The Weekly Sift

No Sift next week. The next new articles will post on November 20.

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision. I do not think this is necessary.

– Bertrand Russell
“Present Perplexities” (1953)

This week’s featured post is “Can we talk about Israel and Palestine?“

This week everybody was avoiding talking about the war in Gaza

That reluctance is the subject of the featured post.

This week Israeli troops moved into Gaza in force, and have encircled Gaza City, cutting the region in two. The Gaza health ministry now reports over 10,000 Palestinian deaths, though this number can’t be independently verified.

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Here are a couple of links that didn’t make it into the featured post: Ta-Nahisi Coates goes to the West Bank and interprets what he sees through the lens of Jim Crow: Some people can vote and others can’t. Some people can go wherever they want and others can’t. The history of how things got to be this way may be complicated, Coates says, but the morality of it is simple.

And Nicholas Kristof visits two Palestinian men he met 41 years ago on a bus.

I pushed back and noted how brutal the Hamas terrorism had been and how many Israeli civilians had been killed or kidnapped. Saleh and Mahmoud said that they mourned the Israeli deaths, but wondered why the world wasn’t equally outraged that Palestinians have been killed in cumulatively greater numbers. They were disappointed by my focus on the Hamas barbarism, and I was disappointed by their reluctance to unequivocally condemn those attacks.

… We parted, all of us less spry than we had been the first time. They were fairly ordinary Palestinian men who had mostly kept their heads down; they had avoided politics and had not lost family members to the conflict. But they had lost freedom and dignity. There are untold numbers just like them who never make the headlines but are stewing inside.

I remembered two young men full of promise and warmth, animated by hope and inhabiting a world in which Israelis and Palestinians interacted regularly and didn’t much fear each other. It is wrenching to see such change. As Saleh and Mahmoud became dads and grandfathers, they were shorn of a future, of vitality, of hope.

And that, I think, is the core of the Palestinian problem.

and talking about the new Speaker’s first bill

OK, the House has a speaker again so it’s open for business and ready to govern. Sort of.

The first order of business is a $105 billion emergency spending bill Biden proposed that included money for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan, and the southern border. It seems likely to pass the Senate with a substantial bipartisan majority.

But “No, no, no,” the House Republican majority says. “That’s not how we want to do business any more. We’ll unbundle the pieces and look at them separately, then combine them with cuts so that spending doesn’t increase.”

One problem with that approach is that bundling proposals together is how you assemble coalitions big enough to pass things. But never mind, Israel is popular, so let’s start there: a $14.3 billion aid-to-Israel bill that is offset by a $14.3 billion cut in funding the IRS, undoing a piece of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act that passed last year before Republicans got control of the House.

But there’s a snag in the House’s logic: The IRS funding was supposed to crack down on rich tax cheats, and is expected to raise more revenue than it costs. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that cutting $14.3 billion out of the IRS budget will decrease revenue by $26.8 billion over ten years, for a net deficit increase of $12.5 billion. (The Fox News story on the bill leaves this detail out.)

So in order to “balance” deficit-increasing aid for Israel, the House adds a deficit-increasing cut to the IRS.

A few things we can conclude from this:

• House Republicans aren’t serious about the deficit. If they were, they’d pair the $14 billion of Israel aid with $14 billion of deficit reduction, not an additional deficit increase.
• They aren’t serious about helping Israel. Otherwise they wouldn’t try to score political points that will slow down coming to an agreement with the Senate.
• Getting aid to Ukraine is going to be difficult. (That should make Putin happy.)
• Helping rich people cheat on their taxes is a high priority for them.
• If this is how Speaker Johnson approaches legislation, avoiding a government shutdown is going to be difficult. New funding has to pass both houses of Congress by a week from Friday.

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Cutting spending: Great idea! Here’s a Labor Party video from Britain a few years ago that explains how austerity (doesn’t) work.

and prejudice rising in America

There were always a number of things wrong with the “melting pot” imagery America once used to describe itself. (Chiefly: the assumption that you had to give up your prior ethnic identity to become truly American, and the fact that we never allowed Black people to fully melt in.) But there’s one thing it got right: Whatever ethnic squabbles you had in the old country should be left in the old country. Germany/France, Greece/Turkey, Serb/Croat — whatever it was, we didn’t want it here. Of course we developed our own ethnic rivalries, but at least they were based on things that happened in America, not feuds brought across the ocean. Mr. Dubois and Mr. Schwartz could be good neighbors here, whatever the Der Kaiser and la République were bickering about.

We seem to have lost that. One of the many depressing aspects of the current conflict in Israel and Gaza is antisemitic and Islamophobic violence in the United States. This much should be obvious: Your Palestinian-American neighbor is not a Hamas terrorist and your Jewish-American neighbor is not trying to steal anybody’s ancestral land. I understand that Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East face difficult issues that I don’t know how to resolve. But the echoing violence here in America is something we can and should just stop. There’s no reason for it.

and the Trump trials

Donald Trump is testifying today in the New York civil fraud trial against the Trump Organization. Last week, Trump sons Don Jr. and Eric testified, and Ivanka is due up on Wednesday.

