The Weekly Arc: June 16, 2017

Welcome to Arc’s newsletter, sent out once per week, highlighting the best and most interesting stories from around the web. The Weekly Arc is curated by Berny Belvedere. Past editions can be accessed here.

Disgruntled Leftist Opens Fire At GOP Baseball Practice

A man angry with President Trump unleashed a barrage of gunfire Wednesday morning at Republican members of Congress as they held a baseball practice at a park in Alexandria, wounding House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and four others in a frenzied scene that included a long gun battle with police.

The gunman, James T. Hodgkinson, a 66-year-old unemployed home inspector from southern Illinois, died after the shootout. Two Capitol Police officers assigned to Scalise’s security detail were wounded.

Hodgkinson, who had been living in his van in Alexandria for the past few months, had posted anti-Trump rhetoric on his Facebook page and had written letters to his hometown newspaper blaming Republicans for what he considered an agenda favoring the wealthy.

The shooting, coming amid harsh political rancor and a divided country, reverberated through Washington and beyond, as Trump and members of Congress began talking about unity for the first time since the presidential election.

The targeted lawmakers were practicing for the Congressional Baseball Game, a charity competition against a team of Democrats.

Several congressmen at the Eugene Simpson Stadium Park in Alexandria praised the officers who engaged Hodgkinson, including two Capitol Police officers who were injured. One lawmaker said the baseball team members would have been sitting ducks had the gunman been able to make it onto the field. — The Washington Post

Here’s an update on Congressman Scalise: the hospital tending to him is “encouraged” by his recent “improvements.” This is good news given that a doctor involved reported that Scalise showed up in “imminent risk of death.”

Jeff Sessions Testified In Front Of Congress

Attorney General Jeff Sessions testified in front of his former colleagues in the Senate. The particular committee he appeared before is the Senate Intelligence Committee, which grilled him on Russia. Sessions refused to provide answers to some of the most important questions asked of him. The reality is that the Senate Intelligence Committee, in being a fact-finding operation with a political goal, is less important to persons of interest to the investigation than is Mueller’s probe, which is a legal inquiry.

The Weekly Standard’s Michael Warren has it right:

There may never be any hard evidence that any high-level Trump campaign or administration officials, wittingly or unwittingly, colluded with the Russians. Indeed, this is what both the Senate investigation and the special counsel investigation, headed by Robert Mueller, are supposed to suss out.

But the Trump administration has a problem as well, which is that there is evidence the president tried to impede or interfere in these investigations. And Sessions did little to dispel this evidence.

In his Tuesday testimony, Sessions was unable to provide any more context to this question: Did Trump fire Comey because of, or in response to, the FBI director’s refusal to “let go” of the investigation into Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Flynn? Because this question has gotten reasonably complicated.

Amazon To Buy Whole Foods

Amazon is buying upmarket grocer Whole Foods Market for $13.7bn, in the largest deal so far for Jeff Bezos as his ecommerce group seeks to exploit its online scale to challenge the likes of Walmart in food retailing.

Buying Whole Foods, the biggest premium grocer in the US, will radically accelerate Amazon’s ambitions in the $800bn US food and grocery sector, where the Seattle-based group has been trying to make inroads with grocery deliveries.

Having watched Amazon upend sectors from bookstores to cloud computing and film on its two-decade march to a $467bn market capitalisation, investors reacted by marking down the shares of bricks-and-mortar grocery rivals from the US to Europe.

Walmart, the world’s biggest retailer, dropped as much as 5.4 per cent, shedding $12.9bn in market value. Wholesaler Costco lost $5.2bn, while discount store Target jettisoned $3.5bn. Kroger, one of the world’s biggest supermarket chains, had $3bn wiped from its market value.

Amazon will pay $42 a share for Texas-based Whole Foods in an all-cash deal that includes the group’s debt.

Whole Foods, which has been nicknamed “whole pay-cheque” for its high prices, has had same-store sales fall for almost two years. Its revenues rose 1.1 per cent to $3.7bn in its most recent quarter on profits down 30 per cent to $99m. …

Charlie O’Shea, analyst at Moody’s, said the deal was a “transformative transaction, not just for food retail, but for retail in general”.

