The Weekly Sift

NO SIFT NEXT WEEK. THE NEXT NEW POSTS WILL APPEAR ON FEBRUARY 27.

If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant.

– Sun Tzu, The Art of War

This week’s featured post is “Choose your enemies well“.

This week everybody was talking about the State of the Union

In the featured post, I describe why Biden’s speech was strategically brilliant. Joe Biden will never have Barack Obama’s skillful delivery, but Tuesday he pulled off a maneuver Sun Tzu would have appreciated: He occupied an easily defended position and then baited his opponents into attacking him there.

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One thing I forgot to mention about Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the Republican SOTU response: She painted Biden’s America as a dystopia and blamed Democratic policies. I was struck by this quote:

After years of democratic attacks on law enforcement and calls to defund the police, violent criminals roam free while law-abiding families live in fear.

It’s worthwhile to look up the states with the highest homicide rates in the country, as of 2020 (the most recent year I could find statistics for): Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Missouri, and Arkansas. All have Republican legislatures, and only one (Louisiana) has a Democratic governor. So whatever might be causing violent crime, I doubt it’s Democratic proposals for police reform.

and the earthquake

I don’t have anything to add to the mainstream media reports. The death toll continues to rise as would-be rescuers dig bodies out of the rubble. It’s currently up to 36,000.

and House Republicans’ hearings

When Republicans took control of the House, the big thing they promised (other than the debt-ceiling hostage crisis currently scheduled for June) was investigation. A few of their planned topics are legitimately things Congress should look into, like how people defrauded Covid relief programs and whether there was a better way to withdraw from Afghanistan. Good hearings on these topics could generate lessons for future Congresses.

But most of what McCarthy & Company have planned is political theater, meant to popularize and legitimize right-wing conspiracy theories: Anthony Fauci’s role in creating the Covid virus, the Twitter/FBI conspiracy against Trump, some previously unenumerated set of crimes that Hunter Biden’s laptop supposedly proves, and so on.

Kevin McCarthy’s problems securing the speakership delayed opening night, but now the hearings are underway. Sadly for him, though, they’re not going according to plan. You see, unlike the auditions that Fox News has been airing for two years now, the actual hearings include Democrats, some of whom are quite smart and do their homework. (My favorite source for clips from these hearings is to follow Acyn on Twitter.)

For example, House Weaponization Committee Chair Jim Jordan called “expert” witness Jonathan Turley to testify that

The Twitter Files raise serious questions of whether the United States government is now a partner in what may be the largest censorship system in our history. The involvement cuts across the Executive Branch, with confirmed coordination with agencies ranging from the CDC to the CIA. Even based on our limited knowledge, the size of this censorship system is breathtaking, and we only know of a fraction of its operations through the Twitter Files.

But then Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz made him admit that he doesn’t actually know anything beyond the cherry-picked claims the rest of us have seen.

DWS: Mr. Turley turning to you. Have you ever worked for Twitter?
Turley: No.
DWS: Do you have any formal relationship with the company?
Turley: No.
DWS: Do you have any specific or special or unique knowledge about the inner workings of Twitter?
Turley: Nothing beyond the Twitter Files and what I read in the media.

In this clip from the House Oversight Committee, AOC interviews Anika Collier Navaroli, a former member of Twitter’s content moderation team. She reviews then-President Trump tweeting that AOC and three other women of color in Congress should “go back where they came from”, and gets Navaroli to verify that:

• At that time, Twitter’s content moderation guide specifically mentioned telling immigrants to “go back where you came from” as an example of banned abuse.
• A higher official at Twitter overrode the content-moderation team’s assessment that Trump was in violation of the site’s policy.
• Within days, that example was removed from the content moderation guide.

AOC: So Twitter changed their own policy after the President violated it, in order to essentially accommodate his tweet?
Navaroli: Yes.
AOC: Thank you. So much for bias against the right wing on Twitter.

That hearing was supposed to focus on a nefarious conspiracy between Twitter and Democrats in government to suppress free speech. But in fact the most striking case was of Trump trying to get a tweet by model Chrissy Tiegen removed because she called him a “pussy ass bitch”. (Trump can dish it out, but he can’t take it. Maybe that’s because he’s a … no, I won’t repeat it.)

And then there’s this epic rant by Rep. Jared Moskowitz. No single quote stands out; it’s just an end-to-end takedown. Along the way, he mentions this recent article from the WaPo, describing the direct financial benefits that Donald Trump and Jared Kushner have gotten from their relationship with Saudi Crown Prince MBS. The corruption described is much less speculative than what Hunter Biden is accused of.

The House Oversight Committee’s hearings about the border are also revealing more than Republicans expected. This full hearing is three hours, but if you skip to 1:40, you can hear Scott Perry (of 1-6 conspiracy fame) question John Modlin, chief of the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector. Perry quotes statistics showing that more migrants were apprehended at the border after Biden took office, and then badgers Modlin to tell him “what changed?”, clearly fishing for a condemnation of the Biden administration. Instead, Modlin explains that during post-arrest interviews, migrants said that they thought the border was open now.

Perry: The migrants said that they thought the border was open, right?
Modlin: Yes.
Perry: Why did they think that?
Modlin: They thought that, sir. … well, I don’t know. What they told us was that they had heard it was open. Sir, in my experience, it only takes a few people to say the right words, and it travels.

Why did they think the border was open? I don’t know, Scott. Maybe it’s because lying about Biden’s “open border” policy has been a major Republican talking point. (In the last Congress, for example, a number of Republicans introduced the “Close Biden’s Open Border Act“.) Maybe migrants think the border is open because they listen to people like you.

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George Santos is not unique. There also appear to be problems with the story Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) tells about herself.

but I want to give you an example of what “sifting” means

Every week, I see upsetting headlines that I decide are not worth your attention. This week, I ran across one so perfect that I thought I would highlight it as an example of the kinds of links you should ignore when they appear on your news feed: “Bill would ban the teaching of scientific theories in Montana schools“.

I have to confess that my first reaction was “Bill Who?”. But then I clicked through and read the article and the proposed legislation it’s based on.

Here’s what it’s about: A newly elected member of the Montana Senate introduced a truly stupid two-page piece of legislation that would limit K-12 science classes to teaching “scientific fact”, which it defines as “an indisputable and repeatable observation of a natural phenomenon”. Anything else is a “theory”, which is “speculation and is for higher education to explore, debate, and test to ultimately reach a scientific conclusion of fact or fiction”.

The bill looks like an attempt to get theories like evolution or climate change out of the K-12 curriculum. But the author clearly has no idea what “fact” and “theory” mean in a scientific context. A fact is something immediately observable, like where Jupiter is in the sky at a particular moment. A theory is a model that explains facts; the solar system, for example. (You can never “observe” the solar system. You can just observe where the planets are.) And no matter how many facts go into forming a theory, or how often a theory is confirmed by observation, it never becomes “indisputable”. (Think how many times Newton’s laws were confirmed by experiment before scientists started testing them near the speed of light, where they don’t work.)

So the whole idea that science chews on theories until they become “fact or fiction” is misguided. Theories and facts are two different kinds of things; one never becomes the other. (The missing word here is hypothesis, which is an insufficiently tested theory. Science tests hypotheses against observations until they are either disproved or become increasingly trustworthy.)

OK then, it’s a dumb bill that would, among other things, ban Montana schools from teaching kids about the solar system. But why do I say you shouldn’t concern yourself with it? Wouldn’t this be a terrible law?

Yes, of course it would. But so far it’s just one ignorant man spouting off. If you live in Great Falls and he happens to be your senator, you should care. But nothing about the bill indicates that it’s on its way to becoming law. It has one sponsor. It has been heard by the relevant committee, which took no action on it. And the bill’s official record already includes a “legal review note“; two lawyers working for the legislature point out that it would violate the Montana constitution, which doesn’t give the legislature this kind of power over curricula.

Conclusion: Don’t waste your energy getting upset about this bill.

