The Weekly Sift

NO SIFT FOR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS. The next new articles will appear on January 30.

If we let everybody in the boat, if we row in the same cadence together, there is no obstacle this body can overcome for this nation.

– Speaker Kevin McCarthy

This week’s featured post is “The Debt Ceiling: a (p)review“.

This morning I’m wondering what’s happening in Brazil

Yesterday afternoon, supporters of Brazil’s defeated former president Jair Bolsonaro occupied the National Congress, Planalto Palace, and Supreme Court in Brazilia. Congress and the Court are not in session and President Lula was elsewhere, so there is no hostage crisis.

This morning, I’m seeing claims that government forces have restored order and that government offices will open. Hundreds of rioters have been arrested. (As in our January 6 riot, the rioters were taking selfies and posting video, so they should be pretty easy to find and convict.)

Ever since Bolsonaro lost the a runoff election October 30, his supporters have been urging the Army to intervene, which it hasn’t done. Lula took office on January 1. This attack appears to be a more extreme plea to the Army, which is still not responding to it. I’m seeing claims that some police or other officials may have helped the rioters.

Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the immediate suspension of the governor of Brasília for 90 days, accusing him and the district’s head of public security of abetting the unprecedented attack on the country’s capital.

Bolsonaro himself is in Florida, where he went instead of attending Lula’s inauguration. Like Trump, he claims that his defeat was not a fair election. It looks like Bolsonaro’s most extreme supporters were victims of the same kind of reality distortion that QAnon brought to January 6. BBC quotes a Brazilian teacher of history and sociology:

They just get information from WhatsApp and Bolsonaro’s social media, so they are really disconnected from reality.

They believed that Bolsonaro would win the election easily, it did not happen, and then when Lula was elected, they believed that it would happen militarily, a coup d’etat, and Bolsonaro would become dictator of Brazil.

This is still breaking news, which I don’t have the resources to cover. Among the major news services, BBC seems to me to have the best coverage. If you want to sort through unvetted reports, search social media for #Brazil.

meanwhile, everybody has been talking about the Speaker election

It took all week and 15 ballots, but Kevin McCarthy is finally Speaker of the House. The 15th ballot wasn’t complete until early Saturday morning, and then the newly elected congresspeople could finally be sworn in.

This afternoon we’ll see whether McCarthy has the votes to pass his rules package, which includes the concessions he made to the MAGA holdouts.

Democrat Katie Porter brought a good book for the occasion.

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One benefit of listening to the various speaker-nomination speeches is getting to hear what the parties (or factions with the GOP) think their best talking points are. I was struck by two of McCarthy’s nominators — Steve Scalise and Kat Cammack — mentioning fentanyl overdoses as if this were a partisan issue. I mean, are Democrats for fentanyl overdoses?

Well, no. In a nutshell, Republicans try to turn every issue into the southern border. Crime is a border issue because immigrants are criminals. (They’re not, other than the one possible offense of crossing the border illegally.) Disease is a border issue because immigrants carry disease. (They don’t.) Fentanyl addiction is a border issue in the same way: It’s an excuse to militarize the border and maybe build Trump’s wall. Beyond that, it’s not clear Republicans have any interest in the problem, which is fundamentally a public-health issue, not a border-control issue.

Some Republicans go full-conspiracy-theory on the subject. Here’s J. D. Vance last April:

If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl? And, man, it does look intentional.

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After McCarthy’s election, he gave a speech and then Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries gave a speech. I think it’s safe to say that Jeffries outdid McCarthy: He used an acrostic technique that goes back the Psalms: One line for each letter of the alphabet.

He starts playing with the alphabet subtly at around the 8 minute mark, envisioning a country that “Provides for the Poor, Works for Working families …”. Around 13 minutes he pledges to the new Republican majority that Democrats will “try to find common ground whenever and wherever possible on behalf of the American people”. But he also pledges that Democrats “will never compromise our principles”.

What principles? That’s where the alphabetic litany starts: “House Democrats will always put American values over Autocracy, Benevolence over Bigotry, the Constitution over the Cult” … all the way to “Zealous representation over Zero-sum confrontation”.

And McCarthy? Well, just before the end he made a Freudian slip:

If we let everybody in the boat, if we row in the same cadence together, there is no obstacle this body can overcome for this nation.

I think your speechwriter wrote “can’t”, Kevin. But in this House, your version is probably more accurate.

Imagine Biden making that gaffe. Fox would spend the next week citing it as evidence of dementia.

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McCarthy also repeated a promise he often made during the fall campaign:

Our very first bill will repeal the funding for 87,000 new IRS agents. You see, we believe government should be to help you, not go after you.

I’m afraid this first bill really will set the tone for McCarthy’s House, because it’s based on a lie: There is no funding to hire 87,000 new IRS agents, and the new resources the Inflation Reduction Act does send to the IRS don’t target middle-class Americans.

I’ve criticized the decision to release Trump’s tax returns to the public — he should do that, not Congress — but I do have to admit that nothing better illustrates the IRS’s need for more funding. Wealthy tax cheats like Trump know that if they make a big enough tangle of their finances, the IRS won’t be able to put enough auditors on the case to sort it out.

And that’s why McCarthy wants the funding repealed: If he represents anybody, he represents wealthy people who cheat on their taxes. That’s his base.

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Michelle Goldberg commented on Marjorie Taylor Greene’s exasperation at the far-right Republicans who wouldn’t get in line behind McCarthy:

It was the embodiment of the Twitter meme: “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”

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Conservative commentator Noah Rothman argues that the chaotic nature of the speaker-election process and the insurgent demands for a weaker speakership is evidence against the charge that the GOP — and especially its MAGA/Freedom Caucus wing — is the “authoritarian” party.

He’s missing a key point: Fascists love weak governance when they are out of power. Any power center they don’t control should have its powers severely limited … until they do control it. Then, the sky’s the limit.

Case in point: Under Biden or Obama, presidential executive orders are tyranny, and presidential emergency powers are the worst tyranny of all. But in 2019, Andy Biggs urged President Trump to fund his border wall by declaring an emergency, usurping Congress’ power of the purse. (Trump did so.) Unchecked presidential power is wonderful if it’s his president.

Ditto for the Supreme Court. Judicial activism was horrible when the Court’s majority was liberal. But now that the Court is firmly in conservative hands, right-wing leaders no longer make “principled” denunciations of judicial activism.

Same thing here. Biggs was the first Republican to challenge McCarthy’s bid for speakership, and is a key member of the group trying to limit the speaker’s power. But that’s only because his faction represents a small percentage of the Republican caucus and has no chance to elect one of its own as speaker. If the tables ever turn, though, they’ll be looking for a very strong speaker indeed.

The lesson here is that authoritarians are not all the same, and in particular that fascists are not monarchists. Monarchists seek order; they believe that somebody needs to be in charge, and so they tend to fall in line behind the new king, whoever it turns out to be. But fascists seek power; they believe they should be in charge. So they’re for chaos when they’re out of power and order after they gain power. Any power center they can’t control should be weak. But power centers they do control should be strong.

and the debt ceiling

The featured post discusses the debt-ceiling standoff that is coming in the summer, and what the speaker election portends for it.

and the second anniversary of the insurrection

Friday, President Biden marked the second anniversary of the 1-6 insurrection by giving medals to 14 people who stood in the way of Trump’s attempt to stay in power after losing the 2020 election.

The group included law enforcement officers, current and former politicians and election workers who were targeted with threats following the 2020 presidential contest. Three of the medals were awarded posthumously to officers who had defended the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and died afterward by injuries or by suicide.

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I heard one commentator (I believe after a conversation with Nancy Pelosi) point out that if this were a presidential inauguration year, a January 6 riot wouldn’t be necessary. Because the House still had no speaker on January 6, it would have been incapable of counting electoral votes. What would happen next is anybody’s guess.

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Elon Musk celebrated January 6 by restoring the Twitter account of one of the top conspirators, retired General Michael Flynn.

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The Fulton County special grand jury investigating Trump’s attempt to interfere with the 2020 presidential election in Georgia has completed its work. Apparently, that means it has written a report that either does or doesn’t recommend indictments. The grand jury had no authority to indict on its own.

At the moment I don’t know whether any indictments have been recommended. This is breaking news this morning, so consult other sources.

and the pandemic

Covid appears to having another surge. Case numbers are mostly flat and hard to interpret, but everything else is increasing. Deaths are now over 500 per day again, after dipping into the 200s in early December. Hospitalizations and ICU cases are also up.

