. Rahm Emanuel then openly told The Washington Post that the Democrats would keep the wars going for two more years in order to run "against" them again in 2008. The Democrats took the chairs of committees and proceeded to do nothing with them. And people who identified with the Democratic Party in 2007 began obsessing with the 2008 presidential election, at the expense of ending the slaughter in 2007 or 2008.

  Endless, lawless war at massive expense was clearly established as a bipartisan norm. Entire presidential debates in 2016 have passed by without a single mention of the world outside the United States. No candidate has been asked whether 54 percent of discretionary spending on militarism is too much, too little or just right. Young people have grown up in this climate and accepted in some cases -- just like most old people -- all the propaganda or at least the part that maintains that we are powerless to stop wars. Corruption by war profiteers and general cultural taboos contribute: The big environmental groups won't take on the biggest destroyer of the environment, the big civil liberties groups won't touch the biggest cause of rights violations etc. But the fact is that a massive movement against war is extremely active and broad in comparison to what the media suggests.

  For an excerpt from the new edition of War Is a Lie, see Fear of ISIS Used to Justify Continued Military Intervention in Middle East.

• How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk: As Secretary of State, Clinton was consistently more hawkish than President Obama. Indeed, she's always been quick to resort to military force. Long story, including a possibly apocryphal story about Clinton wanting to join the Navy.

Music: Current count 26541 [26515] rated (+26), 413 [418] unrated (-5).

Rated count back down. Still probably would have hit thirty had I not spent Thursday cooking dinner from China Moon Cookbook and listen to Prince's The Hits/The B-Sides instead. As you're no doubt aware, Prince died last week -- Papa Wemba too. I hadn't gotten around to looking up Prince's two records last year (turns out they're not on Rhapsody), but his two 2014 albums weren't bad, and I credit him with two A- albums in the previous decade (Musicology in 2004, 3121 in 2006). And, of course, much more earlier. Some links follow.

Expect Rhapsody Streamnotes later this week. Not a huge amount in the file, but I haven't been all that lazy either. Still, don't feel much like writing tonight, or much of anything else either. Guess that means a lazy evening of TV. What isn't self-explanatory below will be revealed soon enough.

Recommended music links:

• Oral History: Prince's life, as told by the people who knew him best
• Michaelangelo Matos: We All Wanna Be Prince: Exploring the Purple One's Impact on Dance Music (2013)
• Michaelangelo Matos: The Beautiful One: Rememberng Prince's Rich Life and Legacy
• David Hajdu: Prince: The Moment's End
• Remembering Prince: tributes from TBC's global staff of writers and editors

New records rated this week:

• Antonio Adolfo: Tropical Infinito (2016, AAM): [cd]: B+(***)
• Nik Bärtsch's Mobile: Continuum (2015 [2016], ECM): [dl]: A-
• Bibio: A Mineral Love (2016, Warp): [r]: B
• The Dynamic Les DeMerle Band: Comin' Home Baby (2014 [2016], Origin): [cd]: B+(***)
• Gambari Band: Kokuma (2016, Membran Media): [r]: A-
• PJ Harvey: The Hope Six Demolation Project (2015 [2016], Vagrant): [r]: B+(**)
• Louis Heriveaux: Triadic Episode (2014 [2016], Hot Shoe): [cd]: B+(**)
• Keefe Jackson/Jason Adasiewicz: Rows and Rows (2015 [2016], Delmark): [cd]: B+(*)
• Julie Kjaer 3: Dobbeltgaenger (2015 [2016], Clean Feed): [cd]: A-
• The Del McCoury Band: Del and Woody (2016, McCoury Music): [r]: A-
• The Oatmeal Jazz Combo: Instant Oats (2016, LGY): [cd]: B+(*)
• Phil Palombi: Detroit Lean (2015 [2016], Xcappa): [cd]: B+(***)
• Pierette Ensemble: Akrostik (2014, Gateway Music): [r]: B+(***)
• Noah Preminger: Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground (2015 [2016], self-released): [cd]: B+(*)
• Carol Saboya: Carolina (2016, AAM): [cd]: B+(*)
• Yves Theiler Trio: Dance in a Triangle (2015 [2016], Musiques Suisses): [cd]: B+(***)
• Trio Da Paz: 30 (2011 [2016], Zoho Music): [r]: B+(**)
• WorldService Project: For King and Country (2015 [2016], Rare Noise): [cdr]: D+

