The Weekly Sift

No Sift articles will appear on Christmas or New Years.
So the next new articles will post on January 8.

This is an opportunity that my Republican colleagues denied us in 2017, when committee Democrats called for a hearing six years ago on campus discrimination, when white supremacists marched through the University of Virginia grounds shouting “Jews will not replace us.” We didn’t — couldn’t get a hearing back then.

– Rep. Donald Norcross (D-NJ)
at the “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confront Antisemitism“ hearing

This week’s featured post is “Those University Presidents“.

This week everybody was talking about university presidents

That’s discussed in the featured post. At the risk of appearing to be soft on genocide, I take the presidents’ side over Elise Stefanik’s.

and COP28

Pretty much across the board, the story of the world’s response to climate change is simple: We’re doing the right things, we’re just not doing them fast enough. The COP28 agreement is more of that trend. So you can spin it positively (it represents progress over all previous international anti-climate-change agreements) or negatively (nations don’t commit themselves to the kind of transformation we really need).

The text of the agreement “calls on” countries to “contribute” to global efforts to reduce carbon pollution. It lists a menu of actions they can take, including “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems … accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050.”

What the agreement doesn’t do is require a “phase-out” of fossil fuels. That ambitious language was supported by more than 100 countries, including the United States and European Union, but was fiercely opposed by fossil fuel states such as Saudi Arabia.

The agreement also calls for a tripling of renewable energy capacity and a doubling of energy efficiency, both by 2030.

Of course, none of that constitutes binding commitments.

Fundamentally, the problem is that governments are not going to get too far ahead of their people, and people’s willingness to sacrifice to stop climate change is not increasing as fast as it needs to. We can see that happening right here: If Biden imposes too much sacrifice on the American people, he’ll lose the 2024 election. And then Trump won’t just stop future progress, he’ll undo the things Biden has managed to get done.

The best we can realistically hope for is that governments won’t be too far behind their people, which can easily happen when special interests have too much influence.

and Rudy

If you watched the January 6 Committee hearings in the summer of 2022, you have to remember Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, the daughter/mother pair of Georgia election workers who were hounded by MAGA yahoos after Rudy Giuliani (and others) made up a lot of nonsense about them stealing massive numbers of votes from Donald Trump, who otherwise would have won Georgia.

How they supposedly accomplished that feat was never precisely spelled out. Maybe they had suitcases of fake ballots, or maybe they did something with a USB drive and those crooked Dominion Voting Systems machines (the ones Fox paid $787 million for lying about).

What isn’t in dispute is that their lives were turned upside down. They got death threats, people came to their homes, and (in one particularly disturbing video) Trevian Kutti pressured Moss to “confess to Trump’s voter-fraud allegations, or people would come to her home in 48 hours, and she’d go to jail.”

Well, Friday a jury ruled that Rudy owes Moss and Freeman $148 million for defamation, emotional distress, and punitive damages. Of course, Rudy doesn’t have $148 million, but now he’s going to have nothing, probably for the rest of his life. Fortunately for Rudy, he won’t go homeless, because the State of Georgia is offering him room and board for many years to come.

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Sadly, this verdict means that Rudy won’t have the money to pay Noelle Dunphy, who probably will also win a million-dollar settlement.

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Giuliani’s refusal to participate in the judicial process or testify in his own defense is the latest example of a pattern in Big Lie trials: In the media, MAGA folks talk big about the evidence they have and the claims they can prove. (Rudy is still making such claims.) But when it’s time to provide solid evidence in court, they offer nothing. That was the story in nearly all of the 60 cases Trump lost after the 2020 election. That’s what happened in the Fox/Dominion defamation trial. Fox could have saved itself 3/4 of a billion by making a plausible case that Dominion’s machines actually were faulty, but they decided not to.

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Just for a moment, I’m going to put aside any sense of journalistic responsibility and approach this situation as a fiction writer: If Rudy were a character in a novel, he’d be found dead in a hotel room in a month or two. We’d all be left to wonder if he had committed suicide, or if he just miscalculated how many sleeping pills or pain killers you can take with that much alcohol. And a few conspiracy theorists would say he had been murdered.

I’m not predicting that or wishing it. I’m just saying that’s the story arc he’s on. Story arcs are not fate, but they can develop momentum.

and Kate Cox

Kate Cox is a married mother of two who wanted to have another baby. She got pregnant, decided not to have an abortion, and looked forward to her due date. But then something went wrong.

The amniocentesis confirmed her fetus was developing with full trisomy 18, an extreme chromosomal abnormality. If her child was born alive at all, they would survive only minutes, hours or days outside of the womb.

The bad news was not just for her fetus, but for her as well: She was making multiple trips to the emergency room, and doctors told her that delivering this baby could affect ability to have children in the future. All things considered, she wanted to have an abortion.

“I do not want to put my body through the risks of continuing this pregnancy,” she said. “I do not want to continue until my baby dies in my belly or I have to deliver a stillborn baby or one where life will be measured in hours or days.”

But there was another problem: Her family lives in Texas, which has outlawed nearly all abortions. When the law was being debated, its proponents said not to worry, because it contained exceptions.

Texas’ laws have narrow exceptions only to save the life or prevent “substantial impairment of major bodily function” of a pregnant patient.

Those exceptions have two problems: (1) They’re vague. (2) A doctor who interprets those exceptions too loosely might face severe consequences.

The penalties for abortion providers who violate the state’s law include a decades-long prison sentence, a $100,000 fine and the loss of a medical license. When one misinterpretation of the law could mean the loss of your vocation and freedom, it’s no wonder that the legislation has had a chilling effect on doctors in the state providing any abortions at all.

So Kate’s doctors wouldn’t proceed without a court declaration that her abortion was legal. (Picture the situation: You’re in and out of the ER with a difficult pregnancy, you’re dealing with tragic news, and you need to scramble to find a lawyer and go to court.) Fortunately, a court agreed with her.

OK, then, you might think; the law is cumbersome, but it works. But then Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton stepped in, asking the Texas Supreme Court to countermand the lower court’s decision — which it did.

The end result was that Kate had to leave the state to get treatment in a strange city from doctors she didn’t know. Her lawyers won’t announce where she went, but they say that she got the abortion and she’s doing fine.

A few observations:

• Her story has a not-as-bad-as-it-could-have-been ending because she has means. A less well off woman wouldn’t have been able to go to court and travel the way she did.
• The exceptions in abortion bans aren’t worth as much as you might think. Pregnancy includes lots of nebulous possibilities, and doctors are not going to risk jail time on anything but a clear-cut case.
• The reason Kate had somewhere to go is that some states still protect women’s rights. If Congress passes a national abortion ban, as some Republicans have proposed, women like Kate will face a much more difficult problem. (Imagine waiting for the State Department to process your passport, and trying to guess how you’ll do during the plane flight.)

This case underlines a point I and others have been making for some while: It may sound reasonable to have an abortion ban after some number of weeks — 15, 20, 30, whatever. And you may think that such a law can have exceptions that avoid all the really bad possibilities.

But fundamentally, what such a law says is that past some point in pregnancy, the government will make better decisions than women can. And cases like Kate’s demonstrate that it won’t.

That’s why I’m against all abortion bans. People will say, “You want to allow abortions right up to the moment of birth?”, but that question misses the point. Women are not going to choose to carry a pregnancy for nine months just so they can abort at the last minute for no reason. In the real world, those late-term abortion decisions are complicated, and they need to be made by the people who are present, not by distant legislatures or judges.

and you also might be interested in …

Ukraine aid is still in limbo in Congress, as Republicans tie it to changes in immigration policy that the Biden administration doesn’t want. In the usual Republican logic, Biden’s failure to surrender is what’s holding everything up. As Senator Cornyn put it: “This is a catastrophe, and it’s a result of the Biden open border policies.”

This of course makes no sense, because there is no logical connection between our immigration policy and whether Ukraine should be sacrificed to Russia.

David Frum comments:

Supposedly, all leaders of Congress are united in their commitment to Ukraine—so the new speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, insists. Yet somehow this allegedly united commitment is not translating into action. Why not?

The notional answer is that Republicans must have a border-security deal as the price for Ukraine aid. But who on earth sets a price that could stymie something they affirmatively want to do? Republicans have not conditioned their support for Social Security on getting a border deal. They would never say that tax cuts must wait until after the border is secure. Only Ukraine is treated as something to be bartered, as if at a county fair. How did that happen?

