The Weekly Sift

The misgovernment of the American people is misgovernment by the American people.

– Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities (1904)

This is our last election. It is fascism or communism. We are at the crossroads. I take the road to fascism.

– Father Charles Coughlin (1936)

This week’s featured post is “American Democracy has been in trouble before“.

This week everybody was talking about the upcoming elections

Polls seem to be tipping back towards Republicans as inflation continues and the stock market keeps falling. But it’s not too late for them to turn again.

Conventional wisdom says Democrats should hope voters are thinking about abortion or democracy or Trump rather than the economy. But I wonder if perhaps the Democrats’ closing message ought to focus on what Republicans will do to the economy if they win one or both houses of Congress: They’ll sabotage it, like they did when Obama was president.

That seems pretty obvious, but not many Democrats are talking about it.

Republicans are already promising a return to their Obama-era hostage-taking policies. If they get hold of any lever of power, you can count on them to force government shutdowns and to play chicken with the debt ceiling. If the Fed succeeds in starting a recession, they’ll try to make it worse with spending cuts.

When I imagine a debt-ceiling crisis, the worst thing is that the MAGA generation of right-wing radicals is significantly dumber than the Tea Party generation. Ted Cruz may have pretended otherwise, but he always knew what a disaster it would be if the US defaulted on its debt. I don’t think Marjorie Taylor Greene does, and I can’t see Kevin McCarthy standing up to her, especially if Trump thinks a global economic panic will help him in 2024.

and Ukraine

Unable to win on the front lines, Putin seems to have settled on a Battle-of-Britain strategy. He’s raining destruction on Ukrainian cities in hope of breaking the people’s will. It didn’t work for Hitler, but I guess you never know.

and the Trump subpoena

The January 6 Committee held another hearing on Thursday. I didn’t feel like I learned much that was new, but the Committee did bolster what might be its closing argument: January 6 wasn’t a rally that got out of control. Rather, it was the culmination of a plot to steal the 2020 election that Trump was already hatching the summer before.

The conclusion of the hearing was a unanimous vote to subpoena Trump himself. I think it’s extremely unlikely that Trump will ever testify to the Committee, which goes out of business on January 1 and certainly won’t be renewed if Republicans get control of the House. But issuing the subpoena does establish a key point: Trump isn’t telling his side of the story because he doesn’t want to, not because the Committee doesn’t want to hear it.

and other egregious malefactors

A Connecticut jury decided Alex Jones owes the Sandy Hook families nearly $1 billion. That’s on top of the $50 million a Texas jury awarded earlier this year, and it doesn’t count possible punitive damages still to be assessed by the judge.

Most observers believe Jones doesn’t have a billion dollars, though he does have considerably more than he claims. (Somewhere in the hundreds of millions, probably.) Declaring bankruptcy probably won’t save him.

When the last appeal ends, the experts predict Jones will be left owing many millions of dollars to the Sandy Hook families he defamed in his broadcasts, in addition to other creditors chasing him through bankruptcy court.

“Alex Jones probably doesn’t have much of a project in life at this point other than beating these kinds of money judgments,” said UConn law professor Minor Meyers. “By and large, he is going to have a hard time earning money without immediately being forced to hand it over. He may really enjoy being a radio personality, but I can’t imagine he wants to do it pro bono.”

---

Steve Bannon’s contempt-of-Congress trial has moved to the sentencing phase. The government is asking for a six month prison sentence, rather than the maximum two years.

---

So Sean Hannity played a recording of a Biden phone message to his son Hunter from October, 2018. (Obtained how, exactly?) It revealed Biden as a compassionate father trying to support a troubled son.

It’s Dad. I called to tell you I love you. I love you more than the whole world, pal. You gotta get some help. I don’t know what to do. I know you don’t either. I’m here, no matter what you need. No matter what you need, I love you.

For some reason, Hannity appeared to consider this a “gotcha” of some sort, which says more about Hannity than he probably intended to reveal.

I keep seeing tweets from people who made some mistakes in their lives and wish their parents had been more like Joe Biden.

---

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Tucker Carlson’s interview with Kanye West is how Carlson edited out Kanye’s anti-semitism to fit the story he wanted to tell.

Media Matters’ Matt Gertz has the details, along with this summary of Tucker’s overall message and mission.

Tucker Carlson Tonight revolves around an antisemitic conspiracy theory. The host posits that a cabal of global elites controls the heights of U.S. politics, media, culture, and business, and is using its power to corrupt American children, destroy western civilization, and replace its population with immigrants.

Carlson’s innovation is that he generally deracinates these familiar antisemitic tropes. While open white supremacists might argue, for example, that Jews are using immigration to replace the white population with a black and brown one, Carlson tells his viewers that elites like the financier George Soros (who is Jewish) are replacing “legacy Americans” with people from “far-away countries” in the “third world.”

Carlson’s stated worldview is close enough that neo-Nazis regularly praise his show for mainstreaming their blood-soaked positions. But Carlson’s careful use of language, and his furious denials that he is a racist, give the Fox brass just enough plausible deniability that they can continue to defend and support his program. 

but maybe we should be talking about nuclear power

This week, the stock broker I inherited from my father tossed out a speculative idea: NuScale Power. He said he couldn’t recommend it, because he wasn’t sure exactly what the company does. But one of his other clients had done the research and was very hot on it. So it might be something to look into, given that my portfolio has been light on energy stocks ever since I purged my fossil-fuel holdings.

The symbol for the stock is SMR, which turns out to stand for “small modular reactor”, a new generation of nuclear power plants that promise to be smaller, safer, easier to build, and less one-of-a-kind than current nuclear power plants. The environmental news site Grist had a mostly favorable article about SMRs in 2020.

While it’s true that renewable energy is cheap now, most energy wonks think it will get expensive when renewables are powering the entire grid, which will require building lots of batteries to deal with fluctuations in the sun and wind. Sure, there are studies suggesting it wouldn’t be prohibitively expensive to power the country purely on renewables, but the most accurate ones — which model the nitty-gritty details of how electrical systems work — tend to show that the best way to keep renewable power cheap is by having a source of clean energy that can be turned up when wind dies and the sun is hiding behind the clouds, said Matt Bowen, a research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy, at Columbia University.

“In the energy world, there are really two camps: The all-renewables camp and everyone else,” he said. “I’m with everyone else.”

The negative case was outlined by Farhad Manjoo last month in the NYT: At best, nuclear power is the expensive kind of power you throw into a low-CO2-emission system when its renewables-and-batteries component is failing to keep up with demand. Manjoo recognizes the potential of SMRs, but if you have to do research to make a power-generation system work, why not spend your research dollars on better renewables and batteries? (And I’ll add this: There’s still no long-term storage plan for the radioactive waste.)

In the end, I decided SMR is not for me (which is one reason I feel no ethical qualms about discussing it here; I’m not touting a stock I own). Even if nuclear does have a role to play in the transition to a low-carbon-emission future, that role looks purely transitional to me. So a nuclear power-plant construction company doesn’t seem like a good long-term investment. If I bought into the industry now, I’d also have to figure out when to sell.

and you also might be interested in …

One of the most important topics in political research is just how social media contributes to political polarization. A new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has a surprising answer. (The study itself is behind a paywall, but an article about it is here.)

Most people think social media is polarizing because it isolates you inside an echo chamber. You are constantly hearing people agree with you that Trump or Biden is a villain, so there’s no reason you should change your mind.

