The Weekly Sift

You may think the camps are for someone else. DHS has already floated “100 million deportations” as a real number. Only 47 million people living in America were born somewhere else. Hitting 100 million means coming for citizens too, native-born and naturalized alike.

“These concentration camps are being built for us. We can stop them.”
LOLGOP Studios

This week’s featured post is “Why everything seems to be getting worse“.

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. Trump’s primetime speech about “election security” had nothing new and was widely dismissed, even by Fox News. But some see it as the beginning of his attempt to steal the 2026 midterms.
• Climate change. Wildfires in Canada and Mexico led to bad air quality along the East Coast. One day last week, the sky above my house in Massachusetts was a disturbing yellow color.
• Iran. The deaths of two more Americans puts us firmly back in an escalation phase. I agree with Amanda Marcotte: “as long as Trump is president, we will be at war with Iran. He’s impetuous, stupid, and sociopathic. Iran will always be able to provoke him. His ego can’t handle losing, so he will always get sucked back in.”
• Ukraine. Nothing really new this week. More Russian missile attacks on civilian targets in Kiev. More Ukrainian missile attacks against Russia’s oil infrastructure.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about ICE killings

As I was writing this blog last week, ICE was killing another person: Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian man who had a work permit and no outstanding warrants.

Weirdly, the DHS statement didn’t even make the usual claim that the ICE shooter feared for his life. It said merely that he “feared for public safety“, whatever that means. Since then, details about the shooter have come out:

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who allegedly fatally shot a Colombian man in Maine on Monday was prone to violence and held racist beliefs, according to some of the people who were close to him.

Meanwhile, an employee of the company that runs an ICE detention center in Colorado shot a woman who had been photographing employees’ cars. Another man was killed in Florida when he was hit by a truck while running away from ICE.

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The New Yorker has an article about the horrific conditions at an ICE detention center near El Paso. The article follows Rey, a Cuban man with diabetes, high blood pressure, and a US-citizen wife.

The ICE officials who regularly appeared at Camp East Montana are called deportation officers. Officially, their job is to make sure that detainees with final orders of removal are deported; unofficially, they often pressured those without orders to agree to be deported anyway. The officers were aided, in the second task, by the conditions at the camp. Many detainees with valid or pending legal claims simply couldn’t stand to be held there any longer. But the deportation officers also had other means of persuading the holdouts. According to testimony given to the A.C.L.U. by multiple detainees from Cuba, the officers would periodically handcuff those who refused to be deported and drive them to remote stretches along the Mexican border. Buses with masked men, presumably agents from Mexico, waited on the other side. “I started yelling and screaming at the immigration guard in Mexico that this is a kidnapping,” a fifty-one-year-old Cuban man from Florida said. “Out of the thirteen people who came with me on the bus, only four people returned with me.”

Every few days, an officer showed up in Rey’s tent to ask if he was ready to sign a document acceding to his deportation. “Are you staying or are you leaving?” he’d ask Rey flatly. For weeks, Rey waved the officer away, but he was spending hours each day in bed with debilitating headaches. He could barely urinate, and he had lost about thirty pounds. “I couldn’t even tell you if there was a medical tent at the facility,” he said. “I just didn’t understand how, in an immigration detention center, they can’t give you medicine. Not only that, how is it that I can’t see a doctor?”

After six weeks in detention he did agree to self-deport, out of fear that he would die without access to his medications.

That seems to be the point. People in the camp have unresolved immigration cases. But if ICE can make them miserable enough, they may drop whatever claims they have and leave the country.

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The ACLU put out a report on more than 1200 incidents related to immigration law enforcement.

The incidents we reviewed indicate agents used force and the threat of force as default tactics and tools to coerce immediate compliance rather than to respond to a threat. Agents also turned to intimidation tactics — bullying, harassing, humiliating, and deceiving people — as they conducted enforcement, creating greater fear in communities and further undermining trust in law enforcement.

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Physicians for Human Rights has a different report out.

Doctors and human rights experts with PHR and HRC documented 412 verified incidents of the “misuse” of these crowd-control weapons, also known as “less-lethal weapons”, from June 2025 through May 2026. … The report documented 203 injuries stemming from the alleged misuse of the crowd-control weapons. Some of the injuries included blindings, traumatic brain injuries, lacerations, fractures and contusions.

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A. R. Moxon sums up the opposing worldviews underlying the debate over letting ICE do whatever it wants to its targets.

The oppositional worldviews? Let’s call them progressive humanism and regressive supremacy.

Progressive humanism is the belief that all people matter and deserve life, that generative human value springs from an inextricable and diverse mutually cooperative interconnectivity, and that we have a natural responsibility and moral duty to take the natural human system we have inherited and use our energies and skills to progress and improve it.

Regressive supremacy is the belief that only specific types of people matter and deserve life, and then only to the degree that they conform to specific and rigid hierarchical roles and doctrines; that all other human beings, who must earn life, get what they deserve and deserve what they get, because they are the natural property of the people who matter most.

and Senate confirmation hearings

Two laughably unqualified nominees for important posts had their Senate confirmation hearings this week: Todd Blanche is the acting Attorney General and wants to be confirmed in that role permanently. Jay Clayton is Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence.

Both were asked hard questions, sometimes by Republicans, and repeatedly dodged them. The lowlight was the exchange between Clayton and Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff. Ossoff asked him who won the 2020 election, to which Clayton replied: “I’m not gonna do this with you.” Ossoff reminded Clayton of his obligation to give “honest and forthright” answers. And Clayton insisted that “I’m not gonna do this with you” was an honest and forthright answer. Finally Ossoff said:

Isn’t it humiliating to be unable to answer this question? To have to indulge the president’s delusions? We know, you know, everybody in this room knows the truthful answer to that question. Why can you not give it?

Thom Tillis pressed Blanche to meet with Epstein survivors, which he finally did after all this time. Afterward, a survivor described his attitude as “dismissive”.

and The Odyssey

I saw it Friday morning when it opened, in IMAX as Christopher Nolan intended (or as close as you can get in Massachusetts). For nearly three hours I was completely enthralled. The movie’s artful mixture of action with character development and story-telling never drags.

The script leaves out several pieces of Homer’s original: conversations on Olympus, Aeolus and the bag of winds, the Phaeacians, Hermes, and some other things that have slipped my mind. That’s why it’s not a five-hour movie. But the omissions are only noticeable if you’re a bit of a Homer buff (as I am). The potential plot holes have been cleanly sewn shut.

A few things have been added. Most notably: the Trojan War making Greece vulnerable to the Sea Peoples (who are rumored to be coming but don’t appear), and the contribution Odysseus’ inner doubts and guilt make to his inability to get home. But the additions do not feel grafted on. Most of them are either hinted at in the text or are already part of the post-Homeric tradition. (For example, the Sea Peoples are historical, and play a role in the sequel to The Odyssey that Nikos Kazantzakis wrote in the 1930s. The underlying immorality of Odysseus’s tricks and stratagems is in Euripides. That Odysseus himself may have felt conflicted about them is not a big stretch. In many ways Odysseus is the first modern man. A character lacking self-awareness and self-criticism would be an unconvincing Odysseus.)