Ukraine’s expendability to congressional Republicans originates in the sinister special relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Meanwhile, Putin’s other major ally, Hungarian strongman and CPAC heart-throb Viktor Orban, is blocking Ukraine aid from the EU.

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National Review’s Jim Geraghty thinks we’re all over-reacting to the whole Trump-as-dictator thing. America has checks-and-balances, you know.

Because if our existing checks and balances under the Constitution aren’t strong enough to stop abuses of power by Trump . . . why would you think that they’re strong enough to stop abuses of power by Joe Biden or anyone else?

If Joe Biden wanted to be dictator, if he had already tried to overturn an election he lost, and if he was the center of a dedicated personality cult willing to act on his word in spite of laws or facts, then I’d also be worried about him. Geraghty’s essay seems insane to me. But I thought you should see the argument.

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Mothers for Democracy have made a powerful ad attacking the thoughts-and-prayers reaction to mass shootings. A mother prays to God to save her drowning child, and numerous others — including a couple sunbathing in the same swimming pool — offer their support, but don’t do anything. The ad concludes with: “Thoughts and prayers are meaningless when you can act.”

I’m sure right-wingers will argue that this is a typical liberal diminishing of religion, but I think plenty of religious people will see the point: Why would you expect God to do something if you choose to do nothing?

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More evidence of how bad things have gotten under Biden:

Murder plummeted in the United States in 2023, likely at one of the fastest rates of decline ever recorded. What’s more, every type of Uniform Crime Report Part I crime with the exception of auto theft is likely down a considerable amount this year relative to last year according to newly reported data through September from the FBI.

It looks like murder blipped up during the 2020-21 pandemic and then went back down. It doesn’t seem to be Trump- or Biden-related.

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The stock market hit record highs last week. This caused a number of people to recall Trump bragging about the stock market’s performance during his term, and predicting that it would crash if Biden were elected.

Now, the stock market is not the same as the economy, and the majority of American citizens benefit little or not at all when stocks go up. However, a rising market does mean that people with money believe the economy is going in the right direction. Joe Billionaire doesn’t buy stocks if he thinks a depression is coming.

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One reason I love following Rep. Jeff Jackson is the level of insight he gives into the workings of Congress. Maybe you learned how a bill becomes law by watching Schoolhouse Rock or something. But Jeff’s experience trying to get parental leave for fathers in the National Guard was a little more complicated than that.

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Amanda Marcotte attempts to answer the “Are Trump supporters evil or stupid?” question and comes down on the side of evil.

Trying to convince Trump’s loyal supporters that he’s a fascist is not worth your time. They know — it’s why they like him.

and let’s close with something scientific

You have probably seen scientific analyses proving that Santa Claus cannot possibly deliver presents to all the world’s good children in one night: the speeds involved, the amount of energy necessary to achieve them, and so on. According to one calculation, the wind resistance alone would vaporize the lead reindeer in 4.26 thousandths of a second.

However, it turns out that this only proves that a Newtonian Santa can’t exist. Things work much differently if you apply the superposition concept from quantum mechanics, which allows an object to be in many places at once, but only probabilistically. (This is the principle that allows a quantum computer to do arbitrarily many calculations simultaneously.) Bastett explains:

Santa is a quantum being. His probabilistic nature means he can be in every house at the same time on Christmas. This is why it’s vitally important no one sees him. If he’s observed, the probabilities collapse and only one house gets presents.

Defendant’s four-year service as Commander in Chief did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens.

– Judge Tanya Chutkan

There’s no featured post this week.

This week everybody was talking about the war in Gaza

Which is back on. Fighting resumed on Friday morning, with each side blaming the other.

During the seven-day ceasefire, Hamas agreed to release 110 people from Gaza, including 78 Israeli women and children. As part of the deal, 240 Palestinians were also released from Israeli jails. They had been accused of a range of offences, from throwing stones to incitement and attempted murder. … It is estimated that about 140 Israeli hostages remain in captivity in Gaza.

Israel has resumed bombing, and its forces have begun moving into the southern part of Gaza. Hamas is again firing rockets into Israel.

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Thursday, the NYT revealed that Israel had the Hamas attack plan for over a year. Israeli officials apparently ignored the plan, which Hamas “followed with shocking precision” on October 7.

The document circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders, but experts determined that an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’s capabilities, according to documents and officials.

Josh Marshall adds:

Very recently, ground-level analysts monitoring video surveillance of activity in Gaza saw evidence that Hamas was war-gaming and running drills for attacks that looked like components of Jericho Wall. One analyst repeatedly pressed the issue with higher-ups, but her effort to raise the alarm was again disregarded.

His column doesn’t identify a source for that information.

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Politically in the US, the Gaza War has been bad for Biden, but not for the reason a lot of people think. He is undoubtedly losing votes on the left for being too pro-Israel, but he would probably lose more votes if he were more critical of Israel. (“Biden is siding with the terrorists!”)

Biden will lose votes whatever he does, because Israel/Palestine is a wedge issue that splits Democrats, but not Republicans. Republicans would probably be happy with anything Israel did, even to the point of an actual genocide. (Aside: Whatever you think of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, it’s not genocide. Genocide is too important a word to ruin through misuse.)

Similarly, the Ukraine War is a wedge issue that splits Republicans, but not Democrats. Democrats are united behind Ukraine. Meanwhile Putin remains a hero to many MAGA Republicans, even as establishment Republicans agree with Democrats in supporting Ukraine.

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I know it’s too much to expect that people will take a step back and think rationally about an issue, but if they did, they’d see that the Gaza War validates a liberal rather than conservative view of how to maintain peace. In its simplest form, the conservative idea is peace-through-strength: If we’re strong enough and tough enough, no one will attack us because they’ll know they will suffer more than we will.

The liberal vision is peace-through-justice: If everyone is getting a square deal, they won’t want to risk it by going to war.

In their purest forms, both visions are naive; real peace requires both strength and justice. But I think liberals understand that, while I don’t think conservatives do. The Hamas attack exposed the folly of the Netanyahu peace-through-strength policy. If people feel aggrieved enough, they won’t care that a war will hurt them more than you. They’ll risk their lives to bite your ankle.

and the Trump trials

Trump’ claims of presidential immunity were denied by two different D. C. federal courts Friday. A three-judge panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals rejected his motion to dismiss a civil lawsuit filed by two U.S. Capitol police officers and several Democratic lawmakers against Trump and a few other individuals and groups they want held responsible for the January 6 violence. And District Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected his motion to dismiss Jack Smith’s election interference indictment.

Nothing in the Constitution explicitly immunizes a current or former president from legal processes. However, certain kinds of immunity have been recognized by the courts: Presidents are immune from lawsuits against the consequences of carrying out their duties. And longstanding DoJ policy, based on a memo by its Office of Legal Counsel, says that a sitting president can’t be indicted. (That doctrine has never been tested in court.) And courts have recognized a vague principle that at some point, legal harassment of a president might reach the point that it violates the separation of powers between the executive and judicial branches of government.

In his motions, Trump was asking the courts to expand that immunity to vast proportions. His arguments were slapped down in both cases.

Both motions were for dismissing the cases without a trial. Dismissal motions have to clear a very high bar, because they’re claiming that a trial can’t possibly reveal anything that would matter. So the judge has to assume that the claims made by the prosecutors or plaintiffs are true, and conclude that no penalty would apply anyway.

The appeals court ruled that the civil case against Trump needs to go forward, because it’s not obvious that Trump’s actions related to the January 6 riot were part of his job.

The President, though, does not spend every minute of every day exercising official responsibilities. And when he acts outside the functions of his office, he does not continue to enjoy immunity from damages liability just because he happens to be the President.

This kind of compartmentalization has never registered with Trump. In his mind, there was no separation between his person and his presidency. If the president had some power, then he had that power, to wield as he saw fit, independent of whether he was carrying out some official duty.

Judge Chutkan ruled similarly: Committing crimes is not part of a president’s job, so crimes allegedly committed while in office can be prosecuted. (Whether those crimes were or were not committed should be decided at trial.) And she need not settle the presidential-indictment question here, because Trump is not president.