Every week, I see stuff like this and decide not to call it to your attention. Thought you should know.

and you also might be interested in …

Every day or two now, we hear about another atmospheric object that the Pentagon is shooting down. There’s still no good explanation of what they are, who put them there, and what they were intended to do. The Atlantic Juliet Kayyem offers a simple if still speculative explanation: Maybe we’re seeing more of these objects because we’ve started looking harder.

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Mike Pence has been subpoenaed by Special Counsel Jack Smith. This move opens up all kinds of speculation: about how close Smith is to charging Trump for his role in instigating the January 6 riot, whether Trump will claim executive privilege to prevent Pence’s testimony, and so on.

When it comes to Trump’s legal jeopardy, I’m just about done with speculation. Wake me up when somebody — whether it’s Smith or prosecutors in Georgia, in New York, or somewhere else — either file charges or announce that they’re not filing charges.

Meanwhile, more classified documents have turned up at Mar-a-Lago, including some that were scanned onto an aide’s laptop.

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I’m growing increasingly suspicious of all the Kamala-Harris-has-a-problem columns I’ve been seeing in the NYT and elsewhere, almost from the moment she was sworn in. I didn’t support Harris when she ran for president in the 2020 primaries, and she wouldn’t be my first choice in 2024 if Biden decides not to run. But I’m not sure what standard she is failing to meet as vice president. I mean, was Mike Pence such a dynamic presence in the Trump administration?

The typical vice president stays in the background. George H. W. Bush’s main duty in the Reagan administration was to attend funerals of foreign leaders. Biden and Obama seemed to have a good relationship, but it was never particularly clear what Biden did in the administration. (Biden was often the comic relief, as in this cartoon about the trillion-dollar coin.) Al Gore was overshadowed by Hillary Clinton. Dick Cheney was a power-behind-the-throne in the George W. Bush administration, but that never seemed like a good thing. And the less said about Dan Quayle the better.

So what’s wrong with Kamala Harris? In my view, the most important duty of a VP is to avoid any appearance of conflict with the president. Otherwise, people with guns might get the idea that they can change the course of the nation by killing the president, as Leon Czolgosz did when he shot President McKinley and put Teddy Roosevelt into office. Done right, the vice presidency is not a job that lends itself to carving out a charismatic public persona.

I admit, Harris is not making a great case for why she should be president after Biden. But no VP does; if a current VP runs for president, the race almost always hinges on the popularity of the current president. So the more criticism of Harris I see, the more I suspect she is being judged by some special woman-of-color standard that hasn’t applied to any previous VP.

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Twitter sounds like a terrible place to work these days. Recently, Elon Musk called a meeting to get an explanation of why his account’s engagement numbers are tanking. One of the engineers provided such an explanation: Musk is becoming less popular. Internal Twitter statistics say so, and so does his Google Trends score, which peaked at 100 in April and is now down to 9.

Musk had been looking for some way that Twitter’s algorithms are biased against him, which turns out not to be true. He fired the engineer.

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It sounds like Jim Crow is coming back in Mississippi:

A white supermajority of the Mississippi House voted after an intense, four-plus hour debate to create a separate court system and an expanded police force within the city of Jackson — the Blackest city in America — that would be appointed completely by white state officials. … The appointments by state officials would occur in lieu of judges and prosecutors being elected by the local residents of Jackson and Hinds County — as is the case in every other municipality and county in the state.

The bill isn’t law yet, though. It still has to be passed by the state senate and signed by the governor.

The alleged purpose of the new system is to deal with Jackson’s crime problem. Why new funding has to go through a new state-appointed system rather than the existing Jackson system has not been adequately explained.

“This is just like the 1890 Constitution all over again,” [Black Democrat Rep. Ed] Blackmon said from the floor. “We are doing exactly what they said they were doing back then: ‘Helping those people because they can’t govern themselves.’”

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The greenhouse effect that causes global warming is more complicated than I thought.

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The price of electric vehicles is coming down and should continue to fall, according to the NYT. Three factors are coming together:

• Production costs are falling, due to new mines opening and supply chains sorting themselves out.
• Competition between manufacturers is increasing, as legacy car manufacturers like Ford and GM expand their offerings.
• The Inflation Reduction Act included EV rebates.

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A bit of right-wing rhetoric I haven’t decoded yet: Instead of talking about China, right-wingers talk about “the Chinese Communist Party”. One typical example comes from Marc Thiessen‘s column the WaPo:

Instead of using his speech this week to report to the American people on the recent incursion of a Chinese spy balloon and lay out a strategy to confront the danger posed by the Chinese Communist Party, Biden made only an elliptical reference

I see this again and again — and the Right doesn’t do this kind of thing by accident — but I don’t have an explanation: Why isn’t it “the danger posed by China” or even “posed by President Xi”? Anybody out there know?

and let’s close with something tiny

Every year, Nikon runs a variety of photo contests, including one devoted to microphotography. Winners are collected on Nikon’s Small World web site. Winning photos are unfailingly beautiful, even if you can’t begin to figure out what you’re seeing until you read the caption. This one, for example, is “blood vessel networks in the intestine of an adult mouse”.

We cannot mistake absurdity for lack of danger. … Absurdity always makes you think something is more benign than it is.

– Jon Stewart, on George Santos

This week’s featured posts are “Gas stoves, freedom, and the politics of distraction” and “How can Democrats win back rural America?“.

I will warn you that this week’s summary is unusually long, being the first one in three weeks. I used the time away from the Sift to focus on public speaking. One talk: “Whatever happened to the citizen journalist?” examines the good and bad ways the internet has changed news, using the history of the Weekly Sift as an example of (what I hope is) good change. I also led a church service, but the YouTube isn’t up yet.

These last three weeks everybody was talking about the new Congress

In an otherwise disappointing set of midterm elections for Republicans, they did manage to eke out a small majority in the House of Representatives. They did that largely by running against inflation and crime, while GOP candidates who focused on election denial and other extreme MAGA issues tended to fail — unless (like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz) they were in districts that any Republican could win.

But now that Kevin McCarthy has secured the speakership, we’re hearing virtually nothing about inflation and crime (probably because Republicans never had a plan to deal with either). Instead, the focus has been on setting up a debt-ceiling crisis to force Democrats to agree to long-term cuts in Social Security and Medicare, as well as getting revenge on Democrats and on government officials who investigated the crimes of President Trump.

The sleight of hand reminds me of a passage in Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter With Kansas?.

The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization.

Republicans could have run on cutting Social Security so that billionaires and corporations can keep the benefits of the Trump tax cuts. But they would have gotten clobbered, so they didn’t.

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Rep. Russell Fry (R-SC) gives the new GOP House majority credit because “We fired 87,000 IRS agents.” I’m glad to see the 87K IRS agents incident come to a successful conclusion. I am reminded of the Khrushchev quote that provides the title for Rick Perlstein’s book The Invisible Bridge:

If the people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.

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On a party-line vote, the House established a new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which will be chaired by Jim Jordan, a suspected January 6 conspirator who defied a subpoena from the January 6 committee. Its Republican members will include numerous election-deniers, and even Scott Perry, who is alleged to have sought a pardon from Trump for his role in the attempted coup.

If you want to consider what “weaponization of government” really looks like, read the NYT’s look back on the Durham investigation and the Durham/Barr relationship. You can expect Jordan’s committee to serve the same purpose Durham’s investigation did: It will provide plenty of fodder for Fox News hosts to speculate about the horrible crimes and scandals the committee is about to uncover, but it won’t actually uncover anything significant. Afterwards, regular Fox-watchers will believe that it did find something, but they either won’t be able to give you details about whatever it was, or they will recall testimony that in fact never happened.

(Occasionally I still see people wearing t-shirts pledging to remember Benghazi, and I always wonder how much of what they recall is real.)

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George Santos has been the comic relief of the new House majority. Every few days has produced either the explosion of some outrageously false claim he made, or evidence of some grift in his past.

So far, the GOP and Speaker McCarthy have been unable or unwilling to remove Santos, partly due to McCarthy’s small majority (which can’t afford to lose Santos’ vote), and partly because grifting is now deep in the party’s identity.

and violence

It was a bad week for squeamish viewers of the news. Video from January 7 of Memphis police beating Tyre Nichols (who died from his injuries) was released. And we also got to see video of the Paul Pelosi attack. California has also had six mass shootings in January.

