As an outside observer, it’s hard for me to assess how serious the division in MAGA-world is. Trump campaigned as an opponent of America’s recent wars, and painted Harris as the kind of hawk who might start another one. But then, Trump campaigned on a lot of things that are long forgotten now, like lowering the deficit and cutting prices. Tariffs were all going to be paid by foreigners and the millions of migrants he was going to deport were violent criminals. He wasn’t going to cut Medicaid.
All that is ancient history now, and the pattern has been that a few MAGAts say, “Wait, what?” for a day or two, but then they get back in line.
This flap seems a bit more serious, with folks like Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Marjorie Taylor Greene speaking out against attacking Iran. There’s little love for Muslims in MAGA-world, so nobody is going to mourn dead Iranians any more than they mourn dead Gazans. But still, it’s hard to shake the feeling that this is Netanyahu’s war, and Trump has been manipulated into going along. If you’re already of the opinion that Jews secretly run the world — which is a more popular view in MAGA-world than anybody likes to admit — it all smells bad.
Will the exposure of Trump’s false promises make any difference this time? I wouldn’t bet on it, but it’s worth watching.
and the Supreme Court
The other featured post examines one decision from this week: Tennessee’s law banning gender-affirming care can stand.
A federal judge in Massachusetts on Tuesday blocked the Trump administration from refusing to process and issue passport applications for transgender and nonbinary people in accordance with their gender identity.
And Mahmoud Khalil is free, after being detained for three months for supporting Palestine and criticizing Israel.
The regime is pushing three big initiatives designed to limit oversight, kneecap states that refuse to cooperate, and dramatically increase the number of ICE agents and detention facilities. … To understand this threat, we need to look carefully within the pages of Trump’s “Big, Beautiful” budget. That bill contains a funding increase for ICE of $27 billion dollars, or 10,000 more ICE officers. Trump is planning to use these billions to recruit an army of masked, armed and largely unaccountable agents. This is a break-the-glass moment for our democracy, hiding within the line items of a single, massive bill.
But the bill doesn’t just add more agents. It also earmarks an eye-popping $45 billion for new ICE detention centers—enough to house 125,000 people.
It’s hard to look at that number and realize that it represents the same number of people of Japanese descent who were put inside of 10 internment camps during World War II.
Students of fascism also understand that, once such centers are built, they won’t just be used to house undocumented migrants subject to mass deportation. The regime, now caught in a horrific dance with private contractors like Erik Prince who will build and profit from these centers, will come to view them as convenient places to house and then disappear its political opponents, perhaps on their way to one of the many gulags it is now contracting with third countries to establish.
The proposal is unlikely to generate much revenue for the government; there is almost no private-sector interest in the mail trucks, and used EV charging equipment — built specifically for the Postal Service and already installed in postal facilities — generally cannot be resold.
The point seems to be to for Republicans in Congress to thumb their noses at people who care about climate change.
Computer science was once the career of the future, but apparently no more.
But if the decline [in computer science majors] is surprising, the reason for it is fairly straightforward: Young people are responding to a grim job outlook for entry-level coders. In recent years, the tech industry has been roiled by layoffs and hiring freezes. The leading culprit for the slowdown is technology itself. Artificial intelligence has proved to be even more valuable as a writer of computer code than as a writer of words. This means it is ideally suited to replacing the very type of person who built it.
The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch comments:
Whether the past few years augur a temporary lull or an abrupt reordering of working life, economists suggest the same response for college students: Major in a subject that offers enduring, transferable skills. Believe it or not, that could be the liberal arts. Deming’s research shows that male history and social-science majors end up out-earning their engineering and comp-sci counterparts in the long term, as they develop the soft skills that employers consistently seek out. “It’s actually quite risky to go to school to learn a trade or a particular skill, because you don’t know what the future holds,” Deming told me. “You need to try to think about acquiring a skill set that’s going to be future-proof and last you for 45 years of working life.”
and let’s close with something nostalgic
Many fans of song parodies and humorous music in general no longer recognize the name of Dr. Demento, whose radio show popularized the genre. He’s shutting it down after 55 years. In the Doctor’s honor, here’s a song I wouldn’t know if not for him: The Cockroach that Ate Cincinnati.
Saturday night, the United States joined Israel’s air war against Iran. The most significant piece of the US intervention was to do what Israel could not: drop giant bunker-buster bombs on the underground Iranian nuclear research facility at Fordow. The US dropped 14 GBU-57 bombs, the largest non-nuclear bomb in our arsenal. (They are also sometimes referred to as MOPs, massive ordinance penetrators.)
The attack came a week after Israel began bombing Iran, and ended several days of what had appeared to be indecision on Trump’s part. Wednesday, he said: “I may do it, I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.” He suggested a two-week window for negotiations, then attacked in two days. (As several people have pointed out, “two weeks” is Trumpspeak for “I have no idea”. He seems to believe that two weeks is long enough for the news cycle to forget about an issue.) Like so many of Trump’s actions, this has been justified after the fact as intentional misdirection rather than indecision.
In response, the Iranian Parliament has authorized closing the Strait of Hormuz, but has left the final decision up to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. One-fifth of the world’s oil goes through that strait, which sits at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Closing it would raise world oil prices substantially, at least in the short term. So far, markets seem not to be taking the threat seriously.
As I’ve often said, a one-person weekly blog can’t do a good job of covering breaking news, particularly if it breaks on the other side of the world. So you should look to other sources for minute-to-minute or day-to-day coverage.
I also frequently warn about the pointlessness of most news-channel speculation. The vast majority of pundits have no idea what’s going to happen next, so taking their scenarios seriously is at best a waste of time and at worst a way to make yourself crazy.
So if I can’t reliably tell you what’s happening or what’s going to happen, what can I do? At the moment, I think the most useful discussion to have on this blog is to ask the right questions.
What are we trying to accomplish in this war? Failure to get this right has been the major failing in America’s recent wars. Our government has frequently marshaled public support by invoking a wide variety of motives, with the result that we never quite know when we’re done. Our involvement in Afghanistan started out as a hunt for Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda leadership behind 9-11. But it quickly evolved into an attempt to establish a friendly regime in Kabul, combat Muslim extremism in general, test counter-insurgency theories, and prove that liberal democracy could work in the Muslim world. So our apparent early success turned into a two-decade failure.
Similarly in Iraq. Were we trying to depose Saddam Hussein? Chase down the (apparently false) rumors of his nuclear program? Control Iraq’s oil? Try yet again to build liberal democracy in the Muslim world? If all we had wanted to do was replace Saddam with a friendlier dictator, that’s not a very inspiring ambition, but we might have been in-and-out quickly. Instead, the failure to find Saddam’s mythical weapons of mass destruction left the Bush administration grasping after some other definition of victory, and getting stuck in another long-term war with dubious goals.
The early indications about this war are not encouraging. Maybe we’re just trying to make sure Iran doesn’t get nuclear weapons. Of course, Obama had a treaty in place that did just that, which Trump ditched, claiming he could get a “better deal”. This war, apparently, is that “better” deal.
