The Weekly Sift

For the purpose of this criminal case,
former President Trump has become citizen Trump.

– US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit

This week’s featured post is “About Biden’s Age and Memory“. Short summary: Everybody calm down.

This week everybody was talking about Biden’s memory

That’s the subject of the featured post. One of the things I learned during my father’s final years was the difference between aphasia (inability to find the right words) and dementia (inability to grasp situations). Biden’s occasional flubs look completely verbal to me, so they don’t seem worrisome. He knows what’s happening and is thinking clearly about it, even if he sometimes calls something or someone by the wrong name.

Trump makes similar mistakes all the time (probably as often as Biden) but the media doesn’t cover them the same way. I guess I understand why: It seems silly to worry about Trump saying the wrong words when the words he intends to say are so reprehensible. What if, when he wanted to call Democrats “vermin“, or accuse immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country“, he had accidentally said something else? Would that be worse?

Just this weekend, he taunted Nikki Haley by asking about her spouse.

What happened to her husband? Where is he? He’s gone. He knew. He knew.

I haven’t seen a clear explanation of what Trump imagines Michael Haley knows. But where Haley has gone is no mystery: He’s a major in the South Carolina National Guard, and has been deployed to Africa since June. The Republican Party used to respect military service, but apparently it no longer does. Wherever Major Haley is, though, he has access to the internet, because he tweeted back:

The difference between humans and animals? Animals would never allow the dumbest ones to lead the pack.

And then there was this:

Former President Donald Trump said Saturday he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” if it attacked a NATO country that didn’t pay enough for defense.

When he says that kind of stuff on purpose, who has time to cover his misstatements?

and the Trump trials

The big news from early in the week was the DC Appeals Court ruling against Trump’s claim of “absolute presidential immunity”. The court rejected Trump’s arguments across the board, summing up its opinion like this:

For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant. But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution.

For weeks, observers have been speculating about what was taking the court so long — nearly a month — to rule, and their opinion validated most of that speculation: The three judges were ironing out their differences so that they could write a single opinion in the name of the court. It seemed obvious from the beginning that none of the three agreed with Trump’s lawyers’ arguments, but if they had disagreed about why Trump was wrong, they would leave issues for the Supreme Court to resolve. As it is, the Court has the option to refuse Trump expected appeal and let the lower court decision stand.

Trump is expected to file his appeal to the Supreme Court today, because the appellate court’s stay on his DC trial runs out today, leaving Judge Tanya Chutken free to restart proceedings. Jay Kuo explains:

But here’s a fun fact: While it only takes four justices to agree to hear a case, it takes five justices to issue a stay. And a stay is what Trump really, really needs to keep running out the clock.

I feel like commentators are doing the public an injustice when they observe that Trump is trying to “run out the clock”, as if that were a natural thing to do. An innocent candidate for office would want to get his cases settled before the election, but Trump wants to delay past the election because he is guilty. His only hope to stay out of jail is to regain the presidency and use its powers to obstruct justice, so that no jury ever sees the evidence against him.

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Thursday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in another Trump case, the one about whether the 14th Amendment bans him from office as an insurrectionist. The questions asked by almost all the justices were skeptical, and most observers have concluded that the Court really doesn’t want to be the reason Trump doesn’t become president again.

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick discusses what she finds “The Most Galling Thing About the Supreme Court’s Trump Ballot Arguments“: taking seriously the idea that finding for Colorado would open a can of worms, as red states would then start throwing Democratic candidates off their ballots. The assumption behind this argument is that our justice system is incapable of distinguishing frivolous cases from well-founded cases.

Remember when Trump said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support? Well, imagine if he did and the State of New York charged him with murder. Trump could then argue that the prosecution shouldn’t be allowed, because otherwise red states would start charging Democrats with murder.

Does that make any sense? I don’t think so, and I don’t think a similar argument in this case makes sense either.

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We’re still waiting for a verdict in Trump’s New York civil fraud trial.

and the Gaza War

Since the ground attacks on Gaza started, Israel has been pushing the civilian population south, towards Rafah. CNN estimates that 1.3 million of Gaza’s two million people are now taking refuge there. The only place further south is Egypt, which is not accepting refugees.

Over the weekend, airstrikes on Rafah began. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society claims that over 100 people have been killed, but says the exact death toll is hard to know because people may still be trapped under rubble.

Last night, an Israeli raid into Rafah rescued two Israeli hostages.

There is beginning to be some daylight between the Biden administration and the Netanyahu government. In the press conference where President Biden responded to the Hur report, he characterized the Israeli response to the October 7 attacks as “over the top” and said

There are a lot of innocent people who are starving, a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying, and it’s got to stop.

