Israel's Devastating Capitulation to Hezbollah

From Caroline Glick:

It is almost impossible to grasp the danger of Israel’s present moment. A month before the Knesset elections, the caretaker government led by Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz is moving full speed ahead with a maritime agreement with an enemy state that it insists will obligate Israel in perpetuity. The Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) agreement Israel is concluding with Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon will fundamentally alter Israel’s maritime borders, deny the Jewish state tens of billions of dollars, which will go instead to a government controlled by Iran’s Lebanese foreign legion, Hezbollah, and transform Hezbollah and Iran into actors in the eastern Mediterranean.

The deal in question has been under negotiation for more than a decade. In 2010, as the natural gas deposits in the eastern Mediterranean were being rapidly explored and developed by Israel, Cyprus, Greece and Egypt, Israel signed agreements with its neighbors to delineate the boundaries of each state’s EEZ. Since Israel and Lebanon are enemy states, Israel did not negotiate an agreement with Lebanon. Lebanon did however negotiate an agreement with Cyprus, as part of which it drew a line delineating the southern boundary of its maritime waters. Israel accepted the Lebanese line and submitted its maritime economic zone borders to the United Nations on the basis of the Lebanese/Cypriot agreement and the bilateral agreement it had concluded with Cyprus.

Given that Hezbollah rejects Israel’s right to exist, Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon surprised no one when it immediately objected to Israel’s map, even though it was based on Lebanon’s own demarcation.

Lebanon demanded 854 square kilometers of Mediterranean waters that formally belonged to Israel. The Lebanese demand included complete control over the massive Qana natural gas field, much of which extends into Israel’s waters. Fred Hoff, who served at the time as the Obama administration’s point man for the eastern Mediterranean, offered a compromise deal which would have given around 55 percent of the area to Lebanon and left 45 percent under Israeli sovereignty. Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon rejected the deal, and there the negotiations stood, more or less, until last July.

In the meantime, Israel began developing the Karish gas field, which by all accounts is located in its EEZ. Karish was scheduled to go online last month, but in July, Hezbollah boss Hassan Nasrallah threatened to attack Karish if Israel began production before reaching a deal with Lebanon. Hezbollah then attacked Karish with four drones, which were intercepted by the Israel Defense Forces.

Rather than retaliate for Hezbollah’s aggression, fearful of Hezbollah, Israel delayed the start of work at Karish, and Biden administration envoy Amos Hochstein swooped into action. As Lebanon expert Tony Badran from the Foundation for Defense of Democracy has copiously documented, the Biden administration is dead set on giving as much money as possible to Lebanon—with full knowledge that money to Lebanon is money to Hezbollah. The administration’s desire to enrich a state dominated by Hezbollah/Iran stems from what Badran and the Hudson Institute’s Michael Doran described in May 2021 as its overarching goal of realigning the United States away from its traditional allies—Israel and the Sunni states—and towards Iran.

During his visit to Israel in July, just days after Hezbollah’s drone attacks on Karish, Biden upped U.S. pressure on Israel to conclude a deal with Lebanon and so enable the Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese government to begin raking in billions of dollars in gas revenues from the Qana field. U.S. pressure only increased since then.

Rather than stand up to the administration and oppose a deal that empowers Hezbollah both economically and strategically at Israel’s expense, the Lapid-Gantz government caved. As head of the caretaker government, Lapid, and his partisan subordinate Energy Minister Karine Elharar began marathon U.S.-mediated negotiations with Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese negotiators over the maritime boundary. Gantz compelled the IDF to support the deal and present his capitulation to Hezbollah extortion as a massive strategic achievement that strengthens Israel’s deterrent edge over Hezbollah.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the deal is that it doesn’t obligate Lebanon. Israel’s deal is with the United States, not Lebanon. And judging by Nasrallah’s statements, Hezbollah views it as a starting point, not an ending point. During the course of the negotiations, the Lebanese negotiators suddenly presented a new, even more expansive territorial demand. Lebanon, they said, is the rightful owner of more than the disputed 854 km of Israeli waters. It is also the rightful owner of large swaths of the Karish gas field. Hochstein reportedly used the ploy, along with Nasrallah’s extortionate demands, to compel Lapid and Gantz to agree to give up a hundred percent of the disputed waters. But now that Lebanon has already tipped its hat to its next demand, and given that Lebanon is not obliged by the boundary line Israel has accepted, it’s obvious that Lebanon will disavow the deal at a time of Hezbollah’s choosing.

Lapid, Gantz and their allies portray the deal as a diplomatic and strategic masterstroke. By surrendering to all of Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon’s 12-year-old demands, they brag that Israel has secured its ability to develop Karish. In other words, they’re bragging that they’re signing a protection deal with Hezbollah. In exchange for 854 square kilometers of sovereign Israeli waters, they believe that Hezbollah will permit us to exploit our natural resources—at least until Nasrallah decides to renew his threats and demands.

Aside from the Israeli media, no one has been buying their line. On Monday morning, former U.S. ambassador David Friedman tweeted incredulously, “We spent years trying to broker a deal between Israel and Lebanon on the disputed maritime gas fields. Got very close with proposed splits of 55-60% for Lebanon and 45-40% for Israel. No one then imagined 100% to Lebanon and 0% to Israel. Would love to understand how we got here.”

Former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu noted at a press conference on Monday that whereas he held the line against Hezbollah for a decade, Lapid folded after only three months.

To try to present their agreement as something other than capitulation to Hezbollah’s extortion, Lapid and Gantz are claiming the deal is the key to a Lebanon free of terrorist influence. This claim is weird on its face. After all, they insist that the Lebanon they are negotiating with is an independent entity not controlled by Hezbollah. And at the same time, they say Lebanon needs tens of billions of dollars from gas proceeds from Qana to free itself of Hezbollah control.

And that isn’t the only absurdity in their claim. Lebanon’s financial dealings are both controlled by Hezbollah and entirely opaque. Hezbollah can be trusted to take as much of the gas proceeds as it sees fit and leave the Lebanese with the crumbs at the bottom of its plate.

In his press conference Monday, Netanyahu said that the deal will not obligate a government under his leadership because it is “illegal.” And he is right. Under Israel’s 2013 Basic Law on territorial concessions, the government is required to present all agreements involving the relinquishment of Israeli territory to the Knesset for approval. To take legal effect, an agreement requires either the support of two thirds of the Knesset or the majority of the public in a referendum. Contrary to the basic law, Lapid and Gantz are refusing to bring the deal before the Knesset for approval.

And with the support of Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, they insist that since the agreement is about economic waters, it isn’t about territory and therefore doesn’t require Knesset approval. Baharav-Miara initially said that all that is required is for the Security Cabinet to approve the deal. That it doesn’t even have to be made available to the Knesset for perusal—let alone approval. Under public pressure, she updated her position Sunday and announced that the deal has to be approved by the full government and submitted to—but not approved—by the Knesset. This too is a mile short of the requirements of the law. Baharav-Miara’s behavior is also a harsh commentary on the corrupted, politicized state of Israel’s legal fraternity.

It was her predecessor Avichai Mandelblit who insisted that caretaker governments may not carry out any non-essential functions or initiate policies that will obligate a successor government. On the basis of his dictate, Mandelblit barred Netanyahu’s caretaker government from appointing an acting state prosecutor. Obviously, the Lapid-Gantz surrender deal to Lebanon’s Hezbollah-controlled government falls within the Mandelblit’s criteria for prohibited actions.

