No sifts for two weeks. The next new articles will appear April 13.
In the dramatic circumstances of war … the media must guard against the risk of becoming propaganda. … It is up to you to show the sufferings that war always brings to the people; to show the face of war and to relate it through the eyes of the victims, so as not to transform it into a videogame.
This week’s featured post is “Notes on yet another week of war“.
Errata: Last week I did a particularly bad job as my own editor: I was fooled by a post apparently by the Stryker Corp IT chief, which was actually satire. (The community notes on X now say so explicitly.) The satirist posts a lot of imaginary inner monologues of tech company officials. They’re entertaining and occasionally insightful, but they’re not real. I also misspelled James Talarico’s name (two weeks in a row). And there were assorted typos that commenters pointed out.
Ongoing stories
- Trump’s assault on American democracy. The Varieties of Democracy (V-DEM) Institute in Sweden maintains a “Liberal Democracy Index” to measure the overall level of democracy in the countries of the world. The US LDI rating has dropped precipitously in the last year to 57, just behind Ghana (61), tied with Panama, and just ahead of Columbia (52). Most other NATO countries are somewhere in the 70s or 80s, where the US was in the Obama years. V-DEM’s annual report notes “The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history.” Putin, Orban, and similar autocrats took much longer to unmake their democracies.
- Climate change. If you worry about the impact of burning a tank of gasoline in your car, imagine how much damage is done by burning a whole tanker or a depot or setting a gas field on fire. In the long run, the Iran War raises the price of gas and points out the unreliability of fossil fuel supplies, which will push more people, corporations, and countries towards renewable energy. But the short-term impact is horrifying.
- Israel/Palestine. The eyes of the world have mostly moved on, but NPR looks at Gaza during the Eid holiday. It observes that about 200 truckloads of aid get through Israeli checkpoints each day, when 600 are needed. Most of Gaza’s 2 million people “live in makeshift tents and rely on aid for survival”. Meanwhile, Israel is expanding its settlements in the West Bank “confining the Palestinian population to smaller and smaller patches of land”.
- Ukraine. As winter ends, Russia is starting a new offensive and incurring large losses. The war in Iran works in Russia’s favor, as it is able to sell more oil at higher prices.
- Epstein. The House Oversight Committee that is investigating the Epstein affair has subpoenaed AG Pam Bondi. Bondi announced a briefing for the lawmakers, but indicated she saw this as a replacement for testifying under oath. Democrats on the committee were having none of this and walked out. The deadline for the subpoena is April 14. So the cover-up continues.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about Iran
The Iran War is the subject of the featured post. What didn’t get covered there is the $200 billion supplemental appropriation the Trump regime is seeking to fund the war. The official request hasn’t been made yet, and getting it through Congress can only happen if it is part of a reconciliation package that circumvents filibuster rules in the Senate. Given Republicans’ narrow margin in the House, it may not even pass there.
Politically, the best thing for Democrats would be the Republicans passing the appropriation on a party-line vote. At that point, they own the war, and every spending cut Republicans want can be compared to it. “Why was there no money to keep your local hospital open, when there was $200 billion to blow hospitals up in Iran? Why is there no money for cancer research when there is plenty to fight foreign wars?” And so on.
But for the nation, the best thing would be to get this thing stopped any way we can. Democrats can’t do that on their own, though. That’s what being in the minority means.
and the strange case of Joe Kent
Opponents of both the Gaza and Iran Wars have faced the same challenge: How do you denounce what the Israeli government does without making common cause with antisemites? For centuries, conspiracy theories have been tracing every unfortunate situation back to some nefarious plot by Jews. But sane people should not get involved in that project. While Netanyahu and his buddies are responsible for plenty of wrongdoing, they are not the cause of all the world’s problems.
This week delivered a case in point: Joe Kent. Kent is a twice-defeated Republican congressional candidate who failed up: Tulsi Gabbard got him a job as head of the National Counter-Terrorism Center. This week he became the first Trump insider to resign in protest over the Iran War. In the message that accompanied his resignation letter on X, Kent said
Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,
So far so good, but the sentence didn’t stop there.
and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.