The Nichols video led to protest marches over the weekend, but they seem to have stayed peaceful, with rare exceptions that Fox News naturally highlighted. (The worst they could find was a guy who was arrested in New York for kicking in the windshield of a police cruiser. He and two others were arrested. The police were unharmed.)

I suspect that the reason the protests were peaceful was that Memphis has taken the incident seriously. It fired the five officers quickly, and has now arrested and charged them with second-degree murder. It also has disbanded the unit the officers belonged to. Now we’ll see if the city (and other cities) follows up with police reform.

A point the press sometimes misses is that public anger usually isn’t about the event itself, but about the official response to the event. If the public is confident that the institutional response will be prompt and appropriate, protest isn’t necessary.

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The most irresponsible coverage I saw came from Tucker Carlson, who (based on apparently nothing) warned his viewers that Antifa would be organizing riots in major cities.

These riots, of course, did not happen, and it’s not clear that an organization called “Antifa” with the capability of organizing a national string of riots even exists. Tucker did an amazing job of making his lack of any actual facts sound ominous:

Antifa is being organized. By whom? We don’t know. Why don’t we know? To do what? We can’t say right now. But we know for certain that in cities across the country right now, Antifa is mobilizing to commit violence. This is a political militia. So the question is: Who’s benefiting from it? Those are the people you ought to be asking questions of.

Maybe, though, we don’t know much about Antifa because there’s not much to know. Maybe it’s not an organization, but just a label that Fox attaches to certain kinds of events, including a lot of events that don’t happen.

and the Georgia grand jury

Earlier this month, the Georgia grand jury investigating Trump’s attempt to reverse Georgia’s 2020 presidential election result submitted its final report. Tuesday, a judge yielded to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ request to keep that report sealed for now, so we don’t know whether the grand jury recommended any indictments for Trump or any of his henchmen. (This was a special grand jury impaneled to investigate, but without the power to indict.)

Willis, however, has seen the report, and her reasons for keeping it sealed implied charges are coming for someone:

Willis argued Tuesday that disclosing the report now could violate the rights of potential defendants and could negatively affect the ability to prosecute those who may be charged with crimes.

The airwaves are full of speculation, but I think we just need to wait and see. Willis said a decision on criminal charges is “imminent”, which could mean days or weeks, but probably not months. That’s the extent of my speculation. If you want more, the Christian Science Monitor does a good job of presenting why Trump might or might not be charged.

and classified documents

Biden’s classified document problem muddied the waters, and now Mike Pence’s similar issue threatens to turn it all into a farce. I stand by what I wrote last week, and extend the argument to cover Pence: While the Trump, Biden, and Pence situations have a surface similarity that makes them politically difficult, they are unrelated legally, and I hope the Justice Department pursues the three investigations separately. Whether or not Trump committed indictable crimes has no bearing on whether Biden or Pence did.

Some writers are trying to turn this into a discussion about overclassification and the bloated system of classified documents. Those are legitimate concerns, but I don’t see the relevance. Whether you have one classified document or a thousand, you should take care of them, even if nothing in them seems all that important.

It’s like stop signs. When you’re driving in the middle of the night, it seems really stupid that there are all these stop signs. But you should stop anyway.

and China’s declining population

One of the odder stories of the last few weeks has to do with China losing population. You’d think this would be a positive development, given how hard China has worked over the years to control its population. A flat or declining population in China could be the harbinger of a flat or declining world population. That would lessen the human strain on the planet’s carrying capacity, and maybe lead to a future of abundance rather than destitution.

Strangely, though, most coverage of the story was doom and gloom. The NYT framed the decline as a “demographic crisis“, and followed up with an explanatory article two days later: “Why China’s Shrinking Population is Cause for Alarm“.

The alarms ringing at the NYT include (1) fewer young-adult Chinese could force businesses to move factory work to other countries (like Mexico and Vietnam); and (2) fewer Chinese consumers could shrink the global market for goods. In addition, there’s the internal-to-China problem of elder care, caused by the combination of low birth rates and higher life expectancy.

But I’m having trouble seeing the “cause for alarm”. If more Chinese are, say, living into their 80s, that probably means that many Chinese in their 70s are still pretty spry, and might be able to do some caretaking themselves. And if the world needs less production because there are fewer people consuming stuff, that just doesn’t seem like a problem to me.

Wired shares my sanguine attitude. For a variety of reasons, its article explains, countries that fall below 1.5 children per female have a hard time returning to replacement-level fertility. But while that means the population on average gets older, it doesn’t have to become proportionately sicker, more feeble, and less productive.

Fears about population aging are often guided by the false idea that older people are homogeneously ill, dependent, and unproductive. In fact, the average health of people over 60 has improved dramatically over the past decades. … We recently calculated the health-adjusted dependency ratio—the proportion of adults with the same or more aging-related disease burden as the global average 65-year-old—in 188 countries. Using this measure, we could demonstrate that many of the world’s chronologically oldest countries have the same or even lower aging-related burden than many of the world’s chronologically youngest countries. Our work suggests that China can effectively stay younger by investing in the health of its aging population.

In summary:

Measures that improve education, productivity, and health across the lifespan would ease the transition to a world with fewer children. It is possible for China—and the rest of the world—to decline and prosper.

A declining population will require some adjustments. But on the whole, I suspect it presents an easier set of problems than endless growth.

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A side note: China’s success in controlling its population means that India’s population should pass China’s sometime this year.

and gas stoves and other nonsense

That’s covered in one featured post.

but you might want to think about rural rage

and that’s the topic of the other.

and parents whose children question their gender identities

The NYT had a thought-provoking article “When Students Change Gender Identity, and Parents Don’t Know“, focusing on parents’ anger at teachers and schools when their kids start “socially transitioning” at school (using a different name, going to a different bathroom, etc.) and no one tells the parents. Columnist Michelle Goldberg followed up with “Trans Kids Deserve Private Lives Too“.

OK, I understand that there’s a lot here I can’t relate to from my own experience: I’ve never struggled with my gender identity and I’ve never been a parent. But there seems to be one point that the complaining parents (both in the article and in the comments) are refusing to grasp: The important communications problem is between them and their kids, not between them and the school.

Again and again, parents cast the school as taking an active role:

But dozens of parents whose children have socially transitioned at school told The Times they felt villainized by educators who seemed to think that they — not the parents — knew what was best for their children. They insisted that educators should not intervene without notifying parents unless there is evidence of physical abuse at home.

But the “intervention” here is just respecting the student’s confidence. (Goldberg raises the example of whether teachers should tell Muslim parents that their daughter has stopped wearing a hijab at school.) If a student is talking to a school counselor about gender issues, that’s because the student raised those issues. Counselors are not roaming the halls looking for kids they can convince to change gender.

To me, the idea that a child’s teachers are all agents of the parents sounds horrible. Children of my friends have occasionally shared secrets with me, and I have always kept them. As long as they weren’t planning to commit suicide or harm someone else, I hope I always would. It’s normal for kids to have thoughts they believe their parents wouldn’t approve — I certainly did — and it’s a blessing to have other adults you can talk to.

If parents are concerned about their child’s gender identity, they should talk to their child directly, not expect teachers the child has trusted to betray that trust.

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I ran the note above past a friend who is trained to counsel youth on gender issues, and they pointed me to the book Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon, which you can look at here.

Solomon, who is gay, is writing about the challenges of parent/child relationships where the child differs from the parent in some way that the parent finds hard to accept. He introduces the useful distinction between vertical identity (the traits that parents and children share that make identification in both directions easier) and horizontal identity (the ways they differ that make identification harder).

Every child, he proposes, has some of both. So in his model, cis parents of trans children are experiencing a magnified version of a problem that every parent faces. I like this model because it encourages empathy for all concerned. Solomon writes:

There is no such thing as reproduction. When two people decide to have a baby, they engage in an act of production, and the  widespread use of the word reproduction for this activity, with its implication that two people are but braiding themselves together, is at best a euphemism to comfort prospective parents before they get in over their heads.