The scenery is stunningly beautiful. The image of “chasing the escaping Sun” as it sinks into the western Mediterranean is a haunting invocation of freedom.

As for the various trumped-up controversies about casting and such: ignore them. Helen is Black? She’s the daughter of Zeus; she should stand out from every other woman in Sparta. You shouldn’t expect her to look like the girl next door. A trans actor (Elliot Page) as a Greek soldier? Odysseus got his character killed by fooling him into playing a part in selling the horse trick to the Trojans. He should look both young and vulnerable, which Page does.

Adaptations (especially of classic works) fail in two ways: Either they are unfaithful to the original and take off in their own directions, or they are too faithful and don’t account for the differences in media and audience. I think Nolan has hit the sweet spot. Clearly he thought long and hard about The Odyssey, and he has made me think hard about it again.

but here’s a point of view I’d like to see take off

One of the arguments anti-immigration people make is that certain (conveniently non-White) groups of people can’t assimilate into America. The Sudanese, the Somalis, the Haitians …

Now, we all know this is ahistorical. Somebody could have gone to New York’s Little Italy in the late 1800s, heard a bunch of people speaking Italian, and argued that Italians are inherently incapable of assimilating. A lot of people probably did make that argument.

But here’s a response I’d like to hear from the defenders of immigration: No nation in the history of the world has ever been as good at assimilating people as the United States. It’s our superpower, and it’s what made us great.

You may believe, when you say certain people can’t assimilate, that you’re insulting them. But really, you’re insulting America. If you think the US can’t assimilate Somalis or anybody else, think again. Believe in America.

and you also might be interested in …

So Trump gave a prime-time speech Thursday, in an attempt to convince the public that election fraud is a problem, and that foreign countries (but not Russia) have tried to interfere in our elections.

Here’s a paragraph that needs to be repeated any time a news outlet quotes Trump’s 2020-election-rigging nonsense:

Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election by 7 million popular votes and 74 electoral votes. It was not close. Joe Biden kicked his butt. Trump’s fragile ego does not allow him to face those facts, so he has made up a lot of complete bullshit to divert attention from his humiliation. He has had numerous opportunities to present evidence of his alleged fraud in court, and has never done so. In fact, he has never even assembled a coherent theory of how the election might have been stolen, and instead jumps around from one unsupported notion to another — from voting-machine hacking to vote-counting fraud to manufacturing fake ballots to non-citizens voting and so on. The one time one of these theories was about to be tested in court, Fox News paid Dominion Voting Systems $787 million rather than go to trial.

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It sounds like a joke, but it isn’t. Pete Hegseth really said this:

I’m authorizing a new screening program for testosterone deficiency for our service members, ensuring you have the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute best,

Critics pointed out that hormone therapies to raise testosterone is “gender-affirming care”.

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Nearly half the Democrats in the House voted to block $3.3 billion in aid to Israel, most of which is military aid. Only one Republican joined them, so the attempt failed.

I’m with the rebel Democrats here. I understand that many Israelis believe they are in a life-or-death struggle with Palestinian organizations like Hamas or Hezbollah, so they’re going to do whatever they think they need to do, including genocide and ethnic cleansing. But they can do it with their own resources. I don’t want to be implicated in Israel’s crimes against humanity.

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NBC News tells the story of a trans high school student in Idaho, who committed suicide after being hounded by state laws.

The weak spot in any bigotry is the personal stories of its victims. Change comes by telling those stories.

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It’s official: The Mint is casting a Trump $1 coin, with his portrait next to “In God We Trust”. (Is he the God we’re trusting?) Apparently it’s meant as a collectible coin rather than a circulating coin, which creates a possible loophole in the law against memorializing living people on money. We need a circulating dollar coin, but not this one. If anyone tries to circulate it, I will refuse to accept one as change.

and let’s close with something obvious

I will never understand why the use of solar panels to create shade isn’t ubiquitous. Here, South Korea turns a highway median into a shaded bike path that produces electricity.

A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

– the Declaration of Independence

This week’s featured post is “Capitalism vs. Socialism? Get Serious.“

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. Courts are blocking Trump’s efforts to use the postal service to cheat in the midterms. He wants to force states to turn over their voter databases, and compile a federal list of eligible voters, so that only those voters could receive mail-in ballots. This plan would shift power over elections from the states to the federal government, contradicting the Constitution.
• Climate change. Last week’s European heat dome was answered this week by one covering the US east coast. World Weather Attribution assesses the (large) role climate change plays in these heat emergencies.
• Iran. Is the Strait of Hormuz open? Sort of. Tanker traffic is picking up, but is nowhere near normal.
• Ukraine. The two sides have very different strategies. Ukraine is targeting Russia’s oil industry, which undermines both the Russian war effort and civilian morale. Russia is stepping up missile attacks on civilian targets. More Russian missiles are getting through because Trump stopped sending Patriot air-defense missiles to Ukraine.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about America’s 250th birthday

This week has been a sad time for those of us who remember the 200th birthday in 1976. That was truly a national celebration. As Paul Krugman recalls, then we celebrated in spite of widespread pessimism about the state of the nation:

This sunniness may seem odd, given that the U.S. was troubled in many ways. We had just suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam. Our cities were a mess: New York had 1600 murders in 1976, more than 5 times the rate last year, and Times Square was an eyesore of drug addicts and porn shops. Oh, and the city had recently gone bankrupt.

But we celebrated together as a country. One reason was that President Ford — who was facing a tough reelection race in the fall — largely stayed out of the way. Whatever you thought about Ford made no difference. Have you ever watched New Years at Times Square on TV, or even gone there yourself? It’s a party, not a referendum on the Mayor of New York. That’s how the bicentennial was. Republicans and Democrats celebrated together, because we were all Americans.

But this year Trump had to be Trump: He made the 250th about himself, turned it into a grift, and screwed it all up. I’ve seldom seen the National Mall as empty as it has been during his Great American State Fair. It got so embarrassing that Fox News stopped broadcasting from the site.

Kevin Elliott posted on Bluesky:

The reason America as a whole is going to walk on by its 250th birthday with nary a thought about it is that it is profoundly embarrassed, ashamed, and angry at what we’ve allowed to happen to our country

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Thinking about what we have to celebrate shines a spotlight on the whole right-wing effort to whitewash our history. Here’s an inside look from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello mansion. For years, the staff went to considerable effort to present a rounded picture of Jefferson, which included Monticello’s slaves (and particularly Sally Hemmings) in addition to all the evidence of Jefferson’s genius. I saw it myself during this period and was impressed.

Then began the right-wing denunciations of Monticello “going woke”, which resulted in the harassment of staff and ultimately turning over the museum’s leadership.

Again and again, you will hear about how woke teachers want to make students “ashamed of their country”. To me, this accusation is a confession: The people who make it are so ashamed of America that they have to cover up the nation’s true history.

I think American history invites us to embrace complexity. Yes, Jefferson was a slaver who even enslaved the children he fathered on one of his slaves. That’s just as bad as it sounds.

