The Weekly Sift

If you don’t think this country is sliding toward theocracy, you’re not paying attention.

– Charles Blow

This week’s featured post is “Sweet Home, Gilead“.

This week everybody was talking about IVF in Alabama

The Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that frozen embryos are children for the purposes of wrongful death lawsuits is covered in the featured post.

Just after I pushed the Post button, I saw that Jay Kuo had written about his personal IVF story. His IVF child is currently in a surrogate mother’s womb. (Since I subscribed to Kuo’s substack blog, I’ve been linking to it almost every week.) He includes a photo of a frozen embryo, so we know what we’re talking about.

The bottom line is that the GOP can’t support IVF and support the idea that an embryo is a “person” entitled to full protection under our laws. Supporting IVF means understanding how it actually works and being comfortable with the idea that intended parents must create more embryos than we ultimately need. And clinics cannot be on the hook for murder should anything happen to them. No clinic coul survive with that threat hanging over it.

Neither of those two principles can be truly supported by Republicans so long as their party adheres dogmatically to the “life begins at conception” notion. Politicians who claim to support IVF must repudiate these kinds of fetal personhood laws, or their public backing of IVF means exactly nothing.

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In my post, I tried not to treat the Alabama court’s position with all the contempt it deserves, so I resisted the temptation to include the “Every Sperm is Sacred” scene from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.

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In other religious-right news: The campaign to overturn the Obergefell same-sex marriage decision begins in Tennessee, with a law allowing state officials to refuse to solemnize same-sex marriages.

This law wouldn’t block same-sex marriages, because same-sex couples could still get a marriage license and find somebody other than a judge or other government official to play the celebrant role. But it does relegate them to a second-class status, which this Supreme Court will probably think is fine. This is exactly the kind of chipping-away that states did on Roe v Wade until it was reversed.

Personally, I judge these things by applying a racial analogy: What if a judge refused to marry an interracial couple to express his personal disapproval? Of course, Justice Alito is unmoved by this analogy. Recently he wrote that his dissent in Obergefell was prescient in foreseeing

that Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government.

Of course, if you want to deny the full rights of citizenship to people your religion disapproves of, and you believe that government officials should be able to treat them with official disrespect, you are a bigot. Conservative political correctness may not let people say so, but it’s not even a close call.

and Russia, Russia, Russia

Last week we learned that the Biden impeachment case — which had always been flimsy — had fallen completely apart: The star witness for the bribery story Republicans wanted to tell, Alexander Smirnov, had been indicted for making the whole thing up and lying to the FBI. Another prospective witness, Gal Luft, had been indicted last summer for arms trafficking and being an unregistered Chinese agent.

This week we found out it’s worse than that: Smirnov now says he got his anti-Biden stories from Russian intelligence.

Jay Kuo (him again) lays out the pipeline by which Russian disinformation found its way to the Trump Justice Department and from there to Republicans in Congress (Jim Jordan, James Comer, Chuck Grassley) who pushed it out to the country.

These GOP leaders are at best hapless dupes. They should have known and understood the games Russia was playing with them. But we shouldn’t discount the possibility that they were well aware that the Smirnov claims were false and may have originated from Russian intelligence… and then went along with them anyway.

Indeed, we should now actively investigate this possibility.

In a members-only newsletter on TPM, Josh Marshall wonders if the mainstream press is up to covering this story.

Donald Trump and his MAGA legions have spent years shock-training reporters not to bring up anything else about Russian disinformation programs aimed at helping Donald Trump. But they’re real. They’re continuing. They’re actually working. And that remains the case no matter how many times Donald Trump says “RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA” on Truth Social. Reporters have been conditioned to ignore the clear implications of what we’re learning.

So what does he think the real story is?

[W]e now see that almost all of 2023 was dominated by a legal/political story that was not only bogus but — according to prosecutors’ filings and the discredited source’s own admission to federal authorities — was a plant by the Russian intelligence services. That’s real. That requires an explanation as to how that was ever allowed to happen.

… The story here isn’t that the “Biden Crime Family” nonsense didn’t pan out. That was always transparently bogus. The story here is how the U.S. again got bamboozled by transparent foreign manipulation and how the U.S. political press bought into it pretty much whole hog. That doesn’t mean they accepted all the claims. But they treated it as reasonable, worthy of a presumption of seriousness, a serious story to be covered as such. Even with the veritable forest of red flags.

and the Trump trials

Judge Engoron officially filed his judgment against Trump Friday, with the disgorgement-plus-interest standing at $454 million. This sets the clock running: Trump has 30 days to appeal. But appealing doesn’t mean he gets to delay coming up with a substantial amount of money.

Trump has two options to meet the state’s demand: to pay the amount in full, or secure a $35m bond against his assets, which might include the Fifth Avenue Trump Tower, 40 Wall Street, his Mar-a-Lago estate, or a number of golf courses in the US.

The WaPo examines the difficulties Trump faces raising cash.

“If the guy can give phony financial statements, he can give phony information to the bonding company,” [attorney Mark C.] Zauderer said, referring to Engoron’s finding in the case that the Trump Organization submitted false information to banks to obtain loans. “A bonding company who is going to put up several hundred million dollars here is not, in my opinion, going to do it easily.”

Those Carroll and NY state totals face very different prospects on appeal. The Carroll money is mostly punitive damages, which was a judgment call made by the jury; an appeals court might make its own judgment and find that excessive. But the NY State money is based on disgorgement of specific ill-gotten gains. To reduce them, an appeals court would need to rejudge Engoron’s conclusions: It would have to find either that Trump did not commit fraud, or that the fraud was not connected to these particular gains.

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I’m not going to put a lot of effort into making fun of Trump’s branded sneakers, because it’s shooting fish in a barrel. But I will pass on one nickname they have picked up: Aryan Jordans. And one suggested slogan I heard: “Fast. Faster. Fascist.”

and media malpractice

I already mentioned Josh Marshall’s doubts that the mainstream media is up to covering the Smirnov story. But that’s just part of a much larger failing.

This week, a new Quinnipiac poll had Biden ahead of Trump 49%-45%. So of course Politico’s headline was “Poll: Nearly 70 percent of voters say Biden is too old to serve again“. There’s no such thing as good news for Biden.

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Jeff Tiedrich recalls “the Clinton rules”

basically, Bill or Hillary would do something that every other politician in the entire history of the world does — something as simple as holding a fundraiser, or giving a speech — and the press would report it in hushed tones and describe it as if it were some new kind of dastardly scandal.

