The Weekly Sift

I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. … Pride is their necklace; a garment of violence covers them. From their prosperity proceeds iniquity; the imaginations of their hearts run wild. They mock and speak with malice; with arrogance they threaten oppression. They set their mouths against the heavens, and their tongues strut across the earth.

– Psalm 73

This week’s featured posts is “Don’t just connect the dots“. It sets the Biden impeachment in a larger context of conspiracy theory reasoning.

This week everybody was talking about the looming government shutdown

As always, the federal government’s fiscal year ends on September 30, i.e. a week from Saturday. So unless Congress passes and President Biden signs some new appropriation bills in the next two weeks, the government will shut down on Monday morning, October 2.

If the budget process were working the way it’s designed, funding the government would mean passing 12 separate appropriation bills, each covering some set of government activities, like defense. That seems extremely unlikely at this point. The Senate is more-or-less on track, but Kevin McCarthy’s Republican majority in the House can’t unite on a set of proposals, much less get together with the Senate and work out something both houses can pass.

Failing at 12 appropriation bills, the next option is one big omnibus bill, which has happened in recent years, and which House Republicans have been railing against. That doesn’t seem very likely at the moment either.

The third option is a continuing resolution, which allows the government to keep spending money at the same rate as last year, until Congress can get its act together to pass an omnibus. Currently, Kevin McCarthy is trying (and mostly failing) to build support for a continuing resolution.

The far-Right “Freedom” Caucus has made a series of demands for what any continuing resolutions would have to include, such as ending the Trump prosecutions. (Anything to avoid a trial in front of a jury, which would see the evidence and find Trump guilty.)

So we seem headed for a shutdown. The main issue in the shutdown is whether or not McCarthy will fulfill the deal he made with Biden in May to resolve the debt ceiling crisis. The “Freedom” Caucus thinks the spending targets in that deal are too high, so they want to renege.

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When McCarthy agreed to open an impeachment inquiry targeting President Biden (without any evidence of wrongdoing), some speculated that he had bought himself credit with the far Right, which would give him some room to maneuver on the spending bills. But, as CNN analyst Stephen Collinson observed, “That narrative barely lasted a day.” Apparently any concession these people get only whets their appetite for more.

and Ken Paxton

Ken Paxton is the corrupt attorney general of Texas.

Even in the long, sordid history of Texas political scandals, Paxton stands out. The accusations leveled against him in 21 years of public life ranged from felonious to farcical: that he duped investors to whom he sold stock, profited from inside information on a land deal, made false claims in court about the 2020 presidential election, and purloined another lawyer’s expensive pen.

Other episodes gave grist to criticism that Paxton considered himself above the law, like when he fled his home last year, in a truck driven by his wife, to avoid being served a subpoena.

In March, the Republican Texas House overwhelmingly voted to impeach him on 16 counts, with 70% of Republicans voting against him. But Saturday, only 2 of 19 Republican senators voted to convict on any charge, and so he was acquitted and returns to office.

What changed? The politics, not the evidence. National Republican groups stirred up the grass roots.

It was made clear to Texas GOP senators that they’d face a very well-funded primary opponent in their next election if they voted to impeach.

“Christian” organizer Nate Fischer argues

I judge politicians on their effectiveness against the left. In an existential war, you do not remove an effective officer—much less cede his position to the enemy—because an affair or gambling problem comes to light. We are in a war for our civilization. Paxton and Boebert have been effective in important battles. But if God could use Samson as his instrument to deliver Israel, I’m skeptical of calls to toss one of our fighters out because he doesn’t meet some standard of conduct that is anything but a uniform rule across the political aisle.

And of course, any conspiracy-theory allegation against a Democrat is evidence that no standard of conduct is “a uniform rule across the political aisle”. So this “Christian” applies no moral standards at all to the conservatives he supports.

Matt Yglesias responds:

This is how corrupt people use culture war hysteria to bait you into sacrificing your interests to advance theirs; it’s the ultimate logic of Trumpism — he may be a thief, a liar, and a scumbag but at least he’s *our* scumbag.

the Hunter Biden indictment

Hunter was indicted on federal firearms charges Thursday. You’d think this would settle questions about the independence of the Justice Department from White House interference, but no.

Hunter could wind up at the center of a legal question that cuts across partisan lines. A federal appeals court representing a different district has found that the law he’s accused of violating conflicts with new Supreme Court precedents and so is unconstitutional. So people on all sides have to ask themselves what’s more important: getting/saving Hunter or gutting/preserving federal gun laws?

and the Trump interviews

Two female journalists did televised interviews with Donald Trump recently: Kristen Welker, as her inaugural broadcast as host of Meet the Press, and Megyn Kelly on her XM Radio show.

It’s hard to say what the point of doing either interview was. Conde Nast Legal Affairs Editor Luke Zaleski summarizes the problem:

Trump doesn’t do interviews. He tells long fake stories that provide an alternate reality in which he’s the hero and allow his audience to conflate themselves with him as he pretends to vanquish imaginary enemies like “Sleepy Joe” “Crooked Hillary” “the Deep State” & “Fake News”

The traditional power of the press comes from its ability to publicly shame a politician for lying or hypocrisy. But Trump has no shame. NYU journalism Professor Jay Rosen describes Welker’s approach as “zero innovation”, meaning that she treated Trump like a typical, shameable public figure.

Everything was predictable, nothing was surprising, and new host Kristen Welker did nothing to justify going to the well again with another Trump Q & A.

So Trump got a platform to spread his usual disinformation, and NBC got to publish a separate fact check, which (as we know) accomplishes little. Unlike a Cronkite-era politician, Trump is not shamed to be caught lying, and his cultists will brush off any fact-checking as “fake news”. Worse, traditional fact-checking is meant for correcting simple lies and misstatements. It can’t cope with a complete alternate reality.

“Pinning Trump down”, as Welker did when she got him to say he would testify under oath that he never ordered a subordinate at Mar-a-Lago to delete security video, is also useless. Making that statement serves Trump’s purposes now — it makes him sound determined and resolute — but when Trump does not testify at all in any of his trials, he will not feel shame for having said that he would.

The end result of this interview is that viewers are more poorly informed about Trump-related issues than they were before they watched. I have to agree with Rosen’s conclusion:

I would love to hear what [MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow] thought about NBC’s interview with Trump. She is the one who said on air: “There’s a cost to us as a news organization of knowingly broadcasting untrue things.” NBC willingly paid that cost today.

Tonight we’ll see a test of Maddow’s integrity: Will she call out her sister network?

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Welker also asked Trump: “Is there any scenario by which you would seek a third term in office?” In other words, “Do you intend to ignore the Constitution?”

Trump said “No.” But again, he’s not going to feel bound by that answer, so what’s the point of asking? All Welker did was put into viewers’ minds the idea that seeking a third term (in defiance of the Constitution) is an option.

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One upside of Kelly’s interview is that Trump said some things that Jack Smith will probably use against him in court.

I’m allowed to take these documents, classified or not classified. And frankly, when I have them, they become unclassified.

Aside from being nonsense legally, Trump’s statement sounds an awful lot like a confession that he did take classified documents.

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It’s a mystery to me why Biden’s mental capabilities are being questioned, but not Trump’s. There could be a story like this every day:

Trump says Joe Biden is “cognitively impaired” and then accuses him of getting us into World War TWO.