Baharav-Miara’s behavior demonstrates that as far as Israel’s politicized legal fraternity is concerned, there are two laws governing the state—one for the left, and one for the right. For the left, everything is permitted. For the right, nothing is. In other words, as far as the legal fraternity is concerned, Israel is governed by its leftist government lawyers, not by the rule of law.

This brings us to the media. In light of the strategic and economic implications of the deal, if Israel had a functioning media, journalists could have been expected to provide critical coverage of the agreement and carry out an informed debate. After all, that’s the purpose of the Fourth Estate. But rather than do its job, in a demonstration of its own political bias and corruption, with a few notable exceptions, Israel’s liberal media have done next to no due diligence in their reporting of the agreement. Instead, they have parroted the Lapid-Gantz government’s talking points one after the other.

The only Hebrew-language media outlet that has subjected the radical surrender agreement to significant scrutiny has been Israel’s new conservative outlet Channel 14. Last week, Lapid petitioned the Central Elections Commission to shutter Channel 14, which, he insists, is opposition propaganda because it doesn’t provide him with enough positive coverage.

On Sunday, Sen. Ted Cruz, (R-Texas) tweeted, “I am deeply troubled that Biden officials pressured our Israeli allies to hand over their territory to the Iran-controlled terrorist group Hezbollah.” Cruz indicated that if the Republicans win control of Congress in next month’s elections, they will conduct a formal investigation of the administration’s actions. As Cruz put it, the deal is “another topic for the next Republican Congress to investigate.”

On Monday night, Globes reported that until a few weeks ago, Israel’s position was that it would retain a third of the disputed waters and its rights to the Qana gas field. But then, at a fateful meeting in the Defense Ministry, Gantz and Lapid’s representative, National Security Adviser Eyal Hulata, abandoned Israel’s long held stand and agreed to give up all of the disputed waters and Israel’s economic rights to Qana. Israel’s chief negotiator, Udi Adiri, vociferously rejected the capitulation and resigned in protest. Hulata was installed as the new head of Israel’s team.

22-Year-Old Colorado Woman Enticed Tinder Date, Only to Duct Tape, Choke, and Stab Him – Then She Ordered Food from DoorDash: Police

It's hard out there. Dating that is. Pfft. Tinder. Swipe right. I'm glad I'm married --- and too old for this shit, anyway.

At the Blaze, "A 22-year-old Colorado woman is accused of committing several felony crimes against a man she had just met on Tinder. The woman duct-taped the 21-year-old victim, choked him with a belt, stabbed him, and then ordered food from DoorDash, according to police."

The GOP Is Herschel Walker

From Andrew Sullivan, "A clarifying glimpse into the values of the Party of Trump":

There are times, I confess, when I decide to pass on writing another column on how degenerate the Republican Party is. What else is there to say? It’s not as if the entire media class isn’t saying it every hour of every day. And it’s not as if the depravity of the party hasn’t been a longtime hobbyhorse of mine. Unlike most of the Never-Trumper set, I was writing about this derangement on the right in the 1990s. I tore into George W. Bush’s spend, borrow and torture policies. I wrote a book on what I thought conservatism really was in 2006 — and why the GOP was its nemesis. I couldn’t have been clearer about what Palin represented — even as Bill Kristol selected her to be a potential president.

But then you come across the Senate candidacy of one Herschel Walker, and, well, words fail. No magical realist fiction writer could come up with something so sickeningly absurd. Walker is, of course, inextricable from his longtime friend, Donald Trump, who made his campaign possible in March 2021:

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if the legendary Herschel Walker ran for the United States Senate in Georgia? He would be unstoppable, just like he was when he played for the Georgia Bulldogs, and in the NFL. He is also a GREAT person. Run Herschel, run!

Which is to say: he’s a celebrity and a friend of mine. Enough said. That’s how a cult picks a Senator. And it worked with the incurious, star-struck base voters who gave Walker a 55-point lead over his nearest rival in the primary.

There are a few problems, however.

Walker is, to start with, very dumb. I don’t usually note this quality in a candidate and it doesn’t make him a huge outlier in politics of course. Being brainy, moreover, can be a serious liability for some pols. But seriously: this stupid?

ere is Walker’s grasp of climate change: “Our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air so when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move.” Here’s his take on John Lewis: “Senator Lewis was one of the greatest senators that’s ever been, and for African Americans that was absolutely incredible. To throw his name on a bill for voting rights I think is a shame.” On the Inflation Reduction Act: “They continue to try to fool you that they are helping you out. But they’re not. Because a lot of money, it’s going to trees. Don’t we have enough trees around here?” On natural selection: “At one time, science said that man came from apes, did it not? But if that’s true, why are there still apes? Think about it.”

Where do you even start? This man is running for the Senate for one of our major political parties. Not even the House. The Senate. He’s clearly incapable of understanding even a scintilla of what his job would entail, and manifestly incapable of doing it.

Maybe Walker makes up for it in charm and eloquence? Nope. He speaks like someone with brain damage. (As a pro-football alum, it’s amazing that the possibility of CTE has barely been raised, even though he has shown classic symptoms — no impulse control, murderous rage, incoherent speech, and even multiple personalities — for decades.) Just read any transcript of his incoherent rambling.

Is he just a good, honest guy who relates well to people? That can make up for a lot of flaws. But nope. He’s a serial liar. He has bragged that he served in law enforcement (he hasn’t); he said he’d been an agent for the FBI (untrue). He has lied about his business:

Walker claimed his company employed hundreds of people, included a chicken processing division in Arkansas and grossed $70 million to $80 million annually in sales. However, when the company applied for a federal Paycheck Protection Program loan last year, it reported just eight employees.

Much more seriously, Walker stalked, harassed and threatened to murder his ex-wife, threats that were enough for a judge to grant her a protective order in 2005. She had divorced him four years earlier, citing “physically abusive and extremely threatening behavior.” At one point, he put a gun to her head and said “I’m going to blow your fucking brains out.” This week, his son, Christian, claimed that he and his mother had to move six times in six months to escape his threats of violence.

Look: everyone’s human; everyone deserves a second chance. But when a man makes the problem of fatherlessness a central part of his campaign, and turns out to be entirely AWOL in the lives of his own four children — from four different mothers, three of whom he only publicly acknowledged after the press discovered them — he beats even Boris Johnson for chutzpah. In the words of his own son this week: “Family values, people? He has four kids, four different women, wasn’t in the house raising one of them. He was out having sex with other women.”

Then the coup de grace: the mother of one of his kids has now said Walker had also paid for an abortion for her. She provided the receipt, the cashed check and a personal card from Herschel. He responded by saying it was a “total lie”, and he had no idea who the mother of one his children was (he had previously identified her to the reporter). Her response? A classic:

He didn’t accept responsibility for the kid we did have together, and now he isn’t accepting responsibility for the one that we didn’t have.

Oof. When asked yesterday if he’d reached out to any of the mothers of his children with all this in the news, he replied: “Why do I need to?” (He also says he hasn’t spoken to his son since the news broke of the three step-siblings.) About the abortion itself, he said this to Hugh Hewitt: “Had that happened, I would have said it, because it’s nothing to be ashamed of there.”

