The Weekly Sift

No Sift next week. The next new articles appear on June 26.

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

– Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

This week’s featured post is “The Mar-a-Lago Documents Indictment“.

This week everybody was talking about the Trump indictment

That’s the subject of the featured post.

Jeff Sharlet takes a deep dive into the fascist codewords in Trump’s first post-federal-indictment speech. Among other things, Sharlet has the only coherent interpretation I’ve heard of “Jack Smith. Does anyone know what his name used to be?” Sharlet reads this as an implication that Smith is Jewish, and hence part of the conspiracy of “globalists” and “Marxists”, which are also fascist codewords for Jews.

Jack Smith, claims Trump, “caused” the IRS to “go after evangelicals, Christians, great Americans of faith.” Get the antisemitism? Jack Smith, who must have changed his name must be a Jewish enemy of Christianity.

Sharlet also has a principle I will have to keep in mind: You can’t fact-check a myth, but you can interpret it.

What he seems to mean by that is that it does no good to point out that what Trump (or some other fascist) says is untrue. His followers probably already know that it’s untrue, or they don’t care. The point of saying such things is to communicate something. Decoding the communication is more important than challenging the fact.

I believe he referenced the following Sartre quote somewhere, but I can’t find the link:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

and wildfire smoke

We usually associate wildfires with the West, and mostly with sparsely populated areas. But this week smoke from wildfires in Canada blanketed the densely populated Northeast, including New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.

Most of the time, climate change seems abstract, but scenes like the one below bring it home.

and the other Republicans running for president

There’s a type of self-fulfilling prophesy that always drives me nuts: Because everyone believes “You can’t do X”, nobody even tries to do X. And then the fact that X doesn’t happen is taken as evidence for “You can’t do X.”

One case in point is the belief among Republicans that “You can’t stand up to Trump.” So again and again we’ve seen some senator like Jeff Flake or Bob Corker or Ben Sasse criticize Trump in some fairly mild way, and then not seek reelection. At each impeachment trial, Mitch McConnell had it in his power to remove Trump from office and make him ineligible to run again, but he backed down both times. Trump was almost untouchable for a few weeks after January 6, but then Kevin McCarthy made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss his ring.

For six years now, Republicans who are secretly anti-Trump have been hoping that someone else — the Democrats, the courts, more courageous Republicans — would take Trump out, absorb the anger of his cult, and leave them to pick up the pieces. But it hasn’t happened.

Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney are the most visible Trump critics who did not voluntarily walk into the sunset. Cheney was expelled from the party, but Romney still seems to be doing fine. For the most part, though, the Republican Party has surrendered without putting up a fight. It’s hard to blame Republican voters for believing there’s no case against Trump, when none of their elected leaders are willing to make that case.

The first few candidates to challenge Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination continued the pattern. Listening to Nikki Haley or Tim Scott raises an obvious question: “Why are you running?” If the front-runner in the race was such a great president and you have no signature issue you would handle differently, why go to all the bother?

Mike Pence’s timid criticisms inspired this parody from Josh Marshall:

Pence: I should have been hanged. Trump couldn’t get it done. I will.

For a long time Ron DeSantis seemed to think he could handle Trump without confronting him, but that resulted in a collapse of the strong position he held in the polls after the midterm elections, where DeSantis did well and Trump-endorsed candidates did badly. But key Republican constituencies — White working-class men, Evangelical Christians — are looking for a fighter who will stand up to the cultural forces working against them. Every time DeSantis takes a punch from Trump without punching back, he convinces more voters that he’s not that guy.

Well finally somebody has entered the race to go after Trump: Chris Christie, who has a CNN town hall tonight.

The grift from this family is breathtaking. It’s breathtaking. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Kushner walk out of the White House, and months later get $2 billion from the Saudis. You think it’s because he’s some kind of investing genius? Or do you think it’s because he was sitting next to the president of the United States for four years doing favors for the Saudis? That’s your money. That’s your money he stole and gave it to his family. You know what that makes us? A banana republic.

He has almost no chance to be the nominee himself, but maybe he can wound Trump badly enough to give someone else a shot at the nomination.

and the voting-rights decision

Chief Justice Roberts has been chipping away at the Voting Right Act for years, so it was a surprise Thursday when Roberts wrote a majority opinion preserving what is left of the VRA. Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh joined the court’s three liberals (Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) in a 5-4 decision rejecting Alabama’s congressional map, which is drawn so that only one of the seven districts has a non-white majority.

Decades of precedent have interpreted the VRA as requiring the creation of majority-minority districts when a state’s voters are racially polarized, the current map results in a congressional delegation where minorities are under-represented, and the districts can be drawn without violating other principles of sound redistricting, like forming compact and contiguous districts that don’t split cities and counties unnecessarily. This has become known as the Gingles test, after the 1986 case where it was spelled out.

Alabama could easily have created a second majority-minority district, bringing its congressional delegation closer to racial parity. But it chose not to, inviting the Court to replace Gingles with a less rigorous test. Justices Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, and Coney Barrett agreed with Alabama.

So the current decision preserves the status quo. It doesn’t represent an advance in minority voting rights.

This decision concerns an injunction, not a final resolution of the case. But the injunction is based in part on the Court’s assessment that Alabama is likely to lose on the merits.

Personally, I remain skeptical of Roberts’ intentions. Like Ed Pilkington in The Guardian, I think Roberts plays a long game. Whenever he is about to push hard in one direction, he first makes a head fake in the opposite direction to give himself cover.

Any day now, I expect the Court to strike down affirmative action in college admissions. When that happens, the media will reference this voting-rights decision to frame Roberts as a “moderate”. Taken as a whole, though, the two decisions will represent a continued whittling down of minority rights, and Roberts can continue destroying the VRA in some later decision.

and the Right shutting down the House

The resolution of the debt-ceiling crisis showed that the far-right House “Freedom” Caucus has less power than they like to think. Naturally, they have to do something to strike back.

Originally, everyone expected they would exercise the concession they got when Kevin McCarthy needed their votes to become speaker: Any single member can introduce a resolution the “vacate the chair” and reopen the speaker election.

Apparently that didn’t suit their purposes, though, so they have struck back at the House as a whole rather than just McCarthy. They have been withholding their support on the procedural motions that bills need to progress towards passage, so the House is essentially shut down.

So far, this is just affecting Republican priorities, like a bill to stop the completely imaginary threat that Biden might ban gas stoves. But the federal fiscal year ends on September 30, so if new appropriation bills aren’t passed by then, the government will have to shut down.

and golf

Corporate PR efforts have expanded our language in so many ways. Many of the new terms spin off of whitewashing, a metaphor for putting a deceptively bright sheen on something rotten. For example, the NRDC has defined greenwashing like this:

Greenwashing is the act of making false or misleading statements about the environmental benefits of a product or practice. It can be a way for companies to continue or expand their polluting as well as related harmful behaviors, all while gaming the system or profiting off well-intentioned, sustainably minded consumers.

This year, Saudi Arabia’s sponsorship of a new golf league, LIV, popularized a new -washing term: sportswashing, which Greenpeace defines:

Sportswashing is the act of sponsoring a sports team or event in order to distract from bad practices elsewhere. This tactic is often used by companies and governments with poor environmental or human rights records, exploiting people’s love of sport to ‘wash’ their image clean.