But maybe we want to topple the Islamic Republic. Maybe we once again want to control the oil. Those kind of goals bring back Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn rule“: If we break the country’s government, we own own the ensuing problems until we can fix them. That implies the same kind of long-term commitment we had in Iraq.
Of course, Trump might walk away from such a moral obligation, since he has little notion of morality in any sphere. Then we wind up with a failed state three times the size of Afghanistan, and who knows what kind of mischief might germinate there?
Did our attack work? The answer to this question depends on the answer to the previous question: What does “work” mean?
If the goal was simply to destroy Iran’s current nuclear program, maybe it did work, or can be made to work soon. Trump announced that the attacks were “a spectacular military success” which “completely and totally obliterated” the target sites. But then, he would say that no matter what happened, wouldn’t he? Without someone on the ground, it’s impossible to know.
And without regime change, or without some kind of verifiable agreement in which the current regime renounces nuclear weapons, any such damage is just temporary. Any nation with sufficient money and will can develop nuclear weapons. If Iran comes out of this war with money and will, it can start over.
If the goal is regime change or “unconditional surrender”, the attack hasn’t worked yet and may never. Air war is a poor tool for establishing a new government. I would hope we learned our lesson from Dick Cheney’s famous “we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators” comment, but maybe not. I’ve heard commentators cite internal political opposition to the Iranian theocracy as some kind of ally, but It’s hard for me to picture how that works.
Apply the same logic to the United States: I am deeply opposed to the Trump administration and regard it as a threat to the tradition of American constitutional government. But would I favor some Chinese operation to overthrow Trump? No. What if the internal opposition in Iran is like me? Might they have to unite behind their government to avoid foreign domination?
What could Iran do in response? It’s always tempting to imagine that I will take some extreme action and that will be the end of the matter. Probably you’ve seen this yourself in online discussions. Somebody says something stupid, and you come up with some devastating comment, figuring that the other person will slink off in disgrace.
It doesn’t usually work out that way, does it? The other person will strike back at least as hard as you did, and the exchange might go on for days. You never planned on a flame war eating up hours of your time, but there you are.
Same thing here. Iran might close the Strait of Hormuz to oil tankers, sending the price of gas shooting up and the world economy reeling. It might attack American troops stationed in various places around the Middle East. It might launch terrorist attacks in the US itself. (Do you trust this 22-year-old to protect you?)
Even worse is the possibility of the unexpected. We seem to be at a hinge point in the history of warfare, where drones and various other new technologies change the battlefield in ways that are hard to imagine. Ukraine’s attack on Russia’s Siberian bomber bases is a case in point, but there are others.
Traditional symbols of power may be vulnerable, the way that the American battleships at Pearl Harbor were vulnerable to the new technology of air power. Are we prepared for, say, a massive drone attack sinking an aircraft carrier? What about a cyberattack blacking out some major city? If we suffer such an unexpected blow to our prestige and power, will we be able to respond in a rational way?
What will this war do to the United States itself? The War on Terror undermined the consensus against torture, and authorized previously unprecedented levels of government spying on ordinary Americans.
So far, this war looks like another few steps down the road to autocracy. We attacked Iran because Trump decided to. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, by contrast, was authorized by a bipartisan vote in Congress (to the shame of opportunistic Democrats who should have stood against it). That vote was preceded by a spirited public debate and mass protests.
This time, Congress was not consulted in any formal way. And even informally, a few congressional Republicans were informed ahead of time, but played no part in the decision. Democrats were not consulted at all. No effort at all has been made to convince the American public that this war is in our interests.
So far we’ve been treating this war as if it were a reality show involving Trump, Netanyahu, and the Iranian leadership. We’re just spectators. Until, that is, our city blacks out or we can’t afford gas.
Equal protection of the laws isn’t what it used to be.
After the 13th Amendment freed the slaves, the nation passed a 14th Amendment to make sure the freed slaves would have rights under the law. It promised every person “the equal protection of the laws”.
It didn’t work, at least not at first. The Supreme Court interpreted that Equal Protection Clause narrowly, and so states were able to pass Jim Crow laws that forced Black Americans to live under a different legal regime entirely. Plessy v Ferguson established the principle of “separate but equal” treatment, where “separate” rules and facilities for Blacks and Whites were very real, but “equal” could be winked at.
In the 20th century, though, the Equal Protection Clause was gradually reinterpreted to mean something very important. There are a number of complicated doctrines that implement this idea, but the underlying concept is simple: If the law treats you differently than it treats someone else, there has to be a reason for it. And the reason can’t just be that the people who make the laws don’t like you.
There has seldom been a more obvious violation of this principle than the recent run of state laws that ban gender-affirming care for trans youth. One such law is Tennessee’s “Prohibition on Medical Procedures Performed on Minors Related to Sexual Identity, Senate Bill 1 (SB1)“. Ostensibly, the law intends “to protect the health and welfare of minors”. The law bans a number of treatments that major medical organizations (“American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Psychological Association, and American Academy of Child Adolescent Psychiatry” according to Justice Sotomayor’s dissent) recommend for young people experiencing gender dysphoria, i.e., the feeling that the sexual characteristics of their physical body are at odds with their inner sense of who they are.
Legislatures typically have wide latitude to permit or ban medical procedures according to their assessment of patient safety. But the smoking gun here is that the procedures are banned only when used to treat trans youth, only
when these medical procedures are performed for the purpose of enabling a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex or treating purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity.
Using say, puberty-blocking drugs or gender-related hormones like testosterone or estrogen, is perfectly fine and safe for any other purpose parents and physicians might have in mind. But not that one.
Keep in mind here that the affected population — families of trans youth — did not ask for this “protection”. To the best of my knowledge, none of them came to the legislature and said “I want the state to make my child’s medical decisions.” To the contrary, three such families sued to block the law, and countless others are leaving Tennessee (and other states with similar laws) so that they will be free to decide for themselves how to handle what everyone recognizes is a difficult situation.
The push for SB1 came instead from people opposed on principle to the existence of trans people, usually for religious reasons. The purpose is to act on trans youth and their families, not for them. The law itself says:
This state has a legitimate, substantial, and compelling interest in encouraging minors to appreciate their sex, particularly as they undergo puberty.
In other words, Tennessee claims a “compelling interest” in convincing trans youth that they are wrong. Their sex is their sex, and they just need to get used to it.
Anyone who has listened to the public debate over such laws has to realize that the laws are motivated by a desire to make life harder for families of trans youth. If the families choose to remove their children from the state by moving, or the children decide to remove themselves from life by committing suicide, this is not necessarily considered a bad outcome. Obviously, the Tennessee legislature does not intend to offer trans youth “the equal protection of the laws”. SB1’s intention is to bludgeon trans youth, not protect them.