And that’s when your head explodes. A candidate who would make abortion a criminal act without any exceptions — the most draconian regime imaginable — also says that abortion is “nothing to be ashamed of.” A man who says he believes that abortion is murder thinks it’s also no big deal if he paid for one.

And for this he is celebrated by the Christianist right. They speak of absolution when he hasn’t even confessed. They shield him from Satan. Ralph Reed went so far as to say that after the abortion news, “he ‘100 percent’ expected evangelical Christians would stick with Mr. Walker. He even argued that the latest report could lift Republican turnout by rallying social conservatives to defend Mr. Walker.”

I might add another twist: Walker’s race. The party that decries identity politics picked him in part because he’s black in a race against a black incumbent — the first African-American to represent Georgia in the Senate. Clarence Thomas and Alan Keyes were picked for similar reasons. But at least they were smart minds who had more qualifications than merely having been a football star. The use of race here is more egregious, creepy even — a sign to my mind of disrespect for black voters that a man like this was deemed qualified to represent them, or anyone else.

So here we have a celebrity candidate with no political experience, neither eloquent nor honest, who abandoned his kids, threatened to kill his ex-wife, and has serious mental health problems … who may hold the balance of the Senate in his hands. That’s what the GOP now is. And if he actually paid for an abortion, i.e. in the view of sincere evangelicals, paid for the murder of an innocent child? Here’s Dana Loesch’s response:

Does this change anything? Not a damn thing. How many times have I said four very important words? These four words: Winning. Is. A. Virtue. I don’t know if he did it or not. I don’t even care.

It’s rare to see this kind of nihilist consequentialism expressed so nakedly. It’s rare to hear someone publicly say something so deeply hostile to any shred of Christianity. (Christians never believe the ends justify any means. Christianism is defined by that principle.) But nothing matters to the current GOP more than victory, by fair means or foul, by democratic processes or not.

I am not saying that the Democrats are not also corrupted by rank tribalism. At their worst, they are, as I often point out. I am saying that they do not compare with the current GOP in its hollowness and depravity and madness.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, The Russia Conundrum

At Amazon, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, The Russia Conundrum: How the West Fell for Putin's Power Gambit--and How to Fix It.

Young and Homeless in Rural America

It's hard out there. 

At the New York Times, "Most social services come through the schools — but it can be impossible to get to them":

One evening in June, Scott Cooper, a high school football coach in rural southern Ohio, received a text from Blake, one of his linebackers. Blake, who was 17, would miss practice the next day, and so would his brother Lee Jr., who was 15. Another text followed with an explanation: Their family had to move, and right away. They didn’t know where, but it would probably mean leaving River Valley High School.

In Cooper’s view, the brothers, each soft-spoken, each over six feet tall, had real promise. They’re “good kids,” he said, “very respectful, and their upside as players is very high.” They would show up on weekends to help make goody bags for team fund-raisers or sandwiches for a charity event. Sometimes they would stay after scrimmages with their mom, dad, little sister and two younger brothers, helping Cooper’s wife hand out hot dogs from a flowered crock pot until the sky streaked pink and the stadium lights popped on.

The family, including an older brother who had graduated from high school, had left their last home suddenly as well, just 18 months earlier. Before moving to Gallia County, they lived in Portsmouth, about an hour’s drive west, where the boys’ father, Lee, worked in landscaping and their mother, LeAnn, collected workers’ compensation after injuring her back as a home health aide. With a population of about 20,000, Portsmouth was hit particularly hard by the opioid epidemic and its fallout. The family rented a government-subsidized house between an abandoned building and a house where drug deals took place at all hours, LeAnn said. The neighbors rummaged through their trash and dumped needles and buckets of human waste in their yard. The sexual trafficking of children for drugs had become a significant local problem. Fearing for their safety, the family fled in December 2020. (I have used middle names or initials to protect the privacy of the families I met.)

Once they left subsidized housing, the family, like an increasing number of Americans, struggled to find a place that they could afford. They crowded in with LeAnn’s mother, then her sister, and as they searched, the children tried to keep up with their studies at their old schools. They had switched to remote learning during the pandemic, but rural internet access is spotty, and they often couldn’t log on. After three months, the family gave up on finding a place of their own and reluctantly moved to Gallia County, to live with Lee’s dad. Lee had a very troubled relationship with his father, and the family was not optimistic about the move. “It was a last resort,” LeAnn said grimly.

For a while, the arrangement worked better than expected. The kids enrolled in new schools, with Blake and Lee Jr. landing at River Valley High. They got good grades, and Blake wowed everyone with his beautiful tenor voice in show choir. In the spring, he started dating a girl he met in rehearsals for a school production of “Bye Bye Birdie.” Over time, LeAnn said, they “got back into who they used to be.”

But the situation with Lee’s father became volatile. The night Blake texted Cooper, his grandfather had thrown the family out. They had nowhere to go. Cooper wanted to help but didn’t know where to start. He asked the principal what to do, and he said: Ask Sandy. She’ll know.

Sandra Plantz, an administrator at Gallia County Local Schools for more than 20 years, oversees areas as diverse as Title I reading remediation and federal grants for all seven of the district’s schools, including River Valley High. In recent years, though, she has leaned in hard on a role that is overlooked in many districts: homeless liaison. Her district serves just under 3,000 students but covers some 450 square miles of an area that doesn’t offer much in the way of a safety net beyond the local churches. The county has no family homeless shelters, and those with no place to go sometimes end up sleeping in the parking lot of the Walmart or at the hospital emergency room. As homelessness increased in the county in recent years, Sandra and her husband, Kevin, a juvenile probation officer, found themselves at the center of an informal advocacy team.

In 2018, Kevin and a few other local law-enforcement agents started a group they called Code 10 Ministries to raise money to pay for motel stays for families in immediate need of shelter. When Cooper reached out to Sandra, she asked Kevin to have Code 10 pay for two rooms for two nights for Blake’s family at the Travelodge, a grim hotel across from the county fairgrounds.

Sandra then introduced the family to the process of applying for HUD housing. Subsidized housing from HUD is effectively a lottery; nationally there are only 36 units available for every 100 families who qualify, and the requirements can be hard to navigate. Plantz told them that purchasing their own motel room could set back the clock on when they could qualify as “HUD homeless” — vulnerable enough for long enough to be eligible for housing assistance. She found a woman from her church who would pay for a few more nights instead.

No one could afford to keep paying for the motel rooms, but neither did anyone want to see the family move to a tent in a park, which was an option they had been weighing. Cooper’s wife wanted to let the littlest children sleep at their house, but Plantz advised that this, too, could compromise their status as officially homeless. Cooper had an old camper he was fixing up for the county fair in August — just to get out of the sun on long days — and he offered it to the family. It had no water, working bathroom or propane tank for the stove. The oldest boys had to duck their heads every time they stood up, and they all slept on the floor or in the family’s minivan. June became July, then August, and no better housing option emerged. When the new school year began, Blake and Lee Jr. headed back to River Valley High — and a few weeks later, the family finally moved into HUD housing.