Or consider this part of the Welker interview:

You talk about Kim Jong Un, right? I got along great with Kim Jong Un after the first month or two when we were sparring. But I got along great with him. We were in no danger. There was — President Biden said, and he felt even now, and President Obama told me when we sat down, Obama told me, and Biden still to this day, except I don’t think he knows, he’s only — he can’t put two sentences together. But President Obama told me, “Our biggest threat is from North Korea. We’re going to end up in a war.”

Yep. It’s Biden who can’t put two sentences together.

David Roberts raises a worthwhile question:

How would we even know if Trump’s age was affecting his mental acuity? He’s done nothing but ramble sub-literate nonsense since he came on the public stage. Could you even tell if he got dementia?

and Mitt Romney

I’ve always been of two minds about Mitt Romney, an ambivalence that comes through in “The Tragedy of Mitt Romney” which I posted during his primary campaign way back in 2012. At his best, Mitt is a conservative version of Joe Biden: a basically decent person who can listen to members of the other party, define common goals, and occasionally get something important done. RomneyCare, the Massachusetts health insurance program that became the model for ObamaCare, is a prime example.

Mitt’s tragic flaw is that he’s never had quite enough courage to be that person consistently. So he’s been a truth-teller, but only sometimes. Other times, he has pandered to the worst elements in his party. Two examples stand out: His 2012 presidential campaign ran away from his record as governor of Massachusetts, to the point of promising to repeal the same ObamaCare his program had inspired. And he bowed down to Trump during the 2016 transition, hoping to become secretary of state.

This week he announced that he’s not running for reelection in 2024. As a result, he is free from future political considerations and can be a truth-teller again. And so we have “What Mitt Romney Saw in the Senate“, a preview of an upcoming biography by McKay Coppins. The biography comes from long conversations with Romney, as well as access to his papers and journals.

And so we find out:

• The Republican Senate caucus gave Trump a standing ovation, and then laughed at him after he left.
• “A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”
• During Trump’s first impeachment, Mitch McConnell told Romney: “You’re lucky. You can say the things that we all think. You’re in a position to say things about him that we all agree with but can’t say.”
• “No one has been more loyal, more willing to smile when he saw absurdities, more willing to ascribe God’s will to things that were ungodly than Mike Pence.”
• Some Republicans wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment or conviction, but were intimidated by the prospect of right-wing violence against themselves and their families. At that time, Romney was paying $5K a day for security.

In return for this openness, Romney is being lauded as a man of principle and integrity. And he has been, up to a point and some of the time.

You know what I long for? Republicans who not only speak out against the MAGA usurpation of their party, but take that message to the voters rather than meekly slip out the Capitol’s side door like Romney and Jeff Flake and Lamar Alexander. Maybe such a race is hopeless — it was for Liz Cheney — but people of real principle would make a charge-of-the-light-brigade anyway. To paraphrase the MAGA god himself: If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a party anymore.

and you also might be interested in …

Climate Change summer is continuing as we approach fall. The worst catastrophes happen when natural disasters cause failures in human infrastructure.

More than 5,000 people are presumed dead and 10,000 missing after heavy rains in northeastern Libya caused two dams to collapse, surging more water into already inundated areas.

Meanwhile, Hurricane Lee spent most of its energy over the Atlantic, but was just 4-mph short of hurricane status when it hit Nova Scotia Saturday. Places like Halifax and Bar Harbor, Maine don’t usually have to worry about tropical storms.

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The United Auto Workers are striking against the Big Three American automakers. The Atlantic explains that this is about more than just the usual wages and benefits: Government-subsidized investments in electric vehicle plants are being used to shift production to states that make it hard for workers to unionize.

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As you may have heard, Saturday night Rep. Lauren Boebert was escorted out of a production of the musical “Beetlejuice” for vaping, taking flash pictures of the performance, and “creating a disturbance”. Afterwards, she denied vaping, said she didn’t realize she couldn’t take pictures, and admitted “laughing and singing too loud”. Unfortunately for her, the vaping is on video, along with some mutual groping with her date (Boebert’s divorce is still pending), as well as Boebert giving theater employees the finger on her way out the door.

In response to the clear evidence that her denial was a lie, Boebert apologized for the vaping (claiming she “genuinely did not recall” doing it), but did not comment on the public groping.

The incident provoked a stream of what-if comparisons on social media: How would conservative politicians and media personalities erupt if some prominent liberal woman like AOC behaved the same way? Or a woman of color? Or a gay or lesbian politician with a same-sex date? What if Biden did something inappropriate in public, denied it, and then explained away his denial by claiming he didn’t remember?

Who better to comment on Boebert’s “trashy” behavior than fellow “trash monster” Trae Crowder? Boebert’s “vaping and hollering stuff” in the theater doesn’t alarm him:

My fellow Trailer Americans, I ask you: Who among us? Right? I mean, we do that. We do. Get a little too excited at a public event, start cussing in front of the 8-year-olds, then act indignant when the bouncer shows up. “Oh, what? Is it illegal to have a good time now?”

What’s wrong with Boebert, according to Crowder, isn’t that she comes from the underclass, because “some of the most genuine, kindest, most empathetic people I’ve ever known were trailer babies”. We’d do well, he says, to have a Congress full of such people. But Boebert is a “ladder-puller”, who tries “to take away the same government benefit programs that kept her alive as a child”.

Boebert … somehow took all the wrong lessons away from her life and now spends her time spewing misplaced rage and making us all look bad.

BTW: If you want a view of how the world looks to the White rural underclass, I can recommend this year’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.

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While we’re talking about the Party of Family Values, The New York Post claims South Dakota Governor (and rumored Trump VP candidate) Kristi Noem has been having an affair with former Trump advisor Corey Lewandowski. Both are married. All together, the two couples have seven children.

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Remember Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses for same-sex couples back in 2015? That case is still percolating through the system. Two couples sued her for damages, and a judge ruled in March 2022 that she had violated their rights. Wednesday, a jury awarded one couple $100K and the other nothing. (I’m not sure what distinction the jury saw between the two couples.)

Davis plans to appeal, on grounds that the current Supreme Court might find tempting:

We will argue religious accommodation under the First Amendment, and other state and federal laws. We will also argue that Obergefell v. Hodges was wrongly decided and should be overturned.

She previously had moved to have her case dismissed, on the grounds that she had immunity for acts performed in her official capacity. But the plaintiffs argued that official immunity doesn’t apply when the official is doing something clearly outside the law. An appellate court refused to dismiss, and in 2020 the Supreme Court decided not to hear her appeal. But this time around could be different, if the current Court is looking for an opportunity to reverse Obergefell.

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Two thousand South African rhinos are looking for new homes.

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A line too good not to repeat: After Mitch McConnell froze up a couple weeks ago, fellow Kentucky Senator Rand Paul was not all that supportive. Among other comments, he disputed the Capitol doctor’s claim that McConnell had not suffered a seizure, but only the effects of concussion recovery and dehydration.

Afterwards I heard a comment that Rand Paul is “nasty and brutish and short”.

and let’s close with something sentimental

In 1950, Oswald Laurence recorded a message telling patrons of the London underground to “mind the gap”. After Laurence died in 2003, his widow Margaret McCollum began going to the nearby Embankment tube station whenever she wanted to hear his voice.