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• John Abercrombie: The First Quartet (1978-80 [2015], ECM, 3CD): [dl]: B+(**)
• Awalom Gebremariam: Desdes (2007 [2016], Awesome Tapes From Africa): [r]: B+(***)
• Sonny Rollins: Holding the Stage: Road Shows Vol. 4 (1979-2012 [2016], Okeh): [cd]: A-

Old music rated this week:

• Taana Gardner: Taana Gardner (1979, West End): [r]: B+(***)
• Del McCoury & the Dixie Pals: Classic Bluegrass (1974-84 [1991], Rebel): [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Claudia Quintet: Super Petite (Cuneiform): June 24
• Rob Clearfield: Islands (Ears & Eyes): June 3
• Jeremy Cunningham Quartet: Re: Dawn (From Far) (Ears & Eyes): June 17
• Cory Healey's Beautiful Sunshine Band: Beautiful Sunshine (Shifting Paradigm)
• Sari Kessler: Do Right (Ruby Street Music): May 6
• The Tony Lustig Quintet: Taking Flight (Bimperl)
• Adam Meckler Quintet: Wonder (Shifting Paradigm): April 23

It's been about two months since my last roundup of book blurbs (Feb. 24). I started to cherry pick some important political books -- frequently noted writers like Andrew Bacevich, Thomas Frank, Jacob Hacker/Paul Pierson, Adam Hochschild, as well as Matthew Desmond's much toutedEvicted -- but I wound up filling out this set of forty with the older entries in my scratch file. Almost have enough left over for a second forty, so that could come later in the week, or next week, or next month -- not clear at the moment.

Julian Assange, ed: The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire (2015, Verso): A big chunk of data from leaked US diplomatic documents in 2010-11, edited, indexed, with notes on context -- I've seen this described as an "executive summary" to an Internet-searchable cache of 2.3 million documents. People went to jail, or were otherwise harassed, to make this information public. Other people should go to jail for what it shows.

Andrew J Bacevich: America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (2016, Random House): Vietnam veteran, conservative critic of America's imperial overreach, especially since his important The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War appeared in 2005 in the wake of Bush's ill-fated invasion of Iraq. That book helped explain why American politicians lost their fear of getting trapped in foreign quagmires. Here he moves from the toxic effects militarism has had on American civil society to the endless chain of disasters US entanglement in the Middle East has caused going back to the 1980s. Very likely another important book.

Yochai Benkler: The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest (2011, Crown Business): Title comes from the free software ethos of Linux (with its happy penguin logo) and Hobbes' politico-philosophical landmark where the unfettered pursuit of self-interest turns into a war of all against all. It shouldn't be hard to show that cooperation is more productive -- indeed, the main thing that companies do is to build a sheltered space where workers can build together, even in a world where competition between companies can be cutthroat. Adam Smith, for instance, imagined an "invisible hand" but what he really demonstrated was the productive advantages of a division of labor. Author previously wrote The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (2006, Yale University Press).

Phyllis Bennis: Understanding ISIS and the New Global War on Terror: A Primer (paperback, 2015, Olive Branch Press): One more in a series of short primers (Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, Ending the Iraq War, Understanding the US-Iran Crisis, Ending the US War in Afghanistan), provides the basics, the history, a firm understanding of international law, and a common sense critique of American imperial hubris. Probably quite useful, but one thing I wonder about is how the idea of ISIS elicits such a knee-jerk reaction from the American psyche: the Syrian Civil War was widely regarded as such a complete mess that US intervention would be foolish, yet as soon as you uttered the words "Islamic State" the US plunged back into war, both in Syria and Iraq, and ISIS has turned into the magic word to justify US bombing in Libya and Yemen. This reaction has proved so instantaneous and unthinking I'm not sure that even Bennis can negate it.