Last Friday on MSNBC’s “Deadline White House”, former DoJ official Andrew Weissman outlined the standard Trump family strategy on testifying. (Sorry I can’t find video on this or quote him exactly.)

The first ploy, Weissman said, is to claim to be the smartest person in the room. You see this, for example, in things Trump has said about valuing Mar-a-Lago: He knows what it is worth, and nobody else’s opinion matters. Appraisers don’t know, assessors don’t know, accountants don’t know — but he knows. When that fails, the back-up ploy is to claim to be the dumbest person in the room: It’s not my job to know these things; I have people for that. I just do what the accountants and lawyers tell me.

It will be interesting to see which way Trump himself goes today.

Don Jr. and Eric were using the second ploy in their testimony. Junior’s Wharton MBA, he testified, doesn’t mean that he knows anything about accounting. (I have it on good authority that other Wharton MBAs were mortified by this.) The accountants, the Trump sons both claimed, did the financial statements and they just signed off on them.

Both of them were tripped up by Assistant Attorneys General Colleen Faherty and Andrew Amer, who produced emails and other documents the sons couldn’t explain.

If you’ve ever had somebody else do your taxes, you should understand that accountants don’t work the way the Trumps claimed. Accountants are not auditors; they apply laws and rules to the numbers you give them. If you lie to your accountant about, say, what you spent to keep your home business operating or how much you paid for the house you just sold, it’s not up to the accountant to do an independent investigation and correct you.

Same thing here: When Trump claimed his Trump Tower apartment was three times its actual size, it wasn’t the accountants’ responsibility to get out a tape measure and check.

and tomorrow’s elections

Ohio votes on whether to guarantee a right to abortion. Kentucky and Mississippi have surprisingly competitive governor’s races. And Virginia’s legislative elections will tell us whether the issues Glenn Youngkin won on two years ago still resonate.

this week’s best schadenfreude moments

Now that Mark Meadows appears to be offering testimony that contradicts what he said in his book, his publisher is suing him.

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Crypto-currency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted on all counts. Wikipedia sums up his spectacular fall:

Prior to FTX’s collapse, Bankman-Fried was ranked the 41st richest American in the Forbes 400, and the 60th richest person in world by The World’s Billionaires. His net worth peaked at $26 billion. By November 11, 2022, amid the bankruptcy of FTX, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index considered his net worth to have been reduced to zero.

The satirical NYT Pitchbot‘s take:

If the federal prosecutors can put Sam Bankman-Fried in jail for stealing billions of dollars, imagine what they can do to you.

but hardly anybody has been talking about the World Series

If you’re younger than, say, 50, you probably have no notion of what the World Series meant when I was growing up in the 1960s. For a little over a week, the world all but stopped. If somebody was playing football on Saturday or Sunday, nobody noticed.

And it wasn’t just the sports world that ground to a halt: The games were all played in the daytime until 1971, and radio broadcasts echoed through factories and other workplaces. Young fans like me applied considerable ingenuity to sneaking radios into our classrooms. (If you could stuff one of the cheap new transistor radios into a shirt pocket and cover the bulge with a sweater, you could thread the earphone cord under a sleeve as far as your left wrist — or right wrist if you were left-handed. Then you could prop your head up palm-to-ear while pretending to do schoolwork with your dominant hand.)

There were no “playoffs” until 1969, and no “wild card” teams until 1995. The regular-season champion of the National and American Leagues played each other, and since there was no interleague play during the season (until 1997), the two leagues were impossible to compare. So the Series held a considerable mystique: These match-ups — Mickey Mantle facing Sandy Koufax or Bob Gibson — could only happen in an All-Star game or a World Series. No one knew what to expect.

That mystique cloaked a difficult truth about baseball: Unlike football or basketball, baseball is so inherently random and streaky that you can’t tell how good a team is by watching it for only a week or two. (For example, countless no-name pitchers have thrown no-hitters during their one magical day in the sun, only to immediately fade back into obscurity.) So while it was undoubtedly true that occasionally the lesser team won the World Series (like the Pirates beating the Yankees in 1960 despite being outscored 55-27 over the course of seven games), it was easy to suspend disbelief and convince yourself that the winner was indeed the best team.

That’s much harder to do now. Twelve teams — nearly half of the 30-team league — get into the playoffs, so one or two of them are bound to get hot and play way over their heads for a few weeks. Whichever two teams are most favored by luck and circumstance will meet in the World Series, and one of them will win. Is that “champion” the best team in baseball? Don’t be silly.

Under the pre-1969 system, this year’s World Series would have featured the Orioles (101-61 in the regular season) against the Braves (104-58), instead of the Rangers (90-72) against the Diamondbacks (84-78). An Orioles/Braves series would have been the culmination of the drama fans had been watching all summer. (Within the National League, the Braves/Dodgers pennant race would have been epic.) Instead, those of us living outside of Texas and Arizona were scratching our heads saying, “Wait. Who are these guys again?”

Or we just ignored it. Because “World Series winner” — the Rangers this year, in case you hadn’t heard — has just become a line in a record book. It doesn’t actually mean anything any more.

and you also might be interested in …

The latest set of polls from NYT/Siena aren’t good, and aren’t good in mysterious ways: Trump has a surprising amount of support among young voters and voters of color.

