The Weekly Sift

A man does what’s right when no one is watching. He upholds his commitments to his family and neighbors. He doesn’t lie, cheat, & steal his way through life. Real men serve others. Weak men serve themselves.

– James Talarico

This week’s featured post is “All Americans Need Pride Now“.

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. To me the week’s most disturbing quote was from DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin. Testifying before a Senate committee, Mullin was asked (by Chris Murphy) whether he would commit to following court orders. Mullin could not say yes. Instead, he said he would follow orders he believed were legitimate, but not politically biased ones. In other words, he will be the judge of what the law says. That’s not how the rule of law works.
• Climate change. El Nino continues to build, threatening record heat this summer.
• Iran. Nothing new to report: Trump keeps saying Iran is defeated and a deal is at hand that will achieve all his goals. Iran keeps refusing to act like it’s defeated. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed and the world’s oil reserves continue to sink.
• Ukraine. Phillips O’Brien’s biweekly updates continue to be the easiest good way to keep track of this conflict. Ukraine’s growing drone-and-missile campaign is making it increasingly difficult for Putin to claim that everything is OK.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about budgets

The Senate passed the Republicans’ reconciliation bill. It needs to go back to the House now, where there may yet be some snags. Prevailing opinion is that it will wind up on Trump’s desk by the end of the week.

If you remember, originally this was about whether Congress could stop ICE and the Border Patrol from being rogue agencies that terrorize American cities and run concentration camps. But as so often happens, once the train started rolling a lot of other controversial issues got attached to it. So it’s easy to forget that this all started when Trump’s storm troopers murdered Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis. Democrats then proposed tying funding to some common-sense limits, the kinds of limits all other law-enforcement organizations already follow, like not wearing masks and going to a judge to get warrants.

Republicans refused to compromise on this, so the funding had to be dropped from the big appropriation bills that funded the rest of the government and then the rest of DHS. By going the reconciliation route, Republicans no longer needed Democratic votes, so they added a nasty kicker to the bill: It funds ICE for three years rather than the usual one. So if Democrats retake Congress in the fall, they won’t be able to defund this rogue agency. In essence, the reconciliation bill puts ICE beyond the power of the voters.

For a while the bill included money for Trump’s White House ballroom and the fund to pay off the thugs who rioted for him on January 6. But those provisions were too toxic even for Republicans, so they were removed. Acting AG Todd Blanche went so far as to say that the administration was dropping the proposed thug-fund, but he wouldn’t put it in writing, and Democrats failed to get explicit language into the reconciliation bill disallowing the fund. Trump says he still loves the idea, so we’ll see it again, either after he signs the bill or maybe after the fall elections.

But that dispute is about the current year’s budget. By October Congress will need to pass next year’s budget, where Trump wants to raise defense spending from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion.

Timothy Snyder observes that this kind of increase doesn’t make sense in any conventional frame.

Increasing the military budget from about a trillion dollars to about 1.5 trillion dollars makes no fiscal sense. We can’t pay for it without destroying basic government functions and soaking the American taxpayer. It makes no military sense. It is based upon no doctrinal innovation or review of technology. The “Trump-class” battleships it proposes are archaic, nonsensical, and more than a little embarrassing. The budget proposal makes no managerial sense. The Pentagon has never passed an audit, and Pete Hegseth has proven himself spectacularly unable to manage organizations of any kind. Putting an additional half a trillion dollars under his authority annually is superpower suicide.

It’s not like this is a Sputnik moment and we suddenly realize our potential adversaries are way ahead of us. It’s not like $1 trillion represented a whittled-down military that needs to be rebuilt. It’s also not like there’s an upswelling of public opinion demanding more defense. If you asked Americans what they want the Pentagon to spend $500 billion more on, you’d draw a blank from the vast majority of voters. And virtually nobody would volunteer to sacrifice their own benefits — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, etc. — to pay for a bigger military.

So why then? Snyder has a theory:

The military budget proposal … makes authoritarian political sense. It is designed to popular among the people with guns who Trump imagines will help him control the population at large (and they should realize this, and they should be offended.) It shifts taxpayer money to soldiers and officers in exchange for their personal loyalty to an aspiring dictator. It is a bribe to stay in power as part of an attempt to change the regime of the United States. It is not a military budget but a military dictatorship budget.

and 60 Minutes

The story so far: Skydance Media, controlled by the Trump-allied Ellison family, bought Paramount Global, giving them control of CBS. The merger raised anti-trust issues, so Paramount paid a bribe to Trump (and fired Stephen Colbert after he used the word “bribe” on the air) to let it go through.

The Ellisons then turned CBS News over to Bari Weiss, whose experience was mainly as a opinion writer for print media. So she begins her career in broadcast journalism at the top, as head of the organization made great by people like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. I don’t have to summarize Weiss’ career, because John Oliver already did.

Weiss’ career has centered on claims of “liberal media bias”. So since taking over, Weiss has shifted CBS Evening News to the right, which has been disastrous for its ratings: CBS is never going to win over Fox News viewers, so all they have done is alienate the viewers they already had.

This week, she brought her wrecking ball to 60 Minutes, the most popular news show on television. Of course, she had already messed with 60 Minutes before, in December. Hours before its scheduled airing, she pulled Sharyn Alfonsi’s outstanding report on the CECOT prison in El Salvador that Trump was deporting people to. After the episode was leaked by a Canadian broadcaster, garnering Weiss a lot of bad press, she relented and let the episode air (with a few changes) four weeks later. Stephen Miller demanded that the people responsible for the report be fired, which Weiss at the time did not do.

But a week ago Thursday, heads began to roll, beginning with Alfonsi, but also including correspondent Cecilia Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich. Last Monday, correspondent Scott Pelley told the executives what he thought about their moves, and was subsequently fired himself. (Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, Anderson Cooper had left the show voluntarily in mid-May.)

Friday, the remaining correspondents — Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim — said they plan to stay on. But their joint statement was hardly a vote of confidence in the new leadership.

We want to express how sorry we are that these principled, fair and honest journalists were treated so shabbily, with such indecency. Tanya deserves to be celebrated, not cruelly cast off. Draggan too. It’s been heartbreaking. But, we have decided to stay on. We feared that our returning might be construed as an endorsement of the existing power structure. That is simply, categorically not the case. Here’s why we’re are staying: We don’t want to see 60 Minutes die.

Pelley gave an interview to the NYT where he fleshed out some of his previous claims of political interference from Weiss.

[A]bout four hours after our deadline, Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.

This is not what you see on the video. On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her, and says something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company.

We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss. The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said about that, and that’s the way she wanted it described.

Jay Rosen is an insightful observer of journalism. Here’s his take: Maybe CBS looks so chaotic because no two executives are playing the same game.

If you follow the mess at CBS, don’t dismiss the possibility that Ellison thinks he’s been clear about playing nice with Trump, while Bari Weiss thinks she can get by with “Center Right,” while Nick Bilton thinks it’s Mike Wallace all over again— but super digital. All at once.

and the SpaceX scam

Elon Musk’s SpaceX (SPCX) will become a publicly traded company on Friday. This is sketchy for a bunch of reasons.

