I didn’t completely get it until yesterday, when I read “Dave Barry’s 2021 Year in Review” in the Washington Post. But then it hit me full force: Not even Dave Barry can make 2021 funny.
He hit all the high points: January 6, Ted Cruz in Cancun, the George Floyd trial.
Hilarious, wasn’t it? I can tell you’re laughing already.
Another year-end WaPo article is actually funnier, though I don’t think the Editorial Board intended it to be: “21 Good Things That Happened in 2021“. It starts well with #1 “Vaccines”, which are undeniable good. But the article already begins to lose its way with #2 “Innovations”, which is partly repetition (vaccines were a great innovation) and already starting to get ambiguous.
Innovations abounded in telemedicine and remote work, and we began to commune as never before with faraway friends and family.
Think back to all the time you spent on Zoom this year. Was that really the second-best thing about 2021? Maybe it was. (Oh, shit.)
#3-#8 are all variations on the theme that we got rid of Trump, even though he was so determined to stay in office that he nearly overthrew American democracy. By #13 we’re celebrating Britney Spears getting free from her father’s conservatorship. (I haven’t done my research: When was the last time Britney was #13 on the charts?)
Imagine being down to Britney and knowing you still have to come up with eight more upbeat things to remember about the year. I want to make fun of the WaPo editorial board’s clueless choices, but try to do better: Did 21 genuinely good things happen in 2021? To anybody?
The Year of Almost
The true highlight of the year came in June, when we almost got past the Covid pandemic. Remember? It happened right after Biden’s vaccination program got rolling and before Delta and Omicron broke out. The national 7-day average for daily new cases got down to 14K (compared to nearly 200K on Inauguration Day and over 200K now).
In Massachusetts, where I live, that average got down to 52. Not 52 thousand — 52 cases in the whole state. Now it’s 7150. In early July, the 7-day average daily deaths was down to 1, and we had a number of days where nobody at all in Massachusetts died of Covid. Now we’re losing about 32 a day.
In Congress, the Democrats’ razor-thin margins in each house allowed them to almost accomplish all kinds of things. They almost started doing something about climate change, almost protected voting rights, almost renewed the child tax credit, almost reduced the cost of prescription drugs, almost reformed the filibuster, and much more.
As the year ends, the January 6 committee has almost gotten to the bottom of Trump’s coup, and I’m sure that 2022 will see the Justice Department almost get off its butt, investigate him, and send him on a well-deserved multiyear vacation inside some federal facility.
Well, I’m almost sure.
The point of no return
For Republicans, 2021 was the year when all hope of redemption was lost.
Remember the old Republican Party? I wasn’t a fan, because it was mostly dedicated to preserving traditional dominance relationships: rich over poor, capital over labor, men over women, Whites over people of color, Christians over non-Christians, the US over the rest of the world, and so on.
Nonetheless, Republicans could be counted on in certain important ways. Like all sensible Americans, they wanted to protect the country from invasion, terrorism, crime, and disease. They didn’t want to crash the economy. They had their own interpretation of democracy, human rights, and the Constitution, but they were more-or-less faithful to that interpretation, and could even at times be principled about it. Party leaders like Newt Gingrich and John McCain could see the reality of climate change and even support doing something about it.
Then came the Tea Party wave of 2010, and the rise of hostage-taking politics: If Obama wouldn’t give them what they wanted, they’d let the government crash into its debt ceiling, doing unpredictable damage to the world economy. Playing chicken with the debt has been a first-choice conservative tactic ever since, along with other hostage-taking tactics like government shutdowns and threatening to deport the Dreamers. Sure, almost nobody wants those things to happen, but what will you give me to make sure they don’t?
With Trump, the new anything-goes style came into the White House. But the old-time Republican Party was still represented by Senate-confirmed cabinet secretaries like John Kelly, Jim Mattis, and Rex Tillerson, who buffered the country from the worst impulses of the “fucking moron” in the Oval Office.
Then came the January 6 riot, whose purpose was to intimidate Pence and Congress into throwing the election to Trump, or at least delaying the electoral process past Inauguration Day and creating chaos Trump might use to stay in power.
For a few days, it looked like this was the long-anticipated moment when old-style Republicans would find a line they could not cross. Sending his thugs into the Capitol itself, staying silent while they threatened to hang the vice president — it was finally too much. Weather-vanes like Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy turned against Trump.
Mitch McConnell could have convicted Trump in either one of his impeachment trials — the evidence to do so was certainly there — but ultimately he didn’t. During 2021, the whole party has gotten behind the Trump’s Big Lie about the stolen election, has made excuses for the attempted coup, and has calmly watched Trumpists set up for the next coup. Those few old-style Republicans who rediscovered their oath of office or their loyalty to the Constitution — Brad Raffensperger, Liz Cheney, and a handful of others — they’re targets now. The Party disowns them.
2021 was the GOP’s last chance to redeem itself, and it refused. Now it will either succeed in sweeping away democracy in favor of Trumpist fascism, or it will die. I wouldn’t want to place bets either way.
Today, our two-party system consists of one party committed to authoritarianism, and another that will almost defend democracy.
Dave Barry can’t make that situation funny, and the Washington Post editorial board can’t put a positive spin on it without looking ridiculous. So I won’t even try.
I have a bad attitude today. I’ve been reading a bunch of year-in-review articles, a genre that typically has a bittersweet tone: celebratory, wistful, nostalgic, reverent about the recently departed, and hopeful for the future.
It doesn’t work this year, at least not for me. 2020 had been a terrible year by all accounts, but it ended on a hopeful note: Trump had been defeated, vaccines were coming, and maybe everything would be better soon. A year later a lot of things are better, but not by nearly as much as I imagined they would be. Covid is still terrorizing us, and the vultures are still circling our democracy. Republicans have closed ranks behind Trump’s sedition, while Democrats have been unable to maintain the kind of unity they need to pass legislation.
So watching year-end pundits try to apply the usual bittersweet glaze to the year has put me in a bad mood. That comes out in the featured post “Closing Out a Dismal Year”, which should appear shortly. (Truthfully, I’d skip it if I were you. Get yourself a too-sweet coffee drink and read a romance novel instead. Or watch the replay of a game your team has already won.)
The weekly summary has to begin with the startling Omicron surge, but there is some upbeat stuff as well: The James Webb space telescope, which launched Christmas Day, is a genuinely cool thing. And I love the audacity NASA has displayed by sending a complex mechanism well beyond the range of any repair crew. If it works, it’s going to be genuinely inspiring.
The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor.… The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty.
Joe Manchin announced on Fox News Sunday that he could not vote for President Biden’s Build Back Better bill, effectively dooming it. The White House released an angry statement in response, ratifying the breakdown in the Biden/Manchin relationship.
For half a year, Manchin has delayed progress on the bill, raising the question of whether he would eventually come through after he had whittled the proposal down to his liking, or if he was simply stringing Biden along. Now it looks like the latter.
Manchin’s decision sinks a number of popular proposals, including lowering prescription drug prices, continuing the child tax credit, and mitigating climate change.
During the House debate on whether to find Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in contempt of Congress for his defiance of a subpoena, (the contempt resolution passed) members of the January 6 Committee revealed a number of text messages Meadows had received on January 6 from various conservative luminaries, including Fox News hosts, at least one member of Congress, and Donald Trump Jr.
The point of publicizing these texts was that they emphasize the need for Meadows’ testimony. But they make another important point about the subsequent cover-up of January 6: As much as Trump propagandists try to claim that (1) the Capitol insurrection wasn’t a big deal, and/or that (2) Trump bore no responsibility for it, they knew at the time that those things weren’t true.
The texts plead with Meadows to get Trump to stop the violence, which demonstrate their authors’ belief at the time that Trump was controlling the violence. The texts would make no sense if the demonstrators were basically peaceful, or if the violence were a false-flag operation sparked by antifa, as Trumpists like to claim.
As Trump’s attempt to block the January 6 Committee’s access to documents from his administration goes to the Supreme Court, Vox points out what a flimsy claim he has under existing precedents. If the Court’s partisan majority wants to protect him, they’ll have to invent new law.
They might, but I’ll bet not. Roberts won’t go for it, and he only needs to convince one more conservative. Either Gorsuch or Kavanaugh might be that deciding vote. If the Court doesn’t find against Trump, they’ll manufacture an excuse to keep the legal wrangling going in hopes that a new Republican House majority will make the case moot by sacking the whole committee in 2023.