I finally broke down and subscribed the The Status Kuo blog by Jay Kuo. His latest post is “One Year Out from Election 2024“, and it roughly parallels the argument I made in “About the Polls” in September. He is concerned about the polls, but still thinks Biden is in a far better position than the polls make it appear.

David Roberts:

Every single Dem presidential candidate of my lifetime, the tag-team of RW media & shitty MSM has honed in on some (often silly) weakness & beaten it to death. Gore is insincere; Kerry’s a flip-flopper; Clinton had her emails; Biden’s age. Only Obama has escaped this. …

Any realistic alternative to Biden would also be tagged with some flaw, some Thing, some narrative that the media beat to death until the public started repeating it back to them. It’s structural, just how the game works.

And then we’d get calls to shove that person aside in favor of some other even-more-unicorn unicorn that would not be subject to the same shit. There is no unicorn. Solve the structural information problem or things keep getting worse.

It reminds me of a refrain I’ve heard so often in climate/energy over the years: “they’ve polarized X, let’s talk about Y instead.” Dudes. They can polarize anything! They’ve spent decades building a giant polarization machine! There is no non-polarizeable term/tech/policy!

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The vote to expel George Santos from Congress failed. But the interesting voice here is Jeff Jackson, a Democrat who voted not to expel him. Jackson points out that an Ethics Committee report on Santos is due in two weeks. The Ethics Committee process that gives investigated members certain rights, and expelling Santos without the report would set a bad precedent. Jackson fully expects to vote to expel Santos after the report comes out, but not until then.

He anticipates an objection:

“But Jeff, the other side doesn’t care about precedent or due process!” Perhaps, but I do. And I think we all should. So that’s the standard I’ll defend.

MSNBC’s Hayes Brown argues the other side:

The bigger threat, as I see it, is not that members are kicked out too easily for partisan reasons. It’s that members who are clearly unfit to serve are permitted to remain because of the letters next to their names.

and let’s close with something anachronistic

I’ve closed with this 2Cellos video before, but not for nine years. This 17th-century performance of AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” is worth a second look.

Just for reference, here’s AC/DC’s original.

It’s ridiculous that Republicans cannot elect a speaker, but it is also, at this point, unsurprising. A gaping void exists at the center of the populist strain of Republican politics; where the ideas ought to be, you too often find a long, primal scream of “Noooooooo!!!!”

– Megan McArdle
“Republicans have created a void that’s becoming harder to escape“

This week’s featured post is “The House, still divided“.

This week everybody was talking about chaos in the House GOP

The featured post provides a quick summary of where we are and how we got here, and then references a couple of deeper essays about how the House and the House Republican caucus actually work. But if you’re looking for some clear this-is-what-happens-next-and-when speculation, I don’t have it.

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The McArdle quote above (and the article it comes from) makes a good point: Factions compromise with other factions because they have policy goals they want to achieve. But MAGA really has no goals beyond returning Trump to power. Cutting the deficit? No. When Trump was in power and had two years of a Republican Congress, they exploded the deficit with both tax cuts and spending increases. Inflation? They complain about it, but have no plan for addressing it. Crime? Ditto.

I’m sure my Republican readers would add other things they care about: the left-wing capture of schools and education policy, the progressive drift of corporations and the mainstream media, the DEI bureaucracies metastasizing across every class of institutions, the gender-medicine doctors rushing kids onto puberty blockers and hormones. …

But notice how few of the things on the list are things Congress can actually fix, even theoretically.

Imagine that you’re an establishment Republican trying negotiate for MAGA support to become speaker, or that you’re Biden trying to make a deal to keep the government open. What can you offer them that they would actually care about enough to give you something back?

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If reality mattered, the House Republican infighting would smash once and for all the myth that Trump is a great deal-maker. He claims that if he were president he could bring Ukraine and Russia to an agreement in 24 hours. But the squabbling among his allies in the House has brought Congress to a standstill for three weeks with no end in sight.

Where is he, and why can’t he solve it?

In the real world, without reality-TV editing to make him look brilliant, Trump is terrible at making deals. He broke two of Obama’s agreements — the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris Climate Accords — claiming each time that he would get a “better deal”. (“I think the people of our country will be thrilled, and I think then the people of the world will be thrilled,” he said about his fantasy Paris renegotiation.) In fact, he got no deal, and in each case the country is worse off than if he had left Obama’s agreements in place.

In 2017, he came within one vote of undoing another long-negotiated Obama compromise, Obamacare. He would have taken health insurance away from millions of Americans — again with no plan to replace it beyond a fantasy.

His big diplomatic “accomplishment”, the USMCA, is basically what Obama had already negotiated as part of the Trans-Pacific Parternship, another deal Trump blew up. His flashy negotiations with North Korea produced a great photo opportunity — which benefited Kim more than anyone — and no substantive progress on the main issue, North Korea’s nuclear missiles. His trade war with China gave him great opportunities to posture, but accomplished nothing.