• If the stock trades at anything like the asking price, it will be the biggest initial public offering (IPO) ever, raising $75 billion for the company and valuing the full enterprise at $1.75 trillion. That would launch SpaceX into the top 10 corporations by market capitalization, roughly the same size as Saudi Aramco and ahead of both Facebook and SpaceX’s sister-company Tesla.
• Elon Musk’s stake will be worth over $800 billion, making him the world’s first trillionaire.
• The asking price wildly overvalues the stock. The company is still losing money hand-over-fist, with a $4.3 billion loss in the most recent quarter. With no profits to go by, investors might evaluate the stock by its revenues. SpaceX’s asking price clocks in at 95 times revenues, compared to 20 times for a hot tech stock like Nvidea.
• Musk has occasionally used SpaceX as a piggy-bank for Tesla. In 2025 SpaceX bought $131 million worth of Tesla Cybertrucks, representing 6-9% of the total sales of that marketing disaster.
• Stock exchanges have bent their rules to get SpaceX into their indexes. That means that index funds (which are considered safe investments for retirement accounts) will be forced to buy the stock, no matter how overvalued it is.
• Due to owning higher-vote shares, Musk will control 80% of the votes in any shareholder decision, so he can do anything he wants with the company. Fine print in the SpaceX prospectus means that minority shareholders have very little recourse if he mismanages the company.

When you put it all together, Musk is essentially defrauding America’s retirees. Here’s how the fraud works: Musk has a small-but-loyal following of investors who think he can do no wrong. By only offering a small percentage of SpaceX’s shares in the IPO, he has created a situation where their opinion of SpaceX’s worth can become the market price. Then, index funds will be forced to buy some sizeable percentage of all the shares available, creating an artificial demand that will pop the stock higher — at least temporarily.

The whole scheme is self-referential: People want to get in on the over-valued IPO, because they anticipate being able to sell at an even higher price to the bigger fools in the index funds.

When the market manipulation is over and the stock collapses, your 401k will be left holding the bag.

At the moment, here’s what you need to do: Check your retirement accounts to see if you have any Nasdaq or Russell index funds. If you do, sell them and move the money to an S&P 500 index, because that index hasn’t changed its rules to let SpaceX in prematurely.

In pro-capitalism propaganda, the great entrepreneurs’ quest for wealth creates more wealth than they can capture for themselves, so all of society benefits. This may have been true at certain points in capitalism’s history, but we’re past that now. Our current oligarchs are so powerful that they not only capture all the value of their innovations, they suck wealth away from the rest of us.

It’s worth noting that Musk has profited in the past by scamming the public. Remember DOGE? Musk was going to save the taxpayers $2 trillion in a single year by finding and eliminating government waste. In reality, he saved nothing.

What did the people in America actually get as a result of DOGE? Chaos at Social Security field offices, uncertainties about veterans’ access to critical care, the end of civil rights enforcement in schools, limited staff to go after corporate billionaire tax cheats, an unstaffed consumer complaint database leaving people vulnerable to bank scams, the end of foreign aid programs that led to the death of hundreds of thousands across the globe, and so much more. And that’s only what we’ve seen so far…as time goes on, we will see the impacts of the loss of expertise and capacity across federal agencies.

But in the process Elon walked away with more government contracts and untold quantities of illegally procured government data. Not a bad return for the $290 million he spent getting Trump elected.

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I usually minimize Trump-acting-out stories, because they happen so often and get a lot of coverage without me. But the last few minutes of his Meet the Press interview with Kristen Welker stand out. Trump makes a series of unfounded claims about Democrats cheating in elections, both his 2020 loss to Joe Biden and this week’s California primary. Welker keeps insisting that he provide evidence for those claims — which he does not have because his claims are false. Trump responds by getting angry, insulting Welker, and leaving the set.

It amazes me the deductions many people never make. If you ask a guy for evidence and he starts sputtering insults, it seems obvious to me that he has no evidence. Similarly, if a detention center keeps out people who are legally entitled to inspect it, they must be up to no good in there. How can anyone deny that?

Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton, who turned against Trump and has consequently been prosecuted, will plead guilty to retaining classified information. Bolton appears to be one of the rare Trump enemies who is actually guilty of something, unlike E. Jean Carroll, James Comey, Letitia James, Jerome Powell, Jack Smith, and a host of other people Trump’s Department of Injustice has been investigating and/or prosecuting simply as harassment.

The cartoon points out the irony of Bolton going down for something that Trump did much worse, but got away with after he won the election and took over the government.

Another crime Trump commits himself is insider trading. This week Trump pardoned a former Republican congressman convicted of insider trading. He made hundreds of thousands by trading stocks based on his inside knowledge of upcoming mergers.

A study says that deploying the National Guard to Washington D. C. has had very little effect on crime.

This doesn’t surprise me, because I’ve been to D. C. recently. The Guard seems to be there for show. I saw some troops deployed on the National Mall in daytime. That’s a high-traffic area that has got to be one of the safest places in the city. However, one night after dinner in a restaurant, I had to walk across the Mall after dark. This actually did make me nervous, though nothing happened. But the Guard was nowhere to be seen.

I concluded that the point of the deployment is for a lot of people to see the guardsmen and think “Trump is protecting us.” If nobody is around to see them, though, they don’t need to be there.

The NYT reports on Israel’s use of white phosphorus in Lebanon. I had thought this was a war crime in itself, but apparently the substance is itself legal, and only becomes illegal when it’s used in populated areas.

The Times does its best to tip-toe around accusing Israel of war crimes, but the photos in the article show white phosphorus plumes with buildings in the background.

After the first half-dozen happened with no political consequences, the Navy’s strikes on boats suspected of smuggling drugs have started to seem normal. It’s easy to forget that these are murders. Now we’re up to 200 or so of them.

Fascinating article about how America’s huge national debt interacts badly with the problems Trump caused in the world economy by attacking Iran. First, Jay Martin explains why the debt is not a problem in normal times:

Countries around the world – Japan, the UK, China, South Korea, and dozens of others – hold roughly $9.4 trillion worth of these American IOUs. They bought them because Treasuries are safe, liquid, and denominated in dollars. For decades, this system worked beautifully. The U.S. borrowed cheaply. Foreign governments parked their savings in a safe asset. Everyone won.

But the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has created a situation where lots of our creditors need to cash out at the same time: Oil exporters like the United Arab Emirates have seen their revenues drop without any corresponding drop in expenses. Oil importers like Japan need to pay more for imported oil. They all need to sell their Treasury bonds to raise cash.

Meanwhile, the US also needs to sell Treasuries because we don’t pay enough tax to cover our spending. (The government is running about a $2 trillion deficit this year. If a Democrat were president, this would be a big deal.)