On the House floor, moments before the vote, Meijer approached a member who appeared on the verge of a breakdown. He asked his new colleague if he was okay. The member responded that he was not; that no matter his belief in the legitimacy of the election, he could no longer vote to certify the results, because he feared for his family’s safety. “Remember, this wasn’t a hypothetical. You were casting that vote after seeing with your own two eyes what some of these people are capable of,” Meijer says. “If they’re willing to come after you inside the U.S. Capitol, what will they do when you’re at home with your kids?”
This is one panel of a Tom Tomorrow comic in which the news anchors outline the run of recent bad news.
AP reviewed “every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump” — all 475 of them.
The cases could not throw the outcome into question even if all the potentially fraudulent votes were for Biden, which they were not, and even if those ballots were actually counted, which in most cases they were not.
The review also showed no collusion intended to rig the voting. Virtually every case was based on an individual acting alone to cast additional ballots.
Not all Republicans are comfortable centering their Party on a lie that undermines democracy. Wisconsin State Senator Kathy Bernier called out her fellow Republicans.
A Delaware judge has ruled that Dominion Voting System’s lawsuit against Fox News can go forward. At issue is whether Fox knew at the time that the election-fraud claims it was making against Dominion were baseless.
and Omicron
The pandemic numbers continue to increase: New cases per day in the US are up to 133K, a 21% rise over two weeks. Deaths are inching up: 1296 per day (7-day average), up 9%. Hospitalizations are at 69K, up 16%.
The records were set last January: 248K cases per day on January 11, deaths at 3336 per day on January 15, 140K hospitalized on January 5.
Omicron spread in the United Kingdom is running ahead of the US, so it may provide a glimpse of our future. The UK has been setting new-case records, and London bars and restaurants have begun shutting down on their own, creating a “lockdown by stealth”.
The economic consequences could be more dire this time around, because the government isn’t providing support to businesses that close temporarily. That could happen here too.
There’s no federal money left to keep restaurants open. The aid for concert halls and other customer-starved performance spaces has nearly gone dry. Federal officials ended their primary effort that pumped money into small businesses with sagging balance sheets, and they stopped paying out extra sums to workers who are out of a job.
Like the original strain of Covid-19, Omicron is hitting the US first in New York City. [See the correction in the comments. Covid his NYC early and hard, but not first.] I’m writing these words in Florida, which has become a low-Covid oasis since the summer surge passed. But a new outbreak seems to be starting in Miami.
The coronavirus is a microscopic ball studded with specially shaped spikes that it uses to recognize and infect our cells. Antibodies can thwart such infections by glomming onto the spikes, like gum messing up a key. But Omicron has a crucial advantage: 30-plus mutations that change the shape of its spike and disable many antibodies that would have stuck to other variants.
… In terms of catching the virus, everyone should assume that they are less protected than they were two months ago. As a crude shorthand, assume that Omicron negates one previous immunizing event—either an infection or a vaccine dose. Someone who considered themselves fully vaccinated in September would be just partially vaccinated now (and the official definition may change imminently). But someone who’s been boosted has the same ballpark level of protection against Omicron infection as a vaccinated-but-unboosted person did against Delta.
… Even if Omicron has an easier time infecting vaccinated individuals, it should still have more trouble causing severe disease. The vaccines were always intended to disconnect infection from dangerous illness, turning a life-threatening event into something closer to a cold. Whether they’ll fulfill that promise for Omicron is a major uncertainty, but we can reasonably expect that they will. The variant might sneak past the initial antibody blockade, but slower-acting branches of the immune system (such as T cells) should eventually mobilize to clear it before it wreaks too much havoc.
Moderna’s results show that the currently authorized booster dose of 50 micrograms — half the dose given for primary immunization — increased the level of antibodies by roughly 37-fold, the company said. A full dose of 100 micrograms was even more powerful, raising antibody levels about 83-fold compared with pre-boost levels, Moderna said.
All vaccines approved in the United States and European Union still seem to provide a significant degree of protection against serious illness from Omicron, which is the most crucial goal. But only the Pfizer and Moderna shots, when reinforced by a booster, appear to have success at stopping infections, and these vaccines are unavailable in most of the world.
The other shots — including those from AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and vaccines manufactured in China and Russia — do little to nothing to stop the spread of Omicron, early research shows.
The protesters compared the employees who refused to serve them to Nazis, and claimed a constitutional right not to reveal their private medical information. (And that is true, of course. But there is no constitutional right to eat at Cheesecake Factory.)
Because the sports leagues do such regular testing, they are spotting mild and asymptomatic Covid cases that the larger society misses. In the last two weeks, Covid’s effect on games has greatly increased. We’re starting to hear calls for the leagues to shut down again.
When it comes to pronunciation, I am on Team OH-micron rather than Team AH-micron. To me, it’s obvious: omicron is a companion to omega (little-o/big-o) and nobody says AH-mega.
and inflation
The Bank of England became the first central bank to start raising interest rates in response to rising inflation.
The Federal Reserve is also responding, but more slowly. The Fed controls short-term interest rates on dollar deposits more-or-less directly, through the rates that it charges to banks; it affects long-term rates indirectly, by purchasing bonds in the market.
The Federal Reserve said on Wednesday it would end its pandemic-era bond purchases in March and pave the way for three quarter-percentage-point interest rate hikes by the end of 2022 as the economy nears full employment and the U.S. central bank copes with a surge of inflation.
Paul Krugman writes a readable account of the history and causes of inflation, and summarizes the debate between economists who think the current inflation is transitory and those who expect it to persist. Krugman himself is on Team Transitory, but he acknowledges that the current bout has already gone further than he expected, and I think he presents the debate fairly.
The problem, as Krugman presents it, isn’t so much that demand has soared as that during the pandemic it shifted from services into goods.
The caricature version is that people unable or unwilling to go to the gym bought Pelotons instead, and something like that has in fact happened across the board.
Services tend to be local, but goods depend on a global supply chain, which hasn’t broken, but hasn’t responded flexibly enough to accommodate increased demand. This, Krugman believes, will work itself out: As the pandemic recedes, service consumption will go back up, and supply-chain adjustments are already being made.
A second factor has been workers’ reluctance to return to the labor market, the so-called Great Resignation, which is forcing wages up. Krugman confesses he doesn’t understand exactly what is causing this or how quickly workers will come back.
A third factor in inflationary periods of the past has been psychological: Businesses raise prices and workers demand higher wages because they’re convinced that other prices will go up. In other words, inflation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. He doesn’t see evidence of this happening yet, but acknowledges that it could.
but you might want to think about this
Take a look at James Muldoon’s article “Regulating Big Tech is not enough. We need platform socialism.” I’m not sure how these specific ideas would work in practice, but I think we need to expand the universe of possible solutions to our social-media problem.
In practice, all participatory democracy processes — the daily hours-long open meetings of the Occupy movement being a prime example — run into the widespread desire for what I like to call Disneyland authoritarianism: Somebody should set things up so that I don’t have to worry about how anything works, and I don’t care if they exploit me a little as long as they also provide an enjoyable experience.
Disneyland authoritarianism works fine in a place like Disneyland, where management knows that you can easily walk out and never come back if you don’t like how you’re treated.
A lot of democratic-on-paper organizations end up running in a Disneyland authoritarian manner, because only a small group of people can be bothered to show up to decision-making meetings and man the bureaucracy. As long as the insider cabal keeps providing the services that the larger community expects and maintaining an acceptable level of quality, most people are content to fall into the role of customers rather than citizens. And that can be OK, as long as the processes are transparent and the cabal’s boundaries are permeable.
Small-town school boards are a good example. As long as local schools function at an acceptable level, most people can’t be bothered to participate, or even to vote in school-board elections. Democratic control exists mainly as a fail-safe, but that’s enough to keep authoritarian abuses at bay.
Disneyland authoritarianism becomes problematic when essential systems of everyday life depend on decisions made inside a Disneyland by a cabal that isn’t transparent or permeable. That’s the problem with social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
In the beginning, free privately owned social media apps seemed like a good deal. We got to stay in touch with our friends, participate in communities of interest, and so on. Sure, they harvested our data and used it to target ads at us, but that seemed like a small price. If we didn’t like their online Disneylands, we could leave them and never come back.
