Author Archives: weeklysift

Doug Muder is a former mathematician who now writes about politics and religion. He is a frequent contributor to UU World.

Basic Understanding

September 11, 2023 – 11:52 am

Your letter makes clear that you lack a basic understanding of the law, its practice, and the ethical obligations of attorneys generally and prosecutors specifically.

– Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis
letter to Rep. Jim Jordan

This week’s featured post is “We’re all in law school now“.

This week everybody was talking about the Trump trials

We’re way past the point where I can hold all the details in my head — even just one week’s events. That’s what this week’s featured post covers.

But that post didn’t cover the freshly released report that the Fulton County special grand jury wrote to recommend indictments it didn’t have the power to issue. The headline result is that it recommended indictments not just of the 19 people who have now been charged, but of 21 others, including Senator Lindsey Graham and former Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.

The theme of the featured post is that we’re all learning law these days, and here’s the lesson I draw from this report: The special grand jury and the district attorney have different jobs. The special grand jury was answering a simple question: Is there probable cause to claim that these people broke these laws?

The prosecutor is asking a different question: What charges can I present to a trial jury and convince them beyond reasonable doubt?

A second lesson to draw is that Willis is really trying to win a case, not just make a big splash.

The WaPo has a long and fascinating article about the Reffitt family: The dad (Guy) was an armed 1-6 rioter now serving an 84-month sentence. The son (Jackson) turned him in to the FBI and testified against him. The mom (Nicole) still believes Trump won and Guy is a patriot. The daughters (Peyton and Sarah) are caught in the middle.

For years and years we’ve been hearing stories about how families get pulled apart when the kids join a cult. But these days, it’s the parents who are joining a cult.

and the Covid resurgence

Several people I know have caught Covid lately, and we’re heading into the fall, when school begins and social get-togethers move indoors.

But Vox has a reassuring article. The new variant (now named Pirola) doesn’t look that dangerous. Yes, infection rates are rising (even if they’re still nowhere near previous highs), but

over the last few days, several laboratory studies have led to sighs of relief: On a cellular level, Pirola just isn’t that alarming, meaning that the chance this variant will lead to a massive, emergency room-flooding Covid surge is pretty small. Other, less mutated omicron variants remain the dominant strains, and it seems unlikely Pirola will wreak major havoc.

So: Get the updated vaccine when it comes out (soon), use common sense about exposing yourself to crowds, and try not to worry too much otherwise unless you’re specially vulnerable.

More good advice for avoiding Covid: Stay out of Florida. With Governor DeSantis’ vocal support, Florida’s quack surgeon general Joseph Ladapo is urging Florida residents not to get the new Covid vaccine.

Dr Joseph Ladapo, the governor’s hand-picked surgeon general and a vaccine skeptic previously found to have manipulated data on vaccine safety, falsely claimed the new booster shots had not been tested on humans, and contained “red flags”.

His reasoning seems to be more religious than scientific.

Casting the dispute as spiritual warfare, Ladapo posed a rhetorical question: Why did so many people follow DeSantis instead of guidance to the contrary from the national public health establishment — “all these Ph.D.s and M.D.s?”

He imputed this thinking to those people: “I hear what they’re saying, but what he’s saying feels right.”

He continued: “Because there is something within all of us that resonates with freedom. And that something is part of our connection with God and our connection with every single thing around us, including each and every one of us.

“There are these forces out there who are relentless. And they really are relentless. It’s not that they were ever done trying, and they’re not done now. They are relentless, relentless, with every breath that they take. They are thinking about how they can control you. To what ends, only God knows, but it’s nothing pretty, right?”

That’s what passes for thought on the Right these days: It’s totally mysterious why public health officials would want to slow the spread of a deadly virus, so they must have some other motive. And it’s nothing pretty.

and Tommy Tuberville

Up until now, I’ve mostly been ignoring Senator Tuberville’s holds on military promotions, figuring it was a stunt that would come to nothing. But he’s been doing it since February, with no end in sight. More than 300 promotions that need Senate approval are in limbo, and three military services — the Marines, Army and Navy — have acting chiefs rather than Senate-confirmed ones. An estimated 650 promotions could be blocked by the end of the year.

The ostensible root issue is abortion, which now trumps national security on the far Right. When the Supreme Court overturned constitutional protections for reproductive rights in its Dobbs decision, and numerous states began restricting abortions to the point of banning them entirely, the Pentagon recognized that that it had ordered tens of thousands of servicewomen of childbearing age to serve in states where they no longer had control over their own medical care.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin responded in October with a policy to:

Establish travel and transportation allowances for Service members and their dependents, as appropriate and consistent with applicable federal law and operational requirements, and as necessary amend any applicable travel regulations, to facilitate official travel to access noncovered reproductive health care that is unavailable within the local area of a Service member’s permanent duty station.

This is what Tuberville objects to. (Notice that the policy does not even pay for abortions. It only pays for travel.) The promotions he is blocking have nothing to do with abortion, but they are the monkey wrench he has access to. The Senate usually passes promotion lists by unanimous consent; going through the names one-by-one could take “months” of dropping all other Senate business, according to Majority Leader Schumer. By refusing consent, Tuberville has brought the promotion process to a halt.

Short-term holds have been used before to call attention to individual officers, and even that has been rare. But shutting down the whole promotion system for months at a time is unheard of.

I said that abortion was the “ostensible” issue, because the more Tuberville talks, the clearer his real problem becomes: The US armed forces are not masculine enough to suit him. (BTW, Tuberville has never served in the military.)

This is a common complaint on the Right. In 2021, Ted Cruz attacked our “woke, emasculated military” by comparing a recruiting ad targeted at women with a much manlier ad for the Russian army. (This was before the Russian military flop in Ukraine. Today, Cruz would be laughed at for saying our armed forces should be more like Russia’s.) He subsequently claimed that Democrats were “trying to turn [our troops] into pansies“. (Cruz also has never served.)

Tuberville likewise attacks our military as too “woke”. The meaning of “woke” shifts from one minute to the next, but here it seems to mean “feminine” (or perhaps “pansylike”) in some stereotypical sense. On Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, Tuberville said:

Right now, we are so woke in the military. We’re losing recruits right and left. Secretary Del Toro of the Navy, he needs to get to building ships, he needs to get to recruiting, and he needs to get wokeness out of our Navy. We’ve got people doing poems on aircraft carriers over the loudspeaker. It is absolutely insane the direction that we’re headed in our military.

I’ll let him take the poetry thing up with Rudyard Kipling or maybe the samurai. (If you want to get scholarly, you can trace Western warrior poetry back to Archilochus.) But recruiting is the point of this policy. Of course, if you dismiss the woke idea that women have something to contribute, then any benefit from recruiting or retaining them can be ignored, as Tuberville seems to do.

But think about it, Tommy: How many women are going to join our military if they know they risk being exiled to some backward state like Alabama, where their rights are subject to the local version of the Taliban?

And before we leave this subject, what about the “and their dependents” in Austin’s memo? Even the studliest dude in the Marines might have a wife with a problem pregnancy. What about her?

One more thing: Once again we see that the rules of the Senate were written for a different era. Holds, blue slips for judicial nominees, the filibuster — they all arise from a model of disagreement within a culture of gentlemanly courtesy. The US Senate is not such a place, if it ever was. All those practices should go.

and another week of climate change

The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service reports that July and August were the hottest months on record by a wide margin. June was the 8th hottest month on record and the hottest June ever, giving 2023 the hottest summer.

A new UN report analyzes how well the world is doing in living up to the Paris Agreement of 2015. I haven’t read it yet, but it looks discouraging.

All summer we’ve been hearing reports of how warm the ocean is. Now that ocean heat is feeding energy into tropical storms. Hurricane Idalia jumped from Cat 1 to Cat 4 in about 24 hours “making it one of fastest rates of tropical cyclone intensification ever observed in the Atlantic basin”.

Hurricane Lee jumped from Cat 1 to Cat 5 between 5 a.m. Thursday and 5 a.m. Friday. (It subsequently degraded, and looks like it will miss land.) In the Pacific, Jova went from a tropical storm to Cat 5, also in about 24 hours.

So far, these are just unusually strong storms and not record-breakers. But no one should be surprised if new categories have to be invented before hurricane season ends in November.

Hong Kong, which had endured a Cat-2-equivalent typhoon the previous weekend, was hit with massive rains Friday. Some parts of the city got nearly 20 inches, the most rainfall there since official records began in 1884.

Grist points out that climate-related deaths are routinely undercounted. It’s a challenging problem that requires case-by-case analysis. If someone with a history of heart trouble dies when it’s 105 and a brown-out has shut down his air conditioning, that might just be counted as a heart attack without noting the role of the heat. Similarly, suppose people die of a disease they caught by drinking polluted water after a hurricane shut down their clean water source. They may not be listed as victims of the hurricane.

and you also might be interested in …

The big news this week is the earthquake inn Morocco, which so far has led to nearly 2,500 confirmed deaths. But I have no special insight into that; I’m just watching the news like anybody else.

So Elon Musk significantly overpaid for Twitter, and has since run it into the ground. But he’s a Wiley-Coyote-level super-genius, so it can’t really be his fault. Somebody else must be to blame. I know! It’s the Jews, isn’t it? It’s the Anti-Defamation League, which has scared off advertisers by pointing out that Musk has made X/Twitter a haven for Nazis, white supremacists, antisemites, and haters of every sort.