Well, the same thing is happening with Biden: Whatever he does — even if every other politician in the world does it — is evidence that he’s too old. Tiedrich links to The Daily Mail, which has discovered the latest evidence of Biden’s senility: He uses note cards!

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Mark Jacobs raises a significant question about the NYT: “Is the New York Times neutral on the future of democracy?” He calls out all the doubts I have about whether the Times deserves my subscription: They regularly give a platform to known liars. They cover politics as “an amusing game”, analyzing everything as strategy without discussing the consequences. They write headlines that hide horrible things Republicans say (like when Trump’s “vermin” comment was simply “a very different direction” for a Veterans Day speech). And they find “balance” for every terrible thing Republicans do. (Trump is facing criminal charges? He encourages Putin to invade our allies? Yeah, but Biden is old. Biden’s age is filling the same “balancing” role that Hillary’s emails played in 2016.)

The Times’ best work is very, very good. But I continue to wonder whether it’s a net positive or negative for American journalism. One change you may have noticed on this blog: I used to subtly encourage my readers to subscribe, but I no longer do. So I’m only linking to NYT articles if there is something unique about them. If I can get the same information from The Guardian or CNN, I will.

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The New York Times Pitchbot suggests an angle for the Times to take in the future:

Given the fact that Trump and Biden have 91 felony counts between them, it’s no wonder that so many Americans are considering voting third party.

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Last week I linked to Ezra Klein’s call for Biden not to run, and for the Democrats to hold an open convention. This week many people pushed back on that idea. Lindsay Beyerstein called attention to Biden’s success at unifying the divergent wings of the Democratic Party, and predicted that party unity would dissolve in an open convention.

In 2024, a contested convention would become an arena to settle every score from Gaza to Medicare for All. A free-for-all would shatter the fragile Democratic coalition that Joe Biden so carefully knit together.

Several pundits made the same observation: No alternative candidate is doing better than Biden in the polls against Trump. (Current polls show the race more-or-less even.) You can claim that’s a name-recognition problem and they’ll do better after they’re nominated, but that’s a leap of faith.

Josh Marshall writes:

The right answer to anyone making these kinds of open-ended statements of concern is to say, tell me specifically what course of action you’re advocating and, if it’s switching to a new candidate, how you get there in the next few weeks? … Klein’s argument really amounts to a highly pessimistic but not unreasonable analysis of the present situation which he resolves with what amounts to a deus ex machina plot twist. That’s not a plan. It’s a recipe for paralysis.

and the wars

As Israel prepares its ground operation against Rafah (the southern-Gaza town where refugees have gathered), it still has no goal beyond the vague and unachievable “destroy Hamas”. For an analysis of how everything arrived at this state, I recommend Zack Beauchamp’s Vox article “How Israel’s War Went Wrong“.

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In The New Yorker, a Palestinian who escaped to Egypt describes how the relatives he left behind are scrambling for food.

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Biden continues to back away from Netanyahu very, very slowly. Friday, the administration restored a legal finding the Trump administration had reversed, saying that the West Bank settlements are against international law.

Tomorrow’s Michigan primary will be a test of how much Biden’s Israel policy is costing him, as Palestinian activists are campaigning for Democrats to vote “uncommitted” rather than for Biden.

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We just passed the two-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. PBS Newshour gathered some experts to summarize.

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My two-years-in observation is about the politics of the Ukraine War in the US: It resembles the politics of January 6. At the beginning, Americans responded the way human beings would. They sympathized with a country trying to get out of the orbit of Putin’s fascist Russia when Putin’s forces invaded to pull them back in. (I’ve since read all kinds of explanations about how either Ukraine or the West provoked Russia, and I just don’t see it. There was never a threat to invade Russia through Ukraine. Anything less is a problem for diplomacy, not justification for an invasion. The typical answer to that point is to bring up the US invasion of Iraq, which was also unprovoked. But I have no trouble admitting that the Iraq invasion was wrong too.)

That initial gut response wasn’t controversial in America. In the early days of the war, everybody, regardless of political party, was rooting for the underdog Ukrainians and wondering what we could do to help. That’s how the situation was similar to January 6: In the beginning, everybody who wasn’t actively involved in the coup reacted with horror to Trump’s brownshirts attacking the Capitol to try to keep him in power by force. Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, and just about the whole GOP establishment united with Democrats in their initial rejection of what Trump had done.

But then the MAGA media machine and the MAGA social-media conspiracy theorists got to work on reversing the natural human instincts of the people under their sway, and today both Ukraine and January 6 are partisan issues.

and the dysfunctional House of Representatives

Ukraine aid isn’t the only thing House Republicans are stalling. Speaker Johnson has recessed the House until Wednesday, with a partial government shutdown looming Friday and the rest of the government running out of money a week later. The WaPo reports that “talks have slowed” on a compromise to prevent a shutdown.

The four appropriations bills set to expire Friday — agriculture; military construction-VA; energy and water and transportation; housing and urban development — are the easier ones. On March 8, funding runs out for more controversial bills for which the far right is demanding even more explosive policy riders around abortion, LGBTQ rights and border security.

and you also might be interested in …

South Carolina’s Republican primary was Saturday, and Trump won over Haley, 59%-39%. How you read that result depends on the question you’re asking. If you’re focused on whether Trump will be nominated, this is a very solid positive result. If Haley is 20 points down in her home state, she really has no chance.

But if your question is whether Trump will be able to unite the Republican voters in the fall, this is a weak showing. Voters went in knowing Trump was the almost certain nominee, but 39% refused to get in line behind him.

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Democracy is returning to Wisconsin. For many years, the Wisconsin legislature has been gerrymandered to guarantee Republican control, independent of the will of the voters. AP reports that Democrats have won 14 of the last 17 statewide elections, but somehow those same elections have yielded a Republican supermajority (22-10) in the state senate and a near supermajority (64-35) in the state assembly.

Nonetheless, the voters of Wisconsin still had access to a few levers of power. Last April, Janet Protasiewicz won a 55%-44% victory to gain a seat on the state supreme court, flipping the court to liberal control. In December, the court ruled 4-3 to throw out the Republican-drawn legislative maps. Forced to negotiate with Democratic Governor Tony Evers (another winner of a statewide election), the Republican legislature produced a relatively fair map, which Evers signed into law last Monday.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:

Under the new state Assembly map, the districts are more evenly split. The new map has 46 districts that lean Republican and 45 districts that lean Democratic. The eight districts left are likely to be a toss-up between Democratic and Republican candidates. …

Under the new state Senate map, 14 out of 33 districts are Democratic-leaning, while 15 are Republican-leaning. Four districts are competitive, where either party has a fair chance of winning them.

