The Weekly Sift

When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck,
and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.

– Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor,
explaining why bump stocks turn AR-15s into machine guns

This week’s featured post is “This Week’s Legal Decisions“.

This week everybody was talking about the courts

The featured post covers the Supreme Court’s ruling on the mifepristone case and the bump-stock ban, as well as a district court ruling overturning Florida’s ban on gender-affirming care.

But the other case in the news was Hunter Biden’s conviction on three felony counts related to purchasing a handgun and lying about his drug use.

In this situation, President Biden has done something Trump has never been able to conceive of: He has drawn a line between his personal life and his role as president. He loves and supports Hunter the way a Dad should. But as president, he stayed out of Hunter’s case, and he’s not going to give Hunter a pardon.

Trump was never able to compartmentalize the presidency like this. Presidential power was his power, to use for whatever purpose he desired. If he liked somebody, or needed to repay them for their silence, he pardoned them, regardless of the merits. Rod Blagojevich, for example, got his sentence commuted because he’d been a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice.

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One clear difference between the Trump trial and the Biden trial: Hunter’s jurors have already begun going public. Trump’s jurors didn’t dare, for fear of violent retribution.

and the weather

Much of southern Florida flooded this week as up to two feet of rain fell in places like North Miami. But of course, Governor DeSantis is not going to admit that climate change played any role.

This clearly is not unprecedented. I think the difference is, you compare 50 to 100 years ago to now, there’s just a lot more that’s been developed, so there’s a lot more effects that this type of event can have.

The WaPo notes:

The brouhaha over how to characterize the storm came a month after DeSantis signed a bill that removes most references to climate change in state law. The legislation, which is set to take effect July 1, eliminates climate change as a priority in making energy policy decisions, even though Florida routinely faces threats from extreme heat, deadly hurricanes and toxic algae blooms.

… The storm arrived 14 months after another “rain bomb” hit South Florida, dropping 22.5 inches on Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in one day. Last year’s storm knocked the city’s main hospital offline for all but emergency procedures, shorted electrical equipment at City Hall and left thousands of travelers stranded.

Both that system and this week’s deluge bear the fingerprint of human-caused climate change. In a warmer world, the atmosphere can hold more moisture. That means rainfall rates are getting heavier and extremes are becoming more common.

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This week, most of the Eastern US is going to roast under a “heat dome”. But if all you want to say is “It gets hot in summer”, nobody can make you see any larger significance.

and fake videos that “show” President Biden’s senility

This cycle’s version of Hillary’s emails or Obama’s birth certificate is the supposed “evidence” that Joe Biden is too old to be president. This week the Republican National Committee released two videos that were picked up by Republican media outlets like the New York Post, and were widely shared on social media. Both seemed to show President Biden being “out of it” during public events. One of these apparent incidents made the New York Post’s cover.

In reality, both videos were carefully edited so that what Biden was reacting to was out of the frame, making it appear as if the President were off in a world of his own. The Washington Post’s fact checker compared these videos to the same events from other angles and wider perspectives — views that were also available to right-wing outlets that chose to ignore them — and awarded the videos four Pinocchios, its rating for the most extreme dishonesty.

In one video, the RNC’s version has Biden apparently wandering off during an outdoor photo op for G-7 leaders in Italy, only to be brought back to the group by the Italian prime minister. Outside the frame, but clearly visible in other videos of the same event, is the parachutist Biden had turned to pay attention to, giving him a thumbs-up and exchanging a few words. (As part of the festivities, skydivers had floated down with the flags of the seven nations.) This video, in fact, shows Biden exercising one of his trademark virtues: acknowledging the contributions of people who aren’t at his world-leader rank.

In another RNC-edited video, Biden stands still while all the people around him dance during a Juneteenth celebration. A conservative UK newspaper, the Telegraph, then wrote an article implying that Biden was having some kind of episode that caused him to freeze. However, the WaPo notes:

The full video, when it pans, shows other people similarly standing still at the right end of the screen.

I have to wonder if the Biden-not-dancing criticism is intended to deflect the response Trump faces when he tries to dance at rallies and looks ridiculous.

If Biden were really doing as badly as Republicans would have you believe, the evidence would be everywhere; they wouldn’t have to manufacture it out of perfectly innocuous events. On the contrary, whenever Biden appears in an event too big to be controlled and packaged for the right-wing echo chamber, the Biden-is-senile narrative gets punctured and outlets like Fox News have to scramble to patch it. That’s what happened during the State of the Union, which Trump explained by saying Biden must have been “on drugs“.

Republicans are already preparing for Biden’s performance in the upcoming debate with Trump, which will undoubtedly conflict with their constructed narrative. Trump is predicting that Biden will be “on drugs” again. In an interview Thursday, Trump said he might lose the debate intentionally so that Democrats won’t take Biden off the ticket. (The idea that some behind-the-scenes cabal has the power to replace Biden is widespread on the Right. I’ve been hearing it for more than a year.)

They know Biden is sharp and will demonstrate that fact during the debate. So they’re already planting the seeds of how they’ll explain away what viewers will see with their own eyes.

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Meanwhile, the evidence that something is seriously wrong with Trump really is everywhere, and doesn’t have to be manufactured. While Biden gets roasted in the media whenever he says one word when he means another, Trump frequently goes off into long what-is-he-talking-about riffs like his recent sharks-and-batteries tirade. The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols points out the obvious: If a 78-year-old relative did this at a family dinner, you’d be seriously worried about him.

Perhaps the greatest trick Donald Trump ever pulled was convincing millions of people—and the American media—to treat his lapses into fantasies and gibberish as a normal, meaningful form of oratory. … But Trump is obviously unfit—and something is profoundly wrong with a political environment in which he can now say almost anything, no matter how weird, and his comments will get a couple of days of coverage and then a shrug, as if to say: Another day, another Trump rant about sharks.