And then we get to Trump’s #1 issue: immigration and the border. The pieces of a deal have been lying around ever since the Gang of Eight compromise passed the Senate and died in the House in 2013. Neither side likes things the way they are and everybody has something to gain from striking a deal. But even with two years of a Republican-controlled Congress, he got no immigration legislation passed, and even shut down his own government to (unsuccessfully) pressure the Republican Congress to fund his wall.

and war

There are lots of individual stories in the Israel/Gaza war, but the fundamental situation didn’t change much this week: Hamas still holds hundreds of hostages. Israel is attacking Gaza from the air, but hasn’t launched a ground invasion yet. Lots of people in Gaza are dying (though it looks like Israel wasn’t responsible for destroying that hospital). A shipment of humanitarian aid made it into Gaza, but it’s a drop in the bucket.

If Israel has a plan for resolving this situation without killing a huge number of civilians, nobody seems to know what it is. In Israel’s defense, though, I haven’t heard a good suggestion yet for what they should do.

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Hamas released two American hostages, but there are still other American hostages in Gaza. Why them? Why now? I don’t think anybody knows.

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Biden gave an Oval Office speech to the nation [video, text], explaining why Israel and Ukraine deserve our support. He also said:

the United States remains committed to the Palestinian people’s right to dignity and to self-determination. The actions of Hamas terrorists don’t take that right away.

But without any viable peace plan, it’s hard to take that sentiment seriously, whether it comes from Biden or from Israeli leaders.

Biden also urged Americans not to bring the Gaza conflict home, citing the murder of a six-year-old Palestinian American near Chicago. The article says the boy’s mother came to the US 12 years ago, which would make him an American citizen.

We can’t stand by and stand silent when this happens. We must, without equivocation, denounce antisemitism. We must also, without equivocation, denounce Islamophobia.

And to all of you hurting — those of you who are hurting, I want you to know: I see you. You belong. And I want to say this to you: You’re all America. You’re all America.

Times like these are when I’m most grateful that Biden defeated Trump in 2020. I shudder to think of this kind of crisis going on in the world with Trump posturing and grandstanding and appealing to everyone’s worst impulses.

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I’m impressed that the White House text of Biden’s speech includes his handful of verbal stumbles and misstatements. For example, he referred to Netanyahu as “president” rather than “prime minister”. The text corrects that mistake with a strikethrough, but doesn’t pretend he didn’t say it.

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Ukraine’s summer offense didn’t gain much ground, but their increasing drone and missile capability has challenged Russia’s dominance of the Black Sea.

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Mitch McConnell is still on board with helping Ukraine defend against Russia’s invasion:

No Americans are getting killed in Ukraine. We’re rebuilding our industrial base. The Ukrainians are destroying the army of one of our biggest rivals. I have a hard time finding anything wrong with that. I think it’s wonderful that they’re defending themselves- and also the notion that the Europeans are not doing enough. They’ve done almost 90 billion dollars, they’re housing a bunch of refugees who escaped. I think that our NATO allies in Europe have done quite a lot.

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I was late finding “How Not to Respond to a Terrorist Attack“, which Benjamin Wittes posted the day of the the Hamas attack on Israel. But it’s well worth bookmarking and coming back to after future attacks, wherever they occur and whomever they victimize.

Fundamentally, he urges humility on those of us tempted to comment quickly. What needs to be affirmed in the immediate aftermath of murder is not deep or complex, but very simple: Murder is wrong. Not “wrong, but” or “wrong, except”, but just wrong. There is a strong temptation, which I feel myself, to segue past the tragedy of individual lives cut short, and to talk instead about the larger context, the need for revenge, what I think will or should happen next, how this event proves some other point I often make, and why people who disagree with me are dangerously misguided.

and the Trump trials

Sidney Powell and Kenneth Cheseboro pleaded guilty and have promised to cooperate with Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis. So three of the original 19 defendants in the Georgia RICO case have now pleaded guilty.

By all accounts, Powell and Cheseboro got very good deals, which they took just before their trial was supposed to begin. Neither will do jail time.

There are two theories on how they got such good deals: Either they have really juicy testimony to offer against the other conspirators, including Trump, or Willis really, really wanted to avoid revealing all her evidence and strategy in a trial before Trump’s trial. (Both Powell and Cheseboro had taken advantage of Georgia’s law giving them the right to demand a speedy trial. There’s still no trial date for the other defendants.)

Powell and Cheseboro are widely assumed to be two of the unnamed and unindicted co-conspirators in Jack Smith’s January-6-conspiracy indictment against Trump, but neither has any deal with Smith so far. As long as that’s the case, it’s hard to see what they could testify to for Willis. Either might legitimately plead the Fifth Amendment rather than describe crimes Smith could still indict them for.

If either of them makes a deal with Smith, the floodgates will open.

The biggest immediate impact of the guilty pleas is its effect on Trump politically: It’s hard to claim there was no crime when your former allies have already confessed to crimes.

As for where each fit into the larger conspiracy: Powell was at the center of spreading the Big Lie, as well as the effort to seize voting machines. Cheseboro organized the fake-elector scheme. I would expect Powell’s testimony to be most damaging to Rudy Giuliani and Cheseboro’s to John Eastman, if you’re looking for the next possible dominos. And Mark Meadows was everywhere, so any new testimony might target him.

