The Weekly Sift

If you don’t want to be prosecuted for crimes, don’t do crimes.

– Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
responding to Republican fears of investigations by a future Democratic Congress

This week’s featured post is “Immigration is about Race“.

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. In Texas, people who engaged in some fairly normal protest mischief got sentenced to decades in prison because one guy shot at a cop.
• Climate change. The European heat wave has caused 1300 excess deaths so far.
• Iran War. It’s very hard to tell what’s going on. We have an agreement but we’re still talking. We have a ceasefire but we’re still shooting at each other.
• Ukraine. Russian oil refineries keep burning. Russia has a fuel shortage now, in spite of being one of the biggest oil producers in the world. Maybe this war-of-choice wasn’t such a good idea.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the Supreme Court

The Court made several important decisions this week, all 6-3 votes by the conservative majority. I discuss the two immigration-related ones in the featured post. The bloodstained gavel is a reference to sending refugees back to Haiti and Syria, which the State Department says is unsafe. A third Alito opinion the same day threw out Hawaii’s law requiring people to get permission from property owners to carry concealed weapons on their property.

The gun law had to be evaluated under that standards established in the the 2022 Bruen decision, the one requiring any gun restriction to be consistent with the history and traditions of gun laws in the US. No one really knows what that means, so in practice it turns into the Court’s conservative majority cherry-picking the historical examples that justify the conclusion it wants.

Today’s rulings just came out, so I haven’t looked at them. It appears to be a more mixed bag, with Trump winning some cases and losing others. To be honest, this worries me. Roberts likes to orchestrate the release of rulings in order to give himself cover. If he’s releasing some Trump losses today, I worry about what he has in store next.

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The Texas Board of Education clearly understands that this Supreme Court will never enforce the separation of church and state against Christians. The Texas Tribune reports that an extensive list of Bible readings are now part of the K-12 curriculum. Meanwhile, the new standards cut back education about diversity and eliminate material that they think shines a negative light on US history.

They approved a lesson this week that requires students to learn about the Prophet Muhammad in the context of “brutal military campaigns against Jewish and Christian tribes, the normalization of slavery, and the taking of female captives as harem slaves.” 

“Let me be very clear: Islam is not a religion,” state Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood, testified before the education board Monday. “It is a totalitarian theocracy, not unlike totalitarian systems of communism, Nazism and globalism.”

Asked if he had ever visited a Muslim-majority country, the senator responded no. 

If you live in Texas and are thinking about raising children, you might want to reconsider your choices.

and Democratic primaries in New York

The big news of Tuesday’s Democratic primaries was the defeat of incumbent congressmen Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat, by challengers from the left backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani backed five candidates in the primaries, and they all won. These results were widely trumpeted as advancing the Democratic Socialist wing of the Democratic Party.

Centrist Democrats (in the words of several headlines) “freaked out“. James Carville said on a podcast that he couldn’t be in the same party with some of the Mamdani candidates.

I’m done. I’m not in that fucking political party.

Conversely, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (NJ-5) wrote the Mamdani candidates out of his party.

Many of us believe, as I do, that if you’re a socialist, you’re not a Democrat.

I’m very disappointed in these reactions. I’m a blue-no-matter-who Democrat, and I’m going to stay that way as long as the Republican Party represents fascism. For the last decade, maybe even as far back as the 2000 presidential race (where Ralph Nader’s voters could have tipped the election to Al Gore), I have argued that progressive voters should line up behind moderate Democrats who win the primaries. If you can’t win the Democratic primary, I said, you can’t win the general election. The way to get the progressive candidates you want is to win in the primaries, not to sabotage the moderate Democrats who do.

Well, now progressives are winning primaries in New York and a few other places. This is the way the game is played. The way to change the party is to win primaries.

What’s disturbing in the Carville/Gottheimer response is the attitude of entitlement. The Democratic Party belongs to them, because it just does. Democratic voters have no say in the matter. Rebecca Solnit writes:

It’s weird the way the Democratic alleged leadership (Jeffries too) think that the party is a club with rules rather than something the voters choose. It’s….undemocratic.

It would be one thing if the Democratic Party had a clear philosophical definition, the way that the Republican Party of the 1850s was the anti-slavery party. But one common complaint about the Party in the current era is that it lacks definition. I don’t see any basis for saying that socialists can’t be Democrats.