Eventually, though, the transport company replaced Laurence’s recording with an artificially generated voice. Margaret then asked the company for a recording. But they did her one better: They restored Laurence’s announcement for exactly one station, Embankment.

We need to understand that if the next 15 months remain the worst-covered election in U.S. history, it might also be the last.

– Will Bunch
“Journalism fails miserably at explaining what is really happening to America“

This week’s featured post is “What an innocent Trump should do“.

This week everybody was talking about Labor Day

It’s a three-day weekend and an excuse for one last cookout. It marks the end of summer. It’s Week 1 of college football. It presages another school year. But isn’t it supposed to be about something else too? You hear a lot about remembering to keep Christ in Christmas, but keeping the labor movement in Labor Day seems like a much more serious problem.

So as you fire up the grill, try to make peace with your to-do list from June, and cheer for the old one-color-and-another-color, take a minute to remember what the labor movement has given us: For one thing, the weekend itself. Also: the 40-hour week, minimum wages, holidays, paid vacations, unemployment insurance, and job safety standards.

And remember how precarious it all is. Do you imagine that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the other masters of the universe want to share the wealth their enterprises produce?

Picture the new wave of technological unemployment that might result from artificial intelligence. Think about the universal abundance that is possible, and compare it to the inequality and insecurity we have now. How can we change that? (Hint: You’re not going to do it by yourself.)

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Jen Sorenson provides an important reminder: In a capitalist media system, what matters isn’t people, but their money. If people mattered, you’d see more TV shows like these:

and Mitch McConnell

I don’t often feel sorry for Mitch McConnell, but it’s hard not to when you watch this clip of him freezing up behind a podium on Wednesday.

It’s the second time this has happened. The first was in late July, and both incidents followed a concussion he suffered in March after falling at a dinner event at the Waldorf Astoria in D.C. Watching his aides’ lack of alarm, I have to wonder how many similar incidents they’ve seen privately.

It’s striking to contrast the responses this incident evoked with a variety of occasions when President Biden has shown much less worrisome signs of aging. Democrats largely responded to McConnell’s lapse compassionately. Biden’s first reaction was to say “Mitch is a friend” and that he would “try to get in touch with him later this afternoon”. After talking on the phone, Biden attributed the freeze to McConnell’s concussion and said that such incidents were “part of the recovery”. He expressed confidence that McConnell “is going to be back to his old self”.

The both-sides-do-it NYT used the McConnell freeze to segue into discussion of aging politicians in general, like Dianne Feinstein and, of course, Biden. (The article paid much less attention to Trump, who obviously is in significantly worse physical condition. If I had to bet which man was most likely to survive until January of 2029, I’d pick Biden.)

Right-wing media, on the other hand, always puts the worst possible construction on anything Biden says or does (including misstatements related to a stuttering problem he’s had since childhood). Sometimes they even doctor video to make Biden look addled. Biden falling off a bicycle was front-page news, when it’s hard to imagine that Trump has ever been on a bicycle. (I recently had a similar foot-caught-on-the-pedal spill. Fortunately, no one immortalized the moment in video.)

Monday, Biden claimed he had managed to talk legendary Dixiecrat Senator Strom Thurmond into voting for the Civil Rights Act “before he died”, clearly referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which Thurmond voted for at a time when Biden was also in the Senate. That claim is based on private conversations unrecorded by history, so it’s entirely possible that Biden exaggerated his role in Thurmond’s about-face. But that’s not where right-wing media went: Instead, they assumed a confused Biden was referring to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was voted on before Biden was a senator and which Thurmond opposed. You know: an old guy talking nonsense.

And let’s not forget Don Jr. saying John Fetterman had “mush for brains” after his stroke. One party values compassion and the other values cruelty.

and the Trump trials

The featured post discusses the obvious disconnect between what Trump is saying about his indictments and how he’s responding to them. If the indictments really are nothing but politics, and he really “did nothing wrong“, he should want to get to court as fast as possible, so that juries of ordinary American citizens can vindicate him before the election.

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Unless a deal closes by Friday, Trump’s Truth Social platform could go bust, with great losses to the investors who believed in it. Who could have predicted that a Trump product might fail in the market? I mean, hitching your wagon to Trump’s genius has always been a reliable path to wealth.

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There’s no way I’m going to read the recently-released 479-page transcript of Trump’s 7-hour deposition with the NY Attorney General for the civil fraud case against the family business. But Ron Filipkowski did and provided the lowlights.

Basically, he’s not liable for misrepresenting the value of his properties, because

• A paragraph warns other parties to make their own assessments rather than rely on his numbers.
• His brand is so potent that the value of any property increases the instant his name gets attached to it.

Also, apparently he whines a lot about how unfair the AG’s lawsuit is. Who could have predicted?

and climate change

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Climate change summer continued with Hurricane Idalia. At least this time it wasn’t something completely unprecedented, like Hilary still having tropical storm strength when it hit Southern California last week. No hurricane had hit Florida’s Big Bend since 1950, but Cat 3 hurricanes hit somewhere in Florida every several years.

Not so long ago — like when President Obama and Governor Christie inspected the damage from Hurricane Sandy in 2012 — we expected political leaders to demonstrate bipartisan unity in the face of disaster. Republicans and Democrats might disagree about taxes or spending or how to handle China, but they pulled together when Americans faced a common challenge.

Apparently not so much any more. President Biden thought Governor DeSantis would be there when he toured Florida’s hurricane damage Saturday, but DeSantis had other priorities. Republican Senator Rick Scott did show up, though, and thanked Biden for the federal government’s quick response to the storm, saying it was “a big deal”.

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As for weather events that never happen, this week’s Burning Man Festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert has had to deal with massive rains. It’s not that unusual to have a little rain during the festival. (Long ago, when I was a much cooler person, I was at Burning Man when a rain shower got tangled up with a dust storm. Mud fell from the sky.) But this quantity is unheard of.

Of course, climate change isn’t the only explanation. Maybe “God has a way of making sure everybody knows who God is“, and so is punishing people for the mock sacrifice ritual at the center of Burning Man.

Just like God is punishing Florida for being so cruel to trans kids, I imagine.

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And the heat is affecting food production:

Across much of the country, the food system also struggled. In Texas, farmers reported smaller yields as their corn and cotton crops struggled to survive soaring summer temperatures. In Arizona, beekeepers spotted dead honeybees outside hives. Even underwater, off the coast of Long Island, kelp farmers recorded another year of shrinking yields.

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But Jeanine Pirro from Fox News’ “The Five” isn’t worried, because weather has been happening forever.

What’s so fascinating about this is one of the first hurricanes reported I think was in the 1400’s. Now I would venture a guess that had nothing to do with fossil fuels, okay?

and as summer ends, here are a few fascinating things you didn’t really need to know

The WaPo brings us up to date on the vital issue of pizza. Pizza is popular everywhere in America, but the word means different things in different places. So asking Yelp about the best pizza in some town you’re passing through is likely to get you a pie you weren’t expecting and may not like.