Secretary Blinken has been trying to negotiate a ceasefire. The most recent Hamas proposal was for

a ceasefire of 4-1/2 months, during which all hostages would go free, Israel would withdraw its troops from Gaza and an agreement would be reached on an end to the war.

Prime Minister Netanyahu described this proposal as “delusional” and instead pledged to push on for “total victory” over “all of Hamas”.

and the failed Mayorkas impeachment

Something about the conservative mindset that’s been true for a long time: They’d rather focus on good and bad people than good or bad policy. So a scapegoat or a savior is more important than a plan to make things better. (You can see this happening in the presidential campaign: The point is to glorify Trump and promise that everything will be better after he’s back in power. But what will he do differently than Biden? Don’t worry about that.)

Case in point: The border. The Senate negotiated a tough bipartisan compromise to try to improve things at the border, but then Trump and his minions rejected it without any alternative proposal beyond “Elect Trump”. Simultaneously, House Republicans tried to impeach the secretary of Homeland Security, Aleyandro Mayorkas, for not solving the problems at the border. So: We don’t need new policies or new funding, we just need to punish somebody we don’t like. That’ll fix everything.

There are really no grounds for impeaching Mayorkas: no criminal activity, no personal scandals, etc. He’s just overseeing a badly broken immigration system that Congress has been refusing to fix for decades. All the problems would still be there if he were gone.

Not to worry, though, because in the end Speaker Johnson counted his votes wrong, and the impeachment failed 214-216. This kind of thing never happened to Nancy Pelosi: If she brought something to the floor, she had the votes to pass it.

Republicans are going to try again, though, because Rep. Steve Scalise may return soon from cancer treatment, and because they have nothing else to do.

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Meanwhile, the Senate is trying to repair the damage done when Trump turned against the border/Israel/Ukraine compromise that was set to pass. Originally, the parts of the bill dealing with the border were put in because Republicans demanded them as a price for Ukraine aid. (Otherwise, they seem content to let Putin take over Ukraine. One fascist hand washes the other, I suppose.) But then Trump decided that solving a problem (which his party keeps saying is an existential crisis for our country) would give Biden a victory and help him claim that he is actually governing. Can’t have that, so the bill had to die.

So a bill with just Israel and Ukraine aid is moving through the Senate, having jumped a couple of procedural hurdles this week. (Bizarrely, Lindsey Graham wants to add amendments with border funding, creating a Groundhog Day causal loop.) It might move faster, but Rand Paul is blocking the unanimous consent necessary to vote sooner.

and you also might be interested in …

Yesterday, two pro-Christian Super Bowl ads promoted the slogan “He gets us” — “he” being Jesus. This campaign has been around for a while, but it seems that many people noticed it for the first time yesterday. The leftist magazine Jacobin traced the money. It comes from the billion-dollar Servant Foundation, which also has contributed $50 million to the Alliance Defending Freedom. The “freedoms” ADF defends are the states’ right to take over women’s healthcare decisions, and businesses’ right to discriminate against LGBTQ people.

So maybe the “us” in “He gets us” isn’t as all-encompassing as the ads make it sound.

Meanwhile, my social media feed was blowing up with the observation that If Jesus had that many millions on hand, he would probably use it to feed the poor rather than to buy Super Bowl ads. It does seem like a rather mysterious way for the Lord to work.

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It was widely reported before the game that Tucker Carlson threatened to kill himself if Taylor Swift’s boyfriend’s team won the Super Bowl. (The claim appears to be false.) Yesterday, Travis Kelce’s Chiefs did win, starting a Tucker death watch.

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Speaking of Tucker, he interviewed Russian dictator Vladimir Putin for two hours and posted the video to the web.

Unfortunately for Tucker’s career, which has gone into eclipse since Fox News sacked him, Putin did what dictators often do: gave a long boring speech that few Americans will be interested in. Putin has this theory of history, going back to the Middle Ages, saying that Ukraine is not really a country and has no right to exist separate from Russia.

It’s not hard to imagine King George making a similar speech about his 13 American colonies, so Americans are unlikely to be persuaded. To Americans, nationhood is a covenant between people, and is not based on some essentialist theory about race, language, and culture. If a bunch of people get together and declare themselves a nation, who are you to tell them they’re not?

Anyway, it appears that the point was to impress Russians with how seriously Putin’s ideas are taken by Americans, and not to actually convince American viewers of anything. It was an internal propaganda victory similar to the victory Kim Jong Un got by meeting with Trump.

Prior to the interview, Tucker put out a video defending his decision to do it. I have no real argument with the points he was making, but I think he was making them in bad faith: Yes, Americans should hear from voices that the American mainstream paints as villainous, but those people should be asked hard questions, challenged when they lie, and fact-checked afterward. Tucker did none of that.