The study says it doesn’t work quite that way. What establishes and hardens a political identity is that social media also exposes you to opposition. You solidify as this or that when you argue with people on the other side.

We shouldn’t think of the internet as an “echo chamber” in which our arguments are repeated back to us until we get more and more convinced. I think it’s more like the island in the Lord of the Flies: it creates a social space that affords the emergence of separate social groups, it strengthens collective identities, and pushes opposing groups into conflict. This leads to a form of politics that is based on cycles of conflict between two warring tribes.

---

Slate examines just how hard it is for a transman to get breast-reduction surgery. Anti-trans mythology imagines doctors all too eager to prey on impressionable people, especially minors, by pushing irreversible gender-affirming treatments. The article claims exactly the opposite is true.

This detail sounds especially weird:

It is, after all, much easier for cis people to get plastic surgery than for trans people to get gender-affirming care. In 2020, there were 15.6 million cosmetic procedures performed in the U.S., according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Breast augmentations were one of the most popular surgeries, with 3,223 of these procedures performed on people aged 13 to 19.

If that sounds OK to you, but you still object to a similarly aged person with a female birth certificate getting their breasts reduced, you might want to think some more about that.

---

Apropos of nothing, Dan Kois’ retrospective on Rod McKuen is fascinating. Kois is too young to remember when McKuen sold poetry books by the millions and was the kind of celebrity poets never get to be.

But by the time I was a teenager, he had completely vanished from the cultural landscape. I only know of him because I spent the entire 1990s in thrift stores and used bookshops, and everywhere I went, I saw Rod McKuen’s name.

Eventually, Kois’ article turns into a meditation on cultural memory.

One of the weird contradictions of living in the future is that every artist is at the tip of your fingers, but you can only find who your fingers know to search for. In the not-so-distant past, artists could avoid slipping away thanks to only the physical evidence: a record in a thrift store, a used book with a man in a white turtleneck on its cover, murmuring to the bewildered shopper, “Who am I? To whom did I matter? To whom did I stop mattering?”

The Spotify algorithm, Amazon’s recommendations, they’ll never, ever show you Rod McKuen. Those are designed to direct you towards things that other people like right now. But thrift stores, used bookshops, and Goodwills are, accidentally, perfectly designed to show you things that people liked decades ago, then stopped liking.

---

I love surprising science results. The WaPo’s Well Being column offers this:

“Healthy fat is not about the amount of fat” someone carries, said Jeffrey Horowitz, a professor at the University of Michigan, who studies exercise and metabolism. It is about how well that fat functions, he said. “A person who has healthier fat is much better off than someone with the same body fat percentage whose fat is unhealthy.”

Apparently, what you want are small fat cells that can expand or contract as the body’s supply-and-demand of calories requires. What you don’t want are big inefficient fat cells leaking fatty acids that can build up inside vital organs.

This is why physical activity can make you healthier, even if you don’t lose weight or even lose fat. Exercise can “remake” your fat.

and let’s close with something batty

It turns out that bats aren’t just screeching for no reason, or even necessarily echolocating. A lot of the time they’re arguing with each other.

Yossi Yovel and his colleagues recorded a group of 22 Egyptian fruit bats, Rousettus aegyptiacus, for 75 days. Using a modified machine learning algorithm originally designed for recognizing human voices, they fed 15,000 calls into the software. They then analyzed the corresponding video to see if they could match the calls to certain activities.

They found that the bat noises are not just random, as previously thought, reports Skibba. They were able to classify 60 percent of the calls into four categories. One of the call types indicates the bats are arguing about food. Another indicates a dispute about their positions within the sleeping cluster. A third call is reserved for males making unwanted mating advances and the fourth happens when a bat argues with another bat sitting too close. In fact, the bats make slightly different versions of the calls when speaking to different individuals within the group, similar to a human using a different tone of voice when talking to different people.

You know who questioned slavery? The enslaved people.

– Van Jones

There’s no featured post this week.

This week everybody was talking about Ian

I won’t try to cover the devastation or the human suffering, because the mainstream media has been all over that. (I can’t tell you how many NBC reporters I’ve seen standing in front of a boat sitting on top of a crushed Chevy Suburban in Fort Myers. The network appears to have declared that particular site Ground Zero.)

I do think it’s worth noticing how normal Biden’s response has been. No Sharpie controversies. No playing politics with disaster funding. No presidential whining that some governor hasn’t been nice enough to him. No tossing paper towels into a crowd, as if relief supplies come from his personal largesse.

One big reason Biden was elected was to make government normal again. This is an example of him doing precisely that. It doesn’t matter that Governor DeSantis is one of Biden’s potential rivals in 2024. Florida needs help and it’s the president’s job to see that they get it.

---

Disasters like Ian emphasize a point that David Graeber made in Debt: the first 5,000 years: Society rests on a core of communism that we seldom see until an emergency happens. When everything else breaks down, we help people because they need it and expect people to help because they can.

In a pure market economy, you’d be perfectly justified to frame a disaster as an opportunity to make enormous profits by, say, only rescuing people who can pay you a lot. But we all understand how unseemly that would be.

(Crassus, the rich man who joined Caesar and Pompey in Rome’s First Triumvirate, made a lot of his money by training a crew of slaves to fight fires — which happened all the time in a crowded city built out of wood. When he saw a fire, he’d show up with his crew and offer to buy adjacent properties for a low, low price. After the sale, he’d have the fire put out. What a guy!)

---

As I predicted last week, the hurricane in Florida made us all forget Hurricane Fiona’s damage to Puerto Rico, which never did get the 24/7 coverage of Ian. But PR isn’t back to normal yet.

On Friday – as Floridians assessed the destruction left by Hurricane Ian and the storm made landfall in South Carolina as a Category 1 – more than 230,000 customers in Puerto Rico were still without electricity, according to the PowerOutage.US website. More than 800,000 customers were without power last weekend.

Nearly 80,000 customers – about 6% – of the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority were without water on Friday, according to the government’s emergency portal system website.

Fox News even forgot Puerto Rico is part of the United States.

Martha MacCallum was telling Fox News viewers about the devastating impacts of hurricanes in places such as Cuba and Puerto Rico on Wednesday when she quipped: “Thank God we have better infrastructure in our country”.

We should never forget the reason Puerto Rico isn’t a state: race and language prejudice. If the US owned an island of three million English-speaking White people, it would have joined the union decades ago.

---

After Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, right-wing Christians proclaimed it as a sign of God’s judgment. Franklin Graham in particular showed little sympathy for the city’s suffering:

This is one wicked city, OK? It’s known for Mardi Gras, for Satan worship. It’s known for sex perversion. It’s known for every type of drugs and alcohol and the orgies and all of these things that go on down there in New Orleans. … There’s been a black spiritual cloud over New Orleans for years. They believe God is going to use that storm to bring revival.

Those voices are silent now. Florida has been competing with Texas to lead the nation in persecuting trans youth, shoving LGBTQ people back into the closet, and keeping students ignorant about racism. So what about that, fundamentalist preachers? Does God speak through storms or not? What might God be trying to tell Ron DeSantis?

Or maybe all the signs-of-God’s-judgment talk has always just been a way for flim-flam artists like Graham to put their own words into God’s mouth.

and Putin’s annexations

He went through with it.

On Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin formally declared four regions of Ukraine as part of Russia following sham referendums this week in eastern and southern Ukraine. Putin made the illegal decree as he lobbed even more threats against the United States and its allies, another potential escalation in the war in Ukraine and in Russia’s standoff with the West.

