The Weekly Sift

No Sift for the next two weeks. New articles will appear September 29.

Judges in the trenches need, and deserve, well-reasoned, bright-line guidance. Too often today, sweeping [Supreme Court] rulings arrive with breathtaking speed but minimal explanation, stripped of the rigor that full briefing and argument provide.

– anonymous lower-court judge

This week’s featured posts are “Will the courts hold the line?” and “The Democrats’ Shutdown Strategy“.

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. Fresh off a rebuke from a California judge about the meaning of the Posse Comitatus Act, Trump seems ready to send troops to Chicago.
• Climate change. Windmills have not had this persistent an enemy since Don Quixote.
• Gaza. Israel’s defense minister issued a “final warning” to Hamas: release the remaining hostages and lay down your weapons “or Gaza will be destroyed, and you will be annihilated.”
• Ukraine. We’ve been hearing all summer that Putin was winning the war and Ukraine’s military was on the brink of collapse. But the summer offensive is all but over, and Russia has gained very little ground.

This week’s developments

Trump’s legal defeats

These are covered in one of the featured posts.

Epstein is back in the headlines

The whole point of starting Congress’ August recess sooner was to avoid voting on legislation to release the Epstein files. By September, Speaker Johnson figured, the whole thing would have died down.

Well, apparently not. Congress is back in session and the Epstein files are still a thing.

Early on, I wrote off the Epstein controversy as a Q-anon-related conspiracy theory (which it contributed to), so I didn’t pay attention to it. As a result, I completely misrepresented it when I first mentioned it here. (Commenters called me out for that, and they were right.)

For my sins, I watched the complete two-hour rally and press conference that Epstein survivors held Wednesday. I recommend it. It’s not an easy story to hear, and the victims’ stories get a little repetitive, but that’s sort of the point: This happened over and over again; it was reported to authorities over and over again; and nothing was done.

What happened over and over was that some attractive and impressionable 14-year-old was invited to come to Epstein’s mansion either with the offer of easy money ($200 to give some old guy a massage), help launching a modelling career, or immigration to the United States. That intro turned into sexual exploitation that was difficult to escape, sometimes for years.

The purpose of the rally was to try to get two more Republicans to sign Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY)’s discharge petition that will force a vote on legislation demanding release of all federal files on Epstein. (Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, and Lauren Boebert are the other Republicans on board. If you’re uncomfortable being on the same side they are, join the club.) That effort seems to be failing, but the petition might succeed anyway after a few more Democrats fill vacancies by winning special elections later this year.

Opposing this bill looks terrible for congressional Republicans: They’re siding with sexual predators against their victims. You know that most of them must want to vote for it, at the very least just to avoid criticism. The only reason they don’t is pressure from Trump. Which leads to an obvious question: What in those files is so bad for Trump that he would torpedo his own party like this?

Declaring War on Chicago

That looks like a fake post some satirist made up, but it’s real. Our president put it out on social media on Saturday.

The previous Tuesday, Illinois Governor Pritzker had given a second speech [transcript, video] challenging the basis for Trump’s planned invasion: It’s not about crime and it’s not about immigration. There are proven violence-reduction programs that Trump cut, and even with majorities in Congress he has offered no plan to fix the immigration system.

Chicago has a

comprehensive evidence-based approach to crime: hiring more police officers and giving them more funding, gun and drug and gang interdiction, investing in community violence intervention, mental health supports, more substance use treatment. Those programs have shown real progress.

Then you know what happened? Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress cut those programs because they are unserious people who seem to know nothing about fighting crime.

Pritzker has pledged to go to court immediately if troops show up in Chicago. From previous court rulings, I think I know how that case will go. Requests for injunctions to stop Trump from sending in the National Guard have failed, because Congress really did delegate that power by law. But the next question is what those troops can do once they get somewhere: They can’t do law enforcement, because that violates the Posse Comitatus Act. Here’s the conclusion Judge Charles Breyer came to in the California lawsuit:

For the foregoing reasons, the Court ORDERS that Defendants are enjoined from deploying, ordering, instructing, training, or using the National Guard currently deployed in California, and any military troops heretofore deployed in California, to execute the laws, including but not limited to engaging in arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants, unless and until Defendants satisfy the requirements of a valid constitutional or statutory exception, as defined herein, to the Posse Comitatus Act.

The California injunction is stayed pending appeal, and doesn’t apply to Chicago or DC anyway. But the same principles hold once they are put before a judge: Nobody can stop Trump from sending troops to Chicago or anywhere else. But legally, they can’t do much once they get there.

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Washington DC has also filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s occupation of the city. They will win.

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Something I don’t hear discussed often enough: Why would anybody expect a temporary military presence to resolve the crime problem in a major city?

Sure: muggers, carjackers, and the like might lie low while troops are patrolling the streets. But what long-term problem is getting solved? Or are the troops themselves the long-term solution, because they stay forever?

The only way any of this makes sense is if you believe the Trump myth that big-city crime is due to undocumented immigrants. In that fantasy world, ICE could deport the whole criminal class during the occupation, leaving a crime-free city at the end.

But if crime is the result of poverty, hopelessness, poor education, drug addiction, mental illness, and the lack of legal opportunities, then it will spring back up as soon as the troops leave.

the Navy attack on a drug-smuggling boat

Tuesday, a US Navy aircraft destroyed a boat that the Trump administration claims was smuggling drugs into the US and was operated by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Eleven people, alleged gang members, were killed.

I was skeptical of these kinds of attacks when Obama did them, so you can predict my position on this. But even more interesting is the view of Benjamin Wittes, founder of the Lawfare blog, who has long been a defender of “targeted strikes against enemy individuals or small groups”. This strike, though, is “not what I signed up for”.

Wittes makes three distinctions between this strike, and, say, the Obama drone attack that killed Anwar Al-Aulaqi (the very one I was complaining about in the link above). First is legality:

The first and most important difference is that those past strikes targeted people genuinely believed to be operational figures in terrorist groups who were at least plausibly covered by a congressional authorization to use military force, which was worded broadly to cover a broad range of worldwide operations.

Second, there were alternatives to deadly force:

When you’re dealing with one small boat heading to one’s own territory in international waters and the United States Coast Guard is available, there are plenty of options short of blowing up that boat. … [T]he United States targeted with lethal force people it believed to be civilian drug traffickers and acknowledged that it could have stopped them. This would be illegal for cops. And it should be unthinkable for the military too.

And finally, this just isn’t a military problem.

Cartel and gang members are not combatants in an armed conflict against the United States. And unless they are engaged in an ongoing or imminent military attack against the United States, it simply isn’t self-defense to attack them with lethal force either.

