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Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.) didn’t play in Wednesday’s annual congressional baseball game, but he managed to throw the best curveball of the evening anyway.

In a lengthy statement, Manchin spelled out the reasons he is unwilling to support the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package his fellow Democrats are hoping to push through Congress within the next few days or weeks. “Spending trillions more on new and expanded government programs,” he said, “when we can’t even pay for the essential social programs, like Social Security and Medicare, is the definition of fiscal insanity.” Manchin went on to say that he worries about how more government spending might drive inflation even higher, how higher taxes necessary to pay for that spending will make it harder for small businesses to compete with big retailers like Amazon, and how an expanded welfare state might slow the ongoing economic recovery.

Manchin’s opinion about these things carries a lot of weight right now. Democrats have the slimmest possible majority in the U.S. Senate, and need all 50 of their members (plus Vice President Kamala Harris) to vote in support of the reconciliation bill or it will not pass. The senator from West Virginia has all the leverage, and he’s using it to force the rest of Congress to take a good, hard look the fiscal mess its made over the past few years (and, more specifically, since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

“I can’t support $3.5 trillion more in spending when we have already spent $5.4 trillion since last March,” Manchin said. “I cannot—and will not—support trillions in spending or an all or nothing approach that ignores the brutal fiscal reality our nation faces.”

While he did not specifically invoke the $28 trillion national debt or the federal government’s current budget deficit, Manchin obviously wants to draw Congress’ attention to the massive disconnect between how much the government spends and how much it collects in taxes. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the national debt will exceed the size of the U.S. economy by the end of this year and will continue growing as annual budget deficits pile up over the next few decades. “A growing debt burden could increase the risk of a fiscal crisis and higher inflation as well as undermine confidence in the U.S. dollar, making it more costly to finance public and private activity in international markets,” the CBO has warned.

Higher levels of debt mean higher interest costs and larger sums of money that must be dedicated to debt service. Every dollar spent paying for the cost of carrying so much debt is a dollar that can’t be used on something else. If interest rates rise even just a few percentage points, the cost of servicing $28 trillion (and counting) of debt will skyrocket.

As Manchin also pointed out, the government is already going to need a lot of dollars to fix the trajectories of the major entitlement programs—Social Security will be insolvent in the early 2030s and part of Medicare will be unable to fully pay benefits in just five years.

But while the senator at the center of the reconciliation bill drama has made clear he won’t support $3.5 trillion in new spending, he’s been more than a bit vague about what sort of package would earn his vote. There are a few nuggets to be mined from Manchin’s statement on that front: He signals support for undoing some of the Trump tax cuts and for means-testing expanded social programs to ensure they are aimed at the truly needy. Those seem like places where Democrats might find a compromise that satisfies both Manchin and the party’s progressive wing.

Relatedly, Politico reported Thursday that Manchin offered in July to support a $1.5 trillion reconciliation bill. That plan would reportedly raise corporate income taxes, personal income taxes on high earners, and the capital gains tax. Excess revenue beyond the $1.5 trillion necessary to pay for the bill would reportedly be directed to deficit reduction.

Manchin is hardly the only person worried about these things, though you wouldn’t know it by paying attention to Congress or the national media. An April poll conducted by the Pew Research Center found that 72 percent of Americans rated the federal budget deficit as a “very big” or “moderately big” problem for the country. It ranked ahead of violent crime, racism, the pandemic, illegal immigration, and lots of other issues that get far more attention.

Manchin’s Wednesday statement drew condemnation from some public figures on the political left who have decided that there’s nothing wrong with massive deficits and nothing to fear in piling up more debt.

THERE IS NO BRUTAL FISCAL REALITY THE NATION FACES; IT IS ENTIRELY MADE UP!

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) September 29, 2021

I’d go further and argue not only is debt not bad, it’s actually in current circumstances *affirmatively good.* As the world’s reserve currency, have a moral obligation to do what we can to help power a global economic recovery from Covid and lead the way on climate investment.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) September 29, 2021

In truth, no one is sure how much money the federal government will be able to borrow before a crisis hits—piling up debt is like walking down an infinite hallway with an invisible pit, as Noah Smith has described it. But higher levels of debt are associated with lower economic growth even in places that haven’t suffered major meltdowns. The surely catastrophic consequences of America going through a major debt crisis demands that even a small risk of one must be taken seriously. And there is no arguing with the fact that we are now in uncharted territory.

“America is a great nation but great nations throughout history have been weakened by careless spending and bad policies,” Manchin said Wednesday. “Now, more than ever, we must work together to avoid these fatal mistakes.”