What is being done to the ADL on Twitter right now has little to do with the group’s conduct and everything to do with the symbolic role Jews play in the conspiratorial imagination. Rather than face up to the hate that has enveloped his platform, and the errors that led to the site’s degradation, Musk is claiming that the victims have had it coming.

Nate Silver is writing a new blog these days. In this post, he gives good advice to people who are freaking out about 2024 election polls: There’s a long way to go.

There are exactly four things you need to know about the horse race right now: Joe Biden could win. Donald Trump could win. Someone other than Biden or Trump could win. The odds of these scenarios do not shift very much from day to day.

I’d argue that 1 (Biden winning) is more likely than 2 (Trump winning) which, in turn, is more likely than 3 (someone else winning). But unless you’re making trades of some kind, there probably isn’t a lot to be gained from further precision than that right now.

The push to get right-wing propaganda into public schools continues. Oklahoma has joined Florida in allowing PragerU videos to supplement civics and government lessons. (I discussed PragerU’s slick distortions of history last month.)

And the board of the Pennridge School District in Bucks County, Pennsylvania (30 miles north of Philadelphia) is mandating

a new social studies curriculum that will require teachers to incorporate lessons from the 1776 Curriculum, a controversial K-12 course of study developed by Hillsdale College, a private Christian institution that promotes right-wing ideologies.

Like the PragerU videos, Hillsdale’s 1776 Curriculum minimizes slavery’s role in American history and whitewashes the Founders’ racism.

This is a consistent pattern on the Right: Lies about liberals doing something (like “indoctrinating children“) invariably lead to conservatives doing that very thing in the name of “balance” or to “set things right”. The starkest example is Trump’s stolen-election lie, which justified his own attempt to steal the 2020 election. Similarly, false claims about Biden’s “weaponization of the Justice Department” have led to open planning by Trump to weaponize the Justice Department if he gets back in office “because they’re doing it to us“. It’s tit-for-tat where the “tat” is manufactured specifically for the purpose of justifying the desired response.

That “praying coach” who got reinstated by the Supreme Court? He quit. I’m sure he’ll make a lot more money on the right-wing talk circuit than any school district would pay him to be a part-time assistant football coach. That was probably the point all along.

and let’s close with something clever

The last couple of years have demonstrated the resilience and ingenuity of the Ukrainian people in all sorts of ways. So suppose you’re a Ukrainian farmer, and you want to plant and harvest your fields like you usually do. But the war has swept through, and who knows who might have planted mines where? There are official government minesweeping units, but they’ve got higher priorities than your wheat or sunflowers. What to do?

Well, wrecked Russian tanks are an abundant raw material, so why not jury-rig something to do the job yourself?

Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (8)

We’re all in law school now

September 11, 2023 – 10:16 am

Simply following the news is teaching the public more about law
than most of us ever wanted to know.

Star Wars movies are famous for building up to climaxes with three centers of simultaneous action. The decisive scenes of Return of the Jedi, for example, jump from the battle on the Planet Endor to the raid on the second Death Star to the Luke/Vader/Emperor showdown. Maintaining three centers of narrative action, it seems, optimizes something having to do with human attention: The tension builds as focus shifts from one center to the next, and viewers can keep track of all three without saying “Oh, I forgot about him” or “Where are we now?”

Sadly, though, the Trump trials have now gone well past the Lucas point, and have reached the you-can’t-tell-the-players-without-a-program stage.

This week’s run-down. Currently, four Trump indictments are pending in four different jurisdictions, two state and two federal. In New York and D.C., he is indicted by himself. In Florida he has two indicted co-conspirators, and in Georgia he has 18. The total number of counts is just under a hundred.

Worse than the sheer number of venues, defendants, and charges, the action in each jurisdiction has a way of spreading: This week, for example, the most significant developments in the Fulton County indictment were happening in federal rather than state court, and Fulton County DA Fani Willis was fending off attempted interference from Republicans in Congress. We also found out the names of 30 conspirators Willis decided not to indict, in spite of the recommendations of the special grand jury.

Two of the 19 Fulton County RICO defendants filed for a speedy trial, but neither wanted to share a trial with the other. The judge had good news and bad news for them: Your trial starts October 23, but you’re each stuck sitting next to that other loser.

In addition to the criminal cases, there are civil lawsuits. The NY attorney general’s $250 million fraud lawsuit against the Trump Organization will go to trial on October 2, assuming neither side gets the summary judgment it’s asking for. And Wednesday, E. Jean Carroll won a second defamation decision against Trump: The judge ruled that since the statements in question were so similar to ones a jury already had found defamatory, no trial was needed, other than to establish damages. Trump is already on the hook for $5 million pending appeal, and his mouth is still running.

And lest we forget: There is the open legal question of whether Trump is even eligible to be president again, given the disqualification clause of the 14th Amendment.

Then there are the criminal cases of related defendants: The trials of the January 6 rioters are not quite done yet. Tuesday, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in planning the assault on the Capitol. Commenters on the Fox News article about the sentence were incensed: “22 years and he wasn’t even there”. But if you plan a crime and recruit people to carry it out, you don’t have to be there. You could be, say, watching TV at a White House dining table and still be guilty.

And John Eastman may be a Fulton County RICO defendant, but he also had to testify at his disbarment hearing in California this week. He “doesn’t recall” making statements that Vice President Pence’s chief of staff has testified under oath that he made.

Oh, and Peter Navarro — I really had forgotten about him — was found guilty of contempt of Congress. Remember? He blew off subpoenas from the House select committee investigating January 6. (Remember them?) It turns out that ignoring subpoenas can get you into trouble. Who knew? Navarro certainly seemed shocked to discover that “Trump told me to” isn’t a universally recognized defense, particularly if Trump didn’t put those instructions in writing.

Steve Bannon (another blast from the past) was convicted of the same charge last summer and sentenced to four months. But he’s still out pending an appeal that will be heard in October. His fraud trial (for misappropriating money raised to build Trump’s wall) is scheduled for next May.

Got all that?

Federal removal law. The upside of this complexity is that (if you manage to keep paying attention) you’re getting an excellent layman’s education in law. This week’s best lesson was US District Judge Steve Jones’ ruling that denied Mark Meadows motion to move his RICO case from Georgia state court to federal court. His decision didn’t just say no; it gave an very clear explanation of the federal removal statute, what it’s for, and how it functions.

The point of the law is to keep states from interfering with federal officers enforcing federal law. For example, occasionally you’ll hear talk among Second Amendment enthusiasts about how local sheriffs should arrest federal officials who show up trying to enforce federal gun laws. If state courts then heard those cases, local police and judges could work together to effectively screw up federal law enforcement.

So instead, any federal official who gets arrested in the course of carrying out his or her duties can get the case moved to federal court. (That’s what Meadows was trying to do, and what Trump would undoubtedly try to do if Meadows succeeded.) On the other hand, just being a federal official isn’t enough. If, say, an FBI agent gets arrested for robbing a bank, his case is no different from anybody else’s.

If you keep that pair of examples in mind, the law makes perfect sense.

So Meadows had to argue that his case was more like the ATF agent than like the bank robber. In other words, Fani Willis had indicted him for carrying out his duties as White House chief of staff. And that was not a completely crazy argument, because some of the specific actions alleged in the indictment are Meadows arranging phone calls and sitting in on meetings, as any White House chief of staff would do.

But Meadows’ problem, as Jones points out, is that that acts cited in the indictment are not the crimes he’s been charged with. The crime is participating in a conspiracy to change the results of Georgia’s 2020 presidential election. The specific actions cited in the indictment simply illustrate that involvement.

So the relevant question is whether White House chiefs of staff have a legitimate role to play in overseeing how states count their votes and allocate their electors. If so, then Meadows (and Trump) might have been playing that role when, say, they pressured Brad Raffensperger to “find” more votes for Trump. It would then be up to a federal court to decide whether Meadows had been carrying out those duties within the law.

But Jones ruled that Meadow had no legitimate role to play as chief of staff: Running elections is a state matter. And under the Constitution, any federal oversight role belongs to Congress, not the president or his staff.

Jones’ ruling has two important consequences:

  • If removal had been granted, Meadows’ had already filed a motion to dismiss the charges, for basically the same reason: He was simply carrying out his federal duties. That motion is now moot.
  • While the judge explicitly wrote that he was not prejudging the claims of any other defendants (like Trump), the logic of his argument will be hard to overcome: Trump and all of his co-conspirators were meddling in something that was none of the president’s official business. None of them have a good argument for moving to federal court or having the charges dismissed.

Willis v Jordan. I think Jim Jordan was trying to intimidate Fani Willis, but it doesn’t seem to have worked. On August 24, Jordan wrote a letter to Willis under the House Judiciary Committee letterhead, saying:

Congress may probe whether former Presidents are being subjected to politically motivated state investigations and prosecutions due to the policies they advanced as President, and, if so, what legislative remedies may be appropriate.

After mentioning his subcommittee’s subpoena power, he demanded she produce by September 7 (Thursday) documents related to her investigation of former president Trump, and especially any communications with Jack Smith or other federal officials.

On Thursday, Willis responded with none of the requested documents, but a letter of her own.

Your letter makes clear that you lack a basic understanding of the law, its practice, and the ethical obligations of attorneys generally and prosecutors specifically.

She goes on to school Jordan, explaining (with detailed legal references) all the reasons that his demands are unconstitutional: They cross the line between state and federal sovereignty, as well as the line separating legislative and executive functions. They interfere with the administration of criminal justice, and violate the form of executive privilege that protects a prosecutor’s deliberative process.