A scary article from BBC: An official in China’s Henan province says that 90% of the population — about 88.5 million people — have had Covid.

Mr Kan did not specify a timeline for when all the infections happened – but as China’s previous zero-Covid policy kept cases to a minimum, it’s likely the vast majority of Henan’s infections occurred in the past few weeks.

In late December, nearly half of the passengers on two flights from China to Milan tested positive.

and the economy

It’s hard to know how to interpret economic statistics during a time when the Fed is trying to fight inflation. Usually, it’s great news that the economy is creating jobs and wages are rising — which is what Friday’s jobs report showed: The economy added 223K jobs in December and unemployment matched its pre-pandemic low of 3.5%.

But the Fed’s inflation-fighting policy is to slow the economy with higher interest rates, so more jobs just means they’ll increase rates further until the slowdown takes effect.

and you also might be interested in …

Jim Jordan will chair the new House select committee to investigate “the weaponization of the federal government”, i.e. the investigation of Trump and his co-conspirators, like Jim Jordan.

This follows in the footsteps of the failed Durham investigation, and will probably proceed in much the same way: with great fanfare about the devastating evidence it is about to uncover, which will be greatly underwhelming when it appears.

Other than giving Fox News something to talk about, the main point of the Jordan committee will be to harass anyone who has had the effrontery to investigate Republicans, and to intimidate anyone who might do so in the future. A second goal will be to screw up any Trump prosecution.

It will be interesting to see if members of the January 6 Committee (now dissolved) will cooperate with Jordan. After all, Jordan defied a subpoena from them; why should they testify for him?

It’s also worth pointing out that Democrats don’t do this. Nobody was ever punished for all those bogus Benghazi investigations.

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President Zelenskyy’s New Year message was as good a piece of wartime messaging as I can think of. I’m inspired, and I’m not even Ukrainian.

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Police killings in the US were up in 2022. At least 1176 Americans were killed by police, up from 1145 in 2021. The 2022 total is a new record, according to Mapping Police Violence, which began keeping track of police killings in 2013.

On TV, police kill violent criminals in self defense or to keep them from killing someone else. But that’s not the typical case.

In 2022, 132 killings (11%) were cases in which no offense was alleged; 104 cases (9%) were mental health or welfare checks; 98 (8%) involved traffic violations; and 207 (18%) involved other allegations of nonviolent offenses. There were also 93 cases (8%) involving claims of a domestic disturbance and 128 (11%) where the person was allegedly seen with a weapon. Only 370 (31%) involved a potentially more serious situation, with an alleged violent crime.

I looked for something to compare these numbers to. In the 2019-2020 fiscal year, Australia set a record with 16 police shooting deaths. The US has about 13 times Australia’s population, so the Australian number looks comparable to 208 American deaths, or less than 1/5 of our total. Canadian police killed 36 people in 2020, which would be comparable to 312 Americans, or less than 1/3 our total.

Iceland — a bit larger than 1/1000th the size of the US — has had only one police killing in its history, which happened in 2013. At the US rate it would have about one a year.

I typically hear two explanations for the US’s high rate of police killings: American police are trained to have a “warrior mindset” (most other countries’ police aren’t), and American police are responding to a more dangerous environment, i.e. anyone they encounter might have a gun. In other words: An increased risk of being killed by police is one of the prices we pay for America’s high level of gun ownership.

For police, the huge number of guns in America also means that every single call is treated as if someone involved could be armed — and that an otherwise nonviolent wellness check, mental health call, or traffic stop could turn into a deadly encounter. US law generally allows police to use force because they merely perceive a threat, and the many firearms in civilian hands give police officers a reason to believe they’re in danger.

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In other gun news, the federal ban on bump stocks was struck down by a federal appeals court.

Bump stocks are devices that allow a semi-automatic weapon to function like an automatic one, shooting a series of bullets on one trigger-pull. They were banned by the Trump administration after one was used in a mass shooting in Las Vegas that killed 58 people.

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I’m still not interested in the British royal family.

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Jackson, Mississippi is having another water crisis. The Guardian attributes the problems to “an aging and underfunded system that routinely fails to withstand extreme cold”. All 33 of Jackson’s public schools stayed closed Thursday and Friday (when they were supposed to return from Christmas break) due to low water pressure.

and let’s close with something sweet

Here’s a teacher’s story from 2018:

One of my first graders lost his mom 2 years ago as did I. On Wednesday he gave me a handwritten card saying both of our moms are angels together. Through tears, I tell him I’m having trouble reading it. He says to me, “Just sound it out.”

Ours is not a system of justice where foot soldiers go to jail and the masterminds and ringleaders get a free pass.

– Rep. Jamie Raskin

This week’s featured post is “Trump still has no counter-narrative“.

This week everybody was talking about Trump’s crimes

Last Monday, the 1-6 Committee held its last public hearing. The executive summary of its final report was released Monday, and the 800-page full report on Thursday

The committee also announced that it had made criminal referrals to the Justice Department.

The committee’s historic referral says there is sufficient evidence to refer Trump for four crimes: obstructing an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the government, making knowingly and willfully materially false statements to the federal government, and inciting or assisting an insurrection.

I summarize Committee’s version of the January 6 plot (and Trump’s lack of any credible response) in the featured post. Briefly, the Committee sees January 6 not as a one-day event, but as the unsuccessful culmination of Trump’s months-long scheme to remain in power after losing the 2020 election. In their telling, Trump knew he had lost the election, knew that his fraud claims were false, knew that his false-elector scheme was illegal, knew that the Constitution did not give Vice President Pence the powers Trump pressured him to exercise, and knew that his January 6 speech would incite violence.

Trump responds with ad hominem attacks on the Committee and its witnesses, and he encourages his people not to testify or provide documents. I don’t believe this is how innocent people behave.

In my view, the one part of this narrative where the evidence is not iron-clad (yet) is in Trump’s connection to those who organized the violence. Those arrangements appear to have gone through Trump’s consigliere Mark Meadows, and then through Roger Stone and Mike Flynn. None of those three have answered questions about this. Meadows has been cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify. Stone and Flynn testified, but repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment.

There is reason to hope that the Department of Justice will have better luck getting at least a little cooperation from one or more of them, most likely Meadows.

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I am largely in agreement with David Frum, who observes how the responsibility for calling Trump to account for his crimes keeps getting passed from one body to another.

Robert Mueller believed he had no power to indict Trump for obstructing his investigation of Russian influence on the 2016 election. When Trump then tried to extort Ukrainian President Zelenskyy into investigating Biden, the House impeached him, but to his defenders in the Senate

Holding Trump to account should be somebody else’s job: in this case, the voters.

When the voters accepted that responsibility and voted to remove Trump from office (by seven million votes), he tried to overturn the election by fraud and ultimately by force. When those actions led to a second impeachment that could have banned him from holding any future office, Mitch McConnell admitted

There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of [January 6].

But he decided that accountability and consequences were still somebody’s else’s job.

We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.

Now, once again, Trump has been investigated by a body that had no power to indict him. The January 6 Committee could only make a referral to the Justice Department, which it has done.

That leaves nobody for DoJ to pass the buck to. The final decision rests with Jack Smith and Merrick Garland. If they choose not to indict Trump, that will be the end of any consequences. Trump will have proven he is above the law.

There has been some debate about whether the 1-6 Committee should have bothered with criminal referrals, given that the Justice Department has no obligation to follow up on them. I think the referrals are important from the point of view of history and narrative.

Every time some official body investigates Trump and then declines to do something, his supporters take that inaction as vindication. The same thing would have happened here, as in “The Committee made a bunch of noise, but in the end even they didn’t claim Trump had committed any specific crimes.”

And if the Justice Department would decline to indict Trump — for what it’s worth, I believe it will indict him, that I’m not sure what the charges will be — the historical record wouldn’t have any explicit claims against him beyond the second impeachment, which had to be put together quickly and missed the full breadth of the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.

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One sidelight of the report is an account of how Cassidy Hutchinson’s original TrumpWorld lawyer tried to influence her testimony.

Hutchinson stressed that he “never told me to lie,” but did say Passantino instructed her to say “I do not recall” and encouraged her to “use that response as much as you deem necessary.”