But now we’ve gotten into a situation where democracy itself is strongly influenced by what happens inside social media platforms that are organized to maximize their owners’ profit. Disinformation and polarization are good for profits, but not for us as individuals, and not for our country or the world. But we can’t join the decision-making group, or even find out what they’re doing. And while we can walk away from the platforms themselves (at some cost to our ability to fully participate in society), we can’t isolate ourselves from their effect on our democratic systems.
For years we’ve been hearing about American airstrikes that go wrong and kill innocent people. This week the NYT published a series based on internal Pentagon assessments, claiming that
the American air war has been plagued by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and imprecise targeting and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children.
… Taken together, the 5,400 pages of records point to an institutional acceptance of civilian casualties. In the logic of the military, a strike was justifiable as long as the expected risk to civilians had been properly weighed against the military gain, and it had been approved up the chain of command.
The Pentagon records point to an official count of about 1,600 civilian deaths from airstrikes in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan since the official American ground war ended in Iraq in 2014. The Times’ estimate is much higher.
Christine Emba brings some common sense to the critical race theory disinformation campaign. Is math racist? Of course not. But the subject can be taught and its classes organized in racially biased ways.
The intrepid war correspondents of Fox News are on the front lines as the War on Christmas enters its 17th year. CNN’s John Avalon looks back at the origins of this annual conflict. He interviews Alisyn Camerota, who is now with CNN, but was at Fox back in those early days of the War, when “marching orders” to give national 24/7 coverage to any local nativity-scene controversy “so that you begin to think it’s a national crisis” came down from Fox president Roger Ailes.
The turning of something that unifying, something that really should transcend partisan politics in every way, into something divisive that people can fixate on and feel fear about — that’s a real trick. And it’s also a sign of sickness, a sign of partisanship seeping into every element of our lives at the hands of people who are trying to gin up this anxiety.
The Sackler family had negotiated a sweet deal for itself: The family’s company, Purdue Pharma, would take full responsibility for its role in creating the opioid crisis, and then declare bankruptcy. That plan would generate $4 billion to pay out to victims, but shield the family from any further lawsuits, letting them walk away with their own billions intact.
But a federal judge threw that agreement out Thursday, saying that the New York bankruptcy court didn’t have the authority to offer the family that protection.
Trust Stephen Colbert to remind us of what the Christmas season is really about: blockbuster movies. This year in particular marks the 20th anniversary of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first film in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Colbert commemorates this milestone as they undoubtedly would in Rivendell, with rap.
The author, Matthew Walther, lives in rural southwestern Michigan and usually writes for Catholic and conservative outlets. The gist of his article is summed up well by the title: In Walther’s world, people already live as if the pandemic is over.
This was not news to me. This week my wife and I have been (very carefully) making our way down the East Coast to re-establish the decades-long Christmas-with-friends-who-now-live-in-Florida tradition that lapsed last year. We’ve seen the mostly unmasked travelers at the rest stops. (My college roommate and his wife caught Covid in 2020 after their own very careful road trip; they blame the rest stops.)
In North Carolina, we were the only diners who chose to sit on the restaurant’s outdoor patio. A Florida lunch spot had only one outdoor table, which no one else wanted. In South Carolina, we bought the instant Covid tests that no CVS back in Massachusetts could keep in stock. When we asked about a limit on how many we could buy, the clerk looked at us strangely, as if we didn’t understand that the whole point of retail is to sell as much as you can.
Believe me, the number of people living as if Covid isn’t happening any more has not escaped my attention.
So why do I feel trolled by Walther’s article? He isn’t denying evident reality, as so many Covid minimizers do. He acknowledges that the virus is still spreading, and that hospitalizations are high, though they “are always high this time of year without attracting much notice”. He backhandedly acknowledges the existence of variants, but claims not to be paying much attention.
COVID is invisible to me except when I am reading the news, in which case it strikes me with all the force of reports about distant coups in Myanmar.
He says (without much concern) that 136 people in his rural county have died of Covid, undermining the whole everybody-knows-everybody image urbanites have of the countryside. (He isn’t saying “Aunt Josie died, but I never liked her anyway.” 136 is just a number to him, like the “statistic” famously attributed to Stalin. I wonder how his Catholic sanctity-of-life sensibilities would react to hearing about 136 local abortions.)
His point isn’t that none of this is happening, but rather that trying to avoid catching and spreading the virus yourself is too bothersome.
What I wish to convey is that the virus simply does not factor into my calculations or those of my neighbors, who have been forgoing masks, tests (unless work imposes them, in which case they are shrugged off as the usual BS from human resources), and other tangible markers of COVID-19’s existence for months—perhaps even longer.
He reports that “from almost the very beginning” he has been attending weddings, taking vacations, and regularly going to indoor bars and restaurants unmasked. His kids belong to a homeschooling group, which they also attend unmasked. They regularly visit (and hug) their grandparents, and did even before vaccination was possible. And while Walther doesn’t disparage the vaccines directly, “The CDC recommends that all adults get a booster shot; I do not know a single person who has received one.”
Well, OK. The people he knows live differently than the people I know. That can’t be what got me roiled.
It also isn’t that his excellent arguments leave me without a coherent response. (We all know how annoying that can be.) Several quick retorts immediately pop to mind.
800,000 of our countrymen are dead. If we’d seen that many deaths in a war, most Americans would be ashamed to admit they had opted out of the war effort, as Walther and his community apparently have.
Risk-takers often have long runs of good luck, but that doesn’t prove that the risk isn’t real. Back in the days before they became a personality cult, conservatives understood this.
From the beginning of the pandemic, a steady stream of voices have scolded the rest of us for overreacting. And every few days, I hear about another one of those scolders dying.
So no, my annoyance isn’t covering up my embarrassment at finding myself speechless in the face of Walther’s unanswerable logic.
And yet, it was hard to let it go and move on. Why?
I had to do a careful second and third reading, watching my emotions closely, to figure it out: I’ve been reacting not to the content of Walther’s article, but to his tone of personal animus. He doesn’t just think that people like me are being foolish; fools are typically pitied. No, he harbors a deep resentment of us. What I can’t shake is a sense of “What did I ever do to him?”
His resentment expresses itself from the early paragraphs, when Walther’s wife responds to an article explaining how to have a Covid-safe Thanksgiving with an exasperated “These people.” [His italics.]
What people? A few lines later he makes that clear:
the professional and managerial classes in a handful of major metropolitan areas
Nailed me there, didn’t he? I have a graduate degree and live just beyond Boston’s Route 128 beltway. Outside my insulated world, he writes, “Americans are leading their lives as if COVID is over.”
So it isn’t just that the people I know are living differently than the people he knows. Walther’s people are “Americans”, while mine are an elite class isolated in our privileged enclaves.
This conservative culture-war version of the Marxist class struggle appears to be a regular part of Walther’s shtick, also demonstrated here and here.
Never mind the CNN poll released this week showing that a majority of Americans report “still taking extra precautions in your everyday life”. That’s just data, and what’s data compared to the deep intuition of a salt-of-the-Earth, real American literary-magazine editor like Walther?
I wager that I am now closer to most of my fellow Americans than the people, almost absurdly overrepresented in media and elite institutions, who are still genuinely concerned about this virus. And in some senses my situation has always been more in line with the typical American’s pandemic experience than that of someone in New York or Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles.
Put aside for a moment that the people being “absurdly overrepresented in the media” are primarily doctors, epidemiologists, and other people who know what they’re talking about. Even ignoring expertise, Walther is strongly implying that there is something illegitimate about the views of people who live in or near a city. (More than one American in seven lives in the three metro areas Walther calls out. Adding in the similarly elite Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and San Francisco metro areas gets you up to one in four. That’s a lot of illegitimate opinions.) No urbanite (or even suburbanite like me) can possibly be a “typical American”. We city folk who lower our masks to let acquaintances recognize us when we pass on the sidewalk are “like Edwardian gentlemen doffing their top hats”.
I can see how that kind of lordly behavior might set off a mere peasant like this contributing editor of American Conservative, who is so underrepresented in the media that I am reading his words in The Atlantic.
But you know the worst thing about people like me? It’s not what we’ve done or are doing, but what Walther is sure we will do.