Republicans and Democrats have mostly abandoned any interest in fiscal responsibility. But Manchin has decided, for whatever reason, that deficits actually do matter. And, right now, he’s got the power to make the rest of Congress listen.

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Last year, according to data the FBI published this week, police in the United States made about 350,000 arrests for marijuana offenses, the lowest level recorded in three decades. The 36 percent drop in 2020, which follows an 18 percent decrease in 2019, reflects the impact of ballot initiatives and legislation that eliminated penalties for low-level possession last year or earlier. It may also reflect the impact of COVID-19 restrictions that drove cannabis consumers indoors, where they were less likely to be noticed by police.

As usual, the vast majority of marijuana arrests in 2020 (91 percent) were for simple possession, as opposed to cultivation or distribution. “As more states move toward the sensible policy of legalizing and regulating cannabis, we are seeing a decline in the arrest of non-violent marijuana consumers nationwide,” says Erik Altieri, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), in a press release. “The fight for legalization is a fight for justice. While these numbers represent a historic decline in arrests, even one person being put into handcuffs for the simple possession of marijuana is too many.”

There is reason to expect marijuana arrests to decline again this year. In seven states that recently legalized possession—Arizona, Connecticut, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Virginia, with a combined population of more than 50 million—the laws did not take effect until late 2020 or this year. All told, more than two-fifths of Americans live in the 18 states that have legalized marijuana for recreational use—a policy supported by about two-thirds of Americans, according to the latest Gallup poll. Nearly all of those states also allow commercial production and distribution or will soon.

Marijuana arrests did not initially follow the trajectory you might expect after Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize recreational use in 2012. Total arrests dropped in 2013, rose slightly in 2014, fell in 2015, then rose modestly for three consecutive years before falling substantially in 2019 and 2020.

Since possession had been legalized in eight states—including California, the most populous—by 2017, it may seem surprising that marijuana arrests continued to rise until 2019. But in California, possession of an ounce or less for personal use had been treated as a citable offense punishable only by a $100 fine since 2011. So while California accounts for 12 percent of the U.S. population, it accounted for less than 2 percent of marijuana arrests in 2016, the year that voters approved legalization there.

Four of the other jurisdictions that legalized marijuana in 2012, 2014, or 2016—D.C., Maine, Massachusetts, and Oregon—likewise had already decriminalized possession of small amounts. In Alaska, Nevada, and Washington, possession was still a misdemeanor, while Colorado treated it as a “petty offense.” Another thing to keep in mind: Public marijuana use and possession of amounts above a specified threshold can lead to arrests even in states that have legalized possession, cultivation, and distribution.

Still, the increases in marijuana arrests after these jurisdictions legalized recreational use suggest that other states picked up the slack. Last year, NORML reported that “much of the national decline resulted from a drop-off in marijuana arrests in Texas in 2019, which experienced over 50,000 fewer marijuana-related arrests last year” than in 2018. In Texas, the second-most populous state, possession of two ounces or less is still a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and a maximum fine of $2,000.

When you take a longer view, the 2020 total looks like a reversion to the arrest numbers recorded in the early 1990s, before a surge in pot busts that continued for a decade and a half. Marijuana arrests rose threefold from 1991 until their peak in 2007, while the U.S. population grew by 19 percent. Last year’s arrest total is still about 22 percent higher than the number recorded in 1991.

While the odds that any given cannabis consumer will be arrested have always been low, they are getting lower. Possession arrests in 2007 represented about 3 percent of marijuana users that year, judging from survey data. Last year, based on survey data for 2019, that number was down to about 0.7 percent.

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Equity. Multiculturalism. Patriarchy. Social justice. White supremacy. Uttering any of these words or phrases in a school could land Wisconsinites in trouble, if the state’s Republican-led Assembly gets its way.

On Tuesday, the Assembly passed legislation that Wisconsin Republicans are touting as a ban on teaching “critical race theory.”

Lately, such bills have become a popular—and problematic—conservative agenda item, despite the mockery they sometimes make of free speech and free inquiry. Often, these proposals ban so much as discussing certain concepts related to race and cut off educational examinations of historical events and injustices. In other cases, the measures seem largely performative, purporting to ban the buzzwordy “critical race theory” while in reality prohibiting much narrower and more controversial concepts that there’s no evidence schools are actually condoning (such as the view that one race is better than another).

At first blush, the Wisconsin measure—Assembly Bill (A.B.) 411, passed by a party-line vote of 60–38—seems to fall into the latter category. The bill would ban public schools and independent charter schools from teaching students “that one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex,” that “an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment because of the individual’s race or sex,” that “an individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by the individual’s race or sex,” and several related concepts. It would also ban schools from training employees in these concepts.