Given all that, she could in good conscience ignore the arguments Jordan made.

While settled constitutional law clearly permits me to ignore your unjustified and illegal intrusion into an open state criminal prosecution, I will take a moment to voluntarily respond to parts of your letter.

Her main piece of advice is that Jordan learn to “deal with reality”, in particular the reality that Donald Trump is a citizen with no special rights.

Here is another reality you must face: Those who wish to avoid felony charges in Fulton County, Georgia — including violations of Georgia RICO law — should not commit felonies in Fulton County, Georgia. In this jurisdiction, every person is subject to the same laws and the same process, because every person is entitled to the same dignity and is held to the same standard of responsibility. Persons’ socioeconomic status, race, gender, sexual orientation, or political prominence does not entitle them to an exemption from that basic standard.

She schools Jordan on how Trump’s rights are properly defended.

[O]bjections to a criminal investigation or prosecution are properly raised—at least in the first instance—at courts with lawful jurisdiction, not through partisan legislative inquiries. The courts in the State of Georgia are fully up to the task of adjudicating the rights of all parties at issue.

Finally, in response to his implicit threats to any federal funding her office receives, she concludes with a series of suggestions for useful work Jordan’s committee might do, such as increasing federal funding for worthwhile purposes like paying witness advocates, processing rape kits, helping at-risk children avoid the criminal justice system, and upgrading state crime labs generally.

The lesson I draw from this exchange is that if you want to mess with Fani Willis, you’d better be a lot sharper than Jim Jordan.

Does the 14th Amendment disqualify Trump? This idea has been rattling around for a few weeks now, and was explained in some detail by J. Michael Luttig and Lawrence Tribe in the August Atlantic. (And in a lot of detail by a law journal article I haven’t read.) But it’s mostly been theoretical until Tuesday, when Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (a real organization that’s been around for a while, not something put together for this purpose) filed a lawsuit in Colorado. The suit seeks an injunction forcing the Colorado Secretary of State to leave Trump’s name off the state’s Republican primary ballot, for reasons that would also apply to a general election ballot.

Presumably, this case will work its way up through the Colorado state courts and will eventually be appealed to the Supreme Court, whose ruling would then apply to all states.

Truthfully, I had never paid much attention to the 14th Amendment‘s third section. The first section is one of the most quoted parts of the Constitution: It guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the United States, as well as “due process of law” and “equal protection of the laws”. Courts are constantly arguing about precisely what those phrases mean.

But Section 3? Not so much. Here’s what it says:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Just about everybody’s initial reaction to this is that Trump would have to be convicted of some crime relating to “insurrection or rebellion” before he’d be disqualified from being president again. And since an conviction is unlikely to become final before the 2024 election, Section 3 wouldn’t apply.

But Luttig and Tribe point out that qualifications don’t work that way. No one has a right to be president, so this isn’t a matter of taking Trump’s rights away. So the criminal proof-beyond-reasonable-doubt standard shouldn’t apply.

Instead, it’s up to the individual states to determine how their presidential electors will be chosen and what candidates are qualified to receive their votes. If a secretary of state in a place like Colorado determines that Trump is ineligible to be president because he supported an insurrection, that’s no different than determining that a candidate isn’t 35 years old or hasn’t already served two terms. The question is about the fact of insurrection, not whether or not there’s been a conviction.

Now, Section 3 has never been tested, so no one knows precisely what phrases like “insurrection or rebellion” or “aid and comfort to the enemies” should mean in practice. So somebody’s going to have to hold some evidentiary hearings, and then the courts will have to make some interpretations. Somebody will have to have the last word, and that will probably be the Supreme Court.

Another objection is to say “let the voters decide”. But if that’s how we do things, why are there constitutional qualifications at all? What if the voters want to elect an 18-year-old president? Or give Obama a third term? For constitutional qualifications to mean anything at all, they have to supersede what the voters want.

Whether disqualifying Trump is politically wise is another question entirely. But legally that’s beside the point. It may not always be politically wise to protect an unpopular religion’s freedom to worship, or to enforce many of the other rights our Constitution guarantees. The point of having a constitution is that some principles have to override the politics of the moment.

Personally, I don’t have a dog in this fight. What I’d really like to see is for Trump to be rejected by the voters, either in the primaries or in the general election. If he’s allowed to run, I think that will happen, current polls notwithstanding. But disqualification is a serious question, and our legal system owes the country a serious answer.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

September 11, 2023 – 8:42 am

In this morning’s featured post, I try to find the bright side in the ridiculous complexity of the Trump trials: four criminal indictments, additional civil suits, various numbers of co-conspirators, nearly 100 counts, state vs. federal procedures, civil vs criminal procedures, does the 14th Amendment ban him from running, and so on.

What a legal education we’re getting, eh?

I find myself turning into something of a law nerd. So this week I loved federal Judge Steve Jones’ denial of Mark Meadows’ motion to remove his case from Georgia state courts to federal courts. Jones took something I’d seen lawyers arguing about on TV and explained it in a way that actually makes sense. And Fani Willis’ explanation of federalism in her well-researched takedown of Jim Jordan’s attempt to intimidate her? Priceless!

I think that’s the attitude we need to take: For the next year or so, we’re not going to be able to follow the news without learning a bunch of law, so let’s try to see that as a feature rather than a bug. That’s the attitude I try to take in “We’re all in law school now”, which summarizes this week’s far-flung Trump legal developments. It should be out maybe around 10 EDT.

As for the weekly summary: The biggest news this week is the Moroccan earthquake, but I’m not equipped to cover it. So I’ll just remind you about it and point you somewhere else. The ongoing Covid resurgence looks manageable if you use common sense and get the updated vaccine when it comes out. But of course folks like DeSantis are urging their followers not to do either. I’ve finally decided I can’t ignore Tommy Tuberville any longer, so I’ll state my opinion: His promotion blockade isn’t about abortion at all, it’s about his outdated notion of masculinity. And Climate Change Summer appears to be rolling into Climate Change Fall. Elon Musk is blaming the Jews for his Twitter blunder. Right-wing indoctrination is continuing its creep into red-state public schools. And I still have to come up with a closing.

Let’s say that posts sometime after noon.

Posted in Morning tease | Comments (2)

Setting the Stakes

September 4, 2023 – 11:43 am

We need to understand that if the next 15 months remain the worst-covered election in U.S. history, it might also be the last.

– Will Bunch
“Journalism fails miserably at explaining what is really happening to America“

This week’s featured post is “What an innocent Trump should do“.

This week everybody was talking about Labor Day

1912: The Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts

It’s a three-day weekend and an excuse for one last cookout. It marks the end of summer. It’s Week 1 of college football. It presages another school year. But isn’t it supposed to be about something else too? You hear a lot about remembering to keep Christ in Christmas, but keeping the labor movement in Labor Day seems like a much more serious problem.

So as you fire up the grill, try to make peace with your to-do list from June, and cheer for the old one-color-and-another-color, take a minute to remember what the labor movement has given us: For one thing, the weekend itself. Also: the 40-hour week, minimum wages, holidays, paid vacations, unemployment insurance, and job safety standards.

And remember how precarious it all is. Do you imagine that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the other masters of the universe want to share the wealth their enterprises produce?

Picture the new wave of technological unemployment that might result from artificial intelligence. Think about the universal abundance that is possible, and compare it to the inequality and insecurity we have now. How can we change that? (Hint: You’re not going to do it by yourself.)

Jen Sorenson provides an important reminder: In a capitalist media system, what matters isn’t people, but their money. If people mattered, you’d see more TV shows like these:

and Mitch McConnell

I don’t often feel sorry for Mitch McConnell, but it’s hard not to when you watch this clip of him freezing up behind a podium on Wednesday.

It’s the second time this has happened. The first was in late July, and both incidents followed a concussion he suffered in March after falling at a dinner event at the Waldorf Astoria in D.C. Watching his aides’ lack of alarm, I have to wonder how many similar incidents they’ve seen privately.

It’s striking to contrast the responses this incident evoked with a variety of occasions when President Biden has shown much less worrisome signs of aging. Democrats largely responded to McConnell’s lapse compassionately. Biden’s first reaction was to say “Mitch is a friend” and that he would “try to get in touch with him later this afternoon”. After talking on the phone, Biden attributed the freeze to McConnell’s concussion and said that such incidents were “part of the recovery”. He expressed confidence that McConnell “is going to be back to his old self”.

The both-sides-do-it NYT used the McConnell freeze to segue into discussion of aging politicians in general, like Dianne Feinstein and, of course, Biden. (The article paid much less attention to Trump, who obviously is in significantly worse physical condition. If I had to bet which man was most likely to survive until January of 2029, I’d pick Biden.)

Right-wing media, on the other hand, always puts the worst possible construction on anything Biden says or does (including misstatements related to a stuttering problem he’s had since childhood). Sometimes they even doctor video to make Biden look addled. Biden falling off a bicycle was front-page news, when it’s hard to imagine that Trump has ever been on a bicycle. (I recently had a similar foot-caught-on-the-pedal spill. Fortunately, no one immortalized the moment in video.)

Monday, Biden claimed he had managed to talk legendary Dixiecrat Senator Strom Thurmond into voting for the Civil Rights Act “before he died”, clearly referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which Thurmond voted for at a time when Biden was also in the Senate. That claim is based on private conversations unrecorded by history, so it’s entirely possible that Biden exaggerated his role in Thurmond’s about-face. But that’s not where right-wing media went: Instead, they assumed a confused Biden was referring to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was voted on before Biden was a senator and which Thurmond opposed. You know: an old guy talking nonsense.