The question I always come back to is: What stops the President from calling in an airstrike on me? It seems like the restrictions on presidential killings are getting thinner and thinner. Ron Filipkowski expresses a similar view:

So if you are out on a boat Trump can just blow you up and kill you and everyone on board by saying you had drugs without presenting any proof? That’s how this works now?

RFK Jr. and the larger attack on science

The HHS Secretary testified for three hours before the Senate Finance Committee Thursday. The hearings came just a week after Kennedy was responsible for decapitating the CDC: The Trump-appointed head was fired and three other high-ranking officials resigned, largely due to Kennedy’s moves to restrict access to vaccines, relying on cranks and conspiracy theorists rather than the scientists of the CDC.

Kennedy faced tough questioning not just from the Democratic minority on the committee, but also from Republicans Thom Tillis, John Barrasso, and especially Bill Cassidy, who had been the deciding vote on the committee that voted to approve Kennedy’s nomination in February.

Cassidy, a doctor, is like so many Republicans in Congress: He surely knew better in February, but for whatever reason decided to go along the Trump administration. In February he told the Senate about assurances he had gotten from Kennedy:

These commitments, and my expectation that we can have a great relationship to make America healthy again, is the basis of my support. He will be Secretary, but I believe he will also be a partner in working for this end. 

If Mr. Kennedy is confirmed, I will use my authority as Chairman of the Senate Committee with oversight of HHS to rebuff any attempts to remove the public’s access to life-saving vaccines without ironclad, causational scientific evidence that can be defended before the mainstream scientific community and before Congress. I will carefully watch for any effort to wrongfully sow public fear about vaccines between confusing references of coincidence and anecdote. 

But my support is built on assurances that this will not have to be a concern and that he and I can work together to build an agenda to make America healthy again.

Now, predictably, RFK Jr. has violated those commitments, including one to “maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes” (in fact he fired the whole committee and replaced them with cranks). Cassidy is left with no recourse beyond asking tough questions. He gave up real power when he had it, and now it is gone.

I watched the first hour of the three-hour hearing. Kennedy staunchly defended an alternate reality in which all evidence of vaccine effectiveness is propaganda from Big Pharma, which controls all medical journals, just about all scientists, and any member of the committee who leaned on him too hard. He did not explain where better information would come from.

I imagine that any MAHA true believers watching the hearing felt vindicated. In a world where there are no reference points and no sources of reliable information, why not believe whoever you want to believe?

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Something similar is happening with climate change. The Trump administration put out a report written by five climate-change skeptics hand-picked by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, the former CEO of a fracking company, who said before his appointment: “There is no climate crisis and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either.”

The report was criticized by 85 climate scientists, who judged it “biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policymaking”, mainly because it cherry-picked data to reach a pre-determined conclusion, and cited papers as proving things that those papers’ authors disagree with. Andrew Dessler, one of the 85, wrote:

I did not go into science to make money, nor did I go in to push a “liberal agenda”. I went into science because I love science. I love the rigor, I love the discipline, I love looking at data and seeing how the world operates. Most importantly, I respect science. When I read the DOE report, I saw a document that does not respect science. In fact, I saw a document that makes a mockery of science.

He compares the DoE report to “research” put out in decades past by the Tobacco Institute, denying tobacco’s connection to cancer.

Their goal was not to win the debate that cigarettes were safe — they clearly understood they could not — but to muddy the waters enough to head off regulations on their business. Thus, the DOE report is designed to do exactly the same thing: muddy the waters enough that the government can claim there’s too much uncertainty to regulate carbon dioxide.

This is the method of the current authoritarianism: There is no capital-T Truth, just your experts arguing with my experts. So we should just all do what we want and whatever we have the power to do.

and FY 2026

Money to operate the government runs out when the fiscal year ends on October 1. One of the featured posts discusses the leverage this might give Democrats and what they should do with it.

and you also might be interested in …

Apparently, firing the head of BLS didn’t fix the jobs reporting process the way Trump wanted. The August report came out Friday, and was once again disappointing, or perhaps even alarming. The economy added only 22K new jobs in August, well below the 80K economists expected, not to mention the 168K per month rate of 2024.

As usual, past months’ estimates were revised as more complete data came in. July numbers were revised upward, but June downward, for a total loss of 21K jobs. The unemployment rate rose to 4.3%, its highest level since October, 2021, during the pandemic. 4.3% is not alarming in itself, but the trend is up.

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The Texas legislature has passed, and Governor Abbott is expected to sign, a new law against abortion pills, modeled on its 2023 bounty-hunter law that allowed civil cases against anyone who helped a woman get an out-of-state abortion.

The background is that out-of-state doctors prescribe to Texas women abortion pills that are illegal in Texas. Such pills are easily mailed or carried across the border. Texas is searching for ways to penalize those doctors, but it keeps running into blue-state shield laws.

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White supremacist and Christian nationalist rhetoric is moving into the mainstream.

Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) addressed the question “What is an American?” at the National Conservatism Conference in D.C. on Tuesday. He called into question the whole idea of immigration and naturalization, and argued against the notion that anyone who believes in our system of government can become an American. [I linked to the full text because you should be able to check that I’m summarizing him fairly.]

He seemed to carefully avoid any specifically racist or fascist quote that could be pulled out for criticism, but the basic ideas were there: American was built by a particular group of people for their descendants. He doesn’t say “White people” exactly, but

We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith.

He mentions the George Floyd “riots” as if they are code for something bad that he doesn’t want to spell out. He proudly points to his own German ancestors (arriving, like mine, in the 1840s), and the Scots-Irish who settled Missouri, who were “ideally suited to life on the edge of civilization”. He doesn’t come right out with proclaiming America a White homeland. But he closes with this:

This fight is about whether our children will still have a country to call their own. It’s about whether America will remain what she was meant to be: The apex and the vanguard of Western civilization. A strong, sovereign nation—not just an idea, but a home, belonging to a people, bound together by a common past and a shared destiny.

He cloaks this message in false class-consciousness. “They” are “the elites who rule everywhere but are not truly from anywhere.” “They” shipped your jobs overseas and brought in foreigners to compete with you. “They” are also “the Left”, which “took [America’s founding] principles and drained them of all underlying substance, turning the American tradition into a deracinated ideological creed.” [my emphasis] “They” are the ones who brought down the statues (of enslavers) and changed the names (of places honoring enslavers).

It’s perfectly rational for native-born Americans to worry about what has been happening to jobs and wages over the past 50 years. But twisting that legitimate impulse in a blood-and-soil direction is dangerous.

We’re real close to blatant ethno-nationalism here, and a vision where Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and even Jews are not really Americans — so why not send ICE after them? This kind of thinking is not hidden any more, and it’s not fringe.

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Elon Musk has a new pay package agreement from Tesla. If he hits all the goals, in ten years he will be a trillionaire.