My friend also pointed out why understanding the wide range of gender identities might be useful to someone who feels uncomfortable in their assigned gender: If all they know is the male/female dichotomy, they may interpret their discomfort to mean that they must be of the opposite gender, rather than something more nuanced. My friend attributed at least some of the examples of detransitioning — undoing a gender transition later in life — to this sort of confusion. (A recent Atlantic article urges us to take the detransition phenomenon seriously, while also not exaggerating its frequency.)

and you also might be interested in …

Trump will soon be back on Facebook, and probably Twitter too. He was banned partly for spreading misinformation, but mostly for fomenting violence on January 6. We’ll see how long he can go before fomenting violence again, and how the platforms will respond when he does.

If you believe, as I do, that his act is getting old even for some people who have supported him in the past, then giving him more exposure might work against him now.

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Ukraine will get tanks: American M-1s (eventually), German Leopard IIs, and British Challengers.

At the moment the front line in this war is mostly static, with a slight momentum for the Russians. Both sides are expected to launch offensives when the weather improves. The Economist (behind a paywall) has been generally pro-Ukrainian in its coverage, but recently it sounds like it’s spinning some disturbing facts. In an otherwise upbeat article about Ukrainian prospects, it says:

Ukraine’s edge in battlefield manpower is eroding, now that the Kremlin has mobilised 200,000-300,000 soldiers and may soon call up more. With Russia’s arms factories working triple shifts, Ukraine cannot outmatch it in brute firepower, given the West’s depleting stocks of arms.

I am uncomfortably reminded of the American Civil War. For a moment, put aside your feelings about the morality of either war and just look at the military situation: The North was richer and more populous than the South, so it had tremendous advantages in a war of attrition. The South generally had better leadership and higher morale, so it enjoyed much early success.

The war turned in the North’s favor when General Grant took command and accepted that if the war became a meat grinder, Lee’s army would be ground up first. He made a horrifying decision, but it did lead to victory.

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I don’t think Dianne Feinstein (who will turn 90 in June and is rumored to be suffering mental decline) has announced her retirement yet, but Democrats are lining up to compete for her Senate seat in 2024. Adam Schiff and Katie Porter have already announced, while Ro Khanna and Barabara Lee are making up their minds.

I’ve always liked Schiff, but my unresearched impression is that Katie Porter is something special. It’s early, though, and the campaign may change my mind.

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In other way-too-early election news, Ruben Gallego is challenging Kyrsten Sinema in the Arizona Democratic Senate primary. Republican Kari Lake has tagged him as “the AOC of Arizona“, which she seems to think is an insult.

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The arrest of Charles McGonigal, the former head of counter-intelligence in the FBI’s New York office, opens up lots of room for speculation about what happened in 2016. Allegedly, McGonigal was being paid by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who was also the guy who paid Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort millions of dollars.

Two moments when the FBI’s New York office may have tipped the scales in Trump’s favor stand out: (1) James Comey reopening the Hillary-email investigation just days before the 2016 election, allegedly out of fear the New York office would leak something, and (2) the NYT’s influential pre-election headline “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia“, which was based on anonymous “law enforcement officials”.

Timothy Snyder thinks there’s something there, but Marcy Wheeler disagrees. I don’t know enough yet to say. (Snyder’s blog is on Substack, which will ask you to subscribe, but let you read the post even if you don’t.)

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The Miami Herald has a report on the teacher-training sessions for teaching the State of Florida’s new civics standards. (It’s paywalled, but you should get one article free.) The training was described by one teacher as “straight-up indoctrination”. Another commented: “It was a bit different than a typical training. [Previously, trainers would] show us how to teach the information. But this time, instead of being shown how to implement the standards, they kind of went the opposite way. They presented this history as if none of us had learned it before.”

Basically, slavery and church/state separation are minimized, originalism is presented as the only legitimate way to interpret the Constitution, and the importance of Christianity in founding the US is emphasized. These are supposed to be taught as facts, not as issues knowlegeable people disagree over.

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Maybe you’ve seen those billboards claiming that a fetus has a heartbeat 18 days after conception. They’re usually accompanied by a picture of a baby, or maybe a fetus that looks almost fully formed.

I’ve been glad to see recent articles in both The Guardian and the NYT give a more realistic view of what gets removed from a woman during an early-term abortion. At five or six weeks, “the embryo is not typically visible to the naked eye”. What shows up in a post-abortion tissue examination is mostly the gestational sac, which is still tiny and looks nothing like a baby.

The image below is after seven weeks, and the gestational sac is about 3/4 of an inch wide.

Patients may come in for an abortion fearful at this stage, having read through forums or looked at images online. “They’re expecting to see a little fetus with hands – a developed, miniature baby.” Often, she says, “they feel they’ve been deceived.”

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On Vox, Ian Milhiser writes about the sudden resurfacing of laws that became irrelevant after the Roe decision, which haven’t been looked at by courts at least since 1973, and possibly a lot longer. Today, many of these laws would probably be considered unconstitutionally vague (like when they use terms like “indecent”). But they’re suddenly applicable again, even though nobody is sure what a court would say they mean. One such law is the 1873 Comstock Act, which says:

Every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose … Is declared to be nonmailable matter and shall not be conveyed in the mails or delivered from any post office or by any letter carrier.

But current DoJ policy

argues that the Comstock Act should be read narrowly to permit abortion-inducing drugs to be mailed “where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully.” This memo signals that, at least as long as President Joe Biden holds office, the DOJ will not prosecute mifepristone manufacturers and mail-order pharmacies under the Comstock Act — although it remains to be seen what happens if a Republican takes over.

Milhiser summarizes:

So, to summarize, abortion providers face a crush of older and uncertain restrictions, many of which can at least plausibly be read to prohibit them from performing very basic tasks — such as receiving a supply of mifepristone in the mail. State lawmakers have prepped a wide range of bills adding new restrictions to medication abortions. And the federal judiciary and many state courts are dominated by Republican appointees who reasonably can be expected to read abortion restrictions expansively, regardless of what the law actually says.

That’s bad news for anyone who needs a medication abortion.

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Rhonna McDaniel won a fourth term as Republican National Committee chair, defeating Harmeet Dhillon. Dhillon, a Sikh woman, faced what Politico called a “whisper campaign” targeting her faith. She tweeted:

To be very clear, no amount of threats to me or my team, or bigoted attacks on my faith traceable directly to associates of the chair, will deter me from advancing positive change at the RNC, which includes new standards of accountability, transparency, integrity, and decency.

After supporting a presidential candidate who called for a “total and complete shutdown on Muslims entering the United States“, Dhillon must have been horribly shocked to discover religious bigotry inside the GOP. Perhaps she should consider joining the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.

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and let’s close by getting out the vote in an important election

Voting is open to name the next set of Minnesota snowplows. My choices: Best in Snow, Han Snowlo, Mighty Morphin Plower Ranger, Sleetwood Mac, Plower to the People, and Alice Scooper.

One of the main conclusions of 2022 is that unpunished evil returns with even greater evil.

– Kira Rudik, member of the Ukrainian Parliament

This week’s featured post is “Partying Like It’s 1942“.

This week everybody was talking about 2022

In the featured post, I raise a possibility (not a certainty) that I find intriguing: Hinge years, when bad trends turn around, look a lot like 2022. They’re scary to live through, because horrible possibilities are constantly looming. But again and again, the worst doesn’t happen.

In 2022 we dodged a lot of bullets: Ukraine didn’t fall, NATO didn’t collapse, and MAGA candidates didn’t sweep the midterms. Early in the year, a lot of people imagined it might end with Trump triumphant: in firm control of the GOP, 1-6 in the rearview mirror, the 2024 nomination his for the taking, and election-denying secretaries of state ready to hand him a victory whether the voters want him or not.

Before good things can start happening, bad things need to stop happening. A lot of bad things didn’t happen in 2022.

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TPM awarded its annual Golden Dukes, which celebrate the cartoonishly corrupt and incompetent in American politics. This year’s winners:

Best Scandal, General Interest: Donald Trump, for the Mar-a-Lago documents

Best Scandal, Local Venue: the Patriot Front, for delivering themselves to the cops in a UHaul

Meritorious Achievement in the Crazy: Herschel Walker, for his vampire vs. werewolf speech

Most Cringe Campaign Ad/Meme: Dr. Oz, for his crudités

Most Convoluted Conspiracy Theory: Marjorie Taylor Greene, for Jewish space lasers*

Soon-to-be-forgotten Hero: Madison Cawthorne.