And let’s not forget Don Jr. saying John Fetterman had “mush for brains” after his stroke. One party values compassion and the other values cruelty.

and the Trump trials

The featured post discusses the obvious disconnect between what Trump is saying about his indictments and how he’s responding to them. If the indictments really are nothing but politics, and he really “did nothing wrong“, he should want to get to court as fast as possible, so that juries of ordinary American citizens can vindicate him before the election.

Unless a deal closes by Friday, Trump’s Truth Social platform could go bust, with great losses to the investors who believed in it. Who could have predicted that a Trump product might fail in the market? I mean, hitching your wagon to Trump’s genius has always been a reliable path to wealth.

There’s no way I’m going to read the recently-released 479-page transcript of Trump’s 7-hour deposition with the NY Attorney General for the civil fraud case against the family business. But Ron Filipkowski did and provided the lowlights.

Basically, he’s not liable for misrepresenting the value of his properties, because

  • A paragraph warns other parties to make their own assessments rather than rely on his numbers.
  • His brand is so potent that the value of any property increases the instant his name gets attached to it.

Also, apparently he whines a lot about how unfair the AG’s lawsuit is. Who could have predicted?

and climate change

As usual, my opponent is playing the quicksand card, while ignoring the real issues facing ordinary people today

Climate change summer continued with Hurricane Idalia. At least this time it wasn’t something completely unprecedented, like Hilary still having tropical storm strength when it hit Southern California last week. No hurricane had hit Florida’s Big Bend since 1950, but Cat 3 hurricanes hit somewhere in Florida every several years.

Not so long ago — like when President Obama and Governor Christie inspected the damage from Hurricane Sandy in 2012 — we expected political leaders to demonstrate bipartisan unity in the face of disaster. Republicans and Democrats might disagree about taxes or spending or how to handle China, but they pulled together when Americans faced a common challenge.

Apparently not so much any more. President Biden thought Governor DeSantis would be there when he toured Florida’s hurricane damage Saturday, but DeSantis had other priorities. Republican Senator Rick Scott did show up, though, and thanked Biden for the federal government’s quick response to the storm, saying it was “a big deal”.

As for weather events that never happen, this week’s Burning Man Festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert has had to deal with massive rains. It’s not that unusual to have a little rain during the festival. (Long ago, when I was a much cooler person, I was at Burning Man when a rain shower got tangled up with a dust storm. Mud fell from the sky.) But this quantity is unheard of.

Of course, climate change isn’t the only explanation. Maybe “God has a way of making sure everybody knows who God is“, and so is punishing people for the mock sacrifice ritual at the center of Burning Man.

Just like God is punishing Florida for being so cruel to trans kids, I imagine.

And the heat is affecting food production:

Across much of the country, the food system also struggled. In Texas, farmers reported smaller yields as their corn and cotton crops struggled to survive soaring summer temperatures. In Arizona, beekeepers spotted dead honeybees outside hives. Even underwater, off the coast of Long Island, kelp farmers recorded another year of shrinking yields.

But Jeanine Pirro from Fox News’ “The Five” isn’t worried, because weather has been happening forever.

What’s so fascinating about this is one of the first hurricanes reported I think was in the 1400’s. Now I would venture a guess that had nothing to do with fossil fuels, okay?

and as summer ends, here are a few fascinating things you didn’t really need to know

The WaPo brings us up to date on the vital issue of pizza. Pizza is popular everywhere in America, but the word means different things in different places. So asking Yelp about the best pizza in some town you’re passing through is likely to get you a pie you weren’t expecting and may not like.

So the Post breaks it down, defining New York, Chicago, Detroit, New Haven, and California Neapolitan style pizzas, and suggesting where to find the best incarnation of each. You also get some history and lore, like the name of New York’s first pizzeria in the 1890s, or this gem about Detroit pizza:

A northern Italian immigrant named Gus Guerra invented Detroit-style pizza at Buddy’s in 1946, because he needed to serve his customers something to soak up their beer. In her book, “Detroit Style Pizza: A Doughtown History,” reporter Karen Dybis writes that Guerra was adapting a homestyle recipe from his Sicilian mother-in-law using a baking pan. According to local lore, the pans responsible for the city’s signature crust came straight off the Ford assembly line.

Dybis couldn’t authenticate that legend, but she did confirm Guerra worked for Ford Motor Company as a tile setter and that his children remember him buying industrial pans from hardware stores. Blue steel pans intended for use as drip trays and scrap metal collectors have become part of the Detroit-style mystique.

In a separate article, WaPo maps the most popular pizza style by state: New York (yellow), Neapolitan-ish (pink), Chicago (brown/orange), and other (grey: Detroit style in Michigan and New Haven style in Connecticut).

Atlantic’s Amanda Mull points out that the state of retail is more complicated than most of us thought. In spite of the internet, more physical stores are opening than closing.

Mull sees an upscale/downscale bifurcation. If you’re trying to be a discount store, the internet is hard to compete with.

At the low end, the math on well-run stores has gotten worse and worse with time. Companies push prices and expenses as low as possible, which means that stores tend to be understaffed, poorly merchandised, and disorganized.

All too often, I find myself in a store wondering “What does this cost?” or even “Does anybody work here?” But at the other end of the market, people who have time to shop and money to spend want to get out of the house and have an in-person retail experience.

Consumers who are less price-sensitive can handle higher markups, and better margins mean more money sloshing around to ensure that stores always look good and are generously staffed with pleasant salespeople. On the higher end, sales require both the customers and the products to feel special.

But to prove that thriving stores don’t have to be exclusive havens for the well-to-do, she highlights Bass Pro Shops, where there is some expensive merchandise (like fishing boats and ATVs), but you can also get the Bass-logo six-dollar baseball hat. And it all happens in a setting that is engaging and entertaining.

Mull’s description of “a store that’s good at being a store” reminded me of a recent trip to the regional IKEA, where I bought a wok I didn’t know I needed and would never have searched for on Amazon. Like Bass Pro Shops, IKEA has a mix of expensive stuff and deals, organized around a unique identity. (Try the Swedish meat balls.)

Similarly, my local independent bookstore isn’t just for acquiring merchandise. Wandering its aisles evokes fantasy: Could I possibly become the kind of person who would read that tome, do those workouts, tour that country, or cook that cuisine? (Did I mention I bought a wok?)

Going shopping can be an event, an errand, or even a chore. If it’s a chore, I’d rather do it online.

and you also might be interested in …

Kat Abu gives us another week’s worth of the most batshit stories on Fox News. Watching Fox live tends to make me angry, but watching it through Kat’s eyes makes me laugh.

Bridgette Exman is the assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction for public schools in Mason City, Iowa. Iowa recently passed one of those narrow-minded laws banning books of various sorts from classrooms and school libraries.

Iowa’s “parental rights bill,” signed into law at the end of May and made effective July 1, put public schoolteachers and administrators in an untenable position and recently thrust my own district in north-central Iowa into notoriety.

The law mandates that school libraries may only contain “age-appropriate” books free of any “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act” as defined by Iowa Code. In a particularly draconian move, the law holds individual teachers and school librarians accountable for violations.

Like most such laws, this one is ridiculously vague. Somebody had to figure out how to apply its terms to the books in Mason City. Otherwise, either all books would have to be boxed up, or teachers would be on their own in facing risks of lawsuits or other disciplinary actions. That somebody turned out to be Bridgette, a former English teacher who loves books and hates the idea of censoring them.

Her NYT account of the moral and educational challenges she faced is clearly meant to garner our sympathy. But I had a more ambiguous reaction: Everybody who chooses to collaborate with an oppressive regime runs into these issues. Authoritarians set these situations up intentionally: If you don’t help us implement our program, even worse things will happen.

Another common pattern is that the line keeps moving: You collaborated up to here, so why not up to there? I hope the NYT checks back with Bridgette next year.

In a WSJ op-ed, Karl Rove compared Vivek Ramaswamy to Harold Hill, the con artist in The Music Man.

But Karl should be careful, because if you watch clips like “Ya Got Trouble“, you might start to think that the whole GOP sounds like Harold Hill. For “pool”, just substitute “wokeness” or “Critical Race Theory” or “drag queens”.

Meanwhile, Ted Cruz wants you to know that “they” are plotting to take away your ceiling fan and limit you to two beers a week. Ya got trouble, I tell ya.

and let’s close with something therapeutic

Venezuelan artist Maria Guadarrama imagines Disney princesses getting the therapy they desperately need.

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What an innocent Trump should do

September 4, 2023 – 9:47 am

If the charges against him are all political shenanigans engineered by Biden, Trump should seek speedy trials leading to a series of jury acquittals before the election. So why is he doing the exact opposite?

For several years now, Rachel Maddow has been repeating: “Watch what they do, not what they say.” This week Rep. Eric Swalwell invited us to apply that maxim to the particular case of Trump’s indictments:

Weird. You’re telling me the guy who says he is being corruptly prosecuted has no interest in the right to speedily contest the charges?

Trump’s people are saying the charges against him are bogus, that it’s all politics waged by overzealous partisan prosecutors. It’s “election interference” whose purpose is to promote slanders against Trump during the campaign. And it’s all being coordinated behind the scenes by Joe Biden. (Biden, meanwhile, is supposedly senile. So how he manages to stay on top of his sprawling conspiracy to weaponize law enforcement seems like a hole in the plot.)