Whatever immunities a sitting President may enjoy, the United States has only one Chief Executive at a time, and that position does not confer a lifelong “get-out-of-jail-free” pass. Former Presidents enjoy no special conditions on their federal criminal liability. Defendant may be subject to federal investigation, indictment, prosecution, conviction, and punishment for any criminal acts undertaken while in office

Chutkan also denied a motion claiming that the Smith indictment should be dismissed because it criminalizes speech protected by the First Amendment.

[I]t is well established that the First Amendment does not protect speech that is used as an instrument of a crime, and consequently the Indictment—which charges Defendant with, among other things, making statements in furtherance of a crime—does not violate Defendant’s First
Amendment rights.

The question of whether Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election were part of a criminal plot has to be decided at trial.

While Defendant challenges that allegation in his Motion, and may do so at trial, his claim that his belief was reasonable does not implicate the First Amendment. If the Government cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt at trial that Defendant knowingly made false statements, he will not be convicted; that would not mean the Indictment violated the First Amendment.

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Meanwhile, there are the gag orders. WaPo keeps track of which ones are active: Judge Chutkan’s order preventing Trump from disparaging prosecutors, witnesses and court personnel involved in his trial is suspended while the appellate court considers it. They might rule any day now.

Judge Engoron’s order preventing Trump from attacking court personnel is currently in force as an appeals court evaluates it.

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After normalizing Trump for many years, many voices in the mainstream media finally seems to be acknowledging his threat to America’s constitutional democracy. Thursday, WaPo editor-at-large Robert Kagan published “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.“

Today’s NYT has an article “Why a Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical than His First“. The authors note that Trump has always had “autocratic impulses”, dating back to his praise of the Chinese massacre of the Tiananmen Square demonstrators, and reflected in his admiration for autocrats like Saddam Hussein or the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, not to mention Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

What would be different in a second Trump administration is not so much his character as his surroundings. Forces that somewhat contained his autocratic tendencies in his first term — staff members who saw their job as sometimes restraining him, a few congressional Republicans episodically willing to criticize or oppose him, a partisan balance on the Supreme Court that occasionally ruled against him — would all be weaker.

Princeton Professor Jan-Werner Müller has a similar article in The Guardian. He observes that establishment-Republican institutions like the Heritage Foundation are now on board with a Trump autocracy.

Trump is not hiding anything; nor does a figure like the Heritage president, who considers Hungary “not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model”.

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Liz Cheney’s book Oath and Honor comes out this week. Early reports portray it as an insider’s view of how the Republican Party officials caved in to Trump, even as they criticized and even laughed at him privately.

and Elon’s breakdown

Elon Musk is further gone than I thought. In an interview Wednesday at the NYT DealBook summit, he told companies who have responded to his antisemitic tweets by pulling their ads from X to “Go fuck yourself.”

If someone is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. GO. FUCK. YOUR. SELF.

You can watch the video. He clearly expected the audience to applaud his courageous stance, but instead there was a stunned silence. The interviewer (Andrew Ross Sorkin) then asked about “the economics of X”, which relies on advertising revenue to survive. And Elon responded:

What this advertising boycott is going to do, it’s going to kill the company. … And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company. We’ll document it in great detail.

When Sorkin explained how the advertisers would justify themselves, Musk countered:

Tell it to Earth. … Let’s see how Earth responds to that.

Elon seems convinced that he is the hero of this story, and that the People of Earth will frame events the way he does. How dare companies like Disney choose to spend their advertising dollars somewhere else? How dare they decide that displaying a trailer for “Wish” next to some white supremacist rant doesn’t serve their purposes? The People of Earth are so attached to the X platform and so enamored of Elon himself that they will make Disney pay for such arrogance.

Unsurprisingly, advertisers did not flock back to X after Musk’s threat to expose them to “Earth”.

Three things are worth pointing out here: First, Musk’s attempt to turn this into a free-speech issue falls flat. Sure: Antisemites, racists, misogynists, and even outright swastika-waving Nazis have a right to speak their minds and try to make converts. But they are not entitled to have someone else sponsor a platform for them.

And second, I see Elon’s stewardship of X as part of what Cory Doctorow calls “the Great Enshittening” of the internet. I would gladly spend my X-time elsewhere if some alternative platform achieved a critical mass of users, and I welcome X’s looming demise because it might create space for something better to emerge.

As for Musk himself, I see him as the kind of tragic figure Aeschylus would have found fascinating. Like the Trump saga, Elon’s story demonstrates that being worshiped is bad for mortals. Almost no humans have enough strength of character to stay sane once they’ve been surrounded by a cadre of worshipers the way Elon has.

One of the things I admire most about Barack Obama is that he has shown the good sense to keep our admiration at arm’s length.

and the Biden economy

GDP growth after inflation was 5.2% in the third quarter, which is a stunning number. At its peak in the third quarter of 2019, the Trump economy posted 4.6% growth.

The US economy continues to lead the G7 countries.

The inflation rate is now lower than when Biden took office.

And what about the claim that Biden has been bad for US oil production?

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The continuing good economic news contrasts with the public view that the economy is in bad shape. David Roberts refers to this as the “vibes” problem, which Democrats have to get better at addressing.

Substantive accomplishments — even the ones the public says on polls they want/like — are not enough, in & of themselves, to win political approval. They don’t advertise themselves or tell their own story. The channels through which the public has traditionally been informed about political accomplishments have become fragmented, polluted, and dominated by lavishly funded right wingers. They can’t be relied on. … In other words, Dems are winning the war of substance but losing the vibes war, largely because they don’t seem to realize that those two fights have drifted almost entirely apart.

and you also might be interested in …

Henry Kissinger died at 100, inspiring obituaries like “Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies“. Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Chile … if you live long enough, all your crimes start to sound like ancient history.

But what I had thought was Kissinger’s most lasting contribution to American culture turns out not to be true: He wasn’t the model for Dr. Strangelove.

It is frequently claimed the character was based on Henry Kissinger, but Kubrick and Sellers denied this; Sellers said: “Strangelove was never modeled after Kissinger—that’s a popular misconception. It was always Wernher von Braun.” Furthermore, Henry Kissinger points out in his memoirs that at the time of the writing of Dr. Strangelove, he was a little-known academic.

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Sandra Day O’Connor also died. The first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, she lived to be 93. Appointed by Ronald Reagan, she was the kind of conservative justice that today’s conservatives abhor. She wasn’t driven by ideology. Instead, the facts of the case mattered to her, and you couldn’t predict her vote without examining them. Politico summarizes:

[H]er decisions and her reasoning demonstrated a constant attention to the proper role of the Supreme Court as a nonpartisan arbiter of hot-button issues in American life, to the actual facts about the actual parties, and to the way in which the bench’s rulings would be experienced by the American public. … The strategy of the Roberts Court, however, has been strikingly different.

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Republicans have begun talking about having a health care plan again. I say “again” not because they have had a health care plan in the past, but because they talk about having a plan every now and then.

Back in 2015 Trump promised a “terrific”, “phenomenal”, and “fantastic” system to replace ObamaCare. But once in office, he left the details to Republicans in Congress, who never united around any particular proposal. Their slogan of “repeal and replace” was always light on the “replace” side. When John McCain delivered the final vote needed to save ObamaCare in 2017, his office’s statement said:

While the amendment would have repealed some of Obamacare’s most burdensome regulations, it offered no replacement to actually reform our health care system and deliver affordable, quality health care to our citizens.

Nothing has changed in the last six years. Trump is now talking again about repealing ObamaCare.

Trump’s campaign is drawing up a health care proposal, although it is unclear when that will be released or if it will propose a full replacement plan (Republicans have struggled to put one together for years).

Not to be outdone, Ron DeSantis is also talking about a health care plan.

We need to have a health care plan that works,” he said when asked whether he will repeal and replace ObamaCare. “ObamaCare hasn’t worked. We are going to replace and supersede with a better — better plan.”

When?

DeSantis said details of the plan will likely be worked out in the spring and that his campaign would “roll out a big proposal.”

By spring, of course, DeSantis will be an ex-candidate and whatever proposal he might have come out with will be moot.