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Judge Chutkan issued a gag order against Trump

All interested parties in this matter, including the parties and their counsel, are prohibited from making any public statements, or directing others to make any public statements, that target (1) the Special Counsel prosecuting this case or his staff; (2) defense counsel or their staff; (3) any of this court’s staff or other supporting personnel; or (4) any reasonably foreseeable witness or the substance of their testimony.

and then explicitly described what is not included:

This Order shall not be construed to prohibit Defendant from making statements criticizing the government generally, including the current administration or the Department of Justice; statements asserting that Defendant is innocent of the charges against him, or that his prosecution is politically motivated; or statements criticizing the campaign platforms or policies of Defendant’s current political rivals, such as former Vice President Pence.

Trump predictably claimed that this order violates his First Amendment rights. This is in line with Trump’s refusal to acknowledge that indictment is a meaningful act. A grand jury of ordinary Americans has found that the evidence of his criminality is sufficiently strong that a trial has to be held. That’s not nothing, and it restricts a person’s rights in ways that are necessary for holding a fair trial.

For example, unindicted Americans are free to travel wherever they want. But if you’ve been indicted, you have to be present when your trial starts. The rights you would ordinarily expect as an American have been narrowed to accommodate your trial.

Again and again, Trump pretends that his indictments are nothing, and so his rights should not be restricted in any way.

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Meanwhile, Justice Arthur Engoron, who is overseeing Trump’s ongoing New York $250 million civil fraud trial, fined Trump $5K for violating his previous gag order and threatened to jail him for future violations. The gag order had been issued after a Trump Truth Social post targeted Engoron’s principal clerk.

Consider this statement a gag order forbidding all parties from posting, emailing or speaking publicly about any of my staff

As requested, Trump took down the offending post. But apparently it was still posted on his campaign web site. Trump’s lawyers claimed this violation of the order was inadvertent, but at a minimum it shows Trump and his people failing to take the order seriously.

It’s just a matter of time before some judge has to jail Trump for contempt, because he is in fact contemptuous.

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Forbes is claiming that former Trump Organization CFO Adam Weisselberg committed perjury during his testimony at Trump’s New York civil fraud trial. After the report was published, prosecutors cut Weisselberg’s testimony short.

Weisselberg is still on probation after pleading guilty at a previous trial and serving three months in prison.

Significantly, perjury in the first degree is also a felony punishable by up to seven years. But perhaps most importantly, the Manhattan district attorney would not have to undertake a new prosecution of Weisselberg for perjury to move to revoke his probation. It would be enough for the DA’s office simply to convince Judge Juan Merchan that Weisselberg engaged in new, criminal conduct during that [five-year] period.

and you also might be interested in …

Threats and disasters are more newsworthy than positive trends, so it’s easy to imagine the world is in worse shape than it actually is. Brian Klaas calls attention to ten charts of important trends, several of which are encouraging. For example, the percentage of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has been falling for two centuries, and falling faster in recent decades.

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Rep. Jeff Jackson’s podcasts have been offering a great inside view of how the House works. Now it looks like North Carolina will gerrymander him out of Congress.

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As I envision my next car, I find [one, two] cautionary tales of road trips in EVs. I am leaning towards a plug-in hybrid.

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A San Francisco chef describes how his idea of a restaurant has changed post-Covid: small dining room, short menu, no reservations, and a retail shop to even out revenue. He thinks this model will catch on.

and let’s close with something harmonious

A barbershop quartet demonstrates that all music is really barbershop. A song just takes about 20 years to get there.

You guys, the UAW — you saved the automobile industry back in 2008 and before. You made a lot of sacrifices. You gave up a lot. And the companies were in trouble. But now they’re doing incredibly well. And guess what? You should be doing incredibly well too. It’s a simple proposition.

– President Joe Biden,
on a picket line in Belleville, Michigan on Tuesday

This week’s featured posts are “MAGA and the Swifties” and “When should public officials resign?“

This week everybody was talking about the close call on a government shutdown

The government did not shut down Sunday morning, and will not shut down until at least November 17.

The shutdown, which had appeared nearly inevitable, was avoided when House Speaker Kevin McCarthy changed his position Saturday morning: He allowed a vote on a short-term continuing resolution. Once the resolution came to the House floor, it passed easily, 335-91. It then went to the Senate, where it passed 88-9. The bill was signed by President Biden Saturday evening with an hour to spare.

The resolution was opposed almost entirely by Republicans: 90 representatives and nine senators. Rep. Mike Quigley of Illinois was the lone Democrat in opposition. Two House Democrats, Rep. Katie Porter of California and Rep. Mary Peltola of Alaska, did not vote. The Republican opposition came mostly from the party’s right wing, the likes of Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.

The resolution continues funding government departments at the same levels as fiscal 2023, which ended on September 30. It also added $16 billion for disaster relief, but included no additional aid to Ukraine. (A similar bill in the Senate had $6 billion for Ukraine, but the House bill got through first.)