Families like Blake’s don’t fit easily into the “homeless industrial complex,” as some advocates for homeless youth and families have taken to calling the funding mechanisms, rules and priorities that determine the fates of millions of Americans who struggle with housing insecurity every year. The system is focused largely on adults experiencing homelessness in cities, and it is not well equipped to address the types of homelessness experienced by children and families, especially in rural areas. The limited data that exists suggests that rural students face homelessness in roughly the same proportion as their urban counterparts — and with far less in the way of a support system. In this vacuum of resources, schools sometimes offer the only form of help available to homeless families. Over the course of reporting in rural Ohio, I spoke with school officials, homeless advocates, students and their families. I met young people living in trailers that stank of sewage, mothers sexually harassed by predatory landlords, families who could not take their children to the doctor because they could not afford gas for the long trip. For all of them, the stakes of precarious housing were high. Homeless students have the worst educational outcomes of any group, the lowest attendance, the lowest scores on standardized tests, the lowest graduation rates. They all face the same cruel paradox: Students who do not have a stable place to live are unable to attend school regularly, and failing to graduate from high school is the single greatest risk factor for future homelessness...

Demand for Cars Faces Test With Rising Rates (VIDEO)

I bought a brand new Toyota pickup when I was in my early twenties, in the early 1980s, and interest raters were astronomical. What did I know back then? (*Eye-roll.) Double-digits, sheesh.

At the Wall Street Journal, "As More Cars Hit Dealership Lots, Buyers Feel Pinch of Rising Interest Rates":

Improved supply chain lifted dealer inventory and sales, but economic obstacles are weighing on customers.

More new cars and trucks are finally trickling into dealerships as supply-chain troubles ease and auto makers increase factory output. Now, rising interest rates and other economic pressures are starting to put a damper on the car-buying mood.

Several major auto makers reported U.S. sales declines in the third quarter as inventory levels remained pressured, despite some improvement in recent months. General Motors Co. posted a 24% jump in third-quarter U.S. sales as its vehicle availability increased after it was disproportionately hit last year by supply-chain constraints resulting from Covid-related shutdowns in Asia.

The auto industry has grappled for nearly two years with choppy factory schedules and thin dealership stocks, stemming from semiconductor shortages and other supply problems. Those troubles are easing and vehicle availability is slowly improving, the car companies say.

Auto executives continue to express confidence they will be able to fill a big backlog in consumer demand as production normalizes. But a worsening economic picture and higher interest rates are raising questions about whether consumers will still keep snapping up cars and trucks at the same pace once stock levels improve.

“There’s a lot of negative consumer sentiment in the marketplace. So we’re obviously concerned about that,” Hyundai Motor America Chief Executive Randy Parker said Monday, citing rising rates and stock-market declines. Hyundai’s third-quarter sales rose 3%.

Still, Mr. Parker said it was too early to say whether demand is weakening significantly and said he is cautiously optimistic that it will hold up. He said sales slowed last week partly because of Hurricane Ian’s impact on the Southeast, making it more difficult to gauge underlying consumer demand. Auto makers pointed to continued low vehicle inventories as the reason for weaker third-quarter sales. Toyota Motor Corp. said sales fell 7% in the July-to-September period. Stellantis NV’s dropped 6%, with the Jeep maker citing continued supply constraints, and Nissan Motor Co. reported a nearly 23% drop in U.S. sales for the third quarter.

Overall, industrywide sales in the U.S. for the third quarter were about 3.36 million, roughly flat over the prior-year period, according to Wards Intelligence. Ford Motor Co. is set to report U.S. sales results on Tuesday.

Electric-vehicle leader Tesla Inc. on Sunday said global vehicle deliveries in the third quarter rose about 42% to a record 343,830, but were hampered by vehicle-shipping capacity. The deliveries total fell short of Wall Street estimates.

EV startup Rivian Automotive Inc. also reported on Monday that it had produced 7,363 vehicles at its factory in Illinois and delivered 6,584 to customers during that same period. The figure remains in line with Rivian’s target of producing 25,000 vehicles this year, the company said. Rivian’s stock was up more than 6% in after-hours trading Monday.

Rising interest rates are making it harder for U.S. buyers to afford record-high pricing on new vehicles, a byproduct of the scant inventory at dealership lots. Gone are the days of 0% financing on new vehicles, which car companies and dealers have long used as a staple promotion to sell cars.

The average interest rate on a new-car loan in the U.S. hit 5.7% in the third quarter, the highest in three years, according to research site Edmunds.com.

Americans also are financing more of the purchase price than ever, reflecting record-high car prices. The average amount financed per vehicle in the third quarter was $41,347, compared with $38,315 a year earlier, according Edmunds.com. And 14% of auto-loan customers during that same period took on a monthly payment of $1,000 or more, up from 8% a year earlier, the firm found. “It seems likely that much of the pent-up demand from limited supply is quickly disappearing as high interest rates eat away at vehicle buyers’ willingness and ability to purchase,” said Charlie Chesbrough, senior economist with research firm Cox Automotive.

The firm last week lowered its 2022 U.S. sales forecast to 13.7 million new vehicles, which would be down 9% from last year. In the five years leading up to the pandemic-plagued year of 2020, the industry sold more than 17 million vehicles annually.

So far, though, car companies and dealers say that most new vehicles that get shipped from the factory are quickly snapped up by buyers.

There were nearly 1.3 million vehicles on dealership lots or en route to stores in August, up 10% from July and 19% higher than a year earlier, according to research firm Wards Intelligence. That represented a 29-day supply, the highest in months but still roughly half historical norms.

“There is still really strong consumer demand, and huge replacement demand,” said Duncan Aldred, head of GM’s Buick and GMC brands, during an interview at the Detroit auto show last month. “I think that will probably overcome a lot of the economic headwinds.”

GM said Monday that semiconductor availability has improved and output has stabilized, allowing it to stock more cars and increase sales. The number of vehicles on dealership lots or en route to stores at the end of the third quarter rose 45% from a year earlier, GM said.

Auto executives have said the semiconductor shortage that has plagued output for nearly two years is gradually easing. Still, shortages continue, and the impact tends to be felt unevenly across regions and companies...

 

Joe Concha, Come On Man!

At Amazon, Joe Concha, Come On, Man! The Truth About Joe Biden's Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Presidency.

Economic Issues Outweigh Concerns About Rights in Midterm Vote

Well, you would think. (*Eye-roll.*)

From Monmouth, "Biden gets poor marks on handling pivotal issues":

West Long Branch, NJ – Economic issues are a bigger factor in this year’s midterm elections than concerns about rights and democracy, according to the latest Monmouth (“Mon-muth”) University Poll. Democrats prioritize a fairly wide range of issues from climate change to abortion, while Republicans focus on a more limited set including inflation, crime, and immigration. Independents, though, tend to hone in on one issue above all: rising prices. Further dampening Democrats’ prospects are the poor numbers President Joe Biden gets for his performance on the issues most important to independents.

Republicans have made slight gains in the public’s preference for party control of Congress since the summer. Currently, 36% of Americans say they want the GOP in charge and another 11% have no initial preference but lean toward Republican control. Democratic control is preferred by 34% with another 10% leaning toward the Democrats. The combined 47% who choose Republican control is up from 43% in August, while the 44% support level for Democratic control is down from 50%.

A majority (54%) of Americans say it is very important to have their preferred party in control of Congress. This control importance metric is slightly higher among those who want Republicans (62%) than those who want Democrats (58%) leading Congress, which is a flip of the partisan result for this question in last month’s poll. Similarly, those who want Republican leadership (65%) are somewhat more likely than those who want Democrats in charge (58%) to say they are extremely motivated to vote this year.