The basic conservative health-care problem is that market competition will never deliver a good health insurance system. There’s a simple reason for that: The way to make money in health insurance isn’t to deliver quality care at an affordable price. Instead, the path to high profits is to insure people who don’t get sick, and to encourage people who likely will get sick to insure with somebody else. The less government regulation a system has, the more this market imperative will assert itself.

Almost no other market works this way. For example, if you’re a car company, there’s no group of consumers that you hope doesn’t buy your car.

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Sports Illustrated got nailed for apparently letting AI write articles and then crediting them to fake reporters with AI-generated photos.

What’s weird to me is the deception. I mean, why not be up-front about it? There’s nothing inherently immoral about letting ChatGPT write an article if you then fact-check, edit, and take responsibility for it. I have no plans to produce Sift articles that way, but if I did, I wouldn’t be ashamed to admit it. (I’m trying to inform people and promote my point of view rather than validate some claim about my abilities.)

In high school I worked for my local newspaper, and occasionally my job involved writing intro paragraphs for box scores of minor sporting events we hadn’t sent a reporter to: “Joe Blow scored 23 points to lead West Nowhere High to a 79-53 rout of its crosstown rival East Nowhere.” I was essentially doing the work of an AI: not reporting anything new, but applying common narrative templates to information already in the box score.

In the WaPo, Josh Tyrangiel takes a similar view: He used to work at Bloomberg, which quickly processed company earnings reports to produce headlines that its subscribers would trade on. But rapidly searching through numbers to find the most significant ones is something computers do better than humans.

Bloomberg shifted to automated earnings headlines in 2013 and has used AI to create its earnings summaries since 2018. It also employs more journalists and analysts now than it did back then — some 2,700, all of whom get to do more interesting work than writing earnings headlines and summaries.

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As expected, George Santos was expelled from the House of Representatives. What’s surprising is the 114 votes not to expel him.

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More evidence how out-of-it I am: The word of the year is “rizz”, which I had never heard of until I read the article. Reportedly, it is Gen Z slang for “a person’s ability to attract a romantic partner through style, charm or attractiveness”.

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If you’re one of those people who does the bulk of your charity giving at the end of the year, consider the Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the Wikipedia. It doesn’t have any poster children or sad animals to show you, but Wikipedia has become central to our basic information infrastructure. I rely on it constantly for historical information, and it actually isn’t a bad way to keep track of evolving news stories, like natural disasters and mass shootings. Typically, the first reports in the media aren’t terribly accurate, and over a period of days it can be hard to sort out what was rumor and what is still considered reliable. Wikipedia collects and curates that stuff.

and let’s close with a visual pun

The artist Gustav Klimt had a very distinctive style, as you can see from one of his most famous works: The Woman in Gold.

The similarity in names inspired Carl Tétreault to produce this image of The Man With No Name: “Klimt Eastwood“.

The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon.

– George Orwell’s 1940 review of Mein Kampf

This week’s featured post is “Revisiting the fascism question“. I didn’t notice this cartoon until after that article posted.

If you wondered what I was doing with my week off last week, I was in a church speculating about death.

This week everybody was talking about Gaza

A frequently rumored deal where Hamas would release some number of hostages in exchange for a ceasefire of a certain number of days keeps not quite happening.

The war news this week centered on the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza, which Israel has claimed sits over a Hamas command-and-control center. Meanwhile, though, it was a hospital, and conditions there became horrific while Israel searched it for Hamas fighters and their hostages. Saturday, a deal was reached to evacuate the patients that could be moved and leave the hospital with a skeleton crew to take care of the rest.

Israel turned up a collection of weapons from the hospital and a shaft that presumably goes down into deeper tunnels. But so far this evidence has fallen short of a command-and-control center, so not everyone was impressed.

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It’s hard to feel good about any news coming out of Gaza. My interpretation of the October 7 attacks is that Hamas designed them to offend Israel as deeply as possible, giving Israelis the maximum motivation to come to Gaza and root them out. Simultaneously, Hamas had embedded itself in Gaza so tightly that Israel would have to do ugly, horrible things to succeed in rooting them out. For its part, Israel is now doing those ugly, horrible things, and Palestinian civilians are dying in large numbers.

Watching from the outside, I have a hard time coming up with some alternative path Israel ought to be taking, and yet I also have a hard time rooting for them to succeed in their current path. I find myself agreeing with this Nicholas Kristof column, especially this line:

Unless you believe in human rights for Jews and for Palestinians, you don’t actually believe in human rights.

---

There’s been a lot written — maybe appropriately so — about antisemitism on college campuses, and from the left in general. But this week we got a reminder that antisemitism on the right is far more pervasive and virulent.

Matt Yglesias wrote a fairly long column about left and right antisemitism, which I’ll oversimplify down to this: Leftists sympathize with Palestinians, and sometimes end up overshooting into hating Jews. Rightists hate Jews, and so invent conspiracy theories to justify that hatred. Neither position is good, but they’re not exactly mirror images of each other.

Cases in point are these statements by Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, which blame Jews for financing “white genocide” and “anti-white causes”. Elon Musk responded to a tweet expressing a similar view with “You have said the actual truth.”

---

In case you thought Hamas was the only group of unreasonable radicals, The New Yorker interviews Daniella Weiss of the Israeli settler movement.

The borders of the homeland of the Jews are the Euphrates in the east and the Nile in the southwest.

That’s the land promised to Abraham’s descendants in Genesis 15. It includes big chunks of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq.

If someone decides to invent a new religion today, who will decide the rules? The first nation that got the word from God, the promise from God—the first nation is the one who has the right to it. The others that follow—Christianity and Islam, with their demands, with their perceptions—they’re imitating what existed already. So, why in Israel? They could be anywhere in the world. They came after us, in the double sense of the world.

She’s fine with non-Jews continuing to live in these lands, as long as they accept that

We the Jews are the sovereigns in the state of Israel and in the Land of Israel.

That means accepting that “they are not going to have the right to vote for the Knesset. No, no, no.”

and averting a government shutdown

I give Speaker Johnson credit for not waiting until the absolute last minute to recognize reality: Any plan to keep the government funded has to rely on Democratic votes, so loading a continuing resolution up with right-wing culture-war riders can’t work. The House got a relatively clean CR done Tuesday (supported by 209 Democrats and only 127 Republicans), the Senate passed it Wednesday, and President Biden signed it Thursday, with a day to spare. The ordinary business of government shouldn’t be dramatic. Things that need to get done should get done without watching some clock tick down to zero.

Johnson accomplished this by pulling the same trick Kevin McCarthy did just before the House sacked him: He avoided putting the bill through the Rules Committee (where all bills usually go, so that rules can be established for amendments, debate limits, etc., and which McCarthy had stacked with “Freedom” Caucus members as part of the deal that made him speaker). That meant it needed a 2/3rds supermajority to pass, which it only got via overwhelming Democratic support.

Predictably, passing a realistic CR with mostly Democratic votes angered the “Freedom” Caucus, which has no interest in the kind of compromise democracy always entails. So far no one is proposing another vacate-the-chair resolution. But it’s hard to see how Johnson gets past the next set of funding deadlines without a revolt.

---

About those deadlines: The one weird thing about the Johnson-designed CR is that it has two. The bill would extend funding until January 19 for military construction, veterans’ affairs, transportation, housing and the Energy Department. The rest of the government – anything not covered by the first step – would be funded until February 2.

It’s not clear what kind of game Johnson has in mind. Maybe he wants to get full-year appropriation bills approved for the January 19 departments approved first, then have a showdown over big cuts to the February 2 departments. Or maybe he wants to be able to have a shutdown over the January 19 departments while the others are still funded. We’ll see how Democrats maneuver in response.

In general, it’s hard to disagree with one part of Johnson’s rhetoric: Congress ought to debate individual programs on their merits, rather than vote the whole government up or down. However, such a plan requires repeated compromises with Democrats, and recognizing that the small and fractious Republican House majority can’t get its way on everything. As long as the House loads every bill with things Democrats will never support, nothing will pass and we’ll keep coming down to deadlines with the government unfunded.

---

The CR does not include additional aid for Israel or Ukraine. Meanwhile, Johnson’s previous bill that coupled aid to Israel with a deficit-increasing IRS cut is dead in the Senate. If Israel (not to mention Ukraine) is going to get more aid, the House is going to have to try again.