However, the Wisconsin congressional maps are still gerrymandered, and Republicans hold six of the eight seats. Democratic voters are packed into the other two districts (containing Madison and Milwaukee), which they won by 19 and 25 points.

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The NYT reports on “The Crisis in Teaching Constitutional Law“. What’s the crisis? The clearly partisan nature of the current conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court. The older generation of professors once shared a faith that interpreting the Constitution is a meaningful activity transcending politics. Justices might have philosophical differences that lead to diverse conclusions, but fundamentally they are all making a good-faith attempt to understand what the law means. Recent Supreme Court decisions — like the Bruen gun control decision — have shaken that faith, to the point that law professors don’t know what to teach their students.

Whatever rationale or methodology the justices apply in a given case, the result virtually always aligns with the policy priorities of the modern Republican Party. …

Stanford’s Professor McConnell recalled a recent exchange in one of his classes. “I said something to the effect of, ‘It’s important to assume that the people you disagree with are speaking in good faith.’ And a student raises his hand and he asks, ‘Why? Why should we assume that people on the other side are acting in good faith?’ This was not a crazy person; this was a perfectly sober-minded, rational student. And I think the question was sincere. And I think that’s kind of shocking. I do think that some of the underlying assumptions of how a civil society operates can no longer be assumed.”

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I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that “the stock market always goes up in the long run”. Well, sometimes the long run is a very long time indeed. If you bought Japanese stocks at their peak in 1989, you finally turned a profit this week.

and let’s close with some musical training

I’ve heard lots of versions of Pachebel’s Canon, but never before one based on train whistles.

Defendant Donald John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020. One of the states he lost was Georgia. Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.

– The State of Georgia vs. Donald John Trump et al

This week’s featured post is “Why I’m Optimistic about 2024“.

This week everybody was talking about the weather

It’s hard to keep up with Climate Change Summer. Last week we were still digesting the burning of LaHaina. Friday, Canada was evacuating Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, as wildfires approached. Yesterday, a tropical storm hit Los Angeles, something that literally never happens. Las Vegas is expecting heavy rain and strong winds. Most of the towns and buildings in the path of Hilary were built under the assumption that this can’t happen.

As usual, I won’t try to keep up with breaking news. But I do want to make two observations:

• It’s time to stop arguing about climate change. Anyone who won’t admit what we can see with our own eyes is not worth talking to.
• For years we’ve been hearing that computer models of the climate were unreliable and could be inaccurate. Such doubts have been spread by people who want to deny the problem. But it’s just as likely that the errors in the models make them too conservative. We need to think about the possibility that climate change could be worse than scientists’ predictions.

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The usual suspects are trying to connect aid to Ukraine with the federal emergency response to Maui, as if Hawaii were being ignored and cutting Ukraine aide would help Hawaians. Beau of the Fifth Column covers the Maui aid process pretty well.

As for Ukraine, it’s as if Democrats said, “Why are we spending money on Trump’s secret service detail rather than helping people in Maui?” These decisions should all be made on their own merits.

and the Trump trials

The Fulton County indictment, Trump’s fourth, dropped Monday night. It covers some of the same actions as Jack Smith’s January 6 conspiracy indictment — Trump’s “perfect phone call” to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger figures in both, for example — but Fani Willis has written a much more sweeping narrative. While Smith’s is laser-focused on Trump, leveling four charges and leaving his co-conspirators unnamed, Willis’ indictment charges 19 people with 41 crimes. Trump and Rudy Giuliani are charged with the most crimes, 13 counts each.

What structures the indictment is a RICO charge, a claim that Trump led a corrupt enterprise that committed a number of individual crimes in service of a single illegal goal:

Defendant Donald John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020. One of the states he lost was Georgia. Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.

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Smith’s indictment, unlike Willis’, is streamlined to get to trial quickly. Smith has requested a January 2 trial date, while Trump’s lawyers produced the laughable suggestion of April, 2026. Judge Chutkan is expected to announce the real trial date by August 28.

A number of other issues will come before Chutkan soon: What to do about Trump’s direct defiance of her order not to make “inflammatory statements” about the case that could be construed as threatening witnesses or trying to taint the jury pool.

And a different federal judge will have to decide Mark Meadows’ motion to move his trial from Georgia state court to federal court and then dismiss the charges. Even if Meadows gets his way about removing the case from Georgia courts, the trial will still take place under Georgia law, and presidential pardons would still be off the table. Dismissing the charges seems unlikely.

Trump will likely file similar motions. Lawrence Tribe et al explain why they should fail.

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Several detailed summaries of the Georgia indictment are out there. Here’s Lawfare’s.

The 98-page indictment itself is a bit dull to read, largely because it endlessly repeats a number of phrases that I assume have significance in Georgia law. For example, the RICO charge is split into 161 individual acts, not all of which are illegal in and of themselves. Each one concludes with some version of “this was an overt act in futherance of the conspiracy”. Each of the 41 charges gets its own section, which ends with “contrary to the laws of said State, the good order, peace, and dignity thereof.”

By the end, I was amusing myself by picturing a liturgical performance of the indictment, with the acts and charges as a call-and-response: A cantor chants the content, and the congregation responds “this was an act in furtherance of the conspiracy” or “contrary to the laws of said State, the good order, peace, and dignity thereof,” as appropriate. At every mention of an unidentified person (Individual 24, say), a background choir intones “whose identity is known to the grand jury”.

If you want to stage such a performance, feel free to take the idea and run with it. Just mention my name in the program and send me a YouTube link.

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The Georgia indictment goes into detail on several incidents that are barely mentioned in the federal indictment. For example: trying to bully election worker Ruby Freeman into confessing to fictitious election fraud, and illegally gaining access to voting machines and voting-machine software in Coffee County.

I had heard about both of these incidents before, but did not appreciate how they fit into the larger conspiracy. The woman who offered Freeman “protection” if she confessed was not just a rogue actor inspired by Trump’s lies; she conspired with Harrison William Prescott Floyd, who was director of Black Voices for Trump; Robert Cheeley, who participated in Rudy Giuliani’s presentation to Georgia legislators, the one in which Freeman was originally slandered; and Scott Graham Hall, who was also involved in the Coffee County voting-machine break-in.

The Coffee County incident also involved Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, fake elector Cathy Latham, and a number of other conspirators.

Acts like these may not have the scope of the fake-elector plot or pressuring Mike Pence to violate the Constitution, but they are the kind of building blocks RICO cases are built on, because they are clearly criminal. There’s no other way to spin the video of Trevian Kutti telling Ruby Freeman she needs to be “moved” within 48 hours to avoid some unspecified consequence. “I cannot say what will specifically will take place. I just know that it will disrupt your freedom and the freedom of one or more of your family members. … You are a loose end for a party that needs to tidy up.” Terrorizing a public official is classic racketeering.