Ari Berman: Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (2015, Farrar Straus and Giroux): A history of the civil rights movement, especially the struggle to pass the Voting Rights Act. The book comes shortly after said Act was gutted by the Roberts Court. Congress should have responded by extending the Act's protections to all states, especially since the Republicans discovered they do better when voter turnout is low and started passing restrictive "voter ID" laws all over the country.

Wendell Berry: Our Only World: Ten Essays (2015, Counterpoint): Kentucky tobacco farmer, poet, essayist, recently passed into his 80s, can be cranky about new technology but has great sensitivity to communal life and the natural world. Recent essay collections have tended to collect older works, so I'm not sure if the essays in this "new collection" are really new. I am sure that the old ones are very much worth your time.

Beth Buczynski: Sharing Is Good: How to Save Money, Time and Resources Through Collaborative Consumption (paperback, 2013, New Society Publishers): One thing I've come to realize is that damn near none of the things I own is in use at any given time, nor does the percentage grow much over days, week, months. I assume that's at least part of what's going on here. (I have a cousin who lives in a retirement community where the houses are tiny but nearly everything imaginable is available in shared buildings -- when I visit, it always strikes me as something of a communist paradise.) So this seems like a reasonable idea for a lower cost, higher value, sustainable future, not that I doubt the devil is in the details. Other books along these lines: Rachel Botsman: What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption (2010, Harper Business; paperback, 2011, Collins); Lisa Gansky: The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing (paperback, 2012, Portfolio); Chelsea Rustrum/Gabriel Slempinski/Alexandra Liss:It's a Shareable Life: A Practical Guide on Sharing (paperback, 2014, Shareable Life); Jay Walljasper: All That We Share: How to Save the Economy, the Environment, the Internet, Democracy, Our Communities and Everything Else That Belongs to All of Us (paperback, 2010, New Press); Malcolm Harris/Neal Gorenflo, eds: Share or Die: Voices of the Get Lost Generation in the Age of Crisis (paperback, 2012, New Society Publishers).

Horace Campbell: Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya (paperback, 2013, Monthly Review Press): It's pretty clear in hindsight that the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011 took a bad situation -- a civil war as Muammar Gaddafi used military force to try to suppress a popular revolt -- and turned it into chaos and who knows what? You'd think this would be cause for reflection, but the intervention came and went too fast to get onto book schedules, and since then little has been published other than the right wing's Benghazi! propaganda, so I thought I'd search out what's available. This book, very critical of NATO, was the first I found. Some others: Alison Pargeter: Libya: The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi (2012, Yale University Press); Vijay Prashad: Arab Spring, Libyan Winter (paperback, 2012, AK Press); Ethan Chorin: Exit the Colonel: The Hidden History of the Libyan Revolution (2012, Public Affairs); Maximilian Forte: Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO's War on Libya and Africa (paperback, 2012, Baraka Books); Francis A Boyle: Destroying Libya and World Order: The Three-Decade US Campaign to Terminate the Qaddafi Revolution (paperback, 2013, Clarity Press); Christopher S Chivvis: Toppling Qaddafi: Libya and the Limits of Liberal Intervention (paperback, 2013, Cambridge University Press); Hugh Roberts: The Fall of Muammar Gaddafi: NATO's War in Libya (2016, Verso).

Satyajit Das: The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril (2016, Prometheus Books): Well, it does seem like the economies of the United States and Europe haven't bounced back from the 2008 financial meltdown like they did from previous recessions, and lately we've seen downturns in China and other "developing countries" that had fared so well in the previous decades. Das attributes all of this to the low interest "easy money" policies used to fight the recession and the overall growth of debt (especially public debt). I see this same stagnation, but I'm more inclined to attribute it to deliberate political policies protecting the issuers of all that debt while letting everyone else slide into an ever deeper mire. What makes this even more disagreeable is how neoliberals use debt as a cudgel to argue for austerity. An unspoken alternative would be to liquidate much of that debt, which would go a long ways toward reversing the increasing inequality trend (and all of its vile consequences).