The frighteningly broad list includes a plethora of perfectly neutral or basic terms—the kinds of words or phrases used to teach about ideas, not necessarily advocate for any particular ones. Wichgers’ list is also rife with concepts far from the academic or political fringe.

For instance, multiculturalism—which just means the presence or support of “several distinct cultural or ethnic groups within a society,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary—and cultural awareness (being cognizant that cultural differences can exist) make the list.

Equity, defined as “the quality of being fair and impartial,” is also on there, along with equitable. So are diversity training, hegemony, intersectionality, marginalized identities, normativity, patriarchy, racial justice, restorative justice, structural bias, systemic bias, and woke.

Wichgers told colleagues his proposal was meant to “prevent government schools from violating” the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, not prevent educators from simply teaching about racism. But it’s hard to see how this assertion jibes with the long list of words and concepts—colorism, racial prejudice, race essentialism, white supremacy—that he claims his legislation could ban.

You can find the full list of words that Wichgers submitted to the Wisconsin Legislature here. These are “terms and concepts…that either wholly violate the above clauses, or which may if taught through the framework of any of the prohibited activities defined above, partially violate the above clauses,” states a note at the top of the list.

Fortunately, Wichgers’ overreaching bill has little chance of becoming law, for now. It’s not yet passed the state’s Senate and—even if it does—would likely be vetoed by Wisconsin’s Democratic governor.

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Asked for his definition of a great movie, director Howard Hawks supposedly responded: “three good scenes and no bad ones.” Somehow, Venom: Let There Be Carnage is the precise opposite—a handful of truly godawful scenes, and no good ones. The movie is an ugly, unpleasant, nearly unwatchable mess, and the only movie I have actively regretted seeing in a theater this year. 

In that, at least, it follows through on the promise of its predecessor, the 2018 Spider-Man-adjacent comic book film Venom. Based on a fan-favorite Spidey antagonist, who also appeared in Sam Raimi’s unfortunate Spider-Man 3, Venom was a disaster on nearly every level. The character, who in the comics typically plays either a villain or an odd bedfellow-frenemy role, felt lost without the friendly neighborhood web-slinger around. Tom Hardy’s antic performance as the title character veered between cringe and camp, turning the gator-mouthed alien symbiote into a clownish rendition of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The whole production was pointlessly dark and brooding, and the highlights, or at least the parts that weren’t quite as bad, consisted of intendedly comic slap fights between Hardy and a toothy glob of talking computer-generated black and white goop. LOL, sure. 

Clunky scripts and incoherent stories are of course commonplace in Hollywood. But the underlying craftwork tends to be reasonably competent, if not always thrilling, especially at higher budget levels. Yet rarely have I seen a film as tedious, turgid, unpleasant, ill-conceived, and downright horrid looking. Even with a budget reportedly somewhere in the vicinity of $100 million, the movie simply looked like garbage—expensive, elaborate, computer-generated garbage, perhaps—but garbage nonetheless.

Naturally, the studio made another one. And somehow it’s even worse.

The slap fights and comic hijinks have returned in louder, more obnoxious form. Indeed, Venom is even more of a comic-relief character than ever, though it’s hard to call anything in this film funny. He spends the middle of the film at some sort of costume party rave, where no one notices that he is an eight-foot-tall computer-animated monster. “Cool costume!” is all anyone will say, as if globular animated tentacles are a perfectly ordinary part of everyday cosplay. The movie’s attempts to make him sympathetic are bizarre at best: He wants to eat brains and feel personally validated by a bunch of kids dressed in wearable glow sticks. Who can’t relate?

The new villain, Carnage, is a sort of son-of-Venom character—another alien symbiote, this one bonded with a murderous serial killer by the name of Cletus Kasady (a smirking, inessential Woody Harrelson). Carnage has many of the same goopy, gloopy abilities as Venom, except that he’s bigger, red, and looks even shoddier when rendered on screen than his progenitor. He changes size from shot to shot, never looks like he’s actually interacting with his surroundings, and moves with the herky-jerky digitized weightlessness of a Playstation 2 cut scene.

Yes, Let There Be Carnage looks even worse than the original. With a budget of about $110 million, it doesn’t look cheap, exactly, just crappy. It’s not just that the effects work is of such low quality, either. It’s that every shot, every cut, every image in the movie has been constructed with a brutal and almost overwhelming thoughtlessness.