“I said, ‘But if I do remember things but not every detail, and I say I don’t recall, wouldn’t I be perjuring myself?'” Hutchinson asked Passantino, she told the committee. “Stefan said something to the effect of, ‘The committee doesn’t know what you can and can’t recall, so we want to be able to use that as much as we can unless you really, really remember something very clearly.”

… In a later conversation with Passantino on March 1, Hutchinson said he told her, “We’re gonna get you a really good job in Trump world,” and “We want to keep you in the family.”

The interview transcript also reveals Ben Williamson, another White House aide who was close to Meadows, told Hutchinson the night before her second deposition in March that “Mark wants me to let you know that he knows you’re loyal, and he knows you’ll do the right thing tomorrow and that you’re going to protect him and the boss.”

Hutchinson got a new lawyer before her second appearance before the Committee.

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It was fascinating to watch how Fox News’ web site covered the criminal referrals. The news article disappeared from their front page quickly; it mentioned the four crimes by name, but gave no hint of the evidence behind the charges. The only person quoted was a spokesman for Rep. Jim Jordan, who characterized the referrals as “just another partisan and political stunt”.

The news article was quickly followed by an analysis article, which did not even list the charges. Instead, the article emphasized that a congressional referral “holds no official legal weight”, is just “theater”, and will be “ignored” by DoJ because it will be a “prosecutorial liability”.

Keep this in mind if you find yourself arguing with someone who mainly follows Fox News and other conservative media: The evidence against Trump has been systematically hidden from them.

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The House Ways and Means Committee has voted to reveal six years Trump’s tax returns, as well as tax returns for eight of his businesses.

These returns are the outcome of a three-year court battle to enforce a fairly clear law, passed in 1924 after the Teapot Dome scandal, that allows certain committees of Congress to request individual tax returns from the IRS. Trump Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin refused to obey that law, and the case had to go all the way to the Supreme Court.

I am not sure why the returns had to be released to the public (though it’s worth noting that all major presidential candidate since Nixon have released their returns voluntarily, so it’s not like Trump has suffered some unprecedented injury). The New Yorker interviewed Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal about that.

Apparently, the failure to give Trump’s returns to Congress was not the only obligation that Trump’s IRS ignored. IRS policy requires that tax returns of presidents and vice presidents be audited annually, but audits of Trump’s taxes didn’t begin until after Neal requested the returns be released to his committee. (Audits of both Obama and Biden have been performed on schedule.) None of the Trump audits have been completed.

Neal phrases his responses carefully, but he clearly intends to leave the impression that it is necessary to release the returns so that the public can do the kind of auditing that the IRS hasn’t done. I have no idea whether that makes sense.

and President Zelenskyy’s visit to Washington

The Ukrainian president made a surprise visit to D.C. just before Christmas, and spoke to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday. He spoke in English and invoked iconic moments in America’s past struggles to achieve or defend freedom: Saratoga and the Battle of the Bulge. He thanked America for its support in both weapons and money, and asked for more.

Your money is not charity. It’s an investment in the global security and democracy that we handle in the most responsible way.

The MAGA right erupted in outrage. Matt Walsh tweeted “Get this grifting leech out of our country please”. Tomi Lahren tweeted: “No more money to Ukraine!!! We can’t fight this war for you for eternity!!!” (I’m puzzled how anyone could look at Ukraine’s bombed-out cities or consider its thousands of war dead and conclude that we are fighting this war for them. We’re helping to bankroll a war they are fighting for themselves with great courage. This is not like Afghanistan, where officials couldn’t surrender or leave the country fast enough as soon as we started turning off the money.) Tucker Carlson seemed deeply offended that Zelenskyy addressed Congress in his combat sweater (clearly the worst offense against America since President Obama’s tan suit).

The point was to fawn over the Ukrainian strip club manager and hand him billions more dollars from our own crumbling economy. It is hard, in fact, it may be impossible to imagine a more humiliating scenario for the greatest country on Earth.

As he so often does (and will if he becomes speaker), Kevin McCarthy seemed not to know what to do with himself.

Lawmakers rose to applaud. McCarthy, who vows to probe Ukraine’s use of U.S. funds, froze in his chair before eventually lumbering to his feet. … McCarthy’s unease was understandable. Zelensky’s joint-session address celebrated U.S. support for Ukraine’s defenses against Russian invaders, and many in McCarthy’s Republican caucus (whose votes McCarthy needs to become speaker) want to cut off U.S. aid. Most GOP lawmakers skipped the speech entirely, and a few in attendance — Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Tim Burchett — sat through it sulking. Other Republicans trashed Zelensky, calling him “the Ukrainian lobbyist” (Rep. Thomas Massie), “the shadow president” (Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene) and a “welfare queen” (Donald Trump Jr.).

Trump and his cultists decided many years ago to side with Russia. It must be very frustrating that Putin has joined Hershel Walker, Keri Lake, and the Atlantic City Taj Mahal in the long list of slow horses Trump has bet on. Putin was supposed to be the prototype fascist strongman. The fact that he turns out to be surprisingly weak and ineffective is deeply embarrassing to fascists everywhere.

and the closing days of a sane Congress

The new Congress, with a Republican House majority, will take office on January 3. Meanwhile, the current Congress passed the bill that it had to pass to prevent a government shutdown. The $1.7 trillion bill will keep the military and a variety of other programs funded through the end of FY2023, i.e. September 30.

This is probably the last time between now and 2025 that the government will be funded without a hostage-taking drama.

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One provision that made it into the bill was a revision of the Electoral Count Act. The revision makes clear the vice president’s role in counting electoral votes, eliminating any ambiguity that some future Trump might try to take advantage of. It also resets the threshold for challenging a state’s electoral votes. Previously, one member of each house was enough to start a debate about a state’s electoral votes. Now it will require 1/5th of each house.

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Kevin McCarthy still doesn’t have the votes to become speaker. It’s hard to guess what kind of deal he can make with the five Freedom Caucus members who have pledged not to vote for him, because (unlike progressives that Nancy Pelosi had to negotiate with in past Congresses), they don’t seem to want anything in particular out of government, or even for the government to function at all.

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One of the new Republican congressmen is George Santos of New York, who apparently isn’t who he says he is. In the simplest sense his name does appear to be George Santos, but beyond that, just about everything he told voters was a lie. He didn’t graduate from the college he claimed or work and the investment bank he claimed. One company he did work at is being investigated by the SEC for being a Ponzi scheme.

Santos is a Brazilian immigrant with a criminal record who was evicted from apartments in 2015 and 2017, but now somehow has enough money to contribute $700K to his own campaign. No one knows where his money comes from.

Kevin McCarthy appears to be standing by Santos, because his Republican majority is tiny and he needs every vote if he’s going to become speaker. As Adam Kinzinger said in his farewell speech to the House on December 15, today’s Republican Party has “embraced lies and deceit“.

and you also might be interested in …

Does Texas Governor Gregg Abbott know the true meaning of Christmas or what? His latest migrant-busing stunt resulted in three busloads of asylum seekers (not illegal immigrants; seeking asylum is recognized in US law) being deposited outside Vice President Kamala Harris’ residence at the Naval Observatory. (A private aid agency took the migrants to a local church. I don’t know what happened to them from there.)

“Governor Abbott abandoned children on the side of the road in below freezing temperatures on Christmas Eve without coordinating with any Federal or local authorities,” White House assistant press secretary Abdullah Hasan said in a statement. “This was a cruel, dangerous, and shameful stunt.”

Up to a point, I can sympathize with border states who feel that the burden of our immigration problem falls disproportionately on them. Wanting to slough that burden off on other states or the federal government is understandable. What I can’t sympathize with is Governor Abbott’s callous indifference towards the individuals involved. They may not be white and they may not speak English, but they are people.

Eric Swalwell tweeted:

Guess we know how Greg Abbott, a “practicing” Roman Catholic, would have treated Jesus, Mary & Joseph.

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It’s also worth pointing out that Republican Thom Tillis and Democrat-turned-Independent Kyrsten Sinema worked out a bipartisan compromise proposal to that would cut the number of asylum-seekers in the US by putting more resources into the asylum-court process — smaller case backlog, faster decisions, fewer people waiting around for their cases to be heard. The proposal would in addition have given legal status to the “Dreamers” — children brought into the US illegally who have grown up here, most of whom know no other home.