So the Post breaks it down, defining New York, Chicago, Detroit, New Haven, and California Neapolitan style pizzas, and suggesting where to find the best incarnation of each. You also get some history and lore, like the name of New York’s first pizzeria in the 1890s, or this gem about Detroit pizza:

A northern Italian immigrant named Gus Guerra invented Detroit-style pizza at Buddy’s in 1946, because he needed to serve his customers something to soak up their beer. In her book, “Detroit Style Pizza: A Doughtown History,” reporter Karen Dybis writes that Guerra was adapting a homestyle recipe from his Sicilian mother-in-law using a baking pan. According to local lore, the pans responsible for the city’s signature crust came straight off the Ford assembly line.

Dybis couldn’t authenticate that legend, but she did confirm Guerra worked for Ford Motor Company as a tile setter and that his children remember him buying industrial pans from hardware stores. Blue steel pans intended for use as drip trays and scrap metal collectors have become part of the Detroit-style mystique.

In a separate article, WaPo maps the most popular pizza style by state: New York (yellow), Neapolitan-ish (pink), Chicago (brown/orange), and other (grey: Detroit style in Michigan and New Haven style in Connecticut).

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Atlantic’s Amanda Mull points out that the state of retail is more complicated than most of us thought. In spite of the internet, more physical stores are opening than closing.

Mull sees an upscale/downscale bifurcation. If you’re trying to be a discount store, the internet is hard to compete with.

At the low end, the math on well-run stores has gotten worse and worse with time. Companies push prices and expenses as low as possible, which means that stores tend to be understaffed, poorly merchandised, and disorganized.

All too often, I find myself in a store wondering “What does this cost?” or even “Does anybody work here?” But at the other end of the market, people who have time to shop and money to spend want to get out of the house and have an in-person retail experience.

Consumers who are less price-sensitive can handle higher markups, and better margins mean more money sloshing around to ensure that stores always look good and are generously staffed with pleasant salespeople. On the higher end, sales require both the customers and the products to feel special.

But to prove that thriving stores don’t have to be exclusive havens for the well-to-do, she highlights Bass Pro Shops, where there is some expensive merchandise (like fishing boats and ATVs), but you can also get the Bass-logo six-dollar baseball hat. And it all happens in a setting that is engaging and entertaining.

Mull’s description of “a store that’s good at being a store” reminded me of a recent trip to the regional IKEA, where I bought a wok I didn’t know I needed and would never have searched for on Amazon. Like Bass Pro Shops, IKEA has a mix of expensive stuff and deals, organized around a unique identity. (Try the Swedish meat balls.)

Similarly, my local independent bookstore isn’t just for acquiring merchandise. Wandering its aisles evokes fantasy: Could I possibly become the kind of person who would read that tome, do those workouts, tour that country, or cook that cuisine? (Did I mention I bought a wok?)

Going shopping can be an event, an errand, or even a chore. If it’s a chore, I’d rather do it online.

and you also might be interested in …

Kat Abu gives us another week’s worth of the most batshit stories on Fox News. Watching Fox live tends to make me angry, but watching it through Kat’s eyes makes me laugh.

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Bridgette Exman is the assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction for public schools in Mason City, Iowa. Iowa recently passed one of those narrow-minded laws banning books of various sorts from classrooms and school libraries.

Iowa’s “parental rights bill,” signed into law at the end of May and made effective July 1, put public schoolteachers and administrators in an untenable position and recently thrust my own district in north-central Iowa into notoriety.

The law mandates that school libraries may only contain “age-appropriate” books free of any “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act” as defined by Iowa Code. In a particularly draconian move, the law holds individual teachers and school librarians accountable for violations.

Like most such laws, this one is ridiculously vague. Somebody had to figure out how to apply its terms to the books in Mason City. Otherwise, either all books would have to be boxed up, or teachers would be on their own in facing risks of lawsuits or other disciplinary actions. That somebody turned out to be Bridgette, a former English teacher who loves books and hates the idea of censoring them.

Her NYT account of the moral and educational challenges she faced is clearly meant to garner our sympathy. But I had a more ambiguous reaction: Everybody who chooses to collaborate with an oppressive regime runs into these issues. Authoritarians set these situations up intentionally: If you don’t help us implement our program, even worse things will happen.

Another common pattern is that the line keeps moving: You collaborated up to here, so why not up to there? I hope the NYT checks back with Bridgette next year.

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In a WSJ op-ed, Karl Rove compared Vivek Ramaswamy to Harold Hill, the con artist in The Music Man.

But Karl should be careful, because if you watch clips like “Ya Got Trouble“, you might start to think that the whole GOP sounds like Harold Hill. For “pool”, just substitute “wokeness” or “Critical Race Theory” or “drag queens”.

Meanwhile, Ted Cruz wants you to know that “they” are plotting to take away your ceiling fan and limit you to two beers a week. Ya got trouble, I tell ya.

and let’s close with something therapeutic

Venezuelan artist Maria Guadarrama imagines Disney princesses getting the therapy they desperately need.

The Defendant lost the 2020 presidential election. Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power. So for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These claims were false, and the Defendant knew they were false. … Shortly after election day, the Defendant also pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results. In so doing, the Defendant perpetrated three criminal conspiracies.

– The United States of America v Donald J. Trump

This week’s featured post is “The Evidence Against Trump is Unchallenged“.

This week everybody was talking about Trump’s January 6 indictment

Tuesday, Donald Trump was indicted for his plot to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election. The indictment was widely covered in the media, so I’ll try not to rehash things you’ve undoubtedly seen many times.

The indictment is only 45 double-spaced pages, so if you don’t want somebody else’s interpretation to get in your way, you can easily read it yourself. If you do want to read somebody’s summary, let me me recommend Marcy Wheeler and Jay Kuo.

The indictment tells a simple story: Trump lost the election. He knew he had lost the election, but wanted to stay in power anyway. So he invented and spread lies about election fraud, which he used to justify a series of illegal actions:

• pressuring election officials either to baselessly refuse to certify the legitimate election results or to change the results in his favor (as in his famous call urging Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes”).
• pressuring Republican state legislatures to illegally overrule their state’s voters and instead award Trump their electoral votes.
• enlisting Republican officials in eight states he lost to falsely claim to be the state’s electors and cast electoral votes in his favor.
• pressuring Vice President Pence to exceed his constitutional authority and recognize the fake Trump electors.
• taking advantage of the January 6 riot to push Republicans in Congress not to certify the votes cast by legitimate electors.

The previous indictments were all vulnerable to the criticism: “You’re indicting him for this because you can’t nail him for what you really want.” This one isn’t. The central thing I want Trump to answer for is his attempt to stay in power after losing an election. What’s more, this indictment goes to the heart of why Trump can never be allowed to wield power again: He was a danger to the republic in January 2021, and his possible return to power represents a fresh threat to the republic.

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Jack Smith appears to have gone to some trouble to streamline this indictment, so that he has a chance to get a trial done before the election. That’s why the six co-conspirators are not named or indicted (though they may be later). It’s also why Trump isn’t charged with inciting a riot, because that would raise Supreme-Court-level issues about the limits of free speech.

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John Eastman (a.k.a. “co-conspirator 2”) is not waffling any more: He’s defending the January 6 riot as a justified attempt to overthrow the government.

Klingenstein asked Eastman whether he would have acted in the same way in 1960 as he did in 2020, referencing the belief on the right that John F. Kennedy stole that year’s election from Richard Nixon.

Eastman replied no, and added that the stakes of 2020 represented an “existential threat to the very survivability, not just of our nation, but of the example that our nation, properly understood, provides to the world.”