Saudi Arabia’s image desperately needs washing. They’re a repressive feudal monarchy with a wasteful and corrupt royal family. They export a dangerous strain of Islam. 15 of the 19 9-11 hijackers were Saudi, as was Osama bin Laden. They sponsor war crimes in Yemen. Their crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, ordered the killing and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was residing in Virginia and working for The Washington Post at the time of his death. Currently, they are working with Russia to keep oil prices high, which helps Putin finance his war in Ukraine.

But on the plus side, they have oil and a huge amount of money: Their sovereign wealth fund is sitting on more than $600 billion. So the fund created the LIV golf tour and started writing nine-figure checks to secure the participation of big-name golfers.

This presented a moral challenge to golfers, and the words “blood money” came up fairly often. The previously dominant PGA tour capitalized on that. PGA Commissioner Jay Monahan challenged golfers by invoking the families of 9-11 victims:

I would ask any player who has left or any player who would consider leaving: “Have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?”

Well, this week Monahan announced a merger with LIV. Let the apologies begin.

and you also might be interested in …

Anti-abortion Republicans have been pushing 12-week bans as a “compromise”, citing similar bans in Europe. The Atlantic’s Julie Suk comments: Not only do Republicans offer far fewer and stricter exceptions than European countries do, but

Republicans are interested in only one part of the European approach to protecting life—the abortion restrictions. They seem to forget that every European country that protects unborn life by restricting abortion after the first trimester protects born life too, through prenatal health care, paid maternity leave, and a public infrastructure for child care and preschool. If Republicans are sincere in invoking Europe as a model, Democrats and other proponents of abortion access should seize this chance to find common ground on policies that would substantially improve the lives of mothers and children in this country.

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After months of speculation, the Ukrainian counter-offensive has started. Ukraine reports some advances, but so far it’s hard to tell from the outside whether the offensive is going well or not.

Meanwhile, Russian rebels based in Ukraine have raided and shelled a sliver of Russia.

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Pat Robertson died at the age of 93. I mark his passing by remembering two moments in his career:

Robertson called feminism a “socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians”. … [O]n his TV show The 700 Club, he agreed emphatically with his fellow evangelist Jerry Falwell’s theory that the 9/11 attacks were caused by “pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the American Civil Liberties Union, and [the progressive advocacy group] People for the American Way”.

I am a Universalist, so I don’t believe in a vengeful God. If there is an afterlife, I picture it as a place of mercy and compassion rather than retribution.

Sometimes that belief is unsatisfying.

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A novel lawsuit is going to trial today: 16 young residents of Montana are invoking a clause in the Montana constitution committing the state to “maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations”. The suit claims that the state’s energy policy, which encourages fossil-fuel production, is unconstitutional.

I’ll be shocked if any Montana laws are thrown out, but the suit will raise local awareness of climate change and frame it in generational terms. Similar cases are pending in Hawaii, Florida, Utah, and Virginia.

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I can’t think of an easy way to check this claim, which is almost too good to check anyway: The LA Times article about newsroom layoffs at the LA Times is illustrated with a photo taken by one of the photographers they laid off.

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DeSantis pledges to change the name of Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg, because deciding not to honor the slavery-defending generals of the Confederacy is “political correctness run amok”.

Mike Pence also promises to restore the name of Fort Bragg. What’s up with that? Is the idea that the US Army should honor people who take up arms against the United States in defense of White supremacy?

and let’s close with a public service

As the summer vacation season kicks off, countless articles will tell you where you should go and where to stop along the way. But Explored Planet tells you something just as important: where not to go. What famous places are either over-priced, over-crowded, full of chain franchises you could find at home, or not worth the effort it takes to get there?

These past few years have given me a new appreciation for the fragility of our freedoms.

– Ron DeSantis

Of course I am quoting the statement above ironically. What DeSantis has been doing in Florida these past few years is what’s been giving me a new appreciation for the fragility of our freedoms.

This week’s featured post is “Neglected policy issues I: Life expectancy“.

This week everybody was talking about the debt ceiling

Saturday, President Biden and Speaker McCarthy announced an agreement to raise the debt ceiling, which Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen expects to be breached next Monday.

I haven’t read the bill’s 99-page text, so I’m relying on summaries of what the deal entails. In general, I agree with Josh Marshall:

Something like this set of concessions was more or less baked in the moment Republicans won control of the House.

In other words, Biden seems to have negotiated the kind of deal you would ordinarily expect between a president and speaker from different parties. It doesn’t look like McCarthy exacted any special ransom for threatening global economic catastrophe.

Assuming this agreement can be turned into law without further concessions, this has to be counted as a win for Biden.

BTW, this should be a moment of cognitive dissonance for Fox News watchers who hoped for more out of this deal. “You mean the guy with dementia bamboozled our guy?”

and the prospect of another Trump indictment

Numerous sources say that Special Counsel Jack Smith has wrapped up his investigation of the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, and that an indictment is coming soon, i.e. sometime in June. A major reason to think so is that the grand jury hasn’t met since May 5, suggesting that Smith has all the testimony he needs and is writing an indictment.

If that’s true, it suggests that the Mar-a-Lago indictment will be separate from the January 6 indictment, if such an indictment is coming at all.

A major scoop from the WaPo indicates that the case for obstruction is very strong. Their report has Trump’s people moving boxes of documents the day before his lawyers (falsely) told a DoJ prosecutor and the FBI that the 35 documents they were turning over (in response to a subpoena) constituted the entire stash. It looks like Trump kept secrets from his lawyers so that they could make false statements to the government without intentionally lying.

Additionally, WaPo says Trump kept classified documents in his office and sometimes showed them to visitors.

The most explosive and most speculative line of investigation concerns Trump’s business relationships with foreign countries, including a lucrative contract from the new Saudi golf tour (LIV) to play tournaments at Trump’s courses (including one this weekend). Did the Saudis pay him to get, say, information on Iran’s missile programs? That would be espionage.

But as I keep saying, it’s a mistake to invest too much energy in speculation. If an indictment really is coming soon, we’ll be able to read it and see what’s in it for ourselves.

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The conventional wisdom says that an indictment won’t matter politically, because nothing matters to Trump’s supporters. Reporters are constantly talking to various Trump voters, who keep telling them that another indictment or two won’t change their mind about him.

But I wonder if that’s true. Right now, a Mar-a-Lago or Georgia or January 6 indictment is just an idea. But when those indictments drop, they will tell stories. And stories are more powerful than mere ideas. Right now, his cultists can say, “I don’t care if Trump had some classified documents. Biden and Pence had them too. So what?” But it would be much more difficult to say, “I don’t care if Trump showed classified documents to the Saudis in exchange for golf money” (if that’s what the indictment says).

If the cult does start to turn, it won’t happen via former supporters speaking out against him. Instead, they will just go silent. People you would expect to defend him will instead change the subject.

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Another indication an indictment might be coming is that Trump’s lawyers sent a letter to Attorney General Garland requesting a meeting. I don’t put much stock in this sign, because the letter clearly wasn’t serious. It was written for public distribution and not to persuade Garland to do anything.

No president of the United States has ever, in the history of our country, been baselessly investigated in such outrageous and unlawful fashion.