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ProPublica looks at what happened when DOGE met Social Security. Social Security is a 90-year-old bureaucracy with ancient hardware and software, so a high-tech team empowered to promote “efficiency” should have been exactly what it needed. Instead, Musk’s minions went looking for non-existent fraud that might quickly provide fodder for good tweets.

and let’s close with something adorable

If you’ve made it through all this seriousness, you deserve seven minutes of escape. Here, National Geographic compiles video of cute baby animals in the wild. My favorites are the arctic foxes.

There’s no question, he’s the leader of our party. So now he’s got a mission statement. His mission, and his goals and objectives, whatever that is, we need to embrace it. All of it, every single word. … If Donald Trump says “Jump three feet high and scratch your head”, we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads. That’s it.

– Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX)

This week’s featured posts are “Harris lost the war of ambient information” and “Caligula’s Horse and other controversial appointments“.

This week everybody was talking about Trump’s appointments

The worst ones are covered in one of the featured posts. In general, Americans believe that presidents should get to choose their own people, unless they go too far. Generally, the Senate revolts on one or maybe two appointees. At a minimum, though, Gaetz, Hegseth, Gabbard, and RFK Jr. deserve to be rejected. Picking them is a test of the phenomenon in the quote above: Will GOP senators really disgrace themselves because Trump asks them to?

and more election retrospectives

As the final votes get counted, it becomes clear that Trump’s victory — while still clear and undisputed — was anything but the mandate-establishing landslide he wants to claim. Currently, his percentage of the vote has fallen under 50% and is likely to continue shrinking. In both percentage and vote-margin terms, his popular vote victory is smaller than what he lost to Hillary Clinton by in 2016.

Lots of ink is being spilled to explain Harris’ defeat and what Democrats should do better next time. I’ve been unimpressed by most analyses, because often Harris did do the things her critics claim she didn’t, and didn’t do the things they claim she did.

The point my brain keeps sticking on is why so many voters believed things that just weren’t true. If you can’t explain that, I don’t think you’ve gotten to the root of the problem.

The other featured post focuses on a New Yorker article that is at least a step in the right direction.

and Palestine

I’m not sure how I didn’t notice this until now — I noticed it this week because Truthout had an article on Thursday — but in September a UN Special Committee submitted a report on the situation in not just Gaza but the West Bank as well.

The report raises serious concerns of breaches of international humanitarian and human rights laws in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including starvation as a weapon of war, the possibility of genocide in Gaza and an apartheid system in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. It documents the impact of the conflict escalation since 7 October 2023 on Palestinians’ rights to food; to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment; to physical integrity, liberty and security of persons; as well as the disproportionate effects on the rights of women, children, and future generations more broadly. The report also highlights the ongoing attacks against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and refers to developments in the occupied Syrian Golan. The report provides recommendations to the General Assembly and Member States; to the State of Israel; and to businesses operating with Israel, that in any way contribute to maintaining Israel’s unlawful presence in the occupied territories.

The report doesn’t present Israel’s actions as unprovoked, or paint Hamas in a positive light. Section IV, the first substantive section, describes the October 7 attacks and the ongoing rocket attacks on Israel.

and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)

Tuesday, Trump announced that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will co-lead the “Department of Government Efficiency”. This could mean a lot or practically nothing. It’s hard to tell at this point.

Programs to streamline government come and go. Al Gore led one during the Clinton administration, a fact that virtually no one remembers. Musk and Ramaswamy will lead a “department” that doesn’t exist: It has no employees and no budget. (They’re both rich, maybe they’ll fund it themselves.)

It also has no authority. Congress establishes the size and funding of government agencies. Trump apparently intends to challenge a Nixon-era law that prevents the President from impounding funds that Congress has appropriated. This will lead to a court battle that only the Supreme Court can decide, and could take some while to play out. It will be a test of the Court’s partisanship, because the Court obviously would not have granted Biden such power.

But even if the Court rewrites the laws and the Constitution to give Trump impoundment power, it still belongs to him, not to Musk and Ramaswamy. Maybe Trump will rubber-stamp the DOGE’s recommendations. But they’re bound to be deeply unpopular, so maybe he won’t. We’ll see.

In general, the American people are inconsistent on the subject of government. If you ask them the broad question of whether government is too big or spends too much money, they’ll say it is and does. But if you give them a specific list of programs to cut, they’ll support those programs. Typically, voters grossly overestimate how much of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid, bridges to nowhere, and obscene art projects.

Trump pledged during the campaign not to cut entitlements, and some of his proposals would make the entitlement-funding situation worse. He is likely to want to spend more on defense, and he’ll have a hard time refusing to pay the interest on the national debt. Once you set all that aside, not much is left for DOGE to slash.

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One thing is certain: We will be seeing a whole bunch of articles/tweets/posts about how stupid science is and how crazy the government is to support it. I’m already seeing tweets about studying the sex life of beetles, and I’m sure there will be many more.

Science is always an easy target if you want to make government spending sound ridiculous. Decades ago, Senator William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, gave out the Golden Fleece Award to highlight expenditures he thought were obviously wasteful. Scientific research was a frequent “winner”.

I’m sure that silly research projects do occasionally get funded, but the bigger problem is that good scientific experiments often sound stupid if you don’t understand what the scientists are looking for. Ben Franklin flying kites during thunderstorms probably looked foolish to any neighbors who noticed. The significance of Galileo dropping weights off a tower was probably lost on contemporary observers. (“They fell. What did you think would happen?”)

More recently, the popular weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy came out of research on Gila monster venom, which no doubt could have been made to sound like a complete waste while it was happening. But what about the sex lives of beetles? Well, if a beetle invasion is devouring your crops, you might wonder about ways to discourage them from reproducing. Shutting down the beetle equivalent of Match or Tinder is probably worth a look.

and BlueSky

X/Twitter has been losing users ever since Elon Musk bought it and turned it into a safe space for Nazis, and eventually into a big in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign. He’s made it much harder to avoid right-wing propaganda or to shield yourself from abusive trolls. (Brian Klaus has labelled it a “Perfect Disinformation Machine“.)

The big reason to stay on X has been all the other people who are there, including a lot of the world’s top journalists. (Frequently, I back up points I’m making in the Sift by linking to X.) But as the user experience has gotten worse and worse — a prime example of what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification” — restless X-natives have talked more and more about going somewhere else.

The question was where? One candidate was Threads, a platform created by Meta, which also owns Facebook and Instagram. But whatever advantages Threads might offer are overwhelmed (at least in my mind) by the fact that you’re just replacing one Internet oligarch with another. Mark Zuckerberg might just be playing Saruman to Musk’s Sauron.