But if that’s what’s going on, then Trump’s lawyers should be chomping at the bit to get into a courtroom, where they can tell the real story, introduce the “complete” and “irrefutable” evidence that clears Trump, cross-examine the witnesses arrayed against him (who are mostly members of his own party and his own administration — probably including his vice president), and generally poke holes in the prosecutors’ narrative.

After all, we’ve already seen what happens when a politicized prosecution goes to trial: Twice, John Durham brought charges based on his Clinton-conspiracy theory of the Trump/Russia investigation. Both times, juries were not fooled and voted quickly and unanimously for acquittal.

So if all Trump’s indictments are nothing but “weaponization of the justice system“, that’s what he should want: Bring in 12 ordinary Americans who are not part of the vast Biden conspiracy, let them examine all the evidence, and then see what they think. In particular, Trump should want to get as many vindicating verdicts as possible on the record before the election, so that voters could put aside all doubts about his guilt. What’s more, a string of unanimous juries voting quickly for acquittal would expose Biden’s nefarious plotting, and turn the whole issue in Trump’s favor. The momentum from those not-guilty verdicts would probably propel Trump back into the White House.

But if you look at what Trump, his lawyers, and his cultists are doing, they seem scared to death of him facing a jury. His legal strategy revolves around endless delay, especially delay beyond Election Day. It’s as if he believes that maintaining the uncertainty about his guilt is good for him, and resolving the issue would be bad.

He constantly points not to exculpatory evidence, but to his “absolute immunity“, or some other magic get-out-of-jail-free card exempting him from prosecution. He calls on his allies in Congress to harass, defund, or remove from office the prosecutors who have sought his indictment. He tries to intimidate Democrats with threats of reprisal. He retweets supporters’ calls for violence — even “civil war” — if Trump’s trials go forward.

Anything to avoid a jury.

The American way to deal with outrageous charges is to say “See you in court.” But apparently that’s not Trump’s way, at least not in these cases.

You can make your own judgment, but here’s how I resolve the contradiction between what Trump and his people say and what they do: They’re lying. They know that the indictments are legitimate, and that he in fact is guilty. They are desperate to avoid a trial, because if 12 ordinary Americans see the evidence against Trump, they will send him to prison.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

September 4, 2023 – 8:51 am

Rachel Maddow often advises us to ignore what Republicans say and watch what they do, because the two are often in conflict. This week, I point to one obvious application of her maxim: Trump’s response to his indictments.

He says that the indictments are all political shenanigans by partisan Democratic prosecutors, engineered by Joe Biden to interfere in the 2024 election. But if that’s true, there’s an obvious way he can counter: Get the cases into a courtroom as fast as possible, where his lawyers can poke holes in the Democrats’ ridiculous claims and fantastical theories. Then a jury of ordinary Americans can vindicate him with a quick, unanimous acquittal.

That outcome would turn the issue around in a hurry: Biden’s nefarious plots would be exposed for what they are, and Trump’s string of courtroom victories would propel him back into the White House.

But what he does is avoid trials any way he can: Delay the proceedings. Ask the courts to recognize his “absolute immunity” from prosecution. Get his followers in Congress to defund the Justice Department until it sidelines Jack Smith, and have Jim Jordan’s committee harass hostile local prosecutors like Alan Bragg and Fani Willis. Get Georgia to fire Willis. And if all else fails, send his loyal cultists into the streets, even to the point of “civil war”.

Anything to avoid letting a jury see the evidence against him and make a judgment. Especially before the election.

This week’s featured post will lay that saying/doing contradiction out in detail. It should be out around 10 EDT.

The weekly summary will mark Labor Day, point to the compassionate way Democrats have handled Mitch McConnell’s unfortunate freeze-up, review developments in the Trump trials, continue marking the disasters of Climate Change Summer, note the resemblance between the Republican message and Harold Hill’s, and cover a few other things before closing with one cartoonist’s view of the therapy Disney princesses need. That should be out before 1 this afternoon.

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Blossoming Seeds

August 28, 2023 – 12:28 pm

Inverting power relationships — casting the powerless as a looming threat and the powerful as beleaguered — is a primal feature of reactionary thinking, the very seed that blossoms into fascism.

– David Roberts

This week’s featured post is “Republicans think they’ve found a way to pitch abortion bans“.

The David Roberts quote above is in response to this social-media exchange:

Rod Dreher: Trump is rich, but he is totally not the ruling class. It’s about culture.

Radley Balko: Trying to think of a definition of “ruling class” that includes Oberlin social justice activists, Black Lives Matter, and drag queens, but not the billionaire real estate mogul who was literally just president, appointed 1/3 of SCOTUS, and is even odds to be president again.

This week everybody was talking about Fulton County Inmate #P01135809

Trump surrendered to authorities in Fulton County Thursday evening. He was booked, photographed, and then released. He returned to Twitter (for the first time since his post-insurrection banning) with a post of his mugshot and the slogan “Never Surrender!” — as if he hadn’t just surrendered. That image and slogan is now available on a wide variety of Trump merchandise, in case you believe a self-described billionaire needs your money more than you do. (BTW, I thought “Never Surrender” was done better in Galaxy Quest.)

Did you wonder what was going on with Trump’s expression in his mugshot? It turns out the look he gave has a name.

“The Kubrick Stare” is one of director Stanley Kubrick’s most recognizable directorial techniques. A method of shot composition where a character stares at the camera with a forward tilt, to convey to the audience that they are at the peak of their derangement

The other amusing thing about the booking was his height-and-weight listing: 6’3″, 215 pounds. That turns out to be a fairly typical set of measurements for NFL quarterbacks. To me, this just underlined something I’ve believed for several years: This guy can’t tell the truth about anything. I mean, we’ve all probably shaved a few pounds off our weight at one time or another, but at some point you’re just insulting people’s intelligence.

Legally, of course, these indignities are meaningless. The other three jurisdictions where Trump was indicted didn’t mugshot him or report his weight, and yet I’m sure police will easily recognize him if he goes on the lam.

Nonetheless, I suspect this ubiquitous mugshot will end up mattering politically. Until now, low information voters who favor Trump have been able to tell themselves that his legal troubles are all meaningless political shennanigans, kind of like the “scandals” on Fox News that rage for a weekend and then come to nothing. (Biden is banning gas stoves! ) They ignored his impeachment hearings (where his guilt was proved for anyone who bothered to watch) and the January 6 hearings (ditto), and felt justified in doing so, because ultimately there were no consequences.

But the mugshot sends a different message: This is really happening. It’s different from the usual partisan mudslinging.

A new poll from Politico underlines this point: 61% of the country wants to see Trump’s election-subversion trial happen before the 2024 election. 51% believe he’s guilty, and only 26% believe he’s innocent. 50% believe he should go to prison if convicted, while only 18% said he should go unpunished.

The upshot is that about a quarter of the country hasn’t paid enough attention to have a definite opinion. That number is going to shrink as the trials take place. And since the evidence against him is compelling, a lot of those people are going to shift into the guilty/prison columns.

and Putin’s revenge

Russian officials have now verified that Yevgeny Prigozhin’s DNA is in the wreckage of the plane that crashed between Moscow and St. Petersburg Wednesday. The number of Putin opponents who have had fatal “accidents” is long and not worth reviewing.

I haven’t yet seen any persuasive analysis of what Prigozhin’s death means for Putin, for Russia, or for Ukraine. University of Colorado Professor Sarah Wilson Sokhey is tentative, but makes sense to me:

What the historical context best tells us in this case is that when you have a coup attempt, and when you have generals being demoted and you have a failing military campaign, there are a lot of cracks in the system. It’s very difficult for people to predict how that power struggle will play out, but violently and chaotically is one way that has played out in the past. And that’s something we should be concerned about.

and the Jacksonville race shooting

Saturday afternoon, a White gunman with swastikas on his AR-15 killed three Black people in a Dollar General store before killing himself. Reportedly, he had previously stalked the historically Black college Edward Waters University, and left behind a manifesto expressing his hatred of Black people.

[The shooter] legally purchased his guns despite having been involuntarily committed for a mental health examination in 2017, the Associated Press reported.

This shooting follows last summer’s shooting in a Buffalo supermarket, where a White racist gunman targeted Black people, killing ten of them. In 2019, a White gunman targeted Hispanics at a WalMart in El Paso, killing 23. He also left a manifesto citing the Great Replacement theory that White people in America are at risk. I could go on.

If young Muslim men were entering places with a lot of Christians and shouting “Allah Akbar!” before opening fire, they would be portrayed in the media as Muslim terrorists, independent of their state of mind at the time. But due to White privilege, that’s not how these shootings have been covered. Instead, each shooter is described as “mentally ill”, rather than as a representative of a dangerous ideology.

In this instance, for example, Governor DeSantis acknowledged that the killings were racially motivated, but denounced the shooter mainly in individual terms as a “deranged scumbag” and “lunatic”.

But these are not random lone-wolf attacks. It’s time we start linking these killings together as a White supremacist terrorist movement, and addressing what the government and the public can do about this dangerous violence.

and the Republican debate

I covered the abortion part of the debate [transcript] in the featured post. But that was not the only important topic. By far the most significant moment of the debate was when the moderators posed this question from a young Republican:

Polls consistently show that young people’s number one issue is climate change. How will you as both President of the United States and leader of the Republican Party calm their fears that the Republican Party doesn’t care about climate change?

