This week, I have been mostly reading:

• A New American Manifesto — AbsurdistWords updates the US Declaration of Independence: Nobody is suggesting that we take the dismantling of a government lightly. Things must have gotten really bad for this to be the only option left. Humans by nature don’t like change and even when they’re being harmed, they’re more likely to just endure that harm than to break down a whole system that they’re comfortable with and used to. But if things get so bad that the government starts abusing and harming its citizens in the name of gaining more power, it’s every human’s moral duty to burn that government down and build one that protects them better from would-be dictators. The American people are now facing down these exact same kinds of abuses. We have tried to be patient, but now we’re fed up and the whole thing needs to come down.
• John Yoo: The Man Who Would Make the President King — Gene Healy reviews Yoo's latest: Defender-in-Chief has already earned Yoo the coveted tweet-blurb from @realDonaldTrump, so it's unlikely anything I write here will put much of a dent in its sales. But ye gods, this is a terrible book: a lazy, turgid, error-ridden mess, perched atop an appallingly silly thesis. Yoo forgets history he learned in high school, announcing that the Mexican-American War kicked off with an "attack on Sam Houston's forces along the Rio Grande." (Zachary Taylor's, actually; Houston was a U.S. senator at the time.) He forgets history he actually lived through, declaring that President Barack Obama "launched attacks on Syria for its use of chemical weapons." (Er, he didn't.) Through large stretches of the book, Yoo even forgets what he's just written, as when he deploys the same damned passage from the Federalist three times in seven pages. You get the sense that with this book, unlike the Torture Memos, his heart really wasn't in it. As for that thesis: What makes a president a defender-in-chief, anyway? The answer is in the book's subtitle: It's the "fight for presidential power." You earn your laurels by defending the office's prerogatives—genuine or imagined—thereby keeping the flame of "energy in the executive" alive for future presidents. Trump amply deserves the honorific, Yoo argues, because he fought back against the special counsel investigation, defended his travel ban in court, dropped bombs without congressional authorization—or, as Yoo frames it, "stood up for traditional executive leadership in foreign affairs and war"—and made some judicial appointments Yoo likes.
• The Election That Could Break America — Barton Gellman in the Atlantic: December 8 is known as the “safe harbor” deadline for appointing the 538 men and women who make up the Electoral College. The electors do not meet until six days later, December 14, but each state must appoint them by the safe-harbor date to guarantee that Congress will accept their credentials. The controlling statute says that if “any controversy or contest” remains after that, then Congress will decide which electors, if any, may cast the state’s ballots for president. We are accustomed to choosing electors by popular vote, but nothing in the Constitution says it has to be that way. Article II provides that each state shall appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late 19th century, every state has ceded the decision to its voters. Even so, the Supreme Court affirmed in Bush v. Gore that a state “can take back the power to appoint electors.” How and when a state might do so has not been tested for well over a century. Trump may test this. According to sources in the Republican Party at the state and national levels, the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority. With a justification based on claims of rampant fraud, Trump would ask state legislators to set aside the popular vote and exercise their power to choose a slate of electors directly.
• Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
  