Matthew Desmond: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016, Crown): Stories of tenants and landlords in poor parts of Milwaukee c. 2008-09: the struggle to meet the rent for bad housing in hard times, "a cycle of hurt that all parties -- landlord, tenant, city -- inflict on one another." Seems to be one of the more important books on American poverty in recent years.

Cynthia Enloe/Joni Seager: The Real State of America Atlas: Mapping the Myths and Truths of the United States (paperback, 2011, Penguin Press): A short (128 pp) book of maps and charts slicing and dicing the US economy and society in various ways. For instance, one map shows military deaths in Iraq by state: Texas (414) is a close second to California (468), and Oklahoma (76) is more than 50% higher than Kansas (47) (per capita would be more revealing, although it would reduce the OK/KS ratio).

Keith P Feldman: A Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (2015, University of Minnesota Press): Takes the thesis that the US relationship to Israel belongs more to US domestic than foreign policy, and explores how US racial attitudes influence that policy. I imagine there's something to this, especially in the 1980s when Israel was one of South Africa's last close allies, but I imagine one can find less explicit evidence earlier -- especially as you don't have to go back very far to get past the taboo against explicit racism. Deeper down, both Israel and the US are colonial outposts of colonial outposts of Europe, and heirs of its crusader mythos -- Jews were long considered outsiders to all this, but one can argue that in colonizing Palestine they became "white," approximately even "Christian" (as the recently popular "Judeo-Christian" terminology shows).

Norman G Finkelstein: Method and Madness: The Hidden Story of Israel's Assaults on Gaza (paperback, 2014, OR Books): Chronicles three major assaults on Gaza since Israel dismantled its settlements in the blockaded territory: codes names Cast Lead (2008-09), Pillar of Defense (2012), and Protective Edge (2014). Finkelstein examines the logic behind these attacks, concluding they "have been designed to sabotage the possibility of a compromise peace with the Palestinians, even on terms that are favorable to [Israel]." Seems to be a collection of essays, less detailed than the book he wrote on Cast Lead: 'This Time We Went Too Far': Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion.

Ronald P Formisano: Plutocracy in America: How Increasing Inequality Destroys the Middle Class and Exploits the Poor (2015, Johns Hopkins University Press): Argues that rule by the rich (plutocracy) undermines both the poor and "the middle class" -- which I take to be a way of saying "democracy." Or as Louis Brandeis put it: "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few; we can't have both." I think inequality is a very important topic not so much because it is unfair and unjust as because it introduces all sorts of twists and distortions into how we relate to each other. Author previously wrote The Tea Party: A Brief History and For the People: American Populist Movements From the Revolution to the 1850s.

Thomas Frank: Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (2016, Metropolitan Books): After three notable books on the rise of the right -- What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004), The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule (2008), and Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right (2012) -- Frank takes a hard look at the Democrats who have aided and abetted the far right's stranglehold on politics. Given how the Republicans have gone from bad to worse without totally marginalizing themselves, this may seem to be an untimely subject to bring up, but politics is not just a game where you tote up points and celebrate the winner: it's how we as a democratic society try to cope with real problems, and that process has become perverted to a staggering degree. Frank is not the first writer on the left to notice that "liberal" leaders like Clinton and Obama often give up rather than fight for the people who elected them -- cf. Chris Hedges: The Death of the Liberal Class (2010), or for that matter the Bernie Sanders campaign.

Rose George: Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate (paperback, 2014, Picador): One of those books on basic, everyday life, and the technology and business that makes it possible. Author previously tried this with another important topic:The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters (2008).