At the other extreme is Mastodon, which is based on open-source software and exists in a variety of “instances”, in which somebody has generously decided to host a social-networking community on their hardware.

But since the election there has been a mass exodus to another alternative, BlueSky. Lots of the people I have followed on X — Paul Krugman, Chris Hayes, Michelle Goldberg, Josh Marshall, James Fallows … — are now on BlueSky, with more joining every day. This week The Guardian closed its X accounts and moved to BlueSky en masse.

I’ve been experimenting with BlueSky (and also Mastodon) for several months. As on X, I don’t post much, and mainly use the platforms to announce Sift articles. I read a lot there, though, to find things to write about.

I’ve generally found BlueSky a more pleasant experience than X, though I can’t tell how much of that is cultural and how much is baked into the software. (I’m told that blocking trolls is much easier on BlueSky, though I haven’t had to use that feature. People seem to understand that they’ll be blocked if they become abusive, so abuse is comparatively rare.) Recently, though, it has become useful in the same way that X has been useful, so my attention has been shifting in BlueSky’s direction.

I confess I don’t really understand BlueSky as an organization. Wikipedia says:

Bluesky is a decentralized microblogging social media service primarily operated by Bluesky Social PBC, a public benefit corporation based in the United States.

I’m not sure how the “public benefit” part works, but the corporation does have investors who probably expect to make money somehow. Ultimately, that might make BlueSky subject to the same forces that enshittify everything on the internet. So it’s hard to say how long this halcyon period will last. Long term, Mastodon is probably the more durable alternative, if only everyone would move there. But for now, BlueSky seems to be the sweet spot of short-message social media: more pleasant than X, more useful than Mastodon.

and you also might be interested in …

I had to check this several times before believing that it wasn’t a joke: The new owner of Alex Jones’ fallen media empire is the satirical newsite The Onion.

Jones lost a defamation suit to the parents of the children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre, which he repeatedly claimed was a hoax. He filed for bankruptcy in an attempt to avoid the $965 million judgment, and the bankruptcy process resulted in auctioning off his assets.

The Onion plans to shutter Jones’ InfoWars and rebuild the website featuring well-known internet humor writers and content creators, according to a person with knowledge of the sale.

The Onion published a very Onionish statement from the CEO of its parent company, Global Tetrahedron.

All told, the decision to acquire InfoWars was an easy one for the Global Tetrahedron executive board.

Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon.

Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron.

The statement does not reveal the purchase price, but says GT got a “steep bargain” of “less than one trillion dollars”.

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Nazis are apparently feeling emboldened by Trump’s victory. Saturday afternoon, a small band of them marched through downtown Columbus. The Columbus mayor and Ohio governor have condemned the march, though I expect we’ll wait a long to before Trump has anything to say about it.

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Red-state Democrat Jess Piper divides Trump-supporting women into four categories:

• Wealthy and well-connected. They’ll get tax cuts and they feel safe from Trump’s anti-woman policies.
• Indoctrinated. Mainly by religion. They’re single-issue anti-abortion voters who explain away Trump’s personal issues.
• Pick-me. Women who count on the men in their lives to protect them.
• Ignorant. “I watched an interview of one young White woman who said she voted for Trump because he ‘brought abortion back to the states.’ She thought Trump was legalizing the procedure. Roe fell during Biden’s term, and she seemed to blame Biden for the ban.”

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Rudy Giuliani’s illegal attempts to avoid paying his defamation liability have finally gotten to be too much for his lawyers.

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State laws that single out trans kids for discrimination are inevitably headed for the Supreme Court. Some have been thrown out, but Indiana just upheld one.

and let’s close with something deep

We often talk about people “going underground” to escape attention, but in ancient Cappadocia they literally did.

The ancient city of Elengubu, known today as Derinkuyu, burrows more than 85m below the Earth’s surface, encompassing 18 levels of tunnels. The largest excavated underground city in the world, it was in near-constant use for thousands of years, changing hands from the Phrygians to the Persians to the Christians of the Byzantine Era. It was finally abandoned in the 1920s by the Cappadocian Greeks when they faced defeat during the Greco-Turkish war and fled abruptly en masse to Greece.

The article estimates that 20,000 people might have lived in the underground city at its peak.

If you don’t think this country is sliding toward theocracy, you’re not paying attention.

– Charles Blow

This week’s featured post is “Sweet Home, Gilead“.

This week everybody was talking about IVF in Alabama

The Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that frozen embryos are children for the purposes of wrongful death lawsuits is covered in the featured post.

Just after I pushed the Post button, I saw that Jay Kuo had written about his personal IVF story. His IVF child is currently in a surrogate mother’s womb. (Since I subscribed to Kuo’s substack blog, I’ve been linking to it almost every week.) He includes a photo of a frozen embryo, so we know what we’re talking about.

The bottom line is that the GOP can’t support IVF and support the idea that an embryo is a “person” entitled to full protection under our laws. Supporting IVF means understanding how it actually works and being comfortable with the idea that intended parents must create more embryos than we ultimately need. And clinics cannot be on the hook for murder should anything happen to them. No clinic coul survive with that threat hanging over it.

Neither of those two principles can be truly supported by Republicans so long as their party adheres dogmatically to the “life begins at conception” notion. Politicians who claim to support IVF must repudiate these kinds of fetal personhood laws, or their public backing of IVF means exactly nothing.

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In my post, I tried not to treat the Alabama court’s position with all the contempt it deserves, so I resisted the temptation to include the “Every Sperm is Sacred” scene from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.

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In other religious-right news: The campaign to overturn the Obergefell same-sex marriage decision begins in Tennessee, with a law allowing state officials to refuse to solemnize same-sex marriages.

This law wouldn’t block same-sex marriages, because same-sex couples could still get a marriage license and find somebody other than a judge or other government official to play the celebrant role. But it does relegate them to a second-class status, which this Supreme Court will probably think is fine. This is exactly the kind of chipping-away that states did on Roe v Wade until it was reversed.

Personally, I judge these things by applying a racial analogy: What if a judge refused to marry an interracial couple to express his personal disapproval? Of course, Justice Alito is unmoved by this analogy. Recently he wrote that his dissent in Obergefell was prescient in foreseeing

that Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government.

Of course, if you want to deny the full rights of citizenship to people your religion disapproves of, and you believe that government officials should be able to treat them with official disrespect, you are a bigot. Conservative political correctness may not let people say so, but it’s not even a close call.

and Russia, Russia, Russia

Last week we learned that the Biden impeachment case — which had always been flimsy — had fallen completely apart: The star witness for the bribery story Republicans wanted to tell, Alexander Smirnov, had been indicted for making the whole thing up and lying to the FBI. Another prospective witness, Gal Luft, had been indicted last summer for arms trafficking and being an unregistered Chinese agent.