There is, however, something fitting about all of this. The character of Venom sprung up in the 1980s, during the runup to the comic book boom of the early 1990s. For a period of time, Spider-Man wore a black suit, which turned out to be an alien symbiote that wanted to bond; when Spidey rejected the bond, the suit turned to a new host, Eddie Brock, a newspaper-world rival of Spider-Man’s plainclothes alter-ego, Peter Parker. Thus, Venom was a dark mirror of Spider-Man turned back on him; he viewed himself as good, but was driven to madness and villainy by his hatred of the Parker/Spider-Man pair.

Carnage, in turn, came about at the peak of the early 1990s comic-book boom. He was an even darker version of Venom, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. He was just a murderous psychopath—bigger, louder, and meaner than Venom, created only after Marvel’s bosses wouldn’t let a writer proceed with plans to kill off Venom, who had become a high-selling fan favorite. So for reasons of corporate strategy, fans got a grosser, cruder version of the original, a kind of violent parody of a character who was already a violent parody of his heroic source character.

Let There Be Carnage is a rotten film from start to finish; it exists only because Spider-Man remains popular, and the first Venom was something of a hit, thus necessitating a sequel. In a movie landscape still in the throes of a superhero boom, there is something strangely appropriate about the sheer crudeness of this hackneyed sequel to a comic book spinoff given that it is based on a comic book character who was, at the time of his inception, an uglier, crasser derivative of an already ugly, crass derivative.

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Military officials appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday to discuss the conclusion of military operations in Afghanistan, as well as President Joe Biden’s handling of the extraction. Those present included Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Lloyd Austin, secretary of defense; and Kenneth McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command.

The session marked the first time that these top military officials had all appeared in front of Congress since the Kabul airport suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. troops and dozens of fleeing Afghans. It was also the top brass’s first opportunity to comment on the drone strike that military officials initially insisted had killed only Islamic State militants. (It had, in fact, accidentally hit civilian targets.) For Milley, in particular, this was also his first visit to Congress since reporting revealed that he had reached out to his counterpart in the Chinese government to assure him that he would provide a warning before acting on any potentially aggressive orders from outgoing President Donald Trump.

In his testimony, McKenzie indicated that earlier this year, he recommended that Biden leave a residual force of 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, afraid that a complete withdrawal “would lead inevitably to the collapse of the Afghan military forces and, eventually, the Afghan government.” Milley confirmed that he agreed with the advice.

Immediately, Republicans seized on this admission: Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) tweeted that the administration “ignored the advice from the military and mislead the American people,” and that had their advice been followed, “Biden’s botched Afghan withdrawal could have been prevented and American lives could have been saved.” Sen. Jim Inhofe (R–Okla.), who had asked the initial question, later tweeted a video in which he criticized the Biden administration for “not listening to his advisors” on the issue.

In response to a question from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), Austin acknowledged that while there were “a range of possibilities” for what could have happened with a theoretical continued presence, “if you stayed there at force posture of 2,500, certainly, you’d be in a fight with the Taliban. And you’d have to reinforce yourself.”

This is the crux of the matter: There is no plausible scenario in which the U.S. could leave behind a permanent, or even indefinite, force of soldiers without incurring further casualties. The Doha Agreement negotiated under Trump set an end date by which all American forces would have left Afghanistan, barring any future Taliban violence; a new administration reneging on that deal would certainly have invited renewed bloodshed. And a force of 2,500 facing the entirety of a renewed Taliban would have necessitated further reinforcement. At that point, we would be right back to October 2001, facing an uncertain future and an even more uncertain end goal.

Nevertheless, some Republicans are asserting that McKenzie’s answer contradicted what the president had said during an August interview with ABC News host George Stephanopoulos, who asked whether Biden had been advised to leave 2,500 troops in Afghanistan. Biden’s answer was, at best, muddled and self-contradictory, saying both that he did not receive such advice, and that the advice was “split.”

In the most charitable interpretation of his response, a Washington Post fact check noted that Biden immediately pivoted to talking about how the Taliban, after agreeing to a U.S. withdrawal deadline and abiding by its stipulation against attacks on troops, continued to capture territory throughout Afghanistan, and any effort on the part of the U.S. to try to extend or even expand its presence within the country would not have been taken lightly by an emboldened Taliban now in near-complete control of the country.

The White House contends that this is what the president meant—that nobody advised him he could leave 2,500 troops without risking a return to direct conflict. Whether or not Biden was lying, equivocating, or simply forgetful, the fundamental point remains the same: For all the well-deserved scorn one can heap on Biden’s execution of the withdrawal, the only true alternative was not withdrawing at all, and that would have been far worse.

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