The Trump 2020 lawyer went on to reference the Declaration of Independence, saying that “our founders lay this case out.”

“There’s actually a provision in the Declaration of Independence that a people will suffer abuses while they remain sufferable, tolerable while they remain tolerable,” he said. “At some point abuses become so intolerable that it becomes not only their right but their duty to alter or abolish the existing government.”

“So that’s the question,” he added. “Have the abuses or the threat of abuses become so intolerable that we have to be willing to push back?”

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The January 6 indictment has overshadowed other important recent developments, like the superseding indictment in the Mar-a-Lago case, or the states that have been going after local conspirators. In addition, Fani Willis’ indictment in Fulton County will probably drop sometime in the next two weeks.

and Israel

Two articles I found worthwhile: “What Israel Has Already Lost” by Yair Rosenberg and “I don’t recognize the intolerant, illiberal country that Israel is becoming” by Max Boot. The gist I draw from these essays is that the battle for democracy is far from over, but it’s not going well.

Rosenberg points to a new willingness to demonize opponents, which he calls “an utter collapse of shared solidarity”. Boot’s column is an elegy to “the nation I fell in love with” 40 years ago. The current Israel, Boot says, “remains freer than its neighbors”, but he “simply cannot support it as unreservedly as I once did.”

but you should pay attention to this Republican vision

The Heritage Foundation has spearheaded Project 2025, a collaboration of many conservative groups that has produced Mandate for Leadership 2025. This is sets out to be a handbook for the next Republican administration, and will likely have a considerable influence on the any Republican who wins in 2024, whether it’s Donald Trump or not.

There are two main things to know about Project 2025:

• It would make the executive branch a more perfect instrument of the President’s will by expanding the power of political appointees and making more government employees fireable.
• It would eliminate any consideration of climate change from US government policies.

The intro to the “Taking the Reins of Office” section says:

When it comes to ensuring that freedom can flourish, nothing is more important than deconstructing the centralized administrative state. Political appointees who are answerable to the President and have decision-making authority in the executive branch are key to this essential task. The next Administration must not cede such authority to non-partisan “experts,” who pursue their own ends while engaging in groupthink, insulated from American voters.

So the next time there’s a pandemic, Heritage wants a CDC committed to the president’s agenda, not public health. It wants an EPA whose top loyalty is to the president, not the environment. This harmonizes with Trump’s Agenda 47, particularly with its plans to “crush the Deep State”.

The NYT summarizes Project 2025’s energy provisions:

The plan calls for shredding regulations to curb greenhouse gas pollution from cars, oil and gas wells and power plants, dismantling almost every clean energy program in the federal government and boosting the production of fossil fuels — the burning of which is the chief cause of planetary warming.

If you want to dig into the details, look at the chapters on the Department of Energy and the EPA. Anything related to climate change is ripped out root-and-branch: Repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, eliminate subsidies for sustainable energy, scuttle standards for energy-efficient appliances, and go full-speed-ahead on fossil fuel drilling, mining, and pipeline-building (in a quest for “American energy dominance” in the world).

These policies are laid out without ever stating an opinion about the reality of climate change or its consequences. It’s as if whatever inadequate climate-change-mitigating programs Biden has managed to install are just some irrational fad that it’s time to be done with.

Bear this plan in mind if you start thinking that the 2024 election is just about Trump. Project 2025 is the consensus of conservative thinking. If you vote for any Republican for any office, this is what you’re voting for. If you decide to stay home or vote third-party because the Democrats aren’t inspiring enough, this is what you’re acquiescing to.

and you also might be interested in …

When a state legislature is as gerrymandered as Ohio’s, a ballot initiative is really the only chance the People have to make their will known. In an election tomorrow — one specially scheduled to get a low turnout — Ohio Republicans are trying to shut that avenue down.

Issue 1, which Ohio Republican legislators put on the ballot, would make future ballot measures to change the state Constitution harder to pass in two key ways. If it’s approved, citizens who hope to put amendments to the voters would first have to collect signatures in each of the state’s 88 counties, up from 44 now. And to pass, constitutional ballot initiatives would need to win 60 percent of the vote, rather than a simple majority.

The measure’s import may not be immediately clear to voters, but it’s meant to thwart a November ballot initiative that will decide whether reproductive rights should be constitutionally protected in Ohio, where a sweeping abortion ban is tied up in court.

Republicans know they can’t win this vote on the merits, so instead they’ve launched a confusing campaign implying that this measure has something to do with protecting your children from “trans ideology“.

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Remember Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, the two Black lawmakers who were expelled by the Tennessee legislature in April? They were each reinstated by local councils until a special election could be held. Those elections were held Tuesday, and both won reelection. Jones got 78% of the vote in his Nashville district, and Pearson got 90% in his Memphis district.

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Is the Gulf Stream about to collapse, as The Guardian reports? Well, no. Some system related to the Gulf Stream might stop working, but not the Gulf Stream itself. Skepchick explains: The report results from a confusion between the Atlantic meridional overturning circuit, which is slowing and could conceivably stop, and the Gulf Stream, which isn’t in danger of stopping.

Now, the AMOC stopping would have serious consequences. But it’s not the Gulf Stream.

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Another skirmish in Florida’s fight against education: It briefly looked like AP Psychology courses would have to be withdrawn from the state.

According to the College Board (which created the curriculum and administers the test for AP credit) “how sex and gender influence socialization and other aspects of development” has been part of the course for 30 years. But the Florida Department of Education had told superintendents that “teaching foundational content on sexual orientation and gender identity is illegal under state law”. The College Board announced that if the whole course couldn’t be taught, any mention of “AP Psychology” would have to be dropped from student transcripts.

Friday, Florida backed down, sort of.

The future of the course appeared to be in jeopardy until, late Friday, Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr., informed school superintendents that students will be able to take the class “in its entirety” but only if the course is taught “in a manner that is age and developmentally appropriate.”

Nobody knows yet what that means, but it seems to me to place the onus on Florida teachers, who will have to stake their careers on their interpretation of this vague guidance.

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Grist examines the downturn in the plant-based meat market. Not so long ago, beef-like patties from Impossible Foods or Beyond Meat seemed like the next big thing. But rather than exploding, sales fell 8% in 2022.

Several factors are in play here: high costs (compared to actual beef), whether or not the taste is convincing (opinions vary), and an increased focus among health-conscious consumers on avoiding ultra-processed foods (plant-based meat derives as much from labs as from farms).

Personally, I experimented with imitation beef exactly once: I used it to replace the ground beef in a spaghetti sauce. I knew I was in trouble when I started browning the “meat”, and my housemates’ dog didn’t come over to investigate.

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About those ultra-processed foods: The New Yorker’s Adam Gropnik paints a more ambiguous picture: He agrees that a lot of what we buy in the store includes unhealthy ingredients, but “processing” is largely in the eye of the beholder.

The history of humanity is the history of processing foodstuffs—by fire, by smoke, by pounding and pulverizing—and it can be hard to find a boundary between those ever more hallowed traditional kitchen practices and the modern ones that we are asked to condemn.