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There’s a legal debate going on about whether the 14th Amendment bars Trump from ever serving as president again. I won’t comment because I haven’t done enough research to have an opinion worth sharing.

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Sadly, Trump has cancelled the press conference today that was going to introduce “A Large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT on the Presidential Election Fraud which took place in Georgia”. This REPORT was going to completely exonerate him from the charges in the Fulton County indictment.

I say “sadly” without irony, because I welcome any development that commits Trump to a fixed position. Rhetorically, Trump is at his strongest when he can float above the discussion, making loose references to a hazy collection of theories that he never quite commits to. While any single claim is probably absurd and easily refuted — Fox News, for example, paid $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems rather than try to defend his rigged-voting-machine lies in court — the entire cloud is hard to get a handle on. Supporters can acknowledge the obvious problems with this claim or that one, while still believing that some other unspecified Biden-stole-the-election theory is true.

Trump fears going to court and is desperately trying to delay his trials because court processes are designed to cut through such fog. His lawyers will have to tell the jury a single coherent story, and he doesn’t have one.

I wish he’d produce a similar “Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT” about the Mar-a-Lago documents. At various times he has implied that he declassified the documents, suggested the documents were planted by the FBI, and claimed “I had every right to have these documents” even if they were classified. These claims contradict each other and are all absurd, but when one is refuted his supporters can simply shift to another. By the time they come back around to their original excuse, they’ve forgotten why it’s false.

So I’d love to see him commit to a single narrative, whatever it is. By all means, Mr. Trump, tell us your side of the story. Write a legal affadavit and sign your name to it — preferably under penalty of perjury. Your cultlike followers may refuse to read the indictments against you, refuse to watch the January 6 hearings, and in general cover their ears against any unwelcome information, but I promise you this: I will read any REPORT you put out there. If you have exculpatory evidence, I want to see it.

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Trump may not be announcing his first-and-best stolen-election claims, but Mike Lindell is, and it’s the same old crap that has been debunked many times.

and Hunter

For almost a year, Republicans have complained that the US attorney investigating Hunter Biden wasn’t given special-counsel status. Now he has been, and they’re complaining about that too.

I seldom discuss Hunter Biden on this blog, for a simple reason: Until whatever Hunter is supposed to have done can be credibly connected to something his father did, I don’t care. I don’t need to see absolute proof before I get concerned, but give me something beyond MAGA wishful thinking. Hunter has never held a government office (unlike, say, Jared Kushner), and he appears to have had no direct influence on US policy.

He appears to have done some illegal things — hence the plea deal that fell through — though exactly what those are is never quite clear. He has also traded on his name, which is unsavory but annoyingly common and not illegal. Whatever he has or hasn’t done, he should be treated like anyone else would be — no better and no worse. If he ends up going to jail, I’m sure that will make his father sad. But that means nothing to me, because I care about the US government, not the Biden family.

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Democrats would do well to write a broad anti-corruption law, one that would apply to future actions like the ones Hunter, Jared, Clarence Thomas, and Ginny Thomas are alleged to have committed. Holding high office should put restrictions and reporting obligations not just on the officeholder, but on close relatives as well. Republicans would of course oppose the law, and it wouldn’t pass, but it would be a good issue to run on in 2024.

and you also might be interested in …

The ten states with the lowest age-adjusted suicide rates are all blue states. The ten with the highest are nine red states and New Mexico. This probably has something to do with the availability of guns. [As a commenter points out below, I missed Colorado on the highest-suicide list. So it’s eight red states and two bluish-purple states.]

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Kat Abu examines Fox News’ persistent attacks on the very idea of being educated.

and let’s close with something inevitable

Epic Rap Battles had to do a Barbie vs. Oppenheimer.

He is a criminal defendant. He is going to have constraints the same as any defendant. This case is going to proceed in a normal order.

– Judge Tanya Chutkan

This week’s featured post is “How did Frederick Douglass become a conservative spokesman?“

This week everybody was talking about the fires in Maui

They’re still finding bodies in burned-out buildings in Lahaina, the main city in Maui. As of this morning the toll was up to 96 deaths. As you can see in the picture above, people stuck in traffic had to abandon their vehicles and try to escape on foot.

The wildfire had two main causes: dry grass and high winds. One recent theory is that the winds blew over some power lines, which sparked the grass. Extreme dryness and wind are two symptoms of climate change, and the Maui disaster is just the latest event in our Climate Change Summer, which has also included smoke from Canadian fires blanketing the Northeast, extreme rain and flooding in Vermont and Pennsylvania, and record heat in the Southwest and Florida.

Politicians who deny what we can see with our own eyes, or who want to ignore the whole issue, are not worth arguing with any more. They just need to be voted out.

and Trump’s trials

Fulton County DA Fani Willis will seek a Trump indictment this week. The Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Tamar Hallerman lays out what to expect from this indictment, which might appear as soon as tomorrow. As I keep saying, I could speculate about the content, but in a few days I can just read it.

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Most of the Trump-trial news this week concerned Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the DC trial for the January 6 conspiracy. In a hearing Friday, she issued a protective order barring Trump from using material the government is sharing in the discovery process to badger or intimidate witnesses against him. She also warned that she would be watching Trump’s public statements closely.

The fact that he is running a political campaign currently has to yield to the administration of justice. And if that means he can’t say exactly what he wants to say in a political speech, that is just how it’s going to have to be.

It’s worth noting that Americans cannot be deprived of their rights “without due process of law”. Trump temporarily faces a judge’s restrictions because a grand jury of American citizens has found sufficient evidence to indict him for several serious crimes. That’s due process of law.

If Trump does appear to be trying to intimidate witnesses or taint the jury pool, Judge Chutkan has a number of possible responses, which include revoking his bail and putting him in jail until the trial is complete. But there has been speculation that Trump would welcome such a move, because he could make political hay out of the “persecution” he had brought on himself. (I doubt this; I think Trump is terrified of jail.) So Friday Chutkan made a novel threat: If Trump won’t behave himself, she might have to move the trial along faster to protect witnesses, prosecutors, and everyone else involved (including herself).

Given that Trump’s whole strategy has been to delay the trial until he becomes president again — as I explained last week, he doesn’t seem to have any other viable defense — that threat might have some teeth.