The deal will give Amazon — a company that has built most of its businesses online — a much more significant bricks-and-mortar presence. The online retailer has been running its own grocery delivery programme, AmazonFresh, since 2007 and has been experimenting with grocery pick-up kiosks in Seattle. — Financial Times

What’s Up With The Senate’s Healthcare Secrecy?

As they draft legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Senate Republican leaders are aiming to transform large sections of the American health care system without a single hearing on their bill and without a formal, open drafting session.

That has created an air of distrust and concern — on and off Capitol Hill, with Democrats but also with Republicans.

“I’ve said from Day 1, and I’ll say it again,” said Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee. “The process is better if you do it in public, and that people get buy-in along the way and understand what’s going on. Obviously, that’s not the route that is being taken.”

The secrecy surrounding the Senate measure to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act is remarkable — at least for a health care measure this consequential. …

At a Senate hearing on Thursday, Tom Price, the secretary of health and human services, said that he also had not seen the Senate bill.

Senate Republican leaders say the bill is still a work in progress, and they have not said exactly how it will differ from the one approved last month in the House. President Trump raised the stakes when he told senators this week that the House version was “mean.”

The Senate bill is likely to phase out the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaidexpansion more slowly than the House version. It is also expected to include larger tax credits to help older Americans buy health insurance.

The legislation will be considered in the Senate under an expedited procedure that precludes a Democratic filibuster and allows passage by a simple majority. But, Republicans say, Democrats will still be able to offer numerous amendments once the bill is on the Senate floor. — The New York Times

A Golden Generation

The Golden State Warriors took care of the Cleveland Cavaliers rather easily in this year’s NBA Finals, getting revenge for last year’s embarrassing slip-up against their LeBron-led rivals from the East.

If the Warriors handle their contract negotiations deftly in the years to come, I see a very difficult road ahead for the rest of the league. The Warriors could win 2–4 titles in the next five years.

Remember, this team went 73–9 last year — the best regular season record of all time — and then they added Kevin Durant!

I not a Golden State fan, but I’m a fan of their brand of basketball. They are the heirs to the 2014 San Antonio Spurs, who displayed such a glorious form of basketball in that year’s Finals that I couldn’t help but (begrudgingly, of course, since I’m a Heat fan) admire it.

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• The Democrats’ Leftward March by Ramesh Ponnuru (National Review)
• Trump and the Religious Right: A Match Made in Heaven by Tim Alberta (Politico)
• Donald Trump Is Making Europe Liberal Again by Nate Silver (FiveThirtyEight)
• Trump’s Credibility Problem by Kevin D. Williamson (National Review)
• The Talent Vacuum in the White House by Lucas Quagliata (Arc)
• The GOP’s Risky Calculation for 2018 by Ronald Brownstein (The Atlantic)
• Twitter is Trump’s Pulpit and Trap by Charlie Gerow (Arc)
• Democrats: Your Russia Obsession is Blinding You From What Really Matters by Ryan Cooper (The Week)
• Why Corbyn Won by Bhaskar Sunkara (Jacobin)
• Why the Rise of Corbyn’s Labour Party Should Worry the West by Michael J. Totten (The Atlantic)
• In Announcing Cuba Crackdown, Trump Returns to GOP Base by Marc Caputo (Politico)

• Augustine, the Guilty Optimist by Elizabeth Bruenig (Arc)
• After High Drama, Southern Baptists Denounce the ‘Alt-Right’ by Chris Moody (CNN)
• Two Kingdoms: Christianity and Islam by Berny Belvedere (Arc)
• Sorry, Old Testament: Most Theologians Don’t Use You by Caleb Lindgren (Christianity Today)
• How Faith Has Affected Bob Dylan’s Music by Scott M. Marshall (Lifezette)
• Lena Dunham’s NYT Op-Ed on the Obamacare Mandate is Based on Two Falsehoods by John McCormack (The Weekly Standard)
• Religious Liberals Sat Out of Politics for 40 Years. Now They Want in the Game. by Laurie Goodstein (The New York Times)

• Wonder Woman: Awesome Movie, Awful Gender Politics by Cathy Young (Arc)
• In Defense of Cultural Appropriation by Kenan Malik (The New York Times)
• Reinforcing the Boundaries of Political Decency by David Frum (The Atlantic)
• What Kind of Theory is Cultural Relativism by Berny Belvedere (Arc)
• The Hard Realities of Hard Time by Barry Latzer (City Journal)
• In This Post-Tragedy World, We Are All Extremists by Kimberly Ross (RedState)
• Making Sense of the Founders: Politics, Natural Rights, and the Laws of Nature by Justin Dyer (Public Discourse)