Moderator Martha Maccallum then asked for a show of hands: “Do you believe in human behavior is causing climate change?”

No hands were raised and the young man’s question was never answered. Vivek Ramaswamy declared that “the climate change agenda is a hoax”, and claimed that “more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.”

No one contradicted him. Various candidates obliquely recognized the issue, but made excuses for doing nothing. Nikki Haley said:

We also need to take on the international world and say, okay, India and China, you’ve got to stop polluting. And that’s when we’ll start to deal with climate.

Tim Scott pointed his finger at the whole developing world:

America has cut our carbon footprint in half in the last 25 years. The places where they are continuing to increase Africa, 950 million people, India, over a billion, China over a billion. Why would we put ourselves at a disadvantage, devastating our own economy? Let’s bring our jobs home.

No one presented an idea that would have any effect on the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, other than to increase them.

To me, everything else about the debate was trivial. My takeaway from the debate is this: If you care at all about climate change, there is no Republican you can support.

That’s why I agree with Beau of the Fifth Column: The winner of the debate was Joe Biden.

The climate change quote was far from the only outrageous thing Vivek Ramaswamy said during the debate, and over the weekend he was on virtually every talk show saying even more outrageous things.

There’s something broken in our media, and it intersects badly with what’s broken in the Republican Party. In our media, saying ridiculous things gets you more attention than saying wise or sensible things. And a sizable chunk of the Republican base yearns to break free from the constraints of Reality, so a potential leader shamelessly spouting nonsense — heedless of the criticism of “elites” who are still attached to Reality — appeals to them.

Ramaswamy has been taking full advantage of that sad configuration, and no doubt the next set of polls will show him moving up, at least as a second choice for Trump voters.

Consequently, I’m not going to repeat all the craziness he spouted on the talk shows. However, I did take a look at his biography, and I’m having a hard time figuring out why anyone thinks he should be president.

Ramaswamy, at 38, is an entrepreneur in the pharmaceutical industry, and he’s made quite a bit of money in that role. But it’s hard to tell whether his career has actually benefited anyone. His fundamental idea is to buy up patents for unproven drugs that the large companies are giving up on, then form small companies focused around getting those drugs through clinical trials and onto the market.

Does that strategy work? Hard to say, at this point. His main company, Roivant, got its first drug onto the market in 2022; it’s a cream for treating plaque psoriasis. A dozen or so other drugs are in various phases of clinical trials and may or may not ever be approved for use. At the moment, the testing and development process is burning cash faster than the one marketable drug can earn it, so the company is losing money. A lot of start-ups do that, and some of them eventually turn into Facebook. But most don’t.

So 10-20 years from now, Ramaswamy could be Elon Musk, or he could be (barely) remembered as a guy who sucked in a lot of investor cash and blew it.

Personally, I’d like to see more definite results from his first career before I consider him for a second career as a political leader.

and you also might be interested in …

Today is a significant day in Trump’s trials. Mark Meadows has a hearing before a federal judge in Georgia, trying to get his trial moved from Georgia state court to federal court. The issue is whether what Meadows did to further Trump’s conspiracy was part of his job as White House chief of staff. If so, he’s entitled to move the case to federal court.

Ordinarily that hearing would mostly have procedural significance, but both sides have upped the ante: Meadows is testifying in favor of his motion, and Fani Willis has called Brad Raffensperger. So this hearing is a preview of the overall case.

In a different courtroom, Judge Tanya Chutkan picked a trial date for the federal case against Trump for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election: March 4, a date much closer to Jack Smith’s January 2 proposal than Trump’s April, 2026 offer. If this date holds up, the trial will begin the day before the Super Tuesday primaries.

Sarah Palin is the latest Republican to suggest “civil war” as a proper response to the Trump indictments.

“Those who are conducting this travesty and creating this two-tier system of justice, I want to ask them what the heck, do you want us to be in civil war? Because that’s what’s going to happen,” Palin told Newsmax on Thursday night.

“We’re not going to keep putting up with this.”

It’s important to recognize this talk for the admission of guilt it is. If Trump supporters really believed what they say — that the charges are politically motivated nonsense — they’d want a quick trial so that a jury could laugh the case out of court. The only way that “civil war” makes sense is if you believe that a jury of ordinary American citizens who sees the evidence against Trump will find him guilty, and so violence is the only way to keep him out of prison.

and let’s close with something photogenic

Past Chronicles picks out a few dozen of the most creative ways people have incorporated statues and prominent architecture into their photos.

As several of the photos suggest, kids do this spontaneously.

Sometimes you can repurpose a statue completely: With the right staging, an applause can become a spanking.

And a baseball swing becomes an assault.

Apparently, the Leaning Tower of Pisa is a popular target for photographic abuse. Here, it tops an ice cream cone.

Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (5)

Republicans think they’ve found a way to pitch abortion bans

August 28, 2023 – 9:52 am

Abortion bans are unpopular, unless their advocates can demonize the opposing position and distract voters from what they really want.

Since the Dobbs decision last year, abortion has been a winning issue for Democrats. Whenever the issue of abortion has been put in front of the voters, the abortion-rights side has won, even in red states like Kansas, Kentucky, and (most recently) Ohio. Abortion was clearly a factor in liberals gaining the swing vote on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and in Democrats seizing complete control of state government in Michigan.

Pre-election polling by the Epic-MRA pollster Bernie Porn also highlighted how this year’s abortion rights initiative benefited Dems. Asked what single issue was motivating them to vote, 43% of respondents said abortion, which topped inflation by about 14 points.

“Abortion, abortion, abortion,” Porn said. “This proposal drove women and younger voters to the polls … and if Democrats in other states have a mechanism to put an abortion ballot proposal on the ballot in 2024, then they should consider that.”

A pragmatic Republican politician, then, should want to play this issue down. The no-abortion-at-all, life-begins-at-conception position is the Republican equivalent of defund-the-police: A segment of the base is strongly committed to it, but it’s an almost certain loser if you put it in front of the general electorate.

Democratic candidates, for the most part, have handled defund-the-police like this: They express sympathy for the concerns of the activists (i.e., police violence against people of color), but change the subject whenever specific proposals come up, and run away completely if they are asked to say “defund the police” in public.

So far, though, Republicans have not been able to do anything similar with abortion. Their anti-abortion base is too large and feels too entitled to primacy. Taking over the Supreme Court was the work of decades, and now that the Court no longer stands in their way, they want action. At the state level, they’re getting it, at least in red states that leave legislating to their gerrymandered legislatures and keep abortion propositions off the ballot. But those new laws are producing horror stories that motivate women around the country to vote for Democrats.

What to do?

This week’s Republican presidential debate gave us a look at the current state of play. Everyone on the stage identified themselves, in one way or another, as “pro-life”. But no one volunteered their support for the kind of complete-ban proposals that used to be at the center of the anti-abortion movement.

The one who came closest was Mike Pence, who called out abortion as a “moral issue” and pledged to be a “champion of life” in the White House. But even he could only offer that “A 15-week ban is an idea whose time has come”. [1]

North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum (who signed a 6-week ban in his state) held out for leaving the issue to the states. And I can’t find a debate quote from Chris Christie, but elsewhere he also has also said abortion should be a state matter. But everyone else coalesced behind a federal 15-week-ban, with some hand-waving in the direction of exceptions for rape, incest, and (possibly) maternal health. [2]

N weeks. The basic framing is rarely stated explicitly, but it goes like this: There is some point in every pregnancy where the government’s judgment becomes better than that of the people who are actually involved. So while (up to some point) the government may allow women to consult with the people they trust and decide whether or not to go forward with a pregnancy, beyond that point the government’s decision prevails. Ditto for doctors: Up to some deadline, a doctor may decide whether or not the best thing to do for a patient is to perform the abortion she is asking for, but past that point the decision belongs to the government.

Once you accept that framing, the only decision to make is when the government takes control. There’s going to be an N-week ban, except for a few special situations the government recognizes. So the only issues left to discuss are what N should be and what exceptions should be allowed.

Under the Roe v Wade framework, women had a complete right to choose abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy. In the second trimester, states could impose restrictions narrowly tailored to protect the woman’s health. In the third trimester, the potential viability of the fetus outside the womb allowed states to impose more-or-less complete bans. The Casey decision of 1992 mostly reaffirmed Roe, but shifted the focus more to viability: When could a fetus survive outside the womb? The viability standard depends on a number of factors, including the progress of technology, but generally it set N at around 24 weeks.

So in proposing a 15-week federal ban, the Republican candidates are framing themselves as moderates willing to compromise (at least until they have more power): Their base would like N to be zero, but they’re willing to settle on 15. The real radicals, they claim, are those who reject the N-week model altogether: They support “abortion up to the moment of birth”, a phrase that seems to have been well tested in focus groups.

Ron DeSantis (who signed a 6-week ban shortly after he was reelected and didn’t have to defend it to Florida voters) laid it out like this:

What the Democrats are trying to do on this issue is wrong: to allow abortion all the way up to the moment of birth. … We’re better than what the Democrats are selling. We are not going to allow abortion all the way up till birth and we will hold them accountable for their extremism.

Martha McCallum, a debate moderator, teed up a similar question for Burgum:

What do you say about the states, there’s about five of them, including New Jersey, I think a few others, that allow abortion up until the time of birth. Now if you were president, would you be able to abide that?