Also, I suspect he won’t apply his reasoning evenly. For example, the same logic would lead him to interview the leaders of Iran and the Taliban, something I suspect he won’t do. He interviewed Putin not for any noble journalistic reason, but because he supports Putin.

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Climate scientist Michael Mann won his defamation lawsuit against two conservative critics. He was awarded only $1 from each in compensation, but one of the two was hit with $1 million in punitive damages.

and let’s close with something in bad taste

Everybody who tries to cook has had the experience: You look at a recipe, have high hopes, and then something else happens entirely. In the end, you see that the outcome was completely predictable, but somehow that wasn’t obvious beforehand.

Well, you can always laugh. The Tasty Area website has collected extreme kitchen fails that will make you feel brilliant by comparison. My favorite is the guy who cooked his pasta from both ends at once.

As Trump left the courtroom after his testimony, he remarked loudly, “This is not America. Not America. This is not America.” The bad news for the former president is that it is. This is the America where the rule of law still holds and where he too is required to abide by it.

– Joyce Vance

There is no featured post this week.

This week everybody was talking about E. Jean Carroll

Friday, after about three hours of deliberation, a New York jury ordered Donald Trump to pay E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million: $7.3 million for the emotional distress Trump caused her, $11 million for the damage to her reputation, and $65 million in punitive damages. The punitive damages are there because Trump just won’t shut up about Carroll; a previous case that cost him $5 million hasn’t discouraged him from continuing to attack her in his rallies and on social media. Maybe, the jury figured, $65 million will be more effective.

I can’t quite imagine what audience Trump thought he was playing for in this trial: muttering during Carroll’s testimony, stomping out during her attorney’s summation speech, jousting with the judge, obsessively continuing the defamation over Truth Social during the trial, and so on. Obviously, this behavior didn’t impress the jury or endear him to the judge. I’ve got to think that most female voters are thinking: “He sexually assaults this woman, repeatedly drags her reputation through the mud, inspires his cultists to harass and threaten her for years … and he thinks he’s the victim.” I suppose some men might be happy that some other man is finally standing up to all the uppity women in the world, but I doubt they’re a winning political coalition.

And of course, the main thing Trump’s antics did was draw attention to the case, which (to put it mildly) does not cast his image in the best light. He has reminded us not just of Carroll’s accusations (which now, in the State of New York, legally have to be considered facts), but also of all the other women who have told similar stories about him and stuck by them, and of the Access Hollywood tape, where he bragged that he can grab women by the pussy and get away with it.

I mean, if you want to badly enough, I suppose you can believe that all 26 women (who have no apparent connection other than being women) are lying, and that Trump’s taped confession was just “locker room talk” to impress Billy Bush. But seriously. After you’ve tied your brain into a knot like that, can you do anything else with it?

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In his first response to the verdict on Truth Social, Trump posted: “THIS IS NOT AMERICA!” Joyce Vance has the right response:

The bad news for the former president is that it is. This is the America where the rule of law still holds and where he too is required to abide by it. I look forward to more of this.

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Lots of people are wondering whether Carroll will ever see this money or if Trump will ever pay it. What you may not realize is that those are two different questions. Consider the $5 million a jury awarded Carroll last year. Trump is appealing that verdict, so Carroll hasn’t gotten the money yet. But Trump has had to pay it: He posted the money to a court-controlled account that will be distributed to Carroll after Trump runs out of appeals, assuming none of them succeed.

So no matter how long Trump strings out this $83.3 million verdict, he’s going to have to put up a big chunk of the money fairly soon.

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I often point out when Fox News ignores some story that breaks its preferred narrative, so I have to give it credit here. Shortly after the verdict was announced, I flipped over to Bret Baier’s show, where famous torture-memo lawyer John Yoo commented:

The whole point of this unprecedented damages is to tell Donald Trump to shut up. … It’s not just that he should stop insulting Jean Carroll, but he has to stop disrespecting the justice system.

Their take wasn’t terribly different from the one I was hearing on MSNBC and CNN.

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I can’t believe I’m writing this, but we’re waiting on judges to rule in two more serious Trump cases. I mean, any other politician in the country would be ruined by the jury verdicts in the Carroll case, but that case is less “serious” because it only concerns Donald Trump’s behavior as an individual, and doesn’t directly affect the institution of the presidency or the rule of law in the United States.

In the Carroll case, I stand at a distance and reflect on one man’s shameless lack of any moral code. But Trump’s sweeping claim of presidential immunity could determine whether I continue to live in a democracy. That claim arose in an attempt to delay Trump’s federal January 6 trial, previously scheduled to being in March. The case can’t proceed until the legal system decides whether Trump can be tried at all.

