I took a week off — to fly a kite, among other things — so I’ve got some catching up to do.
I don’t know about you, but “mercenary army marches on Moscow” wasn’t on my Bingo card. I totally didn’t see that coming.
It’s also been a bad couple of weeks for Republican conspiracy theories: John Durham was supposed to blow the lid off the Deep State conspiracy to smear Trump with Russia collusion, but his testimony to Congress went so badly for MAGA Republicans that Matt Gaetz accused him of being “part of the cover-up”. And a Trump-appointed prosecutor worked out a plea deal with Hunter Biden that includes none of the salacious things he’s supposed to have done — and also doesn’t include any jail time. The most reasonable interpretation is that Hunter really is accountable to the law, but he just hasn’t done that much.
But the featured posts look elsewhere. One of them is about Sam Alito, the latest conservative Supreme Court justice to be exposed living the high life on the dimes of billionaires who have business before his court. Alito defended himself by claiming that “no reasonable person” would find that suspicious.
I’m not the only person who disagrees with that judgment. The article should be out shortly.
The other featured post is somewhat longer and more detailed. I’ve been surprised to discover that some measurable fraction of Democrats believe that Biden should pardon Trump in order to “heal the country” and “reduce polarization”. So I did some thinking about the circumstances under which I’d be willing to show Trump mercy. There are some, but only if he does a few things I don’t expect him to do, like admit wrongdoing.
Anyway, I end up agreeing that we should suppress our desire to see Trump suffer if mercy works to the nation’s benefit, and I speculate about what kind of benefit we might hope for. But I question how likely those circumstances are.
I’ll try to get that out by around 10 EDT, and the weekly summary by noon.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
Thanks to David Wiegleb, who took the picture and supplied the kite.
On the home front the reversal of abortion rights, that our Supreme Court interpreting the constitution did, by turning back such decisions to the states, first resulted in protests giving democrats support now has sunken in and no longer impacts projected voting.
People are asking congress as law giver instead of the court to set the parameters of 15 weeks at the top which seems to be moving forward.
States who gladly accepted approval of prescription opioids now object to same authority approving abortion medicines.
By election time will be a none issue but not so for the banana republic interference in our election intended to stop Trump who instead got higher approval ratings.
The center has been lost by the alternative lifestyle movement who had successfully and fairly obtained marriage rights, but whose school specialization of children was the turning point and now are willing to steer their vote to conservative social values.
As Hillary Lavrov naive pressing of red button of new beginning is now returning to social media the Putin war is turning in favor of republicans while Biden has been very supportive of Ukraine and even invited Modi to the White House to buy arms.
Biden expecting to be impeached for corruption is running despite even democrats not supporting him anymore.
Nuclear war is for the first time a reality sadly, because Ursula and Joe both failed at stopping Putin starting war.
NO mercy for trump. Nixons pardon is the reason he thinks he can get away with it and another demagogue would see their way to attempt to destroy democracy yet again if he gets pardoned. Pardon but jail time, hmm that would work.
Doug:
Alito’s defense that no ‘reasonable person’ could possibly think he was wrong is a fallacy called the No True Scotsman fallacy.
I wish my education had prepared me better to do critical thinking but that’s one fallacy I do know. I noodled around to find info on learning to do critical thinking and came up with The Foundation for Critical Thinking.
https://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/critical-thinking-town-hall/1456
Gretchen R.