The question for the courts, then, should be how to extend equal protection in a coherent way. Precedents offer clear paths. Typically, these precedents involve the most obvious instances of laws being used against disadvantaged groups: race and sex. Laws that turn on issues of race or sex are given “heightened scrutiny” by the courts, because apparent justifications for the laws have so often turned out to be pretexts for hostile discrimination.
Justice Sotomayor’s dissent in this week’s case (US v Skrmetti, decided Wednesday) outlines how to use the precedents involving sex.
What does [application of SB1] mean in practice? Simply that sex determines access to the covered medication. Physicians in Tennessee can prescribe hormones and puberty blockers to help a male child, but not a female child, look more like a boy; and to help a female child, but not a male child, look more like a girl. Put in the statute’s own terms, doctors can facilitate consistency between an adolescent’s physical appearance and the “normal development” of her sex identified at birth, but they may not use the same medications to facilitate “inconsisten[cy]” with sex . All this, the State openly admits, in service of “encouraging minors to appreciate their sex.”
But the conservative justices (Roberts writing the majority opinion, plus concurrences by Thomas, Alito, and Barrett) resist not just the characterization of this case as hinging on sex, but also the idea that any injustice is occurring at all: There is nothing about discrimination against trans people that makes laws about them suspect, and so the Court has no excuse to go probing into the motives of the legislature. Courts should apply only “rational basis” review of SB1, requiring only that the legislature offer some rational connection between its actions and some legitimate government purpose. Protecting minors from a possibly dangerous medical procedure is a rational purpose, and so the Court need not look more closely at whether that explanation is a pretext for hostile discrimination. (In fact, the conservative justices dare not look closer, because the proffered explanation is obviously a pretext.)
There is a standard argument for justifying this kind of discrimination, and it has been used many times in the past: You examine previous suspect classes and draw your lines so that those issues appear not to apply. So, for example, laws banning interracial marriage were once not seen as racially discriminatory, because neither Blacks nor Whites could marry a person of a different race. Laws against same-sex marriage didn’t discriminate on the basis of sex, because neither men nor women could marry a person of the same sex. And so on. In retrospect, such arguments are transparent rationalizations for hostile discrimination, but that doesn’t stop judges from continuing to use them. Justice Roberts writes for the majority:
Neither of the above classifications [in SB1] turns on sex. Rather, SB1 prohibits healthcare providers from administering puberty blockers and hormones to minors for certain medical uses, regardless of a minor’s sex. … SB1 does not mask sex-based classifications. For reasons we have explained, the law does not prohibit conduct for one sex that it permits for the other. Under SB1, no minor may be administered puberty blockers or hormones to treat gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, or gender incongruence; minors of any sex may be administered puberty blockers or hormones for other purposes.
So the law doesn’t discriminate against transgender youth, it just separates out the medical conditions that define transgender youth. It protects youth against the risks of such treatments, but only if they seek those treatments for a purpose unique to trans people.
When the Equal Protection Clause was being explained to me years ago, the following example was given: What if a law banned yarmulkes, the skull caps typically worn by Jewish men? You could argue that such a law isn’t religious discrimination, because it applies universally: Neither Jews nor Gentiles can wear yarmulkes. But of course, only Jews want to wear yarmulkes. So a law against yarmulkes is religious discrimination against Jews.
Sotomayor observes:
nearly every discriminatory law is susceptible to a similarly race- or sex- neutral characterization. A prohibition on interracial marriage, for example, allows no person to marry someone outside of her race, while allowing persons of any race to marry within their races.
The religious right is targeting other applications of the Equal Protection Clause, beginning with same-sex marriage. So it seems likely we will be hearing the same rationalizations again soon.
Breaking news keeps interfering with my plans. I have a number of planned articles that haven’t gotten finished in recent weeks because something else has come up to grab my attention.
This week, the obvious attention-grabber is war. Here we are, involved in another Middle Eastern war. Saturday, President Trump announced that US warplanes had bombed Iranian nuclear facilities. Maybe this will be a one-and-done situation, as Trump and his administration sometimes seem to hope. Maybe Iran will take its punch-in-the-nose and go on about its business. Or maybe Trump will push for regime change in Iran, which might make us responsible for the regime that follows, as we were in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or maybe we’ll be happy with a large oil-rich failed state.
I often warn about the dangers of speculation that purports to be news coverage. It’s always important to separate what we know from what we hope or fear. Speculation at best is a poor use of your time, and at worst can make you crazy about possibilities that never manifest. So I’ll try to discipline myself. Rather than claim to know things, I will just raise “Questions to Ask at the Start of a War”. That article probably won’t appear until 11 or so EDT.
In the meantime, I’m going ahead with another article based on breaking news: the Supreme Court’s refusal to strike down Tennessee’s law banning gender-affirming care. “The Court fails trans youth” will summarize both what should have happened and what did happen. I’m hoping to get that out by 10.
That still leaves a few things for the weekly summary: new outrages in the Big Beautiful Bill, the continuing military occupation of Los Angeles, what Trump plans for ICE, the cases we’re still waiting for at the end of the Supreme Court’s term, and a few other things. That may not appear until after noon.
In short, individuals’ right to protest the government is one of the fundamental rights protected by the First Amendment, and just because some stray bad actors go too far does not wipe out that right for everyone. The idea that protesters can so quickly cross the line between protected conduct and “rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States” is untenable and dangerous.
There is no featured post this week; this weekly summary is all I’m writing.
It was a news-heavy week, most of it bad. In an earlier draft of this post, the opening quote was Shakespeare’s “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
This week everybody was talking about right-wing political assassinations
Early Saturday morning, a man impersonating a police officer killed Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband at their home. He also shot and seriously wounded State Senator John Hoffman and his wife in a similar fashion. Hortman was the ranking Democrat in the Minnesota House and a former Speaker. A suspect has been captured and charged with murder and attempted murder.
A very good summary of what is known is in the NYT. Apparently, the Hoffmans were killed first, and their daughter called 911. Police checked on Hortman’s house and found a fake police vehicle in the driveway. The suspect was present and exchanged gunfire before running away.
A federal law enforcement official said that the vehicle was found with a list of about 70 potential targets. Also found were papers that referenced the “No Kings” protest, a series of anti-Trump rallies that were to be held on Saturday.
I’ve seen claims elsewhere that all 70 were Democrats, but I haven’t seen enough to trust that as a fact. The suspect did not register with a political party, but has given sermons against abortion and LGBTQ rights. A friend reported that he voted for Trump.
I have been briefed on the terrible shooting that took place in Minnesota, which appears to be a targeted attack against State Lawmakers. Our Attorney General, Pam Bondi, and the FBI, are investigating the situation, and they will be prosecuting anyone involved to the fullest extent of the law. Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America. God Bless the great people of Minnesota, a truly great place!
But by Sunday he had revered to form, telling ABC News that he “may” call Governor Walz, who is “a terrible governor” and “grossly incompetent”.
The gold standard for responses to violence from your supporters is the statement Bernie Sanders made after the Steve Scalise shooting.
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.