Vox’ Zack Beauchamp acknowledges that he ought to welcome defections within the Trump war machine, but …
Kent’s resignation should not be celebrated by principled critics of the Iran war, but rather serve as a cautionary tale for how a just cause could be hijacked by extremists to promote something awful.
Kent’s particular awful thing is to portray an American president as nothing more than the dupe of sinister Jews.
Trump and MAGA did not fail in Iran, in Kent’s view; they were betrayed by the same dark forces that have been corrupting American foreign policy for the entire 21st century. And given the corner of far-right politics Kent hails from, it should be fairly clear what religion those dark forces represent.
At the moment, most MAGA fascists are supporting the war whole-heartedly.
But if this war continues to go poorly, public opinion will turn — much in the same way as many Republicans now view President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq as an obvious mistake. In such a future, Republican voters will be looking for someone to tell them why their president led them astray. Kent’s letter is setting up an obvious scapegoat: the Jews. … Kent’s letter, then, is not really a sign of rising Republican resistance to the Iran war that could augur its premature end. Rather, it is an opening salvo in a future political war over how the war’s (likely) failure should be interpreted — and an extremely ugly one at that.
I’m going to repeat a message that I’ve posted many times before: Americans should not bring the troubles of the Middle East home. American Jews who support the idea of Israel because they believe there should be a Jewish refuge somewhere in the world are not the same as Netanyahu’s fascists. And American Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims who believe Palestinians also deserve a homeland are not the same as Hamas. Americans should not be persecuting or even killing other Americans because of their resemblance to overseas villains.
and ICE
Trump claims that today he will start sending ICE agents to help TSA at airports. Mark Jacob points out the obvious: This has nothing to do with ICE’s stated mission.
Trump’s plan to send ICE to the airports makes it clear that ICE isn’t really an immigration enforcement force. It’s Trump’s personal Gestapo, his goon squad ready to act out the dictator’s fever dreams, no matter how reckless and stupid.
If he can send them wherever he wants to do whatever he wants, why wouldn’t he send them to polling places in November to intimidate non-white voters?
Ron Filipkowski asks another obvious question: Will ICE agents at the airports wear masks?
BBC doesn’t sanewash the president’s plan, describing it as a “threat”. When you quote him more completely, it does sound that way:
I will move our brilliant and patriotic ICE Agents to the Airports where they will do Security like no one has ever seen before.
ICE agents behaving “like no one has ever seen before” is exactly what travelers should fear.
Republicans know that it looks bad for them when ICE agents murder American citizens in the streets and suffer no consequences. So they want to soften their rhetoric and present a more pleasant image. But the underlying thuggishness of ICE isn’t changing. Replacing Kristi Noem with Markwayne Mullin is just a change of figurehead at DHS. Stephen Miller still runs the show, and he likes the thugs.
If congressional Republicans really wanted a course correction at DHS, they have a straightforward opportunity without changing its leadership. The agency has been shutdown since Feb. 14, when Democrats refused to support legislation funding the agency because it lacked provisions reforming ICE. The list of demands in their counterproposal is straightforward. ICE agents would be required to wear identification badges and work without masks, and follow existing laws regarding warrants. They would also be banned from targeting people based on race. The GOP’s refusal to rein in the rogue agency even a little shows that the party does not want to “course correct” in any meaningful way.
Brian Beutler sees this as nothing more than an across-the-board plan to save Republicans in the midterms:
They now seem to be tacking back a subtler approach. Not just because they think they’ll get a second chance at authoritarian breakthrough, but because the nature of their conduct over the past 14 months has rendered the whole project politically toxic. What they want, therefore, is to freeze their progress in place, dialing back the braggadocio, in the hope that voters sense the atmospheric differences between March 2025 and March 2026 and assume the worst is behind them. In other words, they are hoping to salvage power through a change in rhetorical emphasis, without substantively backtracking.