At first, it looked like the appeals court wanted to get this done quickly. They held a hearing on January 9, and all three judges seemed skeptical of the whole immunity idea. But nearly three weeks have gone by without a ruling. MSNBC legal blogger Jordan Rubin speculates what might be going on: The court would like to present one unanimous opinion, with agreement on the justification and not just the outcome. That would make a clearer statement to the public and stand up better if it’s appealed to the Supreme Court. But the judges are having trouble ironing out their differences.

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The other judge we’re waiting on is Arthur Engoron, who is expected to make a ruling on the New York civil fraud trial against the Trump Organization sometime in the coming week. As in the Carroll trial, Trump’s guilt has already been established in a summary judgment, and the recent trial was just to assess damages. The NY attorney general is asking for a $370 million payment and restrictions on the Trump family’s ability to do business in New York.

As noted above, Trump can still appeal a judgment he doesn’t like, but he can’t avoid putting up a large sum of money while appeals play out.

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Also pending is whether or not Trump is disqualified from holding the presidency again by the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause. The case has made it to the Supreme Court, which will hearing arguments on February 8.

Deborah Pearlstein urges the Court to give the country a clear answer to the hard questions, rather than find an easy way out.

No matter what the Court does next, its popular legitimacy will be sorely tested. Tens of millions of Americans are going to believe that it got the answer wrong, and that the result of the 2024 election is at best unfair because of it. Punting will only make already bad matters for American constitutional democracy worse. For there is no legitimacy, or democratic stability, in governing institutions that do nothing but race to see who can avoid taking responsibility for the hardest issues for the longest time. … In an era of rising antidemocratic sentiments in the United States and around the world, constitutional democracies have to be able to show that they are capable of fulfilling the most basic functions of governance. In this case, at the very least, that means deciding to decide.

She makes this interesting observation: The legal arguments for the various outcomes run counter to the justices’ political leanings. (For example: Conservatives typically favor an “originalist” reading of the Constitution, which would disqualify Trump.) So it would look very bad for the Court if the decision fell along the usual 6-3 partisan lines.

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I heard on TV that the initial note from the Carroll jury used the abbreviation M, which they had to explain meant “million”. I was reminded of an exchange in the opening episode of The Beverley Hillbillies. Jed is explaining to his skeptical cousin Pearl that some city guy has bought his swamp for between 25 and 100 of “some new kind of dollars”. When Pearl protests that “There ain’t no new kind of dollars”, Jed asks: “What’d he call ’em Granny?”

And Granny says, “Milly-an dollars.”

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News channels occasionally interview Trump’s former lawyers about what’s going on with his cases. Sometimes they are still on his side and sometimes not. But the networks never tell us a central piece of information for evaluating the lawyer’s opinion: Did Trump pay his legal bill or not? Is the lawyer talking about a paying former client or a deadbeat former client? Seems like that would make a difference.

and the Gaza War

The International Court of Justice made a preliminary ruling in the genocide case that South Africa has brought against Israel. Vox has a good summary.

The ICJ is the body specified by the Convention Against Genocide (a treaty signed by both Israel and South Africa) for adjudicating disputes about whether the parties are fulfilling their treaty commitments. As such, the ICJ ruled that it has jurisdiction to hear this case and that South Africa has standing to file it. Israel had asked the ICJ to dismiss the case without further investigation, which it declined to do. Instead, the ruling finds the South Africa’s claims “plausible”. Any final judgment will require a more detailed investigation and could be years away.

The ruling describes the dire conditions inside Gaza, and says

[T]he catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip is at serious risk of deteriorating further before the Court renders its final judgment.

South Africa had asked for an injunction requiring an immediate ceasefire, which the court did not provide. It did place a number of limitations on Israel’s Gaza campaign, “to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip”, and instructed Israel to preserve all evidence that could be relevant to a genocide investigation.

The immediate practical effect of the ruling is likely to be small, because ICJ rulings are enforced by the UN Security Council, where the US can veto any substantive penalties against Israel. But the ruling further isolates Israel and the US from world opinion.

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Israel has charged that staff members of the main UN agency providing relief to Palestinian refugees were involved in the October 7 Hamas attacks. The exact claims have not been made public, but several employees were fired in response. The US and a number of other donor countries have paused their funding of the organization, further complicating the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The agency, UNRWA, has about 13,000 employees.

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The war continues to ooze outward, with a rising risk that the US will get drawn into a larger conflict with Iran. A drone hit a US outpost in Jordan early Sunday morning, killing three US soldiers and wounding more than 30. BBC summarizes the situation:

Since mid-October, US military installations in Iraq and Syria have repeatedly come under attack by Iran-backed militias, injuring a growing number of US soldiers. The US has repeatedly retaliated by striking targets in both countries.

Iran has denied involvement, but a group it supports, Islamic Resistance in Iraq, has claimed responsibility. President Biden has pledged to “hold all those responsible to account”.