So what happens when the number of sellers go up and the number of buyers doesn’t? Prices fall. Or (saying the same thing another way) buyers are in a position to demand higher interest rates. And if the world economy seems fragile now, picture it operating with higher interest rates.

There’s tough competition to be the least qualified person in a Trump cabinet meeting, but we’re about to have a new leader: Bill Pulte as acting Director of National Intelligence.

Pulte is a third-generation real estate guy and has no experience in intelligence. (The legislation establishing the DNI position lists experience as an essential qualification.) He has been serving as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency where he pleased Trump by cooking up mortgage fraud cases against Trump enemies like Letitia James and Adam Schiff. The James case was dismissed by the judge and Schiff has not been indicted.

We can expect Pulte to do two things as acting DNI: fire a lot of people and use the awesome powers of the intelligence agencies to harass more Trump enemies. We can only imagine how happy China and Russia will be to see America’s intelligence agencies masterminded by this bozo.

Most of us have heard about the leveling off of American life expectancy. Lately it has had some negative years and positive years, but the overall trend has been flat: up only a quarter of a year in the 2010s, compared to an average of 1.75 years per decade in the previous five decades. A variety of explanations have been floated: Covid, deaths of despair, bad diet, and so on.

A recent study looks deeper than the year-by-year mortality stats. It tracks generational cohorts and how their death rates compare to previous cohorts at similar ages. They found something interesting and worrisome: The cohort born in the 1940s had the lowest death rates per year. The 1950s cohort (mine) was only slightly worse, but marked a turn-around.

Among all the findings, the most alarming concerns Americans born after 1970. At the ages these people have already reached, roughly 30 to 49 depending on the cause of death examined, they are already dying at higher rates from heart disease, cancer, and external causes than people born just before them were dying at those same ages. Colon cancer, strongly tied to obesity and diet, is a particular concern, with death rates rising at younger ages beginning with cohorts born around 1955 and worsening from there.

Because the post-1970 generations are still relatively young, they represent a small percentage of total deaths, and so their effect on the nationwide life-expectancy averages hasn’t really shown up yet. But it will. Whether anything similar is happening in similar countries isn’t part of this study, but in recent decades they have been pulling away from the US averages.

and let’s close with a stunt

In honor of the NBA Finals, Jimmy Fallon recaps recent news while using the names of all 30 NBA teams.

We are deeply concerned that what is really being rededicated is a nation to a very narrow and ideological part of the Christian faith that betrays our nation’s fundamental commitment to religious freedom.

– Rev. Adam Russell Taylor on Sunday’s “Rededicate 250” rally

This week’s featured post is “Is Corruption the Democrats’ Unifying Theme?“

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. It just broke today: Trump’s Justice Department established a $1.7 billion fund to pay “damages” the US owes to Trump’s January 6 brownshirts for harassing them by convicting them of their crimes.
• Climate change. I lost track of this issue this week. I’ll do better.
• Iran war. Announcing fake peace deals is getting old, so Trump issuing ominous threats again. The basic situation hasn’t changed: Trump wants Iran to surrender, but he hasn’t defeated them. He talks about a “deal”, but an authentic deal has benefits for both sides.
• Ukraine. The war is still a stalemate, but seems to be turning Ukraine’s way. Both sides are pummeling each other with missile and drone attacks, but Ukraine is attacking strategic industries while Russia is terror-bombing civilian targets.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about Trump in China

I continue to wonder why media outlets cover what Trump says, given how often it turns out to be meaningless. Trump came out of China boasting of “fantastic trade deals”, but no one can get details and Chinese sources don’t verify those deals.

I was surprised to hear Chinese leader Xi Jinping make a classical Greek reference I had to look up. He warned against a “Thucydides Trap“, which is when a declining power feels that it has to fight a war to keep down a rising power. (Thucydides chronicled the Peloponnesian War between rising power Athens and declining power Sparta.)

The reference implicitly slammed the US as a declining power. Trump did not rise to the occasion.

and Black voting rights in the South

One fact to remember when you read articles about redistricting: Prior to the round that began with Texas, gerrymandering had pretty much balanced out. In 2024, Republican congressional candidates won a small majority in the popular vote, and they got a small majority in Congress.

Now, it’s looking like the Republicans have given themselves a 10-15 seat advantage, which probably won’t be enough to save their House majority in November.

and inflation

[Having just posted two Nick Anderson cartoons in a row, I feel obligated to recommend that you subscribe to his Substack or follow him through Raw Story.]

The inflation rate in April hit a 3.8% annual rate, which is higher than the 3% when Trump was inaugurated in January 2025.

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Trump’s approval rating continues to sink: 37% in today’s NYT/Siena poll, and 38% in the NYT’s polling average. Only 30% think the Iran attack was a good decision.

Austin Ahlman is an independent running for Congress in Nebraska against a Republican incumbent and a Democratic challenger. I knew nothing about him yesterday, but today I know that he can make one hell of a campaign video.

Your tax dollars paid for a Christian nationalist rally on the National Mall Sunday. (Remember when the Trump regime was all about rooting out government waste?) “Rededicate 250” was part of Trump’s one-sided celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Religion Unplugged commented:

The Rev. Adam Russell Taylor, a Baptist minister who heads the progressive Christian organization Sojourners, noted: “We are deeply concerned that what is really being rededicated is a nation to a very narrow and ideological part of the Christian faith that betrays our nation’s fundamental commitment to religious freedom.”

The role of Christianity in early American history is complex and should be presented in a nuanced way: Yes, the vast majority of Americans in 1776 thought of themselves as Protestant Christians. (Catholics who buy into the idea that we were founded to be a Christian nation should be careful: The same argument would say that you also are a second-class citizen.) Patrick Henry, for one, would probably fit in well in an Evangelical church today.

However, a significant number of the Founders (Franklin, Jefferson) were essentially Deists, Thomas Paine was very close to being an atheist, and Washington’s Christianity was vague at best. The Constitution does not mention God, which was a radical statement at the time. Contrast it with the Magna Carta, whose second paragraph begins:

KNOW THAT BEFORE GOD, for the health of our soul and those of our ancestors and heirs, to the honour of God, the exaltation of the holy Church, and the better ordering of our kingdom, at the advice of our reverend fathers …

But the Constitution’s only mentions of religion curb religious excess. (“no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States”). The Founders were familiar with the destruction wrought over the centuries as various sects of Christians battled for control of the government of England. That’s why they created a secular government for this country, regardless of any of their personal beliefs.

BTW: All the media accounts I’ve seen refer to “thousands” of people in attendance, which is not that big for an event like this. This picture from WaPo (during Marco Rubio’s presentation) shows a lot empty chairs.

Whether you know it or not, somebody you care about is taking anti-depressant drugs under a prescription from their doctor. In their later years both of my parents did, and both described the effects as life-changing. My father in particular had reached the point of despair, but became himself again.