Putin moved to annex four regions of eastern and southern Ukraine — Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia — after officials in Russian-controlled territory staged an illegal vote on joining Russia. The Kremlin does not fully control any of these areas, and pollsters reportedly went door to door with armed soldiers in Russian-controlled zones, but Putin justified the decree by saying that it was done on behalf of the “will of millions of people.”

---

“Illegal” can be a loaded word, so I tracked down the basis for the claim that the annexation referendums are illegal. The 1958 commentary on the fourth Geneva Convention (1949) says:

As was emphasized in the commentary on Article 4, the occupation of territory in wartime is essentially a temporary, de facto situation, which deprives the occupied Power of neither its statehood nor its sovereignty; it merely interferes with its power to exercise its rights. That is what distinguishes occupation from annexation, whereby the Occupying Power acquires all or part of the occupied territory and incorporates it in its own territory.

Consequently occupation as a result of war, while representing actual possession to all appearances, cannot imply any right whatsoever to dispose of territory. As long as hostilities continue the Occupying Power cannot therefore annex the occupied territory, even if it occupies the whole of the territory concerned. A decision on that point can only be reached in the peace treaty.

---

The practical point of the annexation is to frame Ukraine’s current offensive (which is still advancing) as an attack on Russia itself rather than a recapture of its own territory. Putin has said he will use “all available means” to defend “Russia”, which raises the specter of nuclear war.

Yesterday’s NYT discusses the possibility that Russia will use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

“The chance that Putin would strike out of the blue seems very low,” said Graham T. Allison, the author of a seminal 1971 book about the Cuban Missile Crisis, “Essence of Decision.” “But as Kennedy said back then, the plausible scenario is if a leader is forced to choose between a catastrophic humiliation and a roll of the dice that might yield success.”

Mr. Allison suspects Mr. Putin will not face that choice unless Ukraine succeeds in pushing Russian forces out of the areas Mr. Putin annexed on Friday.

For that reason, the next few weeks could prove a particularly dangerous time, a range of American and European officials agree. But Mr. Putin is not likely to use a nuclear weapon immediately.

That’s not very comforting. During the Cold War, I didn’t worry much about a Soviet first strike because it didn’t make sense from a Marxist worldview. Soviet dogma said that communism was the inevitable outcome of history. So why would you risk everything on a roll of the dice now if your eventual victory was certain? But that thinking doesn’t apply now. If Putin sees his regime going down, he might think rolling the dice is his best bet.

OTOH, a gangster regime rests on the self-interest calculations made by all the henchmen. If a lot of those calculations are based on the belief that Putin would never do something that could get them all killed, the possibility of nuclear war could start people up and down the regime reevaluating their cooperation.

I’d like to see Biden address Putin’s henchmen directly, in a statement something like this:

A nuclear attack is something that the world will never forget and never forgive. Anyone who in any way participates in such a decision or such an attack will never know a moment’s peace. You must realize that Putin’s regime will eventually fall and his protection will fail. When that happens, there will be no safe place for you. You will be hunted to the ends of the Earth.

As for how the US should respond if Putin does use a tactical nuke in Ukraine, I’ve been reluctant to say what I’m thinking, because I’d be just another ignorant guy spouting off. So I found a knowledgeable guy who is saying the same thing: former general and CIA head David Petraeus. NATO should respond directly, but with conventional weapons. The goal would be to make sure Russia lost at least as much as it had gained by using the nuke.

The US and its allies would destroy Russia’s troops and equipment in Ukraine – as well as sink its Black Sea fleet – if Russian president Vladimir Putin uses nuclear weapons in the country, former CIA director and retired four-star army general David Petraeus warned on Sunday.

I understand fully the temptation to back down: To the rest of the world, losing Ukraine is a small price to pay to avoid the kind of escalation that could lead to an all-out nuclear war. But giving in to threats means giving something up without getting anything back. Putin retains his nuclear arsenal and can make the same threat over the next conflict. Where does that road end?

---

CPAC has since deleted the tweet, but its reflex response to the annexations was to line up with Putin’s propaganda. The tweet referred to the four territories as “Ukrainian-occupied”, as if they had always been Russian and Ukraine is the aggressor.

---

A possibly related event is the rupture in the Nord Stream pipelines, which take Russian natural gas to Germany. This appears to be sabotage, but everybody is pointing fingers at everybody else. In the short term it helps Russia, because this winter Europe will realize how much it depends on Russian energy. In the long run it hurts Russia, which will need the pipelines to sell natural gas after the Ukraine-related sanctions get resolved somehow.

and other right-wing foreign governments

Speaking of ultra-conservative foreign leaders, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro was up for re-election yesterday. He trails another former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known more simply as “Lula”) 48.4%-43.2%, which means a run-off will happen October 30. There has already been violence in this campaign, and it is expected to get worse.

In addition to how the run-off will come out, everyone wonders what Bolsonaro will do if he loses. Like Trump in 2020, Bolsonaro started questioning the integrity of the election before it happened. His supporters are more likely than his opponents to be armed, and the nation’s police support him. He probably has enough military support to keep Brazil’s army on the sidelines.

---

The far-right Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) Party, which traces its ancestry back to the World War II Fascists, leads the new Italian government, elevating Giorgia Meloni to prime minister. Wikipedia explains the history.

FdI emerged from a right-wing split within Silvio Berlusconi‘s party, The People of Freedom (PdL), in December 2012. The bulk of the party leadership including Meloni, as well as the symbol of the movement (the tricolour flame), comes from the National Alliance (AN, 1995–2009) party, which had merged into PdL in 2009. AN was the heir to the Italian Social Movement (MSI, 1945–1995), a neo-fascist party founded by former members of the banned National Fascist Party (1921–1943) and the Republican Fascist Party (1943–1945).

American conservatives are ecstatic, and Meloni looks likely to join Hungarian authoritarian Viktor Orbán in the pantheon of foreign leaders who get cheered at CPAC (where she has already spoken twice). But lots of people on my social media feeds posted this quip:

I can’t believe they made Mussolini a woman in the reboot. This woke nonsense has ruined yet another franchise.

The most immediate problem raised by Italian neo-fascism is whether Italy will become pro-Putin voice inside NATO. So far, Meloni is not signalling that.

Meloni, 45, has sought to moderate her views recently, and this week she tweeted support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Yet as Europe teeters on the brink of a recession stemming at least partly from energy sanctions imposed on Russia, there are fears within the Biden administration and elsewhere that Meloni could slash what’s been a significant Italian contribution to Ukraine’s defense.

Such a move could have a domino effect and cause key Western allies to push for a negotiated end to Russia’s war on Ukraine. Trump backed that position Wednesday, one Ukraine’s leaders vehemently oppose because it would likely require giving up large swaths of their territory to Putin.

and the Supreme Court

The start of the new Court term led a lot of pundits to raise a bunch of the issues I discussed last week. The NYT Editorial Board wrote:

The actual cause of [the Supreme Court’s] historic unpopularity is no secret. Over the past several years, the court has been transformed into a judicial arm of the Republican Party. This project was taking shape more quietly for decades, but it shifted into high gear in 2016, when Justice Antonin Scalia died and Senate Republicans refused to let Barack Obama choose his successor, obliterating the practice of deferring to presidents to fill vacancies on the court. Within four years, the court had a 6-to-3 right-wing supermajority, supercharging the Republican appointees’ efforts to discard the traditions and processes that have allowed the court to appear fair and nonpartisan.

