The Weekly Sift

Boil it all down and what do we have? We have a military operation with no clear ends at all. Stop asking what the US government’s intentions are, they do not exist outside of the personal interests of Donald Trump. They can and will therefore change in a heartbeat as he searches desperately for whatever end gives him the best chance to declare victory. He has made the national interest entirely personal.

– Phillips P. OBrien

This week’s featured post is “Why this? Why now?“

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. The Iran attack further undermines the role of Congress in our democracy. But congressional Republicans seem content to watch their institution fade into irrelevance.
• Epstein. From the beginning, I’ve been in denial about the depth and persistence of this scandal. It’s not going away. So I’m moving it onto the Ongoing list.
• Climate change. My limited attention didn’t spot anything this week.
• Gaza. The US has opened two consular offices in West Bank settlements that past administrations of both parties have deemed illegal.
• Ukraine. Ukraine seems to have survived the “battle of winter”, gaining more territory than it lost during February.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the attack on Iran

In the featured post I focus on how little Trump seems to care about either Congress’ approval or the public’s.

and the State of the Union

In past years I’ve often devoted a featured post to analyzing the State of the Union, but this one doesn’t deserve that kind of attention. Ordinarily, a president whose party controlled Congress would list things he wants Congress to do in the coming year, and use his public platform to build popular support behind those proposals. But Trump views himself as a dictator, so he didn’t bother to ask Congress for much of anything — not even for approval of the Iran attack that was undoubtedly already in the works.

The one noteworthy thing is a speculative theme I’ve seen in several places, notably from David Frum in The Atlantic: Trump has now broken the State of the Union tradition so badly that Democrats should put an end to it if they hold the House majority next year.

Lots of people think the State of the Union address is mandated by the Constitution, but in fact it isn’t. Here’s the relevant text:

He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient

Notice: no set schedule and no requirement for an in-person speech. Washington and Adams did speak to Congress on a more-or-less annual basis, usually sometime in early December. Jefferson began sending written messages instead, a practice that continued until Woodrow Wilson revived the in-person speech in 1913.

If you look at old state-of-the-union messages, they are not political speeches. What they resemble instead are the reports corporate presidents send to their boards of directors: This is what your government has been doing this last year and what we plan to do in the coming year. They aren’t full of well-crafted phrases and soaring rhetoric. But they did have policy announcements: James Monroe announced the Monroe Doctrine in the 1823 SOTU.

The first SOTU broadcast over radio was Calvin Coolidge’s in 1923. The first televised SOTU was by Harry Truman in 1947. Broadcasting changed the nature of the speech, turning it into an address to the nation rather than a message to Congress. Now it’s an annual pageant for the president to try to whip up support.

This year’s address was shameful, as so many of Trump’s speeches are. It was full of lies, way too long, and insulting to the Democrats in Congress. It contained no proposals of substance. It’s sole point was that Americans should love Trump and hate his enemies.

Before the speech, Democrats debated among themselves about whether to attend or boycott. Why subject yourself to two hours of lies and insults? I “boycotted” in the sense that I had better things to do with two hours of my life. (I scanned the transcript.)

Here’s the piece of the SOTU ritual that Trump has forgotten and needs to be reminded of: He is not the master of this event; he is a guest of the Speaker of the House. He comes in response to an invitation. Guests should act with a certain decorum. In particular, they should not gratuitously insult their hosts.

The Democrats are widely expected to regain the House majority in the fall. So when it’s time for the 2027 SOTU, the Speaker may be a Democrat like Hakeem Jeffries. He should not invite Trump to come speak in person. Trump should not be invited back at all until he pledges to behave as a guest should.

and ICE

Every week, more horror stories.

Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a refugee from Burma who was nearly blind, died after Border Patrol agents took him into custody, determined that they couldn’t hold him, and then abandoned him outside a closed Tim Horton’s franchise on a freezing-cold night in Buffalo. His family (who put up fliers asking if anyone had seen him) wasn’t told about his release or where to find him. His body was found five days later.

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A Nashville man who was in this country legally and had a work permit was stopped, had his windows broken, and was taken away. His wife says he showed the agents his papers but they didn’t care.

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The Portland Press Herald has found 35 Maine residents (out of the 206 swept up by ICE in the recent Operation Catch of the Day) who have been arrested and detained, but were then released by immigration judges who found that the government had no reason to hold them. Many of them have done nothing wrong.