*I know: Jewish space lasers started in 2018, but she did have some tiff about it this year as well. And Lauren Boebert brought it up again. But really Italygate should have won in this category.

and Title 42

Title 42 is a 1944 law that lets the government to keep people from entering the US during a public health emergency. The Trump administration invoked it in March, 2020 to expel migrants at the southern border. The Biden administration has been trying to end the policy since May, but has been blocked by the courts. This week, the Supreme Court issued a stay, keeping Title 42 in effect until it can rule on a case it won’t even hear until February, and probably won’t rule on until June.

What’s embarrassing and infuriating about this whole story is the bad faith. Trump invoked this Covid emergency at a time when he was denying the seriousness of the pandemic in every other way. The point wasn’t to protect the country from Covid, which was already here and wasn’t any more prevalent among immigrants than among any other group. The pandemic was just a pretext for keeping immigrants out of the country.

Similarly today, the states that are trying to enter this case are the ones that have had the fewest Covid restrictions. They’re not trying to protect public health; they just don’t want immigrants.

And the Court’s majority is acting in bad faith as well, as Ian Millhiser explains on Vox. When the conservative majority likes the current administration’s policy (as it usually did when Trump was president), it acts swiftly to remove obstacles in the lower courts. When it doesn’t (as in the current case), it drags its feet and leaves obstacles in place.

In 2021, Trump-appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett delivered a speech at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center (named for Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell), in which she announced that her goal was “to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.” But if that is truly her goal, she and her colleagues might want to consider applying the same scheduling rules to cases brought by Republicans that her Court applies to cases brought by Democrats.

and 1-6 Committee Transcripts

This week was characterized by document dumps bigger than any one person could possibly process. Let us agree to forgive each other for not reading all the 1-6 Committee’s interview transcripts or six years of Trump’s tax returns.

The main thing that has come through for me is that the Committee was very selective about what it included in its public hearings. If it had just wanted to tell outrageous stories, it had plenty that it didn’t use: Mark Meadows burning documents, for example.

and Trump’s taxes

I continue to be of two minds about this. Obviously, Trump should have released his taxes voluntarily long ago, as all other presidential candidates have since Nixon, and as he often promised to do. It is now clear that his excuses for not releasing them were lies.

I’m still not comfortable with a House committee releasing these documents on a party-line vote. As DoJ (I hope) gets ready to indict Trump, I want to be able to argue that everything done against him has been done in the public interest, and not for political advantage. In spite of the protests of MAGA Republicans, I believe the January 6 Committee’s actions can be defended on those grounds. Ditto for the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago.

Here, though, I’m not sure. The political point-scoring is obvious: He claims to be rich and a genius businessman, but he reported huge losses to the IRS that in many years resulted in him paying less tax than you did. Taxpayers who can’t afford complicated tax-avoidance schemes should be angry. Also: His income has come mainly from selling off properties inherited from his father; his own ventures have usually resulted in losses. He looks more like a clueless rich kid than like a brilliant businessman.

There is a public-interest angle, but it’s more subtle. Clearly the IRS has dropped the ball on auditing him, even though they are supposed to audit the president’s taxes every year. Exactly one auditor was assigned to his complicated return, and none of the audits have been completed. Somebody needs to figure out the IRS just lacks resources, or if it was succumbing to political interference.

A lot of things in his returns look suspicious, but they need to be investigated by someone who can demand to see receipts. We in the general public can just shake our heads and wonder.

and you also might be interested in …

Tomorrow we’ll find out whether Kevin McCarthy has the votes to become speaker. If he doesn’t, we’re in the land of political novels, because there hasn’t been a multi-ballot speaker election since 1923. Maybe that’s something we need to do every hundred years.

George Mason Professor Steven Pearlstein suggests that a bipartisan coalition pick a compromise speaker from outside the House. It’s part of a wonderful fantasy in which centrists depolarize Congress and try to do things the voters want done. I don’t believe in it for a second, but I enjoy picturing it.

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Deaths this week: Pelé, Pope Benedict, and Barbara Walters. They were too late to make the annual Sgt. Pepper tribute to people lost during the year by Chris Barker.

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The best account I’ve seen of Southwest Airlines’ recent problems is in the Seat 31B blog. Basically, Southwest tries to keep fares low and profits high by using its assets “efficiently”, which means that there’s no slack if anything goes wrong. It also has an antiquated IT system.

The only real way they have to [handle this situation] (because of the way they operate and their limited IT capabilities) is to stop for an entire day and set to work inventorying their assets and crews and then build out entirely new trips for everyone.

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When I watch Republicans in Congress defend Trump, I often wonder whether they really believe what they’re saying. Elise Stefanik clearly doesn’t. The NYT has a fascinating piece about her “conversion” from a young moderate to self-described “ultra MAGA” member of the House GOP leadership. She made a career move, not an ideological reassessment; it’s actually not clear whether she has any political philosophy at all. I can’t remember who I heard describe her as a “House of Cards” character, but it fits.

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I’ve been enjoying the images that my Facebook friends create using the new AI art tools. But I’ve also been wondering about the dark possibilities.

Cartoonist Sarah Anderson describes how disturbing it is to see strangers easily hijack your style and use it for purposes you would never approve. Her cartoons are on the internet, so they were included in AI training sets (for which she received no compensation). Now you can start making an imitation Sarah Anderson cartoon — expressing your views, not hers — by using her name as a prompt.

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Speaking of online cartoons, have you read SMBC by Zach Weinersmith?

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Paul Krugman has been analyzing Tesla, whose stock fell 65% in 2022 and is still selling at a lofty 35 times earnings. In his first column, he sticks with financial prospects, arguing that Tesla stock never deserved its high growth premium, because it lacks the “network externalities” of successful past tech growth stocks like Microsoft or Apple.

Decoding that: As Microsoft and Apple products became more popular, users got locked in. So if you have a bunch of iPhone apps, your next phone is probably also going to be an iPhone, even if you’re replacing your phone during a period when competing phones are better or cheaper or cooler. Ditto for your company’s Microsoft software.

That’s why, once they hit it big, Microsoft and Apple became profit-generating machines that justified the high prices their stocks had traded at in earlier years: Their products stay on top even through periods where they don’t deserve to, and the difficulty of switching induces users to pay near-monopoly prices.

But Tesla has nothing like that going for it. Maybe Tesla cars are better/cooler right now, so maybe you’ll buy one if you can afford it. But that kind of advantage is fleeting, and once it’s gone, nothing will stop you from buying something else the next time you need a car. So Tesla stock should be valued more according to its current or near-future earnings than by projected far-future earnings that may or may not manifest.

In his second Tesla column, Krugman looks at the likely effects of Elon Musk’s recent behavior. Using a variety of indirect measurements, he argues that Teslas are bought mainly by Democrats. (Counties with large Trump majorities, for example, have very few Tesla registrations.) Consequently,

Musk’s public embrace of MAGA conspiracy theories is an almost inconceivably bad marketing move, practically designed to alienate his main buyers.

Speaking purely for myself, I am considering buying an electric car in the next year or two, and Tesla used to be an attractive possibility. Now, a Tesla would have to be much, much better than competing alternatives to overcome the Musk stigma.

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An NYT article on the failure of election-denier secretary-of-state candidates pointed to a difference in money:

A significant factor in the imbalance was Mr. Trump, who vocally promoted election denier candidates in Republican secretary of state primaries but put almost none of his money where his mouth was. Save America PAC, his leadership PAC, spent only $10,000 of its $100 million-plus war chest on secretary of state candidates who made it into the general election. A spinoff super PAC, MAGA, Inc., chose to spend money on races for Senate instead.

But even the spending on Senate races was a small percentage of his full war chest.