Our quack Secretary of HHS, RFK Jr., would like to change all that. Speaking from a vast wisdom that doesn’t depend on mundane details like medical studies or other tangible evidence, Kennedy says prescribing anti-depressants is a form of “over-medicalization”, which his fevered imagination pictures as a cause of addiction and even violence. He recommends doctors prescribe non-drug remedies like exercise. (Have you ever tried to get a depressed person to exercise?)

Stat News comments:

Kennedy’s willfully uninformed rhetoric on antidepressants is going to cost lives. The similarity to his anti-vaccine chatter is clear: When you bad-mouth effective, lifesaving vaccines, you end up driving people away from lifesaving medical care. Kennedy’s antidepressant rhetoric is not only based on bad science, it fuels distrust in mental health treatments at a time when adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide rates are at record highs.

The Department of WarDefense has just released a trove of previously classified documents pertaining to UFOs.

I didn’t consider that particularly interesting, but this piece from the WaPo “Awakenings” newsletter is: Belief in UFOs, religion professor Diana Walsh Pasulka notes, is taking on many of the roles traditionally played by religion.

It organizes communities of belief, creates narratives of revelation, offers cosmological meaning and establishes interpretive frameworks through which people understand mysterious experiences and humanity’s place in the universe. … Mistrust of institutions has powered the rise of anti-institutional forms of belief. Religious impulses have migrated into new technological and media environments that bypass gatekeepers.

Historians have been upgrading their opinions of President Dwight Eisenhower. At the time he was often dismissed as a “do-nothing president” who presided over a boring era, providing a backdrop for a charismatic JFK presidency and the socially transformative Johnson presidency.

I wonder if the Trump presidency has raised historians’ opinion of boring government. Yes, Ike didn’t appear to be doing much. But among the things he didn’t do: He didn’t bail out the French after their defeat at Dien Bien Phu. He didn’t roll back the New Deal. He didn’t give in to the temptation to take advantage of our lead in nuclear weapons.

and let’s close with something impressive

This peacock is yet another image from The Guardian’s “Week in Wildlife“.

Our difficulty with the Court today rises not from the Court as an institution but from human beings within it. But we cannot yield our constitutional destiny to the personal judgement of a few men who, being fearful of the future, would deny us the necessary means of dealing with the present.

– Franklin Roosevelt, On “Court Packing”
March 9, 1937

This week’s featured post is “What to do with a lawless Supreme Court?“

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. Like Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth showed his contempt for congressional oversight. Asked fair questions about the Iran War, he fired back without offering any answers.
• Iran war. Still basically a stalemate.
• Climate change. A new study says sea level rise endangers New Orleans by the end of the century. “Relocation” is advised.
• Israel/Palestine. With the world watching Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza, Israeli settlers on the West Bank are driving Palestinians from their homes.
• Ukraine. Phillips O’Brien’s weekly update tentatively suggests that Ukraine is gaining the initiative over Russia.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about voting rights

The Supreme Court’s decision voiding the remainder of the Voting Rights Act is the topic of the featured post.

and abortion access

Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order against mailing the abortion drug mifepristone. Today, the Supreme Court stayed that order for a week.

States that have outlawed abortion, like Louisiana, object to their citizens still having access to it via teleprescriptions and the mail. They allege that taking mifepristone at home is unsafe, though that seems to be a pretext.

It’s not clear what the next step in this case is.

and the war

Nothing major seems to be happening, but it’s hard to tell because of conflicting claims and counter-claims by the two sides. The US claims to have escorted two ships through the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians claim to have hit a US warship.

The two sides’ peace proposals continue to be far apart. Iran’s 14 points are all about ending US attacks without any concessions on their part. US proposals want Iran to turn over its nuclear material and swear off future nuclear ambitions without any concessions on our part.

Meanwhile, oil remains around $114 per barrel. Paul Krugman keeps pointing to the physical constraints: The world is burning more oil than is being shipped. If this continues, the stockpiles will run out. At that point, if not before, the price will have to rise high enough that demand falls to equal supply.

and the Comey indictment

Nearly a year ago, James Comey photographed seashells arranged to spell out “86/47”, which Trump and his loyalists exaggerated into a threat of assassination (86) against Trump (47). As soon as Comey heard this interpretation, he took the photo down and apologized.

Now he has been indicted for making a threat and transmitting it over social media. Each count carries a maximum sentence of ten years in prison.

The whole thing is absurd on many levels, and illustrates just how far the current Justice Department will go to harass people Trump views as his enemies.

• 86 has a variety of meanings, and it’s not clear that killing someone is even the most typical one.
• We’re not sure whether Comey arranged the shells himself, or just found someone else’s arrangement on a beach.
• Comey denies he intended the photo as a threat, and no evidence publicly available indicates otherwise.
• It’s not clear whether Comey is supposed to have intended to carry out this alleged threat himself, or was saying that someone should do it.
• In all previous cases, statements like this unconnected to a specific plan aren’t prosecuted under this statute. Simply saying “Somebody should kill this guy” is just free speech unless you are directly inciting somebody to do it. Ditto for “I’d like to kill this guy” if you have no specific plan to do so.

A judge will throw this out well before a jury hears it.

Isn’t it wonderful that the US is so crime-free that the Justice Department can waste its time on stuff like this?

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The government owes billions in refunds to American businesses that paid Trump’s illegal tariffs. The big corporations have lawyers and other specialists to navigate the refund process, so they’ll probably get their money back. But small businesses probably won’t.

The DHS funding shutdown is over, except for funding Trump’s mass deportation programs. Republicans are preparing a reconciliation measure this summer to fund ICE and the border patrol through the end of Trump’s term, presumably so that next year’s Democratic Congress won’t have any leverage over these rogue agencies.

Democrats objected to funding ICE and CBP without restrictions after the videotaped murders of Alex Pretti and Rene Good in Minneapolis in January. The agents who committed these crimes have faced no charges, and federal agencies have done everything they could to block Minnesota’s investigations.

Democratic senators have been asking Trump’s judicial nominees who won the 2020 election and whether Trump could run for a third term in 2028. They can’t answer clearly, which should make everyone doubt their objectivity and resistance to Trump’s intimidation.

On Star Wars Day, Paul Krugman compares the proposed Trump battleships to the Death Star. The difference: The Death Star actually got built.

Trump’s new surgeon general nominee is yet another Fox News talking head, but at least this one has an active medical license. She says a lot of questionable things, but doesn’t appear to be crazy.

60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi received the Ridenhour Courage Prize for standing up to CBS’ management efforts to alter her piece on El Salvador’s CECOT Prison, where the Trump administration had sent a number of migrants.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. Fear is a funny thing – it can paralyze you, or it can point you to exactly what needs to be protected. Right now, our industry is afraid of the wrong things. We’re afraid of offending power. We’re afraid of losing access. We’re afraid of another baseless lawsuit. But what we should all be afraid of is silence. Because as I learned [at her first job as a waitress], there is a fine line between being a team player and being an accomplice.