Stanley B Greenberg: America Ascendant: A Revolutionary Nation's Path to Addressing Its Deepest Problems and Leading the 21st Century (2015, Thomas Dunne): Pollster to hegemonic Democrats like Clinton and Gore, consultant to companies like Boeing and Microsoft, and all around hack reassures us that the future is rosy and won't be clouded by a Republican Party which is self-destructing as we speak. He seeks the nation "turning to Democrats to take on the country's growing challenges," continuing "the social transformations that are making the country ever more racially and culturally diverse, younger, a home to immigrants, and the metropolitan centers that foster a rising economic and cultural dynamism."

Dave Grossman/Gloria DeGaetano: Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie & Video Game Violence (1999; rev ed, paperback, 2014, Harmony): Grossman was a Lt. Col. who had second thoughts and wrote On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (1995; paperback, 1996, Back Bay Books). I don't think there is a simple relationship between witnessing violence in fictional contexts and killing (or for that matter between watching porn and sex crimes), although I also don't doubt that habituation and desensitization can lead some people to become more dangerous. And I'm particularly suspicious of video games, where the point seems to be not just to kill but to develop an automatic reflex to do so thoughtlessly. But I'd worry more about the morals conveyed by our national celebration of "the troops" and their "heroism" -- by the nearly constant practice of war by the United States over the last 75 years. That the military itself is so gung-ho on games is a bad sign, but probably has less to do with violence today than the proliferation of their other favorite toy: firearms.

Jacob S Hacker/Paul Pierson: American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (2016, Simon & Schuster): Once upon a time Ronald Reagan told a joke -- something like "the scariest words in the English language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help'" -- and some people took it as profound insight and blew it up into a nihilistic war against any and all forms of government activity, especially the kind that tries to actually help people. Hacker & Pierson have written a number of important books -- Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (2005), The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement and How You Can Fight Back (2007), Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer, and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (2010) -- and now this one, where the remind us that public investment has long been a foundation of prosperity here, and why the movement against it makes us poorer.

Adam Hochschild: Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (2016, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt): As Franco turned to Hitler and Mussolini to support his movement in Spain's civil war, many others around the world, including 2800 Americans, rallied to the cause of Spanish democracy, becoming (in the terminology of the post-WWII CIA, "premature antifascists." This tries to tell their story, while picking up a few others like George Orwell. Author has written several notable books about (mostly British) protest movements against war and colonialism, such as King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa,Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, and To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918.

Philip T Hoffman: Why Did Europe Conquer the World? (2015, Princeton University Press): Economist, sees the answer in economics, basically the relatively intense competition between late medieval European states involving nearly continuous war. Their rivalry favored whoever could advance science and technology for destructive purposes, and whoever could solve the financial problems of such military adventures. Along the way, Hoffman rejects various other theories, like those of Jared Diamond (Guns Germs and Steel, which as I recall includes similar economic arguments among others). Evidently doesn't address the obvious next question, which is why Europe made such a mess of the world it conquered. Both rise and fall, after all, are intimately related.

Jessica Hopper: The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (paperback, 2015, Featherproof Books): She mostly writes for Pitchfork, which I don't read enough to have any sense of who she is or what she likes. Pitchfork's business model is based on the ideas that bits are cheap and so are writers, so make the latter crank out plenty of the former -- always more than it takes to glaze my eyes over. Her title is provocative, and not just because Ellen Willis and Lillian Roxon are dead, or because others like Ann Powers went straight into books without bothering to gather up their numerous short pieces. Still, the main reason I mention this book is to throw in a plug for Carol Cooper's Pop Culture Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race: Selected Critical Essays (1979-2001), which belies Hopper's title.