The WaPo’s Ruth Marcus wrote an extended introduction to the new Court term, which includes a number of race-related cases: affirmative action and voting rights in particular. Another case revisits whether anti-discrimination laws apply to Christian businesses that turn away gay customers for religious reasons. There’s an opportunity for the Court to limit the power the Clean Water Act gives the EPA, and to increase state legislatures’ power to sway elections.

and the pandemic

Case numbers are dropping almost everywhere except where I am in New England. Nationally, deaths stubbornly remain around 400 per day.

When President Biden declared the pandemic over a couple weeks ago, I had to decide when I’ll start thinking of it as over: When the death numbers get down to about 100 per day. That would be flu-like.

According to data collected by the CDC from 2010 to 2020, the agency estimates that the flu has caused 12,000 to 52,000 deaths annually.

100 per day would be 36,500 annually, right in the middle of a normal flu range. Until then, I’m going to keep wearing masks and avoiding indoor crowds.

and you also might be interested in …

The week’s dumbest controversy was about Lizzo playing James Madison’s flute. If you’ve seen references to it and want to know what it was about, click the link. But if you don’t care, don’t start caring on my account.

I aspire to someday have a life so carefree that how the Library of Congress handles James Madison’s flute rises to the top of my list.

---

The dumbest statement about a controversy had to be this one by Ron DeSantis, who was defending his initiative to put a right-wing slant on how Florida public schools teach American history.

It was the American Revolution that caused people to question slavery. No one had questioned it before we decided as Americans that we are endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights and that we are all created equal.

CNN’s Van Jones pointed out the obvious.

You know who questioned [slavery]? The enslaved people.

Like the history I was taught growing up, DeSantis’ history is based on the principle that only European views count. There’s no other way to justify the claim that “no one” questioned slavery before 1776, that Columbus “discovered” America, that Gutenberg (and not Bi Sheng of the Song Dynasty) invented movable type, or a bunch of other pseudo-facts I remember from my K-12 years.

But even if you only count English-speaking White people, DeSantis’ history is just wrong.

In the 1569 case it had been ruled that English law could not recognise slavery. This view, although overturned by the ruling in Butts V. Penny, was subsequently upheld in 1701 when the Chief Justice, Sir John Holt, ruled that a slave became free as soon as he arrived in England. In this view, different from, but no less unequivocal than that of the Solicitor-General in 1677, slavery was illegal.

---

Judge Cannon continues to put Trump above the law. Once again, the special master that Trump chose wanted to pin down exactly what he’s claiming — this time about whether the FBI planted documents or not. But no. Those claims are allowed to float, and presumably to influence the case, without even being stated for the record, much less supported by evidence.

---

New Tory Prime Minister Liz Truss’ first major act was to propose a gigantic tax cut for the rich.

Last week, Truss’ government announced that they would cut taxes by £45 billion ($48 billion) in a bid to get the UK economy moving again, with a package that includes scrapping the highest rate of income tax for top earners from 45% to 40% and a big increase in government borrowing to slash energy prices for millions of households and businesses this winter.

Truss has acknowledged mistakes in how the proposal was rolled out, but seems to be standing by it, even as the pound crashes. But not everybody is behind her.

Conservative members of parliament fear the combination of tax cuts along with huge public spending to help people cope with energy bills, rising inflation, rising interest rates and a falling pound are going to make winning the next general election impossible.

Who better to comment than UK fake-news personality Jonathan Pie?

---

Having passed the House and gotten support from Mitch McConnell, a bill to reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887 looks likely to become law. The bill eliminates various loopholes and vagueries that Trump used to try to hang onto power after losing the 2020 election.

McConnell’s support is one more step in the continued souring of his relationship with Trump. Obviously, Trump doesn’t like the implication that his failed coup attempt was the kind of thing America should avoid in the future. But he really lashed out after McConnell supported a continuing resolution to keep the government open until after the election. On his Trump-centered Twitter-clone, the former president said McConnell “has a death wish”, which I (and a lot of other people) interpret as a suggestion that McConnell be assassinated. The same post insulted McConnell’s Chinese-American wife, Elaine Chao, who left Trump’s cabinet after January 6. Trump called her McConnell’s “China loving wife Coco Chow”.

Explain to me again how “divisive” Joe Biden is.

---

Speaking at a Trump rally in Michigan Saturday, Marjorie Taylor Greene said

I’m not going to mince words with you all. Democrats want Republicans dead. They’ve already started the killings.

Again, the point here seems to be to incite and justify right-wing violence.

---

This week I learned two words: Having an implant removed is called “explanting”. And a person known by a one-word name (like Madonna or Lula) is “mononymous”.

and let’s close with some practical information

Ryan North’s career in comic books (Dinosaur Comics, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, …) has led him to spend an enormous amount of time contemplating plausible supervillain schemes. Now you can benefit from his lifetime of research by reading his book How to Take Over the World.

The infrastructure chapter alone could save you billions. Where should you build your secret lair? (Not at the bottom of the ocean or on the Moon. You’d just be creating problems for yourself.) How much space do you need to achieve food and energy independence from the outside world? (The Biosphere 2 research is invaluable here.)

And then there are the more specific villainous plans. How can you create your own dinosaurs? (Actual dinosaur DNA is unrecoverable now, so the Jurassic Park technique can’t possibly work. But you might be able to create pseudo-dinosaurs by manipulating the DNA expression of the dinosaurs’ bird descendants. This technique also avoids a lot of catastrophic outcomes, because your dinosaurs’ offspring would be birds again.) What’s the most plausible path to immortality? How can you control the weather? (The plan here looks a lot like the one Neil Stephenson explores in Termination Shock, which was probably being written simultaneously.)

Supervillainy may seem like a radical career choice, but there’s no time to lose, because Disney owns Marvel Comics and Warner-Discovery owns DC. Think about what that means:

Two of the most powerful multinational corporations on the planet have spent decades, in plain sight, paying some of the most creative people alive today to design increasingly credible world-domination schemes.

So if you don’t take over the world, one of those two undoubtedly will. Your reign is bound to be better than theirs.

Even if Durham approached the probe with earnest sincerity, the real reason he was appointed is that Donald Trump’s political con requires the promise of total vindication right around the corner. For a time, Durham provided that hope for Trump backers. But now, as Trump moves on to other ploys, the Durham probe has served its purpose, even though it has produced no major convictions or epiphanies.

– David Graham
“The John Durham Probe Gave Trump What He Wanted“

This week’s featured post is “How the Trump Grift Works“.

This week everybody was talking about something that doesn’t interest me

I have spent exactly zero time these last two weeks watching coverage related to the British royal family. I just don’t see what connects the royals to anything I find meaningful. If I’d been running a news network, I would have briefly announced developments on the days they happened: the Queen’s death, Charles’ coronation, her funeral — and then moved on to something that might actually matter.

and Ukraine

After a grinding Russian offensive in the summer made only minimal gains, Ukraine has been striking back surprisingly effectively. It has regained a comparatively large amount of territory in the Kharkiv area, and put Russian forces into a disorganized retreat.

Like the collapse of Russia’s Kyiv offensive in the spring, this new series of reverses is raising questions about the effectiveness of the Russian military in general. Putin is also beginning to face criticism from the political right, from Russians who believe in the goals of the war but are disappointed by how it’s going.

The main thing to worry about is that Putin will respond by escalating further, which is why Biden warned him not to use tactical nuclear weapons.

and the fall elections

It’s hard to imagine what Lindsey Graham is thinking as he introduces a national 15-week abortion ban. It’s obviously not going to pass in this Congress, and it’s also giving Democrats a wedge issue for the midterm elections: It unites Democrats and splits Republicans.