The Ridenhour Prizes are named for Ron Ridenhour, who exposed the My Lai massacre. They’ve been awarded since 2004, with the first prize going to Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

and let’s close with something wild

If you want to get your mind off the news, The Guardian’s “Week in Wildlife” gallery is a good choice. The squirrel above appears to be adjusting the camera.

The war has accelerated or made evident a trend that was already there, which is that the whole Trump administration is about a kind of rebalancing of power, so that we are less powerful and our rivals are more powerful.

– Timothy Snyder

There is no featured post this week.

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. The Hungarian election has no direct effect on the US, but Viktor Orbán’s landslide defeat (after Trump and Vance pulled out all the tops to support him) has to worry the Trump regime. Orbán was the prototype, and he failed.
• Climate change. The difficulty opening the Strait of Hormuz and the resulting $100-per-barrel oil should motivate more countries to transition away from fossil fuels.
• Israel/Palestine. The focus of conflict has moved to Lebanon, where Israel is applying a tactic it used in Gaza: domicide, i.e., to “systematically destroy and damage civilian housing to render entire areas uninhabitable”.
• Ukraine. One winner from the Hungarian election is Ukraine. Orbán was Putin’s man in the EU, and his objection was standing in the way of the EU making a 90 billion euro loan to Ukraine.
• Epstein. The Iran War had gotten the Epstein scandal out of the headlines, but Melania put if back in. What was she thinking?

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the “peace” talks with Iran

One downside of taking a vacation is that I have missed my chance to say “I told you so” about the ceasefire and negotiations, because I did not in fact tell you so. During my vacation I told other people that Trump would announce a fake ceasefire, falsely claim that Iran had agreed to all kinds of concessions, and then resume the war when the reality became clear. But I have no written record to point to.

The reality is this: Trump badly miscalculated when he started this war. American air power can destroy anything it wants in Iran (other than the deeply buried uranium stocks), but it can’t make the Iranians surrender.

Trump, though, lives an in alternate reality where his power is absolute. J. D. Vance’s mission was doomed from the start because he went to Islamabad not to negotiate peace, but to dictate terms to an enemy Trump falsely insists is defeated. Vance explained his failure: “They have chosen not to accept our terms.” Of course they wouldn’t. As pummeled as Iran’s military currently is, the nation is not defeated. Defeating them will require either hundreds of thousands of ground troops or a willingness to commit genocide.

Increasingly, however, Trump’s alternate reality is being taken seriously in mainstream media. After Vance’s entirely predictable failure, The Washington Post wrote:

The involvement of Vice President JD Vance had raised hopes around the world that the weekend negotiations in Pakistan would solidify the ceasefire with Iran and put an end to the war within reach.

Really? Bill Grueskin commented on BlueSky:

In what universe did this take place?

The WaPo article went on to describe Vance as “President Donald Trump’s most high-profile war skeptic“, which is probably how Vance will try to pitch himself in 2028. But there is no evidence that his pre-war self-description as a “skeptic of foreign military interventions” actually resulted in any protest once Trump started bombing.

As many people have reported, Trump went into the war with his Venezuela adventure as a model: A quick decapitation strike would convince the new leaders to do whatever Trump wanted.

Trump understood the Venezuelan leaders, because fundamentally they are like him: They are interested primarily in their own wealth and power, so there is nothing they are willing to die for. Iran’s leaders, on the other hand, are willing to lose everything including their lives. So Trump has no idea how to deal with them.

So Trump’s latest idea is to blockade the Strait of Hormuz himself. He didn’t like the idea that Iran could profit by charging tolls on the Strait, so he’s going to block everything, no matter what that does to the price of oil. And that would make sense if the Iranian leaders were motivated by profit the way Trump is. But they’re not, so Trump is essentially doing their job for them: Iran intended to disrupt the world economy by driving up the price of oil, and now Trump is helping them do it.

In a few days it will be clear that this move didn’t work either, so Trump will go back to threatening to kill Iran’s “whole civilization“.

Two points:

• Ending a country’s “civilization” is a war crime. And since the world does not recognize a Nuremberg defense (“I was just following orders”), Trump will be involving members of the American military in war crimes. If anyone you care about is in the military, this should worry you.
• Like Netanyahu before him, Trump has fallen for the fallacy that if your opponent is evil, you can’t become the bad guy. But you can. Hamas is certainly evil, but nonetheless Netanyahu became the bad guy in the Gaza War. The Iranian regime is likewise evil. But if Trump’s unprovoked attack on Iran turns genocidal, he will be the bad guy.

For a high-level view of the Iran War and its place in geo-political strategy, I recommend listening to an hour-long conversation between Timothy Snyder (author of On Tyranny) and Phillips O’Brien (author of War and Power). That’s where the quote at the top comes from.

One scary conclusion they come to: The Iran War proves we would lose a non-nuclear war with China over Taiwan. Modern war is less about the big, expensive systems the US military is based on and more about manufacturing large numbers of cheap drones and similar devices. In World War II, the US was “the arsenal of democracy“, because we could manufacture planes, tanks, ships, and other munitions in larger quantities than anyone else. We’ve lost that edge. In the Iran War, we are firing advanced munitions like Tomahawk and Patriot missiles many times faster than we can build them.

Conversely, if you want to manufacture large numbers of things quickly today, where do you go? China. In a war with China, if we couldn’t win in a week, we would run out of weapons and lose.

Snyder and O’Brien both like the nonprofit foundation Come Back Alive, which supplies the Ukrainian military. As they describe it, CBA connects what the Ukrainians need to garage-level workshops that make drones and anti-drone tech. Their tech evolves constantly and is currently some of the best in the world.

and Hungary

The model for Trump’s Project 2025 and his overall attempt to strangle American democracy has been what Viktor Orbán did in Hungary: change election laws to favor his party, get legal immunity from a corrupt judiciary, use government power to push the media into friendly hands, turn the universities away from objective scholarship into pro-government propaganda vehicles, tame big business through corrupt government regulating and contracting, and so forth.

The goal, at least immediately, is not a Hitler/Stalin style dictatorship where political opponents can be killed at will or arrested and sent to concentration camps. Instead, the government establishes a soft autocracy that maintains the appearance of freedom and democracy, but stacks the deck in ways that prevent the formation of any effective opposition. Vox sums up:

The basic goal was to create a system where the government doesn’t have to formally rig elections, in the sense of stuffing ballot boxes. It could generally rely on the background unfairness of the system, the structural disadvantages opposition parties face, to reliably maintain a constitutional majority. Political scientists call this kind of regime “competitive authoritarianism” — a system in which elections are real, but so unfair that they can’t reasonably be termed democratic contests.

… The result of all this has been a remarkably durable authoritarian system. In the 2014 and 2018 elections, Fidesz [i.e., Orbán’s party] managed to retain its two-thirds majority in parliament with less than half of the national popular vote. In 2022, the various opposition parties united around a single candidate and party list to try and overcome its structural disadvantages — and Fidesz actually improved its vote share, easily retaining its two-thirds majority.