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What the people Trump targets might need protection from was underlined last week when the FBI tried to arrest a Utah man who had made detailed threats against President Biden (and other Trump enemies like Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg). A judge deemed these threats credible, so an arrest warrant was issued. The man was armed when agents arrived, and was killed when (according to the FBI) he pointed a weapon at the arresting agents.

Naturally, the man is now considered a martyr by the violent Right. These same people would respond to reports of police killing a person of color with “Why didn’t he just comply?” But the laws are supposed to work differently for them.

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This is far from the first time an avowed Trump supporter has repeated Trump’s rhetoric before threatening or carrying out violent acts.

It’s worth remembering how normal American politicians respond to such situations. In 2017, a Bernie Sanders supporter brought a gun to a baseball practice for congressional Republicans and began shooting, badly wounding Rep. Steve Scalise and several others. Afterwards, Sanders made this statement:

I have just been informed that the alleged shooter at the Republican baseball practice is someone who apparently volunteered on my presidential campaign. I am sickened by this despicable act. Let me be as clear as I can be: Violence of any kind is unacceptable in our society and I condemn this action in the strongest possible terms. Real change can only come about through nonviolent action, and anything else runs against our most deeply held American values.

Trump has never made any similar statement, and it is difficult to imagine him doing so. More typically, he makes excuses for his violent supporters, lauding how “passionate” they are. On January 6, Trump explained to Kevin McCarthy that the rioters who had invaded the Capitol and were chanting “hang Mike Pence” were just “more upset about the election” than McCarthy was. When he did eventually ask the rioters to go home, he told them “We love you. You’re very special.“

So if you belong to Trump’s personality cult and you want him to love you, you know what to do.

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Trump’s apparent approval of violence continues. Saturday at the Iowa State Fair, Rep. Matt Gaetz told a crowd that “we know that only through force do we make any change in a corrupt town like Washington, D.C.” Trump was standing right there, and made no attempt to distance himself from Gaetz’ rhetoric.

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Merrick Garland has taken a lot of criticism lately. Andrew Weissmann, formerly a top assistant to Robert Mueller, put it like this:

We [should] not forget that the predicament Jack Smith is in, racing to get and keep trial dates pre-election, is [be]cause Garland was so slow to pursue a top down investigation.

The conventional wisdom says that Garland didn’t want DoJ to prosecute Trump because he was already wary of the weaponization-of-justice cudgel the Right was going to beat him with. But the House January 6 Committee so clearly demonstrated Trump’s criminality that Garland’s see-no-evil position became untenable. So that’s how we got here, but arrived more than a year late.

Jay Kuo, however, makes an interesting counter-argument: No matter how obvious it might be to the casual observer that January 6 was a great crime against America, the laws were not written with January 6 in mind. So no matter how DoJ proceeded, it was going to have to apply laws in new ways, using interpretations that had never been tested in court.

Making Donald Trump the test case was bound to be fraught. So Garland started at the bottom, with the foot-soldiers who invaded the Capitol. Sure, they were trespassing, but wasn’t there more to it that that? What else could they be charged with? Some had attacked police, but what about the ones who hadn’t (or at least weren’t on video doing so)?

There’s a law against obstructing an official proceeding, but the main thrust of that law is about forging official documents, and whether the clause about obstructing a proceeding “otherwise” applied here hadn’t been tested. And was the joint session of Congress on January 6 an “official proceeding” under this law? What did disrupting it “corruptly” mean?

So Garland’s DoJ went about establishing these points in cases that didn’t have to carry the emotional and political baggage of a case against Trump. Appeals of some of those cases did challenge those interpretations, and those appeals weren’t resolved until April of this year. One (the meaning of “corruptly”) is still pending.

So maybe DoJ was always fated to race against the 2024 election. And maybe Attorney General Garland knew what he was doing.

and the pro-reproductive-rights vote in Ohio

Sometimes politics gets so ridiculous that only a comedian can describe it. Here’s Trae Crowder, a.k.a. the Liberal Redneck.

Ohio Republicans found out that the people of their state were likely to pass an amendment that would protect abortion rights in Ohio. And when they heard that, Ohio Republicans said, “The people of Ohio must be stopped.” So they tried to pass another law before that which would require 60% of the vote instead of the usual simple majority. So basically they went to the people of Ohio and said “Hey y’all. We want y’all to vote on whether or not your vote should count for shit.” And the people of Ohio went, “Uh, I think I’m gonna vote for my vote should count for shit.”

And Ohio Republicans just started stomping their feet and making a shocked Pikachu face. Like, I don’t know what they expected. Like what do they think? People are gonna line up around the block to disenfranchise themselves? What did they think was gonna happen, you know?

But this is their playbook now, y’all. This is what they do, because they’ve finally come to understand that they are not actually popular. Right? It took ’em a long time. For years and years they were alienating and demonizing women, Black people, gay people, Mexicans, minorities, immigrants, smart people, poor people, and everybody in between. They’ve been years doing that, and now they’re like “Why don’t anybody like us?”

Oh, I don’t know, truly a mystery for the ages, that one. But either way, they understand it now. They realize that, generally speaking, the American people do not agree with them on things like abortion, gay rights, civil rights, the economy, healthcare — none of it.

They’ve come to realize that and they’ve arrived at this conclusion: If hearts of the people cannot be won, then the will of the people must be quashed. That’s right. They understand that in a functioning democracy, their policies would be relegated to the impotent fringe, and have decided that therefore, from this point forward, this democracy should no longer properly function.

That’s what all this is about, y’all, the gerrymandering laws, voter restriction laws, and January 6 and the Big Lie — all of it.

And it’s not just in Ohio. In Wisconsin, Republicans have managed to gerrymander their way into a supermajority in the Senate, in a state where Democrats have been winning statewide races, including a race in April that gave liberals control of the state supreme court.

Now the map that gerrymanders Republicans into power is coming before the supreme court, and Republicans are threatening to use their illegitimate supermajority to impeach the new liberal justice if she doesn’t recuse herself.

The people of Wisconsin must be stopped!

and education in Florida

When Governor DeSantis got his Don’t-Say-Gay and Stop WOKE Acts through the Florida legislature, the doom-saying of many liberal pundits was written off as “alarmist”. Surely when it got down to cases, reasonable interpretations would prevail and it wouldn’t be that bad. But developments in recent weeks have shown that in fact it’s worse.

One DeSantis priority is that schools stop cooperating with kids who want to try out a different gender identity without their parents’ explicit permission. So if Timmy wants to be known at school as Tammy, Timmy/Tammy’s teachers are supposed to notify the parents, even if doing so violates the child’s trust.