Nationally, the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe has motivated Democratic voters in special elections and in the Kansas referendum. The Republican response has amounted to “Calm down. The Dobbs decision is just federalism; it returns the abortion question to the states.”

But Graham’s bill points out the obvious: National abortion bans will be proposed in every Congress from now on, and Republicans will not be able to stand up to their base and vote them down. So if Americans elect Republican majorities in Congress and regain the presidency, abortion will eventually be banned.

Graham is pitching his bill as a “late-term” abortion ban, but 15 weeks is early in the second trimester, and has never previously been considered “late-term”.

Polls show that late-term abortion bans are more popular than general abortion bans. But I encourage Democrats to keep raising this question to women who have ever been pregnant: “At what point in your pregnancy did your judgment become inferior to the government’s?” Late-term abortions are nearly all complex situations where difficult decisions need to be made. I can’t imagine that any large percentage of those decisions will be made better by Congress than by the people actually involved.

---

One reason I didn’t panic when Democrats were doing so badly in the polls was that I expected Republicans to do what they’re doing: nominate extreme MAGA candidates who represent about a third of the electorate.

Latest example: Don Bolduc, who is the Republican Senate nominee in New Hampshire. Incumbent Democrat Maggie Hassan won by a whisker in 2016, so she has been an obvious target for Republicans looking to flip the 50-50 Senate. Popular Governor Chris Sununu probably could have won that seat, but decided he didn’t want to be part of a Republican Senate caucus with no policy other than blocking whatever President Biden wants to do.

So the primary came down to Bolduc against a more mainstream Republican, Chuck Morse.

Bolduc holds a wide variety of extreme beliefs: He wants to eliminate both the FBI and the Department of Education, has backed former President Donald Trump’s lies about the election and called GOP Gov. Chris Sununu a “Chinese Communist sympathizer.”

But Sununu has pledged to support Bolduc, because mainstream Republicans are content to watch the fascists take over their party. Bolduc, meanwhile, has had a sudden conversion on election denial: The day after his primary opponent conceded, he announced that he no longer believes Biden stole the 2020 election from Trump.

One of Bolduc’s most charming positions is that voters shouldn’t be able to pick their senators at all: He wants to repeal the 17th Amendment and return to the system where state legislatures picked senators.

That’s how it’s supposed to be. And it worked until the 17th Amendment.

Weirdly, Bolduc sees this as an anti-corruption measure, when the pre-amendment Senate was a big part of what made the Gilded Age notoriously corrupt, as memorialized in the famous political cartoon “Bosses of the Senate“. Bolduc clearly doesn’t know American history.

So anyway, New Hampshire: If you don’t vote for Hassan, you may never get to vote for a senator again.

Another example is the Massachusetts governor’s race. Massachusetts is one of the bluest states in the country, but it has a history of electing moderate Republican governors — like currently popular Governor Charlie Baker, as well as Mitt Romney and Bill Weld in the not-so-distant past.

So there’s every reason to believe the GOP could have put up a real fight this year. Instead, they nominated MAGA Republican Geoff Diehl. The lastest poll has him trailing Democrat Maura Healey by a ridiculous margin, 52%-26%.

---

Of course Republicans are doctoring videos to exaggerate the effects of John Fetterman’s stroke. How did I not see that coming?

and the secret documents Trump stole

I’ve been reluctant to talk about “Trump judges” in a way that implies they’re all MAGA cultists. First, because it’s too reminiscent of the way Trump himself has talked about “Obama judges“, as if the judiciary is necessarily partisan. If we start assuming that every judge is in the tank for the party that appointed him or her, it’s hard to see how democracy stands.

But also, a number of “Trump judges” have held the line against his most outrageous attacks against democracy, and even his Supreme Court appointees refused to overturn the election he lost.

However, it’s hard to explain Judge Aileen Cannon’s rulings in the Mar-a-Lago documents case without assuming some kind of bias or corruption. Her position makes no sense as law, and gives Trump a unique above-the-law status.

Most telling is the way that she takes seriously claims that Trump has made in public, but which his lawyers have not raised in court: that the clearly marked secret documents the FBI recovered may not actually be classified at all, and that this is something for her appointed special master to decide. (Based on what?)

In their court filings, Trump’s lawyers imply claims they do not actually state, referring to “purportedly classified” documents and observing that the government “wrongly assumes that if a document has a classification marking, it remains classified in perpetuity”.

Any real judge would have pressed them to make a factual claim: Did Trump declassify these documents or not? When? How? I believe Trump’s lawyers would have backed down because they know Trump’s public claims are lies, just as Trump’s lawyers often refused to claim fraud in his election lawsuits. Lawyers can be sanctioned for lying to the court, but not for vague implications that the judge lets stand.

Cannon, however, did not ask the obvious questions, and instead just observed that there is a “dispute” about the documents’ classification that the court needs to resolve somehow.

The Justice Department has appealed to the 11th Circuit, which also includes a lot of Trump-appointed judges. Hopefully, though, these are real judges who will insist on applying the law, even to the man who appointed them.

the Martha’s Vineyard stunt

You’ve probably already heard about Florida Governor DeSantis using state funds to fly Venezuelan immigrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. They arrived not knowing where they were (since DeSantis’ people had lied to them), and local officials were not told they were coming. In short, it was a political stunt designed to create maximal chaos. The Martha’s Vineyard community seem to have handled it well, and the Venezuelans are now housed at a military base on Cape Cod.

Similar stunts have been going on for a while, as when Texas Governor Abbott bused about 100 Hispanic immigrants to Vice President Kamala Harris’ residence, again unannounced.

To some, this is reminiscent of the “reverse freedom rides” that Southern racists organized (again, tricking their victims) in the 1960s. Others wonder about the political reaction from Florida’s large Venezuelan population, after seeing how little regard DeSantis has for people escaping the Maduro government.

My reaction to this series of events is to ask: How does dropping migrants in a resort community with no warning make anything better? DeSantis and Abbott seem to share one dominant motive: spite.

The underlying problem is that both treaties and our own laws require the United States to allow people facing persecution in other countries to claim asylum here. (This is largely a response to the shameful way Jewish refugees were treated when they tried to escape the Holocaust.) Once refugees get here and turn themselves in [1], we are legally obligated to hear their claims. Currently, the asylum courts are overwhelmed, and it can take years to decide if someone’s claims of persecution are legitimate.

As it did in so many areas, and as Trump continues to do today, the Trump administration dealt with the asylum problem by ignoring the law. The Biden administration refuses to do that, and systemic reforms have been logjammed in Congress for many years.

It’s important that we get this figured out soon, because in the coming decades many millions of people will become climate refugees, as their homes are flooded out or their fields become deserts. What’s our plan for dealing with the ones who appear on our border? Let them all in? Shoot them?

---

[1] The Republican rhetoric about “securing the Southern border” is way off-base when we’re talking about asylum seekers. They are not avoiding or breaking our laws, they are seeking the protection of our laws. And of course no one worries about our Northern border, because we think of Canadians as White English-speaking people.

you also might be interested in …

Geoffrey Berman’s new book Holding the Line is a good read. Chapter-by-chapter, it’s a real-life crime series that covers art fraud, Jeffrey Epstein, street gangs, extortion, international banking fraud, and many other cases, underlining the wide variety of issues that arise in the Southern District of New York, where Berman was the US attorney for 2 years during the Trump administration.