I’d love to hear Trump say outright that he doesn’t want his supporters committing violent acts, and calling on anybody who is planning such an act to stop. But I suspect I never will.
and Trump’s military occupation of Los Angeles
Federalized National Guard units and hundreds of Marines remain in Los Angeles, but I’ve had a hard time googling up any articles about what they’ve done these last two days. I hope that means they’ve been behaving themselves, protecting federal facilities and personnel, and not performing law enforcement tasks that would violate the Posse Comitatus Act.
A Washington Post reporter posted a video of police firing non-lethal shells at non-violent anti-ICE protesters approaching a federal building. But that’s ordinary police-escalated violence, and appears to have nothing to do with the military.
In case you’ve been wondering, Posse Comitatus does actually have something to do with the posses that sheriffs round up to pursue bank robbers in the Western movies. Oversimplifying just a little, the law says that military forces can’t be part of a law-enforcing posse.
Both uses derive from the Latin verb posse, which means to be able or have power.
Thursday, a federal judge ordered President Trump to return command of the federalized California National Guard troops to Governor Newsom. It hasn’t happened, because an appellate court stayed the order until it can have a hearing tomorrow. It’s easy to imagine that Trump might abuse the slowness of the judicial process to keep the troops there as long as he wanted to anyway.
Like the Alien Enemies Act case (still awaiting final decision), this case revolves around legislation that grants the president additional powers in certain situations. In each case, the question being challenged in court is whether the appropriate situation exists. Trump’s lawyers argue that it is up to him to judge whether the conditions to extend his powers apply. In practice, this would mean that the President has additional powers whenever he decides he wants them. So far, the courts are not buying this argument.
Between the unique concerns raised by federal military intrusion into civilian affairs and the fact that federal officials are not uniquely positioned to ascertain what is happening on the ground (as compared to, say, state and local officials), the Court is not convinced that the judiciary cannot question presidential assertions about domestic activities leading to military action. … Indeed, as Justice [Robert H.] Jackson explained using examples from Weimar Germany, the French Republic, and World War II–era Great Britain, “emergency powers are consistent with free government only when their control is lodged elsewhere than in the Executive who exercises them.”
The law in question allows federalization of the National Guard when there is a rebellion against he US government. But Judge Breyer skeptically applied the conservative principle of originalism: What did “rebellion” mean at the time the law was passed?
… the Court observes that the dictionary definitions from the turn of the century share several key characteristics. First, a rebellion must not only be violent but also be armed. Second, a rebellion must be organized. Third, a rebellion must be open and avowed. Fourth, a rebellion must be against the government as a whole—often with an aim of overthrowing the government—rather than in opposition to a single law or issue.
… The protests in Los Angeles fall far short of “rebellion.” … Moreover, the Court is troubled by the implication inherent in Defendants’ argument that protest against the federal government, a core civil liberty protected by the First Amendment, can justify a finding of rebellion.
I expect the appellate court to uphold that finding; the only question is how long it will take. I predict Trump will end his occupation of Los Angeles before the Supreme Court can also rule against him.
Pundits speculate about whether or not Trump and his people will obey a clear court order, but that’s not the only issue here. The National Guard units themselves will have to make a decision about which set of orders they receive are the legal ones.
The Department of Homeland Security and the officers and the agencies and the departments and the military people that are working on this operation will continue to sustain and increase our operations in this city. We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor had placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.
Take a minute to process that statement. Trump and his administration have sent military troops to LA to “liberate” the city from its elected leaders. Presumably, they expect Californians to be grateful to be relieved of the “burden” of democracy. What cities and states might they “liberate” next?
Thursday, California Senator Alex Padilla was forcably removed from a Kristi Noem press conference, then pushed to the floor and handcuffed.
Noem lied about the incident afterward, saying that Padilla did not identify himself and no one recognized him. The idea that no one recognized one of the two California senators is ridiculous on its face. But tape shows Padilla clearly identifying himself. And Noem has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s panel on immigration, citizenship and border safety, where Padilla is the ranking Democrat. She knew who he was.
Warplanes struck the Natanz nuclear facility, while other operations killed Iran’s top military general, the leader of its Revolutionary Guards, the head of its Air Force, and at least six nuclear scientists. News images showed apartment buildings in Tehran with smoke billowing from specific rooms, indicating precisely targeted attacks (though Iran said that eighty civilians were also killed). An unnamed security source told Channel 12 that the Mossad intelligence services had recently established bases inside Iran, where they kept precision missiles and suicide drones. The news aired grainy black-and-white footage of masked Mossad agents on the ground there, delicately setting down what were reportedly explosive drones, aimed at destroying the country’s air defenses. For twenty years, Israel had threatened to attack Iran’s nuclear program. Seemingly within minutes, it suddenly had.
Whether or not it makes strategic sense for Israel to start a new war with Iran is another question that depends largely on the goal: Is the idea to “mow the lawn” by destroying resources Iran can eventually replace? Or is Israel aiming at some kind of regime change?
Iran has struck back with missile attacks on Israel, which are less sophisticated and less well targeted than the Israeli attacks.
My reading of history is that no matter how big your current advantage may be, no one keeps the upper hand forever. So my question for the Netanyahu government and the Israeli electorate: Is maintaining permanent superiority your plan, or is there some vision of a stable equilibrium that you hope to achieve someday? I mean: an arrangement that your current enemies will someday accede to voluntarily, without an iron fist constantly over their heads?
Trump is fond of claiming that any bad thing in the world — the Ukraine War, the October 7 Hamas attack, post-pandemic inflation, and so on — would not have happened if he had been president when it started. Such alternate-time-line boasts are nearly impossible to check, no matter how unlikely they seem.
But this is a case where a bad thing is directly attributable to Trump: If he had not junked Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, this war would not be happening.
As is so often the case, Trump claimed he could get a “better deal” and wound up with no deal. Trump’s prowess as a deal-maker is a big part of his myth, but has very little grounding in reality. Real deal-making isn’t about bombast and theatrics, it’s about understanding what your partner in the deal really wants, and what you can give up without trashing your own position. Trump’s brain can’t handle that level of detail and nuance. It’s not a matter of age; he never could.
Trump has tried to have it both ways with respect to this attack. He claims he had nothing to do with it, but also that he knew it was coming and that he warned the Iranians.
Certain Iranian hardliner’s spoke bravely, but they didn’t know what was about to happen. They are all DEAD now, and it will only get worse!
If I were an Iranian reading that tweet, I’d assume I was at war with the United States, not just with Israel.
and the No Kings protests
Other cities may have had larger turnouts, but San Francisco’s protest had the most style. Here’s a human banner at Ocean Beach.
Dan Fromkin’s PressWatch blog has an article I wish more journalists would take seriously: ‘How many people were arrested?’ is a lousy way to cover protests. Fromkin points to a common way of covering protests that is particularly lazy and cowardly: Just talk to the cops.
Tell us what brought people out. Was it a range of issues or mostly just one? Tell us what some of the signs said – were they funny, angry, both? Tell us what the protesters did – did they march, chant, scream?