Many of the substances that look suspicious on an ingredient list are as close to “natural” as ones that we instinctively trust.

why is guar gum, extracted from one seed, any more artificial than cornstarch, extracted from another (originally by means of a method patented in the eighteen-fifties by a British industrialist)? Some version of carrageenan, which comes from the seaweed Irish moss, has been used in cooking for centuries; Great-Grandmother certainly used the lecithin from egg yolks, if not from soy oil, to emulsify her sauces.

and let’s close with something oracular

This game has been around for a few years, but I just noticed it. You can get your “Florida man horoscope” by googling “Florida man” and your birthday. Here’s what I get for mine: “Florida man wearing nothing but cowboy hat attacks woman with machete: police“.

Like the positions of the planets when I was born, I’m sure this says something important about my character and life course.

It is not the fault of the FBI that Donald Trump surrounded himself with criminals.

– Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA)

This week’s featured posts are “This summer’s weather is a turning point” and “DoJ, the FBI, and the Biden-crime-family conspiracy theory“.

This week everybody was talking about the weather

That’s the subject of one featured post. Short version: When climate-related disasters happen one at a time, they’re easy to deny: “We’ve always had floods” or heat waves or hurricanes or whatever. But when several apocalyptic weather events are happening at the same time, it feels qualitatively different. Those of us who care about the future need to jump on this moment. The debate over the existence and seriousness of climate change needs to be over.

and politicizing the NDAA

In 1948, the Senate paved the way for Democratic President Truman to negotiate the treaty that formed NATO by passing the Vandenberg Resolution, named for the Republican Senator who chaired the Foreign Relations Committee, Arthur Vandenberg. At that time, Vandenberg said something that has been quoted many times since: “Politics stops at the water’s edge.”

In other words: Republicans and Democrats might have their partisan struggles, but when it came to defending the country, all that would be put aside. That sentiment has always been more of an aspiration than a hard-and-fast principle, but it was never blatantly rejected until this week, when House Republicans loaded up the annual National Defense Authorization Act (which has to pass if our troops are going to be funded in FY2024, which starts in October) with a long list of culture-war provisions that Democrats in the Senate are bound to reject.

Rep Jeff Jackson (D-NC) explains how this process is supposed to work, and how it actually worked this year within the Armed Services Committee: There’s a behind-the-scenes negotiation to draft a bill that can get broad bipartisan support, and then on the final day the committee has to vote on hundreds of proposed amendments.

On this day, the chair of the committee has a very specific job: It’s to say no to his own party.

Why? Because he knows that some of the amendments his party is proposing are absolute deal-breakers for the minority party and he wants a big bipartisan vote out of committee to give the bill the best chance when it reaches the whole House.

Honestly, he did a pretty good job of knocking away the real grenades that would have blown up the whole thing. He definitely knew what he was doing. He let in just enough of the culture war stuff to satisfy his party without going that step too far that could have sunk it.

So Jackson, a Democrat, praised Chairman Mike Rogers, a Republican, for putting national defense above scoring political points. And while that bill would ban the Pentagon from funding drag shows, along with a few other culture-war provisions of little practical significance, it got out of the committee on a 58-1 vote.

Unfortunately, the bill then went to the House floor, where Speaker McCarthy could not stand up to his party’s radicals. Several amendments passed on party-line votes, turning the NDAA into a culture-war messaging vehicle that will make it much harder for servicewomen (or spouses of people in the armed forces) to get abortions, will eliminate the Pentagon’s office of diversity, equity and inclusion, and end coverage for transgender health care. As a result, the NDAA itself became a near-party-line vote, passing the House 219-210.

Now the Senate will undoubtedly pass a very different bill, setting up a showdown closer to the new-fiscal-year deadline of October 1. In that debate, the defense of the country and its global interests will take a back seat to domestic politics.

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Another example of Republicans prioritizing culture wars over national defense is Senator Tuberville’s one-man blockade on military promotions. Ordinarily, promotions pass the Senate en masse by unanimous consent, a process that avoids highly time-consuming votes on individual officers. But Tuberville’s objection makes that impossible, and the result is that the Marine Corps has only an “acting” commandant. Soon several of the Joint Chiefs will need to be replaced as well.

As with the House NDAA vote above, his issue is abortion.

and conspiracy theories about DoJ and the FBI

That’s the topic of another featured post.

A related story that I didn’t mention there: The saga of Gal Luft, who was supposed to be the House Oversight Committee’s star witness against the Bidens. But he went “missing” before he could testify. And then it turned out that he was on the run from an indictment filed in November, before the GOP had even won control of the House, much less touted Luft for a starring role in their hearings.

He faces eight separate counts, including two charges of making false statements to federal officials, one for conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and five counts relating to separate schemes which allegedly involved Luft trying to trade in sanctioned Iranian oil and broker deals for a Chinese firm to supply, among other things, “strike UAVs” to Kenya and anti-tank missile launchers to Libya.

He’s been found and is currently under arrest.

and the Hollywood strike

Most of us aren’t used to thinking of actors or TV/movie writers as workers. We imagine them living lives we can only dream of. And for some of them — though far from the majority — that’s true.

So when the Writers’ Guild of America went on strike May 2, and the Screen Actors’ Guild followed on Wednesday, most of the world’s truck drivers, waitresses, and assembly-line workers probably didn’t feel much instinctive solidarity.

However, there’s a lot to sympathize with here. The issue is a new technology (artificial intelligence) that has the potential to make entire professions obsolete. And the question is: Who’s going to profit from that technology? The dispute parallels issues that played out during the Industrial Revolution centuries ago. Things came out badly for skilled workers then, and it would be a shame if those mistakes got repeated.

One of the myths I was taught about industrialization is that it mechanized repetitive low-skill jobs and created more high-skill jobs. The economist Harry Braverman exploded that myth in his 1974 classic Labor and Monopoly Capital: the degradation of work in the 20th century. In Braverman’s retelling, it was precisely skilled labor that got replaced: weavers, bakers, blacksmiths, cobblers, and craftsmen of all sorts. Their specialized knowledge got designed into machines whose repetitive operations could be overseen by comparatively unskilled workers.

Most of the craftworkers got nothing for their knowledge. A few skilled workers would be observed closely by engineers. When the skills it had taken them years to master had been captured in a machine, they were no longer necessary — and neither were any of their guildsmen. The resulting profits went to the industrialists who owned the machines.

Artificial intelligence could soon do something similar to writers and actors. AI could digest, say, all the romantic comedy scripts ever written (with no payment to their authors), and then be able to fulfill requests like “Write me a rom-com set in Singapore with a rich woman fresh from a messy divorce and an airline pilot.” Another AI might take body-scans of a few real people (maybe they’d be paid for a single day of “labor”) and create a movie in which those “actors” perform the rom-com script.

The possible profits are immense, and they would all go to the companies that own the AIs.

At the press conference announcing the strike, National Executive Director and Chief Negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said that the [American Motion Picture and Television Producers]’s proposal for AI “proposed that our background actors should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day’s pay, and their company should own that scan, their image, their likeness and to be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want with no consent and no compensation.”

People trying to break into the creative professions are often desperate and correspondingly ripe for exploitation. One famous example is the comic-book duo of Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, who sold the rights to their new Superman character for $130 in 1938.

and Trump’s next indictments

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis swore in two new grand juries this week. Georgia grand juries serve for two months. Many of her previous statements indicate that this is the cycle when she will seek to indict Trump for his efforts to interfere in Georgia’s 2020 election.