I am afraid that the future, at least in major metropolitan areas, is one in which sooner or later elites will acknowledge their folly while continuing to impose it on others.
Because people like me are like that. No doubt the next time I drive down the coast, I’ll grab the last seat at the bar and insist that some working-class shlub sit out on the patio where it’s safer. Because by then I’ll have realized the folly of trying to avoid a disease that has killed more of my fellow citizens than World War II, but I’ll impose restrictions on the subordinate classes just to lord it over them.
And while I can’t remember ever having done anything like that before, it’s inevitable that I will. Because Walther really has my number.
That’s the kind of argument I have no answer for. It just leaves me wondering what I ever did to him.
It’s tempting to leave the topic there, but I think there’s a deeper lesson to be drawn. What makes culture-war arguments so frustrating generally is that they typically aren’t rooted in facts and logic, but in resentment. Fact-checking has proven to be impotent against Trumpism, for example, and right-wing cultists are never convinced when the absurdity of their logic is pointed out. Because no matter what is true or makes sense, their emotional resentment — wherever it comes from — endures.
And if you refute all that, chances are that the argument will circle back around to voting machines — Mike Lindell is still pushing that long-debunked lie — because the elite urban professional class (and their poorer dark-skinned minions) must have stolen the election somehow. There are too many “real Americans” for Trump to have lost, and if the ballots don’t show that, it’s because too many of them came from illegitimate places like Philadelphia or Detroit or Atlanta. How could Trump have lost, when all the White Catholics in rural southwestern Michigan voted for him?
Similarly, QAnoners aren’t bothered when their predictions fail. And even if they were, they could jump to other conspiracy theories that support the same narrative motif: You are part of the red-pilled vanguard party, who are ordinary people’s only hope against the powerful liberal cabal that manipulates the world. Your friends and relatives may not grasp the reality of the conspiracy yet, but someday they too will acknowledge their folly.
On Fox News, the lead story shifts from week to week, from critical race theory making White children ashamed of their heritage, to Biden wanting to raise your taxes or take your guns, to vaccine or mask mandates usurping your sacred freedom to die any way you want, to trans women menacing your daughters in bathrooms, to the War on Christmas desecrating your most revered traditions.
Whatever the specifics might be this week, and whether any particular story is true or not, the drumbeat is always the same: Liberals want to take something away from you. That deep resentment you feel against them is justified, because at this very moment they are plotting to destroy your way of life.
So it doesn’t matter whether any particular liberal plot checks out or not, because we must be hatching one. They know what we’re like.
I have to confess that I don’t know what to do about this.
As ridiculous as I find conservative attempts to liken themselves to Jews facing Nazi oppression, there is one particular way in which the current liberal situation resembles pre-Krystallnacht Judaism: When the details of particular plots are allowed to fluidly reshape themselves from day to day, and when you can be held responsible for misdeeds other people believe you are bound to commit, given the kind of person they are sure you must be, then it’s nearly impossible to prove that you are not part of a conspiratorial elite.
That’s where we seem to be.
I am 100% certain that I am not conspiring to destroy the way of life of White Catholics in rural southwestern Michigan. But if some of them want to believe that I am, I have no idea what I can say or do to change their minds.
An eventful week: Build Back Better looks dead. The Mark Meadows text messages show that major conservative voices were panicking in private on January 6 while they publicly said something very different. Omicron is spreading. Central banks are starting to respond to inflation. The NYT exposes what the Pentagon knew about the civilian casualties from its bombing raids. And the War on Christmas enters its 17th grim year.
The featured post isn’t about any of that. A conservative article in Atlantic got under my skin, and I tried to figure out why. That led to “The Emotional Roots of Political Polarization”, which should be out between 9 and 10 EST.
The weekly summary does cover the stuff I mentioned above, and also promotes an article calling for “platform socialism” as a solution to the problem of Big Tech monopolies. I haven’t decided whether I agree, but I do want to widen the range of debate on this issue. Then the summary closes with Stephen Colbert’s Lord of the Rings rap. That should appear before noon.
The legislature of a State cannot annul the judgments, nor determine the jurisdiction, of the courts of the United States.… If the legislatures of the several states may at will annul the judgments of the courts of the United States, and destroy rights acquired under those judgments, the Constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery, and the Nation is deprived of the means of enforcing its laws by the instrumentality of its own tribunals.
The Biden administration hosted a virtual Summit for Democracy Friday and Saturday. The talks are available on the web site.
The event comes at a time when the US has been designated a “backsliding democracy” in the Global State of Democracy 2021 report by International IDEA.
The Global State of Democracy 2021 shows that more countries than ever are suffering from ‘democratic erosion’ (decline in democratic quality), including in established democracies. The number of countries undergoing ‘democratic backsliding’ (a more severe and deliberate kind of democratic erosion) has never been as high as in the last decade, and includes regional geopolitical and economic powers such as Brazil, India and the United States.
… Disputes about electoral outcomes are on the rise, including in established democracies. A historic turning point came in 2020–2021 when former President Donald Trump questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election results in the United States. Baseless allegations of electoral fraud and related disinformation undermined fundamental trust in the electoral process, which culminated in the storming of the US Capitol building in January 2021.
For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.
By way of foundation for all the rest, Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response.
Both Hayes’ segment and Gellman’s article express a deep frustration at the story’s inability to grab public attention. Trump tried to overthrow American democracy and is setting up to try again. And yet, this doesn’t break through as a Watergate-level story that dominates the headlines day after day.
The response of each party is disappointing in its own way. By their complicity and silence, and sometimes by their active participation in Trump’s attempt to overthrow democracy, Republicans have let their party become the de facto party of autocracy. There are a few exceptions, but not many.
Because of their small majorities in Congress, Democrats have to be completely united to accomplish anything. So a few holdouts like Joe Manchin have prevented filibuster reform, which in turn has doomed any attempt to protect voting rights, limit gerrymandering, or put up any other resistance to the prospect of installing Trump (or some other MAGA Republican) against the will of the voters. The result is that, as a party, Democrats are not showing the urgency the situation requires.
CNN’s Zachary Wolf points out how this inability to act in the face of “existential threat” runs through multiple issues, including climate change.
Among the documents Mark Meadows turned over to the House January 6 Committee (before he started stonewalling again) was a 36-slide Powerpoint presentation outlining how to overturn the 2020 election: “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 Jan”, which was presented to some Trump-allied senators and representatives on January 4.
Senators and members of Congress should first be briefed about foreign interference, the PowerPoint said, at which point Trump could declare a national emergency, declare all electronic voting invalid, and ask Congress to agree on a constitutionally acceptable remedy.
The PowerPoint also outlined three options for then vice-president Mike Pence to abuse his largely ceremonial role at the joint session of Congress on 6 January, when Biden was to be certified president, and unilaterally return Trump to the White House.
Apparently the “foreign interference” in the presentation’s title was a bizarre and unsupported-by-evidence claim that “the Chinese systematically gained control over our election system.”
former President Trump has failed to satisfy any of [the] criteria for preliminary injunctive relief.
Namely: a likelihood of success on the merits of his claim, irreparable harm if an injunction is not granted, and advancing the public interest.
In short, confronting former President Trump’s claim of privilege is the hydraulic constitutional force of not only a reasoned decision by the President that a limited release is in the interests of the United States, and the uniquely compelling need of Congress for this information, but also this court’s “duty of care to ensure that we not needlessly disturb ‘the compromises and working arrangements that those [Political] branches themselves have reached.’” …
President Trump bears the burden of at least showing some weighty interest in continued confidentiality that could be capable of tipping the scales back in his favor … He offers instead only a grab-bag of objections that simply assert without elaboration his superior assessment of Executive Branch interests, insists that Congress and the Committee have no legitimate legislative interest in an attack on the Capitol, and impugns the motives of President Biden and the House. That falls far short of meeting his burden and makes it impossible for this court to find any likelihood of success.
The main problem with the suit is that Trump claims to be suing to preserve the interests of the Presidency, and that’s just not his job any more. This isn’t the legislative vs. executive branch conflict he frames it as. It’s a private citizen asking the judicial branch to undo an agreement between the legislative and executive branches.
The case looks headed for the Supreme Court, but I think the best the conservative majority can do for Trump is stall. He hasn’t given them a credible way to rule in his favor.
and the pandemic
The post-Thanksgiving surge continues. New cases are averaging 119K per day, up 43% in two weeks. Deaths are averaging 1298 per day, up 32%. The Midwest and Northeast continue to be hardest hit, though Kentucky and West Virginia are still among the leaders in deaths and hospitalizations per capita.