• Stop Pretending You’re Not Rich by Richard V. Reeves (The New York Times)
• Urbanization 2.0 by Carl Bildt (Project Syndicate)
• The New, Nearly Invisible Class Markers that Separate the American Elite from Everyone Else by Dan Kopf (Quartz)
• Trump Is Deluded About NAFTA by Robert J. Samuelson (The Washington Post)
• Janet Yellen and the Case of the Missing Inflation by Neil Irwin (The New York Times)
• Achilles’ Wrath: Why It Matters For Economic Psychology by Brendan Markey-Towler (Arc)
• U.S. Workforce: Paying Young Americans to Learn the Right Skills by Rana Foroohar (Financial Times)
• Trump Hands Democrats a $1 Trillion Moment of Truth by Jake Novak (CNBC)

• The Robot Takeover Is Greatly Exaggerated by Noah Smith (Bloomberg View)
• The New New Things That Weren’t by Jon Evans (TechCrunch)
• Can Donald Trump Save The Internet? by Tho Bishop (Arc)
• Gchat’s Window Is Closing for Good by Claire McNear (The Ringer)
• Virtual Reality Can Conquer Real Pain by Peter R. Orszag (Bloomberg VIew)
• The Efficiency Paradox by Greg Satell (Arc)
• In China, a Store of the Future — No Checkout, No Staff by Yiting Sun (MIT Technology Review)
• Google Faces Big Fine in First EU Case Against Search Practices by Rochelle Toplensky (Financial Times)

• The 17 Best Films of the Last 17 Years by Brett McCracken (Arc)
• What We Can Learn From Three Wild Months of TV by Alison Herman (The Ringer)
• On “Melodrama,” Lorde Learns How Messy Adulthood Can Be by Carrie Battan (The New Yorker)
• Mario’s New Tricks Make Super Mario Odyssey A Joy by Kyle Orland (Ars Technica)
• Yoko Ono To Receive Songwriting Credit On ‘Imagine,’ 48 Years Later by Andrew Flanagan (NPR)
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Guitars? Exploring the Future of Musical A.I. by Jayson Greene (Pitchfork)
• Hip-Hop Will Never Truly Move on From 2Pac by Justin Charity (The Ringer)

• The Arc Digital 2017 NBA Mock Draft by Brandon Anderson (Arc)
• A Match Made in Time-Machine Heaven by Brad Callas (Arc)
• Nick Hornby Looks Back on Arsenal’s Worst Season in 21 Years by Nick Hornby (ESPN FC)
• The Golden Generation by Berny Belvedere (Arc)
• The Patience of Christian Politic, American Soccer’s Great Hope by Michael Luo (The New Yorker)
• What Are The Best And Worst Finals Games Of LeBron’s Career? by Brandon Anderson (Arc)
• Why Tanking Will be a Nightmare for the NFL by Kevin Clark (The Ringer)

Have you experienced the transformative thrill of liking a page on Facebook, or following an account on Twitter? No? Well, then, carpe diem!

This Week In History

June 16

• 1723 — Adam Smith, the great classical economist, is born.
• 1858 — Abraham Lincoln says “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” accepting the Illinois Republican Party’s nomination for the Senate.

June 18

• 1815 — The Battle of Waterloo. Napoleon and France defeated by British forces under Wellington.
• 1940 — Winston Churchill’s “this was their finest hour” speech urging perseverance during Battle of Britain delivered to British House of Commons.

June 20

• 1895 — Caroline Willard Baldwin becomes the first female PhD from an American University, earned in Science at Cornell University.

June 21

• 1527 — Niccolo Machiavelli (b. 1469), the Renaissance thinker whose name has come to be associated with political scheming in pursuit of power, passes away.
• 1905 — Jean-Paul Sartre, the French intellectual and existentialist, is born.

June 22

• 1941 — Germany, Italy, and Romania declare war on the Soviet Union.
• 1962 — Clyde Drexler, one of the greatest basketball players ever, is born. You should watch this YouTube mix of his highlights.
• 1987 — Fred Astaire (b. 1899), the consummate entertainer and legendary dancer, passes away. This scene is incredible.

Quote

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

— Jean-Paul Sartre