Philip K Howard: The Rule of Nobody: Saving America From Dead Laws and Broken Government (2014; paperback, 2015, WW Norton): Lawyer, political theorist, wrote The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America (1994), followed by The Collapse of the Common Good: How America's Lawsuit Culture Undermines Our Freedom (2002) and Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans From Too Much Law (2009). His big point -- that too many laws and regulatory rules, and lawyers and bureaucrats, has turned into a trap that has all sorts of bad effects, from inhibiting common sense to sapping freedom -- is something that we can all relate to, but still you have to wonder who benefits? For instance, lawsuits have never been the great leveler of theory, but sometimes they do manage to bring corporate abuses to an end. Howard wants to get rid of most lawsuits, which sounds laudable but not if doing so leaves us without recourse to right wrongs. It turns out that Howard is founder and chair of Common Good, a "nonpartisan, nonprofit legal reform coalition" trying to implement his recommendations. He seems to have support from members of both political parties, but most of the names mentioned in his Wikipedia page (which reads like PR) are Republicans (Jeb Bush, Alan Simpson, Mitch Daniels) and mouthpieces like David Brooks. Still, I imagine someone could rewrite Howard's books to arrive at a more progressive result -- although that may involve equalizing access to lawyers and lobbyists before cutting back on the overkill. Howard, by the way, wrote another book that is alarming and self-discrediting on the surface: The Lost Art of Drawing the Line: How Fairness Went Too Far (2001): nothing then or since suggests that we're suffering from too much fairness.

Ian Kershaw: To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949 (2015, Penguin): Part of a series called The Penguin History of Europe, joining the two world wars and the turbulent interwar period -- Arno Mayer called this period "the 30 years war of the 20th century." Kershaw has written several big books on the tail end of this period, includingFateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941 (2007) and The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany (2011). On the same time period, Heinrich August Winkler: The Age of Catastrophe: A History of the West 1914-1945 (2015, Yale University Press), even longer (1016 pp).

Peter H Lindert/Jeffrey G Williamson: Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality Since 1780 (2016, Princeton University Press): The authors crunch numbers for a much longer stretch of American history than anyone else has done before, and find two time stretches where inequality rose steeply: from the 1970s to today, as you damn well know by now, and from 1774 to 1860, which actually predates the legendary robber baron period of the late 19th century and the great bubble of the "roaring '20s" -- two periods where the wealth of the very richest was especially conspicuous. Meanwhile there were three periods when the wealthy took serious hits: during the Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression.

Mike Lofgren: The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government (2016, Viking): Previously wrote The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted (2012) -- no idea whether he's someone who can be trusted politically, but in a nutshell that sounds like the story of our times. Leaving aside the Republicans for the moment, one thing that has made Democrats so useless is how readily Clinton in 1993 and Obama in 2009 abandoned a great many of their campaign promises as soon as they had to face with Washington's entrenched bureaucracies -- more or less what Lofgren calls "the deep state." This especially seems to be the case with security and treasury, where new advisory jobs always seem to go to old hands. But I suspect the extraordinary influence of lobbyists and donors -- not technically part of the state, but perhaps promiscuously intertwined with it -- is at least as large. And one can throw in big media (mainstream and otherwise) which are always vigilant to police what politicians can think and say.

Branko Milanovic: Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (2016, Belknap Press): Looks at inequality in a global context, finding that while inequality has been increasing within nations (especially the US), it has been falling among/between nations -- in large part because large developing nations like China and India have been promoting middle class incomes at the same time the US has been destroying them. A follow up to the author's The Haves and the Have-Notes: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality (2010).

Ilan Pappé, ed: Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid (paperback, 2015, Zed Books): Various papers on comparisons and analogies, the upshot is that Israel is becoming every bit the international pariah state South Africa's apartheid regime became. Don't know if the book gets into this, but there are significant differences. Most importantly, Israel has become almost independent of cheap Palestinian labor, whereas South Africa was literally built on cheap labor.

Susan Pedersen: The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (2015, Oxford University Press): A history of the world from 1920-1939 as seen through the League of Nations, the international organization created in the wake of World War I to ensure world peace. It, of course, failed, largely because the great powers were still preoccupied with their imperialist and colonialist rivalries and grudges.

Richard J Perry: Killer Apes, Naked Apes & Just Plain Nasty People: The Misuse and Abuse of Science in Political Discourse (2015, Johns Hopkins University Press): "Delivers a scathing critique of determinism" -- the notion that human behavior is genetically fixed or inherently programmed, particularly for violence. The title reminds me of certain bestsellers from back in the 1960s and 1970s, although I had thought they were pretty well debunked by now.