But Jefferson also wrote the Declaration of Independence, founded the University of Virginia, purchased the Louisiana Territory from France and sent Lewis and Clark out to explore it, started the Library of Congress, and had many other noteworthy accomplishments. He is sometimes put forward as the world’s “last Renaissance man“, who was up-to-date in all human knowledge before it began to splinter into specialties. JFK once quipped to a group of Nobel laureates he was hosting: “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House – with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

You don’t have to choose between the hero-Jefferson and the villain-Jefferson, or between the Jefferson you admire and the Jefferson you despise. He was all of it.

American history is like that. We enslaved people and then fought a war that ended slavery. We saved Europe from Hitler while sending our own Japanese citizens to internment camps. We extended freedom further down the social ladder than any previous nation, but we still haven’t finished the job.

We are one of history’s great nations, not because we were founded by saints under God’s special attention, but because we have never stopped struggling to overcome our flaws.

The struggle continues.

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In contrast to Trump’s ridiculous denunciation of “communism” as “the greatest threat to our country” (see the featured post), Saturday saw a march of masked White nationalists in the nation’s capital. Patriot Front is a group that formed after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, the one where Trump found “good people on both sides”.

I suspect that if a similarly masked Black Power group marched, Trump would sic the National Guard on them. But White nationalists are on his side, so he will never acknowledge the threat they pose.

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The Declaration of Independence seems oddly relevant today, as Trump repeats the offenses of King George. Robert Reich brings the specifics.

and birthright citizenship

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 against Trump’s executive order refusing to recognize the citizenship of children born in the United States whose parents are undocumented. The three liberal justices (Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) were joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett in respecting the plain wording of the 14th Amendment.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

The Trump regime has tried to make a loophole out of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”, and three justices (Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch) were sufficiently craven to follow their master this far. But this phrase has always been interpreted as applying to children of foreign diplomats, and to Native American tribes before they were fully incorporated into the United States. There’s a simple rule of thumb: Suppose an American law enforcement agency (town, state, or federal) wants to arrest you. Do they have to deal with some foreign government first? If so, then you are not fully “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.

Undocumented immigrants are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. You can’t round up people and put them in camps, and then claim they aren’t subject to your jurisdiction.

Kavanaugh tried to have it both ways: He voted against the executive order but didn’t find a constitutional right; instead, he based his judgment on immigration laws that Congress could repeal at any time.

I have a lot to say about this, but Atlantic’s Adam Serwer has already said it: In 1898, an era of widespread lynchings, the same racist Supreme Court that created the separate-but-equal loophole for Jim Crow laws affirmed the plain text of the 14th Amendment 6-2. No one has challenged that ruling since, and it was not the least bit controversial until Trump’s executive order. But now, four justices can’t find a constitutional right here. We are one vote away, not just from a Republican Congress repealing birthright citizenship, but from Trump being allowed to define the Constitution however he wants.

Neither the text of the Constitution nor more than a century of precedent have proved a match for the partisan-motivated reasoning of several supposedly impartial right-wing justices, whose views on what the Constitution says shift with the ideological currents. … Thomas observed in his dissent that “the President’s initiative generated a groundswell of new scholarship.” Indeed it did, to the extent that you can call it such. That some right-wing legal academics rushed to fabricate a justification for Trump’s goals is not to the credit of the scholarship or those scholars, nor to the justices who embraced them.

Serwer echoes what I wrote last week in “Immigration is about Race“: that the goal here is a nation by and for White people, especially conservative White Christians. The objection

is not to birthright citizenship. It is to the idea that “all men are created equal.”

He also echoes what I wrote in 2014’s “Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party“: When today’s conservatives claim to be following the Founders, they are actually following slavery-advocate John Calhoun’s misappropriation of the Founders.

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One measure of how Republicans have changed during my lifetime is summed up by this quote from Ronald Reagan:

Since this is the last speech that I will give as President, I think it’s fitting to leave one final thought, an observation about a country which I love. It was stated best in a letter I received not long ago. A man wrote me and said: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

and trans athletes

Predictably, the Supreme Court sided with West Virginia and Idaho against transgender athletes. The two states have enacted bans against trans girls and women in public schools participating in female sports leagues.

At this point in our cultural evolution, trans people, especially male-to-female transitions, still seem strange to most Americans, with a high ick-factor. That’s why it’s so hard to have a rational discussion about their lives and their rights. Many people don’t want to hear about the challenges faced by actual trans people. They just get to “ick” and their brains shut down.

If you are old enough or from certain parts of the country, you may remember when gays and lesbians had a similar ick-factor. Two men holding hands or two women kissing could make large numbers of Americans feel physically nauseous. If you ever experienced that sense of nausea, it didn’t even register as bigotry. They seemed to be the aggressors. They were making us feel ill.

What changed over the decades is that more and more gays and lesbians came out, and same-sex couples became a fact of everyday life. Gay men stopped being seen as some sinister underground trying to undermine Western civilization. They lived next door and had that garden you envied. The woman who was your ally at the PTA went home to a wife, not a husband.

It may seem hard to believe at the moment, but the same evolution of attitudes will happen with transfolk. You can see it already in the national debate: The people who want to persecute transfolk are talking about abstractions, while the people who defend trans rights are talking about people they know. Outrageous claims tend to fall apart when you try to apply them to a real person. Eventually, we’ll all know somebody.

The column I wish everybody would read is “The Four Fallacies at the Heart of SCOTUS’ Decision on Trans Athletes” by George Theoharis, a Syracuse professor who has been a public school principal, teacher, and coach. His four fallacies are

• trans youth are pretending to be trans
• the harm of exclusion is acceptable
• anti-trans bans protect girls
• trans athletes create an urgent fairness crisis in school sports

Theoharis applies these fallacies to a trans athlete he actually knows, Cal. Cal is not “pretending” to be female in order to compete unfairly. Cal took drugs to avoid changes in puberty that would produce an unfair advantage. Her presence in a female locker room harms no one (beyond perhaps producing an occasional “ick” response). Athletes like her are not rewriting the record books or making it impossible for cisgender women to compete. If you ignore “ick”, it’s hard to find any harm at all that results from her participation. Conversely, it is easy to see the harm she would suffer from exclusion.

It’s also easy to see the harm female athletes in general will suffer. These bans are about putting more restrictions on women, not freeing them from unfair competition.

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What I find more trying than the underlying issue is the political case many are making: Democrats shouldn’t criticize the Court’s act of bigotry, because most Americans agree with it.

Arguments like this should disturb anybody whose rights might become unpopular at some point in the future. It’s saying: “We don’t have any principles. If your rights are violated, we’ll have to take a poll before we decide whether to defend you.”

It is undeniable that an avalanche of money ($215 million, by one estimate) was spent late in the 2024 campaign to push the slogan: “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” Harris never responded, and damage was done. Maybe that’s why she’s not president.

But I think never-take-an-unpopular-position is the wrong lesson to learn. It looks timid and unprincipled — because it is.

Republicans don’t behave that way. They have a long list of unpopular positions: tax cuts for billionaires, raising the retirement age, sending long-term residents with no criminal records to concentration camps, outlawing abortion, and so on. But does any Republican ever say: “We have to stop talking about abortion”?