Were there speakers? What did they say? What are the organizers hoping to accomplish? What are their short-term goals and their long-term goals?
Describe the makeup of the crowd and give a rough indication of its size (yes you can make a reasonable estimate.) A sense of scale is crucial information.
and Trump’s sad military parade
No doubt when Trump envisioned his taxpayer-funded $45 million birthday bash, he pictured it being the biggest story of that news cycle, with even the denunciations drawing attention to it. In fact, it barely registered. I have not found an estimate of the crowd size, but numerous pictures show empty bleachers, and AP reported that
attendance appeared to fall far short of early predictions that as many as 200,000 people would attend the festival and parade.
Ostensibly, the parade was to honor the 250th birthday of the US Army, not Trump’s 79th birthday. But a similar anniversary is approaching for the Navy, and no similar spectacle is planned. And some spectators sang “Happy Birthday” to Trump after his speech.
and you also might be interested in …
Republican senators need to pay more attention the lyrics of Paul Simon’s “The Boxer“:
I have squandered my resistance For a pocketful of mumbles Such are promises. All lies and jest Still, a man hears what he wants to hear And disregards the rest.
Finally, in his testimony, he noted repeatedly that Roe had been upheld by Planned Parenthood v. Casey, describing it as “precedent on precedent.” When I asked him would it be sufficient to overturn a long-established precedent if five current justices believed it was wrongly decided, he emphatically said “no.”
The latest example of Republican senatorial gullibility is Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. A doctor who gained prominence by vaccinating low-income kids in his home state, Cassidy might have blocked RFK Jr.’s nomination as HHS secretary, and for a time appeared inclined to do so over Kennedy’s anti-vax activism. But after voting Yes in a key committee hearing,
Cassidy explained that he’d received “serious commitments” from the Trump administration that made him comfortable with voting yes. Speaking later on the Senate floor, he added that RFK Jr. had promised to “meet or speak” with him multiple times a month, that the Trump administration would not remove assurances from the CDC’s website that vaccines do not cause autism, and that the administration would give his committee notice before making any changes to the nation’s existing vaccine-safety-monitoring systems.
Medical staff are still required to treat veterans regardless of race, color, religion and sex, and all veterans remain entitled to treatment. But individual workers are now free to decline to care for patients based on personal characteristics not explicitly prohibited by federal law.
Language requiring healthcare professionals to care for veterans regardless of their politics and marital status has been explicitly eliminated. Doctors and other medical staff can also be barred from working at VA hospitals based on their marital status, political party affiliation or union activity, documents reviewed by the Guardian show.
The very poor tend to be unpopular, with a lot of Americans believing they are lazy bums who deserve what they get. (I’m not claiming that, I’m just pointing out that a lot of people believe it.) But I want to call your attention to the working poor: people in the 2nd and 3rd decile who probably work as hard as anybody, but in low-paying jobs. They are also worse off if this bill passes.
Meanwhile, the Senate’s version of the Big Beautiful Bill looks likely to include a provision to sell 3 million acres of public land. The proposal is dressed up as a solution to the national housing shortage, but in fact most of this land is far from any expanding town. An analysis by Headwaters Economics found that most of the land near expanding towns has high wildfire risk, while other sites are prone to drought or flood.
What’s the real reason to sell this land? Probably just an ideological hatred of public ownership.
Philips O’Brien draws attention to something the mainstream media isn’t paying attention to: More and more, Trump officials echo Putin’s worldview.
A. R. Moxon answers a question Rep. Nancy Mace threw at Governor Walz: “What is a woman?”
This is a pretty standard question from the type of bigot that Nancy Mace is. It’s meant to erase the existence of trans women, who are being especially targeted for cruelty and exclusion by [Trump] and all his little minions. The question is asked to attempt to enforce the asker’s own narrow definitions, and then to accuse anyone who refuses to accept those restrictions of sexism and bigotry.
Moxon suggests answering: A woman is not a what. A woman is a who.
I have noticed that what [Trump] and his hateful crew do as almost an instinct is reduce a who to a what, and they do it to women in just the same way as they do it to immigrants and anybody else they want to target, and for the same reason, which is to exclude them from their full humanity so that they can be more easily abused.
The Sift will be a bit abbreviated this week, because I’m on vacation in New York City. (I saw Hadestown yesterday, which I can heartily recommend to anyone who hasn’t had a spouse die recently.) There won’t be a featured post this week, but I will try to cover the broad sweep of serious events that happened this week: the political assassinations in Minnesota, Trump’s continuing occupation of Los Angeles, the court pushback against that occupation, the No Kings protests, Israel’s attack on Iran, and Trump’s military celebration of his own birthday.
I’m going to try to get done early today, maybe by 11 EDT. Then on to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Everything that’s happened over the past six months has been a response to an imaginary crisis. There is no immigrant invasion. No trade crisis. No scientific or governance crisis. Just people completely high off their own supply trying to fundamentally reorder society. None of this had to happen.
Yes, yes, the schadenfreude was amazing, but this bromance breakup points out a few important facts about our current situation.
We take Trump’s corruption for granted. The graph above illustrates how Tesla’s stock price fluctuated as the spat unfolded. Think about what this means: A big chunk Tesla’s near-trillion-dollar market capitalization consists of the favoritism its CEO can expect from the President, versus the revenge the President might take should the CEO oppose his policies. In no other administration has the good will of the President had so much market value. It’s impossible to imagine the value of, say, J.P. Morgan Chase fluctuating because of what Jamie Dimon and President Biden might have been saying about each other. These kinds of fluctuations would be scandalous in any other administration, but hardly anyone has been remarking on it at all. Our major journalists and pundits just take for granted that Trump abuses his power to help his friends and harm his enemies.
Privatizing key government functions is dangerous. Part of the back-and-forth sniping involved Trump threatening Musk’s government contracts. Musk retaliated by saying that SpaceX would decommission the Dragon spacecraft, which is currently the only way for NASA to get astronauts to or from the space station. (Musk later pulled back the threat.) But why is the US in a situation where some unreliable individual, for whatever reason, can threaten to cut us off from our space station? Privatization. NASA should have its own launch ability, and not have to contract launches out to any company.
Musk is exploiting the gap between what Trump promised and what he’s delivering. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” cuts Medicaid and food stamp services needed by the working poor in order to fund a tax cut for billionaires. In addition, it increases rather than decreases the federal deficit. Did anybody vote for that? Efforts to shrug this off, like Joni Ernst’s “We all are going to die“, don’t seem to be working. But Musk speaking up gives Republican senators cover to oppose this monstrosity.
Musk completely failed to find the trillions of dollars of “waste, fraud, and abuse” he claimed existed. Nobody believes government money is spent perfectly. But to the extent WF&A exists, it’s subtle and exists in small pockets. Rooting it out often requires bureaucratic oversight that is more cumbersome and costly than the abuse itself.
Money plays too big a role in our politics. This was always true and got considerably worse after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Now a guy like Musk can openly buy his way into power. Nobody voted for him, but his opposition is a problem.