Jack Smith is investigating many of the same crimes — the fake elector scheme, pressuring election officials (all the way up to VP Mike Pence) to change or throw out the election results — in Georgia as well as other states Trump lost, in addition to his role in inciting the January 6 insurrection. Lots of former federal prosecutors have been speculating that Smith will want to get his own indictment out ahead of Willis.

So we’re on indictment watch again: The Georgia indictment is expected early next month, and Smith could file any day.

In some sense, this would be the “real” indictment. Trump’s constant law-breaking has created a public expectation that ordinary laws don’t apply to him, so the filing-false-business-records charges in New York and the federal stealing-classified-documents charges feel illegitimate even to some people who aren’t part of his personality cult. Those are real laws frequently used against other people, and he’s clearly guilty in both cases. Even in my eyes, though, those charges resemble nailing Al Capone for tax evasion rather than the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

But if I had to pick one reason why I want to see Trump in jail rather than back in the White House, it’s that he tried to stay in power after he lost the 2020 election. That’s the greatest breach of faith committed by any president in American history, and it’s the crime he deserves to be judged on.

If you’re wondering what such an indictment might look like, Just Security has a written a “pros memo” based on the evidence that is publicly available. Such memos are typically written by the DoJ (and kept confidential) prior to writing an indictment that will be available to the public. The full document is over 250 pages, but the introduction and executive summary together are just six.

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Trump’s lawyers filed for an indefinite delay in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, at least until after the 2024 election. Their filing argues that

there is simply no question any trial of this action during the pendency of a presidential election will impact both the outcome of that election and, importantly, the ability of the Defendants to obtain a fair trial.

Like Andrew Weissmann, I read this as a confession of guilt.

If you are innocent and want to be vindicated, you ask for a trial before the election. If you are guilty and want to run on victimization, without being undermined by facts and law, you don’t.

Judge Aileen Cannon is supposed to hear arguments on the trial schedule tomorrow, and should set a trial date (or not) soon. That ruling will tell us a lot about how lenient she intends to be with Trump, who appointed her.

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Another confession of guilt, in my view, is the lawsuit Trump filed asking the Georgia Supreme Court to quash the report of the special grand jury that investigated his attempt to steal Georgia’s electoral votes in 2020. If he’s indicted and a trial jury looks at the evidence against him, he’s toast. So he has to get the evidence thrown out.

An innocent candidate would be demanding that all the evidence come out so that he could clear his name as quickly as possible. But all along, Trump’s strategy has been to delay, block witnesses from testifying, and claim that there’s nothing to see here.

and you also might be interested in …

An appellate-court panel has temporarily set aside the crazy injunction a Trump-appointed judge made last week — the one that barred large chunks of the Biden administration from discussing disinformation with social media companies. The order is short and doesn’t explain the panel’s reasoning, but promises an “expedited” hearing for oral arguments.

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The Netanyahu government has revived its plan to reduce the independence of the judicial branch, and so protests are starting up again. What could possibly go wrong with a plan to give more power over the courts to a leader facing indictment?

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Turkey has dropped its opposition to Sweden joining NATO, so that might happen soon. The other prospective new member, Finland, officially joined in April.

And that makes me shake my head at this poll result:

52 percent of MAGA-identifying Republicans believe Russia’s Vladimir Putin is a better president than Joe Biden. 

Because Putin is doing such a great job of achieving his goals, I suppose.

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A Texas judge is arguing that the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the 303 Creative case should mean that she doesn’t have to marry same-sex couples.

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If I asked you to think of some horrible example of gun violence, probably you’d name a school shooting: Uvalde, Sandy Hook — something like that.

But a report in Thursday’s IndyStar calls attention to another kind of shooting that is horrible in a different way: family annihilations, where some guy (men do 94% of family annihilations) wipes out his whole family, usually with a gun, and often (64%) finishes by committing suicide.

There are way more of these than I had ever imagined: 227 in the US since 2020. Texas has the most,

But it’s happening across the U.S., and the number is going up by the year. There were 62 cases in 2020, 61 in 2021, and 72 in 2022. There already were at least 32 in 2023 through the end of April, a pace that could lead to nearly 100 incidents this year. …

The U.S. has three times more family annihilations than Canada, eight times more than Great Britain and 15 times more than Australia, according to The National Institute of Justice. …

A USA TODAY investigation found American children are three times more likely to be shot at home than at school — and the majority of perpetrators are their parents or guardians.

The IndyStar article shifts back and forth between a general description of the problem and an in-depth account of a specific case: 61-year-old Jeffrey Mumper of Bloomington, Indiana killed his wife and two children (pictured below), before killing himself in September, 2020.

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If you’re considering supporting RFK Jr. for president, you should watch this video, where he seriously discusses the possibility that the Covid virus was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” while “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and the Chinese”.

After that clip went viral and accusations of antisemitism poured in, Kennedy tweeted a clarification, which also turned out to be bogus.

Kennedy perfectly illustrates a quote I have never been able to track to its source, but I’m sure I didn’t think of it myself: “Anybody who believes crazy things will eventually believe crazy things about Jews.”

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In Friday’s NYT, a federal district judge wonders what ever happened to the Supreme Court’s sense of smell. He recounts the kinds of ethical issues that have popped up in his own career: a lawyer has Red Sox tickets he’s not going to use, a man he had awarded disability benefits comes to his office to give him a hand-carved pencil box in gratitude. Neither offer, he believed, was being made with bad intentions. But he turned them down, because

You don’t just stay inside the lines; you stay well inside the lines. This is not a matter of politics or judicial philosophy. It is ethics in the trenches.

He is disturbed that Supreme Court justices seem not to understand this. You turn gifts and favors down not because you can’t find a loophole in the law big enough to squeeze them through, but because they smell bad, and they undermine public faith in the fairness of the judiciary.

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While we’re on the topic: Justice Sotomayor’s taxpayer-funded staff helping promote her books also smells bad. I don’t think this is on the same scale as Clarence Thomas’ corruption, but that doesn’t mean I have to defend it. The Supreme Court needs an enforceable ethics code that applies to everybody. That idea ought to have bipartisan support. But sadly, it doesn’t.

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George Lakoff (the guy who popularized the notion of “framing” back in the 1990s) gives advice on responding to trolls on social media: Don’t do it. Do this instead.

If you don’t wish to amplify trolls, don’t respond to their posts. Instead, try posting your own proactive message. If you see a post spreading false information about vaccines, you could do your own post that says: “I’ve noticed posts containing false information about vaccine safety. I won’t take the bait by responding, but here are the facts…” Then deliver whatever message you were planning to write as a response to the troll, even if it’s just a link to a news story debunking whatever the troll is saying.

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This is how far gone the Right is these days. At the Turning Point USA conference in Florida yesterday, MTG “attacked” President Biden with a long comparison to transformational presidents LBJ (who got Medicare and Medicaid passed) and FDR (Social Security), concluding with this:

LBJ had the Great Society, but Joe Biden had Build Back Better (and he still is working on it): the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs that is actually finishing what FDR started, then LBJ expanded on, and Joe Biden is attempting to complete.

Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu responds: “Thank you, @RepMTG. More of this, please.”

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I have no special animus towards Tom Cruise, and in general I love action movies, but his action-movie series will never be Mission: Impossible to me. The original MI TV series was the polar opposite of a star vehicle: The plan was the star, and it was carried out each week by a rotating collection of perfectly chosen agents with extraordinary-but-not-superhuman abilities.