The outpost is called Tower 22, and is in the far north-east corner of Jordan, near the border with both Syria and Iraq. It is part of a deployment of around 30,000 US troops in the region, mapped by CNN.

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Trump is saying the kind of stuff he always says: Bad things wouldn’t happen if he were president, because he is “strong” while Biden is “weak”. But he hasn’t specified what he would do differently. He alternately sounds isolationist and like he would strike back harder.

and the border

This week House Republicans have been demonstrating why it’s so hard to work out any compromise with them: They don’t actually want anything other than power. Their apparent policy positions are just postures they strike for Fox News and for their base voters.

The Biden administration actually does want something: more military aid to Ukraine, which is fending off an invasion by Trump’s pal Vladimir Putin. Originally, Biden hoped to get that aid included in budget deal at the beginning of the fiscal year (October 1). Most Senate Republicans and about half of House Republicans claim to back Ukraine aid, but it didn’t make the first FY 2024 continuing resolution. Or the second one in November.

Back in October, Biden repackaged Ukraine aid with Israel aid, figuring that strong Republican support for Israel would put it over the goal line. But no deal. He included money for increased enforcement at the Mexican border, because Republicans appeared to care about that. No deal: Republicans said they wanted policy changes, not just more money.

OK, then. Biden and Senate Republicans have negotiated policy changes that cause Democrats some real heartburn:

Components of the deal include a new authority that allows the president to shut down the border between ports of entry when unlawful crossings reach high levels, reforming the asylum system to resolve cases in a shorter timeframe, and expediting work permits.

Under the proposed deal, the Department of Homeland Security would be granted new emergency authority to shut down the border if daily average migrants crossing unlawfully reach 4,000 over a one-week span. Certain migrants would be allowed to stay if they proved to be fleeing torture or persecution in their countries.

It’s impossible to close the border to asylum seekers because of current law, despite multiple attempts by Trump to do so while he was in office.

Republican senators like Lindsey Graham are telling their colleagues in the House that this is a better deal than they are likely to get if Trump takes office in 2025, because Democrats would likely filibuster. (But of course Trump is going to be a dictator in his second term, so why should Republicans worry about what Congress will or won’t do?)

But there’s still a problem: Republicans don’t want to do something about the border, they want to have the worst possible situation so that they can blame Biden for it. Trump wants the border as a campaign issue. If the situation were to improve, that would be bad news for him. (In general, good news for America is bad news for Trump. He is openly rooting for an economic crash, and seems downright cheerful while predicting a “major terrorist attack“. The fact that the stock market continues to set records is an unfortunate development for him.)

So Trump instructed Speaker Johnson to torpedo any border deal, no matter what is in it. “It’s not going to happen, and I’ll fight it all the way.” Mitch McConnell said: “When we started this, the border united us and Ukraine divided us. The politics on this have changed.

Mitt Romney, who still has one more year in the Senate, made a moral critique:

The fact that [Trump] would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is really appalling. Someone running for president ought to try and get the problem solved as opposed to saying, “Hey, save that problem, don’t solve it, let me take credit for solving it later.”

Democratic Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii commented:

I think if Democrats were holding up funding for the defense of three allies unless we got an unrelated thing, and then we said no to the very thing we demanded because our nominee told us to kill it, that the media would justifiably go thermonuclear on us.

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Speaking of the border, what’s going on in Texas is truly outrageous. (And Dan Fromkin wants to know why the major media outlets are ignoring it. ) Texas has recently taken a variety of actions that essentially claim that it — and not the federal government — controls its border with Mexico.

Texas erected razor wire barriers along a river in Eagle Pass, Texas, that physically prevented federal Border Patrol agents from entering the area, processing migrants in those areas, or providing assistance to drowning victims. According to the DOJ, the Border Patrol was unable to aid an “unconscious subject floating on top of the water” because of these barriers.

Federal law, moreover, provides that Border Patrol agents may “have access to private lands, but not dwellings, for the purpose of patrolling the border to prevent the illegal entry of aliens into the United States.” So Texas claimed the power to use razor wire to prevent federal officers from performing their duties, in direct violation of a federal statute.

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in the federal government’s favor, but only 5-4. The order was very terse, so we have no idea why Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh weren’t on board. Do they really want to reinterpret the supremacy clause of the Constitution?

Even so, you might think a 5-4 Supreme Court decision would end the matter, but apparently not.

On Monday the Supreme Court said the federal government has the authority to remove razor wire that Texas installed at the southern border. Homeland Security said Texas had until Friday to give federal authorities access to Eagle Pass. But Governor Abbott is doubling down saying he’ll increase state patrol of the border, adding more barriers and more razor wire. 

Texas has two related disputes with the federal government: The feds want to remove a floating barrier Texas has put in the Rio Grande, and a Texas law (set to take effect in March) would give state judges the power to issue deportation orders.