Like any good TV crime series, the episodes have a long-term background plot playing out: How Trump and Bill Barr tried to use the Justice Department to protect Trump’s friends and attack his enemies. Berman’s refusal to play ball involved strategic resistance, as he was constantly forced to decide which concessions mattered and which didn’t. He eventually did get fired, but managed to avoid handing SDNY off to a Trump/Barr puppet.

One point that makes Berman’s book topical: When Trump talks about “weaponization of the justice system“, it’s projection. He spent four years trying to weaponize it.

---

A legal battle is playing out in Texas over Governor Abbott’s and Attorney General Paxton’s desire to persecute families of trans youth. In Abbott and Paxton’s view, parents who allow their children to receive puberty blockers or other gender-identity-affirming medical care (under a doctor’s supervision) should be investigated for child abuse. A state judge disagrees, but Paxton will appeal the ruling.

---

Whatever happened to the praying football coach? You know, the one that the Supreme Court eviscerated the Constitution’s Establishment Clause for? Has he been reinstated, as he demanded and the Court ordered?

Well, not exactly. His reinstatement papers have been sitting around since August 8, but “we haven’t gotten so much as a phone call” says a spokesperson for the school district.

Instead, ex-Coach Kennedy has been living large as a conservative celebrity.

Instead, as the Bremerton Knights were prepping for the season in August, Kennedy was up in Alaska, meeting with former Vice President Mike Pence and evangelist Franklin Graham. On the eve of the first game, which the Knights won, Kennedy was in Milwaukee being presented with an engraved .22-caliber rifle at an American Legion convention.

The weekend of the second game, which the Knights also won, Kennedy appeared with former President Donald Trump at the Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey. He saw Trump get a religious award from a group called the American Cornerstone Institute.

Coming up this month, Kennedy’s scheduled to give a talk as part of a lectureship series at a Christian university in Arkansas.

No doubt we can soon expect a book tour and a movie. It sure looks like “the praying coach” is just another right-wing grifter.

---

The purge continues at CNN: Don Lemon has lost his prime time slot and has been moved to the morning.

---

The latest “woke” thing that upsets the Right: In the live-action remake of Disney’s animated “The Little Mermaid”, Ariel is played by a Black actress.

Let me provide some perspective: When I was growing up in the 1960s in the Midwestern White working class, I was still a little uncertain about imitating great athletes like Willie Mays or Bill Russell on the playground, because White boys weren’t supposed to identify with Black men. That all changed in my lifetime, and now there’s nothing the least bit strange about players of any race or age trying to shoot like Steph Curry.

Same thing here: If you worry that your daughter can’t really identify with a Black Ariel, it undoubtedly bothers you a lot more than it does her. And in the future, she will look back on this controversy as something weird about her childhood.

and let’s close with something well designed

The Betterdoggos web site picks out dozens of examples of cleverly designed public spaces, like these Bulgarian benches.

What is the responsibility of those with power? Do they merely have an obligation to refrain from the misuse of that power? Or do they have a duty to protect those without it?

– Jennifer Walters, opening lines of She Hulk: Attorney at Law

This week’s featured post is “The Return of the Bitter Politics of Envy“.

This week everybody was still talking about the Mar-a-Lago search

In fact, we’ve been talking too much about it. You can waste a lot of time on this kind of story. Some new detail emerges almost every day, but there’s still a lot we don’t know, creating room for endless speculation about what will or ought to happen.

I recommend viewing from a distance: Trump continues to claim that he’s the victim of political persecution by the “Deep State” [see definition below]. But with every new revelation, it becomes clearer that the Feds had good reason to search Mar-a-Lago and did everything by the book. Here’s the gist:

• When he left office, Trump kept dozens of boxes of documents that by law now belong to the US government and should be overseen by the National Archives.
• Many of those documents are classified at the highest levels. We don’t (and shouldn’t) know precisely what’s in them, but their classification markings indicate that some of them (if they got into the wrong hands) would compromise human intelligence sources and/or the US government’s capabilities for intercepting signals.
• Intelligence officials are now studying the recovered documents to assess the specific risks associated with them.
• Mar-a-Lago is not a secure facility approved for housing such highly classified documents. (And that may understate its lack of security.)
• The government tried to avoid a confrontation, which is why the documents weren’t seized more than a year ago. The Archives asked nicely, the Department of Justice served a subpoena, and still they didn’t get everything back. Going in and taking the documents was a last resort that Trump’s intransigence made necessary.
• Trump has not explained why he needed or wanted these documents.
• Laws were clearly broken. DoJ now has to decide whether to bring charges or to be satisfied to have the documents back.
• Trump allies like Lindsey Graham are threatening violence if Trump is charged for his crimes.

There are also a few things about Trump’s defenses that you might notice from a distance without obsessing. Ask yourself:

• If you were being investigated for something you didn’t do, would you worry that people close to you would “flip” on you?
• Would you urge all your friends not to testify? Or to encourage them to go to jail rather than talk to investigators?
• If forced to testify yourself, would you plead the Fifth Amendment?

To me, those all look like strategies for guilty people. They’re not about establishing innocence, they’re about making it hard for the government to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

You may now return to your ordinary news consumption. Don’t let Trump suck all the oxygen out of the room.

---

Another development this week: The memo that then-Attorney-General William Barr used to justify not charging then-President Trump with obstructing the Mueller probe has been released over the objections of the Garland Justice Department.

The memo is basically a whitewash to justify what Barr had decided to do anyway. One part of it is particularly bad, as former Mueller assistant Andrew Weissmann observes:

Key “reasoning” of Barr/Engel/O’Callaghan memo: if you successfully obstruct an investigation, you cannot be charged with obstruction as you were not charged with the crime under investigation. Future defendants will have a field day with this memo unless DOJ repudiates it soon.

---

When Senator Graham threatened violence, he compared Trump’s crimes to “the Clinton debacle”, i.e. the Hillary email thing, which was very thoroughly investigated and was not anything like what Trump has done.

I did all the background reading on Hillary’s emails about a month before James Comey explained his reasons for not charging Clinton, which was exactly the same conclusion I had come to. Other people who do more-or-less what Clinton did never get charged. People who do what Trump did always get charged.

---

If you want a laugh, check out Mrs. F talking to Trump as if he were a toddler.

Do you understand why they took those items from you? … No, not for no reason, friend. Those did not belong to you. You took them home and you were not supposed to, so they took them back. The FBI. Yeah. We need to start taking some responsibility for our actions.

---

[Deep State]: As I’ve said before, the “Deep State” is an ominous way of pointing to people who aren’t that hard to understand: They joined some government agency because they were committed to its institutional mission, and they continue to be more loyal to that mission than they are to the chain of command leading up to the White House.

So deep-staters at the EPA kept trying to protect the environment even when the Trump administration wanted to let corporations trash it. Deep-staters at CDC tried to fight Covid when Trump wanted to happy-talk it away. Deep-staters in the military pushed to stay in Afghanistan despite both Trump and Biden wanting to get out. Deep-staters in DoJ want to investigate crimes, and so on.

and Biden canceling some student debt

I cover this, and the Republican attempt to turn it into a culture-war issue, in the featured post.

and the pandemic

Reported cases are trending downward, for what that’s worth. But lagging indicators are lagging the way they should if something did indeed turn around a few weeks ago. Cases are down 14% in two weeks, hospitalizations down 10%, and ICU admissions down 7%. Deaths, the longest-lagging indicator, have barely budged, down 2%.

and you also might be interested in …

The uncrewed Artemis I mission was supposed to launch this morning, but got delayed. It is the first step towards new missions sending astronauts to the Moon, where no man has boldly gone in nearly half a century.