The fact that the IRS cut increases the deficit (by making it easier for rich taxpayers to cheat; I’ve heard the cut described as “defund the tax police”) is routinely left out of conservative-media articles. Conservative media frames the situation as Democrats wanting to protect IRS bureaucrats, not Democrats wanting rich people to pay the taxes they legally owe.

Basically, there are two kinds of legislators. When something needs to get done, one kind thinks “What am I willing to give up to make this happen?” and the other thinks “What can I get people to give me to stop blocking this?”

and the China summit

President Biden met President Xi on Wednesday, and accomplished a small number of important but not flashy things: They restored communications between Chinese and American military leaders, which is how minor incidents are settled without escalating into war. And China agreed to reduce precursor chemicals for making fentanyl, which is a key point in the China-to-Mexico-to-America drug trade. The two leaders disagreed about a number of other issues, like Taiwan.

---

Yeah, yeah, Taiwan and trade and climate agreements and all that are important, but here’s what you were really concerned about: China will resume sending pandas to US zoos.

---

Back in 2018, John Oliver publicized the banned-in-China anti-Xi memes styling him as Winnie the Pooh, and now I can’t see him without noting the resemblance.

and the Tuberville drama

Senator Tuberville’s blockade on military promotions continued this week, and we found out that he has at least one ally: Mike Lee of Utah.

Several Republicans have publicly expressed frustration with Tuberville on the floor of the Senate, to no avail. Democrats are going to propose a temporary rule change to circumvent the blockade, but it needs 60 votes to pass. If all 51 Democrats show up to support the change, nine Republicans will be needed. No one knows whether the anti-Tuberville faction has that many Republicans.

and Trump’s “insurrection”

A Colorado judge weighed in Friday on whether the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause makes Donald Trump ineligible to be president again. The ruling is a mixed bag: She finds that Trump did engage in insurrection, in the sense intended by the Amendment, but denies that the phrase “officer of the United States” was intended to include presidents. As a result, Trump’s name should appear on Colorado primary ballots.

That sounds like a victory for Trump, but Harry Litman isn’t so sure. The engaged-in-insurrection part is a finding of fact (based on extensive examination of evidence) which the appellate courts would be inclined to defer to, while the not-an-officer part is a matter of law that the higher courts will want to decide for themselves. So this Trump “victory” may set up a less victorious outcome on appeal.

The judge’s opinion is a good summary of what happened on January 6. A key point is that Trump’s words can’t be taken at face value because

Trump developed and employed a coded language based in doublespeak that was understood between himself and far-right extremists, while maintaining a claim to ambiguity among a wider audience.

and you also might be interested in …

Former first lady Rosalynn Carter died Sunday. Her husband, former president Jimmy Carter, has been in hospice since February.

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When Republicans and a few Democrats voted against a resolution to expel George Santos from the House of Representatives a few weeks ago, they claimed it was because he had not yet gotten the due process that an Ethics Committee investigation would provide.

Well, the Ethics report came in Thursday, saying that

Mr Santos exploited “every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit.”

A new expulsion resolution is expected after Thanksgiving, and it will probably pass.

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The Supreme Court finally adopted an ethics code. Critics are not impressed.

The most glaring defect of the new code is its complete lack of any enforcement power. Its 15 pages are littered with weak verbs like “should,” “should not” and “endeavor to,” which, as any college student on a pre-exam bender will tell you, is a reliable way to sound serious without actually doing the work. … Whatever the justices do, they must know there will be no professional repercussions. Appointed for life and removable only by impeachment, they are effectively untouchable.

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Baseball’s A’s will move from Oakland to Las Vegas by 2028, leaving Oakland without any sports franchises. The A’s are baseball’s most traveled franchise, beginning as the Philadelphia Athletics, then moving to Kansas City, Oakland, and now Las Vegas.

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My annual exercise in humility — reading various publications’ best-books-of-the-year lists and admitting how few of them I’ve even noticed — begins with the Washington Post. And Vox reviews the 25 nominees for a National Book Award.

and let’s close with an interesting question

WaPo columnist Michael Dirda raises the idea of books you come back to again and again, and refines it a little: Books you may have read only once, but you want to come back to. What’s interesting in his column isn’t his list of 22 books, but the question itself.

I’ll offer All the King’s Men as a novel I re-read every five years or so, and Gravity’s Rainbow as one I don’t re-read cover to cover, but keep coming back to for specific scenes and descriptions. (If you write, you need to keep exposing yourself to authors whose grasp of language is deeper than your own.) As for a set of books I want to come back to someday: Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle and Nick Harkaway’s Gnommon, which I almost understood the second time through.

Your turn.

Someone asked me today in the media, “People are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue?” I said, “Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.“

– Speaker Mike Johnson to Sean Hannity

This week’s featured post is “Mike Johnson is worse than you think“.

This week everybody was talking about the new speaker

Wednesday, the House ended three weeks of chaos by electing Mike Johnson (R-LA) Speaker of the House on a party line vote. The featured post outlines why Johnson scares me more than some random right-wing extremist with similar views on most issues: Mike Johnson is a Christian Nationalist. So he feels perfectly justified in ignoring the will of the electorate and imposing his moral vision on us.

But there’s more to think about here than just Johnson. Last week I may have raised your hope that non-MAGA Republicans had found their backbones. I apologize. After watching the MAGA wing torpedo Tom Emmer’s candidacy for speaker, his supporters gave in and voted unanimously for Mike Johnson, whose ideology differs from Jim Jordan’s only by being more theocratic.

Ken Buck of Colorado is a prime example. Two weeks ago, in an interview with MSNBC’s Katy Tur, Buck seemed to be taking a principled pro-democracy stand:

I asked [Steve Scalise] last night: “Will you unequivocally and publicly state that the election, the 2020 presidential election, was not stolen?” He didn’t answer that question very clearly and Jim Jordan didn’t answer that question very clearly.

But then he backed down and voted for Johnson, who led 100 Republican members of Congress in supporting an unsuccessful lawsuit by the Texas attorney general that would have invalidated the electoral votes of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Without those states, Joe Biden would not have had 270 electoral votes and the outcome of the election would have been thrown into dispute. (The Supreme Court refused to consider the case on the grounds that Texas had no standing.)

After casting his vote in support of Johnson on Wednesday, Buck told CNN that he had not heard Johnson acknowledge that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, as he had previously demanded of Jordan and Scalise.

“I have not gotten that promise from Mike,” Buck said. “I hope he comes around to that point.”

Here’s how much respect Johnson has for Buck’s question: When Johnson faced the press for the first time as speaker, ABC’s Rachel Scott tried to ask something similar. She was shouted down by the Republican congresspeople surrounding Johnson, highlighted by North Carolina’s Virginia Foxx yelling, “Shut up! Shut up!” The Hill describes the Speaker’s response:

Johnson smiled, shook his head and said “next question.”

That seems to be Speaker Johnson in a nutshell: He dresses more neatly than Jim Jordan, keeps his cool, and is not as uncouth as Virginia Foxx. But he’s on the same page, and will unapologetically take advantage of their rudeness.

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In the same Katy Tur interview, Rep. Buck mentioned that he wanted assurances from the speaker candidates that they would bring Ukraine funding up for a vote. It looks like he didn’t get that from Johnson either. Thursday, Speaker Johnson announced that he intended to separate Ukraine and Israel funding bills. The implication of that is that each bill would be subject to the Hastert Rule, which does not allow votes on bills that don’t have majority support inside the Republican caucus. Ukraine aid is a close question within the caucus, so it may not come up for a vote in the full House, where it would surely pass.

and the Israel/Gaza war

Unless you implicitly trust one side or the other, it’s hard to get any clear idea of what’s going on in Gaza. Bombs are falling, and whatever anyone intends, they fall (like the rain) on the just and the unjust alike. A ground invasion has started, but doesn’t seem yet to be an all-out assault. Such an assault may still be coming, but it might not.

The possibilities for the war to expand are numerous. A northern front could open between Israel and Hezbollah. A uprising in the West Bank is possible. I’ve seen a claim on X/Twitter — God knows if anything on X is true these days — that Israeli settlers are attempting to expel Palestinians. Peter Beinart believes this report enough to claim he saw it coming in his article last spring: “Could Israel Carry Out Another Nakba?“.

and another mass shooting

This is America, so you don’t have time to process one shooting before the next one happens. Saturday night, shots were fired in Tampa’s Ybor City neighborhood.