That’s political rhetoric more likely to anger Garland than to make him sympathize. What’s the point of meeting with Trump’s lawyers to hear more nonsense like that?

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The Oath Keepers convicted in November of seditious conspiracy related to January 6 were sentenced this week. Leader Stewart Rhodes got 18 years. Other conspirators got lesser sentences that were still substantial.

Again, the significance of the three seditious conspiracy trials (all resulting in convictions) is that juries have been convinced that January 6 was not just a mob that got out of control. Somebody intended the mob to do what it did. One of those somebodies was Stewart Rhodes, but it’s very unlikely he was at the top of the chain.

and Ron DeSantis’ glitchy campaign launch

After a technical delay of around 20 minutes, Ron DeSantis officially announced his candidacy during a live Twitter interview with Elon Musk. DeSantis supporters made a big deal about the 300K viewers, which nearly crashed Twitter’s diminished infrastructure. But 3 million watched Trump’s CNN town hall a few weeks ago, and 400K watched AOC play a video game over Twitch in 2020.

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DeSantis said a lot of false and/or misleading stuff. For example, when challenged on Florida schools removing books from their classrooms and libraries because of his Don’t Say Gay and STOP Woke Acts, he deflected onto the left, saying that liberals were banning To Kill a Mockingbird. Here, DeSantis is doing a much worse version of what he accuses the media of doing: calling something a ban that is really a much less serious restriction.

I can’t say whether this is a complete view of the topic, but if you google “ban on To Kill a Mockingbird” and look for liberal examples, what comes up is a Washington school district deciding to stop requiring the book for ninth graders, which makes perfect sense. If you assume a required-reading list has a limited number of spaces for novels about the Jim Crow era, it makes sense to shift to one by a Black author with a Black central character. But TKaMB remains available in school libraries and can be assigned by teachers who make that choice.

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Just a coincidence, I’m sure:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) signed a bill regarding spaceflight on Thursday just one day after he announced his presidential run in a glitch-filled interview with Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces. … Florida is a known launching point for [Musk-owned] SpaceX aircrafts, and the new law could potentially shield Musk and other space flight companies from being sued for accidents that injure or kill crew members. …

Last month, SpaceX’s privately owned spaceport in South Texas launched the most powerful rocket ever built before the spacecraft exploded over the Gulf of Mexico. The explosion reportedly hurled chunks of concrete and metal thousands of feet away into sensitive habitat, and sparked a 3.5-acre fire on state park lands near the launch site.

Or maybe, coupled with his war against Disney, it tells us about DeSantis’ theory of government: Use government power to reward your friends and punish your enemies. If Musk turns against DeSantis, this favor from the State of Florida could be revoked, the way DeSantis has tried to revoke Disney’s special taxing district.

Along the same lines: NBC reports that Florida state employees are soliciting DeSantis campaign contributions from lobbyists.

NBC News spoke with 10 Republican lobbyists in Florida, all of whom said they couldn’t remember being solicited for donations so overtly by administration officials — especially at a time when the governor still has to act on the state budget.

That process that involves DeSantis using his line-item veto pen to slash funding for projects that the same lobbyists whom they are asking for political cash have a professional stake in. Most of the lobbyists said they felt pressure to give to the governor’s campaign.

“What the f— am I supposed to do?” one lobbyist said. “I have a lot of business in front of the DeSantis administration.”

and Ken Paxton’s impeachment

Apparently there are limits, even for MAGA politicians. Saturday the Texas House impeached Attorney General Ken Paxton “on articles including bribery and abuse of public trust”. Trump and Ted Cruz support him, but the vote was 121-23.

Paxton will be suspended from office while the Texas Senate hears his case.

and you also might be interested in …

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won a run-off election yesterday, netting himself a third term in office. In the run-up to the election, there was some hope that an Erdogan defeat might mark a global turning away from autocratic rulers. But it was not to be.

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President Biden announced a national strategy for combating antisemitism. Rep. Lauren Boebert complained that Biden will “go after conservatives”.

Conservatives get closer and closer to just admitting that they’re bad guys. A few weeks ago, Senator Tommy Tuberville took offense at Biden wanting to get White nationalists out of the military. “They call them [White nationalists]. I call them Americans.” In a later interview he dug in deeper. “I look at a white nationalist as a Trump Republican. That’s what we’re called all the time. A MAGA Person.”

If he thinks that characterization is unjust, i.e., if sees any difference between a Trump Republican and an actual White nationalist, Tuberville didn’t explain what it was.

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Of course, sometimes liberals also own the negative labels people throw at them. The Satanic Temple is running the Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic out of New Mexico, providing telehealth abortion services nationwide, particularly to states where abortion is illegal. As the Temple says:

The Satanic Temple, on behalf of its members, objects to government interference with abortion access and contests that laws that impede our faith in bodily autonomy and our ability to perform our Religious Abortion Ritual violate the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

TST Health’s first telehealth clinic will provide medication for safe abortions through the mail for members and for those who wish to perform TST’s Abortion Ritual. The goal of this first clinic is to allow our members to have access to safe and legal abortions, no matter where they live or what their financial situation may be.

One of the manifest hypocrisies of conservative legal activism is pushing a notion of “religious freedom” that really only applies to Christians, and in practice grants them special rights. TST is the most out-there group pushing for equality of religious freedom: If Christians have all these rights, explain to us why Satanists don’t.

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Target has removed some Pride-month merchandise from its stores and moved other items to less prominent locations in response to objections and threats from conservatives

As Target explained in a statement, some customers had knocked down Pride displays at stores while others outraged by Pride-themed merchandise angrily approached workers as well as posted threatening videos on social media. Target has been celebrating Pride month for a decade, but as the company noted, “Since introducing this year’s collection, we’ve experienced threats impacting our team members’ sense of safety and wellbeing while at work.”

Targets in several states subsequently received bomb threats appearing to come from Pride supporters angry about the pullback, but these appear to be hoaxes that originated overseas.

What’s not a hoax is the violence-themed rhetoric right-wing pundits have been directing at Target. 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said that Target had “put a target on its back”. Charlie Kirk said “the only thing they understand is force. Pain is a teacher”. No doubt if they were challenged, each would deny promoting literal violence, but they have to know that some portion of their audience will take it that way.

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If you’re wondering what’s supposed to be so terrible about Target’s pride display, the Heritage Foundation produced this video tour of Target’s Pride section to outrage you. Strangely, though, I’m not outraged — at least not at Target.

Heritage’s claim is that Target is pushing LGBTQ messages at young consumers, who presumably go in as blank slates without any opinions or intentions or identities of their own. It’s a weird point of view for a group that ordinarily is so pro-capitalist. Obviously, Target puts stuff out there because the corporation expects to sell it, and not because Target has some sinister agenda about “grooming” children to be gay or trans.

If you think the products have some negative effect on society — I don’t in this case — well, that’s capitalism, isn’t it? Exxon sells fossil fuels and Colt sells AR-15s. Those products have negative effects on society, but I suspect the corporations sell them to make money rather than because of some pact with Satan.

Case in point: a teen-sized sweatshirt that says “Not a Phase”. The narrator interprets this as Target “grooming” kids into believing they won’t grow out of their “gender confusion”. This woman clearly has no memory of being a teen-ager and (whatever you happened to be into) being fed up with condescending adults. The shirt expresses a timeless teen attitude, and I see why Target expects to sell a lot of them.