The flaw in that model is that if the public gets sufficiently united against the government, the official thumb on the scale might not be heavy enough.

Sunday, Hungarians took advantage of what power they have left to oust Orbán. After 16 years in power, his party was decisively swept out. The opposition has won a 2/3rds supermajority in Parliament, which is big enough to undo the constitutional changes Orbán made.

I happened to be in Budapest Thursday, on a tour I arranged last fall without any journalistic motive. I don’t speak Hungarian and had little opportunity to talk to the locals, but I did see the election posters dominating every flat surface, and workmen setting up for a huge opposition concert Friday. I worried about a violent outcome to the election, so I was not sorry to get out before the action started.

and the astronauts

Sadly, the Artemis II mission all but vanished from the headlines. I’m showing my age here, but I remember when the whole nation was transfixed by each new space flight. One of the few things my grandfather and I were both interested in was watching the countdown for John Glenn’s launch. In school, we took time out of class to watch an unmanned mission that did nothing more than stick a TV camera onto a rocket and slam it into the Moon.

The four astronauts of Artemis II looped around the Moon, went farther from Earth than any human ever has, and successfully returned to Earth on Friday.

and you also might be interested in …

The week’s most mysterious story is why Melania called a news conference to read a statement saying that she was not connected to Jeffrey Epstein. She was not responding to anything obvious in the news cycle, so her main accomplishment was to start people wondering whether what she is denying is actually true.

New York magazine speculates:

The most logical explanation: The First Lady is trying to get ahead of forthcoming story about her ties to Epstein. But there are no specific rumors about such a story circulating on social media; it’s all just conjecture based on Melania’s statement.

But The Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi offers a simpler theory:

I have another possible explanation. And that is that the Trumps aren’t just morally bankrupt, they’re also very, very stupid. A lot of people seem reluctant to acknowledge this about the president; they will tie themselves into knots trying to argue that his erratic actions actually represent a genius playing four-dimensional chess. He’s not really a madman, they insist, he’s just playing one on Truth Social! I understand why people want to believe this: it’s comforting to think there’s some sort of method behind the madness. But if there is any sort of method, I certainly can’t see it. All I can see is a man who thinks he can bully his way through life.

Here’s the thing: even if you are blessed with “a very high IQ”, when you are as rich and powerful as the Trumps, you can easily lose perspective. People rarely say “no” to you. Your employees don’t tell you that your ideas are ridiculous because they don’t want to lose their jobs. Melania may not be the president, but she is in the same sycophantic bubble as her husband. It’s possible she just thought she could hold a press conference and command all us plebs to stop talking about her, and we would immediately obey.

It’s hard to top The Onion’s take on this: “Melania Trump Slams Baseless Reports Linking Her To Wrong Wealthy Pedophile“.

US Congressman and recent top contender to be the next governor of California Eric Swalwell has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least four women so far. He has denied the accusations, but a Democrat can’t ride something like this out the way Republicans can. He has suspended his campaign for governor, and I’ll be surprised if he hangs on to the House seat.

I’m always amazed by candidates who imagine something like this won’t come out. How do you recruit people to spend two years or more trying to get you elected, when you know that something you’ve done could result in all their effort being wasted?

As Congress returns to work, there is still no plan to fund DHS, and Trump really wants action on the vote-suppressing SAVE Act.

The regime revealed plans for Trump’s “arch of victory” monument, which is planned to be 250 feet tall. This motivated The Contrarian’s Tim Dickinson to review all the things Trump wants to name after himself.

All this self-aggrandizement is futile. As soon as he’s gone, everything he’s done will be reversed. The Kennedy Center will be the Kennedy Center again. Trump class battleships will never be built. The White House ballroom will be repurposed and renamed.

As for the money he’s planning to add his signature to, I think we can shame him out of it. You can get little stamping pads to add comments to currency. I think every Trump dollar should have “is America’s worst president” added to it.

Remember what Conan O’Brien said at the Oscars: “Welcome back, we are coming to you live from the Has a Small Penis Theater! Let’s see him put his name in front of that.”

and let’s close with something far out

The Artemis II crew got some new views of the Earth and the Moon. Here we see how everything is relative: the Earth setting over the Moon looks tiny.

The transition to pathocracy begins when a disordered individual emerges as a leader figure. While some members of the ruling class are appalled by the brutality and irresponsibility of the leader and his acolytes, his disordered personality appeals to some psychologically normal individuals. They find him charismatic. His impulsiveness is mistaken for decisiveness; his narcissism for confidence; his recklessness for fearlessness.

– Steve Taylor, “The Problem of Pathocracy“

This week’s featured post is “The Longer View“, where three articles try to answer the question “What’s wrong with those people in the Trump administration?”

Ongoing stories

This week I didn’t have the time and energy to look at the ongoing stories I usually keep track of. I’ll try to do better next week.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was still talking about Iran

I don’t think I need to say a lot about the progress of the war: The US and Israel continue to blow things up in Iran and in Lebanon, and while Iranian casualties are far larger than ours, we’re still getting our own people killed. And they’re dying for some goal that seems to exist only in Trump’s inarticulate mind. He certainly hasn’t figured out a way to explain it to the rest of us.

As the cartoon indicates, even though everyday Americans are largely insulated from the killing (at least until the next big terrorist attack), the war has significant effects everyone can see: immediately, higher gas prices, and down the road, higher prices overall.

Trump appears to have thought through none of this. Articles about how the go-to-war decision got made are largely based on anonymous sources, so they’re not as reliable as I’d like. But they do all paint a similar picture: Trump imagined his Iran attack going like Venezuela: He’d take out the country’s leadership, and the next leaders would be so intimidated they’d cooperate with whatever plan he came up with. It would all be over in a few days.

No one else thought it would go that way, including a lot of folks inside the administration. What has happened since was easily predictable: Iran’s theocratic leadership would take a next-man-up approach. The next leader would face the prospect of martyrdom with the same dispassion the last leader did and would refuse to surrender. Iran would attack US allies in the region with missiles and drones, and they would shut the Strait of Hormuz, jacking up world oil prices.

But in his second administration, Trump has surrounded himself with opportunists, weaklings, and cowards. No one is willing to lose his job to save the country from some wrong-headed notion that gets into the Great Leader’s head. So: We’re at war, gas prices are high and rising, overall inflation will start rising soon, victory remains undefined, and the Iranian regime is as entrenched as ever. We face the prospect of either stopping our attack without any lasting accomplishment, or significantly escalating the war with either ground troops or nuclear weapons.

So far, I haven’t heard anyone in the administration talk specifically about nuclear weapons, so my mention of them in the previous paragraph may seem unwarranted.

But I worry about them anyway. As I’ve said before, Trump has only two ways of dealing with opposition: buy them off or intimidate them. If opponents refuse to be intimidated, he makes a series of ever more extreme threats — which he is then on the spot to carry out.