But who’s to decide the gender implications of a nickname? Maybe Samantha wants to be Sam not because she’s experiencing a crisis of femininity, but because she thinks it sounds cooler. So, do her parents need to be notified? Schools don’t want to take responsibility for making such judgments. Hence this email to parents in Seminole County:

If you would like for your child to be able to use a name aside from their legal given name on any of our campuses, we will ask for you to complete the consent form titled “Parental Authorization for Deviation from Student’s Legal Name Form.”

Orange County announced a similar rule. And yes, it does mean exactly what it says.

The rule would impact everyone from students who prefer using a shorthand nickname (“Tom” versus “Thomas,” for instance), to those who prefer a different name altogether, including transgender students

All my life, I’ve gone by Doug rather than Douglas, the name on my birth certificate. And my parents never had to fill out a form to make that OK.

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Last week, I reported on the controversy over whether the College Board’s AP Psychology course could be taught in Florida schools. As of last week, the state Department of Education was saying it could be taught “in a manner that is age and developmentally appropriate.” Nobody knew what that really meant, so several school districts announced they still wouldn’t teach the course.

And in a phone call Tuesday, a spokesperson for Brevard Public Schools, a district about 50 miles east of Orlando, said it was also abiding by the Education Department’s initial guidance, referring NBC News to a statement from the district last week.

“In essence, if we don’t teach all of the content, our students will not receive AP credit. If we do teach all of the content, our instructors will violate the law,” the statement said. “Therefore, we will not offer AP Psychology at any of our high schools this year.”

Wednesday, Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. tried to make the state’s position clearer:

It is the Department of Education’s stance that the learning target, 6.P ‘Describe how sex and gender influence socialization and other aspects of development,’ within Topic 6.7, can be taught consistent with Florida law

But even with that explicit permission, some school districts are not willing to take the chance that the way they do teach AP Psych will match Diaz’s official view of how it can be taught. So the class won’t be reinserted into their course catalogs.

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This week something similar happened with Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet may be a classic, but fundamentally it’s about two teens who have sex despite their parents’ disapproval. And sure, it’s a tragedy and (spoilers!) they both wind up dead. But still, the whole love-and-death saga is kind of glorious somehow, especially from an emo-adolescent perspective. (According to “Don’t Fear the Reaper” they’re “together in eternity” and “we can be like they are”.) Is this “age appropriate” for high school students? In Ron DeSantis’ Christo-fascist Florida?

So, citing the bard’s overall “raunchiness”, Hillsborough County announced that it would only teach excerpts of Shakespeare, not whole plays, and several other counties were considering following that example. The bad press from those decisions caused FDoE to issue another explicit permission:

The Florida Department of Education in no way believes Shakespeare should be removed from Florida classrooms.

So R&J is back in sophomore English, and all’s well that ends well, so OK then. But still, these episodes underline something I find disturbing: In practice, Florida schools have become a place where everything not explicitly permitted is forbidden. So what happens to literature less canonized than Romeo and Juliet or topics that don’t have the College Board lobbying for them? As the vagueness of Florida’s new laws causes schools to steer clear of anything that might fall into the enormous gray zone those laws have created, how many valuable works — full of ideas that might engage teens, make them think, or spark meaningful discussions — are being swept out the door without making headlines?

Plutarch once wrote (more or less): “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.” But teachers are never fired for failing to kindle young minds. Being dull and demonstrating to your students that education is pointless can be the safest course — especially in Florida.

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But the development that best displays the Orwellian nature of DeSantis’ “Freedom from Indoctrination” slogan is Florida’s approval of Prager University videos for use in the public schools. That’s discussed in the featured post.

and you also might be interested in …

The ongoing war between red states and their blue cities has claimed a new victim: Houston school libraries. Houston schools have been taken over by the state, leaving locally elected school boards with little say.

In Houston, Texas, dozens of public schools won’t have librarians and traditional libraries when classes start later this month. It’s part of a controversial reform effort in the state’s largest school district. The new superintendent says schools in working-class areas need good teachers more than they need librarians.

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While we continue to worry about inflation, China is experiencing deflation. This can be an even more serious problem, because it can lead to cascading bankruptcies: As money gains value, debts become harder to repay. So people and businesses sell assets to raise cash, depressing prices further.

What an inflating West and a deflating China means for the world economy is hard to predict.

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Using government power to make “woke” corporations toe the conservative line isn’t just a DeSantis thing, it’s catching on in Republican circles generally. Here, Fox News’ Laura Ingraham warns Apple and Disney that when Republicans regain power “everything will be on the table — your copyright and trademark protection, your special status within certain states, and even your corporate structure itself”.

Recall that Mussolini’s definition of fascism was the merger of state and corporate power.

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I can’t explain why the Montgomery dock brawl went viral the way it did, but it inspired some great creativity, including this version using the theme to “Good Times” and ending with some white folding chairs painted into a Harlem Renaissance artwork.

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If you’re not following Kat Abu on social media, you should be. She watches Fox News so you don’t have to, and summarizes it in a way that will usually make you laugh rather than fume.

I sometimes picture a gaggle of blond Fox News hosts watching Kat and saying, “Girl, if you just used more make-up and changed your hair, you could get a job here.”

and let’s close with something artificial

If there’s one thing AI is perfect for, it’s producing stereotypes. Most of the time that’s a problem. If you’re trusting AI to write your term paper on Transylvania, for example, you’ll need to make sure you aren’t repackaging a bunch of vampire mythology as fact. But somebody used AI to create images of the most stereotypical person from each of the 50 states.

They aren’t intended to be funny, just stereotypical. Here’s the Californian.

The next new articles will appear on August 22.

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. … The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty.

– President Abraham Lincoln (April 18, 1864)

This week’s featured post is “The Emotional Roots of Political Polarization“.

This week everybody was talking about Build Back Better

Joe Manchin announced on Fox News Sunday that he could not vote for President Biden’s Build Back Better bill, effectively dooming it. The White House released an angry statement in response, ratifying the breakdown in the Biden/Manchin relationship.

For half a year, Manchin has delayed progress on the bill, raising the question of whether he would eventually come through after he had whittled the proposal down to his liking, or if he was simply stringing Biden along. Now it looks like the latter.

Manchin’s decision sinks a number of popular proposals, including lowering prescription drug prices, continuing the child tax credit, and mitigating climate change.

and January 6

During the House debate on whether to find Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in contempt of Congress for his defiance of a subpoena, (the contempt resolution passed) members of the January 6 Committee revealed a number of text messages Meadows had received on January 6 from various conservative luminaries, including Fox News hosts, at least one member of Congress, and Donald Trump Jr.