Here’s what I suspect: Trump has sucked up a significant portion of Republican fund-raising, but as a grift. Even money that his PACs apparently spend on candidates somehow finds its way back to the Trump Organization. (Quartz noticed this pattern back in 2015.) That creates friction for GOP candidates across the board.

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It’s not new, but The New Yorker just pointed me to a 2018 article in which Molly Ringwald looks back at her breakout hits Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club.

I imagine that everyone in my generation (60-something) has had the experience of re-watching something we loved when we were younger and reflecting on how horrible parts of it are by current standards. I’m sure it’s even more complicated when you helped make the thing in question.

Ringwald does a good job of giving the past its due without excusing its flaws, and recognizing that the good and bad do not cancel each other out. That’s a complex attitude that we would all do well to master, particularly as we look back on American history.

Ringwald is focusing on adolescents and especially girls, but she describes a pattern that applies to Blacks, gays, and all sorts of groups that have had to struggle for recognition: First you’re invisible, then you’re a token, then you’re a stereotype, and then (maybe, eventually) you start to be seen as a person. With all its problems, each stage is an advance over the previous stage.

and let’s close with a countdown

As a teen-ager, I used to listen to AM radio on New Years Eve as they counted down the top songs of the year. What would be #1? I’ve been hooked on countdowns ever since (though I don’t do song-countdowns any more because I wouldn’t recognize most of them).

I still appreciate good humor and satire, though. So here’s McSweeney’s countdown of its most-read articles of 2022. My favorite is #4: “Selected Negative Teaching Evaluations of Jesus Christ“, which includes the comment: “Only got the job because his dad is important.”

The main reason is that I’m still recovering from Covid. It’s a fairly mild case, but it has sapped my ambition. Saturday I realized I hadn’t gotten started yet, and asked, “Am I willing to put on a big push to catch up?” The answer was no.

A second reason is that this week’s news isn’t inspiring me. A lot of articles and news-show segments have been speculating about what the January 6 Committee will report, in particular whether it will make criminal referrals against Donald Trump for this or that crime. I admit that’s an intriguing topic, but if we can just hang on for a few more hours, the committee will tell us this afternoon. The full report will be available on Wednesday. So if you’re having fun speculating, don’t let me discourage you. But it’s not an efficient use of energy, particularly if you’re running short this week.

Or we could speculate about whether Kevin McCarthy will find the votes to become speaker, and what will happen if he doesn’t. Again, if you’re enjoying yourself, have at it. But hardly anybody who’s writing about this knows anything for sure. Here’s what I think I know: Nothing tells voters that you’re “ready to govern” like having a big internal conflict on Day 1, especially if it’s mostly about egos and has nothing to do with the voters’ lives.

Other big news stories have involved people who are intentionally trolling us. So Elon Musk tweets “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” And MTG told New York’s Young Republicans that if she and Steven Bannon had organized January 6, the Capitol invaders would have been armed, and “We would have won.” She then said she was joking, which was probably at least partly true. Fascists are famous for their sense of humor; I suspect many Nazis were laughing uproariously on Kristallnacht as they broke windows and burned Jewish shops.

The ambitious post that I didn’t have the energy to pursue asked the question: So how should we respond to such trolling? People say this stuff because they want to be the center of an outrage-storm, so if we get outraged we’re just playing the role they’ve assigned us. Since the trolls are not interested in an exchange of ideas, a detailed debunking is probably useless. Pointing out that these are horrible people is more wasted effort, because I suspect most of their fans already know that they’re horrible people.

When trolls are powerless to do anything more than get your goat, ignoring them is the right answer. But ignoring a soon-to-be-important member of the new House majority and the world’s second-richest man (who has turned a significant chunk of the public square into his personal fiefdom) is probably also a mistake.

So what, then? I have thoughts, but nothing resembling a complete answer. Feel free to contribute your thoughts in the comments. Maybe you’ll influence what I eventually do write.

A talk I’ve been working on for January — I’ll link to a full text after I give it — has me recalling how the Sift got started. Originally, it was just a list of links that I called “What impressed me this week”. I posted the list on Monday mornings as an easy product that would get my week off to a good start. (Over time, the tail came to wag the dog, and now my week is organized around getting the Sift out.)

So what follows is a throwback: With minimal comment, these are the links that caught my eye this week.

I’m not usually a Thomas Friedman fan, but his column “What in the World is Happening in Israel?” is worth your time.

Ron DeSantis wants a grand jury to investigate the pharmaceutical companies who produce and distribute Covid vaccines. He also is establishing a Florida “public health integrity committee” to second-guess the CDC. Chris Hayes points out that DeSantis is attempting to get between Trump (who wants credit for funding Operation Warp Speed) and his base (who believe all sorts of anti-vax conspiracy theories). Ironically, it’s Trump’s one clear life-saving accomplishment that makes him vulnerable. Lesson for future conservative presidents: Never do anything good, because other conservatives will use it against you.

Do I really need to comment on the Trump NFTs? Sad. Maybe the saddest thing ever produced in our Country.

Cory Doctorow summarizes Joseph Stiglitz’s report on the current inflation: It wasn’t caused by excess demand, so raising interest rates is the wrong way to solve it — and might make it worse. I have a yes-but reaction: Raising interest rates may not solve inflation, or might solve it but create too much collateral damage. But rates had been unreasonably low since the start of Covid, and needed to go up to more typical levels eventually.

The one development that tempted me to sift this week was TPM’s series exposing the texts Republican congresspeople sent to Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows just before and after January 6. Both Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rep. Ralph Norman urged Meadows to urge Trump to declare “Marshall Law” which is not really a thing. (Martial law is literally the “law of Mars”, i.e., rule by the military.)

Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin explains that Greene and Norman asked for Marshall Law “because they’re both f–king idiots”, but I prefer to think that they intended to invoke the hero of this 1980s comic book.

The House Oversight Committee had a hearing about anti-LGBTQ violence and the Club Q shooting. If you’re a Republican, the problem can’t be guns and it can’t be right-wing eliminationist rhetoric against drag queens and transfolk, so how do you spin this? It’s about defunding the police, which no one anywhere near Club Q actually did.

The recent Musk/Twitter developments have made it clear that free speech was never the issue. Now that one of their own has control, right-wingers are fine with Twitter banning whoever Musk feels like banning, for whatever reasons he wants. This is a general trait on the right: Freedom means freedom for them. They will never, ever defend freedom for everybody.

Over on Mastodon, Simon Weiss makes a good point about the @ElonJet controversy:

There are many legitimate reasons to track Elon Musk’s flight coordinates, for example to offer him ads more relevant to his interests

Amanda Marcotte argues that the right-wing “cancel culture” and “woke mobs” rhetoric is psychological projection:

In reality, it’s left wing ideas that are suppressed out of a genuine fear of their persuasiveness. Books are banned from schools so kids won’t learn that LGBTQ people are normal or that racism is wrong. Musk openly argues that the “woke mind virus” must be “defeated,” which is to say that threateningly convincing ideas about human equality must be banished from the discourse, lest they win people over.

Until next week: Have a great Christmas, Solstice, Hanukah, or whatever you celebrate. Have fun, stay safe, and try to stay (or get) healthy.

it would be the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.

– Florida General Counsel Ryan Newman,
explaining what “woke” means to the DeSantis administration
(He thinks it’s a bad thing.)

There’s no featured post this week.

I’ve been battling a cold (or a minor case of Covid, the tests have been ambiguous, and either way I’ve almost recovered), which is my excuse for a number of failings:

• the mental glitch that caused me to turn Douglas Rushkoff into Douglas Coupland halfway through last week’s “Two Glimpses into the Future“. Douglas Coupland is also an author, but how his name got into my head, I have no idea. He had nothing to do with Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest.
• not paying attention to comments, which meant that a comment by Neo on the weekly summary sat in limbo for several days. (That comment takes me to task for complimenting Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system, when STAR voting has several advantages.) I should explain this wrinkle in the WordPress software: When a comment has some number of links (Neo’s had four), WordPress kicks it into my “moderation” queue. I think this is supposed to be a spam-control feature, but it happens seldom enough that I forget to check the queue.
• not getting enough research done to have a featured article this week.