Tim Scott also invoked the phrase:

We cannot let states like California, New York, and Illinois have abortions on demand up until the day of birth. That is immoral. It is unethical, it is wrong. We must have a President of the United States who will advocate and fight for at the minimum a 15-week limit.

And Nikki Haley went on offense: Democrats who don’t like 15 should be pushed to specify what number they do support.

What I would love is for someone to ask Biden and Kamala Harris: Are they for 38 weeks? Are they for 39 weeks? Are they for 40 weeks? Because that’s what the media needs to be asking.

Jen Psaki summed it up:

This wasn’t just some throw-away line for applause on the debate stage. This is a talking point.

The demonized image. It’s not hard to see why “abortions on demand up to the day of birth” polls so badly. It invokes the image of a healthy woman who carries a healthy fetus for nearly nine months, and then, on a whim, decides to kill her baby rather than let it be born and given to some deserving childless couple eager to provide a loving home. By refusing to stop her from performing such a heinous act, you and I and the nation as a whole are “allowing” it to happen.

But once you draw that scenario into the foreground of your awareness, it should be obvious that it literally never happens, not in New Jersey, California, New York, or anywhere else. Abortions after 21 weeks (still well before birth) were already rare, even under Roe. [3] They get rarer with each week of gestation.

Nearly every one is a special case of some sort. That stands to reason: Who is going to endure months and months of pregnancy if they plan not to have a baby? Women who get late abortions are almost all women who decided not to get early abortions. Overwhelmingly, they wanted to have a child, and then something unexpected happened. Maybe the woman has cancer, and doesn’t dare wait until after the birth to start chemotherapy. Maybe the fetus has failed to develop in some way that dooms it to a short and pain-filled life. Maybe the fetus is already dead.

A million things can go wrong in the final months of pregnancy. Good luck anticipating all of them and writing all the appropriate exceptions into a law, much less making sure that law is applied compassionately in emergency situations.

So while Mike Pence is right that abortion is “a moral issue”, it is the height of arrogance to imagine that we, while sitting on our sofas watching a debate, can decide those complex moral issues better than the people who are actually there and know all the special circumstances.

State governments that opt out of the N-week framework are not “allowing” heartless moms to kill healthy babies about to be born. Instead, they are yielding to the judgment of people who are in a better position to weigh the complicated moral questions a late-term abortion invariably involves.

Restoring the rights protected by Roe. So OK, I have just defended a position that a hostile adversary could smear as “allowing abortion up to the moment of birth”. But a second point is worth making: Despite what the debaters repeatedly claimed, I’m an outlier. The vast majority of elected Democrats aren’t willing to go that far.

The best evidence of what most Democrats want is the bill they tried to pass last year: the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2022. That bill passed the then-Democratic House before getting derailed by a Republican filibuster in the Senate. It had President Biden’s support. The WHPA eliminated prohibitions on abortion “at any point or points in time prior to fetal viability”, and also prohibitions “after fetal viability when, in the good-faith medical judgment of the treating health care provider, continuation of the pregnancy would pose a risk to the pregnant patient’s life or health”.

In other words, it put the law back more or less to where it had been before Roe was reversed last summer. Nothing in it allowed “abortions on demand up until the day of birth”.

Polls. In every poll or election where it has been tested, restoring the pre-Dobbs configuration of reproductive rights is an extremely popular position. So anti-abortion advocates are trying very hard to pretend that this option doesn’t exist. If you watched the debate, you would never have guessed that anyone, much less President Biden, wants to restore precisely the rights the Supreme Court took away.

Mike Pence claimed at one point that a 15-week ban is “supported by 70% of the American people”. When challenged on this, his staff pointed to a poll conducted on behalf of an anti-abortion group, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.

In fact, Pence understated the poll’s result: 77% wanted either a 15-week ban or something even more restrictive. But here is the question the respondents were asked:

Which of the following best describes your position on the abortion issue?

  • Abortion should be prohibited throughout pregnancy, with exception for the life of the mother, rape, and incest. (26%)
  • Abortion should be prohibited after a baby’s heartbeat can be detected at 6 weeks of pregnancy, with exception for the life of the mother, rape, and incest. (20%)
  • Abortion should be prohibited after a baby can feel pain at 15 weeks of pregnancy, with exception for the life of the mother, rape, and incest. (31%)
  • Abortion should be allowed throughout all 9 months of pregnancy, without any restrictions. (15%)
  • I’m totally unsure. (8%)

There’s so much wrong with this question I don’t know where to start. First off, respondents are asked to respond to “facts” that are not facts. Embryos (not babies) don’t have a heartbeat at 6 weeks. And the idea that fetuses (also not babies) can feel pain at 15 (or even 20 or 25) weeks is highly speculative and not the current medical consensus. [4]

But perhaps worse than the biased wording is that no option corresponds to the rights women had 15 months ago. If you aren’t for banning abortion at 15 weeks or earlier, the only other choice is essentially “abortions on demand up until the day of birth”.

A similar poll was conducted by Cygnal, with a headline result that “Majority support abortion ban”, fleshed out in the press release to “56% of voters support a federal abortion limit of 15 weeks (23% oppose; 21% unsure), including a plurality of Democrats.”

How did they come up with that? The same way Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America did, but with even fewer options. The question they asked respondents was:

Do you support a federal 15-week ban on abortions with an exception for rape, incest, and life of the month or support allowing abortion up until the point of birth?

Can Republicans “go on offense”? That’s the advice from Kellyanne (“Alternative Facts“) Conway in a WaPo column the morning after the debate. “If they want to win, Republicans need to go on offense on abortion“.

If you probe into the column, “go on offense” means what it usually does with Conway: bury voters in bullshit. She repeats the 6-week-heartbeat and 15-week-pain canards, and claims

Democrats are making a radical push for abortion on demand throughout pregnancy and will try to put some version of that question on the ballot in the coming election.

An obvious way to back this point up would be to point to some abortion-until-birth ballot proposal Democrats are gathering signatures for in some state or another. But Conway doesn’t, because there is none.

She quotes the Cygnal poll (whose biased question I just quoted) claiming that a majority support a 15-week ban. She advocates pushing Democrats the way Nikki Haley did, with “Is there any abortion they find objectionable?”, as if refusing to usurp a woman’s decision is the same as agreeing with every decision a woman could conceivably make (even if no women are actually choosing whatever hideous option Republicans might imagine).

So that’s what’s coming: an avalanche of anti-abortion bullshit. Get your wading boots ready for it.

[1] Pence rooted his position in his religion:

After I gave my life to Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, I opened up the book and I read, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you” and “See, I set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life.” And I knew from that moment on the cause of life had to be my cause.

Here Pence demonstrates the back-flips you have to do if you want to claim that the Bible denounces abortion: He takes two quotes out of context and smushes them together so that they seem to say something neither one says.

The two verses are Jeremiah 1:5 and Deuteronomy 30:19. In Jeremiah 1, God tells Jeremiah about his longstanding plan that Jeremiah be “a prophet to the nations”. The focus is on God’s foresight and Jeremiah’s special destiny. The text says nothing at all about any fetus in a womb today.

Deuteronomy 30 centers on those “blessings and curses”: God promises to make a great people of the Israelites if they obey the laws he has just given them, but threatens to wipe them out otherwise. (Moses had to talk God out of such a genocide in Exodus 32 after the golden calf incident. After some coaxing, God was satisfied with three thousand deaths rather than the whole nation.) Read in its proper context, “choose life” means “Don’t disobey and make me kill you.” Again, it’s got nothing to do with abortion.

Invariably, when I make a point like this, someone will object that we shouldn’t argue Biblical interpretation in a political arena, because the Bible plays no legal role in governing the United States. And that’s true: The US Constitution is an entirely secular document. The Founders were almost all Christians of one stripe or another, but they were well aware of the wars of religion that had plagued England and wanted to avoid anything similar happening here.

That said, though, I think that when a politician or a party makes an argument that is invalid in its own terms, it’s worth calling out — even if those terms have no legal standing. So when I see it, I call out bad religion in the same way that I call out bad science.

And politically, I don’t want to see the abortion issue framed as Christians vs. non-Christians or Bible-believers vs. everyone else. Anti-abortion is unrelated to the Bible, except through speculative interpretations that no one would put much stock in if they read the text without prior convictions.

[2] As we’ve seen in the states, these exceptions often are not all they’re cracked up to be. Even if your case seems to fit an exception, you still may not be allowed an abortion.

[3] In 2019, the CDC counted 4,882 abortions after 21 weeks in the whole country, or slightly less than 1% of all abortions. Normalizing for the handful of states that didn’t report, I’ve seen estimates that the number of post-21-week abortions could be as high as 6,000 a year.

[4] The short version of the argument against pain-at-15-weeks is that the nerve clusters that would report pain are not yet hooked up to the brain centers that would recognize it.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

August 28, 2023 – 8:37 am

Wednesday, even I couldn’t make myself watch the Republican presidential debate. But I did eventually read the transcript, and what struck me was how the candidates are struggling to dress up their most unpopular position: banning abortion. They actually have a strategy, and it could work if nobody confronts them with the facts. So this week’s featured post will be “Republican candidates think they’ve found a way to pitch abortion bans”. It should be out between 9 and 10.

The weekly summary has to cover what was everywhere this week: Trump’s mug shot, the first one his career of crime has produced. The week’s other big story was in some sense the most predictable: Putin rival Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a plane crash. I don’t pretend to know what that portends for Russia’s future, but I’ll link to some people trying to figure it out.