The point of publicizing these texts was that they emphasize the need for Meadows’ testimony. But they make another important point about the subsequent cover-up of January 6: As much as Trump propagandists try to claim that (1) the Capitol insurrection wasn’t a big deal, and/or that (2) Trump bore no responsibility for it, they knew at the time that those things weren’t true.

The texts plead with Meadows to get Trump to stop the violence, which demonstrate their authors’ belief at the time that Trump was controlling the violence. The texts would make no sense if the demonstrators were basically peaceful, or if the violence were a false-flag operation sparked by antifa, as Trumpists like to claim.

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As Trump’s attempt to block the January 6 Committee’s access to documents from his administration goes to the Supreme Court, Vox points out what a flimsy claim he has under existing precedents. If the Court’s partisan majority wants to protect him, they’ll have to invent new law.

They might, but I’ll bet not. Roberts won’t go for it, and he only needs to convince one more conservative. Either Gorsuch or Kavanaugh might be that deciding vote. If the Court doesn’t find against Trump, they’ll manufacture an excuse to keep the legal wrangling going in hopes that a new Republican House majority will make the case moot by sacking the whole committee in 2023.

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The Atlantic follows freshman Republican Rep. Peter Meijer through the events of January 6.

On the House floor, moments before the vote, Meijer approached a member who appeared on the verge of a breakdown. He asked his new colleague if he was okay. The member responded that he was not; that no matter his belief in the legitimacy of the election, he could no longer vote to certify the results, because he feared for his family’s safety. “Remember, this wasn’t a hypothetical. You were casting that vote after seeing with your own two eyes what some of these people are capable of,” Meijer says. “If they’re willing to come after you inside the U.S. Capitol, what will they do when you’re at home with your kids?”

That account led WaPo’s Aaron Blake to write “The role of violent threats in Trump’s GOP reign”.

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This is one panel of a Tom Tomorrow comic in which the news anchors outline the run of recent bad news.

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AP reviewed “every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump” — all 475 of them.

The cases could not throw the outcome into question even if all the potentially fraudulent votes were for Biden, which they were not, and even if those ballots were actually counted, which in most cases they were not.

The review also showed no collusion intended to rig the voting. Virtually every case was based on an individual acting alone to cast additional ballots.

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Not all Republicans are comfortable centering their Party on a lie that undermines democracy. Wisconsin State Senator Kathy Bernier called out her fellow Republicans.

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A Delaware judge has ruled that Dominion Voting System’s lawsuit against Fox News can go forward. At issue is whether Fox knew at the time that the election-fraud claims it was making against Dominion were baseless.

and Omicron

The pandemic numbers continue to increase: New cases per day in the US are up to 133K, a 21% rise over two weeks. Deaths are inching up: 1296 per day (7-day average), up 9%. Hospitalizations are at 69K, up 16%.

The records were set last January: 248K cases per day on January 11, deaths at 3336 per day on January 15, 140K hospitalized on January 5.

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Omicron spread in the United Kingdom is running ahead of the US, so it may provide a glimpse of our future. The UK has been setting new-case records, and London bars and restaurants have begun shutting down on their own, creating a “lockdown by stealth”.

The economic consequences could be more dire this time around, because the government isn’t providing support to businesses that close temporarily. That could happen here too.

There’s no federal money left to keep restaurants open. The aid for concert halls and other customer-starved performance spaces has nearly gone dry. Federal officials ended their primary effort that pumped money into small businesses with sagging balance sheets, and they stopped paying out extra sums to workers who are out of a job.

Like the original strain of Covid-19, Omicron is hitting the US first in New York City. [See the correction in the comments. Covid his NYC early and hard, but not first.] I’m writing these words in Florida, which has become a low-Covid oasis since the summer surge passed. But a new outbreak seems to be starting in Miami.

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Ed Yong’s article in The Atlantic does a great job of explaining the biology of Omicron in terms ordinary people can understand.

The coronavirus is a microscopic ball studded with specially shaped spikes that it uses to recognize and infect our cells. Antibodies can thwart such infections by glomming onto the spikes, like gum messing up a key. But Omicron has a crucial advantage: 30-plus mutations that change the shape of its spike and disable many antibodies that would have stuck to other variants.

… In terms of catching the virus, everyone should assume that they are less protected than they were two months ago. As a crude shorthand, assume that Omicron negates one previous immunizing event—either an infection or a vaccine dose. Someone who considered themselves fully vaccinated in September would be just partially vaccinated now (and the official definition may change imminently). But someone who’s been boosted has the same ballpark level of protection against Omicron infection as a vaccinated-but-unboosted person did against Delta.

… Even if Omicron has an easier time infecting vaccinated individuals, it should still have more trouble causing severe disease. The vaccines were always intended to disconnect infection from dangerous illness, turning a life-threatening event into something closer to a cold. Whether they’ll fulfill that promise for Omicron is a major uncertainty, but we can reasonably expect that they will. The variant might sneak past the initial antibody blockade, but slower-acting branches of the immune system (such as T cells) should eventually mobilize to clear it before it wreaks too much havoc.

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Data continues to come in.

Moderna’s results show that the currently authorized booster dose of 50 micrograms — half the dose given for primary immunization — increased the level of antibodies by roughly 37-fold, the company said. A full dose of 100 micrograms was even more powerful, raising antibody levels about 83-fold compared with pre-boost levels, Moderna said.

But not all the results are encouraging:

All vaccines approved in the United States and European Union still seem to provide a significant degree of protection against serious illness from Omicron, which is the most crucial goal. But only the Pfizer and Moderna shots, when reinforced by a booster, appear to have success at stopping infections, and these vaccines are unavailable in most of the world.

The other shots — including those from AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and vaccines manufactured in China and Russia — do little to nothing to stop the spread of Omicron, early research shows.

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Six anti-vax protesters were arrested for a sit-in at the Cheesecake Factory in New York City. They barged in after refusing to show their vaccine cards, as the city requires.

The protesters compared the employees who refused to serve them to Nazis, and claimed a constitutional right not to reveal their private medical information. (And that is true, of course. But there is no constitutional right to eat at Cheesecake Factory.)

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Because the sports leagues do such regular testing, they are spotting mild and asymptomatic Covid cases that the larger society misses. In the last two weeks, Covid’s effect on games has greatly increased. We’re starting to hear calls for the leagues to shut down again.

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Fox News has been actively denying the well-established link between vaccine status and hospitalization for Covid.