This week we found out it’s worse than that: Smirnov now says he got his anti-Biden stories from Russian intelligence.

Jay Kuo (him again) lays out the pipeline by which Russian disinformation found its way to the Trump Justice Department and from there to Republicans in Congress (Jim Jordan, James Comer, Chuck Grassley) who pushed it out to the country.

These GOP leaders are at best hapless dupes. They should have known and understood the games Russia was playing with them. But we shouldn’t discount the possibility that they were well aware that the Smirnov claims were false and may have originated from Russian intelligence… and then went along with them anyway.

Indeed, we should now actively investigate this possibility.

In a members-only newsletter on TPM, Josh Marshall wonders if the mainstream press is up to covering this story.

Donald Trump and his MAGA legions have spent years shock-training reporters not to bring up anything else about Russian disinformation programs aimed at helping Donald Trump. But they’re real. They’re continuing. They’re actually working. And that remains the case no matter how many times Donald Trump says “RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA” on Truth Social. Reporters have been conditioned to ignore the clear implications of what we’re learning.

So what does he think the real story is?

[W]e now see that almost all of 2023 was dominated by a legal/political story that was not only bogus but — according to prosecutors’ filings and the discredited source’s own admission to federal authorities — was a plant by the Russian intelligence services. That’s real. That requires an explanation as to how that was ever allowed to happen.

… The story here isn’t that the “Biden Crime Family” nonsense didn’t pan out. That was always transparently bogus. The story here is how the U.S. again got bamboozled by transparent foreign manipulation and how the U.S. political press bought into it pretty much whole hog. That doesn’t mean they accepted all the claims. But they treated it as reasonable, worthy of a presumption of seriousness, a serious story to be covered as such. Even with the veritable forest of red flags.

and the Trump trials

Judge Engoron officially filed his judgment against Trump Friday, with the disgorgement-plus-interest standing at $454 million. This sets the clock running: Trump has 30 days to appeal. But appealing doesn’t mean he gets to delay coming up with a substantial amount of money.

Trump has two options to meet the state’s demand: to pay the amount in full, or secure a $35m bond against his assets, which might include the Fifth Avenue Trump Tower, 40 Wall Street, his Mar-a-Lago estate, or a number of golf courses in the US.

The WaPo examines the difficulties Trump faces raising cash.

“If the guy can give phony financial statements, he can give phony information to the bonding company,” [attorney Mark C.] Zauderer said, referring to Engoron’s finding in the case that the Trump Organization submitted false information to banks to obtain loans. “A bonding company who is going to put up several hundred million dollars here is not, in my opinion, going to do it easily.”

Those Carroll and NY state totals face very different prospects on appeal. The Carroll money is mostly punitive damages, which was a judgment call made by the jury; an appeals court might make its own judgment and find that excessive. But the NY State money is based on disgorgement of specific ill-gotten gains. To reduce them, an appeals court would need to rejudge Engoron’s conclusions: It would have to find either that Trump did not commit fraud, or that the fraud was not connected to these particular gains.

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I’m not going to put a lot of effort into making fun of Trump’s branded sneakers, because it’s shooting fish in a barrel. But I will pass on one nickname they have picked up: Aryan Jordans. And one suggested slogan I heard: “Fast. Faster. Fascist.”

and media malpractice

I already mentioned Josh Marshall’s doubts that the mainstream media is up to covering the Smirnov story. But that’s just part of a much larger failing.

This week, a new Quinnipiac poll had Biden ahead of Trump 49%-45%. So of course Politico’s headline was “Poll: Nearly 70 percent of voters say Biden is too old to serve again“. There’s no such thing as good news for Biden.

---

Jeff Tiedrich recalls “the Clinton rules”

basically, Bill or Hillary would do something that every other politician in the entire history of the world does — something as simple as holding a fundraiser, or giving a speech — and the press would report it in hushed tones and describe it as if it were some new kind of dastardly scandal.

Well, the same thing is happening with Biden: Whatever he does — even if every other politician in the world does it — is evidence that he’s too old. Tiedrich links to The Daily Mail, which has discovered the latest evidence of Biden’s senility: He uses note cards!

---

Mark Jacobs raises a significant question about the NYT: “Is the New York Times neutral on the future of democracy?” He calls out all the doubts I have about whether the Times deserves my subscription: They regularly give a platform to known liars. They cover politics as “an amusing game”, analyzing everything as strategy without discussing the consequences. They write headlines that hide horrible things Republicans say (like when Trump’s “vermin” comment was simply “a very different direction” for a Veterans Day speech). And they find “balance” for every terrible thing Republicans do. (Trump is facing criminal charges? He encourages Putin to invade our allies? Yeah, but Biden is old. Biden’s age is filling the same “balancing” role that Hillary’s emails played in 2016.)

The Times’ best work is very, very good. But I continue to wonder whether it’s a net positive or negative for American journalism. One change you may have noticed on this blog: I used to subtly encourage my readers to subscribe, but I no longer do. So I’m only linking to NYT articles if there is something unique about them. If I can get the same information from The Guardian or CNN, I will.

---

The New York Times Pitchbot suggests an angle for the Times to take in the future:

Given the fact that Trump and Biden have 91 felony counts between them, it’s no wonder that so many Americans are considering voting third party.

---

Last week I linked to Ezra Klein’s call for Biden not to run, and for the Democrats to hold an open convention. This week many people pushed back on that idea. Lindsay Beyerstein called attention to Biden’s success at unifying the divergent wings of the Democratic Party, and predicted that party unity would dissolve in an open convention.

In 2024, a contested convention would become an arena to settle every score from Gaza to Medicare for All. A free-for-all would shatter the fragile Democratic coalition that Joe Biden so carefully knit together.

Several pundits made the same observation: No alternative candidate is doing better than Biden in the polls against Trump. (Current polls show the race more-or-less even.) You can claim that’s a name-recognition problem and they’ll do better after they’re nominated, but that’s a leap of faith.

Josh Marshall writes:

The right answer to anyone making these kinds of open-ended statements of concern is to say, tell me specifically what course of action you’re advocating and, if it’s switching to a new candidate, how you get there in the next few weeks? … Klein’s argument really amounts to a highly pessimistic but not unreasonable analysis of the present situation which he resolves with what amounts to a deus ex machina plot twist. That’s not a plan. It’s a recipe for paralysis.

and the wars

As Israel prepares its ground operation against Rafah (the southern-Gaza town where refugees have gathered), it still has no goal beyond the vague and unachievable “destroy Hamas”. For an analysis of how everything arrived at this state, I recommend Zack Beauchamp’s Vox article “How Israel’s War Went Wrong“.

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In The New Yorker, a Palestinian who escaped to Egypt describes how the relatives he left behind are scrambling for food.