The proposal died, largely because of a no-compromise attitude on the part of conservatives. It will not be revisited in the new Congress, because Kevin McCarthy has vowed not to consider any immigration reform compromise.

Amnesty is a nonstarter. It won’t be taken up by a House Republican majority.

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Keri Lake’s lawsuit to overturn her election defeat in Arizona was thrown out. She lost.

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Republicans lost the majority in the Pennsylvania House in the fall elections, but they could maneuver to hold the speakership. Power matters; the will of the voters doesn’t.

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Maybe the problem of tall trucks should be handled the way we handle our gun problem.

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This week I learned that chicken tikka masala is not a traditional Indian dish. One of the people credited with inventing it was a Pakistani immigrant who opened a restaurant in Glasgow in the 1960s. The NYT published his obituary Friday.

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By this point in the season I get cynical about Christmas songs. I think “Last Christmas” is a jealousy ploy, and I doubt that “someone special” is a real person. I also don’t trust Mariah Carey: If she got me, she’d soon remember all the other stuff she wants for Christmas.

and let’s close with something cranky

Mark Woodley is a sports reporter for KWWL in Waterloo, Iowa, but when a blizzard hit he got drafted into storm coverage. He wasn’t happy about it.

Part of the scam is to define basic bedrock standards of decency as “left” & then, lo, you find “left bias” everywhere you look. But that’s not bias, fellas. That’s just people trying to live in a society together.

– David Roberts

So this week I have some first-hand experience of Covid to report. Shortly after Thanksgiving, I started a cold. So I took a home test for Covid and it was negative. Then a bit later, my wife seemed to catch my cold, but her Covid test was positive. So I took the more accurate PCR test, which was also negative. A few days later, my cold symptoms stopped fading and began to intensify, so I took another test: positive this time.

Anyway, I have good news and bad news about my experience. The bad news is that Covid is even easier to catch than I thought; my wife and I have been very careful and seem to have gotten it anyway. The good news is that, having had every possible booster and being generally in good health, my symptoms are pretty mild.

This week everybody was talking about the Georgia runoff

I expected more Republicans to stay home rather than vote for such an embarrassing candidate, so I had anticipated Warnock winning by a larger margin than 2.8% — something more like 55%-45%. (538 anticipated a smaller margin of 1.9%, which was not far off.) But one way or another, Rafael Warnock defeated Herschel Walker and won reelection, giving Democrats a net gain of one Senate seat in the 2022 midterms, and a 51-49 overall majority.

Watching the TV coverage was an odd experience: Before the polls closed, commentators explained how the vote had arrived in November: Early voting was counted first, and it favored Democrats. Then the smaller rural counties counted their same-day vote, which favored Republicans. Finally, the big counties around Atlanta reported their same-day vote, which again favored Democrats.

Combined with polls showing Warnock slightly ahead, that established pattern led to this expectation: a big Warnock lead early, possibly a small Walker lead in the middle, and then a Warnock surge to victory at the end. And that’s exactly what happened.

But after giving that analysis, the TV people mostly forgot about it and covered the incoming vote as if they were calling a horse race: “Warnock opens a lead, Walker comes charging back along the rail, now it’s Warnock, Walker, Warnock, Walker, and Warnock surges at the tape to win.”

Josh Marshall has a good point: Don’t watch TV on Election Night. The drama of a lead see-sawing back and forth was almost entirely an illusion.

We went into the night thinking the probable election outcome was X. The very first results supported the eventual outcome of X but were too limited to confirm it. As the results came in they continued to point to X with a mounting likelihood. With more and more data that mounting likelihood of X moved toward relative certainty. The point, as I noted, is that there was no drama as the statewide results lead sloshed back and forth between the two candidates.

Marshall recommends following the returns through the livefeeds of political pros, as he did. If you did that, you’d have gone into the evening kinda/sorta expecting Warnock to win, and then watching that likelihood slowly grow into a certainty.

Or you could do something else with your evening and check for results the next morning.

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In total, Democrats lost nine House seats (and the majority) in the midterms, which probably cripples the Biden agenda going forward. But they also gained two governorships and four houses of state legislatures. So it was a mixed bag, rather than the “shellacking” President Obama took in his first midterm.

Walker’s loss puts the capstone on the other major story of the midterms, which is that Trump’s hand-picked candidates lost winnable elections all over the country.

Walker had been Trump’s personal choice as a Senate candidate in Georgia and turned out to be the only Republican statewide candidate to lose in the Peach State in 2022. … In other swing states, Trump-backed Senate candidates suffered embarrassing losses, including Blake Masters in Arizona and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, along with a host of other candidates who embraced the former president’s lies about the 2020 presidential election.

In both Georgia and New Hampshire, governors who kept their distance from Trump easily won reelection, while Trumpy senate candidates lost. In Ohio, Trump’s senate candidate J. D. Vance won by 6.1%, but significantly trailed the rest of the Republican ticket. (Goverrnor DeWine, for example, won by 25%.) So maybe the argument that beats Trump in the 2024 Republican primaries is to let him blather, and then say: “Yeah, but we want to win this time.”

It’ll be interesting to see where Georgia goes in the coming years. In some ways, Warnock’s reelection resembles Claire McCaskill’s in Missouri in 2012: She faced a terrible opponent and won in a mostly red state. Six years later, the Missouri GOP had learned its lesson and ran a less obviously unsuitable candidate (Josh Hawley), who beat her.

The difference, though, is that Missouri was trending increasingly red in those years, while Georgia is trending blue now. A better Republican candidate could probably have beaten Warnock this time, but Georgia might look very different by 2028.

---

I’m not sure what to make of Kyrsten Sinema’s announcement that she is now an independent. She’s been pretty independent before this, and intends to caucus with the Democrats, so I’m not sure it makes much difference in the Senate.

She’s up for reelection in 2024 and seemed likely to lose a Democratic primary, so she’s probably trying to bluff the Democrats out of running a candidate against her, for fear of handing the seat to some MAGA Republican like Kari Lake. How credible that bluff is will depend on the polls: Will Sinema’s move garner enough support from independent Arizona voters to make her a credible general election candidate? If it doesn’t, I can’t believe she’d endure the embarrassment of a spoiler campaign where she got 6% of the vote. But we’ll see.

---

The next time you’re thinking about not voting because “What difference does it make?”, remember Kristin Kassner. The first count of the vote in her race for the Massachusetts House had her behind a five-term Republican by ten votes. That triggered a recount, which concluded that she actually won by one vote.

and Kevin McCarthy’s struggles

The Republicans’ 222-213 margin in the House means that any five GOP representatives can torpedo Kevin McCarthy’s election as speaker, which is still uncertain. (The vote is scheduled for January 3, when the new Congress opens.) Nancy Pelosi has been running the House quite effectively with a similar margin, but (to speak bluntly) she’s good at this and Kevin McCarthy isn’t.

Also, the Democrats’ progressive wing and the Republicans’ fascist wing are not mirror images of each other. The progressives want positive things that Pelosi could include in legislation. So, for example, enough pieces of the Green New Deal showed up in the Inflation Reduction Act to win progressive votes. But the MTGs and Paul Gosars don’t have a comparable agenda that McCarthy can write into a compromise. They want to burn it all down.

There’s still a chance that GOP moderates will refuse to let the extreme right wing call the tune, and will instead work out a deal with the Democrats to organize the House around some compromise speaker. But I’m not betting on that.

and Brittney Griner’s release

The deal to trade Russian black-market arms dealer Viktor Bout for American WNBA star Brittney Griner was announced Thursday. Griner arrived in the US Friday morning.

The press has speculated at length about why the deal happened now, but (without any inside knowledge) I ask this question: Can it really be a coincidence that it happened two days after the Warnock/Walker runoff, which marked the end of the US midterm elections? Griner’s return is the fulfillment of a promise from President Biden, and would have helped Democrats politically if it had happened sooner. I think the timing shows that Putin still knows which American party he’s rooting for.

---

Former US marine Paul Whelan remains in Russian prison. A Biden administration spokesperson said that Russia classifies him as a spy (which the US denies) and wanted Russian spies in return for him, a trade the US has been unwilling to make. “The choice was Brittney or no one at all.”