Serhii Plokhy: The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (2015, Basic Books): Ukraine has lately become a major flash point in the West's renovated cold war to contain and isolate Putin's Russia, so it's about time someone wrote a history of the nation itself rather than consigning it to a sidebar in the history of Russia. Of course, most of its long history is subsumed under Russia or any of a number of other invading tribes or nations -- early chapters include "The Advent of the Slavs,""Vikings on the Dnieper,""Byzantium North," and"Pax Mongolica" before there is any hint of "The Making of Ukraine."

Robert Pollin: Greening the Global Economy (2015, MIT Press): Leftist economist, I found his book Contours of Descent: US Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity (2003) insightful. This short (176 pp) book argues that it is possible to replace fossil fuels with renewables -- indeed, it is happening -- and grow the economy as a result.

Bill Press: Buyer's Remorse: How Obama Let Progressives Down (2016, Threshold Editions): It's certainly true that"in many ways President Obama has failed to live up to either his promises or his progressive potential" -- I've often been critical both of his strategic vision and of his tactical choices -- but I (and policy-wise I'm easily to the left of Bernie Sanders) think"remorse" suggests much more disillusionment than nearly any Obama voter feels. (Remorse is more like Lyndon Johnson, who campaigned to save us from the belligerent madness of Barry Goldwater, then promptly plunged us into the Vietnam War.) So I wonder what's up here, not least because I associate the publisher with right-wing cranks (e.g., Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, Oliver North).

Ray Raphael: Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past [Tenth Anniversary Edition] (2004; rev ed, paperback, 2014, New Press): Remarkable how many stories people think they know about the American Revolution have been transformed over the ages into myth -- what the author calls "cherished fabrications." Raphael has written many books aimed at broadening and deepening understanding of the period by stripping away those myths, so this is his core text, newly revised. His other books include: A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence (2001, New Press; paperback, 2002, Harper Collins), and includingFounders: The People Who Brought You a Nation (2009, New Press);Mr. President: How and Why the Founders Created a Chief Executive (2012, Knopf); and Constitutional Myths: What We Get Wrong and How to Get It Right (2013, New Press).

Eric Rauchway: The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace (2015, Basic Books): George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are widely regarded as sainted presidents, but in many ways Franklin Roosevelt's many accomplishments are more remarkable -- he's just never had the sort of activist beatification committee that has managed to deface vast swathes of America naming shit for Ronald Reagan. This story deserves to be retold, not least because we are still plagued by goldbuggers -- probably the single dumbest idea still held by any reputable politician in America.

Nicholas Stargardt: The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945 (2015, Basic Books): Attempts to create a broad portrait of how the German people viewed and were engaged in the German war against Europe, notably finding that "the Wehrmacht in fact retained the staunch support of the patriotic German populace until the bitter end."

Jim Wallis: America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America (2016, Brazos Press): Edits a Christian evangelical magazine called Sojourners tied to a Protestant religious sect he helped found, but has steered away from"Christian conservative" politics, recently writing books that take up political themes: like God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It (2005), and Rediscovering Values: On Main Street, Wall Street, and Your Street. Here he tackles the history and legacy of racism, and appeals to end it.

Karine V Walther: Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921 (2015, University of North Carolina Press): Time framework extends from the Greek War of Independence (1821) to the Greco-Turkish War (1919-22) -- curiously that period skips over the Barbary Wars (1801-05) when the US first tangled with the Ottoman Empire -- "excavates the deep history of American Islamophobia, showing how negative perceptions of Islam and Muslims shaped US foreign relations from the Early Republic to the end of World War I." I imagine thee is some evidence of that, but I've long been under the opposite impression: that US foreign policy toward the Ottomans was relatively benign, and only became more consequential once the oil industry got involved.