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Biden continues to back away from Netanyahu very, very slowly. Friday, the administration restored a legal finding the Trump administration had reversed, saying that the West Bank settlements are against international law.

Tomorrow’s Michigan primary will be a test of how much Biden’s Israel policy is costing him, as Palestinian activists are campaigning for Democrats to vote “uncommitted” rather than for Biden.

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We just passed the two-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. PBS Newshour gathered some experts to summarize.

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My two-years-in observation is about the politics of the Ukraine War in the US: It resembles the politics of January 6. At the beginning, Americans responded the way human beings would. They sympathized with a country trying to get out of the orbit of Putin’s fascist Russia when Putin’s forces invaded to pull them back in. (I’ve since read all kinds of explanations about how either Ukraine or the West provoked Russia, and I just don’t see it. There was never a threat to invade Russia through Ukraine. Anything less is a problem for diplomacy, not justification for an invasion. The typical answer to that point is to bring up the US invasion of Iraq, which was also unprovoked. But I have no trouble admitting that the Iraq invasion was wrong too.)

That initial gut response wasn’t controversial in America. In the early days of the war, everybody, regardless of political party, was rooting for the underdog Ukrainians and wondering what we could do to help. That’s how the situation was similar to January 6: In the beginning, everybody who wasn’t actively involved in the coup reacted with horror to Trump’s brownshirts attacking the Capitol to try to keep him in power by force. Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, and just about the whole GOP establishment united with Democrats in their initial rejection of what Trump had done.

But then the MAGA media machine and the MAGA social-media conspiracy theorists got to work on reversing the natural human instincts of the people under their sway, and today both Ukraine and January 6 are partisan issues.

and the dysfunctional House of Representatives

Ukraine aid isn’t the only thing House Republicans are stalling. Speaker Johnson has recessed the House until Wednesday, with a partial government shutdown looming Friday and the rest of the government running out of money a week later. The WaPo reports that “talks have slowed” on a compromise to prevent a shutdown.

The four appropriations bills set to expire Friday — agriculture; military construction-VA; energy and water and transportation; housing and urban development — are the easier ones. On March 8, funding runs out for more controversial bills for which the far right is demanding even more explosive policy riders around abortion, LGBTQ rights and border security.

and you also might be interested in …

South Carolina’s Republican primary was Saturday, and Trump won over Haley, 59%-39%. How you read that result depends on the question you’re asking. If you’re focused on whether Trump will be nominated, this is a very solid positive result. If Haley is 20 points down in her home state, she really has no chance.

But if your question is whether Trump will be able to unite the Republican voters in the fall, this is a weak showing. Voters went in knowing Trump was the almost certain nominee, but 39% refused to get in line behind him.

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Democracy is returning to Wisconsin. For many years, the Wisconsin legislature has been gerrymandered to guarantee Republican control, independent of the will of the voters. AP reports that Democrats have won 14 of the last 17 statewide elections, but somehow those same elections have yielded a Republican supermajority (22-10) in the state senate and a near supermajority (64-35) in the state assembly.

Nonetheless, the voters of Wisconsin still had access to a few levers of power. Last April, Janet Protasiewicz won a 55%-44% victory to gain a seat on the state supreme court, flipping the court to liberal control. In December, the court ruled 4-3 to throw out the Republican-drawn legislative maps. Forced to negotiate with Democratic Governor Tony Evers (another winner of a statewide election), the Republican legislature produced a relatively fair map, which Evers signed into law last Monday.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:

Under the new state Assembly map, the districts are more evenly split. The new map has 46 districts that lean Republican and 45 districts that lean Democratic. The eight districts left are likely to be a toss-up between Democratic and Republican candidates. …

Under the new state Senate map, 14 out of 33 districts are Democratic-leaning, while 15 are Republican-leaning. Four districts are competitive, where either party has a fair chance of winning them.

However, the Wisconsin congressional maps are still gerrymandered, and Republicans hold six of the eight seats. Democratic voters are packed into the other two districts (containing Madison and Milwaukee), which they won by 19 and 25 points.

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The NYT reports on “The Crisis in Teaching Constitutional Law“. What’s the crisis? The clearly partisan nature of the current conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court. The older generation of professors once shared a faith that interpreting the Constitution is a meaningful activity transcending politics. Justices might have philosophical differences that lead to diverse conclusions, but fundamentally they are all making a good-faith attempt to understand what the law means. Recent Supreme Court decisions — like the Bruen gun control decision — have shaken that faith, to the point that law professors don’t know what to teach their students.

Whatever rationale or methodology the justices apply in a given case, the result virtually always aligns with the policy priorities of the modern Republican Party. …

Stanford’s Professor McConnell recalled a recent exchange in one of his classes. “I said something to the effect of, ‘It’s important to assume that the people you disagree with are speaking in good faith.’ And a student raises his hand and he asks, ‘Why? Why should we assume that people on the other side are acting in good faith?’ This was not a crazy person; this was a perfectly sober-minded, rational student. And I think the question was sincere. And I think that’s kind of shocking. I do think that some of the underlying assumptions of how a civil society operates can no longer be assumed.”

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I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that “the stock market always goes up in the long run”. Well, sometimes the long run is a very long time indeed. If you bought Japanese stocks at their peak in 1989, you finally turned a profit this week.

and let’s close with some musical training

I’ve heard lots of versions of Pachebel’s Canon, but never before one based on train whistles.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.]

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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.

He is a criminal defendant. He is going to have constraints the same as any defendant. This case is going to proceed in a normal order.

– Judge Tanya Chutkan

This week’s featured post is “How did Frederick Douglass become a conservative spokesman?“

This week everybody was talking about the fires in Maui

They’re still finding bodies in burned-out buildings in Lahaina, the main city in Maui. As of this morning the toll was up to 96 deaths. As you can see in the picture above, people stuck in traffic had to abandon their vehicles and try to escape on foot.

The wildfire had two main causes: dry grass and high winds. One recent theory is that the winds blew over some power lines, which sparked the grass. Extreme dryness and wind are two symptoms of climate change, and the Maui disaster is just the latest event in our Climate Change Summer, which has also included smoke from Canadian fires blanketing the Northeast, extreme rain and flooding in Vermont and Pennsylvania, and record heat in the Southwest and Florida.

Politicians who deny what we can see with our own eyes, or who want to ignore the whole issue, are not worth arguing with any more. They just need to be voted out.

and Trump’s trials

Fulton County DA Fani Willis will seek a Trump indictment this week. The Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Tamar Hallerman lays out what to expect from this indictment, which might appear as soon as tomorrow. As I keep saying, I could speculate about the content, but in a few days I can just read it.