Meanwhile, the first information about vaccines and the Omicron variant started coming out. British and Israeli studies tell similar stories: Two doses of vaccine don’t provide much protection against Omicron, but three do.
Michael Osterholm from the University of Minnesota predicted in April, 2020 that the US could see 800K deaths in the next year and a half, which is startlingly close to what has happened. It’s always hard to tell how much luck is involved in a prediction like that, but you do have to wonder what he’s saying now.
Here’s what I found interesting:
While it’s early, I believe that Omicron is less virulent than Delta. The variant is being studied in South Africa, which is important because the virus has been in that country longer than others. And we do know that hospitalizations, serious illness and deaths are lagging indicators. Rates often rise two to three weeks after rises in case numbers start to occur. But as of today, the epidemiologic and clinical data on Omicron cases around the world support this virus is less lethal than Delta.
… When we first investigated the Covid-19 vaccines, we had to prioritize the assessment of the safety of the vaccines, which was done well. But we never really understood how to best use the vaccine in terms of number of doses, dose spacing, even the dose amount to maximize our immune response both for the short and long-term. … [W]e do need that third dose — and not as a luxury dose, but the third dose of a three-dose prime series. It should have been three doses all along.
… [W]e keep hearing about technology transfer and giving [low-income] countries the ability to make their own vaccines, and yet the expertise needed to make these vaccines is really at a premium. It’s very difficult to find people who know how to do this. So, it’s not enough to transfer technology to a low-income country if you don’t provide the expertise to make these vaccines. It’s not as simple as making chicken soup.
Ridiculous claims of executive privilege are not just for coup plotters. Trump administration trade representative and Covid-adviser Peter Navarro is refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.
Navarro claims he is obeying a “direct order” from Private Citizen Donald Trump.
The reason the 8-1 vote is misleading stems from the fact that the Court left open “a single tenuous route to challenging” SB8 while not only keeping intact the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the US, but also foreclosing relief against Texas state court officials and its attorney general. As one academic commentator from Florida State University remarked, “If you read the win for abortion providers here as some kind of positive sign in the Dobbs case, I think you’re deluding yourself.”
I confess that I haven’t read the Court’s ruling, but I make the link available in case you want to.
The Court was not ruling on the case itself, but on various motions: to dismiss the case, or to grant in injunction against enforcing the SB8 until a final decision on its constitutionality. It denied the injunction, and narrowed the scope of who the pro-choice plaintiffs can sue.
If you consider Roe v Wade a binding precedent (which it is until the Court reverses it), SB8 is clearly unconstitutional. But SB8 is designed to evade the federal courts, and by a 5-4 vote, the Court is doing nothing about that.
This evisceration of the Supreme Court’s authority does not sit well with Chief Justice Roberts (hence the quote at the top), but the five radical conservative justices on the Court now leave him on the outside looking in.
California Governor Gavin Newsom plans to strike back. If conservative states can nullify federal court rulings, so can liberal states:
If states can shield their laws from review by federal courts, then CA will use that authority to help protect lives. We will work to create the ability for private citizens to sue anyone who manufactures, distributes, or sells an assault weapon or ghost gun kit or parts in CA.
A Texas judge is doing what the federal Supreme Court has refused to do: block the enforcement mechanism of SB8 because it violates the state constitution. The judge
ruled that the law unconstitutionally gave legal standing to people not injured, and was an “unlawful delegation of enforcement power to a private person.”
In response to a direct question from this court, the attorneys responded that they are not aware of any comparable set of procedures in American law, ever, whether enacted for civil cases generally or for one special kind of lawsuit alone.
Citing complaints from Hindus as well as health concerns, local officials in Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s largest city, and at least four other cities in mid-November banned the sale and display of meat, fish and eggs on the street. As the mayor of one city, Rajkot, told the local news media: “Carts with nonvegetarian food can be seen everywhere in the city. The religious sentiments of the people are hurt by this.”
See? The religious nationalists are victims of those horrible egg-eaters and the vendors who serve them. They’re just fighting back.
and tornadoes
Tornadoes ripped through the center of the country late Friday and early Saturday, probably killing over 100 people, most of them in Kentucky.
Weirdly, another Republican in Congress decided to celebrate the birthday of the Prince of Peace by posting a photo of her children with their military-style guns. Didn’t some guy once tell his followers to put their weapons away because “all who draw the sword will die by the sword”?
I am reminded of the John Pavlovitz column where he asks conservative Christians what Jesus they believe in, and concludes “It’s not any Jesus I know.”
As Fox News becomes the Tucker Carlson Channel, there is less and less place for anyone hoping to do real journalism. The network’s latest loss is Chris Wallace. He will join CNN’s new streaming service, CNN+.
Paul Krugman remarks on the strange disjunction between the economy and public opinion about the economy. Jobs are up, GDP is up, businesses are investing, retail sales are up, and the stock market is high. If you ask people how they are doing personally, they are upbeat. But if you ask them how the economy in general is doing, they say “not so good”. There’s some inflation (which is a global phenomenon), but does that really negate everything else?
Speaking of Mark Meadows (as I did above), I have never before heard an author refer to his own book as “fake news”. Trump objected to Meadows’ account of him testing positive for Covid and not telling the people around him, so Meadows backed down. Because the Truth is whatever Trump says it is.
Chris Christie, meanwhile, is pretty sure Trump gave him the Covid that sent him to the ICU.
Rather than try to rehabilitate the party he’s belonged to for decades, Baker chose to step aside. His move dovetails with the recent decisions of Chris Sununu of New Hampshire and Phil Scott of Vermont—two other Republicans who routinely poll among the most popular governors in the country—to spurn what could be competitive Senate races next year.
Baker-style Republicans are starting to recognize that they have no place in the Trump personality cult that the GOP has become. Why would they want to rise in a party where Trump can make you denounce your own book as “fake news”?
The main causes the article cites are (1) liberal disgust with the increasing identification between Christianity and conservative politics; and (2) America’s main enemy switching from the atheistic USSR to the hyper-religious Al Qaeda.
He also inverts the usual link between families and churches. It’s not that loss of religion undermines families, but that the loss of close family relationships undermines religion.
just as stable families make stable congregations, family instability can destabilize the Church. Divorced individuals, single parents, and children of divorce or single-parent households are all more likely to detach over time from their congregations.
The new medicine takes effect in about 15 minutes, with one drop on each eye providing sharper vision for six to 10 hours, according to the company.
Hating eyedrops myself, I don’t see the win. But I guess other people do.
Gawker demonstrates the right way to publish an interview with someone who makes a lot of off-the-wall and unsupported claims. This interview is with RFK Jr., who was anti-vax before anti-vax was cool among the people who think it’s cool now. Kennedy’s words are published as he spoke them, but fact-checking and other needed contextual information is displayed just as prominently.
and let’s close with a different kind of merriment
If you’re about to OD on Christmas movies, maybe this collection of SNL Christmas-movie parodies will get you feeling like yourself again.
A variety of non-blog-related distractions grabbed my attention this week, so I didn’t get a featured post written.
The weekly summary will discuss various ongoing threats to American democracy, more info emerging about Omicron, the continuing post-Thanksgiving Covid surge, the Supreme Court’s unwillingness to stop Texas from nullifying federal court decisions, tornadoes, reflections on the economy and a few other things, before closing with a medley of SNL parodies of Christmas movies.
Will this institution survive the stench this creates in the public perception that the constitution and its reading are just political acts?…If people actually believe it’s all political, how will the court survive?
This week everybody was talking about the Supreme Court
Most of what I have to say about this is in the featured post, but I feel that I should elaborate on the Sotomayor quote above: The authority of the Supreme Court comes not from armies or police, because it commands none. It also doesn’t come from money, because the Court has none to disperse.
The power of the Court depends on the other branches’ compliance. If a President openly defied the Court (as Nixon did not, and we often wondered whether Trump would), the only possible consequences would have to come from someone else: impeachment by Congress or rejection by the voters at the next election.