Trump still calls the shots for the GOP in Congress, and he opposes “any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats”. The deal apparently on the table would lead to no changes at ICE, but would make Republicans fully own ICE’s rogue behavior: Democrats would vote to fund all of DHS other than ICE, while ICE funding would be part of a reconciliation bill that would be immune to filibuster.
To me, even the Democrats’ demands aren’t enough. At the very minimum, I want to see charges filed against the agents who murdered Rene Good and Alex Pretti. Until that happens, ICE’s thugs will go on assuming they have a 007-like license to kill.
ICE has illegally been taking DNA samples from protesters it arrests. “It’s very concerning to me because what it looks like the government is doing is creating this catalog of political dissidents.” DHS hasn’t said what it does with this information.
and law
The Trump administration had another bad week in court.
A federal judge blocked the Pentagon’s restrictive rules on the press and restored the press passes of seven NYT Pentagon reporters.
They had surrendered those passes in October instead of signing the policy, which empowered the Pentagon to declare journalists “security risks” and revoke their press passes if they engaged in any conduct that the Pentagon believed threatened national security. In his 40-page ruling, Judge Friedman wrote that the Pentagon’s policy rewarded reporters who were “willing to publish only stories that are favorable to or spoon-fed by department leadership.”
Siding with an argument advanced by The Times, Judge Friedman added that the Pentagon had given itself too much power to enforce its new rules. The policy also violates journalists’ due process rights under the Fifth Amendment, he said, writing that it “provides no way for journalists to know how they may do their jobs without losing their credentials.”
According to Law Dork, third-country removals — deportations to someplace other than the deportee’s home country — is one of Trump regime’s “most dramatic anti-immigrant policies”. I invite you to think about what an extreme punishment this is: Imagine being dropped into a country you know nothing about, possibly a war-torn country like Sudan. You have no friends there and you may not speak the local language. You don’t know what rights (if any) the local system grants you. Even if you aren’t immediately imprisoned, you are in rough shape: You have no job and no prospect of getting one.
In its Wednesday post, LD gives a good summary of where the case to restrain these deportations stands: A district court has been trying to rein in this practice, and recently issued its final opinion — not an injunction or any similar temporary judgment.
[Judge Brian] Murphy has ordered the Trump administration to provide people with “meaningful“ due process before carrying out third country removals.
Trump’s DoJ took that ruling to the First Circuit appellate court, which put a stay on the lower court’s order while they consider the merits of the case. That stay allows third-country removals to continue temporarily, but LD interprets this as possibly a strategic move by one of the Biden appointees who might ultimately want to affirm the lower-court ruling.
Looking at this strategically, in light of the Supreme Court’s prior shadow docket order, the stay grant prevented the case from going to the Supreme Court now — allowing the First Circuit to fully consider these questions and issue a full merits ruling before this important case goes back up to the Supreme Court.
Instead, the First Circuit is going to hear this case quickly, with briefs and oral arguments finished in April.
RFK Jr.’s reign of error at Health and Human Services got bad news from the courts on two fronts.
- Just about everything RFK Jr. has done to discourage vaccine use got thrown out by the same Judge Murphy.
- A different federal judge set aside HHS’s declaration that gender-affirming care “is neither safe nor effective as a treatment modality for gender dysphoria, gender incongruence, or other related disorders in minors.”
Both rulings make similar arguments: There are legal ways to change HHS policy, but Kennedy circumvented them.
The vaccine ruling revolves around the role of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which is supposed to be a board of scientific experts on vaccines. Back in June, Kennedy fired the entire committee, which he subsequently replaced with hacks who agree with him. Judge Murphy noted that of ACIP’s 15 current members “only six appear to have any meaningful experience in vaccines”. This violates the legislation that established ACIP and numerous laws that refer to it.
HHS, sometimes with the advice of the new unqualified ACIP and sometimes without, changed childhood vaccination schedules and made other vaccine-related rulings — all pointing in the direction of Americans receiving fewer vaccinations. These moves also violated various laws, including the Administrative Procedures Act.