The right lesson is to be ready to defend your positions, even if the majority disagrees with you. You have to stand by what you believe and refuse to act as if you are ashamed. 2028 hopefuls like Gavin Newsom may hedge their bets, but I think Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker has it right:

I know there are transgender people right now, looking out at this world and wondering if anyone is going to stand up for their simple right to exist. Well, I am. We are. We will. And we want them to thrive.

I know that amidst the ongoing assault on our democratic institutions, it’s easy for people to fall into despair about our democratic system. But I love this country too much not to fight for it.

and you also might be interested in …

My need to stay on top of the national conversation causes me to subscribe to publications I don’t necessarily recommend. I’ve been been a Washington Post subscriber for many years, but I’ve also been down on it ever since Amazon centi-billionaire Jeff Bezos started interfering directly in the paper’s editorial positions, like when he blocked its endorsement of Kamala Harris. I watched him toady to Donald Trump at his inauguration, and make the sycophantic claim that second-term Trump is a more “disciplined” and “mature” version of first-term Trump. I have occasionally noted on this blog how the WaPo editorial page has turned into the voice of the billionaire agenda.

But Saturday I finally cancelled. Their editorial criticizing the Supreme Court for one of the few good things it did this term — reading the plain text of the 14th Amendment and protecting birthright citizenship — pushed me too far. (It didn’t help that they then published a call to abolish the National Institute of Health.)

There’s a free press in this country (at least for billionaires), and Bezos can print whatever he likes. But he can spend his own money on that. I have better things to do with mine.

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Wednesday, Air Force Major Jason Watson stood on the Capitol steps in full uniform and denounced President Trump, calling for his impeachment, conviction and removal. He was arrested.

To the extent that mainstream media covered this event at all, it focused on the wrong thing. Yes, what Watson did politicized the military (as Pete Hegseth does every day), and is a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It is entirely appropriate that he be arrested and punished. (Hegseth is still at large.)

But this isn’t a somebody-trying-to-get-away-with-something story, it’s a civil-disobedience story. Watson knew he was breaking the rules and knew he’d pay a price for it. When officers came to arrest him, he did not run or fight.

The story is that Watson, a man who had made a career out of serving his country, is willing to pay the price of his actions. That’s how much he believes in his message.

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This insight about using AI in education rings true to me:

Cognitive load theory has told us since 1988 that the productive struggle — the moment a student has to reach, fail, and reach again — is exactly where learning happens. Vygotsky called it the zone of proximal development: not too hard, not too easy, the precise difficulty that requires a human to stretch.

What the causal evidence shows is that AI, deployed as a general-purpose answer machine, collapses that zone. Students feel better. They learn less. They enjoy the session and can’t recall it the next day.

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Elon Musk can’t handle the truth.

This particular episode started on June 21, when Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) called him out for gutting USAID, which “possibly sentenced to death” 4.5 million children around the world. Musk threw a fit on X — it’s easy to act out on a platform you control — saying it was “time to sue this liar”.

There is not even a single dead child! … They cannot cite a single name of someone who died out of the ‘millions’ they falsely claim have died. Not a single name!

NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof has a long history of calling attention to the plight of the desperately poor, particularly in Africa. So he began giving Musk the names he asked for.

Jibia was a 10-year-old girl, ranking third out of 58 students in her fourth-grade class in Rwamwanja, Uganda. Aid cuts meant that the local clinic ran out of $2 bed nets to protect from mosquitoes, as well as anti-malaria medicines. Jibia died of malaria last July, her mother told me outside the family home. Medical records confirmed that, and health workers told me that she would have been fine without the aid cuts: Replacing her tattered bed net with a new one could have prevented malaria, and in any case drugs would have helped her to recover promptly.

Yamah Freeman hemorrhaged while pregnant with her third child in her village in Liberia. The United States had provided ambulances to the local hospital, but the aid cuts under Musk and President Trump meant that the ambulances had no fuel. The strongest young men in the village placed her on their shoulders and raced down the path toward town, shouting encouragement to her as they ran, but she bled to death along the way. Her parents and sister told me about this, and I visited her grave.

Achol Deng, 8, had been infected with H.I.V. at birth in South Sudan but had been kept alive by American-provided medicines costing just 12 cents a day. The dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. and the resulting chaos meant that she lost her caseworker and access to medicines, and soon died of an opportunistic infection, health workers told me.

“I could go on,” he wrote. And then he challenged Musk:

Come with me on a reporting trip to South Sudan or Somalia or Mozambique. Meet starving children whose lives can be easily saved. Hold them. Look into their eyes. Talk to their terrified moms.

Musk seems unlikely to accept the challenge.

Musk replied with a multi-post tantrum, calling Kristof “utterly evil” and a “piece of shit and liar” who is “lying through his teeth.” He also called another researcher, Alonso Gurmendi, “a piece of shit who loves murder” after Gurmendi mentioned a 10-year-old child in South Sudan who died after being cut off from his HIV medication.

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Trump is refusing to renew the trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, the USMCA. The agreement, which replaced the Clinton-era NAFTA, was promoted as a diplomatic triumph of the first Trump administration. The agreement does not automatically lapse now, but has to go through annual reviews, creating uncertainty for any company looking at long-term investments.

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It’s a bad time to be a Russian oil refinery.

and let’s close with something messy

Lately I’ve been looking into wedding rituals, for reasons I’ll explain in a couple months. In Hinduism there’s a haldi ceremony that is held before a wedding. Friends and family assemble to smear the bride and groom with an orange tumeric-based paste. The photos make it look like fun, but I have my doubts.

These are the values and traditions I believe in, and they are not Republican or Democratic values. They’re American values we can all share.

– Barack Obama, opening the Obama Center Friday

This week’s featured post is “Story Games“.

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. The attack on California’s elections as “fraud” are a preview of what we’ll see when Trump’s party gets pounded in the fall elections. The charges are a clear example of “truthiness“. No one has any evidence of fraud, but the charges just feel right to the MAGA faithful. “It’s impossible to prove, but I think everybody knows instinctively, something is wrong here,” says Speaker Johnson.
• Climate change. The Trump regime continues to pay money to cancel wind-power projects. The total bill has reached $2.5 billion. It’s hard to imagine a more wrong-headed policy.
• Iran War. For months commentators have been saying that Trump was losing the war. The agreement he signed to end the war proves he did. Now we get to see whether the US can control Israel and Iran can control Hezbollah, because the Lebanon front is key to maintaining the ceasefire.
• Ukraine. The war continues to shift in Ukraine’s favor. The video below of the roof flying off of a Moscow oil refinery is striking. Putin’s war has followed him home.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about Trump’s Versailles Agreement

The full text of the US/Iran memorandum of understanding finally came out. I don’t know what’s more striking: What a bad deal this is for the United States, or how many people are surprised it came out this way. What did they think was going to happen? The phrase that springs to mind is: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Pentagon simulations had consistently demonstrated two reasons for avoiding a war with Iran:

• Air power by itself won’t topple the theocracy.
• When Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz, we have no effective answer short of a costly land invasion or nuclear war.