John Adams is rolling in his grave. Adams is generally credited for the phrase “a government of laws, not of men“. The Trump administration is a government of men — unstable ego-driven men, unfortunately.
But OK, once you appreciate all that, go ahead and enjoy the schadenfreude. My favorite response was AOC’s: “Oh man. The girls are fighting, aren’t they?”
the allegations against Abrego Garcia are damning. A federal grand jury found that the 29-year-old was an MS-13 member who transported thousands of undocumented immigrants, including children, from Texas to states across the country for profit for nine years. He allegedly also transported firearms and drugs, abused female migrants and was linked to an incident in Mexico where a tractor-trailer overturned and killed 50 migrants.
Maybe he did all that and maybe he didn’t, but that’s not the point that concerns me or should concern you. The important point is that his due process rights are being respected. He won’t just vanish down a rat hole. He will get a trial, and a jury will decide whether or not he’s guilty.
Even if he is found guilty, that will not justify what the Trump administration did to him. Due process is the foundation of all other rights. If somebody can be sent to a foreign prison on nothing but Trump’s say-so, then anybody can be sent to prison on Trump’s say-so.
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Ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and abortion rights, people on both sides of the issue have been wondering whether Obergefell and same-sex marriage rights were next. This week, the Southern Baptist Convention will vote on whether to pursue that goal.
I’ll repeat something I’ve said before: Same-sex marriage became feasible — and indeed obvious — in America because of the ways that opposite-sex marriage changed over the last two centuries. Once, men and women were different classes of citizens with different rights. Similarly, husband and wife were different roles treated differently under the law.
In that legal regime, same-sex marriage made no sense: Who is the “husband” in a lesbian marriage, and how does that “husband” perform the role without the legal privileges of masculinity?
But in a world where men and women are equal citizens, and neither husbands nor wives have special roles under the law, requiring spouses to have opposite genders has no justification beyond prejudice against gays and lesbians.
When you understand this, you’ll see that overturning Obergefell is a step towards Gilead. It leads to seeing man/woman and husband/wife as inherently unequal. This is the hidden content in what the resolution calls “God’s design for marriage and family”, which cannot be disentangled from patriarchy.
I think it’s important not to be “nice” about this. If you claim this is really what the Bible says — and not just your interpretation of a multi-faceted text — you’ve given the rest of us a good reason to reject the Bible. If this is what your God wants, it reflects poorly on your God.
In other anti-LGBT news, Defense Secretary Hegseth is changing the name of the USS Harvey Milk, so that Navy recruits don’t have to be posted to a “gay” ship. This is a prime piece of Pride Month trolling.
Missouri has been running the pilot program for Project 2025 for at least a decade. We have been under the boot of a GOP supermajority for 22 years. Republicans have purposely defunded our public schools for so long that 33% of Missouri schools run a four-day week.
But why?
To curate failure — to say that public schools are broken and public school teachers are inept all in a push to privatize public schools. To dumb down the populace. To demonize a system that educates over 90% of kids in this state. To send taxpayer money to grifters who will line their pockets while opening the fly-by-night private schools operating out of the old Pizza Hut buildings dotting the heartland.
It’s a scam. It’s always been a scam.
As he did in his first term, Trump has declared a travel ban. It takes effect today and targets 19 countries:
The order, which Trump signed last week, restricts the nationals of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen from entering the US.
Nationals from a further seven countries – Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela – will face partial travel restrictions.
The stated goal of the policy is “to protect [US] citizens from aliens who intend to commit terrorist attacks, threaten our national security, espouse hateful ideology, or otherwise exploit the immigration laws for malevolent purposes.” Trump cited the recent attack on pro-Israel demonstrators by an Egyptian immigrant as a motivation for the ban, but Egypt is not on the list.
Trump declared a travel ban from seven Muslim-majority countries early in his first term. He lost initial court cases on its constitutionality, but eventually produced a ban that passed muster with the Supreme Court. Biden reversed that ban, just as the next president will reverse this one.
There is a special exception for Afghans who hold the Special Immigration Visas, which were given to those who helped our troops during our 20-year Afghan war. But many of our former allies fall into grey areas and don’t have such visas. Others have them, but now won’t be able to get their relatives out of Afghanistan.
Trump’s commitment to stopping terrorism seems a little suspect. He just appointed 22-year-old Thomas Fugate as the Homeland Security official in charge of the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships. “Known as CP3, the office has led nationwide efforts to prevent hate-fueled attacks, school shootings and other forms of targeted violence.”
One of the looming climate disasters that environmentally aware people worry about is the possible collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC), which Grist calls “an enormous system of currents that carries water and nutrients across the world and plays a large part in stabilizing the global climate”.
Should the current break down, the most frightening predictions describe a world thrown into chaos: Drought could destroy India, South America, and Africa; the Eastern Seaboard of the United States would see dramatic sea level rise; and an arctic chill would spread across Europe.
Well, good news, sort of: Recent research appears to show the AMOC breaking down gradually rather than heading towards a sudden collapse.
Extreme heat is mostly a silent killer; lots of heat-related deaths get recorded as heart attacks or strokes. But studies indicate that heat waves actually kill twice as many people as hurricanes and tornadoes combined do.
That understanding led NOAA to form a Center for Heat Resilient Communities, which worked with cities and towns to better understand their vulnerability to heat waves. Well, no more. The Center just got defunded. People will have to go on dying from heat waves so that billionaires can pay lower taxes.
It started with ICE raids at Home Depots and other places undocumented immigrants might congregate to look for work.
Xochitl, a Guatemalan mother of two, was inside a McDonald’s that shares the parking lot with the Home Depot when she said she saw numerous agents running after men she sees every day but knows only by their nicknames. She said she momentarily froze but then began walking in the opposite direction of agents who were detaining food vendors on sidewalks.
“They were just grabbing people,” she said. “They don’t ask questions. They didn’t know if any of us were in any kind of immigration process.”
Anti-ICE protesters gathered, as they do in towns and cities all over America. (There’s a weekly protest outside a Massachusetts ICE facility one town over from mine. I haven’t attended yet, but I feel like I should.) Increasingly, ICE is targeting not the violent criminals Trump campaigned against (who never existed in the numbers he claimed), but the neighbors, friends, and co-workers of ordinary Americans.
By Friday, the situation had devolved into law enforcement officers using tear gas and protesters shooting fireworks at ICE. Who started the violence? Hard to say. In this video, a man describes an ICE raid causing a traffic jam. When agents began dragging people out of a local business, people stuck in the jam began taking videos on their phones. “We’re not there to protest. We were stuck at the light.” The tear gas, the man claims, was aimed at the people taking videos on their phones. “One of the agents, I hear them: ‘Go for the people with the phones’.”