On his excellent blog Popular Information, Judd Legum goes into more detail, explaining how Governor Abbott is recreating the nullification crisis from the Jackson administration.

I forget where I first heard this suggestion, but if we simultaneously let Texas secede and admit Puerto Rico, we don’t have to change the flag.

and the 2024 campaign

The Democratic side of the New Hampshire primary was muddled, because the DNC wants South Carolina to be the first primary. So NH was unofficial, Joe Biden was not on the ballot, Biden did not campaign in NH, and a bunch of Democratic-leaning independents probably voted on the Republican side for Haley. Nonetheless, Biden’s write-in campaign got 64% of the vote, easily beating back challenges from Rep. Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson, whose campaigns never caught fire.

Biden also got good economic news of two types: The economy continues to perform quite well, and the media is finally starting to take note of it. Both trends are captured in the WaPo’s “Falling inflation, rising growth give U.S. the world’s best recovery“.

I forgot to mention last week that the general public is also starting to catch on: consumer sentiment has jumped in recent months.

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After losing in New Hampshire, Nikki Haley has just one possible winning strategy (other than hoping that some court takes Trump out of the race; see above): Her continued presence in the race annoys Trump, and if she needles him enough he might act out in ways that even his supporters will have to see as crazy.

This week she characterized Trump’s notably ungracious victory speech in New Hampshire as a “temper tantrum” and called him “unhinged”. She’s also alluded to his apparent cognitive decline: “We’ve seen him get confused.“

For some time I’ve been pointing to the media magnifying symptoms of Biden’s age while minimizing Trump’s far more serious mental glitches. Apparently they needed some Republican’s permission before they could raise Trump’s cognitive issues.

If I were running Haley’s campaign, I would want her to hammer on the point that he won’t debate because he’s not up to the challenge. Make it a real playground put-up-or-shut-up thing. I double-dog dare you to debate me.

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Since Trump’s New Hampshire victory made his nomination seem inevitable, news-network talking heads have been speculating about his VP choice. What’s weird to me is that hardly anybody is saying the obvious: Trump thinks he made a mistake picking Mike Pence, because Pence eventually realized he had a moral code and a responsibility to America. So he didn’t help Trump stay in office after losing the 2020 election. Like Meat Loaf, Pence would do anything for Trump, but he wouldn’t do that.

Trump doesn’t want to make that same mistake again. So what he is mainly looking for is someone with no moral code, no loyalty to America, and no will of his or her own that might conflict with Trump’s will.

In All the King’s Men, the Boss explained his choice of the comically unctuous Tiny Duffy as lieutenant governor: “You get somebody somebody can trust maybe, and you got to sit up nights worrying whether you are the somebody. You get Tiny, and you can get a good night’s sleep.”

So: Elise Stefanik, then.

and you also might be interested in …

If you’ve ever wondered where those media takes on “real Americans” come from, Tom the Dancing Bug explains:

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It looks like Taylor Swift is headed to the Super Bowl. Apparently some fans are annoyed with how often the cameras show us Swift in a luxury box at Kansas City Chief games, but I’m amused. From what little I know of Swift’s biography, she missed a lot of typical schoolgirl stuff while she was working to make it in the music business. Now, in her 30s, she finally gets the quintessential high school experience of rooting for her boyfriend’s football team and wearing his team jacket. I’m happy for her.

and let’s close with something eponymous

What happens when an actual penguin interns at Penguin Books?

Now, we got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best, power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on.

– Martin Luther King
“Where Do We Go From Here?” (1967)

This week’s featured post is “The Corruption of the Evangelical Movement“, which is my review of Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory.

This week everybody was talking about the Yemen attacks

Thursday, the US and the UK, supported by a number of other allies, launched air attacks on the Houthi rebels in Yemen. If you responded to that news by asking “The Who rebels Where?”, I sympathize. Yemen is a pretty much godforsaken place south of Saudi Arabia, where the Red Sea turns a corner and becomes the Gulf of Aden. You probably don’t own anything imported from Yemen. It has few resources, it’s running out of water, and its people are desperately poor.

Yemen also has a civil war that’s been going since 2014, because no matter how poor a nation is, it can always afford more guns. There’s a Sunni government backed by the Saudis, and the Shia Houthi rebels are backed by Iran. The Economist reports:

The UN estimates that 223,000 people have died from hunger and lack of medical care since the war began. 80% of the population now lives in poverty.

Last week I talked about terrorist strategy, where sometimes it makes sense to provoke someone much stronger than you in hopes that their over-reaction will win you international sympathy and new recruits. That seems to be what is happening here. The US doesn’t want to get involved in the Yemen war, where there really are no good guys. But for weeks the Houthis have been using Iran-supplied drones and missiles to attack ships in the Red Sea, which is one of the world’s busiest and most important trade routes. (More geography: The Suez canal sits at the other end of the Red Sea, so the Red Sea is the most efficient way for ships to pass between Europe and India or East Asia. It’s also how oil tankers from the Persian Gulf get to Europe.)