Conservative American media could not celebrate the return of Griner, who is Black, liberal, and married to another woman, so it focused instead on Whelan. Tucker Carlson said, “Paul Whelan’s case would be a priority for any American government”, ignoring the fact that President Trump also failed to secure his release, and was “not particularly interested” in his case, according to Fiona Hill, a Russia expert in the Trump administration.

Trump also didn’t own up to his own record, calling Griner “a basketball player who openly hates our Country”, and gaslighting us with the claim that Paul Whelan “would have been let out for the asking”. (So why didn’t you ask when you were president, Don?)

The “hates our country” charge against Griner, which has been widely repeated on the right, is based on something she said after George Floyd was murdered by a White Minneapolis policeman. She asked the WNBA to protest racism by not playing the national anthem before games. (Personally, I’d like to see all sports leagues stop playing the anthem, because there’s nothing patriotic about sporting events. We don’t play the anthem in movie theaters, so why sports arenas?)

Like many conservatives, Trump elevates the symbols of patriotism over the substance. He’ll posture about the flag or the anthem, but he won’t obey the laws, respect the Constitution, or pay his taxes. I’ll take Brittney Griner’s kind of patriotism over Trump’s any day.

and the Trump Organization’s tax fraud

Last week brought the seditious conspiracy verdict against the leader of the Oath Keepers. This week the Trump Organization was convicted of criminal tax fraud. It was not the first Trump entity found to be engaged in dishonesty: In 2018, the Trump Foundation was dissolved by the State of New York, and in the same year Trump paid $25 million to settle civil fraud claims related to Trump University.

Predictably, Trump labeled the tax-fraud verdict as a “the Greatest Political Witch Hunt in the History of our Country“, blamed the crimes on his loyal CFO Allen Weisselberg, and said he would appeal.

I suspect Trump’s claim that his legal troubles are just politics is starting to wear thin among all but his most rabid supporters. As we know from the Durham investigation and Benghazi, political partisanship can start an investigation and maybe even muster an indictment or two. But getting a jury to convict requires enunciating a clear charge and proving it beyond a reasonable doubt to 12 ordinary people. The government did that in this case.

That’s more than just politics.

and the Supreme Court

The Court heard arguments this week in two cases with ominous implications. It’s always chancy to predict outcomes based on the questions the justices ask, but the Court seems likely to do the ominous thing in one case but maybe not the other.

In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis , the Court’s conservative majority appears likely to gut anti-discrimination laws in favor of special rights for conservative Christians. The weirdest thing about this case is why it’s a case at all, much less what it’s doing at the Supreme Court. Ostensibly, it’s yet another case about a business owner who doesn’t want to serve same-sex couples, but there is no same-sex couple, and the business is mostly hypothetical.

There is only one face in this case—Lorie Smith, the web designer who has never made a wedding website for anyone, much less withheld a proposed wedding website from anyone due to their sexuality. (She just already knows that she will want to do that. Really!)

Fear of the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA) is inhibiting her from offering wedding-website-design services, though, so she wants the part of it that would apply to her declared unconstitutional. Supposedly, this is a free-speech case. CADA wants to force her to create something that supports same-sex marriage, which is against her religious principles. Website design — even if it’s just a template whose content is filled in by the couple — is “speech”, so the law violates her free-speech rights.

I question a whole bunch of things in this case:

• Whether Smith genuinely intends to create wedding websites, or if this entire case has been constructed to undermine anti-discrimination laws.
• What part of the Bible says that Christians can’t create wedding websites for same-sex couples. (I think this case, like Masterpiece Cakeshop before it, arises from conservative spite over losing the battle to keep same-sex marriage illegal. It has nothing at all to do with Christian principles.)
• Whether this broad interpretation of free-speech rights will ever apply to non-Christians “speaking” in favor of positions conservative Christians don’t share.
• Whether any anti-discrimination laws at all can stand if Christians want to discriminate. (Remember, the judge who found in favor of Virginia’s interracial marriage ban — and was subsequently overruled — cloaked his racist argument in a Christian guise. “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. … The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”)

In oral arguments, the conservative justices mostly just refused to engage any of the case’s substantive issues, and instead just yucked it up, as you can do when all the harms you are threatening to cause are hypothetical.

So today’s hearing at the highest court in the land was about levity and mockery, and all the trivial examples of imaginary harms that will never come to pass. This is not just erasure of LGBTQ interests; interests which the state has an important and established interest in protecting. This is about mocking the obvious implications of creating a carveout from antidiscrimination laws with fatuous slippery slopes and petty humor.

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The Court also heard arguments in Moore v Harper, which the Brennan Center sums up like this:

In Moore v. Harper, the Supreme Court will decide whether the North Carolina Supreme Court has the power to strike down the legislature’s illegally gerrymandered congressional map for violating the North Carolina Constitution. The legislators have argued that a debunked interpretation of the U.S. Constitution — known as the “independent state legislature theory” — renders the state courts and state constitution powerless in matters relating to federal elections.

ISL is a very weird theory, because it implies that with regard to federal elections, a state legislature is not bound by the state constitution that defines it and by whose authority it governs. Consequently, the state’s supreme court has no role to play in gerrymandering cases.

Extreme versions of ISL would allow state legislatures to ignore presidential election results and appoint their own slate of electors, which is what Trump urged Republican legislatures to do in 2020. This case does not ask the Court to make such a ruling, so the decision will almost certainly not go that far. But in the same way that the arguments in Dobbs set up future challenges to interracial marriage and other unenumerated constitutional rights, arguments in this decision could set up a Trumpian constitutional crisis in the future.

Justice Barrett and Chief Justice Roberts seem reluctant to back an extreme ISL, which is the good news. But Just Security’s Kate Shaw worries that even a compromise ruling could get ISL’s foot in the door.

and you also might be interested in …

There was really only one choice for 2022’s Person of the Year. Before 2022, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was just the guy being extorted on Trump’s “perfect” phone call. Now he’s the symbol of his nation’s heroic resistance to the Russian invasion.

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The Respect for Marriage Act, which repeals the parts of the Defense of Marriage Act that (before the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision) allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, passed the House and should be signed by President Biden soon.

During the House debate, Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo) tearfully urged the House not to pass the bill.

I’ll tell you my priorities: Protect religious liberty, protect people of faith and protect Americans who believe in a true meaning of marriage. I hope and pray that my colleagues find the courage to join me in opposing this misguided and this dangerous bill.

After Hartzler’s speech went viral on right-wing outlets, she was answered by her nephew Andrew Hartzler, a gay man who had to endure Christian “conversion therapy” as a teen-ager. He had come out to his aunt in February, but “I guess she’s still as much of a homophobe.”

You want the power to force your religious beliefs onto everyone else. And because you don’t have that power, you feel like you’re being silenced. But you’re not. You’re just going to have to learn to coexist with all of us.

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Wednesday, Germany arrested 25 people plotting a right-wing coup. The group involved, Reichsbürger, has been compared to QAnon, and so the plot has similar fantasy-world components that make it hard to take seriously. But Germany is taking it very seriously. Vox’ Zack Beauchamp interviews someone who’s been tracking the movement:

It sounds like something out of a novel: a cell of heavily armed German extremists plotting to overthrow the elected government and elevate a man called Prince Heinrich XIII to the throne of a new Teutonic monarchy.

On Wednesday, German police arrested 25 people attempting to do exactly that — including a former member of parliament from Alternatives for Deutschland (AfD), a far-right anti-immigrant faction.

The plot originated out of a movement called the Reichsbürger — literally, “Reich citizens.” They believe that every German state since World War I has been illegitimate, a corporation rather than an authentic government, and thus feel entitled to ignore its laws.

There’s a similar the-government-became-a-corporation conspiracy theory in the US, which was involved in several of QAnon’s Trump-restoration theories.

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That wasn’t even the only coup attempt on Wednesday. In Peru, a president facing impeachment announced that he was dissolving Congress and instituting an “emergency government”. Fortunately, nobody bought it. The Constitutional Court refused to recognize the dissolution order, the Army didn’t back the emergency government, Congress went ahead with its impeachment, and the president was arrested on his way to seek asylum at the Mexican embassy.

That’s what they do in other countries: They arrest presidents who try to stay in office illegitimately.