[South Portland resident Evaristo] Kalonji’s name was on ICE’s target list even though the agency knew he had no criminal record, according to notes the government submitted in court that were viewed by the Press Herald. He said he had left his native Angola, completed an ardous journey up through the Americas and arrived in California a few years ago. He presented himself at the border, he said, then applied for asylum, so the Department of Homeland Security knew he was here.

He spent weeks in custody, paid a $3000 bond, and was released back into the same situation he was abducted from: He’s living with his family and working while he waits for his next asylum hearing.

“People were held in detention facilities for weeks for an immigration judge to essentially find that they were not a danger or a flight risk and should be released,” said Jenny Beverly, an immigration attorney in Portland and a former immigration judge. “That tells me that the arrests were needless to begin with.”

Being in detention meant Kalonji and others missed paychecks. Some lost their jobs. Their families and friends scrambled to raise money to continue to pay their bills, to pay bond, while waiting anxiously for news.

Here’s what grinds on me: The Maine detainees were brought to a detention facility in Burlington, Massachusetts — the next town over from where I live. The site was built to be a temporary processing center, but has turned into an overcrowded jail where people spend weeks or months under “inhumane” conditions. I’ve protested outside this facility, which is a quick walk from the popular Burlington Mall, with its Nordstrom’s and Victoria’s Secret. (Mall police chase away protesters who try to use the mall’s parking.) But those of us who live nearby have no way of knowing what goes on inside.

You may feel like all this Gestapo activity is far away from you. But it probably isn’t.

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Politico tells the inside story of Minnesota officials dealing with Trump’s crackdown, and what lessons they have for other cities.

and Epstein

So now Bill and Hillary Clinton have both testified before the House Oversight Committee that is investigating the Epstein files. Reportedly, they answered every question. Both denied wrongdoing, and Hillary said she had never met Jeffrey Epstein, although she did know Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.

There is way more evidence linking Trump to Epstein than either of the Clintons. So why isn’t he testifying?

and deadly AIs

The Pentagon was negotiating a contract to use Anthropic’s AI app Claude, a competitor of ChatGPT. They hit a snag when Anthropic wanted the contract to ban Claude “being used for the mass surveillance of Americans or deployed in autonomous weapons with no humans involved”.

That demand didn’t just result in Anthropic losing the contract, but being declared a “supply chain risk“, which would blacklist the company from just about any government work. Axios says this designation is “usually reserved for companies from adversarial countries, such as Chinese tech giant Huawei”.

The future is not working out the way Isaac Asimov pictured. Sticking to his three laws of robotics will get you punished.

and you also might be interested in …

Florida is making it virtually impossible to teach introductory sociology at their state universities.

In 2023 the Florida Legislature passed a bill that bans curriculum at state-funded schools that supposedly teaches identity politics or diversity, equity and inclusion, or that suggests racism, sexism and other forms of oppression are embedded in American institutions.

You might wonder what kind of sociology textbook Florida professors could find that stays clear of all that. Well, Florida has made its own.

Florida’s new 267-page sociology textbook is an abbreviated version of the 669-page free and open-source “Introduction to Sociology 3e” and excludes chapters not just on race and ethnicity and gender and sexuality — the usual targets — but also on media and technology, global inequality and social stratification.

The word “racism” appeared 115 times in the original textbook, but just six times in the censored version. Sociology Professor Robyn Autry comments:

Because sociology aims to better understand “today’s most divisive issues,” it’s hard to imagine how any sociology course, especially an introductory one, can be taught without delving into topics that have been censored. And that appears to be the point for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his allies on the board of governors. It’s rational to conclude that they don’t want sociology taught at all, and that it’s not just particular topics but the discipline as a whole that bothers them.

Robert Cassanello, president of the United Faculty of Florida, warns:

I have it on good authority that next year they’re going to look at the psychology and American history textbooks. It’s an assault on critical thinking.

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Hegseth won’t allow officers to take courses at Ivy League universities. Anything that interferes with the indoctrination he wants the military to have is off the table.

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India has shifted towards Israel because they are both ethno-nationalist states now.

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How does MAGA want to make ObamaCare plans cheaper? By raising the annual deductible to $31,000.

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Trump’s Trumpiest judge isn’t satisfied with just blocking his prosecution for his document-stealing crimes. She has also banned Jack Smith from releasing volume 2 of his report.

and let’s close with something slick

What do Canadian dads get up to when their wives aren’t looking? Curling with the baby in a car seat.

Until I went looking for that video, I never realized that “Dads unsupervised” is a popular YouTube search term. Here’s something else it will get you.