Whether those other parties would back the Court up depends on its reputation as a body above politics. The public needs to believe in the analogy John Roberts made at his confirmation: The justices are umpires who call balls and strikes objectively, rather than assert their own preferences. If the Court is seen as just another actor in our partisan drama, someday a president will feel empowered to ignore its rulings, and then constitutional government will be over in America.
The striking thing about the current reconsideration of Roe is that nothing of significance in the legal or scientific environment has changed since Roe was decided in 1973. All that has changed are the particular people who are on the Court. The Mississippi case comes to the Court now because conservatives have maneuvered their way into five or six anti-Roe votes. Justice Ginsberg dies and Justice Barrett replaces her; suddenly the Constitution says the opposite of what it said two years ago.
That dependence on personalities is what threatens the Court’s survival as an institution.
The day after Thanksgiving, the World Health Organization named a new Covid variant-of-interest “Omicron”. The stock market immediately tanked, more out of fear than knowledge, and much panic has ensued.
The worry, of course, is that this is Delta all over again: It looked like we had the pandemic licked in June, but then the rise of the more transmissible Delta variant started another surge.
Every new variant raises questions about how well our previous protections will work: Is it more transmissible than even Delta? More deadly? Can Omicron evade the vaccines and the natural immunity of people who have already recovered from one bout of Covid? How effective are current anti-viral treatments? Will it sneak past our current generation of tests? Do we have to revise our previous ideas about masking and distancing? Will new lockdowns be necessary?
The first headlines about any of these questions should be taken with a grain of salt. As useful as it is to get quick answers, fast research is less accurate than slow research. Bearing that in mind, here’s what I’m seeing:
Omicron is outcompeting Delta in South Africa, where it was first detected, so it’s probably more transmissible. On the positive side, anecdotal evidence from South Africa says the symptoms have been mild, though some experts discount this because South Africa’s population skews young.
A study published on Thursday as a pre-print, which is still awaiting peer review, found that Omicron is at least 2.4-times more likely to reinfect someone who’s already had a COVID infection compared to the other variants that have been studied.
I’m not sure about this, but I’m guessing a person without a previous infection would be more than 2.4 times as likely to get infected, implying that natural immunity to Omicron from infection by a previous variant is diminished but not gone.
As for vaccine effectiveness, Moderna’s chief medical officer said on November 28 “we should know in a couple of weeks”, but he sounded pessimistic, based on the number of mutations in Omicron. (As with natural immunity, I’ll guess that antibodies targeted at earlier variants would be less effective, but not ineffective.) He predicted an an Omicron-specific vaccine would be “available in large quantities” in early 2022.
If in fact the current vaccines turn out to be less effective, but not ineffective, against Omicron, the conventional wisdom says that you want your immunity to start out as high as possible. So Omicron is an argument for, not against, vaccination and booster shots.
The chair of the South African Medical Association says that the nation’s hospitals were not overwhelmed by patients infected with the new variant (another indication that symptoms may be mild), and most of those hospitalized were not fully immunized.
Until they can be updated, Regeneron’s monoclonal antibody treatments are also likely to be less effective on Omicron, according the company’s CEO. Merck and Pfizer are optimistic about their anti-Covid pills, because their attacks on the virus aren’t targeted at the spike protein, where most of the mutations seem to be. For similar reasons, Gilead says its drug Remdesivir should still work against Omicron, though it doesn’t have test results yet.
Speculations about lockdowns seem wildly premature. As with the original Covid outbreak, travel restrictions can only slow the spread, not keep Omicron out. It has already been detected in multiple states.
For a few days it looked like case numbers were going down again, but we always knew that Thanksgiving would give the virus another boost. New cases in the US are averaging 110K per day, up 19% over two weeks. Deaths, which have been staying in the 1000-1200 per day range for several weeks, are at 1178. The current surge continues to be concentrated in the cold-weather states, with New Hampshire and Minnesota having the highest per capita rates.
Despite the recent surge in cases, the highly vaccinated Northeast continues to have lower death rates than less vaccinated regions. Vermont (73% vaccinated) is averaging 69 new cases per 100K per day, but only .15 deaths. For comparison, Wyoming (46% vaccinated) averages 30 new cases per 100K per day, but 2.00 deaths.
As other numbers go up and down, the ratios of vaccinated/unvaccinated cases and deaths remain fairly steady: The unvaccinated have about five times as many cases per capita as fully vaccinated people, and 13 times as many deaths. Those numbers probably understate the effectiveness of vaccination, because higher-risk people have been more eager to get vaccinated.
Marcus Lamb, a religious broadcaster who championed anti-vaccine arguments and other Covid-advancing misinformation, has died of Covid at age 64. His son’s account of his illness is a classic example of epistemic closure, i.e., having a belief system that is impervious to contradictory evidence.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that this is a spiritual attack from the enemy,” Lamb’s son, Jonathan, said about his father’s COVID-19 illness on a Nov. 23 broadcast of the Ministry Now program. “As much as my parents have gone on here to kind of inform everyone about everything going on to the pandemic and some of the ways to treat COVID — there’s no doubt that the enemy is not happy about that. And he’s doing everything he can to take down my Dad.”
Yes, Lamb died because Satan wanted to keep him from spreading the Truth, and not because of his own willful ignorance and misguided ideas.
Tuesday, a public still buzzing about the Rittenhouse and Arbery verdicts got a new act of violence to argue about: the Michigan school shooting. Fifteen-year-old Ethan Crumbley has been arrested and charged as an adult in the murder of four students, plus injuries to seven other people, including a teacher.
In an unusual move, Crumbley’s parents have been charged with involuntary manslaughter, meaning that they participated in the deaths unintentionally. The parents didn’t attend their original arraignment hearing, and were captured hiding in a warehouse.
Oakland County Prosecuter Karen McDonald explained the charges: The parents “could have stopped it. And they had every reason to know [Ethan] was dangerous, and they gave him a weapon and they didn’t secure it. And they allowed him free access to it.”
By canceling last week’s Sift, I missed the chance to make a more timely comment on the guilty verdict against the three men charged with murdering Ahmaud Arbery.
Shortly after the verdict was announced, I checked how NewsMax was covering it: Their commentators saw the verdict as proof that the justice system is not racist, and as an implicit vindication of the Kyle Rittenhouse not-guilty verdict a few days before.
I, on the other hand, saw the Arbery verdict as the exception that proves the rule of systemic racism in the justice system. (The adage uses proves in the archaic sense of tests.) The murderers very nearly got away with a KKK-style lynching, and would never have stood trial but for some incredibly stupid moves.
It’s hard to imagine them being convicted without the video evidence they recorded themselves. Pro tip: If you’re going commit crimes, don’t make videos of yourself in the act. If you discover that you have accidentally videoed yourself participating in a murder, drop your phone in a lake as soon as you can.
The local prosecutor saw the video proving their guilt, but didn’t charge them and didn’t release the video. Now that the cover-up of the murder has failed, she’s been indicted for prosecutorial misconduct.
The video leaked to the public because a friend of the murderers thought it would clear them. Second tip: If your friends are idiots, don’t let them see the evidence against you, no matter how much it will impress them.
Only after the video went viral did the Georgia Bureau of Investigation get involved, which led to the murder charges.
All of this makes me wonder how many similar lynchings have been committed by White racists who weren’t total morons, and who consequently are still walking around free.
So anyway, the Arbery verdict proves that the justice system isn’t totally racist. If you can get video of a white-on-black crime to go viral, public pressure can embarrass the justice system into doing the right thing, as it did (sort of, eventually) in response to George Floyd’s murder. Hurray for America!
It’s been hard to find a good dispassionate analysis of the Rittenhouse verdict. I like this one, written by Harvard Law Professor Ronald Sullivan Jr.
He simultaneously believes that the not-guilty verdict was a reasonable application of the laws of Wisconsin, and that a Black defendant in a similar case would have been convicted.
My view is that the aim of the criminal legal system should be to level up, not level down. We should spend our energies insisting that the system treat black defendants as Rittenhouse was treated, and not advocate for the system to treat Rittenhouse as black defendants are, and have historically been, treated. Leveling down inures to no one’s benefit. The derogation of rights would spiral downward—and quickly—such that all of our rights would be in jeopardy.
The law, Sullivan argues, always embodies our moral sensibilities imperfectly. (Oliver Wendell Holmes is said to have reprimanded a newly minted lawyer for his overly idealistic argument: “This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.”) The solution is to change the laws, not misapply them to get a more satisfying outcome in a particular case.