The ruling blocks these changes to HHS vaccine policy and bars ACIP from continuing to meet in its current form.
HHS’ gender-affirming care declaration not only prevents federal funds from being used to provide such care, but threatened the institutions that provide it.
In the weeks after Mr. Kennedy issued his written declaration, the Department of Health and Human Services indicated that it would investigate institutions that continued to prescribe medication to minors for gender transitions and would potentially bar them from receiving federal Medicare and Medicaid funds. (As an aside, the declaration re-names “gender-affirming care” as “sex-rejecting procedures”. )
The court ruling prevents HHS from enforcing its new policy. HHS will undoubtedly appeal.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation is suing to stop construction of Trump’s massive White House ballroom until the project gets congressional approval and submits to the ordinary review process. Verbal comments by the judge in this case have observers speculating that he will side with NTHP when he rules later this month.
and Robert Mueller
The death of Robert Mueller at age 81 provides a news hook for renewed discussion of what Mueller investigated: Trump’s ties to Russia. Certainly Trump himself sees the connection:
Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!
(Remember all the handwringing about “civility” when liberals weren’t sufficiently deferential about Charlie Kirk’s death?) But certainly Trump is not one of those “innocent people”. Marcy Wheeler reviews the convictions Mueller’s Russia investigation led to, and points to the pardons of key figures that kept Mueller from fully uncovering the Trump/Russia conspiracy.
Mueller’s failure, solidified by Democrats’ failure to do anything with the impeachment referral, to thwart Trump’s betrayal of the United States is one of many aspects of a larger lesson that the US legal system was not built to hold a corrupt President accountable. Impeachment does not work, and even before John Roberts gave Trump a retrospective and prospective Get Out of Jail Free card, Presidents had too much power to tamper in investigations of their own crimes.
and the Illinois primary
Tuesday, Illinois held primaries for both parties. It’s a blue state, so the big news was on the Democratic side. Several races were interpreted in the media as progressive/moderate races, with moderates doing somewhat better. But there was not a clear trend. Illinois does not have a run-off rule, so several multi-candidate races were won with less than 50% of the vote.
The top of the ticket was the race to replace retiring Dick Durbin in the Senate. (Side note: I was living in New Hampshire during the 2008 primary campaign. The Obama victory party was supposed to be upstairs from my favorite brew-pub, but Obama was surprisingly defeated by Hillary Clinton. I was in the pub for dinner, went to the bar for some reason, and noticed I was standing next to Dick Durbin. I let him mourn in peace.) Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton won with 40%.
Another noteworthy race was for the 9th congressional district. I was rooting for Kat Abughazaleh, but Evanston Mayor David Biss performed well during the ICE focus on the Chicago area, so I was not sorry to see him win. The big loser in this race was AIPAC, which put a lot of money behind the third-place candidate.
The somewhat better showing of moderates touched off the usual debate about which direction the Democratic Party should go, with many voices pushing for what Matt Yglesias calls “popularism”: backing away from unpopular positions. Unfortunately, this is generally interpreted to mean throwing trans people under the bus. I have trouble seeing how this actually works in practice. Harris never mentioned trans issues during the 2024 fall campaign, but that didn’t save her because she had supported the trans community in the past.
About the only way this can work is to do what my congressman, Seth Moulton, did: repeat anti-trans talking points yourself. (He’s running for the Senate now, and I will not be voting for him in the primary against incumbent Ed Markey.) Even that probably won’t work, because your Republican opponent can always make a more extreme anti-trans attack and dare you to match him.
I’m struck by how seldom the same popularist point is made to Republicans about issues like abortion. At most, Republicans are told to soften their rhetoric, not change their position (that abortion should be illegal in nearly all situations, often including ones that endanger a pregnant woman’s health). Chair Richard Hudson of the National Republican Congressional Committee told Punchbowl News:
Republicans don’t have a policy problem. We have a branding problem.