“Because the congressional map favors the GOP, Democrats need to do more than ‘keep it close’ in order to hold onto their House majority. One roadblock for them is that the issue picture favors Republicans,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute.

The poll asked about the importance of 12 issue areas for the federal government to address. Those rated either extremely or very important by the largest number of Americans include inflation (82%), crime (72%), elections and voting (70%), jobs and unemployment (68%), and immigration (67%). The next tier of issue concerns includes transportation and energy infrastructure (57%), abortion (56%), racial inequality (53%), gun control (51%), and climate change (49%). The least important issues for federal government action right now are the Covid pandemic (32%) and student loan debt (31%). About 8 in 10 Republicans put inflation, crime, and immigration at the top of their issue list. A similar number of Democrats prioritize climate change, racial inequality, elections and voting, gun control, and abortion, with about 3 in 4 also giving emphasis to jobs and inflation. However, the only issue which more than 3 in 4 independents place high importance on is inflation. Additionally, independents are more concerned about overall economic issues along with crime and immigration than they are by other issues.

When asked which group of issues is more important in their support for Congress this year, concerns about the economy and cost of living (54%) outpace concerns about fundamental rights and democratic processes (38%) among all Americans. Republicans prioritize the economy (71%), while Democrats prioritize rights (67%). Independents are more likely to give preference to economic issues (61%) than concerns about rights and democracy (29%).

“Democrats are all over the place when it comes to their key issues. This makes it difficult for the party to create a cohesive messaging strategy to motivate its base. Republicans, on the other hand, just have to hammer away at rising prices and ‘the wolf is at the door’ to get their voters riled up,” said Murray. He added, “A major problem for Democrats is their base messaging doesn’t hold as much appeal for independents as the GOP issue agenda does. Even though truly persuadable independents are a rather small group these days, this small difference can have a major impact given the expectation that congressional control will hinge on a handful of very close contests.”

Perception of President Biden’s performance on these key issues is not helping the Democratic cause. The only issue where he gets a net positive rating is handling the Covid pandemic (50% approve and 47% disapprove) – which is one of the public’s lowest priority issues right now. Only 3 in 10 Americans approve of the job Biden has done on the nation’s top concern – inflation (30%) – as well as other concerns that Republicans are focused on – i.e., crime (32%) and immigration (31%). Biden also gets similarly low marks on abortion (31%) and gun control (30%) – two issues that are important to Democrats. About 4 in 10 approve of the president’s performance on other issues covered in the poll.

Democrats are about twice as likely as independents – and many multiples more likely than Republicans – to give Biden high marks for handling each of these issues. Still, Democrats are relatively less prone to approve of the president’s performance on crime, inflation, abortion, immigration, and gun control – between 61% and 69% – when compared with the other seven issues covered in the poll. Biden gets between 77% and 82% approval from his fellow Democrats on these issues, except for Covid where he earns nearly universal approval (91%).

“Obviously, the Republicans are hitting away at issues where Biden – and by extension the Democratic Party – is weakest. But it’s also worth noting that Biden does not provide a rallying point for Democratic voters on some of the issues, such as abortion, that his party is leaning on to motivate its own base,” said Murray...

Keep reading (via Memeorandum). 

The Tories' Weird Incoherent Collapse

She's backtracking on her supply-side economic policy reforms. Not good for so new a prime minister. 

More from Andrew Sullivan, "The contradictions of Brexit and a choice for conservatism":

At the heart of Brexit was, it is now becoming ever clearer, a contradiction. For some on the economically liberal right, it was a chance for Britain to wrest free from becoming a highly regulated, highly taxed province of the European Union. It was a chance to create what the EU always feared: a low-tax, deregulated Singapore-on-Thames that would snag more business investment and realize its Thatcherite potential. For others — call them Red Tories — it was a way to preserve the nation, to listen to working-class voters who felt they had become the victims of the free market and free movement of labor across Europe, and to return to a conservatism that sought to protect rather than liberate.

Boris Johnson represented both wings — he had a liberal mind but a Tory gut. And his emphasis on more public spending, redistribution of wealth from South to North (“leveling up”), new infrastructure projects, and pissing off EU technocrats all pointed toward a much broader coalition for the right. He won a stonking majority on those grounds, re-branded the Tory party, and provoked writers like me to grapple with a new bigger-state Toryism, much more similar to its Disraelian past than its Thatcherite inheritance. It was a risk — but one that reflected a genuine shift among many ordinary people, responding to the catastrophic success of the Thatcher/Blair revolution. And his charisma and charm sold it.

That brave new dawn for Toryism really wasn’t that long ago. It was echoed in much of the revamped debate about conservatism in America — with Republicans worried again about a beleaguered working class, the decline in domestic manufacturing, off-shoring, mass immigration, and the collapse of the family and a vibrant civil society. These intellectual and ideological realignments take time — but it seemed that Johnson had that time, and the wind behind him, when he won so convincingly in 2019.

But Boris was Boris; and it is difficult to be a pathological liar and deeply unserious about everything and stay in power in a parliamentary system where your peers matter. The right inheritor was Rishi Sunak, Boris’ sane chancellor. But the tiny Tory membership, like the much bigger Labour membership that once picked the nutter Jeremy Corbyn, went for the base-pleasing radical, Liz Truss, aka “the human hand-grenade,” as Dominic Cummings has dubbed her.

And almost instantly, whatever coherence or direction or even meaning that resided in post-2016 conservatism vanished. Overnight, Truss has gone full retro-Thatcher, with a dose of unfunded Reaganite fiscal stimulus thrown in. She and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, have backed a series of policies that will super-charge inflation, redistribute wealth back from the North to the South, super-size the post-Covid debt, and force the Bank of England to raise interest rates so high that soaring mortgage payments in Britain will cancel out much of the tax cuts’ stimulus anyway. It’s insane. And it has virtually no constituency beyond 20 percent of the Tory party’s elderly membership who picked her.

It’s true that some of the policies are popular. The “mini-budget” is a huge giveaway, after all, and the bulk of it is to cushion soaring energy prices because of the war in Ukraine. As Matt Goodwin shows here, Brits like the small tax cuts for the working and middle classes; and they support the energy subsidies for this coming winter and the next. But they have no idea why the government couldn’t claw back some of that money with a tax on the huge windfall profits of energy companies, and are disgusted by a set of measures that seem designed to alienate the very working-class voters Boris won:

Scrapping the cap on bankers’ bonuses? Only 12 per cent of voters support it. Abolishing the 45% top rate of income tax for people earning over £150,000 a year? Only 11% support it. Cancelling the planned increase in corporation tax? Only one in five think it’s good idea.

When a political party reverses itself so completely after a landslide election win, you’d imagine that there would be a huge campaign to explain why — a major communications push, briefings of journalists, speeches, and all the rest. But the day that Kwarteng introduced this shocker, he barely picked up the phone and went to a pub.

The prime minister herself went silent as the pound tanked, the IMF panicked, and the Bank of England said it would be forced to hike interest rates more decisively than before. Yesterday, she finally held a press call with regional and local papers in Britain … and was incapable of saying anything faintly coherent or compelling. The questions were tougher than any US president would ever face from the US media, but it was nonetheless painful to listen to. A brutal quip from an opposition leader, Angela Rayner, summed it up: “Liz Truss has finally broken her long painful silence with a series of short painful silences.”