Long-standing self-defense law conspired with absurdly permissive open carry laws to create the set of conditions to make the Rittenhouse affair possible. Perhaps those of us who find the verdict troubling are better served by focusing our attention on state legislatures. I see nothing in the text of the Second Amendment or its doctrinal exegesis that compels states to permit minors to stroll about town with a rifle strapped across their shoulder. It makes no sense, and the unintended consequence of such a legal regime is a Wild Wild West mentality where citizens feel emboldened to engage in private law enforcement.
and you also might be interested in …
Former Senator and Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole died at 98. He represented a bygone era when rivals were not necessarily enemies, senators compromised to get things done, and presidential candidates — even Republicans — conceded after they lost.
Trump’s co-conspirators are changing their stonewalling tactics. They’re starting to drop executive privilege as an excuse not to answer, and starting to invoke the Fifth Amendment. The implication is that they know they’ve been involved in a criminal conspiracy.
A handful of anti-public-health Senate Republicans threatened to torpedo the last-minute bill to prevent a government shutdown. Their price was to get a vote on an amendment to defund enforcement of President Biden’s vaccine mandate (which is already on hold pending a court challenge); the vote failed 48-50. The funding bill then passed and was signed by Biden on Friday, so the government will stay open until sometime in February.
Senator Mike Lee of Utah made the unvaccinated sound like a persecuted minority: “All we wanted to do was have a vote to give a chance to the hardworking mom or dad, soldier, sailor, airman or Marine struggling to put food on the table.” Of course, these unvaccinated workers are not just risking their own lives, but (given how contagious diseases spread) everyone else’s as well. And they already have two chances to save their jobs: get vaccinated, or take advantage of the alternative frequent-testing option. Defunding the vaccine mandate serves the interests of Covid, not American workers.
As the nation approaches 800,000 deaths, close to double the number that we lost in combat in World War II, I have lost my patience for unvaccinated Americans’ misguided and self-centered stubbornness.
The Republicans’ next chance to sabotage America is the debt ceiling, which will probably be hit sometime next week. (At the risk of tediously repeating myself every time this comes up: Having a debt ceiling at all is a terrible idea.)
Edward Geist of the Rand Corporation argues in The Atlantic that the more often Congress plays chicken with the debt ceiling, the more likely it becomes that the nation will default someday.
Nuclear-war strategists have long understood how recklessness, or the appearance of recklessness, may help one side get the other to relent during a single game of chicken. But these strategists’ work also offers a warning for Congress: The more times the game is played, the more treacherous it becomes, because when both sides become convinced that catastrophe will always be averted in the end, each behaves more rashly.
CNN fired Chris Cuomo for conflicts of interest related to the sexual harassment charges against his brother, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Reportedly, Chris helped Andrew craft his media strategy, and used his own investigative resources to gather information on his brother’s accusers.
It was always dicey having a news-talk host whose brother was a governor with national ambitions. But for a time the relationship seemed to have more benefits for CNN than costs. Prior to the scandal, when Andrew would be a guest on Chris’ show, the brotherly banter was often entertaining and even informative. Once Andrew got into trouble, though, Chris should have been much more scrupulous. CNN was right to fire him.
You may recall the outrage generated two weeks ago when Vice President Harris spent $375 on a serving dish “as US families fret over the cost of Thanksgiving dinner”. How much do you think the Massie family arsenal cost? I’m betting each one of those killing machines is more expensive than Harris’ dish.
But Massie is male, White, and Republican — so who cares?
While we’re talking about fake outrage directed at uppity women, right-wing media recently invented a Nancy Pelosi story out of nothing. According to a rumor that apparently was too juicy to check, Pelosi had just bought a $25 million Florida mansion, simultaneously demonstrating how out of touch she is with ordinary Americans (I wonder how much her cookware costs) and abandoning liberal California for Ron DeSantis’ Florida.
The story was tweeted far and wide (as fact) by the likes of Sean Hannity before anyone bothered to see if it was true. Using Ninja investigative reporting skills far beyond the capabilities of anyone at Fox News, Realtor.com’s Claudine Zapcalled the listing agent, who debunked the rumor. “I have no idea where the rumor started in regards to Nancy Pelosi. I keep saying I can’t disclose who the buyer is, but it’s not Pelosi.” Hannity has not acknowledged the error.
Who’s got the energy reserves? Who was the major player in world affairs? Who’s the potential counterbalance against China, which is the actual threat? Why would we take Ukraine’s side, why aren’t we on Russia’s side? I’m totally confused!
When schooled by GOP Rep. Mike Turner about democracy vs. authoritarianism and the undesirability of condoning nations expanding by military force, Tucker responded tentatively: “I’m for democracy in other countries, I guess.”
When I first got to Rome, I wasn’t taking the ancient statues seriously as representations of real people. I mean, the Romans also made statues of the gods, and who knows what Jupiter or Minerva look like?
After a day or two in the museums, though, I started recognizing some of the emperors before reading the plaques. (A famous statue of Augustus in the Vatican Museum has tucked-under little toes. There’s no way a sculptor would give the Emperor crooked toes unless he really had them.) By the end of the week, Augustus, Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius were becoming old friends, to the point that I could say, “Oh, this statue is Trajan styling himself as Augustus.”
Now an artist in Switzerland has used modern tech to create photo-realistic images of the masters of the ancient world. This head-shot of Augustus is so real it inspires a whole new level of detail in my imagination of his life. Like: When you grow up with a name like Octavian, what do the other kids call you on the playground?
Despite numerous claims during confirmation hearings that they would respect precedent, Republican justices look ready to overturn Roe.
Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, a case that invites the Court to overturn Roe v Wade. Their decision will most likely not be announced until the end of the Court’s term in June, and comments justices make during oral arguments do not always predict what they will decide. But it sure sounded like five of the justices — Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett — were preparing to overturn Roe, while Chief Justice Roberts was looking for a way to uphold Mississippi’s Roe-violating law (that bans abortions after 15 weeks, in open defiance of Roe’s fetal-viability standard) without reversing Roe completely, thereby chipping away at abortion rights rather than instantly ending them. [1]
What is Roe v Wade? When a Supreme Court decision is talked about as much and as often as Roe has been, sometimes the original gets lost in the noise. So I went back and read Roe, which was decided in 1973. If you’ve never read it, or read it so long ago you don’t remember, it’s worth a look.
For one thing, Justice Blackmun’s majority opinion assembles an excellent summary of the history of abortion laws going back to ancient times. Anti-abortion arguments often imply that abortion has traditionally been illegal, and that only modern judicial hocus-pocus has created a pregnant woman’s right to choose that option. But in fact the opposite is true: Abortion-producing potions are as old as history, and laws banning abortions prior to “quickening” (when women start to feel the fetus moving) were rare until the late 1800s.
It is thus apparent that at common law, at the time of the adoption of our Constitution, and throughout the major portion of the 19th century, abortion was viewed with less disfavor than under most American statutes currently in effect. Phrasing it another way, a woman enjoyed a substantially broader right to terminate a pregnancy than she does in most States today. At least with respect to the early stage of pregnancy, and very possibly without such a limitation, the opportunity to make this choice was present in this country well into the 19th century. Even later, the law continued for some time to treat less punitively an abortion procured in early pregnancy.
The second thing worth noting is that Roe is a delicate balancing of rights and interests rather than the sweeping extension of judicial authority it is frequently portrayed as. On one hand, “the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision”, but a state also has legitimate interests that could conflict with an “absolute” right to abortion: “in safeguarding health, in maintaining medical standards, and in protecting potential life.”
That’s where Roe’s trimester breakdown comes from. During the first trimester, Blackmun wrote, abortion is safer than childbirth, so the state’s interest in maternal health can’t justify first-trimester restrictions. The state’s interest in potential life becomes “compelling” at the point of viability.
With respect to the State’s important and legitimate interest in potential life, the ‘compelling’ point is at viability. This is so because the fetus then presumably has the capability of meaningful life outside the mother’s womb. State regulation protective of fetal life after viability thus has both logical and biological justifications. If the State is interested in protecting fetal life after viability, it may go so far as to proscribe abortion during that period, except when it is necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.