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Back when Parkland-massacre-survivor David Hogg was starting his gun-control activism, Fox News host Laura Ingraham mocked him for being rejected by four colleges, because she’s classy that way. This week he graduated from Harvard.

Hey @IngrahamAngle you can send my graduation present to: http://Marchforourlives.com/donate

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The Supreme Court took power away from the EPA this week by reading the Clean Water Act narrowly. The immediate result is that some wetlands will lose protection, but the precedent may have larger implications. The case deserves more attention than I’ve been able to give it.

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Tina Turner died Wednesday at the age of 83.

and let’s close with something natural

The Nature Conservancy has an annual photo contest. This is one of the winners in the “Plants and Fungi” category. These are Dragon Blood Trees. The story behind the tree’s name isn’t all I was hoping for: apparently it has red sap.

We don’t have enough time to fact-check every lie he told.

– Jake Tapper, hosting the wrap-up of Trump’s CNN town hall

This week’s featured posts are “Why the Carroll verdict might matter” and “Normalizing Trump normalizes political violence“.

This week everybody was talking about the border

Title 42 was always a pretext. At a time when Trump was denying the seriousness of the Covid epidemic, his administration invoked a public-health law from 1944 as an excuse to stop migrants from legally seeking asylum in the United States.

At the same time, our system for processing asylum seekers is swamped, and Congress has refused to fix it. So the Biden administration, believing it had no better option, continued the policy until Thursday night, when the government’s declaration of a Covid emergency officially lapsed.

Ending the policy resulted in a surge of people crossing the border from Mexico, though apparently not quite as large a surge as had been expected. Resources to deal with migrants have been strained, particularly in border communities like El Paso, but also in Northern cities like New York or Chicago, where migrants often end up while they wait for their asylum cases to be adjudicated.

and George Santos

George Santos leaped into the headlines after being elected to Congress in 2022, because his entire biography was almost comically false. Now he’s been indicted for a variety of crimes. One charge is that he created a false campaign PAC and got people to donate to it, then used the money for personal purposes. Another is that he falsely claimed unemployment payments while making a six-figure salary.

The indictment had the same comical quality as most Santos news. Reading it, you have to wonder why he thought he could get away with any of this.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy is refusing to ask Santos to resign from Congress, because he represents a swing district in New York that could easily go for a Democrat in a special election.

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If you’re not following North Carolina Rep. Jeff Jackson, you should be. He blogs and posts a video on Twitter every week, describing what’s going on in Congress in a very down-to-Earth way. Here’s what he says about the Santos situation:

Normally, if one of your co-workers gets arrested for a bunch of felonies related to their job, they don’t get to just come back to the office the next day. But he did, and it was really weird.

and the Carroll verdict

A jury in New York federal court found Donald Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. It awarded his accuser E. Jean Carroll, $5 million in damages. I discuss the implications of that verdict in one of the featured posts.

Trump’s attempt to spin the verdict focused on two things: The jury did not rule that Carroll had proved Trump raped her, and “you can’t get a fair trial” in New York City.

As he did with Russian collusion in the Mueller report, Trump is claiming vindication when in reality there just wasn’t enough evidence to condemn him. The jury did not say Trump hadn’t raped Carroll, just that she hadn’t proved it. The sexual assault was enough to invoke the damage claim, so I imagine there was not a big effort to reach unanimity on the rape claim.

The verdict makes a certain amount of sense when you consider the evidence presented. On the Access Hollywood tape, Trump confessed to a pattern of sexual assault — grabbing women “by the pussy” — but didn’t confess to rape. And the two witnesses who described being attacked by Trump told about attacks that were interrupted. So the rape claim was a purer he-said/she-said case, while sexual assault had more support.

Still, as I talk about in the featured post, being guilty of sexual assault is nothing to brag about.

Trump is appealing to federal appellate court. (The case was already in the federal court system, because the two parties were from different states.) But an appeal is not an automatic do-over. He’ll have to convince the appellate court that the original judge’s rulings were illegal in some way.

and CNN’s Trump town hall

The day after being found liable for sexual assault and defamation, Trump appeared on CNN with an audience of New Hampshire voters who had been pre-selected to be favorable to him. I discuss that in one of the featured posts.

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For the most part, Republicans haven’t been willing to go after Trump, despite all the material lying around in plain sight. But Liz Cheney narrates this anti-Trump ad.

and you also might be interested in …

The Ukrainian spring offensive may be starting, as Ukrainian forces gain territory around Bakhmut. But so far it’s slow going.

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The House Oversight Committee released a 65-page memo about its investigations of the Biden family, which so far have been a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

The House GOP accused Joe Biden and his family on Wednesday of engaging in business with foreign entities—but were unable to provide any actual evidence linking the president to any wrongdoing.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer released a 65-page memo detailing a sprawling investigation into Biden and some of his relatives, particularly his son Hunter Biden. Nowhere in the massive document was there a specific allegation of a crime committed by Biden or any of his relatives. During a press conference explaining the investigation, Comer was asked if he had evidence directly linking Biden to corruption. The Kentucky Republican hemmed and hawed but ultimately admitted he didn’t.

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[As a commenter pointed out below, I have confused two cases: Daniel Penny is the guy who killed Jordan Neely in New York. Daniel Perry is the guy in Texas who killed a protester during a Black Lives Matter protest. Both cases are discussed in Jamelle Bouie’s NYT column Tuesday.]

Conservatives are defending Daniel Penny (the guy who killed homeless man Jordan Neely on the New York subway) as a “Good Samaritan”. (Examples: Ron DeSantis, National Police Association.)

It’s one more example of making the Bible say whatever you want. Anyone who knows and respects the Bible ought to respond similarly to David Roberts:

No way to exaggerate how fucked up and dystopian it is that the reactionaries are transmuting the parable of the Good Samaritan from “he helps the person having problems” to “he kills the person having problems but who’s making everyone else uncomfortable.”

Penny has been charged with manslaughter. Here’s the background on the story.

At this point there’s no way to quantify what race might have had to do with this incident and people’s reactions to it. (Neely was Black, Penny is White.) But if anybody is wondering what “Black Lives Matter” is supposed to mean, this is it: OK, Neely was creating an incident on the subway, though he had not actually attacked anybody. There’s an argument to be made for someone stepping in to restrain Neely until some authority takes charge of the situation. But restraining Neely with a chokehold until he dies is only a “solution” if Neely’s life doesn’t matter.

Maybe Neely being Black had nothing to do with why his life didn’t matter. Maybe it was because his behavior was outside normal subway behavior, or some other reason. But if Neely’s life did matter to Perry, he’d have handled the situation differently.

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Turkey had an election yesterday. President Erdogan, who has been in power since 2003, has been accused of instituting one-man rule. But it looks like Turkey is not so far gone towards autocracy that he can’t be voted out.

The upshot seems to be that no one got a majority of the vote, so Erdogan will face a runoff later this month.

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A sidebar to the Turkish election is Twitter giving in to the Erdogan government’s demands to censor opposition tweets.

In response to legal process and to ensure Twitter remains available to the people of Turkey, we have taken action to restrict access to some content in Turkey today.