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When it comes to pronunciation, I am on Team OH-micron rather than Team AH-micron. To me, it’s obvious: omicron is a companion to omega (little-o/big-o) and nobody says AH-mega.

and inflation

The Bank of England became the first central bank to start raising interest rates in response to rising inflation.

The Federal Reserve is also responding, but more slowly. The Fed controls short-term interest rates on dollar deposits more-or-less directly, through the rates that it charges to banks; it affects long-term rates indirectly, by purchasing bonds in the market.

The Federal Reserve said on Wednesday it would end its pandemic-era bond purchases in March and pave the way for three quarter-percentage-point interest rate hikes by the end of 2022 as the economy nears full employment and the U.S. central bank copes with a surge of inflation.

Paul Krugman writes a readable account of the history and causes of inflation, and summarizes the debate between economists who think the current inflation is transitory and those who expect it to persist. Krugman himself is on Team Transitory, but he acknowledges that the current bout has already gone further than he expected, and I think he presents the debate fairly.

The problem, as Krugman presents it, isn’t so much that demand has soared as that during the pandemic it shifted from services into goods.

The caricature version is that people unable or unwilling to go to the gym bought Pelotons instead, and something like that has in fact happened across the board.

Services tend to be local, but goods depend on a global supply chain, which hasn’t broken, but hasn’t responded flexibly enough to accommodate increased demand. This, Krugman believes, will work itself out: As the pandemic recedes, service consumption will go back up, and supply-chain adjustments are already being made.

A second factor has been workers’ reluctance to return to the labor market, the so-called Great Resignation, which is forcing wages up. Krugman confesses he doesn’t understand exactly what is causing this or how quickly workers will come back.

A third factor in inflationary periods of the past has been psychological: Businesses raise prices and workers demand higher wages because they’re convinced that other prices will go up. In other words, inflation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. He doesn’t see evidence of this happening yet, but acknowledges that it could.

but you might want to think about this

Take a look at James Muldoon’s article “Regulating Big Tech is not enough. We need platform socialism.” I’m not sure how these specific ideas would work in practice, but I think we need to expand the universe of possible solutions to our social-media problem.

In practice, all participatory democracy processes — the daily hours-long open meetings of the Occupy movement being a prime example — run into the widespread desire for what I like to call Disneyland authoritarianism: Somebody should set things up so that I don’t have to worry about how anything works, and I don’t care if they exploit me a little as long as they also provide an enjoyable experience.

Disneyland authoritarianism works fine in a place like Disneyland, where management knows that you can easily walk out and never come back if you don’t like how you’re treated.

A lot of democratic-on-paper organizations end up running in a Disneyland authoritarian manner, because only a small group of people can be bothered to show up to decision-making meetings and man the bureaucracy. As long as the insider cabal keeps providing the services that the larger community expects and maintaining an acceptable level of quality, most people are content to fall into the role of customers rather than citizens. And that can be OK, as long as the processes are transparent and the cabal’s boundaries are permeable.

Small-town school boards are a good example. As long as local schools function at an acceptable level, most people can’t be bothered to participate, or even to vote in school-board elections. Democratic control exists mainly as a fail-safe, but that’s enough to keep authoritarian abuses at bay.

Disneyland authoritarianism becomes problematic when essential systems of everyday life depend on decisions made inside a Disneyland by a cabal that isn’t transparent or permeable. That’s the problem with social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

In the beginning, free privately owned social media apps seemed like a good deal. We got to stay in touch with our friends, participate in communities of interest, and so on. Sure, they harvested our data and used it to target ads at us, but that seemed like a small price. If we didn’t like their online Disneylands, we could leave them and never come back.

But now we’ve gotten into a situation where democracy itself is strongly influenced by what happens inside social media platforms that are organized to maximize their owners’ profit. Disinformation and polarization are good for profits, but not for us as individuals, and not for our country or the world. But we can’t join the decision-making group, or even find out what they’re doing. And while we can walk away from the platforms themselves (at some cost to our ability to fully participate in society), we can’t isolate ourselves from their effect on our democratic systems.

and you also might be interested in …

A heart-breaking article about how conspiracy theorists hurt the very people they claim to help, like the children they are misguidedly trying to save from sex trafficking, as well as the actual sex-trafficking investigations they monkey-wrench.

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For years we’ve been hearing about American airstrikes that go wrong and kill innocent people. This week the NYT published a series based on internal Pentagon assessments, claiming that

the American air war has been plagued by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and imprecise targeting and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children.

… Taken together, the 5,400 pages of records point to an institutional acceptance of civilian casualties. In the logic of the military, a strike was justifiable as long as the expected risk to civilians had been properly weighed against the military gain, and it had been approved up the chain of command.

The Pentagon records point to an official count of about 1,600 civilian deaths from airstrikes in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan since the official American ground war ended in Iraq in 2014. The Times’ estimate is much higher.

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Christine Emba brings some common sense to the critical race theory disinformation campaign. Is math racist? Of course not. But the subject can be taught and its classes organized in racially biased ways.

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Now we know what Putin’s sabre-rattling in Ukraine is about: He wants NATO to renounce expansion or other interference in what he imagines to be the Russian sphere of influence.

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Bruce Springsteen’s half-billion-dollar deal with Sony induced the NYT to explain the new economics of the music business.

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The intrepid war correspondents of Fox News are on the front lines as the War on Christmas enters its 17th year. CNN’s John Avalon looks back at the origins of this annual conflict. He interviews Alisyn Camerota, who is now with CNN, but was at Fox back in those early days of the War, when “marching orders” to give national 24/7 coverage to any local nativity-scene controversy “so that you begin to think it’s a national crisis” came down from Fox president Roger Ailes.

The turning of something that unifying, something that really should transcend partisan politics in every way, into something divisive that people can fixate on and feel fear about — that’s a real trick. And it’s also a sign of sickness, a sign of partisanship seeping into every element of our lives at the hands of people who are trying to gin up this anxiety.

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The Sackler family had negotiated a sweet deal for itself: The family’s company, Purdue Pharma, would take full responsibility for its role in creating the opioid crisis, and then declare bankruptcy. That plan would generate $4 billion to pay out to victims, but shield the family from any further lawsuits, letting them walk away with their own billions intact.

But a federal judge threw that agreement out Thursday, saying that the New York bankruptcy court didn’t have the authority to offer the family that protection.

The Sackler family is the subject of the best-selling book Empire of Pain, and the HBO documentary The Crime of the Century.

and let’s close with something seasonal

Trust Stephen Colbert to remind us of what the Christmas season is really about: blockbuster movies. This year in particular marks the 20th anniversary of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first film in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Colbert commemorates this milestone as they undoubtedly would in Rivendell, with rap.