The Weekly Sift

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

– The United States of America v Donald J. Trump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and Israel

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

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

but you should pay attention to this Republican vision

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

There are two main things to know about Project 2025:

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

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

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

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

The NYT summarizes Project 2025’s energy provisions:

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

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

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

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

and you also might be interested in …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, Florida backed down, sort of.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and let’s close with something oracular

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

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

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

– Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA)

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

This week everybody was talking about the weather

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

and politicizing the NDAA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and conspiracy theories about DoJ and the FBI

That’s the topic of another featured post.

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

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

He’s been found and is currently under arrest.

and the Hollywood strike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and Trump’s next indictments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and you also might be interested in …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and let’s close with something cosmic

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

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

– Justice Sonia Sotomayor
SFFA v Harvard, dissenting

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

This week everybody was talking about the Supreme Court

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

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

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

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

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

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

My candidate university: Georgetown.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and Bidenomics

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

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

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

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

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

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

and you also might be interested in …

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

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

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

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

and let’s close with something pop cultural

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

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.