Elon Musk defended the decision by making a lesser-evil argument:

The choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales answered that question:

What Wikipedia did: we stood strong for our principles and fought to the Supreme Court of Turkey and won. This is what it means to treat freedom of expression as a principle rather than a slogan.

And Matt Binder points out:

Twitter used to routinely challenge Turkey’s takedown requests. Erdogan actually had Twitter banned in Turkey in 2014 for refusing to comply. (the courts later ended the ban.) but that was on the “censorship” version of Twitter, not this new “free speech” one

I’ll add this: An authoritarian government can always use its power to manipulate lesser-evil thinking. No matter what it wants you to do, it can make something worse happen if you refuse.

And maybe it’s just a coincidence that another Musk company, SpaceX, has a business relationship with Erdogan’s government.

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Are you conservative? Do you think America has gotten too “woke” to be livable? Good news: Russia wants you!

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In general, Grist is a good source for environmental news. Here’s an interesting article about green steel, i.e., steel produced without fossil fuels.

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Relating to the normalization issues discussed above: Joe Biden should not debate unless and until a more legitimate challenger emerges. Currently, only RFK Jr. and Marianne Williamson have announced their candidacy. RFK Jr., in particular, is someone who should not be normalized. He is an endless font of anti-vax misinformation, from his vaccines-cause-autism days to more recent lies about Covid vaccines. He shamelessly repeats stuff that has been authoritatively debunked, and keeps misquoting scientists after they’ve asked him to stop. Watch SkepChick’s RFK Jr. takedown.

In general, sitting presidents running for re-election don’t participate in debates. There’s an argument for Biden breaking that tradition in order to challenge the perception that age has addled him. And I could see that if it meant sharing a stage with candidates of stature, like say, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, California Governor Gavin Newsom, or maybe Elizabeth Warren. But he shouldn’t give a platform to RFK Jr at all, and I don’t see what he gains by debating Williamson.

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From the MAGA translation of the New Testament:

and let’s close with something adorable

An animal rescue shelter found Nibi when she was a week old. She’s never seen another beaver, but she seems to know how to build dams.

In America, the government cannot punish you for speaking your mind.

– Disney v DeSantis

This week’s featured post is “Laboratories of Autocracy“.

This week everybody was talking about the Supreme Court’s ethics problem

If you don’t recognize it, the cartoon refers to the taunting French soldier in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It’s a fairly apt summary of John Roberts’ response to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s request for Roberts to come testify about the need (or absence of need) for the Court to have an enforceable ethics policy, as every other institution of government does.

Roberts observes that chief justices have seldom testified before committees (though it has happened), and that these appearances are about “mundane” matters. Presumably, he means that showing up to answer criticism would create “separation of powers concerns”. Roberts attached a “Statement on Ethics Principles and Practices” which says nothing about how justices might be held to these standards.

Vox’ Ian Milhiser characterized the response as “tone-deaf”. In Roberts’ vision, “separation of powers” makes the Court the unique institution of government to which checks and balances do not apply.

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Meanwhile, questions continue to mount up. In addition to the original Clarence Thomas bribery concerns, issues related to Neal Gorsuch and Roberts himself have surfaced. In addition, we discovered more details about the cover-up that passed for an investigation of Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings.

Meanwhile, in a Wall Street Journal interview, Samuel Alito doubled down on tone-deafness.

We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us.

Like Roberts, he worries about the legitimacy of the Court, but sees it as everybody’s problem but his own. The onus is not on the Court to be more transparent and circumspect; it’s on the rest of us to stop criticizing them. David Roberts (no relation to John) comments:

Alito is really the conservative’s conservative: in a position of near-absolute power, free from any accountability, yet possessed by an endless sense of grievance. A whole interview about how awful it is that people criticize him!

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Through all the revelations of Clarence Thomas’ apparent corruption — the millions of dollars worth of free vacations, the unreported real estate transactions, Clarence’s mom getting her home fixed up and living rent-free, and who knows what else we don’t know about yet — the most convincing defense of his innocence has gone something like this: Nobody had to bribe Clarence Thomas to be conservative; he was always conservative.

Here’s my theory on that: Harlan Crow is Thomas’ minder.

To understand what that means, you have to think back to what conservatives were worried about in the 1990s. When the first President Bush appointed Thomas to the Court in 1991, Republicans had won 7 of the last 10 presidential elections, going back to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. They also had been lucky with the timing of Supreme Court vacancies, so when Thomas replaced Thurgood Marshall, the Court had only one justice appointed by a Democrat: JFK appointee Byron White.

The rest of the Court looked like this: The Chief Justice, William Rehnquist, had been nominated by Richard Nixon and elevated to Chief Justice by Ronald Reagan. Reagan had also appointed Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy. President Ford had appointed John Paul Stevens, and Nixon appointed Harry Blackmun. Bush appointed both Thomas and David Souter.

With an 8-1 Republican majority, conservatives felt entitled to a very conservative court. And yet, judges appointed by Republicans had a (to them) disconcerting way of moving left after they were seated. So the precedents of the liberal Warren Court of the 1960s continued to stand, and in 1992 the Court (mostly) reaffirmed Roe v Wade in Casey. Bush’s previous pick, Souter, became a particular irritation for the Right, and by Bush v Gore in 2000, everyone was lumping him with the liberals.

So when Thomas took his seat in 1991, the question among conservatives wasn’t just “Is he really a conservative?”, but “How can we keep him from doing a Souter on us?”

That’s where I think Harlan Crow comes in. The point of introducing Thomas and his wife to the joys of billionaire society wasn’t to buy his vote on any particular case. It was to give him something to lose if he should start seeing the charms of liberal philosophy.

So Thomas may well believe that his relationship with Crow is a genuine friendship with no unsavory aspect. After all, what’s not to like about a guy who gives you a chance to live in a lavish world you otherwise could never approach? Thomas and Crow may not talk politics any more than friends typically do, and they probably mostly agree. Quite likely, Thomas has never changed a vote because Crow pressured him. The thought that all this luxury could go poof if he steps off the conservative path may not even be a conscious consideration.

But that’s how corruption often works. As Upton Sinclair once put it, “It is hard to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” A mega-church pastor may genuinely believe in God, but he also recognizes that any atheistic thought crossing his mind threatens his entire career. If all your friends think X, it’s hard for not-X to get a fair hearing in your mind.

So Clarence Thomas probably has no awareness of being bribed. He just lives an enviable lifestyle that could go away if he ever changes his mind.

and Tucker Carlson

Last week, Tucker Carlson’s departure from Fox News was being announced just as I was ready to post. It wasn’t even clear yet whose decision it was; the announcement just described a parting of the ways.

By now it’s clear that Tucker was fired, though it’s still not clear why. Lots of explanations present themselves — something to do with the Dominion lawsuit or its settlement, something to do with Abby Grossberg’s lawsuit, friction with the Murdochs … — but none of the theories have accounted for the timing: Tucker signed off on Friday expecting to be back on Monday, and then he wasn’t.

One thing we know for sure is that he wasn’t cancelled for saying racist or sexist stuff. That’s been going on for years.

And that brings up the other big point of debate: whether his firing is something to celebrate. Clearly, Tucker was a force for evil in the world. But maybe that’s just the role he has been playing, and whoever takes his place will be just as bad. Or maybe he himself will be just as malignant somewhere else.