Immigration? You might recall how Brexit was fueled in part by the demographic revolution initiated by Tony Blair, and the public’s sense that they had lost control of their own country. Yes, part of this was ethnic and cultural, as the once homogeneous island was turned into something it had never previously been at a breakneck pace. Both those in favor of staying in the EU and those who wanted to leave preferred immigration from the EU to immigration from the rest of the world.

But Boris’ immigration reform — while taking back control from the EU — massively liberalized skilled, non-white immigration from the rest of the world. This past year has seen foreign work visas surge by 80 percent. As Goodwin writes, there are now “close to 1.8 million non-EU nationals working in Britain — 302,000 more than a year ago.” The biggest contributors? India, the Philippines, Nigeria and, with a cool 744 percent increase, Zimbabwe. This is a great refutation of the idea that Boris was or is a racist. But I don’t think it’s what most Brexit voters were anticipating. (Ed West, in fact, observes how different this makes the British right from the resurgent right-populism in Italy and Sweden. The Tories have actually embraced mass non-white immigration since Brexit, not kept power by vowing to end it.)

It’s enough to make you think that the Tory party has become an incoherent, chaotic shit-show, zig-zagging, divided, bitter and exhausted after 12 years in power. This is not to say, of course, that supply-side reforms in a country with struggling productivity are bad; nor to deny that Brexit has widened the scope of actions the UK government can take. (Tyler Cowen notes that there’s less stimulus in the plan than some are claiming.) But policies this ill-timed, this different from what has gone before, and this horribly communicated are a form of collective political suicide. It does not in any way surprise me that the polling has shown a simply staggering and instant collapse in Tory support. In one poll, Labour now leads by 33 points — the largest lead by any party since the 1990s.

So what now? Well, the Tory party has its annual conference next week — so we won’t lack for drama. The most hopeful scenario, some Tory friends tell me, is that the energy crisis won’t be as bad as many feared, that the economy might rebound with this stimulus, and that some of these reforms will indeed juice some productivity gains. That’s a profoundly weak case for optimism. But the deeper problem is figuring out just what conservatism now is. Neoliberalism unbound? Or illiberalism unleashed? Protectionism? Ever freer trade? Pro-immigration neoliberalism? Or anti-immigration conservatism?

The good news is that the Tories are not careening toward the anti-democratic authoritarianism of the GOP. The bad news is that they have nothing else coherent to offer, and no one left with any talent to sell it. Advantage: Keir.

Olga Tokarczuk, Books of Jacob

At Amazon, Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob: A Novel.

Matt Walsh, What Is a Woman?

At Amazon, Matt Walsh, What Is a Woman? One Man's Journey to Answer the Question of a Generation.

Beauty Anonymous

I lost this woman's name, but she's wonderful.

 

C. Bradley Thompson, America's Revolutionary Mind

At Amazon, C. Bradley Thompson, America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It.

Hurricane Ian Makes Landfall in Southwest Florida with 'Catastrophic' Winds and Surge (VIDEO)

At the Miami Herald, "Hurricane Ian made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane in Cayo Costa Florida at 3p.m. Wednesday. The storm was already “causing catastrophic storm surge, winds and flooding” in southwest Florida early Wednesday afternoon, the beginning of what promised to be a damaging path across the peninsula."

Giorgia Meloni's Election Victory: What the Rightward Shift Means for Italy

At Der Spiegel, "Right-wing radical politician Giorgia Meloni appears poised to govern Italy with an absolute majority after Sunday's election. But the amount of leeway she has will depend on two partners who are unlikely to be easy to deal with: Matteo Salvini and Silvio Belusconi":

In the end, it wasn’t quite enough. In the final few days of the campaign, Giorgia Meloni's opponents had suddenly appeared to have a chance. The center-left Democratic Party spoke of a shift in the mood. In southern Italy, the Five Star Movement, which had already been written off, was suddenly enthusiastically celebrated.

But soon after the polls closed at 11 p.m. on Sunday, the left’s dream lay shattered. According to initial forecasts, the nationalist alliance led by Meloni and her Fratelli d'Italia (FdI) party has secured an absolute majority in parliament.

Almost 11 years after the resignation of Silvio Berlusconi, who led his country to the brink of national bankruptcy, a right-wing government will soon be taking office again in Rome. The days when outgoing Prime Minister Mario Draghi stood firmly by the side of Berlin, Paris, Brussels and Washington are over.

Even before the right’s election victory, there had been much discussion about the dangers for Italy and Europe. Now, they could soon become reality.

Meloni hails from a neo-fascist splinter party that erected a monument to Italy's worst war criminal, a man responsible for genocide. She views Germany with "disgust." And she prefers to court Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán rather than German Chancellor Olaf Scholz or French President Emmanuel Macron.

The main question after her election victory is: How far will she go in carrying out her hostile agenda? Or will reality set in over the next few weeks, pushing the Meloni government to a reasonably moderate-conservative government program?

The 45-year-old now has to overcome three challenges that will come in quick succession...

Keep reading.

 

Russia’s Mobilization, Plunging Oil Prices Weaken Putin’s Economic Hand

At the Wall Street Journal, "Economic storm clouds come as Russian president orders more financial resources directed at war in Ukraine":

A costly troop mobilization, plunging energy prices and a new round of Western sanctions threaten to bear down on Russia’s already embattled economy and undermine the financial underpinnings of President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.

The economic storm clouds come as Mr. Putin orders more financial resources directed at the war in Ukraine. The Kremlin’s decision to call up more than 300,000 soldiers will require new funds to equip, train and pay the new reinforcements, analysts said. It has also spread disruption among Russia’s private businesses, which face a fresh challenge as workers report for duty or flee the country.

And it is happening as the windfall from soaring energy prices—Russia’s main economic strength—appears to have peaked. Russia’s federal government budget was in deficit last month because of diminished energy revenue. That was before the latest leg down in prices for oil and before Moscow shut down most of its remaining natural-gas flows to Europe.

“Mobilization is another serious hit on the Russian economy, especially because of the increased uncertainty,” said Maxim Mironov, professor of finance at Madrid’s IE Business School. “And it happens when oil and gas revenues are beginning to dry up.”

Wars are often won by the side that has the economic wherewithal to support fighting over the long haul. Ukraine’s economy has been battered, but receives a gusher of aid from the West to stay afloat.

Western sanctions staggered Russian commerce, but Moscow succeeded in stabilizing the economy thanks to a jump in energy prices. The ruble, which plunged at the start of the war, rose sharply against the dollar and inflation moderated. The Russian government and independent economists now predict a shallower recession this year than previously assumed.

While there is no evidence of an imminent economic collapse, business owners and investors inside the country reacted with dread to the news of the mobilization. Activists and analysts said Mr. Putin’s order opens the door to a much larger draft. Russia’s stock market, limited mostly to domestic investors, tumbled after the draft announcement.

“It’s really impossible to count,” said Mihail Markin, head of the business development department at Moscow-based logistics company Major Cargo Service. “If it’s five people in a 1,000 person company, that’s one thing, but what if it’s half?”

“And then who knows how businesses will act without the people who are drafted,” he said.

Before the draft, official data showed the government veered into a big budget deficit in August. It reported the budget surplus for the year narrowed to 137 billion rubles, or $2.3 billion, for the first eight months of the year, from about 481 billion rubles in July.