A shooting erupted in the middle of Ybor City after a Saturday night full of Halloween celebrations, leaving two dead and at least 18 people injured, Tampa police said.

But you may not be ready to think about that yet, because the rampage in Lewiston, Maine Wednesday evening is still so fresh. A shooter attacked random people in a bar and in a bowling alley, killing 18 and wounding 13. (Early reports that 50-60 people had been injured were wrong.) The shooter has been identified as Robert Card, and his body was found Friday; apparently he killed himself.

If you wanted to make the point that American gun laws are insane, you could hardly have designed an event more perfectly. In July, Card bought a Ruger SFAR high-powered rifle and a Beretta semi-automatic pistol. Ten days later, while serving as an Army reservist at a camp in New York,

the army gave Card a “Command Referral” to seek treatment after he told army personnel at Camp Smith Card had been “hearing voices” and had thoughts about “hurting other soldiers.” A National Guard spokesperson confirmed to CNN Card was transported to the nearby Keller Army Community Hospital at the United States Military Academy for “medical evaluation,” after Army Reserve officials reported Card for “behaving erratically.”

His family was also worried about him.

Card’s family told NBC News on Thursday that he had been hearing voices for months. “His mind was twisting them around,” said Katie Card, the suspect’s sister-in-law.

She said the family reached out to police and Card’s Army Reserve base as they “got increasingly concerned.”

Unfortunately, Maine only has a “yellow-flag law”, a watered-down version of the red-flag laws 21 other states have.

Even though Card underwent psychiatric treatment, [Nick] Suplina [senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety] said he believes that would not have immediately set Maine’s yellow flag law into motion because that process involved a law enforcement agency in a different state. [New York]

The family would have likely had to contact police in Maine, starting a new process, Suplina said.

So in the United States, or at least in Maine, you can be crazy, people can know you’re crazy, there can be a recent record of you buying a gun suitable for mass killing, and nobody can do anything about it.

I’ve heard several local people explain that implementing a more effective red-flag law hadn’t seemed all that urgent, because Maine (and particularly a small town like Lewiston), just didn’t seem like the kind of place where these things happen. But the inadequacy of that kind of thinking has been exposed over and over again: Parkland, Florida wasn’t the kind of place where these things happen. Neither was Uvalde, Texas or Newtown, Connecticut. After last year’s Fourth of July shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, I tried to explain what that meant:

I don’t think I’ve ever been to Highland Park, and you probably haven’t either. But you’ve seen it. The movies use Chicago’s North Shore suburbs to symbolize affluent communities so sheltered from the scary aspects of modern life that teens have to seek out adventure for themselves. Ferris Bueller lived in Highland Park; so did Joel Goodsen from Risky Business. That idyllic family life The Good Wife had before her crooked-politician husband went to jail and everything fell apart? It was in Highland Park. The town sits between Lake Forest, where 1980 Best Picture Ordinary People was set, and Winnetka, site of the Home Alone house. (But parts of that movie were shot in Highland Park too.)

During their glory days with the Bulls, basketball legends Michael Jordan and Scotty Pippen had Highland Park mansions. Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick was born there. About 30K people live there now, and the 2010 census says the median household income is over $100K.

Here’s what I’m trying to get across: If a mass shooting can happen in Highland Park, it can happen anywhere. It can happen in your town too.

So me say it again: As long as we have these crazy gun laws, we’re all vulnerable.

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Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is hearing a case that could invalidate another kind of red-flag law: one that takes guns away from domestic abusers. Such laws are excellent from two points of view:

• They undoubtedly save the lives of spouses, children, and other close associates of violent individuals.
• And they probably prevent mass shootings, because mass shooters often start on a smaller scale, with violence against the people closest to them.

But maybe a law disarming domestic abusers is one of those nice things we just can’t have in the United States, at least not under this Supreme Court.

According to Vox’ Ian Millhiser, Zackey Rahimi is “an individual that no sensible society would allow to have a gun”. Allegedly, in addition to assaulting his girl friend in a parking lot, Rahimi fired a gun at a bystander who witnessed the incident. He was involved in five other shooting incidents in a little over a year.

And yet, an appeals court recently found that Rahimi has a constitutional right to own a gun. In fact, any law that tries to take his guns away is unconstitutional on its face.

That means that, if the Fifth Circuit’s decision is upheld by the Supreme Court, this federal ban on firearm possession by domestic abusers may never be applied to any individual, no matter how violent that individual may be and no matter how careful the court that issued a restraining order against such an individual was in ensuring that they received due process.

But we haven’t gotten to the craziest part yet: That result is a correct application of the doctrine Clarence Thomas laid out in the 2022 Bruen decision.

Bruen held that, in order to justify nearly any law regulating firearms, “the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” This means that lawyers defending even the most widely accepted gun laws, such as the federal ban on gun possession by domestic abusers, must show that “analogous regulations” also existed and were accepted when the Constitution was framed — particularly if the law addresses “a general societal problem that has persisted since the 18th century.” If they cannot, the challenged gun law must be struck down.

And that’s where we’re out of luck. Domestic abuse certainly existed in the Founding Era, but it wasn’t considered a crime. And there’s no contemporary record of any law taking flintlock pistols away from wife beaters. So unless the Court wants to backtrack on a fairly recent decision, Rahimi (and even worse people) will get to keep his guns.

and the Trump trials

Another of Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia RICO case pleaded guilty Tuesday: Jenna Ellis.

Ellis, who once described herself as part of an “elite strike force team” of attorneys pursuing unfounded claims of election fraud, pleaded guilty to one count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings.

“If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges,” a tearful Ellis told the judge.

What damage Ellis’ testimony might do to Trump — or to co-defendant Rudy Giuliani, who Ellis worked with closely — is still speculative. In the NYT, Norman Eisen and Amy Lee Copeland cast her as a star witness, but it’s hard to say at this point.

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Two different Trump gag orders were in the news. In the civil fraud trial against the Trump Organization in New York, Judge Arthur Engoron called Trump to the stand, found his testimony not credible, and fined him $10,000. Engoron had earlier issued a gag order on Trump preventing him from attacking officers of the court when Trump had baselessly posted on Truth Social that Engoron’s law clerk was Chuck Schumer’s girlfriend. He had fined Trump $5K when the post persisted on Trump’s campaign website, which his lawyers said was “inadvertent”.

This fine came after Trump told reporters outside the courtroom on Wednesday that “This judge is a very partisan judge with a person who is very partisan sitting alongside him — perhaps even much more partisan than he is.” Judge Engoron took that as yet another reference to his clerk, which Trump denied on the stand. (He claimed he was talking about Michael Cohen, who had appeared that day as a witness. Attacking witnesses is also typically frowned upon.) This was the claim Engoron said he didn’t believe.

Meanwhile, Judge Tanya Chutkan (presiding in the federal election interference case against Trump) issued a gag order banning him from attacking prosecutors and witnesses in that trial. She stayed the order temporarily while waiting for an appellate court to rule, but then reinstated it when Trump used the temporary break in the order to go after potential witness Mark Meadows.

Trump is claiming that his status as a former president and current presidential candidate gives him rights no other criminal defendant would have. I doubt the appeals court will agree with him.

Ultimately, Trump will have to be found in contempt of court because he is in fact contemptuous of the proceedings against him. Clearly, $10K fines are not going to restrain him. Eventually, we’ll have to see if jail time works.

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This should be an exciting week in the New York fraud trial: Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka are expected to testify.

you also might be interested in …

The Commerce Department reported that the US economy grew at a 4.9% annual pace in the third quarter. (And yes, that number does account for inflation.) The previous week, a report from the Federal Reserve said that both mean and median household wealth is up. In other words, American households are generally richer than they were before the pandemic.

One of the continuing mysteries of American politics is that President Biden consistently polls badly on economic issues, while the country’s economic statistics have been quite good.

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Weird weather continues to result from climate change: Hurricane Otis made landfall near Acapulco as a Category 5 storm Wednesday. It is the only Cat 5 storm to hit the Pacific coast, and intensified from a mere tropical storm in less than 24 hours.

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Virginia holds its elections in odd years, making the state a possible bellwether of national trends. Two years ago, Glenn Youngkin’s upset victory in the governor’s race drew attention to critical race theory and other right-wing education tropes.