In 1960s science fiction, it was considered plausible to set missions to Mars and perhaps even Jupiter in the 1980s. By the 21st century, you could go almost anywhere in the solar system.

---

The Ukraine War has passed its six-month mark, leading to assessments of where things stand. Short version: Russia has lost in a lot of ways. Its initial plan to overwhelm Kiev failed, its military has badly underperformed expectations, and it has suffered enormous losses of both soldiers and equipment.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean Ukraine is winning, in that there’s no quick or obvious way for Ukraine to achieve its goals either. Russian forces continue to occupy territory in eastern Ukraine, and the Ukrainian military may not have what it takes to force them out.

---

One provision of the Inflation Reduction Act was to fund more employees at the IRS. This makes tons of sense, because IRS budgets have been trending downward for years, and every year there’s a huge backlog of unprocessed returns. In 2020 the Congressional Budget Office reported:

The IRS’s appropriations have fallen by 20 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars since 2010, resulting in the elimination of 22 percent of its staff. The amount of funding and staff allocated to enforcement activities has declined by about 30 percent since 2010.

One result is that rich people with clever accountants can gamble on outlasting the IRS; they can cheat in ways that IRS can only catch if they’re willing to invest a lot of person-hours they don’t have.

But the prospect of a larger IRS staff has turned into a major bugaboo on the Right. In the right-wing imagination, the employees the agency hopes to hire over ten years are all going to be there tomorrow, and they’re all going to be armed agents, rather than, say, people who answer questions on the phone or keep the computers running. Seriously, folks on the Right are scaring each other with visions of an IRS army breaking down their doors.

Dana Milbank sets the record straight. Bookmark this in case some social-media friend starts ranting about “87,000 armed IRS agents”.

---

Last week I forgot to mention the knife attack on author Salman Rushdie in upstate New York. Reports say he was on a ventilator for a time, but is now “articulate“, though still in a hospital.

---

Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society leader who essentially picked Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees, heads a new conservative group that just got a $1.6 billion donation from one guy. The group is the Marble Freedom Trust and the guy appears to be Barre Seid, an electronics-industry billionaire I had never heard of. (Several news organizations followed a paper trail to figure out who he is, but the law didn’t require any official announcement.)

Because of Supreme Court decisions by other Federalist Society judges, there are few limits on what Leo can do with all that money.

To put the total in context: If every person who voted in the 2020 presidential election sent in $10, we could almost equal Seid’s gift.

---

Republicans are trying to make hay out of Biden’s remark tagging their ideology as “semi fascism“, as if he were insulting everyone who voted for Trump rather than accurately characterizing the extreme MAGA faction — and perhaps giving it too much credit with that “semi” modifier.

It amazes me how sensitive MAGAts are, given how often they accuse liberals of being pedophiles and groomers and haters of America.

The comparisons being made to Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” line are accurate, but for the wrong reasons: Hillary was absolutely right, and subsequent history has vindicated her. Like Biden (and like Liz Cheney in other contexts), she was trying to get McCain/Romney Republicans to look at who they’re supporting these days: people who are fundamentally against democracy, who have formed a personality cult around their leader, and who feel justified in resorting to violence if they get outvoted or if their leader faces legal consequences for committing crimes. If that’s not “semi-fascism”, what do you call it?

and let’s close with something deep

If you go 3000 meters below sea level and hang around long enough, you might see an 8-foot-long sea creature known as a Solumbellula Sea Pen.

Against all evidence, I keep thinking the assholes are outliers.

– James Holden,
a character in the novel Babylon’s Ashes by James Corey

This week’s featured post is “What’s the point of punishing Trump?“.

This week everybody was talking about Kansas

In a deep red state, the Republican-dominated legislature hoped voters would approve a constitutional-amendment referendum that would let it ban abortion. So it scheduled the vote to coincide with a low-turnout primary where Republicans had interesting races and Democrats mostly didn’t. Result: the amendment failed by a wide margin, 59%-41%.

The result raises an obvious question: If an anti-abortion referendum can’t pass in Kansas, where could it pass? The NYT tried to answer. This kind of speculation is always sketchy, but here’s what they came up with: A similar national referendum (if such a thing existed) would be opposed by 65%. Seven states would clearly pass the anti-abortion referendum, and the question would be a toss-up in several more.

One thing the Kansas referendum proved is that people will come out to vote on this issue. During the Roe era, that was always the question: People might tell pollsters they supported abortion rights, but would they cast a vote on that issue, or just count on the Supreme Court to protect them?

The next question, which won’t be answered until November, is whether voters will choose candidates based on abortion rights. For years, suburban Republican women in particular may have thought of themselves as feminists, but have cast their votes with other priorities in mind, like taxes or national security.

The clearest test of this question is the Michigan governor’s race, where Gretchen Whitmer faces Republican challenger Tudor Nixon, who would ban abortion even in cases of rape and incest.

---

Indiana banned abortion Friday, except in cases of rape, incest, lethal fetal abnormality, or serious health risk to the pregnant woman. Along the way, a Democratic representative unsuccessfully offered an amendment also banning erectile dysfunction drugs.

If an unwanted pregnancy is an act of God, then impotency must be an act of God.

---

Here’s how the abortion issue is being used in Texas by Mothers Against Greg Abbott (the other MAGA).

Texas has virtually banned abortion, but that doesn’t mean it values fetuses. Bloomberg has a long article about how bad maternity care is in rural areas near the Mexican border. Presidio (a town of 4500 or so residents) has no full-time doctor. The nearest hospital is 90 minutes away: Big Bend in Alpine (population 5900). But that hospital has had trouble staffing its labor and delivery unit.

Some months it’s been open only three days a week. … If [visiting Dr. Adrian] Billings’s patient goes into labor when the maternity ward is closed, she’ll have to make a difficult choice. She can drive to the next nearest hospital, in Fort Stockton, yet another hour away. Or, if her labor is too far along and she’s unlikely to make it, she can deliver in Big Bend’s emergency room. But the ER doesn’t have a fetal heart monitor or nurses who know how to use one. It also doesn’t keep patients overnight. When a woman gives birth there, she’s either transferred to Fort Stockton—enduring the long drive after having just had a baby—or discharged and sent home.

Why can’t Big Bend staff its maternity unit? Covid, of course, but also a more basic problem:

As quaint as Alpine is, it has some drawbacks. It’s three and a half hours from El Paso and more than five from San Antonio. There’s one grocery store, and the closest Walmart is an hour away. There’s no day care, which makes it hard for businesses to recruit families with two working parents.

“We’ll hire a nurse who’ll say, ‘Great, I can start work in two weeks. Just let me get day care set up.’ We tell them, ‘Well, we don’t have day care in Alpine.’ They’re like, ‘What are you talking about?’ They can’t accept the job,” says Roane McLaughlin, Alpine’s only obstetrician and gynecologist. Before she moved to the area in 2014, Alpine didn’t have an OB-GYN at all.

In short, rural Texas is a bad place to be pregnant, whether you want to be or not. The state is anti-abortion because it’s anti-woman, not pro-fetus.

---

Thinking about related rights, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby defends Rep. Glenn Thompson against charges of hypocrisy. Thompson is the GOP congressman who voted against a bill to codify same-sex marriage rights, and then delivered an upbeat toast at his son’s same-sex wedding. So: yes, a hypocrite.