Local officials thought the police response was appropriate to the size of the disturbance, but Trump evidently disagreed. Saturday, he federalized 2000 troops from the California National Guard and placed them under the command of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Using National Guard troops to control unrest is a well established practice, but usually the troops are requested by the governor. Here, Governor Newsom (and LA Mayor Karen Bass) opposed using the troops, but Trump sent them in anyway — something that hasn’t been done since 1965, when LBJ sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights workers.
Trump’s over-the-top response has created an additional reason to protest: the appearance of a military takeover as federalized troops are used against the citizens of a major American city. A weekly blog can’t cover breaking news, so I’ll just have to wait and see how this plays out.
The legal authority here is tricky. Jay Kuo breaks it down: Trump is invoking his authority under Title 10, which allows him to use National Guard troops to respond to “a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States”. Characterizing spontaneous demonstrations as “rebellion” against the US government is a bit of a stretch, but it’s the kind of stretch the Trump administration has made before, like when it claimed illegal immigration is an “invasion” that justifies invoking the Alien Enemies Act.
But Title 10 doesn’t allow martial law.
So here’s the part that’s a bit hard to grasp at first. Title 10 permits the President to federalize the troops and put them under his command. But what they are permitted to do as military troops operating on domestic soil is still governed by other laws.
And one of those laws is the Posse Comitatus Act.
The PCA doesn’t allow federal troops to play the role of local law enforcement. All they can do is protect federal buildings and federal agents carrying out their duties.
The Insurrection Act makes an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, and so would be a step towards martial law. But so far Trump has not invoked the Insurrection Act.
Now I’ll begin to speculate: It looks like Trump wants this confrontation, and is hoping the situation escalates. This will provide lots of violent video to show on Fox News, of blue-state citizens battling US troops. After a few days of that, he can justify invoking the Insurrection Act, turning LA into a military occupation zone.
It’s hard not to connect this directly provoked confrontation with the events scheduled for next Saturday. Trump has planned a North-Korea-style military parade in Washington. Ostensibly, the parade is to celebrate the 250th birthday of the US Army. But coincidentally, Saturday is also Trump’s own birthday.
Trump’s $45 million birthday party has incited plans for thousands of counter-protests around the country, under the theme “No Kings“. Whether he intends to meet these protests with state violence remains to be seen.
It’s been one of those weeks where everything seems like a distraction from everything else. Trump and ICE have provoked a showdown with protesters in Los Angeles, and used it to push another overreach of executive power: Any violence that erupts during a protest is now evidence of a “rebellion against the government of the United States”, and justifies taking federal control of state National Guard units.
Meanwhile, Trump and Elon Musk had a major falling out this week, putting passage of Trump’s “big beautiful bill” in jeopardy. And it turns out that the Trump administration can get Kilmar Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador after all — now that they’ve got charges to file against him.
Anyway, the featured post deals with the situation in Los Angeles. As always, I stay away from trying to cover unfolding events. But the legal authority Trump is invoking and its implications are worth paying attention to sooner rather than later. That should be out shortly.
Musk and Garcia are covered in the weekly summary. I’ll mostly avoid the sensational parts of the Trump/Musk spat, but the story implies a bunch of things that the mainstream media is mostly ignoring. Like this: If Trump isn’t corruptly using his power to reward his friends and punish his enemies, why does Tesla’s stock price gyrate based on whether Musk seems like a friend or enemy at the moment?
Also in the summary: Southern Baptists debate whether to try to reverse same-sex marriage. Missouri’s broken public schools are a preview of what the GOP has planned nationally. And a few other things. That should be out by noon EDT.
In so holding, the court does not pass upon the wisdom or likely effectiveness of the President’s use of tariffs as leverage. That use is impermissible not because it is unwise or ineffective, but because [the law] does not allow it.
That’s the subject of the featured post. The decision of the US Court for International Trade revolves around what powers Trump has and how he exercises them. In the conclusion I note that there are legal ways to achieve Trump’s legitimate purposes, but he has chosen illegal ways that put him into conflict with the courts.
You can view that tendency in a sinister way, as Trump seeking conflict as he angles toward dictatorial power. But the Atlantic’s David Graham puts a different spin on it.
Some of Trump’s most notable collisions with the law and courts are less a product of him wanting powers that he doesn’t have than about him wanting things to happen faster than his powers allow. The president has a great deal of leeway to enforce immigration laws, but he is unwilling to wait while people exercise their right to due process, so instead he tries to just erase that right.
Trump could lay off many federal workers using the legally prescribed Reductions in Force procedure; instead, he and Elon Musk have attempted to fire workers abruptly, with the result that judges keep blocking the administration. Similarly, Trump could try to get Congress to close the Education Department or rescind funding for NPR, especially given the sway Trump holds over Republicans in both the House and the Senate. Instead, he has tried to do those things by executive fiat. Last week, a judge blocked his effort to shut down the department, and this week, NPR sued the administration over the attempt to slash funding, arguing that only Congress can claw back funds it has appropriated.
and Elon’s last day
Another SpaceX Starship rocket failed Tuesday. Friday was Elon Musk’s official last day as a “special government employee“, a status which was always supposed to have a 130-days-per-year time limit — pretty close to the time since Trump’s inauguration on January 21.
Trump and Musk marked the occasion with a joint Oval Office press conference. Send-offs are times for reflection, and this one raises a bunch of questions.
Is he really leaving?Trump says no, for what that’s worth.
Elon is really not leaving,” Trump said. “He’s going to be back and forth. I think I have a feeling [DOGE is] his baby, and I think he’s going to be doing a lot of things.
It’s hard to know how seriously to take that. On the one hand, Musk is still the richest man in the world and can single-handedly finance campaigns at multiple levels. He still owns X/Twitter, which is a powerful force for injecting his point of view into the public mind. So if he wants to have influence in politics, he can.
On the other hand, Musk’s time as the face of the (mostly illegal) DOGE firings and budget cuts has probably not been a fun experience for him. He’s been widely vilified. Trump may well see Musk as a used-up shield. He absorbed blame from Trump’s policies, but became so unpopular that Trump may well not want to be linked with him going forward.
It had to hurt when fellow mega-billionaire Bill Gates said:
The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one. I’d love for him to go in and meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money
So Musk may look back on his involvement in government as an unpleasant mistake. Time will tell.
What did he accomplish for the country? For the conservative cut-government-spending movement, not much. He came in promising to find $2 trillion of waste, fraud, and inefficiency. But in spite of all the people he fired or tried to fire, numbers of that size were never on the table. In the end, DOGE claimed it had saved $160 billion, but even that number was inflated. CBS reported an estimate from Partnership for Public Service that balanced that $160 billion with $135 billion in additional costs, resulting in a net savings of $25 billion. Once you factor in lost revenue (like the additional taxes those fired IRS employees might have collected) DOGE may have increased the federal deficit.
In addition, much of what Musk cut had real value, like medical research and the food and medical aid that Gates was talking about. Michelle Goldberg writes:
There is one place, however, where Musk, with the help of his minions, achieved his goals. He did indeed shred the United States Agency for International Development. Though a rump operation is operating inside the State Department, the administration says that it has terminated more than 80 percent of U.S.A.I.D. grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk’s foray into politics accomplished.