We’ve now had four months to watch those two obvious truths play out. Sure, we can destroy a lot of Iranian stuff and kill a lot of their people, while using up a lot of weaponry it will take years for us to replace. But no one in the Trump regime was ever able to explain how destruction and killing by itself could lead to some positive outcome for the US. Wednesday,

Trump said that “the alternative would be a worldwide depression”, arguing that if he had not struck a deal, “the strait [of Hormuz] would never have been opened.”

Of course the Strait was open before Trump attacked, so maybe he could have thought about worldwide depression then. But he didn’t, so he ended up making a number of concessions to Iran in order get it open again. Avoiding a bad outcome is an explanation for why you sign a bad deal, not something to crow about as an accomplishment.

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Is the Strait of Hormuz open now? Kinda-sorta. Some ships are getting through, but the traffic is limited.

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If you want to mix some laughter into your tears, watch British pseudo-journalist Jonathan Pie recount the course of the war.

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For an example of the kind of military cluelessness that got us into this war, look at WaPo columnist Marc Thiessen’s reaction to the Versailles agreement. He thinks Trump had achieved a “historic victory” on the battlefield, which the peace agreement mysteriously screws up.

What victory is that? Well, we destroyed things and killed people. And if we’d just kept doing that for two more weeks we wouldn’t need an agreement at all.

I have been clear about my view from the start: Trump would be better off ending the war without a deal, with a final 10-to-14-day bombing campaign that completes the destruction of Iran’s military capabilities — and then declaring victory, ending combat operations and launching a covert effort to arm the Iranian people and help them overthrow the regime in time.

Where does that 10-14-day estimate come from? From “the target list [Admiral Cooper] was assigned at the start of Operation Epic Fury”.

Yep, that’s how war works: You make a target list before the shooting starts, and when you finish it you’ve won. Easy-peasy. Why didn’t anybody think to do that in Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq?

and Obama’s new library/museum

When an ex-president who is widely respected and admired throws a party, people show up. Friday, on Juneteenth, the Obama Presidential Center opened in Chicago. Every living president other than Trump was there, along with celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Stephen Colbert, and Dwayne Wade.

The musical line-up put Trump’s Freedom 250 effort to shame: Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Common, Christina Aguilera, John Legend, Bono, and others. But the highlight was President Obama himself, who can still give a great speech:

[T]he exhibits here focus not just on policies, but on the shared values that make democracy possible, a belief in the intrinsic dignity and worth of all people, and that no one is above the law or beneath its protection, a belief in checks and balances in our government and an accountability that comes with an independent judiciary and a robust, free press. A belief that our military and law enforcement owe allegiance not to any president or political party, but to the people and our Constitution.

A belief in the peaceful transfer of power after the people have spoken in fair and free elections, recognizing that in a large, complicated society like ours, no group or faction gets its way 100% of the time. And a belief that qualities of character, honesty, integrity, kindness, compassion, a sense of duty and honor, those things matter in our public dealings, just as they do in our private lives.

These are the values and traditions I believe in, and they are not Republican or Democratic values. They’re American values we can all share.

The word “Trump” did not appear in his text. It didn’t have to.

and masculinity

The combination of the UFC bout on the White House lawn, a match winner telling an outrageous lie about Michelle Obama (who wasn’t there and had nothing to do with the event), and neither the White House nor any of the sponsoring corporations making any statement about it afterward — it started a lot of people writing about how the MAGA movement has distorted and corrupted the notion of masculinity. Mitch Jackson comments:

Here is the product Trump and his supporters are selling. Be loud. Be cruel and a male chauvinist. Racism is fine. Mock the weak. Call people names. Shout down anyone who corrects you. Repeat whatever Fox News told you this morning as gospel, even when you know nothing about the subject. Wrap all of it in a red hat and call it manhood. …

Here is what the Trump manosphere salesmen do not want you to know. A man stands tall and tells the truth even when the truth costs him. A man keeps his word. A man protects the people who have no one else to protect them, the kid getting bullied, the worker getting cheated, the stranger getting hounded by a mob. A man stays calm when calm is hard. A man extends his hand to the person everyone else wrote off. Compassion is strength. Empathy is strength. Owning your mistakes out loud is strength. Shouting the loudest in the room has never once made anyone a man. Name calling is the move of a coward who ran out of arguments.

It especially burns me to hear the MAGA imitation of a man called a “cowboy”. I grew up watching westerns on TV, and Mitch Jackson is describing the heroes of those westerns. Ben Cartwright, Matt Dillon — they were the kind of men Jackson is describing. They were nothing at all like Donald Trump.

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Here’s a question: If, as right-wing ideology insists, there are only two genders, established by God and unalterably built into our bodies — then why does masculinity require a performance like this? Can’t MAGA males just be men? Why do they have to go to great lengths to perform their masculinity?

But if, on the other hand, gender is at least partly a performance, that opens up a lot of interesting discussions and possibilities.

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Another example of MAGA “masculinity”: Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is a right-wing leader who had been one of Trump’s few allies in Europe. Recently there’s been some friction between them after Trump started attacking Pope Leo. (Popes tend to be popular in Italy — who knew?)

She’s also a comparatively young and good-looking female head-of-state who stands out in a graybeard meeting like the recent G-7 in France. So of course Trump had to comment to an Italian TV interviewer about how Meloni “begged” to have her picture taken with him, as (no doubt) all good-looking younger women beg when overwhelmed by his manly presence.

She’s probably happy I talked to her. I didn’t have to talk to her. She begged me to take a picture with her. She wanted a picture with me so badly. I wouldn’t have taken it, but I felt sorry for her.

Meloni, and apparently all of Italy, took offense at this comment. The Italian foreign minister cancelled a trip to the US. Meloni said that Trump had “fabricated” the interaction and said “Italy and I do not beg.”

Trump make something up? Heaven forefend. Just the other day, someone said to him “Sir, you are so honest. You never invent conversations that didn’t happen.” But I think Meloni should count her blessings. At least he didn’t grab her by the pussy.

and the reflecting pool

This is the kind of trivial thing I usually ignore. The $14-or-so million Trump spent to repaint the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool isn’t significant in any fiscal way, and the resulting mess isn’t something I walk past on any regular basis. Even the fact that the job was done on a no-bid contract awarded to somebody Trump had hired at one of his clubs — it’s barely a drop in the bucket of Trump regime corruption.

But the series of incompetent moves — the huge cost overrun, not understanding the biology of algae, awarding the no-bid clean-up contract to another crony, dumping hydrogen peroxide into the pool to kill the algae without realizing it might cause the new layer of paint to peel up, and then blaming all his failures on “vandals” — it’s just too typical of the whole regime. Trump ignores expert opinion, pats himself on the back for his brilliant solution, siphons taxpayers’ money off to insiders, and then blames somebody else when it all goes wrong.

Like the Iran War, in other words. Max Boot comments:

I’m sure Trump will catch the vandals desecrating the Reflecting Pool just about the time that Captain Queeg catches the thieves who absconded with his strawberries.