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Like Trump, Elon Musk is a bright shiny object that would be easy to obsess over. This week, I’ll limit myself to one link.

the Twitter Files are best understood as an egregious example of the very phenomenon it purports to condemn — that of social-media managers leveraging their platforms for partisan ends. … The Twitter Files provide limited evidence that the social-media platform’s former management sometimes enforced its terms of service in inconsistent and politically biased ways. The project offers overwhelming evidence that Twitter’s current management is using the platform to promote tendentious, partisan narratives and conservative misinformation. In that sense, Taibbi and Weiss have performed revelatory journalism.

The full article (by Eric Levitz) does an in-depth takedown of Parts I (Matt Taibbi) and II (Bari Weiss) of the Twitter Files.

Well, OK, one more link. Josh Marshall:

[It’s] remarkable to me that literally with access to everything, even things ethically they shouldn’t have access to, they’ve surfaced basically nothing. one guy didn’t get boosted? libs of tiktok actually got special treatment? blowing the shit wide open guys.

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Back in 1960, when Air Force Captain Joseph Kittinger proposed a parachute jump from 19 miles above the New Mexico desert, probably some worried friends warned him he would die.

Well, Friday they were proven right. Lung cancer got him at the age of 94. Kittinger retired as a colonel, and his record stood until 2012.

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The Keystone Pipeline, which moves about 600K barrels of oil a day from Canada to Oklahoma, has spilled about 14K barrels into a creek in Kansas, about 150 miles from Kansas City.

Concerns that spills could pollute waterways spurred opposition to plans by TC Energy to build another crude oil pipeline in the Keystone system, the 1,200-mile Keystone XL, which would have cut across Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska.

President Biden revoked a construction permit shortly after taking office, and TC Energy cancelled the XL.

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The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer points out the inconsistencies in conservatives’ “free speech” arguments:

In Citizens United, the Republican-appointed justices feared that restrictions on corporate electioneering amounted to state control of civic discourse, “muzzl[ing] the principal agents of the modern free economy.” But when the justices wrote that decision, they were thinking of corporations as allies of the conservative movement. The moment that perception changed, conservative views on corporate speech changed too. Last year, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a longtime champion of corporate electioneering, warned of state retaliation if private firms did not “stay out of politics,” by which he meant stop opposing Republican interests. It is wrong to “muzzle” the “principal agents of the modern free economy,” unless they do something Republicans don’t like. Then it’s fine.

and let’s close with something custom made

If you’ve heard of the late Bill Lishman, it’s probably because of the 1996 movie Fly Away Home, where he trained geese to imprint on his ultralight airplane and helped them learn a new migration route.

Bill died in 2017, but his widow is still living in the unique house the family designed and built in the countryside outside of Toronto. They cut the top off of a hill, built a series of interconnected igloo-like domes, and then rebuilt the hill over them, leaving just the skylights exposed to the weather. The round rooms mean that everything in them had to be custom-built, but Bill was a universally talented craftsman, so why not?

One of the uncomfortable truths that you find in the dark corners of our history is that fascism happens, recurrently. Movements and demagogues and media figures and elected officials promote elements of fascism: antisemitism, hatred of minority groups and immigrants, worship of strongman leaders, wishing for the end to elections, the end to rule by law — it comes up, repeatedly. It has a certain appeal to a certain percentage of the country, in a fairly dependable way.

– Rachel Maddow
Ultra, episode 8

This week’s featured posts are “Is Club Q just the beginning?” and “Two Glimpses into the Future“.

This week I staked out some turf on Mastodon: @DougMuder@newsie.social

The Weekly Sift Twitter account has been used almost entirely to announce new posts, so at least in the beginning I plan to use Mastodon the same way. I’m also going to stay on Twitter for the time being.

This week everybody was talking about mass shootings

The Wal-Mart shooting in Virginia followed the Club Q shooting in Colorado so quickly that the public didn’t really have time to process Club Q. So I try to do that in one of today’s featured posts. I wanted to make a clear point in that article — the campaign of anti-LGBTQ lies and particularly anti-trans lies is so vicious that it looks designed to set off a pogrom — so a lot of auxiliary details got left out.

Club Q is an LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs, which is a stronghold of the religious right. In 2021, MinistryWatch identified six different conservative Christian organizations with annual revenue over $100 million that have headquarters there, including James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. As far back as 2005, NPR’s All Things Considered portrayed Colorado Springs as “a Mecca for Evangelical Christians”. (Not long afterward, mega-church pastor Ted Haggard, who figured prominently in NPR’s piece, fell in a drugs-and-gay-sex scandal. He then started another church in Colorado Springs, which also eventually asked him to leave. He then started a third church that met in his home. I don’t know how that’s going.)

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In his recent successful reelection campaign in Florida, Senator Marco Rubio answered questions from survivors of the Parkland shooting by pointing to his support for red-flag laws rather than a ban on assault weapons. But the Club Q shooting points out one problem of red-flag laws in the current political environment: The local sheriff is one of many in Colorado who refuse to enforce Colorado’s red-flag law. El Paso County is a “2nd amendment sanctuary”.

So if you’re a violent crazy person and you want to keep your guns, Colorado Springs is the place for you. The citizens must be so proud.

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Assault-weapon bans work. The WaPo’s Robert Gebelhoff supports that idea, and adds five other things that work:

• Keep guns away from kids.
• Stop the flow of guns
• Strengthen background checks.
• Strengthen red flag laws.
• Treat guns like we treat cars.

Each of Gebelhoff’s points is turned into specific proposals, complete with evidence to support the idea that it will make a difference in the number of gun deaths.

and the incoming GOP House majority

It’s still not clear how Kevin McCarthy is going to get enough votes to become speaker, or what he’ll have to promise to who.

I keep wondering when a dozen or two moderates will realize they could probably cut a better deal in coalition with the Democrats. That has happened in the Alaska legislature.

Meanwhile, the Democrats still have control for the next five weeks. Let’s hope they pass something that takes the debt ceiling off the table for a long time. Having a debt ceiling at all is kind of like having an easily-triggered self-destruct button on your car.

and Twitter

The claim that Elon Musk was going to create a “content moderation council” to decide who gets banned or reactivated was always just for show. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick elaborates:

For years, tons of people have believed, falsely, that it was the CEOs of these social media companies making the final call on what stays up and what stays down. … Indeed, part of the reason those same folks got so excited about Musk taking over, was that they believed (falsely) that he was going to get rid of all the moderation and so they’d be “freed.” Instead, what they have is exactly what they falsely feared was happening before: an impulsive, moody, vindictive billionaire, enforcing his own personal views on moderation. It’s deeply ironic, but his supporters will never recognize that Musk is doing exactly what they falsely believed Dorsey was doing before.

It’s also deeply stupid, because no CEO should be engaged in such day to day decision making on content moderation questions. The flow of questions is absolutely overwhelming.

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Conservatives often claim that social media algorithms are biased against them, and that was one reason Elon Musk cited for wanting to take over Twitter. But it’s worth pointing out that people who have done research on the topic have found the exact opposite:

Our results reveal a remarkably consistent trend: In six out of seven countries studied, the mainstream political right enjoys higher algorithmic amplification than the mainstream political left. Consistent with this overall trend, our second set of findings studying the US media landscape revealed that algorithmic amplification favors right-leaning news sources.

I can think of two reasons for both the actual algorithmic bias and the inverted public perception of it:

• The purpose of social-media algorithms is to generate responses and keep people engaged. The industry understands that negative emotions like anger and fear serve that purpose better than empathy and good will. Since the MAGAverse also emphasizes anger and fear, their interests align. I mean, what’s more likely to keep you clicking: AOC explaining the difference between pardons and expungements, or MTG speculating about Jewish space lasers?
• When you think of people who have been banned from social media, the names that pop to mind are high-profile conservatives like Trump and MTG, rather than equivalently high-profile liberals. But that’s because no equivalently high-profile liberals have misbehaved to the same extent. For example, none of Biden, Obama, and Clinton have ever used Twitter to incite a riot that got people killed, as Trump did prior to January 6. Twitter’s then-CFO said, “Our policies are designed to make sure that people are not inciting violence.”

That second point is supported by this study:

In sum, these data indicate that the tendency of Twitter users to share links to misinformation sites prior to the 2020 US election was as predictive of post-election suspension as partisanship or ideology – because users who were Republican/conservative were much more likely to share low quality information than users who were Democrat/liberal.

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If you subscribe to TPM, read Josh Marshall’s “Elon Musk and the Narcissism/Radicalization Maelstrom“. He documents Musk’s rapid radicalization in recent weeks.