President Biden believes he has a promise from Speaker McCarthy to allow a separate vote on Ukraine aid soon. However, Biden also believed McCarthy had committed himself to funding the government back when the debt-ceiling deal was reached in June. McCarthy ultimately came through, but not without considerable drama.

It also remains to be seen if McCarthy will continue as speaker. Gaetz and his right-wing allies in the “Freedom” Caucus had threatened to withdraw their support from McCarthy if he made a deal to get Democratic votes, as he did Saturday.

McCarthy has clearly been frustrated by the nihilism of his party’s right wing, which never proposed a government-funding deal it could support. McCarthy told reporters after the vote:

If you have members in your conference that won’t let you vote for appropriation bills, [don’t] want an omnibus and won’t vote for a stopgap measure, so the only answer is to shut down and not pay our troops: I don’t want to be a part of that team.

The next question is whether Gaetz and his allies will carry out their threat to submit a motion to vacate the chair, which would remove McCarthy from the speakership unless Democrats decided to save him. (They say they won’t without getting something in return.) Over the weekend he said he would submit the motion sometime this week. McCarthy responded with bravado: “Bring it on. Let’s get this over with.”

Also: Will anything be different as we approach November 17? McCarthy bought himself (or his successor) some time, but if he has some plan for achieving a less chaotic outcome, he hasn’t revealed it yet.

One final point: The fact that McCarthy’s change-of-mind resolved the issue so quickly is pretty convincing evidence that Republicans were causing the problem.

and the Trump trials

The New York Attorney General’s lawsuit against the Trump Organization won a big victory Tuesday: Judge Arthur F. Engoron issued a partial summary judgment on the case, declaring that Trump had committed fraud by inflating his net worth when applying for bank loans. Because Trump Organization’s fraud is ongoing, the judge

cancelled all of the business licenses for the Trump Organization and its 500 or so subsidiary  companies and partnerships after finding that Trump used them to, along with his older two sons, commit fraud.

His gaudy Trump Tower apartment, his golf courses, his Boeing 757 jet and even Mar-a-Lago could all be disposed of by a court-appointed monitor, leaving Trump with not much more than his pensions as a one term president and a television performer.

Under the New York General Business Law you can only do business in your own name as a sole proprietor or with a business license, which the state calls a “business certificate.”  All of Trump’s businesses were corporations or partnerships that require business certificates.

The judge’s ruling found that a trial was unnecessary to determine fraud, because all the arguments Trump’s lawyers presented in his defense were beside the point.

[The Office of the Attorney General] need only prove: (1) the [statements of financial condition] were false and misleading; and (2) the defendant repeatedly or persistently used the SFCs to transact business.

The instant action is essentially a “documents case”. As detailed [elsewhere in this ruling], the documents here clearly contain fraudulent valuations that defendants used in business, clearly satisfying OAG’s burden.

Trump’s attorneys instead argued a number of legally irrelevant points, like that the banks in fact did not lose money, or that the SFCs contained a clause warning the banks to do their own valuations, or that property valuations are subjective. Their stubbornness in repeating arguments the judge had already rejected as frivolous led the judge to sanction the attorneys $7500 each. (David Cay Johnston notes that this ruling could be cited in some future disbarment hearing.) University of Michigan business law professor Thomas elaborates:

What we’ve seen with Donald Trump over and over again is that often arguments that gain traction with his supporters are flatly inconsistent with the law.

Underlining that point, Trump has continued making the irrelevant arguments rather than addressing the actual ruling.

I’ve heard a number of analogies capturing why the nobody-lost-money argument fails. Here’s my favorite: What if as you were closing up at your job, you stole $100 from the till, then went to the racetrack and bet it on a horse that won? In the morning you could replace the $100, so your employer didn’t lose money. But you’re still a thief.

Probably the most egregious overvaluation was of Trump’s apartment in Trump Tower, which he claimed was three times its actual size and valued accordingly. The judge comments:

In opposition, defendants absurdly suggest that “the calculation of square footage is a subjective process” … A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud.

Of course Trump will appeal, but an appeal is not just a do-over. He’ll have to support an argument that the judge did something wrong. The judge’s reasoning is simple and doesn’t seem to rely on esoteric points of law, so an appeal doesn’t seem to have much to work with.

Meanwhile, a trial on the rest of the state’s charges, including insurance fraud, will begin today. Thursday, the appeals court refused to delay that trial pending a ruling on Trump’s appeal. The trial will also determine the fines Trump will have to pay. The state is asking for $250 million.

Trump has said he’s going to appear in court today, though it’s not clear what he plans to do there, since it’s not time for him to testify, if he intends to do that at all (which I doubt). Trump says a lot of things, so I’ll believe he’s coming when I see him.

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In political terms, one consequence of this decision isn’t getting the attention it deserves: Like sexual assault, Trump’s involvement in fraud is no longer just an accusation: It is a finding of a court of law. Trump is no longer just “alleged” to have committed fraud. He committed fraud.