Ellen Willis: The Essential Ellen Willis (paperback, 2014, University of Minnesota Press): A pioneering feminist polemicist who early on wrote some notable rock criticism, since her death in 2006 her daughter, Nona Willis Aronowitz, has done a fine job of collecting her various writings for posterity -- before this general collection there appeared Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music (2011), and reissues of Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll and No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (both 2012, all University of Minnesota Press paperbacks). I've never been much of a fan -- partly because she seemed to be too glib about war for a leftist, partly because of a tone I recall in her feminism, like wrapping oneself in a flag -- but I don't doubt that these books are chock full of interesting insights.

Tim Wise: Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich and Sacrificing the Future of America (paperback, 2015, City Lights): It isn't enough for the rich to steal from the poor. They also demand that we praise the rich for their successes, and condemn for poor for their failures. Wise wrote a rather similar book in 2014: Culture of Cruelty: How America's Elite Demonize the Poor, Valorize the Rich and Jeopardize the Future. Before that he mostly wrote about racism, which works much the same way.

Recently I decided that I needn't write a full paragraph of every book worth noting, so I started building a list. Here are a few examples that may (or may not) pique your curiosity:

• David Axelrod: Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (2015; paperback, 2016, Penguin Books)
• Alastair Bonnett: Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies (2014, Houghton Mifflin)
• Dan Baum: Gun Guys: A Road Trip (paperback, 2013, Vintage)
• Gregory Clark: The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility (2014, Princeton University Press)
• Ed Conway: The Summit: Bretton Woods, 1944: JM Keynes and the Reshaping of the Global Economy (2015, Pegasus)
• Timothy Egan: The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero (2016, Houghton Mifflin)
• Barney Frank: Frank: A Life in Politics From the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (2015, Farrar Straus and Giroux; paperback, 2016, Picador)
• Lani Guinier: The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America (2015, Beacon Press)
• Andrew Hammond: The Islamic Utopia: The Illusion of Reform in Saudi Arabia (paperback, 2012, Pluto Press)
• Luke Harding: The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man (paperback, 2014, Vintage)
• Mark Kelly: The Bus on Jaffa Road: A Story of Middle East Terrorism and the Search for Justice (2014, Lyons Press)
• Paul Rogat Loeb: The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times (2004; rev ed, paperback, 2014, Basic Books)
• Nur Masalha: The Palestinian Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory (paperback, 2012, Zed Books)
• David McCullough: The Wright Brothers (2015, Simon& Schuster)
• Mark Miodownik: Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World (2014, Houghton Mifflin).
• Nathaniel Philbrick: Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution (2016, Viking)
• Douglas Rushkoff: Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity (2016, Portfolio)
• Joe Sacco: Journalism (paperback, 2013, Metropolitan Books)
• Lynne Segal: Out of Time: The Pleasures and the Perils of Ageing (paperback, 2014, Verso)
• John Summers/Chris Lehmann/Thomas Frank, eds: No Future for You: Salvos From the Baffler (2014, MIT Press)
• James Tracy: Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes From San Francisco's Housing Wars (paperback, 2014, AK Press)

I used to append a few paperback reissues of books I had previously written about, with additional blurbs, but I've tended to skip that recently. Since I've been collecting at least some, I'll list them here:

• Reza Aslan: Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (2013; paperback, 2014, Random House)
• Andrew J Bacevich: Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (2013, Metropolitan Books; paperback, 2014, Picador)
• Max Blumenthal: Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel (2013; paperback, 2014, Nation Books)
• Ian Buruma: Year Zero: A History of 1945 (2013; paperback, 2014, Penguin Books)
• David Harvey: Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (2014; paperback, 2015, Oxford University Press)
• David Mirowski: Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (2013; paperback, 2014, Verso)
• Harvey Pekar/JT Waldman: Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me (2012, Hill & Wang; paperback, 2014, Farrar Straus and Giroux)
• Nomi Prins: All the Presidents' Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power (2014; paperback, 2015, Nation Books)
• Jeremy Scahill: Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (2013; paperback, 2014, Nation Books)
• Orville Schell/John Delury: Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century (2013; paperback, 2014, Random House)