He’s done with general “free speech” grievance and springing for alternative viewpoints. He’s routinely pushing all the far right storylines from woke groomers to great replacement.

Marshall makes an apt comparison to Donald Trump, who had vague “dark political impulses and beliefs going back decades,” long before the 2016 campaign. But during that campaign he filled in his views to move to where the applause was loudest and the worship the most intense, i.e., the far right. Musk is doing something similar, but at light speed.

If you’re not a TPM subscriber, check out “Elon Musk has gone full authoritarian” by Dustin Rowles, which covers much of the same ground.

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Found on Mastodon: “50 Ways to Leave Your Twitter” by Jon Reed

You just pin your last tweet, Pete …

From there it kind of writes itself.

and protests

Iranian soccer players didn’t sing their national anthem at the World Cup, apparently in support of the protests that have been going on in that country for the last two months. A girls’ basketball team posted to Instagram a team photo in which none of them wore hijabs.

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Chinese protesters want the Covid quarantines lifted. It doesn’t seem to be working. China recently had a record 31K new infections in a day, which is actually not that bad by American standards. (We’re averaging about 42K per day, with a much smaller population.) But our cases are less serious because of our vaccines. China relied on a homegrown vaccine, which was never as effective as the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, and hasn’t been updated for Omicron.

In America, the point of lockdowns was to buy time for vaccines to arrive. It pretty much worked.

but I’d like to talk about two recent books

One of the featured posts discusses Yascha Mounk’s The Great Experiment and Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest.

and you also might be interested in …

Rachel Maddow’s 8-episode podcast Ultra is complete now. You can binge the whole thing rather than parcel it out week-by-week. It’s the story of American fascists, some directly allied with the Hitler government, who plotted to overthrow democracy in the 1930s and 1940s. The pro-Nazi effort included a couple dozen members of Congress, as well as armed militias in various parts of the country.

Rachel’s theme, which she obviously intends as a lesson applicable to the present, is that the justice system by itself was not able to deal with these plotters, who had enough resources and behind-the-scenes influence to stymie prosecution even after the plot was uncovered. The big names in the plot — Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana and Rep. Hamilton Fish III of New York — never went to jail. (And yes, the Hamilton Fish Bridge on I-84 is indeed named after him and his son, Hamilton Fish IV. I’ve driven over it.) But they did get voted out after the scandal came to light.

yes, the courtroom might have maybe been a more satisfying place for these members of Congress to face consequences for what they had done. But the voters did it instead once they had the information they needed about what those members of Congress had been up to. It’s not jail-time accountability, but it is political accountability.

I’m sure she intends Ultra to be an argument against a let-Jack-Smith-do-it attitude towards Trump and our current crop of fascists. We need anti-fascist and pro-democracy activity at all levels.

What was required then, in the 1940s, was all of it. It was the plucky, creative, heroic efforts of clever, brave Americans, journalists, activists, lawyers, people of faith, citizens of all stripes who came to democracy’s aid when it needed them the most. That is what got us through back then. And now, almost a full century later, we get to learn from what they left us. We inherit their work.

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Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system took weeks to produce final results, but they’re in: Democrat Mary Peltola held the House seat that she won in a special election earlier this year, once again defeating Sarah Palin. Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski held her seat against a Trump-backed challenger.

In spite of the delay, I’ve become a fan of Alaska’s system. They hold a jungle primary where all candidates are on the same ballot. The top four vote-getters move on to the general election, where voters are allowed to rank them. Votes are then tabulated in rounds. In each round, the lowest vote-getter is eliminated and his/her votes are distributed according to the voters’ rankings. After at most two rounds of redistribution, somebody has a majority.

There are grounds for criticizing this system. For example, a candidate who was the second choice of literally everyone could be eliminated for not getting enough first-choice votes, even though the preferences might indicate that the eliminated candidate would have won one-on-one races against each of the other three. (Something like this appears to have happened to Republican Nick Begich in the special election.) But no system is perfect; there’s an actual theorem that proves it. This system seems better than most, and is a real improvement over the way elections work almost everywhere else.

The major benefit is that a moderate candidate can win by getting support from people of both parties plus independents, even though that candidate would have lost either party’s primary. That’s what Murkowski appears to have done this time.

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New York magazine’s Intelligencer explains the FTX crypto collapse at many different levels of sophistication. I’ll let you find your own level.

The thing I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around is that Sam Bankman-Fried’s net worth was estimated at $16 billion earlier this month, but more recently “Bloomberg Billionaires Index considered Bankman-Fried to have no material wealth.” Seems like he could have tucked a few hundred million under a floorboard somewhere.

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Josh Marshall nails something in this tweetstorm about guys who label themselves “alpha males”, like conservative author Nick Adams.

An Alpha, to the extent the term has any meaning, is the guy who the other guys get behind. Girls are into him. Charisma. Big man on campus, etc. … Back in the real world, being alpha can’t ever be a “hard job” since that’s basically the opposite of what being an alpha is – dominant, powerful, assertive and – critically – the ability to pull those things off. … If you’re going around constantly saying you’re an “alpha” and how it’s just getting harder and harder to do and things are tough all over and everyone’s being such dicks to the “alphas” and wow inflation is so high I can’t afford the chicken wings at Hooters… well, you’re pretty clearly doing it wrong.

In other words, alphahood isn’t a lifestyle you can choose. It’s something that either shows up in your life or it doesn’t.

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The NYT published its annual assault on my ego: The 100 Notable Books of 2022. Usually I’ve read one or two of them, but this year it’s zero. The WaPo lists ten best books, which I have also read none of.

and let’s close with something that saves time

I’ve closed before with John Atkinson’s cartoons, particularly his radically condensed versions of classic novels. As we enter into the Christmas season, it’s a good time to recall Atkinson’s retelling of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

Every county, every vote. … I never expected that we were going to turn these red counties blue. But we did what we needed to do. And we had that conversation across every one of those counties. And tonight, that’s why I’ll be the next U.S. senator from Pennsylvania.

– John Fetterman

This week’s featured post is “Notes on the midterm elections“.

This week everybody was talking about the midterms

That’s the subject of the featured post.

I noticed this too late to include in that post, but it perfectly illustrates how unlikely MAGA Republicans are to learn from their mistakes. Like their object of worship, they don’t make mistakes, so how could they learn from them?

The American Greatness blog has put its finger on who’s to blame for MAGA candidates’ failure: the voters.

The problem here is voter quality.

The picture we got from Tuesday is that of a decadent, vegetative electorate easily swayed by platitudes and sentimental appeals, fervently attached to its entitlements. … Republicans performed well with married men and women—the people who should be the center of our civic life, while Democrats dominated with unmarried women and the twitchy, nihilist Gen Z. 

Again: voter quality.

The writer only expects things to get worse “after another 10 or 15 years of mass immigration have taken their toll”. He doesn’t say it, but the obvious answer is to give up on democracy entirely and take power by force.

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David Frum recalls how after 2016, reporters from the “liberal media” went on tours of small-town diners to connect with the white-working-class voters that had surprised them by turning out for Trump. Lots of liberals (me, for example), read J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy in an attempt to understand. He wishes MAGA Republicans would do something similar now, but he doesn’t believe they will. He quotes historian Bernard Lewis:

The question, ‘Who did this to us?’ has led only to neurotic fantasies and conspiracy theories. The other question—‘What did we do wrong?’—has led naturally to a second question, ‘How do we put it right?’ In that question … lie[s] the best hope for the future.

and Twitter

It’s been stunning to watch how quickly Elon Musk has destroyed his reputation as a great businessman. The problem in a nutshell is that Twitter’s revenue comes from advertising, and most advertisers hate to have their ad next to hate speech. It’s just a bad association. So they got spooked when Musk described himself as a “free speech absolutist” and fired Twitter’s content-moderation people. That flight of advertisers tanked the company’s revenue, and now Musk is floating the possibility of bankruptcy.

One of the more interesting takes on this situation comes from Josh Marshall. Marshall’s TPM site used to be supported by advertising, but after years of trying to make an advertising model work he moved to a subscription model. (His Twitter article is behind his paywall, so I’ll quote liberally.)