Where does the right to privacy come from? Any anti-abortion critique of Roe is bound to assert that the Constitution never specifically mentions the “right to privacy” that justifies a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy. In particular, unlike freedom of speech or the right to bear arms, it’s not in the Bill of Rights.
Again is there not danger in the Enumeration of Rights? may we not in the progress of things, discover some great & important, which we don’t now think of? there the principle may be turned upon Us, & what [government power] is not reserved, said to be granted.
The right to privacy has implications far beyond abortion, and had been recognized long before Roe, which provides a long list of previous cases that applied and developed it. One case in particular should resonate with the anti-abortion faction today: Pierce v. Society of Sisters.
In 1925, the Supreme Court struck down an Oregon law that required children to attend public schools. The law was an anti-Catholic measure targeting parochial schools. But if you search the Bill of Rights for a provision that specifically allows parents to choose a Catholic school for their children, you won’t find it. [2] That freedom to choose depends on recognizing a sphere of personal autonomy that governments can’t invade.
Roe does not argue that a right to privacy exists; that was well established by 1973. Rather, the Court concluded in Roe that
This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment‘s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment‘s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.
What about fetal personhood? Blackmun discussed this at length in Roe. He concluded that no occurrence of “person” in the Constitution could plausibly be claimed to include the unborn. If the Court was going to recognize the fetus as a person with constitutional rights, it would have to do so on its own authority. Blackmun was unwilling to claim such authority.
Texas urges that, apart from the Fourteenth Amendment, life begins at conception and is present throughout pregnancy, and that, therefore, the State has a compelling interest in protecting that life from and after conception. We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.
It should be sufficient to note briefly the wide divergence of thinking on this most sensitive and difficult question.
He goes on to describe views of the ancient Stoics, most Jews, and (as was true at that time) “a large segment of the Protestant community” that the moment of conception does not establish an ensouled being with the full moral value that it will have after birth.
Elaborating on that point, I will say that no branch of the US government should be making pronouncements that establish one religious position as superior to another, if there is any way to avoid doing so. The Founders had were well aware of how religious conflicts had torn England apart during the 1500s and 1600s, as one sect and then another claimed control of the government and used it to enforce their views. They wanted no such conflicts in their new country, which is why they wrote a secular Constitution.
Blackmun continues:
In view of all this, we do not agree that, by adopting one theory of life, Texas may override the rights of the pregnant woman that are at stake.
Gaslighting. Comments the justices made Wednesday underlined just how dishonest and disingenuous many of them had been during their confirmation hearings. AP summarized:
During his confirmation to the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh convinced Sen. Susan Collins that he thought a woman’s right to an abortion was “settled law,” calling the court cases affirming it “precedent on precedent” that could not be casually overturned.
Amy Coney Barrett told senators during her Senate confirmation hearing that laws could not be undone simply by personal beliefs, including her own. “It’s not the law of Amy,” she quipped.
But during this week’s landmark Supreme Court hearing over a Mississippi law that could curtail if not outright end a woman’s right to abortion, the two newest justices struck a markedly different tone, drawing lines of questioning widely viewed as part of the court’s willingness to dismantle decades old decisions on access to abortion services.
Kavanaugh in particular now makes a virtue out of breaking precedent and ignoring the principle of stare decisis.
If you think about some of the most important cases, the most consequential cases in this court’s history, there’s a string of them where the cases overruled precedent.
That string included landmark cases like Brown v Board of Education, which overturned the prior standard of “separate but equal” schools. [3]
So the question on stare decisis is why, if … we think that the prior precedents are seriously wrong, if that, why then doesn’t the history of this Court’s practice with respect to those cases tell us that the right answer is actually a return to the position of neutrality and — and not stick with those precedents in the same way that all those other cases didn’t?
Maybe he should have told Susan Collins that during his confirmation interview. Or maybe she shouldn’t have been so gullible about what he did tell her.
Dahlia Lithwick thinks it would be “refreshing” if the conservative justices’ new honesty about their intention to reverse Roe meant that the gaslighting is over
Sadly, though, she goes on to point out that the lying continues. Now they’re gaslighting us about the significance of reversing Roe: Kavanaugh pretended that leaving abortion to the states (i.e., giving Mississippi exactly what it wants) would be a compromise. Alito claimed personhood-at-conception isn’t a religious view, because some secular philosophers agree. (Plato believed in the immortality of the soul. Does that secularize the doctrine?) Barrett opined that forced pregnancy is not such a big deal anymore, because (assuming you survive childbirth) it’s easier now to give the child up for adoption. (Why should it bother a woman to devote nine months of her life to the survival of her rapist’s genes?)
But the most extreme gaslighting concerns the implications of overturning Roe: It won’t stop there. The right to privacy undergirds, for example, same-sex marriage, gay rights in general, and the right to use contraception. All of these rights are targeted by the same theocratic faction that put Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett on the Court.
At their [confirmation] hearings, Roe was settled law, the precedent of the court. But now Roe is Plessy, which is why when the justices whisper softly that Lawrence v. Texas, Obergefell, and Griswold are not under threat today, you might wonder why you should trust them. They are all settled law—until they are not. They told us as much at their confirmation hearings and assured us today they were lying then, but aren’t lying now.
Where will abortion be illegal? You might imagine that the only immediate effect of the Court deciding in Mississippi’s favor is that their ban-at-15-weeks law would take effect. But 12 states have already passed abortion bans that are set to apply automatically as soon as Roe is reversed: Mississippi, Texas, Idaho, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Utah.
But that’s not all. Josh Marshall connects the dots between abortion and the Republican minority-rule project.
Many purple and even blue states are sufficiently gerrymandered at the state level that we should assume they’ll soon outlaw abortion too. I’m talking about states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio.
Wisconsin as so often is an instructive example. Wisconsin is a very closely divided state politically. It usually goes to the Democrats at the presidential level. But it’s always by a narrow margin whoever wins. The state’s governorship is similarly always close, though at the moment there’s a Democratic governor. The Democrats won the governorship in 2018 by a tiny margin. Then Joe Biden won the presidential race there by another very small margin. And yet Democrats struggled in 2020 to prevent Republicans from getting a supermajority in the state legislature. A supermajority!
Given that Republican majorities in purple-state legislatures have successfully insulated themselves from the people, all it takes is electing a Republican governor one time, and abortion rights will be gone for decades to come.
[1] Appearing to respect a law or precedent while gutting it in practice is a very Robertsy thing to do. For example, he didn’t strike down the Voting Rights Act in 2013, he just eliminated the government’s main tool for enforcing it.
If you look at the broad sweep of Roberts’ career, he wants to achieve partisan objectives without tarring the Court’s non-partisan image.
[2] You also couldn’t claim that the Founders intended to include such a protection. Some of the Founders were virulently anti-Catholic. In a 1774 letter to Parliament, which I believe was written by John Jay, the Continental Congress described Catholicism as “a religion that has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed bigotry, persecution, murder and rebellion through every part of the world.”
[3] It’s worth pointing out that the Court didn’t reverse the Plessy standard of separate-but-equal just because the 1954 justices had different views than the 1896 justices. The intervening half-century had brought a long series of cases to the Court in which states claimed that their segregated schools were “equal”, but they really weren’t. In Brown, the Court concluded from experience that the Plessy standard wasn’t workable; separate schools for Black students were always going to be unequal.
Nothing similar has been happening with respect to Roe. The only difference between 2021 and 1973 is that different people are on the Court.
These last two weeks saw two significant developments: The Omicron variant of Covid was announced, and the Supreme Court heard arguments on a case it might use to overturn Roe v Wade.
The featured post will focus on Roe. In particular, I went back to read Roe, which impressed me more than I expected. Justice Blackmun wrote an excellent discussion of the issue, and anticipated many of the criticisms that people are making today. I’ll also comment on the extensive gaslighting by the conservative justices, which started in their confirmation hearings and continues to the present.
That post “The Roe v Wade Death Watch” should be out a little after 10 EST.
The weekly summary will cover what little we know about Omicron and how uncertainly we know it. I’ll also discuss the Michigan school shooting, and go back to comment on the Arbery and Rittenhouse verdicts. In other news: Bob Dole died. Congress managed to fund the government until February, but there’s still a debt ceiling crisis scheduled for later this month. Chris Cuomo got fired. A Russia/Ukraine crisis is brewing. And a few other things. I’ll try to get that out around noon or so.
The Weekly Sift 