The Houthi attacks were starting to have a significant effect on world trade, so the Biden administration felt like it had to do something.

But the attacks are unlikely to end the Houthi rebellion, or even to deter it much. The Houthis have already endured much worse at the hands of the Saudis. At best, we have destroyed a chunk of their offensive capacity, so their attacks on shipping will have to die down until Iran can resupply them. The Economist again:

Conflict with the West could have other benefits for them. Their supposed blockade of Israel has already won them new admiration across the Arab world, tapping into pro-Palestinian sentiment at a time when Arab states are feckless bystanders to the war in Gaza. Being targeted by America, while anti-Americanism is running high because of Mr Biden’s support for Israel, will add to their popularity.

and the looming government shutdown

The observation that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it is attributed to Santayana, and the underlying idea goes back to Cicero. Usually when we quote that, we’re talking about things that happened decades or centuries ago, but in the current situation “history” is what happened in September and November, which we are now repeating.

The short version is that Republicans have a small majority (down to two seats now) in the House, while Democrats control the Senate and the White House. In order for the government to spend money (which it needs to do to keep the doors open), all three have to agree. MAGA radicals in the House believe that this position should allow them to dictate large cuts in federal spending (which are popular in the abstract, but unpopular when implemented). Democrats disagree, believing that the public will blame Republicans for any pain caused by a government shutdown. So they’re not inclined to roll over and accept the MAGA-demanded cuts, which probably can’t even pass the House.

In September, Speaker McCarthy saw this reality and negotiated a continuing resolution which more-or-less left federal spending intact until November. That act of rationality could not be allowed to stand, so MAGA Republicans forced McCarthy out. After much turmoil, he was replaced by Speaker Mike Johnson, whose conservative bona fides are much stronger than McCarthy’s were.

But reality is reality, so Johnson had to make a similar deal in November, cutting the federal-spending can into two pieces and kicking them to different points on the calendar. The first can comes up Friday, and reality still has not changed.

Last night, Johnson and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer released the text of a continuing resolution that would kick both cans into March. The House “Freedom” Caucus is outraged again, but what it will do is unclear.

and the Trump trials

Trial season is gearing up, and it’s hard to tell the players without a program. Closing arguments in New York State’s civil fraud trial against the Trump Organization happened last week. It’s a bench trial, so now we’re waiting on the judge rather than a jury. Judge Engoron has already issued a summary judgment that the Trumps committed fraud, so the trial was largely to assess damages.

Engoron will consider whether to grant the attorney general’s request to fine Trump $370 million, ban him from the state’s real estate industry for life and bar him from serving as the officer or director of a New York corporation.

Engoron knows Trump is looking for grounds to appeal, so he will be very careful in how he justifies his judgment. Observers are predicting a decision in “weeks” rather than days or months.

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The second E. Jean Carroll defamation trial starts tomorrow. Basically, Carroll says Trump raped her in a department store dressing room in 1995. Trump met those charges (in a book Carroll wrote) with insults, so Carroll sued him for defamation. The statute of limitations had passed for accusing him of the original assault, but New York changed the law in 2022. So she sued for damages from the assault and for insults he made after he left office. She won a $5 million settlement, which Trump is appealing.

Now the original defamation suit is coming to trial, having been delayed by all sorts of wrangling about when presidents can be sued. The judge is refusing to let Trump relitigate issues resolved in the first trial, such as whether the assault happened and whether his comments were defamatory.

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We’re waiting for a federal appeals court to weigh in on whether presidential immunity prevents the government from trying Trump on January 6 charges. They are unlikely to agree with Trump on this, but how exactly they refute his claim of immunity will be important. Also important: how long they take to rule and how much time they allow for an appeal to the Supreme Court.

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The Supreme Court has agreed to review the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision that Trump is disqualified from the presidency by the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment. Oral arguments are scheduled for February 8. It’s hard to imagine this Court kicking Trump off the ballot, but it’s not clear how exactly they’ll get around the text of the 14th Amendment.

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Meanwhile, Trump threatens “bedlam” if court decisions don’t go his way. And Judge Engoron suffered a bomb threat at his home. Judge Tanya Chutkan was the victim of a “swatting” incident, in which a false emergency call sent armed police to her home.