Sadly, though, law enforcement in the capital now serves the Mad King’s fantasies. People are being arrested for vandalizing the pool, including an ex-Olympian who stopped by in the middle of his morning bike ride. Prediction: None of these cases will go to trial. Either grand juries will refuse to indict or judges will throw the charges out for lack of evidence.

but I want you to read an essay

“Winning the Story Game” by A. R. Moxon. I discuss it in the featured post.

and you also might be interested in …

Most stunning video of the week: During a massive Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow Thursday, the city’s largest oil refinery literally flips its lid. The roof is blown off and turns over in the air. Later, it turned out that the refinery wasn’t hit by a drone, but by a misfired Russian anti-drone missile.

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The anti-ICE protests outside Delaney Hall in New Jersey are continuing. The latest: video of a protester getting hit by a car.

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The $400 million bribe Trump took from the Qatari royal family is now ready for service as Air Force One.

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Sci-fi TV shows like “For All Mankind” sometimes feature nuclear-powered rockets. Russia has one now, but it’s “wildly expensive and very dangerous”.

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Since the Supreme Court reversed Roe v Wade, the number of abortions nationwide has nearly doubled. Nobody knows for sure why, but one possibility is that women in remote areas did not realize before that they could get abortion pills through the mail. NPR reports that even if telehealth clinics are banned from sending mifepristone through the mail, the companion drug misoprostol will work by itself, but with more discomfort.

I’ll repeat something I’ve pointed out before: Christian abortion opponents can stretch certain Bible verses to claim that the prophets would have banned surgical abortion if they’d known about it. But drugs to induce miscarriage are as old as time, and the Bible does not mention them. Mifepristone and misoprostol are just more effective modern versions of folk remedies that go back to the Egyptians.

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Paul Waldman asks why Trump’s increasing mental and physical infirmity isn’t being covered the same way Biden’s was.

While there are occasional articles analyzing Trump’s aging, the mainstream media — especially the most important agenda-setting outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal — treated Biden’s age as one of the most important stories in politics, a four-alarm fire that demanded every ounce of attention they could give it. … There’s no way to know for sure [how age has affected Trump’s judgment]. But the nature of Trump’s personalist presidency, in which the entire government is organized around turning his whims into reality and the barest hint of dissent is swiftly punished, makes the question of his age even more important than it was with Biden, who was surrounded by competent people who could run the government even when the president was less engaged than he ought to have been.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article in Vanity Fair is headlined: “Did Kamala Harris’s Silence on Gaza Cost Her the White House?“, but it’s also a meditation on the long-standing American conflict between democracy and human rights at home vs. empire abroad.

Gaza is not a betrayal of American democratic tradition but an expression of an American imperial tradition.

Coates describes “survivalist democracy”, when the lesser evil of a leader who protects many groups within America allows many Americans to ignore brutality against the groups left out.

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So Georgia won’t be redistricting to kill its majority-Black districts. At least not this year.

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Using solar panels to create needed shade always seemed like a no-brainer to me. Now California has a pilot project to cover its canals with solar panel canopies to avoid evaporation while generating electricity. Next we need to do big retail parking lots.

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UCLA Professor of Medicine Robert B. Shpiner pulls together a bunch of Trump initiatives that don’t look nearly so ominous when you see them one-by-one.

• The schedule of newborn vaccinations has been cut back from 17 to 11. One of the missing vaccines is hepatitis B, a disease which turns chronic in 9 out of 10 infants who catch it.
• The monthly food stamp fruit-and-vegetable benefit for small children has been cut from $26 to $10.
• About four million people are being pushed off food stamps, many of them parents.
• Two million fewer children are covered by Medicaid or CHIP than were at the end of the Biden administration.
• A program that bought locally-grown produce for school lunches has been cancelled.
• Enforcement of the law guaranteeing an education to children with disabilities has been moved from the Department of Education to the Department of Justice.
• The federal government is no longer gathering data that might show the effects of these changes.

He concludes: “I’ve never seen the US harm its children this deliberately.”

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Pete Hegseth cancelled the Pentagon’s requirement for flu vaccines. Now there’s been a flu outbreak at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. Over 220 cases have been reported so far.

The military forces people to live in close quarters that facilitate the spread of disease. Such diseases are often have military significance. The Plague of Justinian in the sixth century (an early version of the Black Death of the Middle Ages) put a stop to the Byzantine Empire’s attempt to reconquer the western territories that had been lost after the fall of Rome.

Requiring vaccines is just military good sense.

and let’s close with something twisted

Occasionally I’ve managed to glimpse a hummingbird before it flitted away. But my eye has never been sharp enough to see one’s extended tongue.

The president is suing himself and compensating other people for legal claims that have not been identified from people that we don’t know. We just haven’t seen anything like that.

– Adam Zimmerman

This week’s featured post is “Has Trump finally pushed Republicans too far?“

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. The fund to reward January 6 rioters for their crimes essentially makes Congress and the courts irrelevant. So bad as it is in itself, the precedent it sets is much worse.
• Climate change. See the closing for a creative response to climate-change-related flooding in West London.
• Iran war. Trump is always saying that he’s close to an agreement with Iran, so I ignore those claims. But this weekend, some other sources were saying the same thing and laying out some sketchy details.
• Ukraine. This week, Phillips O’Brien’s update describes how Ukraine’s medium-range strike ability is shutting down the main supply road for Russia’s forces, while it’s long-range strikes are targeting Russia’s oil refineries.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was reacting to Trump’s “thug fund”

I talk about the political implications of this for Republicans in the featured post. But it’s important to take a step back and just see it on its own terms. Trump has found a way to get the US Treasury to pay for his private army of brownshirts.

The striking thing about this “settlement” is that nobody who isn’t answerable to Trump has anything to do with it. Trump’s Justice Department negotiated the agreement with Trump’s IRS, and avoided letting any judge oversee the result. The five commissioners who run the fund will be appointed by Trump, and can be removed by him at will. The fund has no obligation to reveal who it has given the money to.

So the upshot is that Trump, on his own, is removing $1.8 billion from the Treasury and doing whatever he wants with it.

and rumors of a deal with Iran

Maybe it’s real this time, maybe not. The devil is in the details. One thing that seems clear: The terms are nothing close to the “unconditional surrender” Trump said he was aiming for. Axios reports:

The agreement the U.S. and Iran are close to signing involves a 60-day ceasefire extension during which the Strait of Hormuz would be reopened, Iran would be able to freely sell oil, and negotiations would be held on curbing Iran’s nuclear program, according to a U.S. official.

The thing to watch for is whether Trump just gets back to the pre-war situation, if he falls short of that, or if he makes some gain. That will tell you who won the war. The Strait was open before the war started, and we were already negotiating about Iran’s nuclear program. So if that’s the deal, what did the war accomplish, beyond spending a lot of money, raising gas prices, and depleting our stock of weapons?

Jennifer Rubin:

If this deal holds, there will be no question that Trump’s war amounted to a major strategic failure. Maybe we get an agreement similar to the JCPOA, which would have been in place had Trump not exited the deal. (Getting back in war something you already had is nothing to cheer about.) The agreement would leave the regime (perhaps more radical than ever) in place, deny Israel any permanent end to the Iranian threat, reveal the limits of U.S. influence and power in the region, and, by default, afford China (as evidenced by Trump’s pathetic showing at the summit) increased stature and confidence. Preventing a restart of a war no one wanted and an end to the energy shock Trump provoked can hardly been called “wins.”