Maybe. But personally, I’m celebrating. Yes, all Fox hosts are right-wing propagandists. (That’s the clearest lesson the Dominion lawsuit established.) And no, there is no reason to think that the Murdochs are interested in seeing the network turn over a new leaf. So there’s every reason to believe that the new 8 p.m. host will be another Hannity or Ingraham.

But Tucker was worse than that. He didn’t just amplify whatever Republican talking points were making the rounds. He had become a conduit for bringing rhetoric from the White supremacist fringe into the conservative mainstream. Sure, the next 8 p.m. host will claim that tax cuts pay for themselves and Joe Biden has dementia. But s/he may not be a gateway for young men to find the nazis.

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Speaking of Fox’s propaganda, Chris Hayes presents the other half of a story Fox has been hyping: The network again and again played video of a former San Francisco official being beaten by a homeless man, as if this were the kind of random violence that is rife in cities run by Democrats. (That’s a constant Fox theme: Blue-state cities are “hellholes”, a conclusion crime statistics don’t bear out. In reality, red states like Tennessee and Missouri have violent crime rates far higher than California or New York.)

But it turns out that somebody who looks a lot like the former official has been trying to chase homeless people out of the neighborhood by attacking them with bear spray. In other words, this isn’t a random-urban-violence story, it’s a fuck-around-and-find-out story. If you attack homeless people often enough, eventually one will fight back.

and the debt ceiling

The big question this week was whether Speaker McCarthy could pass his ransom demand for raising the debt ceiling. It was a close call, but he did.

What McCarthy hasn’t passed, and almost certainly can’t pass, is a Republican budget. The bill he passed would raise the debt ceiling until March while making substantial spending cuts. But the cuts are to overall spending levels, and what the government does less of is not specified.

Biden’s reelection bid

Tuesday, President Biden officially announced what he’s been hinting at for months: He’s running for reelection in 2024.

My reaction is, I suspect, fairly typical among Democrats: Biden is not an inspirational figure in the mold of JFK or Barack Obama, but he’s been a very good president. Trump (after trying everything he could think of to break democracy and hang onto power) handed him a country in pretty bad shape: Covid was killing more than 3,000 Americans every week; vaccines existed but the government had no plan for distributing them; unemployment was at 6.3%; Trump’s final budget showed a $4.8 trillion deficit; the NATO alliance was in tatters; and respect for America had plunged around the world.

Biden took office with little margin for error. Democrats in the House held a slim 222-213 margin in the House, and Vice President Harris was the tie-breaking vote in a 50-50 Senate that required 60 votes to break a filibuster.

And yet, he accomplished a great deal, including things that Trump had long promised but never delivered, like an infrastructure bill to rebuild America. The Inflation Reduction Act began addressing climate change, really for the first time ever. (President Obama had taken executive actions, but had not gotten climate-change legislation passed. President Trump was more interested in undoing climate action.)

Without Biden, it’s doubtful NATO would have given Ukraine enough aid to stave off a Russian takeover. And while the US exit from Afghanistan was messy — perhaps needlessly so — nonetheless we are out of Afghanistan. That’s another thing Trump kept promising but never delivered.

And finally, it’s wonderful to have a president who actually believes in the Constitution. If, God forbid, Biden should happen to lose the 2024 election, I have no doubt that he will leave office peacefully. There will be no scheme to create fraudulent electors, or riots to intimidate Congress into keeping him in power.

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Nikki Haley (who needs to say wild things to draw attention to her own presidential candidacy) immediately took the low road, announcing that Biden’s survival to the end of a second term “is not something I find likely”. (Biden’s Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates responded with, “Honestly, I forgot she was running”)

Just as a matter of statistics, Haley is wrong: An 80-year-old White American male has an average life expectancy of seven years. Biden appears to be fit and has the best medical care, so if anything, his odds should be better than average.

But Haley’s macabre comment points to something Republicans do need to think about: Biden’s age could be an issue if they nominate a younger candidate like Haley or DeSantis, but it will fall flat for Trump, who is 76, fat, eats a terrible diet, and resists exercise or medical advice.

Would Republicans really bet on Trump to outlive Biden? I wouldn’t. And I wouldn’t make ridiculous claims about his superior mental competence either, as congressman and former White House doctor Ronny Jackson (a.k.a. “Candyman“) does:

Donald Trump can stand up unprompted without any teleprompter or anything else and he can talk for two hours

I think we all know old people who can drone on endlessly about their imaginary grievances. It’s not usually a sign of acuity.

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Thursday was Take Your Child to Work Day at the White House.

and the Trump rape trial

Up until now, I’ve mostly been discounting E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit against Trump. After all, it’s a civil case, so (unlike the January 6 or Mar-a-Lago documents or Georgia election interference investigations or the Stormy Daniels indictments) it can’t send him to jail. It probably won’t even result in a huge monetary settlement, like the $250 million New York is seeking in its fraud lawsuit.

But as the trial got underway this week, I finally realized what this case does: It brings Trump’s wrongdoing down to a human scale. The allegation here is not some complicated story about a larger-than-life historical figure trying overthrow our constitutional democracy. Instead, it’s very simple: Trump raped E. Jean Carroll, and when she told her story he said she was a liar who was too ugly to rape.

Fundamentally, this is the story of a man with the fame and money and power to do whatever he wants. As he bragged on the Access Hollywood tape:

When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.

Carroll’s lawsuit is raising the question: Is that true? Is that the kind of world we live in or want to live in? Can a man like Donald Trump really do anything and walk away unscathed?

This week, Carroll testified, and held up well under a badgering cross-examination by Trump’s lawyer. Trump himself is not going to testify or even attend. This is all beneath him, though he continues to attack Carroll on the social media platform he owns.

The Carroll trial is putting a face on a class of people we all know exist: Trump’s victims. They are real people, and at least one of them is willing to stand up to him.

but we need to keep our eyes on Republican state legislatures

That’s the subject of the featured post.

and you also might be interested in …

A family in Cleveland, Texas asked their neighbor to stop shooting his gun, so he killed them. He’s still at large

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More life in Texas:

A Texas man on a date who paid $40 to park, only to learn inside a Houston burger joint that he was scammed, allegedly went back and fatally shot the man posing as an attendant and then returned for dinner, according to court records.

His date turned him in to police.

and let’s close with something self-referential

The Toronto Recursive History Project commemorates its own history of commemorating its own history.

Those who seek to silence us will not have the final say.

– Justin Pearson

This week’s featured post is “Why fascism? Why now?“.

This week everybody was talking about a security leak

Thursday, the FBI arrested a 21-year-old man suspected to be the source of the recent leak of hundreds of classified documents, whose publication has damaged the US relationship with its allies and possibly exposed intelligence sources to America’s enemies. He worked as a “cyber transport systems specialist” for the Massachusetts Air National Guard, which appears to have given him access to highly classified systems.

The FBI’s explanation for the leak is frightening in its ordinariness: Jack Teixeira wanted to impress his friends. He appears not to have been motivated by money, blackmail, loyalty to another country, hatred of America, or any of the other motives typically found in spy movies. I am reminded of two characters in a minor John Le Carre novel struggling to explain why someone had defected. “I knew a man once who sold his birthright because he couldn’t get a seat on the Underground.”