Elected Republicans almost universally ignore all this. It’s just become accepted that Trump will goad on his violent supporters, and that crossing Trump will entail physical risk. It’s the modern version of the Nazi brownshirts.

but I wrote about the Evangelical heresy of Christian Nationalism

Or, more precisely, Tim Alberta wrote about it, and I reviewed his book.

and you also might be interested in …

The Iowa Caucuses are tonight. I can’t remember the last time these were a smaller deal. Democrats aren’t having one, and Trump will obviously win the Republican caucuses. The only suspense is whether Nikki Haley can finish second. If she does, Ron DeSantis should drop out.

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The Hunter Biden circus continues. Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee debated citing Hunter Biden for contempt because he refused a subpoena to be interviewed behind closed doors and insisted on testifying in public. Who should show up for this hearing but Hunter himself?

The debate went forward, underlining what a farce it all is. Republicans would say that the American people deserve answers from Hunter, and Democrats would respond: “There he is. Let’s ask him”, which the Republicans would refuse to do.

I’m adding this Oversight Committee Democrat, Texas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, to my list of politicians I would pay money to hear. Watch this clip from Wednesday night’s Chris Hayes show.

Friday, Hunter announced he would appear for non-public testimony.

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South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, and is seeking an immediate order to stop the military campaign in Gaza.

A decision on South Africa’s request for so-called provisional measures will probably take weeks. The full case is likely to last years.

Vox explains:

Under international humanitarian law, proving allegations of genocide is incredibly difficult. And even if South Africa does prove that Israel is committing genocide — or that it is failing to prosecute incitement to genocide or prevent genocide from occurring — ICJ decisions aren’t necessarily easy to enforce. But these initial arguments aren’t yet entering that complicated territory.Instead, they’re about whether the ICJ will issue a preliminary order for Israel to stop its onslaught in Gaza immediately; the court will rule on that issue after hearing arguments from South Africa and Israel Thursday and Friday. Though Israel could ignore that ruling if it’s issued, it could make Israel’s allies less inclined to support the war.

Despite the difficulties, NYT contributor Megan Stack says the charges deserve serious consideration.

The word “genocide” rings loudly in our imagination. We think of Rwanda, Bosnia, the Armenians, the Trail of Tears and, of course, the Holocaust. I have heard many people balk at the suggestion that Gaza could be experiencing genocide. The Holocaust, after all, wiped out over 60 percent of European Jews. Israel’s war — instigated, no less, by the murder of Jews — has killed about 1 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza. One percent is terrible, of course, but genocide?

Under the genocide convention, though, the term describes an intent to wipe out a defined group of people and taking steps to achieve that end. There is no threshold of death, or proportion of death, that must be reached. It is possible to kill a relatively small number of people, but still commit an act of genocide.

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Saturday, the people of Taiwan shrugged off Chinese threats and elected another president from the Democratic Progressive Party.

The result shows voters backing the DPP’s view that Taiwan is a de facto sovereign nation that should bolster defenses against China’s threats and deepen relations with fellow democratic countries, even if that means economic punishment or military intimidation by Beijing.

It is also a further snub to eight years of increasingly strongarm tactics towards Taiwan under Xi who has vowed that the island’s eventual “reunification” with the mainland is “a historical inevitability”.

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The New Yorker lays out the case that a Texas woman died because of that state’s abortion laws. This case gets to the heart of how tricky life-of-the-mother exceptions really are.

Yeniifer Alvarez was an uninsured woman living in a part of central Texas without good health care, particularly prenatal care. She was overweight, diabetic, and had a history of pulmonary edema “in which the lungs fill with fluid, that strains the heart and can be fatal”.

Her pregnancy was obviously risky, and a wealthier or better-insured woman would have been under constant observation. In a state with different laws, a precautionary abortion might have been performed, under the theory that the risks were too high. When the crisis came, it took too long to get her to a hospital capable of handling her case, and she died in an ambulance.

Life-of-the-mother exceptions in abortion laws tend to assume binary choices: She gets the abortion or she dies. The less solid notion of unacceptable risk just doesn’t enter the picture.

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Here’s Kat Abu’s weekly recap of Fox News.

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Josh Marshall makes an unpopular point that I happen to agree with: Bad as the execution looked at the time, Biden was right to get us out of Afghanistan.

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I made a New Year’s resolution to highlight more positive news about the climate and efforts to cut carbon emissions. In that vein, the Dutch company Elysian is trying to develop the first practical electric airliner. Previous electrical plane designs have carried few passengers relatively small distances, but Elysian is picturing a 90-seat plane that can go nearly 500 miles on a charge.

For comparison, New York to Boston and New York to D.C. are each a little over 200 miles.

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The New York Times Magazine raises an interesting question: Could an engineering project divert warm-water flows away from a Greenland glacier and prevent it from sliding into the ocean and melting? If that idea is feasible, how big an expense would it justify?

and let’s close with something adorable

The young of just about any species can be cute. But baby rhinos? Yes, baby rhinos.

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“.