The government has come up with several measures to plug the gap, including raising taxes on the energy industry. It issued government bonds this month for the first time since February and promised to run a deficit next year. The bonds will have to be financed by local savers. Foreign investors, who owned 20% of government bonds before the war, are barred from the market. Moscow is shut out of foreign debt markets.

Russia’s economic problems are partly a boomerang effect of the country’s own policies. High energy prices caused by the war in Ukraine initially created huge revenues for Russia. Around 45% of Russia’s total federal budget revenues came from oil and gas in the first seven months of the year, according to the Institute of International Finance.

But high energy prices have put a brake on global growth and led to a widespread slowdown in demand for oil. Benchmark Brent crude has fallen by almost a third from its June high to trade at less than $85 a barrel.

Factoring in the discount of about $20 for Russian crude, Moscow is already selling its oil below the price needed to balance the budget, estimated at $69 a barrel in 2021 by S&P Global Commodity Insights. The strong ruble complicates matters for the Kremlin by reducing the value of oil exports when the proceeds are converted into Russia’s currency...

 

Catalina

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What Does Fidelity to Our Founding Principles Require Today?

From Michael Anton, at American Greatness, "If historicism is false, then the American system can be lost. Tyranny can recur. But do conservatives see this?":

We’re all political people here, right? So we all know Senator Pat Geary? No?

He’s the Nevada senator portrayed at the beginning of “Godfather II.” He tells Michael Corleone, “I intend to speak very frankly to you—maybe more frankly than anyone in my position’s ever talked to you.” He tries to blackmail a mob boss and later ends up in bed with a dead hooker. I believe he was also a Democrat. So just about the only thing I have in common with Senator Geary is that I intend to speak very frankly to you.

What does fidelity to our founding principles require today? Let me begin to answer that question with a quote—perhaps a familiar quote to some or most of you. But it’s apt, and there’s always a chance some of you haven’t heard it, and/or that others can use a refresher.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types—the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.

Those words were spoken by G.K. Chesterton, a Brit, in 1924. He was speaking of the British Constitution, not ours. But the words strike me as especially apt to our situation.

What have our conservatives conserved? But before we answer that—hint: almost nothing—let’s first ask: what were they supposed to conserve? What do they say they are conserving in all those fundraising letters they send out that have been netting them hundreds of millions per year for most of my lifetime?

First of all, the physical territory of the United States. OK, so far so good. That at least has been conserved. And given conservative support for the military and our posture during the Cold War, it’s at least plausible that conservatives had something to do with that.

Second of all, the people. Are they doing so well?

We actually have declining life expectancies in America. We’re the only nominally “first world” country that can say that. China, with a per capita income one-fifth of ours, recently passed the United States in life expectancy.

Birth rates here have crashed. Deaths of despair—opioids, alcoholism, and the like—are soaring. Religiosity is down. Marriage is down. Divorce at least isn’t up from its 1980 peak, but it’s still endemic.

You might say that conservatives are not at fault for all this—fair enough. But their stated purpose is to conserve—and it’s rather evident they’ve failed to conserve these aspects of decent human life. That’s before we even get to demographic transformation, one of those things that is both not happening, and it’s great that it is.

Third, I would say, is the American way of life. Some of that is covered in what I just said. But there are others, for instance the total unaffordability of housing, especially for younger people. It’s impossible for average earners now to buy, except in the very cheapest markets, which also happen to be where there are the fewest opportunities.

We may add to this deindustrialization, the decline of the middle class, wage stagnation, falling standards of living, and the increasing necessity of a college degree in the job market—at a time when colleges teach less and less, charge more and more, and vacuum up middle class wealth to enrich what are effectively hedge funds with bad schools attached.

Fourth—and certainly not least—is the American regime itself. Have we conserved that? Does it function as it was designed to do? As a political scientist, and as a historian of sorts before that, I find the question laughable. If any of you want to make the case that we still live in the founders’ regime, go ahead.

Meanwhile, I will tell you some of what I see. A giant, unaccountable, unelected fourth branch of government that does what it wants without input or supervision from the people, and that usurps executive, legislative, and judicial power. Rights are routinely trampled. Two-track justice—one standard for friends of the regime, another for its enemies—is now the norm. Just last week a man killed with his car a teenager for the “crime” of being Republican. He’s already out on bail. Meanwhile there are still dozens of January 6 protesters in pretrial detention for ridiculous noncrimes such as “parading.”

The Justice Department, FBI, CIA—all the security agencies—are out of control in attacking American citizens. The FBI is now doing SWAT raids for misdemeanors. Earlier this month, the president of the United States gave a speech calling half the American population enemies of the state. I could go on.

What is conservatism’s response to all this? What is the response of “the weasels, compromisers, mediocrities, and losers of the Republican-conservative-libertarian establishment”? Those are not my words, but I like them. They sum things up concisely, accurately, and vividly.

Conservatism’s response is to get angry. But not at any of these abuses or the people who commit them. No, rather it gets angry at people like Mollie Hemingway, Julie Kelly, and Heather Mac Donald (and others) who point out these outrageous abuses.

Conservatives have long believed that the noblest thing they can do is “police” their own side. The Left of course never does this. The Left works overtime to ensure that its people are excused of murder, arson, and rioting. Meanwhile, the conservatives eagerly seek the death penalty for their own over parking tickets.

Now, am I saying we should be like the Left? A little. We ought to be more loyal, for instance. I am not saying we should excuse arson and rioting—but that’s moot anyway since our side doesn’t do that, walking through doors held open by the Capitol Police notwithstanding.

For “conservatives,” the most heroic act of the 20th century was not D-Day or the moon landing but William F. Buckley, Jr. purging the Birchers. Hence, they’re always on the lookout for more purges. Whole careers and institutions are now made of this. Think of the Bulwark and the Dispatch—of Bill and Steve and Jonah and David and Kevin. All of these “conservatives” are now character assassins out to destroy the lives of anyone even a click to their right, many their former friends.

One thing I’ve noticed is that conservatives really get mad when you point out that people who treat you like enemies are, in fact, your enemies. Finally, the conservatives find a backbone, and righteous indignation! To refer to someone libeling you, trying to cancel you, calling for your “extirpation” and even assassination as an “enemy”? How dare you! Civility in politics above all else!

What explains this? Let me give you another quote, this one from a movie. Try to hear this in your head with Robert DeNiro’s accent:

I’m sorry, but he knew about our gettin’ hit on three big machines in a row and he did nothing about it. That means either he was in on it or, forgive me for saying this, he was too dumb to see what was going on. Either way, I cannot have a man like that workin’ here.

The operative phrase here being “in on it,” i.e., part of the operation to ensure that the Right is forever feckless and useless, and to destroy anyone on the Right who scores real points against our anti-conservative, anti-liberal, anti-American and—brace yourselves, I’m just going to say it—increasingly anti-white regime.

Actually, this is what gets the conservatives most upset: noticing that the regime is all of the above. Quoting the Left’s own radical words back to them makes conservatives apoplectic. Not with rage, exactly. I don’t think they have enough thumos for rage. But with a kind of terror. Oh no! He said it! Now they’ll really get mad! Let’s not rock the boat! Peace above all! ...

You gotta keep reading.

 

Luke Mogelson, The Storm Is Here

At Amazon, Luke Mogelson, The Storm Is Here: An American Crucible.