A week from tomorrow, the governorship is not on the ballot, but control of the legislature is. Democrats currently hold a small majority in the Senate and Republicans in the House.

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Here are a few things Trump said in Sioux City, Iowa yesterday. He bragged about being willing to ignore our NATO obligations.

I remember, the head of a country stood up and said, “Does that mean that if Russia attacks my country, you will not be there?” And I said, “That’s right. That’s what it means. I will not protect you.”

He said hello to Sioux Falls, not realizing where he was. (Sioux Falls is in South Dakota.) And he claimed that Hungary shares a border with Russia.

The NYT collects some of Trump’s other recent blunders: He warned that the US is on the verge of World War II. He bragged about being ahead of Barack Obama in the polls, and claimed that he beat Obama in 2016. He referred to Hungarian President Viktor Orban as the president of Turkey. He pronounced Hamas as if it were hummus.

But Biden is the one who’s out of it because he’s too old.

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Mike Pence suspended his presidential campaign. From the beginning, his campaign has felt like one of those moments in football when a quarterback cocks his arm and I think, “Where is he throwing that?” And sure enough, the pass goes right to a defender and gets intercepted.

Same thing here. I never understood what voters Pence was targeting. MAGA voters resent Pence for not cooperating in Trump’s coup. Non-MAGA voters resent Pence for staying loyal to Trump right up to moment of the coup. Maybe he thought that he could reclaim the Evangelical voters he led to Trump in 2016, but they’re long gone. In the GOP, the good-Christian-family-man boat sailed a long time ago.

He should have thrown the ball out of bounds and punted.

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You may not know about Conservapedia, the conservative alternative to the “liberal” (i.e., reality based) Wikipedia. But Kat Abu pays attention to these things, while managing to keep her sense of humor.

and let’s close with something massive

There’s something really primal about singing along with large numbers of people. Also, large groups often sound surprisingly decent. (The notes sung tend to average out on the right ones.) Astrid Jorgensen of Australia started the Pub Choir project to create singing-together projects on an epic scale.

At Pub Choir events, Jorgensen teaches a well-known song in 3-part harmony to non-trained singers. The performance is filmed and posted on the net.

In this video, Pub Choirs in cities across Australia unite to sing Toto’s “Africa”. The result is strangely compelling, whether you like the song or not.

As a nation, Israelis acted as if we could afford the luxury of a vicious internal fight, the kind in which your political rival becomes your enemy. We let animosity, demagogy and the poisonous discourse of social media take over our society, rip apart the only Jewish army in the world. This is our tragedy. And it carries a lesson for other polarized democracies: There is someone out there waiting to gain from your self-made weakness. This someone is your enemy.

–Shimrit Meir

This week’s featured post is “The Weirdness in the House“.

This week everybody was talking about Kevin McCarthy’s downfall

This, and what might happen next, is the subject of the featured post.

and war in Israel and Gaza

Hamas, which controls Gaza, launched a surprise attack on Israel Saturday. The attack was unusually vicious, even by Hamas’ previous standards, and included a massacre of hundreds of Israelis attending a rave. I don’t do breaking news, so I advise you to follow developments through some more comprehensive news source.

I have a muddle of feelings about this:

• The attacks on Israeli civilians are morally repugnant and should not be tolerated, either by Israel or by world opinion. Israel has every right to defend its citizens.
• The people of Gaza live under awful conditions and feel abandoned by the outside world. When human beings live in a constant state of despair and hopelessness, some percentage of them will respond violently, even if their violent options are equally hopeless. This should surprise no one. You don’t have to side with Hamas to realize that any outcome leaving Gazans in despair is not a long-term solution.
• I worry that Israel’s retaliation will be so extreme that those Americans currently saying “I stand with Israel” will be horrified. I will be happy if in the weeks to come I can confess to misjudging the nation and its government. (For comparison, think about all the regrettable things we did after 9-11.)

Predictably, American politicians are using this moment to take potshots at each other. But this did not happen because Biden showed weakness in dealing with Iran, or because Trump and other MAGA Republicans have “embraced the language of isolationism and appeasement” (as Mike Pence charged). This war isn’t about the US. Israel has plenty of deterrence capability on its own, and Hamas attacked anyway.

The most partisan thing I can legitimately say is that the US government would have an easier implementing its response if we had a confirmed ambassador in Jerusalem, our military didn’t have 300 promotions frozen, and the House had a speaker who could put through emergency aid if Israel needs it. But even if we had a full team ready to tackle the crisis, this would have happened anyway. It’s not about us.

and Trump

Every time I think Trump can’t shock me any more, he proves me wrong. This week we heard him go full Nazi in an interview with National Pulse. Talking of migrants at the southern border he said:

Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country. [my emphasis]

The phrase “poisoning the blood” does two things: It’s a fairly direct racial reference, and it dehumanizes the people it targets. Hitler said something similar in Mein Kampf.

All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.

At the time, Hitler was just a crazy little man who said outrageous things. Sophisticated Germans knew better than to take his rhetoric seriously.

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The other thing we found out about Trump this week is that he disclosed secrets about our nuclear submarines to a foreign national who belonged to his Mar-a-Lago club. I wonder if it ever occurred to Chinese or Russian or Iranian intelligence to give agents $200K so that they could give it to Trump and join Mar-a-Lago.

In 2016, Republicans were beside themselves at the thought that classified information might have made it onto the server in Hillary’s basement, which foreign governments might have been able to hack into. Now we know that Trump just blabs secrets to random people, and they don’t care. Fox News waited nearly 24 hours before briefly mentioning this story.

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When he was in office, Trump’s clubs and businesses functioned as conduits for bribery.

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Trump has lashed out at his former chief of staff, John Kelly, who recently confirmed reports about Trump’s disrespect for soldiers who died or were wounded in the line of duty. Kelly joins a long list of high Trump administration officials who have bad-mouthed their former boss, calling him “a f**king moron” and many other colorful names.

Can you imagine anything like this happening to Obama? There’s virtually no such thing as an Obama-administration tell-all book. Every Obama-administration account I’ve read paints the President as sharp, compassionate, and basically decent.

and life expectancy

By now probably most of you have heard that life expectancy in the US flattened out in the 2010s (after decades of steady increase) and then started going down even before the Covid pandemic. This week two articles in The Washington Post and one in Vox provided more insight into that phenomenon.

Here’s how Dylan Matthews sums up the public’s prior understanding in Vox:

For the past decade or so, Princeton economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case have been promoting a particular story about death in America. Less-educated Americans, particularly those without college degrees, have seen their life expectancy outcomes diverge from those of more-educated Americans. Much of this divide can be explained through a category that Deaton and Case call “deaths of despair”: deaths from suicide, opioid overdoses, and liver cirrhosis and other alcohol-related causes. The deaths are concentrated in non-Hispanic whites. This phenomenon indicates something is deeply wrong with the way American society treats its most marginalized citizens, including lower-class whites.

But five WaPo reporters tell a somewhat different story: Yes, addiction and suicide are cutting into life expectancy, but the big problem is chronic diseases:

Chronic illnesses, which often sicken people in middle age after the protective vitality of youth has ebbed, erase more than twice as many years of life among people younger than 65 as all the overdoses, homicides, suicides and car accidents combined, The Post found.

In other words, we’re doing a really bad job taking care of people who need low levels of care over long periods of time, like people with diabetes, high blood pressure, or cardiovascular disease. Or maybe people who have survived one bout with cancer and are vulnerable to a recurrence. We’re also bad at helping people live in ways that avoid chronic diseases.

But we’re not failing everybody with chronic diseases, just the poorest and least educated Americans.

Wealth inequality in America is growing, but The Post found that the death gap — the difference in life expectancy between affluent and impoverished communities — has been widening many times faster. In the early 1980s, people in the poorest communities were 9 percent more likely to die each year, but the gap grew to 49 percent in the past decade and widened to 61 percent when covid struck.

The Vox article narrows this down further: The epicenter of the problem is high school dropouts in rural areas. Part of the problem is probably lifestyle choices like smoking and bad diet. Access to healthcare is also part of the story. (In the small town where I grew up, well-to-do people take for granted that you need to seek care in a major city if you have a serious problem. Less well-off people don’t have that option, and poorly educated people may not get good advice on where to go, even if they assemble the resources.)