We’re already running low on conventional munitions, so Trump’s threats to hit Iran “20 times harder” if they don’t surrender are mostly empty — unless he goes to nukes. I have trouble picturing him backing down on his threats, given what he’s said in the past, and I also don’t trust the people around him to tell him no.

Wednesday, Iran flexed its cyber-terrorism muscle. The Iranian hacker group Handala somehow got high-level privileges on the network of medical device maker Stryker. At the very least, the attack will delay delivery of devices. But it raises the possibility of homocidal mischief in the future.

Chillingly, Stryker’s chief of IT emphasizes that nothing went wrong on the technical side:

I build the robots that perform your surgery. The defibrillators that restart your heart. The systems that let your nurse find your doctor at three in the morning when something goes wrong. Twenty-five billion dollars a year. Fifty-six thousand employees. Sixty-one countries. Every device in every country, managed from one console.

On March 11th, someone who was not me sat down at that console and erased everything. I should be precise. They did not hack us. They logged in. … My security tool did not fail. It performed exactly as designed. It wiped every device it was told to wipe, without error, on schedule. The architect of my destruction was my own IT budget line item. The command went out. The devices obeyed.

The man who rammed his vehicle into a synagogue in Michigan quite likely was motivated by learning that four of his family members had been killed in Lebanon by an Israel bombing raid. He was wrong to do what he did, and it is fortunate no one died but the perpetrator. But it’s not hard for me to imagine being in that situation and feeling like the only conceivable response is to kill someone.

Saturday, Trump asked other countries to help clean up his mess.

In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump called on the UK, China, France, Japan, South Korea and other countries to send ships to the waterway, the world’s busiest shipping route, which is being violently blockaded by Iran. In his post, Trump alleged that “many countries, especially those who are affected by Iran’s attempted closure of the Hormuz strait, will be sending war ships, in conjunction with the United States of America, to keep the strait open and safe”.

In a later post, Trump extended his call to all “the countries of the world that receive oil through the Hormuz strait” to send naval support.

But countries are not exactly jumping up to volunteer.

German chancellor Friedrich Merz’s spokesperson, Stefan Kornelius, underlined that “it is not Nato’s war. Nato is an alliance to defend the alliance area.”

The time to look for allies is before you start a war, not after. Trump is like the guy who starts a bar fight nobody else wanted without giving his buddies any warning, but then expects them to come fight on his side.

Josh Marshall asked the same question I’ve been wondering about: Why do oil markets respond to what Trump says, when so much of what he says is nonsense?

Most of us are losers in this war, but there are a few winners: Putin and the major oil companies. But some people and countries are less vulnerable to oil prices, because they invested in renewable energy and electric vehicles, both of which Trump has discouraged in the US.

and the law

Courts have been proving troublesome to the Trump administration.

Friday, a judge unsealed an opinion quashing subpoenas in the investigation of Fed chair Jerome Powell. The investigation appears to be nothing more than an effort to harass Powell into doing what Trump wants: lowering interest rates. The US attorney’s brief in support of the subpoenas vaguely asserts that cost overruns in renovations at the Fed might be due to fraud, and that testimony Powell gave to Congress might be false. No further specifics are given.

After the opinion was released, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro went on a rant about “activist judges”. But

The striking thing about the brief, and about Pirro’s press conference, in fact, is that neither seems remotely concerned with establishing that there is a predicate for a criminal investigation at all. … [N]either shows any awareness that investigative agencies aren’t supposed to initiate criminal investigations at all without an appropriate evidentiary predicate.

In her rant, Pirro “said she was willing to see acquittals and willing to see grand juries reject her proposed indictments”. Grand juries used to almost never reject the government’s attempts to indict someone. But now they regularly do, because the government pursues so many indictments purely to harass Trump’s enemies.

Lawfare examines proposals circulating in administration circles for Trump to declare a national emergency to take control of the fall elections. Unsurprisingly, such an order would likely be illegal.

While the SAVE Act appears blocked in the Senate, Florida has passed its own version, which Gov. DeSantis is expected to sign:

Under the new law, a voter registration applicant’s citizenship status must be verified by the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. Until that happens, an applicant will be registered as an unverified voter and must vote with a provisional ballot that will not be counted if his or her legal status as a citizen cannot be verified through the department’s records.

The law doesn’t just impact new registrations. It also requires the Florida Department of State to verify the citizenship status of all registered voters who have not already been verified as U.S. citizens. If the citizenship status of a registered voter cannot be established or the voter record does not indicate that the registered voter’s citizenship is verified, the department must notify local election officials, who then notify the registered voter.

Unless courts intervene, we can expect chaos in Florida in November.

Remember all those people claiming that ICE agents were randomly rounding up brown people because they had arrest quotas to meet? A wild, crazy accusation, right?

Well, now some ICE agents have been interviewed under oath, and it turns out they were supposed to make eight arrests a day. They found people to arrest using a custom AI-app that made a lot of mistakes. And this part is beyond parody:

JB said the team decided to follow the van once it departed, even though officers didn’t confirm whether the driver of the van was, in fact, the registered owner of the vehicle. JB found it suspicious that the driver was making multiple stops for passengers, saying: “You don’t know if it’s human trafficking or smuggling.” The fact that the occupants were “only speaking Spanish” during the stop seemed to “confirm” there was smuggling or “harboring people that are not supposed to be here in the United States”, JB said.

It was a car pool, taking farm workers to their worksite. But

JB’s team pulled over a van of farm workers heading to their job early in the morning, smashed the car windows and detained all seven occupants.

One of them, a plaintiff in the suit that resulted in this deposition, had entered the US legally. But she

was taken to a detention center in Washington state before ICE released her “without explanation and left her to find her own way back home to Oregon”.

Princeton law Professor Deborah Pearlstein explains how the Trump administration is trying to make it OK for its lawyers to lie in court.

Under the proposed rule, the attorney general could ask any independent disciplinary authority to suspend ethics proceedings against a Justice Department lawyer (on threat of unspecified enforcement action) and send the matter to the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility. But a review by that office is not a serious substitute for a state bar investigation. Even before Mr. Trump, the office, which answers to a political appointee, had a reputation for operating like a black hole, with the details of investigative findings almost never made public.

and trans people

The effort to demonize and dehumanize the trans community continues.

So, most but not all states allow you to change or choose the gender marker on your driver’s license. Blocking that is one level of discrimination, but the state of Kansas has taken it a step further: They retroactively cancelled any license where the gender had been changed while it was legal to do so: 1700 of them in all.

Hundreds of trans drivers already received letters from the state informing them their documents were “invalid immediately” and they “may be subject to additional penalties” if they continue to drive, unless they surrender the license to the Kansas Division of Vehicles and receive a new one with their birth sex.

Does forcing the gender on a drivers license to match the one on the corresponding birth certificate solve any problem? Let’s think about what drivers licenses are for and how they’re used. It makes perfect sense for states to want to keep track of who can drive on their roads and to impose standards to disqualify unsafe drivers. In addition, drivers licenses get used as an commonly available form of ID.