The Party establishment has made several large mistakes in the last few years. Obama let the big bankers off the hook after the Great Recession of 2008. Biden uncritically kept feeding weapons into the Israeli war machine as it committed genocide in Gaza. Maybe a few others leap to your mind.

Even at its best, the Democratic establishment drifts into nostalgia about the Obama years, as if America would be fine if we could just undo what Trump has done to the country. But Trump rose to power because a lot of Americans already felt left behind. I agree that I’d rather have Obama back than stick with Trump, but it’s not like that was some kind of golden age.

There has to be a reckoning. Leaders who backed those mistakes need to make their case to the voters and face judgment. They aren’t entitled to keep their jobs just because.

and Tulsi Gabbard

Last Sunday, WaPo published an expose about Tulsi Gabbard. In particular, it focused on the Hare Krishna group she was raised in and the influence its leader, Chris Butler, may have had on her while she was in Congress and possibly while she was Director of National Intelligence.

I’ve never been much of a fan of Tulsi Gabbard, either when she was progressive Democrat or a MAGA Republican. But I’m not inclined to pile on to this story, for a number of reasons: First, the accusations in the story are not that extreme; it always seems to be building up to something it never delivers. For many years, some anonymous emailer who seems to be Butler gave Gabbard detailed political advice, including what positions to take and how to defend them. She seems to have taken much of that advice. But WaPo has no evidence, for example, that Gabbard ever discussed classified information with Butler, or that she otherwise abused the power of her various offices for his benefit. Gabbard just had a religious leader whose guidance she took very seriously.

And that brings me to the second reason I’m playing this down: In political stories concerning religion, strangeness often gets misinterpreted as danger. When Barack Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright became in issue in the 2008 campaign, clips of Wright’s sermons went viral. To people whose image of church came from mainline White denominations, Wright’s speaking style seemed scary, even though it was perfectly normal in Black churches.

Hare Krishna is strange to many Americans, so the Gabbard/Butler connection seems suspicious in a way that a similarly close connection between Marco Rubio and a Catholic priest would not.

Maybe there is a newsworthy scandal somewhere in the decades-long conversations Gabbard had with Butler. But I haven’t seen it yet.

and you also might be interested in …

To nobody’s surprise, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said inflation was up in May, to 4.1% year-over-year. Even excluding food and energy (i.e., the more volatile parts of the index), it was up 3.4%. The only time since the 1980s that it was higher were 2021 and 2022, when Covid interrupted supply chains.

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It’s sad that Trump has made America’s 250th birthday center on himself rather than the country. He undercut the bipartisan America 250 planning committee by creating his own Freedom 250. He opened Freedom 250 with a UFC cage match on his own birthday, then kicked off his Great American State Fair by giving a political speech.

The State Fair itself has become a sad affair, with mostly red states represented and no crowds worth mentioning. The concert fell apart as artists realized they were contributing to Trump’s greater glory.

The Duckpin blog describes how the GASF devolved from something that sounded kind of fun to its current manifestation. Originally it was going to be on the Iowa State Fairgrounds. Then it was going to move from state to state, eventually reaching the National Mall like a musical arriving on Broadway. Then just the National Mall part of the idea survived.

When Trump did kick it off Wednesday night, only about 1000 people showed up, and many of them left while Trump was still speaking. So he lied about it and claimed 45000 people instead.

It didn’t have to be this way. A president with less ego, like Gerald Ford in 1976 or an alternate-timeline President Harris today, could have stayed out of the way and let the country celebrate itself. There might be a real festival happening, with a concert lineup similar to what President Obama arranged to open his presidential center in Chicago on Juneteenth.

Instead, we’re looking at each other and wondering how long the country can go on this way. How much past 250 will “freedom” survive, if it’s still surviving now?

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Pete Buttigieg had to endure being separated from his children for 24 hours because someone called in a false complaint to child protective services.

and let’s close with something

One of the more whimsical YouTube channels is the musical “There I Ruined It“, which promises to “lovingly destroy your favorite songs”. In this selection, a new country-and-western song is constructed out of 50 country songs that all mention “cold beer”.