Jacoby defends the vote because the Respect For Marriage Act is a “political gimmick” that is unnecessary because same-sex marriage rights aren’t in danger. We know this because “the court’s majority opinion [in Dobbs] repeatedly emphasizes that the overruling of Roe v. Wade does not cast doubt on prior rulings involving marriage or gay rights”.

And Supreme Court justices would never mislead us about something like that, would they? Also, if the bill accomplishes nothing, why not pass it? What harm would it do?

For those of you who don’t follow the Boston papers, before I read a Jacoby column I always ask myself “What would Pope Benedict have said about this issue?” That’s usually a good predictor.

BTW: the religious Right doesn’t think protecting same-sex marriage rights is a phony issue. They’re solidly against it, and are pressuring Republican senators.

and the Inflation Reduction Act

The Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act Sunday, 51-50 on a straight party-line vote, with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the tie. (Remember this the next time someone tells you there’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats.)

The IRA is primarily a climate bill that over-funds itself by cracking down on corporations that pay no taxes, leaving $300 billion to offset the deficit over the next ten years. It also protects ObamaCare subsidies, cuts drug costs for seniors, and does a few other things. According to the environmentalist website Grist:

Independent analyses estimate that the IRA would slash approximately 6.3 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from the nation’s emissions ledger over the course of the next decade, prevent up to 3,894 premature deaths per year by 2030, and get the U.S. two-thirds of the way to Biden’s goal of reducing total emissions 50 percent compared to 2005 levels by the end of this decade.

It now goes to the House, where it is expected to pass quickly.

This is a big deal. It’s much smaller than the $4 trillion plan Biden originally proposed, and smaller yet than the $6 trillion plan Bernie Sanders wanted. But getting it through the Senate with only 50 Democratic senators was a major accomplishment.

---

In other legislative news, Tuesday Mitch McConnell’s Republicans relented and passed the Honoring our PACT Act to help veterans suffering from the effects of toxic fumes from burn pits. It was the exact same bill they blocked last week.

The history of this bill is a lesson in Republican disinformation. In June, a version of the bill passed the Senate with 84 votes, which means at least 34 Republicans voted for it. (The 14 No votes were all Republicans.) The House passed the same bill, minus one line deleted technical reasons that had little impact on what the bill would do. So it went back to the Senate, where it was expected to pass without incident.

But then Senator Manchin announced that he had found a version of Biden’s Build Back Better plan he could support, now relabeled the Inflation Reduction Act (see above). McConnell decided to throw a tantrum by scrapping whatever bipartisan bill he could find, which turned out to be PACT.

Suddenly, 41 Republican senators — the exact number needed to sustain a filibuster — had grave reservations about PACT. In particular, Ted Cruz (who had voted for the nearly identical bill in June) now denounced it as a “budgetary trick” that would lead to $400 billion in pork-barrel spending.

Over the weekend, the GOP realized just how unpopular it is to play games with the health care of veterans who may be dying from something we did to them. So they came back and passed the same bill that was so terrible last week. Cruz voted for it, and put out a statement applauding its passage. All the features Cruz complained about when he blocked the bill had been in it when he voted for it in June, and when he voted for it again Tuesday.

Bear this history in mind as you hear Cruz and other Republicans tell you terrible things about the Inflation Reduction Act.

and the economy

The late-pandemic economy is breaking all the usual patterns. By some definitions, we’re already in a recession, but job growth is still booming and unemployment is the lowest it’s been since the 1960s. Year-over-year inflation is the highest since 1981, but gas and food prices have been dropping this last month or two.

In short, just about anything anybody says about the economy these days, good or bad, deserves a yes-but response.

and the pandemic

Case-numbers are nearly meaningless in this era of home tests whose results are never reported. But hospitalization and death statistics continue to creep upwards. Deaths per day are running just under 500, up from under 300 in early June.

and Alex Jones

A jury ruled that he has to pay nearly $50 million to two parents of a child killed at Sandy Hook. I discuss this in the featured post. I didn’t get around to mentioning that his lawyers’ blunder has exposed him to a possible perjury charge. That’s what happens when you should have called Saul.

and you also might be interested in …

Even the “courageous” Republicans are lining up to support election-denying anti-democracy Trumpists once the primaries are over. Peter Meijer endorsed the guy he lost to. After seeing anti-democracy Republicans win the primaries in his state, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey tweeted:

This is going to be an important election given the issues our state is facing and it’s important for Arizona Republicans to unite behind our slate of candidates.

It’s party-over-country, all the way.

---

I wish all the Biden’s-low-approval-rating articles would break out WHY voters disapprove: How many conservatives think he’s too liberal? How many liberals think he hasn’t done enough? How many people of all sorts don’t know what he’s done or believe he’s done something he hasn’t?

I remember similar polls about how unpopular ObamaCare was at first: They never broke out how many people wanted the status quo versus how many wanted universal health care. Those polls fooled Republicans into thinking a repeal would be popular.

---

Jamestown, Michigan just voted to defund its public library.

The controversy in Jamestown began with a complaint about a memoir by a nonbinary writer, but it soon spiraled into a campaign against Patmos Library itself. After a parent complained about Gender Queer: a Memoir, by Maia Kobabe, a graphic novel about the author’s experience coming out as nonbinary, dozens showed up at library board meetings, demanding the institution drop the book. (The book, which includes depictions of sex, was in the adult section of the library.) Complaints began to target other books with LGBTQ+ themes.

One library director resigned, telling Bridge she’d been harassed and accused of indoctrinating kids; her successor also left the job. Though the library put Kobabe’s book behind the counter rather than on the shelves, the volumes remained available.

“We, the board, will not ban the books,” Walton told Associated Press on Thursday.

The library’s refusal to submit to the demands led to a campaign urging residents to vote against renewed funding for the library.

I emphasize: This is a town library, not a school library. “Jamestown Conservatives” are trying to control what their fellow citizens are allowed to read.

---

Christianity Today looks at White Southern Protestants who have mostly stopped going to church. (About 45% of White Southerners report going to church once or less in the past year.) When Northeastern Catholics left their church, they tended to become more liberal, particularly on social issues. But WSP’s aren’t doing that. Instead, they’re just losing their trust in other people.

When asked, “Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance or would they try to be fair?” 54 percent of white Protestant southerners who attended church no more than once a year said that most people would try to take advantage of them.

In response to the question “Would you say that most of the time people try to be helpful or that they are mostly just looking out for themselves?” 58 percent said the latter.

The responses from white Southern Protestants who attended church every week were almost the direct opposite. Sixty-two percent said that most people would “try to be fair” rather than take advantage of them, and 57 percent said that most of the time people “try to be helpful.”

---

This isn’t news, but it’s such a good line I have to repeat it. In the preface to the 10th anniversary edition of his spy novel Slow Horses (now an Apple TV+ series) Mick Herron confessed that he actually doesn’t know that much about spies.

A writer spends the first part of his or her career hoping to be discovered; the rest hoping not to be found out.

and let’s close with something sporty

Legendary sports announcer Vin Scully died Tuesday night at the age of 94. He called the Brooklyn/LA Dodger games for 67 seasons (1950-2016), but also covered a wide variety of other sports events. If you’re a sports fan, you probably know his voice from historic moments like Hank Aaron’s 715th home run.

But if you don’t remember Vin or his voice, here’s some amusing proof that he could make anything sound engaging: A guy who did the sports report for a San Diego rock station (and met Scully in the press box during a Padres/Dodgers game) once asked Scully to read his grocery list.