Roxy Music Live at the Inglewood Forum September 28th (VIDEO)

I saw them play in Pasadena in 1979. Turns out they're back on tour, playing the Inglewood (Kia) Forum Wednesday night. 

Amazing.

At the Los Angles Times, "50 years ago, Roxy Music invented rock’s future. Now they’re taking a well-deserved bow":

Phil Manzanera, the 71-year-old guitarist for art-rock pioneers Roxy Music, is leaning into a computer camera backdropped by a nondescript hotel room. The band has assembled in Toronto, where they’re rehearsing for their first U.S. tour in two decades, and Manzanera is relearning their repertoire after a long spell away from it. “I haven’t really played those songs for 10 years,” he says with a trace of concern. “And so it’s all like coming back fresh.”

Roxy Music has come together for the first time since a run of shows across the U.K. and Australia in 2011. (The band will perform at the Kia Forum on Sept. 28.) They are venturing back to the States in celebration of being a band for 50 years, with large breaths and pauses and solo adventures peppered throughout.

“We were never going to be the Beatles, like a bunch of brothers,” Manzanera says. “Luckily we’ve come together as this unit, which you could call a band, but it is not as straightforward as that. Now it’s about the joy of rediscovering those songs and playing them live. If we don’t play them, who’s going to?”

Roxy’s permanence in music culture — they were inducted into the Rock & Roll of Fame in 2019 — belies the decades in which the band’s cachet, mainly among musical adventurers and high-cheekboned jet-setters, far outstripped its popularity.

In the fall of 1970, Bryan Ferry had lost a job teaching ceramics at an all-girls school near London, in part due to his holding frequent record-listening sessions during school hours. Having floundered a bit after finishing art school a couple years prior, Ferry put an ad in the paper, looking for bandmates to collaborate with him and an old art-school classmate, bassist Graham Simpson. Saxophonist Andy Mackay replied to the ad, bringing along his university pal Brian Eno, who could work a synthesizer and owned a tape machine. The original iteration of the group was rounded out by guitarist Roger Bunn and drummer Dexter Lloyd. In search of a name that signified “faded glamour,” Ferry chose Roxy Music.

By 1972, Manzanera had come on as the group’s guitarist, Paul Thompson had replaced Lloyd as the drummer, and Roxy Music was off and running, releasing five albums between 1972 and 1975 alone, all of them critically acclaimed while finding modest commercial success. (In the U.S., their highest-charting hit was the taut and funky “Love Is the Drug,” which reached No. 30 on the Billboard Hot 100.) Their albums gained praise for their inventiveness, the band being credited with pioneering a new wave of art rock, wherein the visuals and onstage stylings were just as meticulously thought out as the lush production and incisive lyrical wit of the songs.

Ferry, now 76, acts as the band’s emotional conductor, of sorts. His voice is malleable — sometimes a distinctive and melodic drone, something one might hear in a smoky jazz lounge, sometimes soaring to beautiful highs. But his writing is what most commonly stands out. Ferry is one of the great architects of the love song, a lyricist who approaches the concept of love from all angles: the inception of romance, the tentative and uncertain bridges between affection and even greater affection, longing and heartbreak and bracing for the inevitability of loss. For all of the artistic flair surrounding Roxy Music, at the core, under the care of Ferry, they were a band in constant pursuit of considerations of love.

But there was also artistic flair. Their album covers were striking and sometimes controversial (the cover art for 1974’s “Country Life,” featuring two scantily clad models, was censored in the U.S. upon its release,) and the music itself was undeniable. By 1982’s “Avalon,” the band’s consistent members were Ferry, Mackay, Thompson and Manzanera (those four are now on tour; Eno is not participating.) They took a hiatus after 1982, despite “Avalon” being the group’s most commercially successful record.

There has been a renewed interest and excitement in Roxy Music in their time away. “Avalon’s” swelling “More Than This” was memorably karaoke’d by Bill Murray in the Sofia Coppola film “Lost in Translation.” The sinister “In Every Dream Home a Heartache,” from 1973’s “For Your Pleasure,” gained renewed interest after being featured in a pivotal scene in the show “Mindhunter.” The group’s consistent presence in the cultural atmosphere has a lot to do with the fact that they were, very much, ahead of their time, in terms of vision and influence. But it is also attributed to the fact that, despite not releasing an album in 40 years, their songs still sound fresh. Manzanera’s logic on this is simple.

“We always recorded on analog tape, and actually played together in a studio,” he says. “That sound seems to have quite a long life span. You listen to all the great songs that are still so popular from the ’70s, and they were beautifully constructed; they sound as if they could have been recorded yesterday.”

Not only their influence on music, but also on performance, on how bands present themselves and use the stage as a canvas, it has all endured. That influence spans decades, from peers like David Bowie in their early ’70s heydays to new wave founders like Devo, Talking Heads and Blondie. By the time they had stepped away, acts from the Cars to Pulp to TV on the Radio were charging through a new rock landscape with the style, affect and sound once pioneered by Roxy Music.

Both Manzanera and Ferry, with whom I spoke in early August from his home in London, are not explicitly focused on the band’s legacy, saying that it isn’t something they think about until someone mentions it to them. But there is the reality of time, and what time affords a band of people who have created over a long enough stretch of it. There are also, very literally, monuments to this kind of introspection, even if it is unnamed by the band members.

This year, Ferry has released a book of his lyrics, spanning both Roxy and all of his solo albums. It is a massive but joyful book to traverse, as Ferry’s lyricism comes across on the page like reading small, delightful short stories. Stories of love, or the anguish of love. Songs that unravel intimacy, sometimes finding the unraveling unsatisfying, but knowing it must be tended to. There’s an ever-present longing in the songs, but also a space where one is bracing for the impact of giving themselves over. “Preparing oneself for the worst,” Ferry says, shrugging and smiling. Forward-facing as ever, Ferry does admit that organizing the book itself, and sitting with the wide range of lyrics he’d penned over the years, did provide him with small regrets and sentimentalities.

“As you get older, life becomes more complicated and writing time becomes, I guess, precious and limited. Some of the songs, when I was compiling the lyric book, I thought, oh, I wish I’d had another week to spend on that. Or I wish I’d edited that out. But maybe it’s just as well that there was an immediacy about them. Being up against the wall time-wise can be a good thing for artists. For writers.”

Whether they feel like tangible attempts at solidifying and firmly upholding legacy, both the book and the tour gaze fondly upon the past greatnesses of the group and its most central figure. The Roxy tour setlist is a tight 20 tracks that spans just about two hours of performance. Anchored by their cover of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy,” the majority of tunes bounce through Roxy’s sprint of stunning ’70s albums.

“It was all such a rush of time,” Ferry says about that era. “We found this derelict house in Notting Hill and it was quite picturesque, freezing cold, just trying to get this program of work assembled. When we went into the studio, we did that really fast and then it all started to accelerate. That’s when it started getting really hard and I learned to write very quickly, but it was really exciting because I suddenly felt, wow, we have an audience.”

That audience extended to the States, and across generations. Roxy Music became notorious for their romanticism, the flourish in their performances, the eccentricities of future superstar producer Eno pushed up against the brilliantly calculated charisma of Ferry. Their performances, even now, unlock an elsewhere, a place to escape to that seems, to the eye of a spectator, to be fabulous. The only party you’d ever want to be at...

Still more.