• Down with meritocracy — Michael Young writing in the Guardian about 20 years ago: I have been sadly disappointed by my 1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy. I coined a word which has gone into general circulation, especially in the United States, and most recently found a prominent place in the speeches of Mr Blair. The book was a satire meant to be a warning (which needless to say has not been heeded) against what might happen to Britain between 1958 and the imagined final revolt against the meritocracy in 2033. […] It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others. Ability of a conventional kind, which used to be distributed between the classes more or less at random, has become much more highly concentrated by the engine of education. A social revolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and universities to the task of sieving people according to education's narrow band of values. With an amazing battery of certificates and degrees at its disposal, education has put its seal of approval on a minority, and its seal of disapproval on the many who fail to shine from the time they are relegated to the bottom streams at the age of seven or before. The new class has the means at hand, and largely under its control, by which it reproduces itself.
• Democrats Need to Wake Up: The Trump Movement Is Shot Through With Fascism — Rich Benjamin in the Intercept: In order to win this presidential contest, liberals need to accept that Trump supporters do not care if he were to scrap millions of mail-in votes or to welcome, and even solicit, Russian interference for his cause. Not only do some Trump supporters understand that he is an autocrat who will cheat the rules to stay in power, that’s precisely what they like about him. The left should understand that many Trump supporters inherently believe that they would fare better under an autocratic system of white supremacy than under a multiracial democracy. So many white liberals and moderates are invested in the idea that authoritarianism can’t happen in America, because to question whether authoritarianism exists here is to question what they’ve achieved. Such white people, figuratively and literally, have so much money, property, social status, and self-image invested in the mirage that this country is based on merit and fair play. They have so much invested in the illusion that their political institutions and white cohorts are good actors that will keep everything nicely afloat. Questioning all that fervent, widespread Trump support would force them to question how their neighbor, their cousin, their uncle, their co-worker, their favorite vendor is complicit to a regime that prioritizes their well-being and social privilege as white people, second only to Trump’s greed. To acknowledge your aunt’s or your own complicity in Trump’s nationalist autocracy might make you feel accountable for what this country is. And that accountability to the problem damns you to an accountability to the solution.
• Houses are becoming commodities to buy and sell and not homes — John Menadue, Pearls and Irritations: It is no accident that Scott Morrison was a senior executive in the Property Council. So it is no surprise that the ‘housing minister’, Michael Sukkar is not even in the Cabinet. He is in the ‘Outer Ministry’. That demonstrates to me more than anything that Morrison regards property as a commodity to be traded in the market and not a social good like education or health. We need major reforms in our health and education sectors but the failings in our housing sector tell me that housing and particularly social housing for rent is of the highest priority. Housing policy should be based on three important principles. First, we should value housing for its use-value, not its exchange-value. Second, housing policy should be part of community and neighbourhood building. Third, housing policy should promote social mixing and sharing, rather than stratification.
• Bizarro — by Dan Piraro:
  
• Will citizen assemblies change local government? — Bill Garner in Pearls and Irritations: With the local elections on the way in Victoria democracy could get a surprising boost. If instead of merely voting in councillors, what if citizens were able to directly set the strategic directions councils must follow? This may seem far-fetched yet it is exactly what the new Victorian Local Government Act enables. The Act places community engagement at the core of municipal governing. It is intended to encourage a much greater degree of participatory democracy. It is potentially revolutionary. […] Where citizens actively take up this opportunity it could go a long way to restoring the democracy deficit that resulted from the council amalgamations of the 1990s when more than 100 councils were sacked. This managerialist reform resulted in the old cities, towns, suburbs and neighbourhoods being submerged beneath newly-created megacities. […] The council amalgamations were justified by the claim that the admitted decrease of democracy would be more than compensated by an increase in efficiency and effectiveness. People would be better served if local government was primarily an exercise in management. […] While the democracy deficit became increasingly apparent, the promise of large economic gains in efficiency was never realised. But for a quarter of a century this has been the largely unquestioned way of running local government in Victoria.
• From the FSF Bulletin: Trial by proprietary software — John Sullivan, Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation: Unfortunately, with the shutdown of in-person institutions around the world, people have turned to the proprietary software companies that had the sales and marketing resources to quickly insert themselves as "solutions." Among these institutions are courts of law, many of which have been conducting some proceedings over Zoom. While Zoom is a "service," it also requires those using it to run nonfree software on their local devices -- either the official client application, or downloaded nonfree JavaScript when connecting via a Web browser. While Zoom's software itself doesn't cost an individual any money to use, it raises two clear categories of concern: requiring people to agree to Zoom's arbitrary demands as a condition for access to justice, and the state's public endorsement of Zoom.
• So an ancient TV set can bring down the mighty broadband? Good... — David Mitchell being all David Mitchelley in the Guardian: Not being able to access the internet is a plus as far as I’m concerned. I look back fondly on the afternoon in 2009 on the Isle of Skye that I spent waving a Samsung flip phone around my head in the hope of it coinciding with a big enough blob of reception to get a text to send. I was significantly more likely to catch a flying splat of seagull shit. But the inconvenience makes you feel remote and, for me, that was the point of going there. Nowadays, I could probably get streaming HD. Which sounds like a disease. And maybe it is.