But anyway, wait for real details before getting too excited one way or the other.

I have to laugh at the Republican senators warning that we can’t trust Iran to negotiate in good faith. Why would anyone trust Trump to negotiate in good faith? The air attacks that killed most of Iran’s ruling council happened while negotiations were underway in Geneva.

and the Democratic “autopsy”

It’s common for a political party that loses an election to fund some kind of study about why it lost, in hopes that something can change before the next election.

The Democrats funded such a report after 2024, but then didn’t release the results. Recently a partial report surfaced. It’s 192 pages and I admit I have only skimmed small parts of it. It has drawn a lot of commentary, almost entirely negative. The main criticism repeated many times is that the report avoids a lot of significant issues:

• Biden should have dropped out soon enough for there to be a real nomination process, rather than just a coronation of Harris.
• The Israel/Gaza situation demoralized a lot of progressive voters.
• Harris needed a response to the anti-trans message that Trump focused on in the closing weeks.

All the same, I’m not sure I would have focused on any of that if I had written a report, because it’s not likely to matter as much in 2028. I mean, Biden isn’t going to try to run again, we will have a nomination process, and the winning candidate will probably have a different message about Israel or trans rights (not that I know what it will be).

A lot of what is in the report sounds like platitudes: court rural votes better, for example. Or build up the state and local party operations. Great. Tell me how.

An interesting counterpoint to most of the chatter about the report comes from the Strength In Numbers blog, which focuses on data.

When we boot up the data, it’s obvious the main reason Harris lost — and the reason I am going to explore here, at this website, it being a data-driven website — is that 2024 simply had too much inflation-induced anti-incumbent sentiment for the incumbent party to overcome.

The author puts together a model for predicting how an incumbent party should do based on approval of the current president and public optimism/pessimism about the economy. That model predicts Harris should have done slightly worse than she actually did.

So maybe Harris wasn’t such a bad candidate and didn’t run such a bad campaign. Maybe all our 2024 autopsies are trying to analyze factors that made no difference.

and you also might be interested in …

The Ebola outbreak in the Congo comes at a bad time. The Trump regime has cut way back on programs to track and mitigate diseases in Africa.

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The only refugees the Trump regime is taking in any numbers are the white South Africans who feel oppressed by the Black-majority government. This week they announced plans for 10,000 more.

But racism is over in this country. John Roberts says so.

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Wish I’d said that: Tom Tillis commented on Ken Paxton, who will probably be the Republican nominee for a senate seat in Texas now that he has Trump’s endorsement:

To call Paxton ‘ethically challenged’ is to call Jeffrey Dahmer suffering from an eating disorder.

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RIP Barney Frank. I was in the same room with Frank once, at a fund-raiser for another congressman. He predicted 2020 would be a 1964-scale Democratic landslide, which didn’t happen. Biden’s win was convincing, but not LBJ-like.

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Trump missed Don Jr.’s wedding in the Bahamas Saturday. I just note the fact and refuse to speculate about the reason.

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Tulsi Gabbard will resign as Director of National Intelligence at the end of June. Her stated reason is to support her husband, who has just been diagnosed with cancer. The rumor mill says that she’s out because she can’t get behind Trump’s foreign wars.

It’s tempting to be happy she’s leaving, because she never should have had this position to begin with. But she’s likely to be replaced with someone just as unqualified and less independent.

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In a recent CNBC interview, Jeff Bezos said that Trump is “more mature, more disciplined” in his second term.

I have a theory about what has happened to Bezos lately: His first wife was his conscience. And now she’s gone, so he’s just another rich asshole. Meanwhile, she’s using her divorce settlement to do all kinds of good.

and let’s close with something creative

As the climate changes, London’s famous fog and drizzle is more often turning into serious rain. So West London had a flooding problems that it could try to solve with expensive public works projects. Instead, it has brought in beavers, who had been virtually extinct in Britain.

In West London, conservationists got a government license to resettle a family of five beavers in a 20-acre urban park near the Greenford Tube station. It used to be a golf course, with a creek running through it. Within weeks, the beavers dammed up the creek, creating a pond that holds water and stops it from spilling into the city. They also diverted the creek’s flow into smaller tributaries, creating a wetland that better absorbs heavy rainfall — mitigating the risk of flooding downstream.

“They effectively turned this site into a giant sponge that can take heavy rainfall and slowly release water back into the landscape, creating a lot more resilience for flooding,” explains Sean McCormack, a local veterinarian who started the Ealing Beaver Project, named for the London borough of Ealing, where it’s located.

Good people, people who go to church, people who love their families, people who believe they’re good have, throughout the history of this country, done deeply, profoundly wrong things to Black Americans, and they told themselves it was about something else. They told themselves that it was about economics, heritage, party, patriotism. It was never about something else. And today it’s not about something else.

– Tennessee State Senator Charlane Oliver

This week’s featured post is a book review: “Phillips O’Brien’s ‘War and Power’“.

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. With the Virginia Supreme Court throwing out the result of the state’s redistricting referendum, and various southern states taking advantage of the Supreme Court’s invitation to get rid of majority-minority districts, Republicans have now managed to tilt the playing field in their favor. Democrats will have to win the popular vote decisively in November to get a House majority.
• Climate change. Early signs point to a strong El Nino effect this year, making weather events more extreme.
• Iran. The pattern continues: Trump keeps announcing peace deals that the Iranians never agreed to. Nothing can change until Trump recognizes that he’s going to wind up with a situation worse than the one at the start of the war. Trump can’t admit that, so the Strait stays closed and gas prices keep rising.
• Ukraine. Phillips O’Brien’s weekly update discusses Putin’s (realistic) fears that Ukraine could attack his Victory Day parade in Moscow with a long-range drone. Ukraine now hits Russia with more long-range drones than Russia uses against Ukraine. This must be very demoralizing for the Russian public, which (like Americans and Iran) has to wonder why it’s in this war at all.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the race to disenfranchise southern Blacks

The Virginia Supreme Court tossed out the results of the recent referendum. It’s a 4-3 decision and highly questionable, but there’s not a federal issue that would invite US Supreme Court intervention, even if we had an honest Supreme Court.

The Virginia redistricting was supposed to pick up four Democratic seats in Congress, and briefly looked like it put Democrats narrowly ahead in the redistricting wars. But not only has that been undone, but southern red states are wasting no time in using the Supreme Court’s Callais decision to eliminate majority-Black districts. Tennessee has already eliminated its last such district by dividing the voters of Memphis among three districts that will now all have White Republican majorities.

The new map points to a 9-0 Republican advantage in the Tennessee delegation in the US House.

In one particularly outrageous moment, Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee were kept out of the room where the redistricting proposal was being voted on, resulting in this soon-to-be-iconic photo of Justin Pearson and the sergeant-at-arms.

Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina are expected to follow suit this week with their own proposals to end Black representation in Congress.

and Trump’s ballroom

I would hate to work for The Onion these days, because Trump keeps doing things that already sound like over-the-top parodies. Case in point: the proposed White House ballroom.