Their policy is that a woman who is raped should be forced to bear her rapist’s child. In other words, rape should be a viable male reproductive strategy; if you’re having trouble attracting women, you can still propagate your genes by force.
Republicans think they can win the issue by painting Democrats as even more out-of-step with the public than Republicans are.
We need to point out that the Democrat position is abortion for any reason, up until the moment of birth, paid for by taxpayers.
But that’s hardly any Democrat’s real position. Not that the truth actually matters.
Here’s my take on where most voters are: They generally dislike abortions and wish the US had fewer of them. But if someone in their family needs one, they don’t want the government to tell them they can’t get one.
Coincidentally, I think most voters have exactly the same opinion about guns.
and you also might be interested in …
CBS started broadcasting news on the radio in 1927. It will stop in May.
TPM collects what is known so far about the DHS contracting scandal. The gist: DHS funds big projects through dummy general contractors who then farm the work out to politically connected sub-contractors. This, plus a few other gimmicks, circumvents the usual government contracting process — which is cumbersome but designed to prevent exactly this kind of corruption.
Republican rhetoric about the SAVE Act started as painting the bill as common-sense, nothing-to-see-here. But as it looks increasingly unlikely to get through the Senate, they are revving up evidence-free conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting.
The Contrarian calls out “The Voter Fraud Fraud“.
The accusation that there is rampant cheating in our election is dramatic, alarming, and oft-repeated. It is also totally false.
After years of audits, recounts, lawsuits, academic studies, and investigations across red states and blue states alike, there is absolutely no evidence—zero—that substantial, outcome-changing voter fraud is present in American elections. There simply isn’t proof.
It turns out that the real fraud is not at the ballot box; it’s claims like the one the president made as he addressed a joint session of Congress.
If I were a Democrat in a general-election debate with a Republican, I’d want to ask this question: “Do any of your proposals address a problem that actually exists?”
The Idaho House has passed another transgender persecution bill. This one makes it a misdemeanor to “knowingly and willfully enter a restroom or changing room … designated for use by the opposite biological sex”. First offense can get you a year in prison, while the second offense can get you five.
Idaho is not alone.
Earlier this year, Kansas passed a bill that mass-invalidated transgender people’s driver’s licenses and created a bathroom bounty hunter system across the state. Missouri then advanced three anti-transgender bathroom bills in a single night.
OK, I see how this makes life more difficult for transfolk. But how does it make life better for the rest of us? What problem do such bills solve?
Accept for the moment that transgender and nonbinary people exist. (Off the top of my head I can think of three that I’ve met personally. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are others that I haven’t noticed.) So picture a person with a female birth certificate who now presents as male, to the point that you really can’t tell unless you stare. Like all humans, that person may need a public bathroom from time to time. Which is more disruptive?
- Going into the men’s bathroom and using a stall.
- Going into the women’s bathroom looking like a man.
I think the answer is obvious. Idaho’s law is mandating the more disruptive outcome. So the point isn’t to make society work more smoothly. The point is to persecute trans people.
This weekend, the US oil blockade of Cuba caused the third nationwide blackout in the last month. The Trump administration is punishing the Cuban people in hopes that they will rise up against their government. The blackouts are particularly hard on Cuba’s hospitals.
Trump’s concentration of lies seems to be rising. This post must be some kind of record:
FREE TINA PETERS, A 73-YEAR-OLD WOMAN, WITH CANCER, GIVEN A NINE YEAR DEATH SENTENCE IN A COLORADO PRISON BY DEMOCRAT GOVERNOR, JARED POLIS, AND A CORRUPT POLITICAL MACHINE, FOR EXPOSING FRAUD BY THE DEMOCRATS IN THE 2020 ELECTION.
Kyle Clark finds four false claims in those 40 words:
Peters is 70 (not 73), does not have cancer, was sentenced by a judge in Mesa County (not the Governor), and did not expose fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
and let’s close with something youthful
If this week’s news has been raising your anxiety, spend a couple of minutes watching a puppy and a kitten get acquainted.
The Weekly Sift 