Because of that, for upwards of fifteen years I had to deeply immerse myself not only in the advertising business generally but in the niche of advertising in political media. It was a huge part of my work for years and I had to understand it really, really well — because the existence of TPM depended on it. …

When I first got into advertising, TPM was hot. We had a big audience and it was pretty clear that it was just a matter of agreeing to sell this lucrative ad space. Our audience was educated, fairly well off. We would print money.

I soon realized it was quite a bit more complicated.

It’s not just that advertisers don’t want to be near hate speech or awful things. It goes way beyond that. They want to tell you about their brand when you’re in a good, comfortable, feel-good moment.

He points out that the Drudge Report had a huge audience for many years, but it never had high-quality advertisers, because it was “hot and contentious” and left its readers in an “agitated state”.

This aspect of the advertising business is actually a big, big reason for what we sometimes call “bothsides” journalism. This is often presented as an outmoded style of journalism. It’s really more a business model. In a politically polarized society advertisers are very, very cautious about giving any hint that they are taking sides in the great political or political factional controversies of the day.

So while it may look like Musk has gotten into the social media business, actually he has gotten into the advertising business, which he doesn’t understand.

He wants to be the world’s biggest troll, play to his new far-right/Trumpy fan base and have all the high dollar national brand advertisers flock to the platform he just wildly overpaid for. That was always an absurd proposition.

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Wish I’d said this: “Buying Twitter is Musk’s invasion of Ukraine.” Guys who surround themselves with people who believe they are geniuses eventually start doing stupid things.

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Wired explains how Twitter has become a “scammer’s paradise“.

and Ukraine

Ukrainian troops have taken Kherson, a key Black Sea port that the Russians occupied in the early days of the invasion. President Zelenskyy visited there today, and vowed that “We are step by step coming to all the temporarily occupied territories.”

I’m not an expert on Russian or Ukrainian culture, but I know that the folklore is full of heroes who confidently bluff and bluster. I remember Boris Yeltsin — backed by nobody in particular at the time — standing on a tank outside the Parliament building and announcing that he would see the leaders of the ongoing coup brought to justice. It worked.

It’s hard to imagine a bigger contrast of imagery than Zelenskyy touring a front-line city versus Putin sitting alone at the end of his long table. One of them is a folk hero and the other isn’t. I have to think that the people of both countries see that.

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Last week I linked to Masha Gessen’s warning in The New Yorker that Putin might really use nukes. Now Alexander Gabuev is saying something similar in The Atlantic.

and Trump’s legal situation

Getting past the midterms has reawakened speculation about when or whether Trump might be indicted for a variety of crimes. (DoJ policy discourages indictments that might influence an election.) The source I trust most here is Marcy Wheeler. She’s been following the investigations closely, but tries to avoid making sensational claims that she’ll have to walk back later.

An indictment of Trump is not going to happen today. In the stolen document case, that’s likely true because DOJ will first want to ensure access to the unclassified documents seized in August, something that won’t happen until either the 11th Circuit decision reverses Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to appoint a Special Master (that will be ripe for a hearing after November 17) or after a judgement from Special Master Raymond Dearie on December 16 that Cannon chooses to affirm. It’s not impossible, however, that DOJ will take significant actions before then — perhaps by arresting one or more of Trump’s suspected co-conspirators in hoarding the documents, or by executing warrants at other Trump properties to find the documents still believed to be missing.

The next most likely indictment to drop is in the fake-electors scheme, but Wheeler thinks there’s a layer of conspirators who will be indicted before Trump. Ditto for January 6. She isn’t sure what to predict about the Fulton County election-tampering investigation, which is still is fighting to get testimony from Lindsey Graham and a few other witnesses. (One objection I have to the media coverage of these battles: They’re being treated as if avoiding testifying is a normal thing to do, and few are drawing the obvious conclusion that Graham et al know things they don’t want investigators to know.)

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Meanwhile, the lawyers who filed Trump’s massive (and quickly dismissed) lawsuit against everyone involved in starting the Trump/Russia investigation (i.e., Hillary Clinton, Jim Comey, and 29 others) have been sanctioned by the judge in the case. He ordered them to pay $50K to the court and $16K in legal fees to Charles Dolan, the defendant who asked for sanctions. Such sanctions are warranted under the law when a lawsuit’s claims are “objectively frivolous” and “the person who signed the pleadings should have been aware they were frivolous”.

The judge’s order says:

Plaintiff deliberately misrepresented public documents by selectively using some portions while omitting other information including findings and conclusions that contradicted his narrative. This occurred with the Danchenko Indictment, the Department of Justice Inspector General’s Report for Operation Hurricane, and the Mueller Report. It was too frequent to be accidental.

Every claim was frivolous, most barred by settled, well-established existing law. These were political grievances masquerading as legal claims. This cannot be attributed to incompetent lawyering. It was a deliberate use of the judicial system to pursue a political agenda.

But the courts are not intended for performative litigation for purposes of fundraising and political statements.

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Trump’s last-ditch attempt to avoid showing his tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee is at the Supreme Court. The six partisan Republican justices could do their buddy a solid just by dragging their feet until Republicans take over the House (assuming they do) in January. I expect the Court to avoid this unsavory option and make an actual ruling, but it’s an open question.

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Trump’s former chief of staff and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly is the latest ex-official to describe attempted wrong-doing. He doesn’t have a book to sell, but …

Mr. Kelly said he chose to respond now because Mr. Trump had publicly claimed last week that he had used the Justice Department and the F.B.I. to help Gov. Ron DeSantis win election in Florida in 2018. Mr. Kelly, who was Mr. Trump’s chief of staff at the time, said Mr. Trump never made such a request. If he had, Mr. Kelly said, it would have been an improper use of the Justice Department and the F.B.I.

(MSN fact-checked Trump’s statement and found “no evidence” to support it.) Kelly went on to describe other times when Trump wanted to misuse the IRS and other government agencies to help his friends or harm his enemies.

“I would say, ‘It’s inappropriate, it’s illegal, it’s against their integrity and the I.R.S. knows what it’s doing and it’s not a good idea,’” Mr. Kelly said he told Mr. Trump.

“Yeah, but they’re writing bad things about me,” Mr. Kelly said Mr. Trump told him.

A spokesman for Trump denied the claims, calling Kelly “a psycho”.

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Meanwhile, Mike Pence does have a book to sell, so he’s finally dishing on Trump. Trump’s “reckless” words on January 6, he says, “endangered me and my family”. Maybe he should have told the Senate that during the second impeachment trial.

and you also might be interested in …

A Trump-appointed judge has blocked Biden’s student-loan forgiveness program. This case will have to work its way through the system before anybody sees debt relief.

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A study in the New England Journal of Medicine compared Massachusetts school districts that dropped mask mandates to those that maintained them. Conclusion: masks work.

Among school districts in the greater Boston area, the lifting of masking requirements was associated with an additional 44.9 Covid-19 cases per 1000 students and staff during the 15 weeks after the statewide masking policy was rescinded.

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Two more raped minors have had to leave Ohio to get abortions.

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Remember that billion dollars Alex Jones is supposed to pay to the Sandy Hook parents? That was just the actual damages. A judge has added another $473 million of punitive damages.

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Dean Baker points out something important: In the early years of the 21st century, health-care spending as a percentage of GDP was headed inexorably upward. That seemingly unstoppable trend caused economists to make a lot of ominous projections. But instead health-care inflation moderated, and the percent of GDP spent on healthcare is now below where it was in 2014, when ObamaCare was implemented.

This is an example of how good government is hard to campaign on. Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act in March of 2010, and then got clobbered in the 2010 midterms, largely because Republicans were able to raise so many fears about “death panels“, rationing, and all sorts of other things ObamaCare supposedly included.

So here’s to all the Democrats in Congress who lost their seats in 2010 because they did the right thing. The purpose of having power should be to use it well, not to hang onto it.

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Friday wasn’t just Veterans’ Day, it was also Kurt Vonnegut’s 100th birthday. I recently passed through Indianapolis, Vonnegut’s home town, and went to the Vonnegut museum there. I particularly enjoyed reading Vonnegut’s rejection letters from publishers, which are framed and hung on the wall.

and let’s close with something powerful

Like a fleet of snowplows. Last year, the Minnesota Department of Transportation started a contest to name new snowplows. Predictably, the big winner was Plowy McPlowface.

But now that the obvious name is out of the way, things have gotten more interesting. The next generation of plows named by the public display much more creativity.

Runner-up names are also listed. My favorite is Sled Zeppelin.