Matthews makes a good point: While it would be great if the US could implement better health policies generally, narrowing the problem description makes it more tractable.

People dying now cannot wait for the whole US economy to transform to be more worker-friendly, as nice as that might be. They need solutions that are tailored for their specific problems, that can be implemented soon.

A second WaPo article looks at the influence of politics: It compares three demographically similar counties on the shore of Lake Erie: one in red Ohio, one in purple Pennsylvania, and one in blue New York.

New York advances policies that promote public health, while Ohio doesn’t, and Pennsylvania is in between. So New York discourages smoking with high taxes on cigarettes, it enforces seat belt laws more rigorously, and its Medicaid benefits are comparatively generous. The results show up in death rates. And we can only guess how much worse this is going to get, as MAGA politics causes people to lose faith not just in Covid vaccines, but in vaccines and medical expertise generally.

and you also might be interested in …

If you’re worried about President Biden’s mental acuity, you should watch this interview with Pro Publica’s John Harwood. Admitttedly, Harwood asks friendly questions and doesn’t aggressively try to fluster the President. But the questions are substantial, and Biden answers them thoughtfully. He sometimes has to search for words, but he has no trouble grasping what Harwood is getting at, and he gives coherent answers from the heart. He doesn’t have to control the conversation in order to follow it, so he can address the questions Harwood asks, rather than constantly steering the conversation back to some other topic.

You know what else Biden doesn’t do? Lapse into canned talking points or go off into long well-rehearsed monologues about how unfairly he’s been treated. When asked about something tricky, his answers are carefully nuanced. (For example, when asked about former Democrat Joe Lieberman’s work for the No Labels third-party movement, Biden carefully explains that he thinks No Labels is a mistake, but that Lieberman is acting within his rights as an American.)

I’ve been saying for a while that Trump displays far more signs of mental decline than Biden does. I think if you compare this video to any recent Trump speech, you’ll see it.

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When Democrats scare themselves about the 2024 election, the possibility always comes up that a third-party candidacy might siphon votes away from Biden and get Trump elected again. But as The Nation notes, it’s not obvious that such candidates won’t pull more votes away from Trump.

Suppose you’re a Republican whose main gripe with Trump is that he promoted the Covid vaccine. You can protest by voting for RFK Jr.

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The economy added 336K new jobs in September, and previous monthly estimates were revised upwards by 119K.

One way you can see the slant in American news coverage is the way the monthly employment reports get covered.

The US economy added 336,000 jobs in September, highlighting concern that the labor market isn’t cooling as fast as the Federal Reserve would like in its battle against inflation.

Bad news: More people are working and their wages are rising.

OK, that’s Yahoo Finance, so you’d expect their coverage to be aimed at investors rather than working people. But the same themes showed across the board: More people working for more money is at best mixed news, rather than the outcome our economic policies should be trying to achieve. Matt Yglesias tweeted an image of the headlines on the NYT home page, and commented:

The NYT covered the jobs report from four different angles, none of which involved the possible benefits of more people getting jobs.

I don’t think there’s anything intentionally sinister in this kind of coverage, but it does reflect the skewed motivations built into our commercial media: News companies rely either on people with enough disposable income to subscribe, or on advertisers, who want to reach consumers with money to spend. So news coverage is aimed primarily at people with money, rather than at people who are working for hourly wages or trying to find a job.

Fox News’ coverage, on the other hand, was sinister: They felt a need to actively misrepresent the report. Jesse Watters says “the Biden administration” (actually the nonpartisan Bureau of Labor Standards, the same career bureaucrats who produced these reports under Trump) is “cherry picking and double counting”, because government jobs (73K new jobs in state and local government, but still 2K below the pre-Covid level) shouldn’t count (because public school teachers don’t really have jobs, I suppose), and jobs in the hospitality industry “like bartenders hostesses, waitresses” are “not really careers”. And Charles Payne declared “it was not a strong jobs report” because leisure and hospitality jobs (accounting for 96K of the 336K new jobs) are “the lowest paying jobs in America” — ignoring the fact that average hourly wages rose slightly (by 0.2%) during the month and the average workweek was unchanged.

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While we’re discussing Fox, The Five’s co-host Greg Gutfeld started out talking about a Philadelphia DA’s light treatment of shoplifters and looters, segued to how unfair it was that 1-6 rioters didn’t get a similar “criminal mulligan”, and then went totally off the rails, claiming that “elections don’t work” and “you need to make war” like we did to end slavery.

The race-baiting in Guttfeld’s rant was barely cloaked at all. “They” (the looters) get off easy because they’re “the oppressed”, while “we” (1-6 rioters) don’t because we’re “the oppressors”. In case you didn’t catch that, Black criminals get treated better than White patriots.

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About shoplifting and other retail theft: Retailers appear to be using crime as an excuse to close stores that they wanted to close for other reasons. “Shrink”, the technical term for inventory losses as a percentage of sales, rose only slightly from 2021 to 2022. 2022’s shrink was the same as it was in 2019 and 2020. Crime appears to have been no worse at the stores Target closed than in similar stores that stayed open.

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The NYT ran an apparently even-handed story about two families who moved to a different state for reasons related to politics: the Nobles moved from red Iowa to blue Minnesota, and the Huckinses from blue Oregon to red Missouri.

I’m biased here, but the two cases don’t look that similar to me. The Nobles move from suburban Des Moines to suburban Minneapolis because they have a transgender son whose treatments and school-bathroom use have become illegal in Iowa. That’s a genuinely political motive.

But the Huckinses move from a neighborhood in Portland where they didn’t feel safe to a small town in Missouri where they can leave their truck unlocked and play with their grandchildren, who already lived there with Ginger Huckins’ daughter from a previous marriage.

Both families say they’re happier in their new homes. But Steve and Ginger Huckins are better off for reasons only tangentially related to politics: their grandchildren and the small-town lifestyle. I’m sure Oregon also has small towns where they could feel safe, and Missouri includes St. Louis, where they might be no safer than in Portland. (I live in a blue Boston suburb where people aren’t very rigorous about locking things up and I never worry about walking home after dark.)

The Nobles, on the other hand, are running away from acts of the state legislature, which would create problems for their family in any part of Iowa. The article makes me wonder if there are any blue-state refugees who are truly parallel to the Nobles. I suppose someone might move to avoid taxes (one of the Huckinses’ complaints) or regulations on a business, but even those reasons seem weak compared to the state persecuting your son.

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We don’t know the whole story yet, but Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders might be taken down by a scandal centering on a $20K podium.

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My Facebook friend Jennifer Sheridan (who designed the t-shirt I’m wearing in my FB profile photo) wrote:

I think I have figured out something important about the Book Banners.

When I was a kid in school, I was a book nerd, and my friends were book nerds, and we all knew which books had “dirty parts.” We would read them, probably giggle a bit, and then get on with our lives. No one ever made a big deal about it, it was nothing.

And I realize looking back, that if you weren’t a book nerd in school, you probably don’t know there have ALWAYS been library books that had dirty parts.

If you are a grown person now, and are hearing “filthy” passages from some books that are popular today, you might find it shocking that books with those kinds of passages can be found in public school libraries.

But because you didn’t read as a kid, you think this is all something new. It isn’t new; you’ve just shown you never cared about books.

I’ll just add that I went to a religious elementary school, so I knew where all the dirty parts of the Bible were.

and let’s close with something untranslatable

One of my favorite books to randomly page through is As They Say in Zanzibar by David Crystal, a collection of proverbs and sayings from other cultures. How else would I discover that in Ukraine they say “Those who have been scalded with hot soup blow on cold water.”

Sometimes these words of wisdom seem to contradict each other. For example, Canadians are credited with “Crooked furrows grow straight grain” while on the Ivory Coast they say “A crab does not beget a bird.”

And then there are sayings that are just obscure, like the Slovenian “When you are chased by a wolf, you call the boar your uncle.”

Almost as much fun are idioms from other languages. When a someone is very stubborn, Russians say “You can sharpen an ax on his head.” To the Portuguese, taking the blame for something you didn’t do is “paying the duck”.

Where we say that something easy is “a piece of cake”, the Poles say “It’s a roll with butter.”