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Most of the Trump-trial news this week concerned Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the DC trial for the January 6 conspiracy. In a hearing Friday, she issued a protective order barring Trump from using material the government is sharing in the discovery process to badger or intimidate witnesses against him. She also warned that she would be watching Trump’s public statements closely.

The fact that he is running a political campaign currently has to yield to the administration of justice. And if that means he can’t say exactly what he wants to say in a political speech, that is just how it’s going to have to be.

It’s worth noting that Americans cannot be deprived of their rights “without due process of law”. Trump temporarily faces a judge’s restrictions because a grand jury of American citizens has found sufficient evidence to indict him for several serious crimes. That’s due process of law.

If Trump does appear to be trying to intimidate witnesses or taint the jury pool, Judge Chutkan has a number of possible responses, which include revoking his bail and putting him in jail until the trial is complete. But there has been speculation that Trump would welcome such a move, because he could make political hay out of the “persecution” he had brought on himself. (I doubt this; I think Trump is terrified of jail.) So Friday Chutkan made a novel threat: If Trump won’t behave himself, she might have to move the trial along faster to protect witnesses, prosecutors, and everyone else involved (including herself).

Given that Trump’s whole strategy has been to delay the trial until he becomes president again — as I explained last week, he doesn’t seem to have any other viable defense — that threat might have some teeth.

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What the people Trump targets might need protection from was underlined last week when the FBI tried to arrest a Utah man who had made detailed threats against President Biden (and other Trump enemies like Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg). A judge deemed these threats credible, so an arrest warrant was issued. The man was armed when agents arrived, and was killed when (according to the FBI) he pointed a weapon at the arresting agents.

Naturally, the man is now considered a martyr by the violent Right. These same people would respond to reports of police killing a person of color with “Why didn’t he just comply?” But the laws are supposed to work differently for them.

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This is far from the first time an avowed Trump supporter has repeated Trump’s rhetoric before threatening or carrying out violent acts.

It’s worth remembering how normal American politicians respond to such situations. In 2017, a Bernie Sanders supporter brought a gun to a baseball practice for congressional Republicans and began shooting, badly wounding Rep. Steve Scalise and several others. Afterwards, Sanders made this statement:

I have just been informed that the alleged shooter at the Republican baseball practice is someone who apparently volunteered on my presidential campaign. I am sickened by this despicable act. Let me be as clear as I can be: Violence of any kind is unacceptable in our society and I condemn this action in the strongest possible terms. Real change can only come about through nonviolent action, and anything else runs against our most deeply held American values.

Trump has never made any similar statement, and it is difficult to imagine him doing so. More typically, he makes excuses for his violent supporters, lauding how “passionate” they are. On January 6, Trump explained to Kevin McCarthy that the rioters who had invaded the Capitol and were chanting “hang Mike Pence” were just “more upset about the election” than McCarthy was. When he did eventually ask the rioters to go home, he told them “We love you. You’re very special.“

So if you belong to Trump’s personality cult and you want him to love you, you know what to do.

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Trump’s apparent approval of violence continues. Saturday at the Iowa State Fair, Rep. Matt Gaetz told a crowd that “we know that only through force do we make any change in a corrupt town like Washington, D.C.” Trump was standing right there, and made no attempt to distance himself from Gaetz’ rhetoric.

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Merrick Garland has taken a lot of criticism lately. Andrew Weissmann, formerly a top assistant to Robert Mueller, put it like this:

We [should] not forget that the predicament Jack Smith is in, racing to get and keep trial dates pre-election, is [be]cause Garland was so slow to pursue a top down investigation.

The conventional wisdom says that Garland didn’t want DoJ to prosecute Trump because he was already wary of the weaponization-of-justice cudgel the Right was going to beat him with. But the House January 6 Committee so clearly demonstrated Trump’s criminality that Garland’s see-no-evil position became untenable. So that’s how we got here, but arrived more than a year late.

Jay Kuo, however, makes an interesting counter-argument: No matter how obvious it might be to the casual observer that January 6 was a great crime against America, the laws were not written with January 6 in mind. So no matter how DoJ proceeded, it was going to have to apply laws in new ways, using interpretations that had never been tested in court.

Making Donald Trump the test case was bound to be fraught. So Garland started at the bottom, with the foot-soldiers who invaded the Capitol. Sure, they were trespassing, but wasn’t there more to it that that? What else could they be charged with? Some had attacked police, but what about the ones who hadn’t (or at least weren’t on video doing so)?

There’s a law against obstructing an official proceeding, but the main thrust of that law is about forging official documents, and whether the clause about obstructing a proceeding “otherwise” applied here hadn’t been tested. And was the joint session of Congress on January 6 an “official proceeding” under this law? What did disrupting it “corruptly” mean?

So Garland’s DoJ went about establishing these points in cases that didn’t have to carry the emotional and political baggage of a case against Trump. Appeals of some of those cases did challenge those interpretations, and those appeals weren’t resolved until April of this year. One (the meaning of “corruptly”) is still pending.

So maybe DoJ was always fated to race against the 2024 election. And maybe Attorney General Garland knew what he was doing.

and the pro-reproductive-rights vote in Ohio

Sometimes politics gets so ridiculous that only a comedian can describe it. Here’s Trae Crowder, a.k.a. the Liberal Redneck.

Ohio Republicans found out that the people of their state were likely to pass an amendment that would protect abortion rights in Ohio. And when they heard that, Ohio Republicans said, “The people of Ohio must be stopped.” So they tried to pass another law before that which would require 60% of the vote instead of the usual simple majority. So basically they went to the people of Ohio and said “Hey y’all. We want y’all to vote on whether or not your vote should count for shit.” And the people of Ohio went, “Uh, I think I’m gonna vote for my vote should count for shit.”

And Ohio Republicans just started stomping their feet and making a shocked Pikachu face. Like, I don’t know what they expected. Like what do they think? People are gonna line up around the block to disenfranchise themselves? What did they think was gonna happen, you know?

But this is their playbook now, y’all. This is what they do, because they’ve finally come to understand that they are not actually popular. Right? It took ’em a long time. For years and years they were alienating and demonizing women, Black people, gay people, Mexicans, minorities, immigrants, smart people, poor people, and everybody in between. They’ve been years doing that, and now they’re like “Why don’t anybody like us?”

Oh, I don’t know, truly a mystery for the ages, that one. But either way, they understand it now. They realize that, generally speaking, the American people do not agree with them on things like abortion, gay rights, civil rights, the economy, healthcare — none of it.

They’ve come to realize that and they’ve arrived at this conclusion: If hearts of the people cannot be won, then the will of the people must be quashed. That’s right. They understand that in a functioning democracy, their policies would be relegated to the impotent fringe, and have decided that therefore, from this point forward, this democracy should no longer properly function.