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Fani Willis got the first guilty plea from one of her 18 RICO defendants. (It’s kind of amazing this isn’t even the lead story under “Trump trials”.) Scott Hall pleaded guilty to five misdemeanors and was sentenced to five years of probation. He is also committed to testify in future proceedings, and if he doesn’t testify truthfully, the deal is revocable.

Hall’s role in the Georgia election-stealing scheme is both low-level and easily established: When Trump allies were trying to assemble (or invent) evidence of voter fraud in Georgia, they illegally accessed voting machines in Coffee County.

The security breach in the county about 200 miles southeast of Atlanta is among the first known attempts by Trump allies to access voting systems as they sought evidence to back up their unsubstantiated claims that such equipment had been used to manipulate the presidential vote. It was followed a short time later by breaches in three Michigan counties involving some of the same people and again in a western Colorado county that Trump won handily.

… Authorities say Hall and co-defendants conspired to allow others to “unlawfully access secure voting equipment and voter data.” This included ballot images, voting equipment software and personal vote information that was later made available to people in other states, according to the indictment.

In a RICO case, specific crimes like these are used to establish the existence of a corrupt organization that other defendants belong to. Hall’s guilty plea raises the question of whether it will start a stampede to make a deal with Willis before the other defendants do. A defendant’s only leverage in such a deal is if s/he can testify to something Willis can’t already prove.

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In other Georgia-election-case news, former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark and three of Trump’s fake electors lost their bid to move their cases to federal court. Mark Meadows’ similar motion had already been denied, and Trump surprisingly announced he will not try to shift his case to federal court.

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Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro are the first of the 18 (now 17) RICO defendants facing trial. They requested a speedy trial, which will begin October 23. CNN has speculated that they will be offered plea deals to avoid this trial, which would preview the state’s evidence to the other defendants.

and the sham impeachment hearing

Like the rest of the House Republican investigations of Joe Biden, the opening session of their impeachment inquiry did not live up to its billing. None of the witnesses called were “fact” witnesses, i.e., none of them saw or heard President Biden doing anything impeachable. The witnesses also made much weaker claims than the Republican congressmen did.

Forensic accountant Bruce Dubinsky: “I am not here today to even suggest that there was corruption, fraud or wrongdoing. More information needs to be gathered before I can make such an assessment.”

Law professor Jonathan Turley: “I do not believe that the current evidence would support articles of impeachment. That is something that an inquiry has to establish.”

That’s a far cry from the claim House Oversight Chairman Rep. James Comer made, that the GOP probes have “uncovered a mountain of evidence revealing how Joe Biden abused his public office for his family’s financial gain.”

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A rule of thumb: Investigations that are going somewhere get more and more specific. For example, the Manhattan case about Trump’s Stormy Daniels payoff — widely considered the weakest of the four Trump indictments — has come down to this: 34 Trump Organization documents are fraudulent business records.

The longer the Republican investigation of Biden stays at the level of “Hunter did shady things and Joe must have been involved somehow”, the more likely it is to go nowhere.

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A tip on interpreting headlines: When a headline attributes some wrong-doing to “the Biden family“, that means the article contains no new information about President Biden himself. If they had anything on Joe, that would be the headline.

and the rain

Climate Change Summer has turned into Climate Change Fall. Friday, as much as 8 inches of rain fell on parts of New York City, shutting down the subways and producing flash floods. The storm was not due to a hurricane or tropical storm. Instead, seemingly innocuous systems came together unexpectedly to produce a hurricane-like rainfall. The NYT explains:

It has been raining a lot in New York, which hasn’t seen a September this wet in over a century. Climate change is very likely stoking more ominous and lengthy downpours because as the atmosphere heats up, it can hold more moisture, said Andrew J. Kruczkiewicz, a senior researcher who specializes in flash floods at Columbia Climate School at Columbia University.

Scientific American gives the larger context:

The 2018 National Climate Assessment (a new version of which is due sometime this year) found that the amount of rain that fell during the heaviest 1 percent of rain events had increased by 55 percent across the Northeast since 1958, with most of the increase happening since 1996. That trend will only get worse as global temperature rise, causing more evaporation from oceans and lakes and giving storms more water to fuel deluges.

and Taylor Swift

The right-wing attacks against Swift are the subject of one of the features posts.

and two speeches aimed at workers

Biden and Trump each talked to auto workers, but in very different ways. Biden went out on the picket line with UAW strikers and addressed them with a bullhorn. In addition to the quote at the top of this post, he said:

Wall Street didn’t build the country. The middle class built the country, and unions built the middle class.

Biden handed the bullhorn to UAW President Shawn Fein, who said:

These CEOs sit in their offices, they sit in meetings, and they make decisions. But we make the product. They think they own the world, but we make it run. 

Whether we’re building cars or trucks or running parts distribution centers; whether we’re writing movies or performing TV shows; whether we’re making coffee at Starbucks; whether it’s nursing people back to health; whether it’s educating students, from preschool to college — we do the heavy lifting. We do the real work. Not the CEOs, not the executives.

The next day, Trump was invited by management to speak at a non-union auto parts shop.

About 400 to 500 Trump supporters were inside a Drake Enterprises facility for the speech. Drake Enterprises employs about 150 people, and the UAW doesn’t represent its workforce. It wasn’t clear how many auto workers were in the crowd for the speech, which was targeted at them.