Originally, it wasn’t supposed to cost the taxpayers anything (other than the cost of whatever favors Trump does for the private donors who funded it, plus the money lost to the tax deductions from these bribes gifts). That was the go-to response whenever anybody objected to Trump exceeding his authority by tearing down the East Wing without approval of Congress or buy-in from the appropriate DC architectural committees: It’s free; be grateful.

But the ballroom kept getting bigger and glitzier. The price tag kept going up. And now We the People are getting the bill: $1 billion tucked into the omnibus bill Republicans are hoping to pass through reconciliation (i.e., without any Democratic votes).

So rich donors aren’t building Trump’s ballroom any more than Mexico has paid for Trump’s wall. At a time when the government is saving money by kicking Americans off food stamps or refusing to subsidize their health insurance, it seems to have plenty of money to fight an unnecessary war and build a monument to Trump’s vanity.

You and I will never see the inside of this ballroom, if it ever gets built. We’ll just pay for it.

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The ballroom issue is putting pressure on congressional Republicans, who face a choice between their constituents and the desires of He Who Must Be Obeyed.

One interesting political strategy: Democrats should make them own this. At some point in the reconciliation process, amendments will be possible. If Democrats propose to strip the ballroom funding out of the bill and then back that amendment, only a handful of Republican votes will be needed to pass it. That would let the vast majority of Republicans tell Trump they did their best, but tell their constituents that their bill doesn’t pay for the ballroom.

But what if Democrats abstain on any anti-ballroom amendment? Then Republicans actually have to choose between voters and Their Lord and Master.

and Ka$h Patel

About a month ago, Atlantic reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick used a large number of anonymous sources within the FBI to verify that Director Kash Patel has a drinking problem — something we all had to suspect after seeing the viral video of his alcohol-fueled celebration with the gold-medal-winning US Olympic hockey team.

On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials. A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.

Patel responded with a $250-million defamation lawsuit, which (to begin with) assumes Patel ever had a reputation worth $250 million. Further, he would need to prove not just that the story is false, but that Atlantic either knew or should have known it was false, but published it anyway out of malice.

Simultaneously, Patel abused his position to open a leak investigation into Fitzpatrick’s sources — contradicting the implication that she didn’t really have sources and just made the story up. (It’s reminiscent of an old joke: A reporter writes that the president is a moron. He is prosecuted and goes to jail — not for defamation, but for revealing a state secret.)

Well, Fitzpatrick and The Atlantic are so intimidated that they followed up:

After my story appeared, I heard from people in Patel’s orbit and people he has met at public functions, who told me that it is not unusual for him to travel with a supply of personalized branded bourbon. The bottles bear the imprint of the Kentucky distillery Woodford Reserve, and are engraved with the words “Kash Patel FBI Director,” as well as a rendering of an FBI shield. Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: Ka$h. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with “#9” there as well. One such bottle popped up on an online auction site shortly after my story appeared, and The Atlantic later purchased it.

Why would anyone think that Ka$h has a problem, or that alcohol plays too large a role in his life?

and you also might be interested in …

So far, the hantavirus doesn’t seem worth panicking over. Still, it would be nice to have a trustworthy CDC right now.

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So far, the rising price of gas, Trump’s illegal tariffs, and other economic woes have not shown up in the job numbers. The April jobs report showed 115K more jobs and the unemployment rate holding steady at 4.3%.

However, it’s worth pointing out that the government is running a $2 trillion annual debt to get those results. As soon as a Democrat becomes president, the national debt will become an existential emergency again.

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On the surface, the results of Trump slashing funding to fight AIDS in Africa doesn’t look bad: People previously diagnosed are continuing to get their drugs and are not dying in large numbers. The forward-looking projections are alarming, though. Funding has collapsed for testing, so new people are getting AIDS and spreading it undetected.

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For those former Christians who have chosen to worship Trump instead of Jesus, his Doral golf course now provides an idol they can use: a 17-foot gold-leaf statue sitting on a five-foot pedestal.

It’s yet another case where satire has a hard time staying ahead of the news. In the current (and concluding) season of Amazon Prime’s “The Boys”, the series’ villain (the super-powered Homelander) is declaring himself to be God, challenging the loyalty of his Christian nationalist base.

We can only hope that actual MAGA “Christians” will feel similarly challenged. So far they don’t seem to.

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Add Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) to the list of current or former Trump staffers with multiple accusations of domestic abuse.

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A. R. Moxon raises an interesting point, related to accepting ex-MAGA folks like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Tucker Carlson: It’s one thing to try to meet people where they are. But it will never work to try to meet people where they think they are, when they’re not really there.

If they will only meet us in a place where we will agree with them that their bigotries have justification, their awareness need no expansion, and their conviction needs no progression, then I would say we can’t meet them where they are, because even if we show up where they are, they won’t be there, and if we go to where they think they are, we won’t be where we need to be.

and let’s close with something hopeful

If you’re looking for some reason not to give up, check out LOLGOP’s “The Case of Earl Warren“.

It begins with a provocative set of questions:

[W]hat if good and evil—as concepts, as actual forces in the world—what if they exist? What if people—regular, flawed, embarrassing, complicated people—can actually be moved beyond the programming of their nervous system or algorithm or the combination of the two? What if it’s possible to change your mind, or someone else’s mind, or the collective mind of a country that has been, let’s say, unwell? And maybe, by making the case now, we can shape history in the coming years by beginning a process that might regenerate something we once called conscience?

After that Twilight Zone intro, I can almost hear Rod Serling say: “Case in point: Earl Warren, an ambitious state attorney general with his eye on the governor’s mansion.” In the 1942 campaign, Warren found his issue: Japanese Americans. They were all potential traitors and needed to be put away. So after he ascended to the governorship of California, he enthusiastically went along with the Japanese internment, one of the most shameful things America had done since slavery. Warren was, in other words, xenophobic, hateful, and willing to scapegoat an entire ethnic group of innocent people to advance his political career.

But somehow, by 1954, he had become chief justice of the Supreme Court that outlawed racial segregation in America’s schools. Between 1953 and 1969, the Warren Court established previously unrecognized rights of minority groups both racial and religious. It expanded our notions of free speech and put limits on the ability of police to railroad defendants.

As someone who remembers the last chunk of that era, I can testify: Warren was not just going with the flow here. The Warren Court wasn’t being pulled along by the trends of its era. In many cases it was leading the parade towards human rights. Far from trying to please the crowd, Warren was making himself unpopular. “Impeach Earl Warren” was the right-wing slogan of the day.

While Warren’s conversion probably didn’t happen overnight on Christmas Eve, and I have no reason to believe ghosts were involved, it was a transformation worthy of Dickens.

He became, by many accounts, a genuinely different person. Under different conditions, with different pressures, with enough exposure to the consequences of what he’d helped create—he changed.

I’m not telling you this to make you feel better. I’m not telling you this because the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice and all of that. I’m telling you because the conditions that produced Earl Warren in 1942—the organized fear, the nativist infrastructure, the information environment that made cruelty feel like common sense—those conditions are not so different in their structure from what’s producing the people who scare and exhaust us today.

Which means: they are not a different species. Which means: some of them can be moved. Which means: the work of figuring out how to move them is not naive.