Why is gender on a license at all? Like height and eye color and the picture, it helps verify that you really are the licensed person. But if your appearance corresponds to a different gender than the one on your license, that actually makes the license less useful as ID. Worse, it sets you up for discrimination and abuse: Anyone who has a legitimate reason to ask for your license now knows that you’re trans.

Now think about situations where you might show your drivers license. Is there any reason why a policeman or a cashier or anybody else needs to know what gender is on your birth certificate? I can’t think of one. So this law solves absolutely zero problems.

All it does is harass trans people and expose them to discrimination and abuse. The only motive Kansas had to pass this law was to encourage such discrimination and abuse.

Last week, I talked about how the Supreme Court only takes “sincerely held religious beliefs” seriously if they are conservative religious beliefs about topics like abortion or gender.

Example: On March 2, the Court set aside a California law that prevents schools from telling parents about a student’s change in gender presentation without the student’s permission. The Court said the law prevents parents from implementing their sincerely held beliefs in the religious upbringing of their children.

It remains to be seen whether teachers and school districts who keep a child’s confidences will be held liable in some way. If a child ever confided some deep issue to me and asked me not to tell their parents, I would hope that my first response would not be to go rat them out. (I haven’t had that conversation about gender transition, but I have occasionally kept confidences about drugs or sex.) That practice comes from my sincerely held moral beliefs, which I fear the current Court would not recognize.

I also wonder when a student’s behavior might trip such a requirement. If Samantha tells her teachers she wants to be called Sam, and starts wearing gender-nonspecific jeans and t-shirts, are they supposed to call the parents?

It’s a telling point that the version of the SAVE Act (another law that solves no problems) that Trump is throwing his hissy fit about isn’t just about making it harder to vote, it’s also about attacking trans people. The version of SAVE passed by the House and held up in the Senate just focused on disenfranchising people who don’t have passports or easy access to their birth certificates or marriage licenses. But Trump wants to add:

NO MEN IN WOMEN’S SPORTS: NO TRANSGENDER MUTILIZATION FOR CHILDREN!

Translation: Ban transwomen from women’s sports and make gender-affirming care illegal for minors. Those provisions deserve their own argument, which maybe I’ll get to later. But the simpler question is: Why should they be part of a voter-suppression law?

The answer is simple: Transfolk are to Trump what Jews were to Hitler or Blacks have been to the KKK. His base has been trained to hate them, and he can sometimes transfer the energy of that hatred to some other issue, even a completely unrelated issue like voting.

Morgana Ignis:

Trump just declared that he’d ban trans women from the Olympics. Only one openly transgender woman has ever competed in the Olympic Games in its history. In 2020. She did not win a medal. This is fabricated controversy to fuel bigotry. Like banning trans women from owning nuclear weapons.

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Courts near the border are clogged with misdemeanor trespass cases that serve little purpose and are usually thrown out by judges. By declaring the border area a military zone, the administration created a new crime that most people who commit it have never heard of.

More and more, the Bezos-owned Washington Post is becoming a mouthpiece for a billionaire agenda. Here’s what I saw in their opinion section on just one day (yesterday). This piece on Pittsburgh sets up a false dichotomy between city services and progressive politics, essentially blaming progressive Democrats for the state of the city, which is painted in the same gloomy colors MAGA uses to describe all Democrat-run big cities. Pittsburgh’s new centrist Democrat mayor is a “lesson” for the national party to shift away from its progressive wing.

Zohran Mamdani wants to tax New Yorkers “to death“, but

Of course, New York doesn’t need more revenue — the city could simply cut expenditures, starting with Mamdani’s $127 billion spending plan for fiscal year 2027.

which is described in the next paragraph as “a socialist laundry list”.

Chicago also is portrayed as on the brink of insolvency. And San Francisco’s BART is “headed for a financial death spiral”. What looks on the surface like a fluffy denunciation of fancy coffee drinks is some guy from the Hoover Institute quoting Edmund Burke about how our failure to control our appetites is ruining society. A fair point, maybe, but why is the example a type of excess associated with upscale liberals, rather than say Bezos’ half-billion-dollar yacht?

And James Talarico’s candidacy isn’t inviting Christians to return to the teachings of Jesus, it’s a return to the failed views of liberal Christians in general, which the religion market rejected in the 20th century in favor of right-wing Christianity.

None of these pieces is outright pro-fascist, and any one of them might have a place on the editorial page of a newspaper trying to present a balance of views. But the WaPo bombards readers with all of them on the same day, with no voices at all from left of center.

Today, the WaPo warns DC not to raise its minimum wage and that congestion pricing would cripple downtown DC. It also breaks with its usual opposition to taxes so that it can denounce Katie Porter’s plan to eliminate the California state income tax for families making less than $100K.

NPR has an article about Spartanburg County, South Carolina, which is experiencing “the biggest measles outbreak in the U.S. in more than three decades, with nearly 1,000 confirmed cases”. The reason? The vaccination rate has fallen to 89%, well below the 95% necessary to achieve herd immunity.

And why are parents so reluctant to vaccinate their kids? One of the reasons is “lingering resentment over COVID mandates”.

“I think it should have been a choice. It shouldn’t have been shoved down your throat like you have to do it.”

It’s amazing to me how quickly the popular culture has minimized the COVID pandemic. (Starting with Trump, who minimized it while it was happening.) 1.2 million Americans died of COVID. When the country has to deal with a disaster that big, you’re not going to keep all your freedom. I mean, think about 9-11, and how much disruption of daily life followed from that. But in terms of deaths, COVID was hundreds of times larger than 9-11. At the pandemic’s peak, it was like a 9-11 was happening every day or two.

So yes, once a vaccine existed, the government absolutely should have “shoved it down your throat”. And they should shove a lot of other vaccines down your throat too, so that the general population doesn’t have to worry about polio or smallpox.

A deposition under oath made it clear that a DOGE staffer tasked with flagging National Endowment for the Humanities grants to cancel due to DEI actually had no idea what DEI was and no education in the humanities. Having no knowledge himself, he used ChatGPT to

search programs and grants to cut using terms such as “Black,” “gender,” “LGBTQ+,” and “equality.” However, DOGE would not search for cuts from anything involving terms like “caucasian” and “heterosexual.”

That and similar clips went viral, but I can’t link to them because a judge has ordered them removed. Apparently, they exposed the DOGE tech bros to “widespread ridicule”.

Imagine that: Young idiots served as judge and jury over NEH grants they did not understand. And now they’re being ridiculed. How unfair!

I am enjoying “The Ballad of Stephen Miller” from the album “MAGA Country”.

and let’s close with a political judo move

I’ve been a fan of Kat Abughazaleh since days when she used to do quick summaries each week of what Fox News was covering. Now she’s running for Congress in Illinois’ 9th district. The Democratic primary is hotly contested, and Kat (a Palestinian-American who has been outspoken about the Gaza genocide) has been targeted by AIPAC.

In her usual style, Kat offers her opponents an attack ad to use against her.