Then there was the Republican debate in general, where a number of topics other than abortion were covered. This led to the bizarre ascent of Vivek Ramaswamy, who was on all the talk shows this weekend, saying all manner of absurd things. Ramaswamy is a challenge to our news system: He’s intentionally saying outrageous things to get attention, and it’s working. I’ll try to tell you what you need to know about him without falling into that trap. (Wish me luck.)

Also, a number of significant things are happening in the Trump trials this week, and especially today.

This week’s news calls for a goofy closing, so I found one: an amusing collection ways people have posed with statues and other famous landmarks. The Leaning Tower of Pisa, for some reason, is especially popular.

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Knowing and Willful

August 21, 2023 – 12:04 pm

Defendant Donald John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020. One of the states he lost was Georgia. Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.

– The State of Georgia vs. Donald John Trump et al

This week’s featured post is “Why I’m Optimistic about 2024“.

This week everybody was talking about the weather

It’s hard to keep up with Climate Change Summer. Last week we were still digesting the burning of LaHaina. Friday, Canada was evacuating Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, as wildfires approached. Yesterday, a tropical storm hit Los Angeles, something that literally never happens. Las Vegas is expecting heavy rain and strong winds. Most of the towns and buildings in the path of Hilary were built under the assumption that this can’t happen.

As usual, I won’t try to keep up with breaking news. But I do want to make two observations:

  • It’s time to stop arguing about climate change. Anyone who won’t admit what we can see with our own eyes is not worth talking to.
  • For years we’ve been hearing that computer models of the climate were unreliable and could be inaccurate. Such doubts have been spread by people who want to deny the problem. But it’s just as likely that the errors in the models make them too conservative. We need to think about the possibility that climate change could be worse than scientists’ predictions.

The usual suspects are trying to connect aid to Ukraine with the federal emergency response to Maui, as if Hawaii were being ignored and cutting Ukraine aide would help Hawaians. Beau of the Fifth Column covers the Maui aid process pretty well.

As for Ukraine, it’s as if Democrats said, “Why are we spending money on Trump’s secret service detail rather than helping people in Maui?” These decisions should all be made on their own merits.

and the Trump trials

The Fulton County indictment, Trump’s fourth, dropped Monday night. It covers some of the same actions as Jack Smith’s January 6 conspiracy indictment — Trump’s “perfect phone call” to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger figures in both, for example — but Fani Willis has written a much more sweeping narrative. While Smith’s is laser-focused on Trump, leveling four charges and leaving his co-conspirators unnamed, Willis’ indictment charges 19 people with 41 crimes. Trump and Rudy Giuliani are charged with the most crimes, 13 counts each.

What structures the indictment is a RICO charge, a claim that Trump led a corrupt enterprise that committed a number of individual crimes in service of a single illegal goal:

Defendant Donald John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020. One of the states he lost was Georgia. Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.

Smith’s indictment, unlike Willis’, is streamlined to get to trial quickly. Smith has requested a January 2 trial date, while Trump’s lawyers produced the laughable suggestion of April, 2026. Judge Chutkan is expected to announce the real trial date by August 28.

A number of other issues will come before Chutkan soon: What to do about Trump’s direct defiance of her order not to make “inflammatory statements” about the case that could be construed as threatening witnesses or trying to taint the jury pool.

And a different federal judge will have to decide Mark Meadows’ motion to move his trial from Georgia state court to federal court and then dismiss the charges. Even if Meadows gets his way about removing the case from Georgia courts, the trial will still take place under Georgia law, and presidential pardons would still be off the table. Dismissing the charges seems unlikely.

Trump will likely file similar motions. Lawrence Tribe et al explain why they should fail.

Several detailed summaries of the Georgia indictment are out there. Here’s Lawfare’s.

The 98-page indictment itself is a bit dull to read, largely because it endlessly repeats a number of phrases that I assume have significance in Georgia law. For example, the RICO charge is split into 161 individual acts, not all of which are illegal in and of themselves. Each one concludes with some version of “this was an overt act in futherance of the conspiracy”. Each of the 41 charges gets its own section, which ends with “contrary to the laws of said State, the good order, peace, and dignity thereof.”

By the end, I was amusing myself by picturing a liturgical performance of the indictment, with the acts and charges as a call-and-response: A cantor chants the content, and the congregation responds “this was an act in furtherance of the conspiracy” or “contrary to the laws of said State, the good order, peace, and dignity thereof,” as appropriate. At every mention of an unidentified person (Individual 24, say), a background choir intones “whose identity is known to the grand jury”.

If you want to stage such a performance, feel free to take the idea and run with it. Just mention my name in the program and send me a YouTube link.

The Georgia indictment goes into detail on several incidents that are barely mentioned in the federal indictment. For example: trying to bully election worker Ruby Freeman into confessing to fictitious election fraud, and illegally gaining access to voting machines and voting-machine software in Coffee County.

I had heard about both of these incidents before, but did not appreciate how they fit into the larger conspiracy. The woman who offered Freeman “protection” if she confessed was not just a rogue actor inspired by Trump’s lies; she conspired with Harrison William Prescott Floyd, who was director of Black Voices for Trump; Robert Cheeley, who participated in Rudy Giuliani’s presentation to Georgia legislators, the one in which Freeman was originally slandered; and Scott Graham Hall, who was also involved in the Coffee County voting-machine break-in.

The Coffee County incident also involved Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, fake elector Cathy Latham, and a number of other conspirators.

Acts like these may not have the scope of the fake-elector plot or pressuring Mike Pence to violate the Constitution, but they are the kind of building blocks RICO cases are built on, because they are clearly criminal. There’s no other way to spin the video of Trevian Kutti telling Ruby Freeman she needs to be “moved” within 48 hours to avoid some unspecified consequence. “I cannot say what will specifically will take place. I just know that it will disrupt your freedom and the freedom of one or more of your family members. … You are a loose end for a party that needs to tidy up.” Terrorizing a public official is classic racketeering.

There’s a legal debate going on about whether the 14th Amendment bars Trump from ever serving as president again. I won’t comment because I haven’t done enough research to have an opinion worth sharing.

Sadly, Trump has cancelled the press conference today that was going to introduce “A Large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT on the Presidential Election Fraud which took place in Georgia”. This REPORT was going to completely exonerate him from the charges in the Fulton County indictment.

I say “sadly” without irony, because I welcome any development that commits Trump to a fixed position. Rhetorically, Trump is at his strongest when he can float above the discussion, making loose references to a hazy collection of theories that he never quite commits to. While any single claim is probably absurd and easily refuted — Fox News, for example, paid $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems rather than try to defend his rigged-voting-machine lies in court — the entire cloud is hard to get a handle on. Supporters can acknowledge the obvious problems with this claim or that one, while still believing that some other unspecified Biden-stole-the-election theory is true.

Trump fears going to court and is desperately trying to delay his trials because court processes are designed to cut through such fog. His lawyers will have to tell the jury a single coherent story, and he doesn’t have one.

I wish he’d produce a similar “Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT” about the Mar-a-Lago documents. At various times he has implied that he declassified the documents, suggested the documents were planted by the FBI, and claimed “I had every right to have these documents” even if they were classified. These claims contradict each other and are all absurd, but when one is refuted his supporters can simply shift to another. By the time they come back around to their original excuse, they’ve forgotten why it’s false.

So I’d love to see him commit to a single narrative, whatever it is. By all means, Mr. Trump, tell us your side of the story. Write a legal affadavit and sign your name to it — preferably under penalty of perjury. Your cultlike followers may refuse to read the indictments against you, refuse to watch the January 6 hearings, and in general cover their ears against any unwelcome information, but I promise you this: I will read any REPORT you put out there. If you have exculpatory evidence, I want to see it.

Trump may not be announcing his first-and-best stolen-election claims, but Mike Lindell is, and it’s the same old crap that has been debunked many times.

and Hunter

For almost a year, Republicans have complained that the US attorney investigating Hunter Biden wasn’t given special-counsel status. Now he has been, and they’re complaining about that too.

I seldom discuss Hunter Biden on this blog, for a simple reason: Until whatever Hunter is supposed to have done can be credibly connected to something his father did, I don’t care. I don’t need to see absolute proof before I get concerned, but give me something beyond MAGA wishful thinking. Hunter has never held a government office (unlike, say, Jared Kushner), and he appears to have had no direct influence on US policy.

He appears to have done some illegal things — hence the plea deal that fell through — though exactly what those are is never quite clear. He has also traded on his name, which is unsavory but annoyingly common and not illegal. Whatever he has or hasn’t done, he should be treated like anyone else would be — no better and no worse. If he ends up going to jail, I’m sure that will make his father sad. But that means nothing to me, because I care about the US government, not the Biden family.

Democrats would do well to write a broad anti-corruption law, one that would apply to future actions like the ones Hunter, Jared, Clarence Thomas, and Ginny Thomas are alleged to have committed. Holding high office should put restrictions and reporting obligations not just on the officeholder, but on close relatives as well. Republicans would of course oppose the law, and it wouldn’t pass, but it would be a good issue to run on in 2024.

and you also might be interested in …

The ten states with the lowest age-adjusted suicide rates are all blue states. The ten with the highest are nine red states and New Mexico. This probably has something to do with the availability of guns. [As a commenter points out below, I missed Colorado on the highest-suicide list. So it’s eight red states and two bluish-purple states.]

Kat Abu examines Fox News’ persistent attacks on the very idea of being educated.

and let’s close with something inevitable

Epic Rap Battles had to do a Barbie vs. Oppenheimer.

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