I was investigated for a top-secret clearance (which I got) back in the 1980s, though I probably never saw more than half a dozen classified documents. The questions the investigators asked me and my references focused on things like whether my lifestyle matched my income, did I have blackmail-worthy secrets, had I expressed bizarre political beliefs, did I have friends or relatives in hostile countries, and so on. None of it would have picked up a motive like wanting to show off for an online discussion group. I don’t know how investigators could look for that kind of risk. That’s what’s most scary about this case.

The depth and variety of the leaked documents raises another question: Why did anybody in the Massachusetts Air National Guard need to know all this stuff? Why did our systems allow access to it?

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The leak may have helped Russia, and it also sort of looks like Donald Trump’s theft (and possible misuse) of classified documents. So of course Marjorie Taylor Greene defends the leaker.

and abortion drugs

The abortion-pill injunction is still working its way through the system. The initial injunction banning mifepristone was supposed to take effect Friday. The appeals court rolled back the worst of it, but still left a terrible ruling. (That’s how bad the original was.) The Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court, which froze everything until Wednesday. Stay tuned.

The Supreme Court has an easy way out if it wants one: Under existing precedents, the plaintiffs don’t have standing to sue. The appeals court upheld their standing, which is just really bad law in general, independent of how you feel about abortion. If an organization can sue any time one of its members is statistically likely to suffer some theoretical injury sometime in the future, the courts will be swamped with frivolous suits.

and the Fox News trial

The Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox News was supposed to hear opening statements today, but (in a surprise last-minute move) that was delayed until tomorrow. Maybe that means a settlement is in the works.

and even more evidence of Clarence Thomas’ corruption

Last week, we found out that for two decades Thomas has been taking expensive vacations paid for by a major Republican donor who also gives a lot of money to organizations trying to influence Supreme Court decisions. We had to find out about these trips from Pro Publica rather than Thomas himself because, you know, the gift-reporting rules are just way too complicated for a mere Supreme Court justice to understand, and it’s not like Thomas should be expected to have some kind of moral intuition that would tell him this whole arrangement smells bad.

Right-wing media raced to Thomas’ defense, because clearly Thomas was just a guy hanging out with a dear friend — who just happens to be a billionaire and just happens to have befriended Thomas after he rose to the Supreme Court. And it’s not like there’s been a pattern of conservative organizations trying to befriend justices.

This week Pro Publica let another shoe drop: In 2014 the same donor, Harlan Crow, bought real estate from Thomas, including the house where Thomas’ mother lives, for over $100K, which might or might not be market price for properties a previous Thomas disclosure form had valued at less than $15K each. Again, Thomas did not report the transaction, in spite of laws that seem to say he has to.

Crow has since been paying the property taxes on Thomas’ mom’s house, and has funded a number of improvements that I’m sure Mrs. Thomas appreciates.

Soon after the sale was completed, contractors began work on tens of thousands of dollars of improvements on the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home, which looks out onto a patch of orange trees. The renovations included a carport, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, according to city permit records and blueprints.

Crow’s statement on the Pro Publica scoop doesn’t say whether Mrs. Thomas pays rent. Clarence himself has said nothing.

Even Fox News has more-or-less gone silent, mentioning Thomas less than 50 times (and Bud Light 183 times) since the first Pro Publica article. The substance of its reporting has been that Democrats are attacking Thomas, and that AOC wants him impeached. But that’s Democrats for you. And you know AOC, she’s like that. It’s not like there’s an actual issue here. I mean, it’s not like George Soros has been buying off a liberal justice. That would be a national scandal deserving 24/7 coverage.

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Yesterday, the WaPo reported another Thomas disclosure anomaly — that he reports income from a defunct real estate firm rather than the entity that replaced it. But unless there’s more to this story, I’m willing to write this one off as sloppiness rather than corruption.

and Tennessee

Both of the Justins — Justin Jones and Justin Pearson — have returned to the Tennessee House. After they were removed by the Republican supermajority last week, both were unanimously reappointed by councils of their constituents.

Both appointments are temporary until a special election can be held. But if the Justins were popular at home before, they are rock stars now. I don’t think getting elected will be a problem.

I’ll make a prediction: One or both of them will speak at the 2024 Democratic Convention.

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Republican criticism of the demonstration the Justins led has included intentional misuse of the word insurrection. It started with Speaker Sexton, and then became a more general Republican talking point.

For almost a decade, I’ve been pointing out the right-wing practice of breaking words through intentional misuse. In 2014, I recalled the effort that had gone into breaking fascism, terrorism, and religious freedom, while pointing to a then-current effort to break torture.

The American Thinker blog reports on the “real torture scandal in America“, which is abortion. General Boykin says “Torture is what we’ve done by having the IRS go after conservative groups.” The Koch-funded American Energy Alliance is calling EPA fossil-fuel regulations “torture”.

Fortunately, they failed to break torture, and we have since been able to reclaim fascism, a word that has a lot of work to do these days. In 2021, I updated my 2014 analysis to include fake news, socialism, and even, ironically, Orwellian. (The breaking of fake news was so effective that hardly anyone remembers the original meaning: imitation “news” articles from entirely fictitious “publications” like the Denver Guardian or WTOE 5 News, created to be shared online and promote a false reality. The 2016 Trump campaign was the primary beneficiary of fake news, as many people took seriously fake articles that went viral, like “Pope Francis shocks world, endorses Donald Trump for president” or “FBI agent suspected in Hillary email leaks found dead in apartment murder-suicide“. Trump hated this meaning, so he misused fake news until it broke, and instead came to mean any news report — no matter how accurate — that he doesn’t like.)

And that leads us to insurrection. It annoys Republicans that January 6 is quite accurately described as an insurrection, so they want to make that idea inexpressible. That’s what’s behind their widespread use of insurrection to describe the protest on the floor of the Tennessee House that led to the Justins’ expulsion.

That usage is literally absurd. The Tennessee House was inconvenienced for about an hour. No one was injured and no one was threatened. The state house was not damaged. At no time did anyone propose establishing a new government in Nashville outside the usual electoral process. January 6, by contrast, was the culmination of a months-long plot to install the loser of the 2020 election as president. Had it succeeded, the United States’ centuries-old tradition of constitutional government would be over. Along the way, 114 Capitol police officers were injured, and numerous member of Congress (and their staff) feared for their lives. So did Mike Pence’s Secret Service detail.

But the absurdity is the point. Expect more misuse of insurrection, until the word ceases to mean anything at all. As Orwell put it in “The Principles of Newspeak“:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. … This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.

and crazy new laws

Red-state legislatures just keep upping the ante on crazy.

Idaho hasn’t just outlawed almost all abortions, it is also outlawing “abortion trafficking”.

The new “ abortion trafficking ” law signed on Wednesday, is the first of its kind in the U.S. It makes it illegal to either obtain abortion pills for a minor or to help them leave the state for an abortion without their parents’ knowledge and consent. Anyone convicted will face two to five years in prison and could also be sued by the minor’s parent or guardian. Parents who raped their child will not be able to sue, though the criminal penalties for anyone who helped the minor obtain an abortion will remain in effect.