This week everybody was talking about the Georgia runoff

In a runoff, turnout is everything. Early voting has set records (particularly in Democratic counties), and Election Day is tomorrow. I can easily imagine how in November, people who showed up at the polls to vote for Governor Kemp and the rest of the Republican slate might also vote for Herschel Walker. But I have a much harder time imagining Republicans going to the polls for the exclusive purpose of voting for Walker. He is, as this Warnock ad points out, an embarrassing candidate.

I’ve often said that speculation is a waste of both my time and yours, but I’m hopeful for a Warnock victory.

Shortly after the November election, I sent Warnock a contribution. So every time I hear Republicans complain that they’re being outspent, I’m like “That’s me, you losers!” I’m getting a lot of satisfaction for the amount of money I sent, especially if Warnock wins.

As you probably already know, Democrats will retain control of the Senate either way — either 51-49 or 50-50 plus VP Harris’ vote. The difference that makes is technical, but significant. Currently, all Senate committees are evenly split between the two parties. But if Warnock wins, Democrats will get a one-vote advantage on all committees. That matters for things like launching investigations and issuing subpoenas.

A Warnock victory would also mean that no single senator can veto what the rest of the Democratic caucus wants to do. Though probably anything Manchin or Sinema would object to is already doomed in the Republican House.

and a complete non-story about talks with Putin

Thursday, President Biden and President Macron of France held a joint press conference. The last question asked about the possibility of talking to Putin concerning Ukraine. Biden answered:

I have no immediate plans to contact Mr. Putin. Mr. Putin is — let me choose my words very carefully — I’m prepared to speak with Mr. Putin if in fact there is an interest in him deciding he’s looking for a way to end the war. He hasn’t done that yet. If that’s the case, in consultation with my French and my NATO friends, I’ll be happy to sit down with Putin to see what he wants — has in mind. He hasn’t done that yet.

So Biden didn’t bring up talking to Putin, his first response was that he has no plans to, and that he’ll only do so after Putin does something he hasn’t done yet. Even then, he’ll meet after consulting with France and our other NATO allies. Minutes before, the French president had said:

we will never urge the Ukrainians to make a compromise which will not be acceptable for them … If we want a sustainable peace, we have to respect the Ukrainians to decide the moment and the conditions in which they will negotiate about their territory and their future.

President Zelenskyy, meanwhile, has insisted that Ukraine won’t give up any territory.

There is only one condition for the negotiations: Russia must leave all captured territories.

So what is Biden supposed to say about talking to Putin? (Maybe something diplomatic, like: “Screw that guy. I’m not talking to him.”) He says he’ll talk to Putin if “he’s looking for a way to end the war”.

For some reason, Reuters interpreted this as a “trial balloon”. Russia then said it’s open to negotiations if the West “accepts its demands”, i.e., recognizes Russia’s ownership not just of Crimea, but also of the other Ukrainian provinces it has annexed (which its retreating forces don’t even fully occupy). Then Fox News’ wrote the headline: “Putin open to Ukraine talks after Biden signals willingness if Russia serious about ending war“.

Basically, each side has said that it’s willing to accept the other’s complete surrender. That’s not news.

and another bad week for Trump (and associated traitors)

Tuesday, two members of the right-wing paramilitary group Oath Keepers, including its founder Stewart Rhodes, were convicted of seditious conspiracy for their role in the January 6 riot, plus several other charges. Seditious conspiracy by itself carries a sentence of up to 20 years, and convictions for it are rare; this is the first guilty verdict since 1995.

The jury appears to have done its job carefully. There were five defendants and a list of charges, with each defendant guilty of some and not guilty of others. The deliberations took three days. So it’s hard to paint this jury as radical Trump-haters or a rubber stamp for the Justice Department. It sure looks like they went through the charge/defendant matrix cell by cell and asked “Did the government prove this charge against this defendant?”

To me, the main significance of this verdict is what it implies about future cases, including a possible charge against Donald Trump. In the Oath Keepers case, the Justice Department proved to a jury (beyond a reasonable doubt) that there actually was a conspiracy behind January 6; the attack on the Capitol wasn’t just a Trump rally that spiraled out of control. It also proved that the intention of the conspirators was seditious; the conspirators weren’t patriots, and they weren’t trying to protect democracy against a stolen election. Quite the opposite, they were trying to overthrow democracy.

What can be proved to one jury can be proved to others. Both the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys (whose seditious conspiracy trial begins later this month) must realize they are facing serious jail time. So it must be very tempting to make a deal with the government, perhaps delivering the goods on people closer to Trump, like Roger Stone or Mark Meadows.

The verdict has political as well as legal importance. Since the insurrection, most Republican politicians and conservative pundits have tried to claimed January 6 was no big deal. Maybe Democrats on the January 6 committee were trying to make something out of it, but that was just politics.

Well, a guilty verdict is more than politics. This is a jury of ordinary Americans unanimously saying that January 6 was a very serious matter. The guilty parties weren’t just some people trespassing on government property: The attack was planned, and the planners intended to subvert the orderly transfer of power.

For contrast, look at the Durham investigation, which really was just politics. It produced only minor charges against minor characters — and never persuaded a jury that the “conspiracy” it was investigating existed at all. (Kevin McCarthy is planning a similar investigation of the January 6 committee, for all the good that will do. Bring it, Kevin.)

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Ever since Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon interfered in the Mar-a-Lago case (by appointing a special master to review the documents seized from Trump under a legal search warrant), I and a lot of other people have been yelling about favoritism and corruption: Cannon was clearly repaying her debt to Trump by bending the the law in his favor.

Well, it looks like the appeals court agrees. Thursday, a three-judge panel from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals (two of whom were also appointed by Trump, but seem loyal to the law anyway) vacated Cannon’s order, and sent the case back to Cannon with instructions to dismiss Trump’s lawsuit.

The law is clear. We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so. Either approach would be a radical reordering of our caselaw limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations. And both would violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations. Accordingly, we agree with the government that the district court improperly exercised equitable jurisdiction, and that dismissal of the entire proceeding is required.

Trump will undoubtedly appeal to the Supreme Court, but I don’t think they’ll take long to deny his motion. (They didn’t take long to reject his claim with regard to the classified documents seized in the search.) The law here really is clear, and the Constitution does not define any special rights for former presidents.

Presumably, the Mar-a-Lago investigation can soon proceed the way any other criminal investigation would.

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Mark Meadows lost his case at the South Carolina Supreme Court, which refused to protect him from a subpoena to testify to the Fulton County grand jury investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. (Meadows is currently living in South Carolina.)

Because of a previous adverse ruling on his executive privilege claim, Trump’s White House Counsel Pat Cipollone testified to a Washington, D.C. grand jury Friday.

News stories on these kinds of cases leave out the obvious: Trump’s people fight so hard against subpoenas because they don’t want the full truth to come out. Deduce from that what you will. Personally, I believe that if they knew something that would exonerate Trump, they’d be begging to testify.

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One sign that Trump has jumped the shark is that he keeps trolling the country harder and harder, in a vain attempt to regain the edginess he had in 2015. After seven years of watching his act, we’re not shocked any more if he calls Mexicans rapists or says that John McCain wasn’t a hero. So he’s got to turn it up to 11.

Last week we found out he had a pre-Thanksgiving dinner with a White supremacist, Nick Fuentes. (I was going to mention it in last week’s Sift, but it slipped my mind.) And then Saturday he called for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” if that’s what’s necessary to undo the 2020 election and install him as president again.

What’s next? Maybe he’ll suggest genocide against the people who didn’t vote for him. Whatever.

Meanwhile, most Republicans in the House and Senate — stalwart defenders of the Constitution that they are — aren’t commenting. One or two are condemning the remarks, but Rep. Dave Joyce isn’t one of them.

Joyce, the chair of the influential Republican Governance Group in the House, was asked by ABC “This Week” anchor George Stephanopoulos to respond to Trump’s post on Saturday on his Truth Social platform.

Joyce initially declined to do so, saying the public wasn’t “interested in looking backwards.” But Stephanopoulos followed up and Joyce ultimately said that Trump’s comment shouldn’t be taken seriously but that it wouldn’t lead him to pull potential support for Trump’s 2024 comeback bid.

