Quick links, then back to work

Of note:

• Jeff Maurer wants every Democratic candidate in the next election cycle to hammer the OAFPOTUS for selling pardons (and all his other corruption).
• Former Republican US Representative Adam Kinzinger takes his party to task for rejecting its own history by attacking the civil service. (By the way, Netflix has a great four-part miniseries about Presidents Garfield and Arthur called "Death by Lightning" that you can watch now.)
• Paul Krugman frets that we have become a "digital narco-state."
• Amanda Petri wonders WTF she saw at the Kennedy Center Honors this week.
• Jerry Kaplan lays out the evidence that we are definitely in an AI bubble.

Finally, Divya Subramanian reviews Life After Cars, an evidence-packed examination of the hidden costs of North American car dependency. I view car dependency and our inability to break out of the suburban sprawl development pattern as both a result of and a reinforcement of our right-wing (by global standards) culture. I might buy the book at some point, but I feel like it will just make me mad, as a lot of other books in the genre have already done.