So if an Idaho man gets his 13-year-old daughter pregnant, her grandmother can get 2-to-5 in the big house for driving her across the border to get an abortion in Washington. But at least the rapist can’t sue the grandmother, because that would push a good idea too far.

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In Missouri, the House just passed a budget that defunds the state’s libraries. Reportedly, the Senate plans to put the $4.5 million back, but still. Is there any public institution that does more good for less money than the public library?

And in Llano County, the commissioners are debating whether to close their three libraries rather than submit to a judge’s order not to ban 17 books.

The banned books, which include themes of LGBTQ+ identity and race, were removed last year without public input after Llano County officials declared them pornographic and sexually explicit.

Somebody’s going to have to explain to me how Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste is pornographic. (I somehow missed the dirty parts when I read it.) Among a long list of awards and honors, Time magazine named Caste as its #1 nonfiction book of 2020. And remember: This is the public library, not a school library. It would be bad enough to keep children from reading Caste, but Llano is claiming no one should be allowed to read it, at least not on the public dime.

Another too-sexy-for-Llano book is Larry the Farting Leprechaun, which I have not read. If I do, I’ll have to stay alert so I don’t miss the pornographic sections.

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Amanda Marcotte sees the defund-the-library trend as a skirmish in a more general war against public education.

Libraries are the latest battlefield, but the real white whale for the GOP is the destruction of public education.

She cites Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s “school choice” proposal, which would move money from public to private (i.e. religious) schools through a voucher program linked to “education savings accounts”.

In the Texas Observer, David Brockman goes a step further: The motive behind ESAs is Christian nationalism.

Having spent nearly a decade researching and writing about Christian nationalism—the movement to make the United States an explicitly “Christian nation” governed by Bible-based laws—I see this year’s push to fund private and religious schools as just the latest front in that movement’s decades-long battle to undermine what Thomas Jefferson called the wall of separation between church and state, and thereby establish conservative Christian dominance over government. … Though not all “school choice” supporters are Christian nationalists, it’s hard not to notice the strong Christian nationalist presence among them.

But Texans who believe in separation of church and state have an unexpected ally against Abbott’s proposal: rural Texas communities who find a civic identity in their public schools.

Many in New Home worried that political shifts in Austin threatened to leave out the voices of rural Texans, for whom the local schools — the Friday night football games and principals whose cellphone numbers you know — are essential parts of what makes a community.

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While we’re talking about publicly supported religious schools, Oklahoma is deciding whether to approve its first explicitly religious charter school, which would be Catholic. If it does, the inevitable lawsuit will undoubtedly go to the Supreme Court. I think this Court will find a way to approve it on originalist grounds, despite so many of the Founders being anti-Catholic bigots. As we saw in Alito’s Dobbs opinion and Thomas’ Bruen opinion, history says whatever the six-judge majority needs it to say.

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It’s not true, but you can be forgiven if you got the impression this week that 12-year-olds can marry in Missouri. (The actual minimum age is 16, with anybody under 18 requiring parental consent.) Tuesday, a debate in the legislature over an anti-trans law produced this viral clip: Missouri state Senator Mike Moon defended the idea that 12-year-olds should be allowed to marry. He claimed to know a couple that got married at 12 when the girl became pregnant. And “their marriage is thriving“.

Somehow, I don’t find that story as heartwarming as he apparently does.

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Ordinarily, I’m a fan of electoral systems where a jungle primary is followed by a runoff between the top two candidates. The system should allow moderate candidates to win by marshaling support from independents and the other party, even if they couldn’t win a one-party primary.

But there’s something decidedly shady about the way Montana’s Republican legislature is planning to implement such a system: They’ve written the election-law change so that it applies once — to Jon Tester’s Senate race in 2024 — and then sunsets immediately. The point here is to keep a Libertarian candidate from siphoning votes away from Tester’s Republican challenger.

So: The jungle-primary system, I like. Changing the rules election-by-election to get the result you want, I don’t like.

and you also might be interested in …

There was another mass shooting, this one in Alabama at a teen-ager’s birthday party. Four dead, 28 injured. The birthday girl’s brother was one of the four.

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Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) on the changing politics of guns:

For decades, the most vocal voices on the issue of guns were on the side of the gun lobby. If you held a town hall and someone stood up and said “I want to talk about guns”, you knew they were going to be advocates for the Second Amendment. That’s totally flipped. Today, in red and blue states, if somebody says “I want to talk to you about guns”, they want you to pass the assault weapons ban and universal background checks.

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DA Alvin Bragg is asking a federal court to get Jim Jordan off his back. Jordan’s attempt to interfere in Bragg’s prosecution of Trump is completely out of line. Heads would explode on the right if a congressional committee tried to protect a Democratic politician against a local indictment, or to intimidate the local prosecutor.

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I could have mentioned the right-wing outrage at Bud Light last week, but it was just too crazy to wrap my mind around. So I’ll let Vox explain it. The gist seems to be that the parent corporation wants to sell their beer to trans people, so if you hate trans people you should boycott it.

But hey, maybe there’s money to be made off folks who drink beer to express their bigotry rather than because they like the taste.

As JoJoFromJerz tweeted:

Apparently, this is real. But if I told you it was a parody video, would you know the difference?

Anyway, there’s a long history of such performative outrage, and zero examples of it accomplishing anything beyond providing opportunities for grifters. MAGA types love to lash out, but they don’t organize and persist, as successful boycotts must. So corporations just wait for them to get over it.

Remember the Great Keurig Boycott of 2017? Or Frito-Lay in 2021? Or, more recently, when people were mad because M&Ms were girls?

Most right-wingers probably don’t remember either.

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I continue to believe that the best way to bridge the culture-war gap is for all of us to listen to each other’s stories. HuffPost Personal published one mother’s story of discovering that her child was trans.

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I’m occasionally asked whether we should “trust” the mainstream media. My answer is usually some form of “Trust them to do what?”

A good case in point is Thomas Friedman’s recent NYT column “America, China, and a crisis of trust“. Nobody who lived through the Iraq War will ever again trust Friedman as a prognosticator. His rolling assurances that the war would turn a corner (for the better) in the next six months led to six months being referred to as a “Friedman Unit“.

Friedman is well-spoken and has access to the top experts — his problem in Iraq was that he too easily believed Bush administration sources who wouldn’t have talked so openly to the rest of us — so he can do a very convincing Voice of Authority. But he’s not as smart as he thinks he is, and his sources aren’t as smart as he thinks they are, so his authoritative predictions often go astray.

However, Friedman is also an honest reporter. In the current column, he goes to a conference in Beijing and talks to a lot of well connected Chinese who undoubtedly would not return my calls, even if I knew their numbers. Do I believe his account of what they’re saying? Yes, I do. I also believe his observation that the Chinese are investing in infrastructure that puts ours to shame.

And then there’s this:

a story making the rounds in Beijing is that many Chinese have begun using ChatGPT to do their ideology homework for the local Communist Party cell, so they don’t have to waste time on it.

and let’s close with someone who deserves my gratitude

Like Stephen Colbert, I grew up reading Mad Magazine and enjoying the cartoons of Al Jaffee, who died last Monday at the age of 102. I picture him reaching the Afterlife and giving the gatekeeper a snappy answer to a stupid question.

Here’s Stephen’s tribute to Al, which is well deserved.