Greetings,

A more interesting than usual day on the opinion pages:

Perry Bacon has a smart piece in The Washington Post explaining the scenario by which Joe Biden might bounce back: “It’s like the ebb and flow of a basketball game. Biden doesn’t have positive momentum right now—and that negative dynamic is self-reinforcing.” He lays out the momentum scenario, which is not, of course, inevitable but is plausible.

Also in the Post, Catherine Rampell has an interesting and rather less optimistic read on Biden and inflation. There’s only so much a president can do about inflation, she writes. And she warns that Biden is probably overplaying the anti-inflationary aspects of Build Back Better.

In The New York Times, Michelle Goldberg critiques the new language guide put out by the American Medical Association. She finds it embarrassing and unhelpful: “Substantive change is hard; telling people to use different words is easy.”

And Fredrik deBoer hops on the Times page to warn his fellow socialists that while it’s true that establishment Democrats close ranks against leftist candidates, it’s also time “to recognize that our beliefs just might not be popular enough to win elections consistently. It does us no favors to pretend otherwise.” He’s going to have a fun day on Twitter.

On the Steve Bannon front, David Frum posted a sharp argument at The Atlantic yesterday. Frum compares Bannon & Co. to the Chicago Seven, the 1960s radical leftist group that stood trial after the violent 1968 Chicago Democratic convention. Bannon wants to put the system on trial. Frum writes: “The struggle between supporters of constitutionality and legality, on the one side, and Trump and his faction, on the other, is always an asymmetrical fight, as it was between the law and the Chicago Seven in 1968.… The fight to uphold law cannot be won by law itself, because the value of law in the face of violence is the very thing that’s being contested.”

Politicooffers a rare “Dems not in disarray” headline: “Tensions abate as Dems await cost of social spending bill.” The authors write: “After a monthslong standoff, the party’s push to unite its narrow majorities behind Biden’s social spending bill seems to have exhausted all members of the caucus. But Democrats are ready to finally drag the bill across the House finish line.” The piece even quotes Texas Congressman Henry Cuellar, one of the most conservative House Democrats, as saying he’s ready to vote for it (of course, he has a primary from his left, which helps). The article says a vote could come as early as Thursday. That’s nice. It would have been a lot nicer about eight Thursdays ago.

At NewRepublic.com today, read Esther Wang on the suburban school district outside Wichita, Kansas, that pulled 29 books from the school shelves; Timothy Noah on why The Washington Post op-ed page gave acreage to the Big Lie lawyer who printed an obvious and easily checkable lie; and Alex Shephard has an interesting dialogue with Leah Greenberg of Indivisible about what Democrats can learn from the 2010 midterms. 

Salutations,

Michael Tomasky, editor

Yesterday’s political history question: Trouble is brewing in Bosnia, where the Serbian faction, led by genocide denialist Milorad Dodik, is threatening to secede and break the country apart. This would repeat, in a horrifying way, the move made, in the early 1990s, by the Bosnian Serb leader, who withdrew from the multiethnic government (Serb, Croatian, Muslim) to set up his own government. Who was that person? And about how many people were killed by Serbs in the Bosnian genocide?

Answer: It was Radovan Karadzic, and the estimated number killed in the genocide was 100,000.

Today’s European political history question: I was watching a World War I documentary last night and was reminded of the fairly mind-blowing fact that three of the monarchs involved in hostilities were first cousins (!). Who were the three, and who was their grandmother?

Today’s U.S. geography question: Which city is farthest away from New York City: Portland, Maine; Richmond, Virginia; or Buffalo, New York?