Since the start of the second Trump administration, federal agencies that had scrutinized Musk and his business empire in recent years have begun to look a lot different. At the Department of Agriculture, for example, President Donald Trump fired the person who had been investigating the Musk company Neuralink. At other agencies including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Trump and Musk have tried to slash the number of employees — potentially hobbling those regulators’ ability to enforce the law against companies including Musk’s Tesla and X.
In the past few months, Trump’s Justice Department has dropped a case against Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, and his Labor Department has canceled a planned civil rights review of his automaker, Tesla. Another regulatory matter against SpaceX has entered settlement talks with the National Labor Relations Board.
And in more than 40 other federal agency matters, regulators have taken no public action on their investigations for several months or more — raising questions about whether those cases may have become dormant, according to an NBC News review of regulatory matters involving Musk’s companies. Those matters range widely, from safety investigations into Tesla’s “self-driving” features to alleged workplace safety violations at SpaceX.
So maybe the $277 million he spent on the Trump campaign was a good investment.
and Ukraine’s well designed raid
Just a few months after Pearl Harbor, American spirits were lifted by a daring bombing raid on Tokyo, which everyone — including the Japanese — had believed was out of range. It became known as the Doolittle Raid, after its leader, Jimmy Doolittle. Doolittle’s team figured out how to launch the ordinarily land-based B-25 bomber from an aircraft carrier, then maneuvered the carrier close enough to make the attempt. All 16 planes were lost, but Doolittle got the Medal of Honor for the propaganda victory.
Sunday, Ukraine launched a similarly audacious attack, as it smuggled 117 drones close enough to Russian air bases deep in Siberia that it could destroy dozens of the Russian bombers that had been hitting Ukraine. The attacks hit three separate air bases. Ukraine claims to have damaged 40 Russian aircraft, and says that all drone operators are now safely out of Russia.
Whenever Trump announces massive tariffs, stock prices plunge. But then something almost always happens, like he puts the tariffs on pause, and then stock prices rebound. If you had known he would do that, you could have “bought the dip” and profited hugely when prices went back up.
Well, among Wall Street traders, this buy-the-tariff-dip strategy became known as “the TACO trade“, where TACO stands for Trump Always Chickens Out. In other words, he’ll talk tough about high tariffs, but will always find some way to back down.
One idea that has been discussed is to transform the [presidential daily briefing] so it mirrors a Fox News broadcast, according to four of the people with direct knowledge of the discussions. Under that concept as it has been discussed, the national intelligence director’s office could hire a Fox News producer to produce it and one of the network’s personalities to present it; Trump, an avid Fox News viewer, could then watch the broadcast PDB whenever he wanted.
A new PDB could include not only graphics and pictures but also maps with animated representations of exploding bombs, similar to a video game, another one of the people with knowledge of the discussions said.
“The problem with Trump is that he doesn’t read,” said another person with direct knowledge of the PDB discussions. “He’s on broadcast all the time.”
One tool of the creeping surveillance state is the automated license plate reader. Put enough of them in enough places, and you can track who drives where. Like all powers, this can be used for good or ill purposes.
This week 404 Media reported that a Texas police officer used Flock to perform a nationwide search of more than 83,000 ALPR cameras while looking for a woman who had had an abortion. Abortion is almost entirely illegal in Texas but law enforcement reportedly looked at cameras in states such as Washington and Illinois, where abortion is legal.
Jay Kuo’s brother Kaiser responds to Secretary of State Rubio’s announcement that the US has started revoking the visas of Chinese students.
The soft power cost is immeasurable. For decades, a degree from a U.S. university was the golden ticket, and not just for the prestige and the improved job prospects back home. It was often the start of a lifelong affinity for America, its values, and its people. Some of China’s best-known reformers and tech founders were educated in the U.S. They returned to China with not just skills and credentials, but admiration for an open society that welcomed them. Those days are ending. We are actively teaching the next generation of global talent that America is hostile, capricious, and unwelcoming.
Sam Stein is an American-raised Jewish Israeli citizen who devoted half a year to being a “protective presence” for Palestinians in the West Bank occupied territories.
For six months, I lived alongside those I’d been relentlessly warned would kill me at first opportunity. The truths I learned there must be shared, especially with others raised on the same fears.
The Real News Network’s Adam Johnson does a takedown of Jake Tapper and his new book “Original Sin”.
So Tapper has found the great scandal of the Biden years, and it is, of course, not one that upsets anyone at the Pentagon, the US Chamber of Commerce, the editorial boards of the New York Times or the Atlantic or AIPAC. The Biden aging story is the perfect pseudo-scandal for corporate media, and thus the perfect Jake Tapper story: vaguely true, but ultimately of peripheral importance, scapegoating a handful of Biden flunkies and, most important of all, it allows Tapper to polish his Speaking Truth to Power brand without speaking truth to anyone in a position of actual power.
Johnson’s candidate for the real Biden scandal is supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
[I]n over 15 months of co-hosting the influential Sunday news show State of the Union during the Gaza genocide under Biden, Tapper never once platformed a single Palestinian guest, while giving ample platform to a revolving door of Biden officials, Israeli spokespeople, and two softball interviews with Israeli Prime Minister—and fugitive from international justice—Benjamin Netanyahu.
Consistent with his yawning through the genocide under Biden, Tapper mostly ignores it under Trump and only chimes in to frame the latest Israeli war crime in terms favorable to Israel. Even worse than never bothering to interview a single Palestinian, his Sunday news show, since Israel recommenced its genocide on March 18, hasn’t brought up Gaza as a topic once.
Anthropologist Anand Pandian has traveled the country speaking to people of all backgrounds and opinions.
In my writing, I try to show how everyday structures of isolation – at home and on the road, for the body and the mind – magnify the social and political divides we lament so often. These interlocking walls of everyday life sharpen the divide between insiders and outsiders, making it hard to take unfamiliar people and perspectives seriously, to acknowledge the needs of others and relate to their struggles.
So much turns on the edges between the familiar and the foreign, these lines we’ve come to live with on a daily basis. Can we learn once again to take these edges as spaces of encounter, rather than hard divides between ourselves and the world beyond?
and let’s close with an intriguing thought
David Farrier considers the possibility that AI might crack animal languages, and what it might do to human consciousness if we learned how other species communicate.
In interspecies translation, sound only takes us so far. Animals communicate via an array of visual, chemical, thermal and mechanical cues, inhabiting worlds of perception very different to ours. Can we really understand what sound means to echolocating animals, for whom sound waves can be translated visually?
The German ecologist Jakob von Uexküll called these impenetrable worlds umwelten. To truly translate animal language, we would need to step into that animal’s umwelt – and then, what of us would be imprinted on her, or her on us? “If a lion could talk,” writes Stephen Budiansky, revising Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism in Philosophical Investigations, “we probably could understand him. He just would not be a lion any more.”
The Weekly Sift 