… [M]any people in the media have fallen under the spell of the Jedi hand-waves from Trump and his people that none of this is as disturbing and weird as it sounds. The refs have been worked: A significant segment of the media—and even the Democratic Party—has bought into a Republican narrative that asking whether Trump is mentally unstable is somehow biased and elitist, the kind of thing that could only occur to Beltway mandarins who don’t understand how the candidate talks to normal people.

Thursday, Trump spoke privately to a group of big-name CEOs like Apple’s Tim Cook and Chase’s Jamie Dimon. They came out dismayed, according to CNBC anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin.

They walked away from that meeting, I think, a bit disheartened, a bit questioning—I don’t want to say his mental fitness—but questioning just how meandering, how, in some cases, one said to me he could not keep a thought straight. He would go in one direction and then he’d go in another direction and … there wasn’t really necessarily a through line.

Apparently the CEOs expected to see a coherent and rational behind-the-scenes Trump, one who wasn’t acting like a carnival performer to entertain his fans. But it turns out that the sharks-and-batteries Trump is the only one available.

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Fake videos are OK if they’re over-the-top fake. In this hilarious one, Trump’s sharks-and-batteries riff is interspersed with reaction shots from the nurses and patients of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

and you also might be interested in …

An unsettling reminder of how easily freedom is lost: “The Apprentice” is a new movie about the relationship between a young Donald Trump and his hard-nosed lawyer Roy Cohn. The film exists, and was screened to an appreciative crowd at the Cannes festival in May.

But you can’t see it.

Distributors have bought the rights to “The Apprentice” in Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Japan and many other countries. But the filmmakers have yet to secure a deal to release it here, either in theaters or on streaming services.

Negotiations are ongoing, and domestic distribution could still come together. Yet the possibility that American audiences won’t be able to see “The Apprentice” isn’t just frustrating. It’s frightening, because it suggests that Trump and his supporters have already intimidated some media companies, which seem to be pre-emptively capitulating to him.

… The fear seems to be twofold. Few want to end up in the MAGA movement’s cross hairs the way Bud Light and Disney did. And as one distribution executive told Variety, any company that wants to be sold or to merge with or buy another company would be hesitant to touch “The Apprentice” because of the possibility that, should Trump be re-elected, his “regulators will be punitive.”

When we think about authoritarianism, we picture restrictive laws, police who throw their weight around, and prison camps. But it can be far more subtle than that, working its Leader’s will by intimidation rather than overt force. Don Corleone rarely had to make good on the implied threat in “an offer you can’t refuse”.

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Friday, Vladimir Putin issued his conditions for ending the Ukraine War, which amount to Ukraine’s complete surrender: Not only must it renounce claims to its eastern provinces and Crimea, but it must permanently drop its bid to join NATO. So even after giving up territory, the remainder of Ukraine would be wide open to some future invasion.

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How did I not see this coming? “Book about book bans banned by Florida school board“.

The book is Ban This Book by Alan Gratz. And of course, it’s the oxymoronic Moms for Liberty who are behind this violation of liberty. (Can anybody come up with an example of Moms for Liberty doing something that promotes or protects liberty? I can’t.) Gratz comments:

It feels like they know exactly what they’re doing and they’re somewhat ashamed of what they’re doing and they don’t want a book on the shelves that calls them out.

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Kellyanne Conway told Fox News that Trump talked to 8,000 people at a Black church in Detriot. Video makes clear it was a few hundred people, most of whom were White. The point of this kind of deception is not to attract Black voters, but to reassure White Trump supporters that he’s not racist.

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The NYT’s David Leonhardt explains why both theories of Covid’s origins — natural transmission from an infected animal in the Wuhan live-animal market or a leak from Wuhan’s virus-research lab — are plausible. What he doesn’t explain (and should) is how implausible the conspiracy version of the lab-leak theory is: Covid wasn’t genetically engineered as a bio-weapon and then released for some nefarious purpose. It’s hard even to tell that story in such a way that all the major players have some clear motive to do what they’re supposed to have done.

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Leaving Caitlin Clark off the US Women’s Olympic basketball team is the latest chapter in a saga that illustrates the continuing significance of race in American sports.

Clark set scoring records in college, and was arguably (but not obviously) the greatest player in the history of NCAA women’s college basketball. She lifted women’s college basketball to new heights of public attention, partly due to her personal star power and exciting style of play, but also (let’s face it) because she’s White, and basketball hasn’t had a lot of White American-born heroes since Larry Bird retired.

This spring she started her professional WNBA career, and has similarly been drawing new fans to that league. So far, she’s shown some promise, but her team is terrible (that’s why they got such a high draft pick) and her quality of play does not yet live up to the level of attention she’s been getting. (She scores well, but shoots a low percentage and has a lot of turnovers, as rookies often do.) Veteran WNBA players seem to resent the spotlight on her, and so she’s getting pushed around on the court in ways that go beyond the usual rookie hazing.

Again, all of this is drawing national attention, and is fueling racial resentment among fans: To those on one extreme, she’s the White underachiever who has had stardom handed to her, and to those on the other, Black thugs are targeting her unfairly.

So now we have the Olympic team. Looking at the roster, I don’t see who should be kicked off to make room for Clark, whose WNBA performance so far doesn’t justify her inclusion. (Some sources have reported inaccurately that she’s been named as an alternate.)

Clark herself seems to be caught in the middle of all this, and is embarrassed by the racist tropes being used to defend her. Laura Ingraham once famously told LeBron James to “shut up and dribble“. I suspect Caitlin Clark would be happy if the world would let her do that.

and let’s close with something joyful

Be sure to spend a few moments looking at “the happiest dog I’ve seen in my life“. It may improve your day.