“I will support whoever the Republican nominee is,” Joyce said while noting he didn’t think Trump would manage to win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

“That’s a remarkable statement,” Stephanopoulos said. “You just said you’d support a candidate who’s come out for suspending the Constitution.”

“Well, you know, he says a lot of things,” Joyce said. “I can’t be really chasing every one of these crazy statements that come out about from any of these candidates at the moment.”

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Joyce that the GOP could find candidates who don’t constantly make “crazy statements”.

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Former prosecutor Dwight Holton imagines how this Trump statement might play in his own seditious conspiracy trial.

Now the defendant wants you to think that this is all a misunderstanding – that he never meant to subvert the Constitution when he urged his armed followers to go to Capitol Hill to “stop the steal.” “I’d never subvert the Constitution!” the defendant wants you to believe.

But we know that is not true – the evidence makes that crystal clear. We know that subverting the Constitution is right in this defendant’s wheelhouse. And you don’t have to take my word for it. We know he is ready to subvert the Constitution BECAUSE OF HIS OWN WORDS.

and the Twitter/Hunter flap

Twitter continues to go down the tubes under Elon Musk’s visionary leadership, but he has learned a trick from his new right-wing allies: Play the Hunter Biden card.

So at a time when the big Twitter-related stories are falling advertising revenue, Nazis getting their accounts back, and Musk deplatforming Ye (i.e. Kanye West, who is also starting to sound like a Nazi), Musk turned some internal Twitter correspondence over to Matt Taibbi, showing times when the 2020 Biden campaign asked Twitter to take down certain tweets about Hunter Biden based on material allegedly hacked from his famous laptop.

This is being hyped as yet another great Hunter scandal, but (unless there’s a lot more that hasn’t been revealed yet) it seems to fall apart pretty quickly: The tweets in question posted dick pics, which probably would have been taken down for anybody. Tim Miller explains.

A related concern is why the New York Post’s pre-2020-election story on Hunter’s laptop wasn’t the beginning of a big media firestorm. Philip Bump explains that: The authenticity of the laptop and its files was just sketchy enough to remind everyone of the 2016 DNC-emails story, which was based on Russian hacking for the purpose of getting Trump elected. The American media had been played once before, and was wary of getting played again.

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The other thing the Hunter story proves is that people like Musk and Tucker Carlson either don’t understand the First Amendment or don’t want you to understand it. Nothing in the Hunter/Twitter story concerns the First Amendment. The Atlantic’s David French elaborates:

In October 2020, when the laptop story broke, Joe Biden was not president. The Democratic National Committee (which also asked for Twitter to review tweets) is not an arm of the government. It’s a private political party. Twitter is not an arm of the government; it is a private company.

This matters for a simple but profoundly important reason. The First Amendment regulates government conduct. It does not regulate private actors. …

This means the First Amendment protects Twitter, the Biden campaign team, and the Democratic National Committee. The “TWITTER FILES” released so far do not describe a violation of the First Amendment. Instead, they detail the exercise of First Amendment rights by independent, private actors.

Even when the government does get involved, it’s not a First Amendment violation unless some kind of coercion is involved. (An example French doesn’t give, but could: Police may ask media outlets not to publicize certain aspects of a murder case. As long as that’s just a request, it’s not a First Amendment issue.)

But there’s no evidence of any such coercion (at least so far) in the Hunter Biden story, and unless and until there is, the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop is the story of private individuals making decisions they were entitled to make. It is not the story of a government run amok.

Similarly, when Twitter decides to block the account of somebody (like Ye, for example), it’s not a First Amendment issue, any more than it’s a First Amendment issue when The New York Times decides not to print your letter.

A related concern is that the major social-media companies — Twitter, Meta, Google — have too much influence over our national conversation. But that’s an antitrust problem, not a First Amendment problem.

and you also might be interested in …

Both Iran and China seem to have yielded (at least a little) in response to public protests. Iran may be abolishing its morality police, and China is backing off of its zero-Covid policies.

What China does next is tricky, because its population is much more vulnerable to Covid than, say America’s. Fewer people have immunity from previous infections, and China’s vaccine is much less effective, particularly against Omicron variants.

Looking at the results achieved in countries around the world, hindsight makes the right strategy obvious: Lock down hard to limit the spread of the disease until an effective vaccine can be developed, then vaccinate everybody as quickly as you can and reopen.

An authoritarian government like China’s should have an advantage in dealing with a pandemic, and during the lockdown phase it did: China has had fewer deaths per capita than almost any other country. But it should have recognized the superiority of the MRNA vaccines and imported them. Then it could have used its authoritarian power to vaccinate everybody, and reopened its economy with comparatively little damage.

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Tuesday, the Senate passed the Respect for Marriage Act. The House is expected to pass it this week, and President Biden is expected to sign it.

The bill is intended as a backstop in case the Supreme Court overturns its ruling in the Obergefell case, which mandates that same-sex marriages be performed in all 50 states. As Clarence Thomas pointed out in his concurring opinion in Dobbs, the logic the Court used to overturn abortion rights would also overturn same-sex marriage rights.

But this bill stops short of forcing states to perform same-sex marriages. Instead, it says that all states and the federal government must recognize marriages performed in other states. The Clinton-era Defense of Marriage Act allowed states not to recognize same-sex marriages from other states. (To me, that always looked like a violation of the Constitution’s Full Faith and Credit clause, but that’s a different argument.) That would once again be the law if this bill doesn’t pass and the Court overturns Obergefell.

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According to the UK’s Office of National Statistics:

For the first time in a census of England and Wales, less than half of the population (46.2%, 27.5 million people) described themselves as “Christian”, a 13.1 percentage point decrease from 59.3% (33.3 million) in 2011; despite this decrease, “Christian” remained the most common response to the religion question.

“No religion” was the second most common response, increasing by 12.0 percentage points to 37.2% (22.2 million) from 25.2% (14.1 million) in 2011.

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Back in August, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis suspended Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren (who was elected, not appointed) because Warren said he would not enforce the state’s 15-week abortion ban, and signed a statement supporting prosecutors in other states who refuse to enforce laws against gender-affirming care.

DeSantis summed up his objection by calling Warren a “woke ideologue”. “Woke” has been a buzzword for DeSantis, as it has been for much of the right. But does it mean anything, or is it just pejorative?

Warren challenged his suspension in court, and the trial was held this week, though there is no decision yet. During the trial DeSantis aides were asked what “woke” meant to them. I found DeSantis’ General Counsel Ryan Newman’s answer astounding.

Asked what “woke” means more generally, Newman said “it would be the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”

Newman added that DeSantis doesn’t believe there are systemic injustices in the U.S.

If you had asked me what conservatives mean by “woke”, I would have given more-or-less the same answer. But I’m viewing them as a hostile outsider. I never imagined they would put it that way themselves.

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While we’re on the subject, the NYT’s Jamelle Bouie has some interesting observations about the “woke capitalism” DeSantis objects to. Bouie thinks DeSantis should have read more Karl Marx. Then he would understand that capitalism inevitably upends established social relations and prejudices. You can have traditional values or you can have unfettered capitalism, but not both.

Conservatives, if their policy priorities are any indication, want to both unleash the free market and reserve a space for hierarchy and domination. But this will not happen on its own. The state must be brought to bear, not to restrain capital per se but to make it as subordinate as possible to the political right’s preferred social agenda.

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The WaPo’s Ruth Marcus savages the judicial philosophy of originalism. Two criticisms seem particularly on-target to me:

• Originalism encourages how-many-angels-can-dance-on-a-pinhead arguments about unknowable questions, like exactly what people in other eras thought some particular word meant. They may not have had a coherent view, and may have chosen a vague word precisely because they couldn’t agree on anything more specific.
• Conservative judges apply originalism opportunistically to get the results they want. (The Founders’ hostility to corporations like the British East India Company, for example, goes out the window whenever the Court considers corporate rights.)

and let’s close with something family oriented

John Wilhelm has some very cute and expressive kids, a camera, and photo-manipulation skills. The three come together in imaginative ways. He calls this one “Catch It Like a Dog”.