That’s what all this is about, y’all, the gerrymandering laws, voter restriction laws, and January 6 and the Big Lie — all of it.

And it’s not just in Ohio. In Wisconsin, Republicans have managed to gerrymander their way into a supermajority in the Senate, in a state where Democrats have been winning statewide races, including a race in April that gave liberals control of the state supreme court.

Now the map that gerrymanders Republicans into power is coming before the supreme court, and Republicans are threatening to use their illegitimate supermajority to impeach the new liberal justice if she doesn’t recuse herself.

The people of Wisconsin must be stopped!

and education in Florida

When Governor DeSantis got his Don’t-Say-Gay and Stop WOKE Acts through the Florida legislature, the doom-saying of many liberal pundits was written off as “alarmist”. Surely when it got down to cases, reasonable interpretations would prevail and it wouldn’t be that bad. But developments in recent weeks have shown that in fact it’s worse.

One DeSantis priority is that schools stop cooperating with kids who want to try out a different gender identity without their parents’ explicit permission. So if Timmy wants to be known at school as Tammy, Timmy/Tammy’s teachers are supposed to notify the parents, even if doing so violates the child’s trust.

But who’s to decide the gender implications of a nickname? Maybe Samantha wants to be Sam not because she’s experiencing a crisis of femininity, but because she thinks it sounds cooler. So, do her parents need to be notified? Schools don’t want to take responsibility for making such judgments. Hence this email to parents in Seminole County:

If you would like for your child to be able to use a name aside from their legal given name on any of our campuses, we will ask for you to complete the consent form titled “Parental Authorization for Deviation from Student’s Legal Name Form.”

Orange County announced a similar rule. And yes, it does mean exactly what it says.

The rule would impact everyone from students who prefer using a shorthand nickname (“Tom” versus “Thomas,” for instance), to those who prefer a different name altogether, including transgender students

All my life, I’ve gone by Doug rather than Douglas, the name on my birth certificate. And my parents never had to fill out a form to make that OK.

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Last week, I reported on the controversy over whether the College Board’s AP Psychology course could be taught in Florida schools. As of last week, the state Department of Education was saying it could be taught “in a manner that is age and developmentally appropriate.” Nobody knew what that really meant, so several school districts announced they still wouldn’t teach the course.

And in a phone call Tuesday, a spokesperson for Brevard Public Schools, a district about 50 miles east of Orlando, said it was also abiding by the Education Department’s initial guidance, referring NBC News to a statement from the district last week.

“In essence, if we don’t teach all of the content, our students will not receive AP credit. If we do teach all of the content, our instructors will violate the law,” the statement said. “Therefore, we will not offer AP Psychology at any of our high schools this year.”

Wednesday, Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. tried to make the state’s position clearer:

It is the Department of Education’s stance that the learning target, 6.P ‘Describe how sex and gender influence socialization and other aspects of development,’ within Topic 6.7, can be taught consistent with Florida law

But even with that explicit permission, some school districts are not willing to take the chance that the way they do teach AP Psych will match Diaz’s official view of how it can be taught. So the class won’t be reinserted into their course catalogs.

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This week something similar happened with Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet may be a classic, but fundamentally it’s about two teens who have sex despite their parents’ disapproval. And sure, it’s a tragedy and (spoilers!) they both wind up dead. But still, the whole love-and-death saga is kind of glorious somehow, especially from an emo-adolescent perspective. (According to “Don’t Fear the Reaper” they’re “together in eternity” and “we can be like they are”.) Is this “age appropriate” for high school students? In Ron DeSantis’ Christo-fascist Florida?

So, citing the bard’s overall “raunchiness”, Hillsborough County announced that it would only teach excerpts of Shakespeare, not whole plays, and several other counties were considering following that example. The bad press from those decisions caused FDoE to issue another explicit permission:

The Florida Department of Education in no way believes Shakespeare should be removed from Florida classrooms.

So R&J is back in sophomore English, and all’s well that ends well, so OK then. But still, these episodes underline something I find disturbing: In practice, Florida schools have become a place where everything not explicitly permitted is forbidden. So what happens to literature less canonized than Romeo and Juliet or topics that don’t have the College Board lobbying for them? As the vagueness of Florida’s new laws causes schools to steer clear of anything that might fall into the enormous gray zone those laws have created, how many valuable works — full of ideas that might engage teens, make them think, or spark meaningful discussions — are being swept out the door without making headlines?

Plutarch once wrote (more or less): “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.” But teachers are never fired for failing to kindle young minds. Being dull and demonstrating to your students that education is pointless can be the safest course — especially in Florida.

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But the development that best displays the Orwellian nature of DeSantis’ “Freedom from Indoctrination” slogan is Florida’s approval of Prager University videos for use in the public schools. That’s discussed in the featured post.

and you also might be interested in …

The ongoing war between red states and their blue cities has claimed a new victim: Houston school libraries. Houston schools have been taken over by the state, leaving locally elected school boards with little say.

In Houston, Texas, dozens of public schools won’t have librarians and traditional libraries when classes start later this month. It’s part of a controversial reform effort in the state’s largest school district. The new superintendent says schools in working-class areas need good teachers more than they need librarians.

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While we continue to worry about inflation, China is experiencing deflation. This can be an even more serious problem, because it can lead to cascading bankruptcies: As money gains value, debts become harder to repay. So people and businesses sell assets to raise cash, depressing prices further.

What an inflating West and a deflating China means for the world economy is hard to predict.

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Using government power to make “woke” corporations toe the conservative line isn’t just a DeSantis thing, it’s catching on in Republican circles generally. Here, Fox News’ Laura Ingraham warns Apple and Disney that when Republicans regain power “everything will be on the table — your copyright and trademark protection, your special status within certain states, and even your corporate structure itself”.

Recall that Mussolini’s definition of fascism was the merger of state and corporate power.

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I can’t explain why the Montgomery dock brawl went viral the way it did, but it inspired some great creativity, including this version using the theme to “Good Times” and ending with some white folding chairs painted into a Harlem Renaissance artwork.

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If you’re not following Kat Abu on social media, you should be. She watches Fox News so you don’t have to, and summarizes it in a way that will usually make you laugh rather than fume.

I sometimes picture a gaggle of blond Fox News hosts watching Kat and saying, “Girl, if you just used more make-up and changed your hair, you could get a job here.”

and let’s close with something artificial

If there’s one thing AI is perfect for, it’s producing stereotypes. Most of the time that’s a problem. If you’re trusting AI to write your term paper on Transylvania, for example, you’ll need to make sure you aren’t repackaging a bunch of vampire mythology as fact. But somebody used AI to create images of the most stereotypical person from each of the 50 states.

They aren’t intended to be funny, just stereotypical. Here’s the Californian.