While I’m on the subject, here’s something I just learned this week: One of the best things about the MI franchise is the catchy beat of its theme song. If you read that beat as Morse code, it’s dash-dash, dot-dot, dash-dash, dot-dot. In other words: MI, MI, MI …

A related point: Cruise will also never be Jack Reacher for me. In the Lee Child novels, Reacher is 6’5″, and the first thing people notice about him is how physically imposing he is. Alan Ritchson, who plays the role in Amazon’s Reacher series, is a much better choice.

and let’s close with something cosmic

The James Webb space telescope turned 1 this week. To celebrate, I’ll share this image of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth.

Ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal. What was true in the 1860s, and again in 1954, is true today: Equality requires acknowledgment of inequality.

– Justice Sonia Sotomayor
SFFA v Harvard, dissenting

This week’s featured post is “The Court Unleashed“.

This week everybody was talking about the Supreme Court

As usual, and as I predicted last week, the Court saved its most controversial decisions for last. In the featured post, I examined how the Court is throwing off any restraint on its power. For a case-by-case analysis, I’ll refer you to a series of articles by Vox’ Ian Millhiser.

Another angle not covered in the featured post is what happens next. On student loan relief, President Biden has not given up. His Department of Education is working on a new approach based on a different law.

On LGBTQ rights, the ball is in the bigots’ court. As I explained in the featured post, the 303 Creative case was vaporous, so there are no immediate consequences: Maybe Lorie Smith will start her wedding website business and maybe it will discriminate, but who really cares? Her case was a stalking horse for future discrimination, and we’ll have to wait and see what that discrimination entails.

The affirmative action case is immediately consequential if you hope to attend a university in the coming years. The first thing to look for is what each institution’s new admission policy is, and whether they try to achieve the goal of a diverse student body in some other way — say by focusing on class rather than race, or recruiting a more diverse applicant poll, or something else.

Whatever they do, it seems likely that Black and Hispanic enrollment in elite universities and professional schools will drop, at least in the near term.

A few people on my social media feed have suggested an intriguing idea: What if some religion-affiliated university claims that its religious mission requires a diverse student body? How would the Court handle a religious-freedom defense of an affirmative-action admission policy?

My candidate university: Georgetown.

“Georgetown, the oldest Catholic and Jesuit university in the nation, was founded on the principle that engagement between people of different faiths, cultures and beliefs promotes intellectual development, an understanding of service and solidarity, and a commitment to the common good,” says Georgetown President John J. DeGioia. “Our Jesuit tradition of education recognizes the value of diversity as necessary to education and in our work to shape future leaders who will make invaluable contributions to our national and global communities.”

Another possibility is Notre Dame, where Amy Coney Barrett got her law degree and used to teach.

At Notre Dame, our Catholic mission compels us to build a class reflecting the diversity of experiences and gifts of the human family. We undertake a comprehensive assessment of applicants, admit talented students with interests and aspirations consonant with our mission, and provide opportunities for a wide range of young people. These commitments are as meaningful today at Notre Dame as they were yesterday. We will study the Supreme Court’s decision and consider any implications for our admissions process as we strive to fulfill our distinctive mission.

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In the background of the affirmative action debate is a national sense of disappointment. In the 1960s, it was easy to imagine that our racial caste system needed a legal framework. Once Jim Crow and various other legally enforced discrimination ended, many of us expected things to equalize. In a generation or two, race truly would not matter.

By now it’s obvious that didn’t happen. So we’re seeing a number of possible responses:

• Pretend it did happen. This seems to be Chief Justice Roberts’ approach: It’s been such a long time, racism must be over by now.
• Blame Black people: We really did level the playing field, so anybody who can’t climb the meritocracy must just lack merit.
• Blame White people: Prejudice is so strongly ingrained in Whites that we can’t let Blacks succeed.
• Look for structural inertia. Once a caste system takes root, it manifests in more places than just the law. It was naive to think that ending blatant legal discrimination would fix everything.

Personally, I’m a structuralist. White prejudice still persists and still matters; I can see it in myself, for example. But I don’t think the personal prejudices of individual Whites are the main force keeping Black people down.

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Some of the best short-form political satire comes from the NYT Pitchbot, which suggests articles for the New York Times to pursue:

Opinion | Without the burden of affirmative action, Harvard can finally become a true meritocracy by Jared Kushner and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

and Bidenomics

It goes without saying that the Biden administration doesn’t hype itself as often or as well as the Trump administration did. Trump is a natural braggart and showman, while Biden has consistently focused more on governing than on taking credit.

In part, not taking credit is part of Biden’s governing strategy: He has gotten a surprising amount of Republican cooperation on stuff like infrastructure and technology precisely because he leaves the focus on infrastructure and technology rather than making it all about himself. Trump, on the other hand, consistently failed to get programs through Congress, even when his party controlled both houses.

The result is that Biden consistently runs behind Trump in polls about managing the economy, in spite of the fact that Biden’s record is pretty darn good: Trump handed him a terrible economy in 2021, and yet the predicted recession never comes and jobs continue to be created at record rates. Trump’s economic record can be summed up in two lines: Obama left him a growing economy with room to run, and Mitch McConnell let him run big deficits that he would have rejected under a Democratic president. Nothing else about the Trump administration made much economic difference.

But it’s nearly impossible to get reelected without claiming credit for things, so Biden has begun to lay claim to a term Republicans have been using as an insult: Bidenomics.

Bidenomics isn’t just a slogan and a set of graphs. It actually means something that should be popular if people hear its message. Ever since Reagan, the economy has been run under a trickle-down theory: Make sure rich people have lots of money and hope they invest it in things that create jobs. That was the logic of Trump’s tax cut, which went almost entirely to corporations and the rich.

Biden’s vision is to build the economy “from the middle out and the bottom up“. The three legs Bidenomics stands on are: public investment in infrastructure and future oriented industries like sustainable energy; empowering the workforce through training and unionization; and promoting competition through antitrust enforcement.

and you also might be interested in …

A January 6 defendant was arrested near Barrack Obama’s home with two guns and 400 rounds of ammunition.

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Pro-science podcaster Skepchick (Rebecca Watson) lines up on the don’t-debate-kooks side of the Peter Hotez/Joe Rogan/RFK Jr. controversy that I discussed last week. In case you imagine RFK Jr. can’t really be that bad, Rebecca summarizes what he said on Rogan’s show (“to which Joe Rogan responded with a pathetic, open-mouthed gape”).

vaccines cause autism, vaccines contain mercury, ivermectin cures COVID, “Big Pharma” “had to destroy” ivermectin to get emergency use authorization for vaccines, all the studies showing no benefit to ivermectin are fake, taking the COVID vaccine makes you “21 percent more likely to die of all causes,” he’s being silenced by “Big Pharma,” and oh yeah, wifi “radiation” ALSO causes autism plus food allergies, asthma, and eczema while “degrad(ing) your mitochondria and (opening) your blood-brain barrier.”

I can understand Democrats worrying about Biden’s age, or wishing the liberal worldview had a more charismatic advocate. But seriously, is that what you want in a president?

and let’s close with something pop cultural

As the Oppenheimer movie opens, let’s flash back to Oppy’s previous pop-culture appearance: his rap battle with Thanos.