One individual in the crowd who held a sign that said “union members for Trump,” acknowledged that she wasn’t a union member when approached by a Detroit News reporter after the event. Another person with a sign that read “auto workers for Trump” said he wasn’t an auto worker when asked for an interview. Both people didn’t provide their names.

In other words, Biden lent his support to an event workers started on their own, while Trump staged a event for the cameras, complete with extras playing phony roles. His support for working people is about as authentic as his property valuations or his marriage vows.

and Cassidy Hutchinson’s book

I read Cassidy Hutchinson’s new book Enough. A lot of what’s in it is stuff you already know if you watched her testimony and followed the news about her.

But it does make it easier to understand how she could fall under Trump’s spell: She had a psychologically abusive father whose approval she valued but could never secure. He was a head-of-the-household type who had big plans, but was never wrong. It was up to Cassidy’s mother to make the details of those plans work, and to take the blame if things fell apart. So that role was already in Cassidy’s head, waiting for Trump to slide into it.

Her description of the Trump White House resembles an abusive family in a lot of ways. Hutchinson and her boss Mark Meadows lived in fear of Trump’s temper. And if he did erupt, the explanation that he’s an over-coddled asshole wasn’t available to them. Instead, they believed they should have foreseen and prevented whatever set him off.

The book also underlines a problem in our justice system: It’s expensive, even if you did nothing wrong. When Hutchinson got her first subpoena from the January 6 Committee, everyone told her she needed a lawyer. She was driven to use a TrumpWorld lawyer when an independent lawyer quoted her a six-figure price. Only after she got disgusted with herself and wanted to change her testimony did she ask Liz Cheney for help. Cheney gave her a lead on a firm that took her case for free.

This raised a question in my mind: If you’re a witness and not a target of an investigation, and if you intend to answer all questions truthfully, why do you need a lawyer? All the coverage I’ve seen takes the necessity of counsel for granted, so I asked a lawyer I know to spell it out.

He made three points:

• You don’t always know for sure that you won’t eventually be a target, even if you’re innocent.
• A lawyer can negotiate about how you’ll testify, to minimize how much the investigation will disrupt your life.
• If you’re not familiar with all the relevant laws, you may not realize that you violated one. If you did, you may need to negotiate a plea deal or a cooperation agreement.

With Trump and his allies threatening retribution if they ever get back in power, both sides need to think about this problem. Merely witnessing a suspected crime shouldn’t bankrupt you.

and you also might be interested in …

Senator Dianne Feinstein died at the age of 90. Politico looks back at her career.

Governor Newsom is wasting no time in naming her successor: Laphonza Butler, the president of Emily’s List. The official announcement is expected later today.

Newsom had made two pledges, both of which this appointment fulfills: He said he would appoint a Black woman, and that he would not give any of the candidates already running for this seat in 2024 an advantage by naming them as the interim.

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I didn’t watch the second Republican presidential debate. In reading accounts of it, nothing made me feel like I missed out.

Ron DeSantis is a terrible strategist. He was riding high immediately after last fall’s midterm elections for a simple reason: He won his race handily, while Trump’s favorite candidates almost all lost. His potentially winning message against Trump was obvious: I can win and Trump will lose again. (If Trump wanted to respond by claiming he didn’t lose, let him. It makes him sound like a whiner. Ask: “So are you living in the White House now or not?” When that sets off another rant, respond with an eye roll and “Whatever.”)

DeSantis’ policy positions should have sounded conservative while remaining vague, giving a wide range of Republicans room to fantasize about the wonderful things he might do after he won.

Instead, he committed to very specific and not very popular policies, like a six-week abortion ban, taking books out of libraries, and seizing control of universities. It’s been all downhill from there.

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and let’s close with something out of this world

In 2024, NASA is planning to launch a probe to study Europa, a moon of Jupiter where scientists hope to find an ocean of salty water under a thick crust of ice. The presence of water, kept in a liquid state by friction-producing tides powered by Jupiter’s gravity, opens up the possibility of finding extra-terrestrial life for the first time.

The probe, which NASA is calling the Europa Clipper, would go into orbit around Jupiter in 2030.

Over several years, it will conduct dozens of flybys of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, gathering detailed measurements to determine if the moon has conditions suitable for life.

“OK,” I imagine you thinking, “but what’s that got to do with me?”

NASA is offering a variety of ways for you to engage with the mission. Inspired by the thought of Europan life, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón has written a poem for the mission “In Praise of Mystery: a Poem for Europa“. NASA’s “Message in a Bottle” campaign invites you to cosign Limón’s message.

The poem will be engraved on the Clipper, along with participants’ names that will be etched onto microchips mounted on the spacecraft. Together, the poem and participant’s names will travel 1.8 billion miles on Europa Clipper’s voyage to the Jupiter system.

Other suggested activities have a more educational flavor: NASA provides material that might nudge you to write your own space poetry. Or you can download a line-drawing of the Clipper and Europa suitable for coloring. The coloring can get even more interesting if you put textured surfaces under the paper.

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.