Is there somehow Putin can back off from this? I mean, in poker terms, he has gone all in. So he either wins or he loses. And I think, for us, Putin has to lose this war.
This week’s featured post is “How did Christianity become so toxic?” It’s the most Christian Weekly Sift post ever, but I doubt everybody will see it that way.
If the Ukraine War were a mini-series, we’d all be complaining that the plot moves too slowly. Just like last week and even the week before, Russia has an overwhelming advantage in nearly every factor of war: more airplanes, more tanks, more trained and experienced soldiers. And yet, like last week and the week before, the Ukrainians are doing much better than anyone expected. They’re slowing the Russian forces down and making them pay a huge price, but they can’t push them back. Little by little, Russia is advancing towards Ukraine’s major cities, including Kyiv. As hope for a quick victory fades, the invaders get more indiscriminately destructive. So we see more refugees, and more scenes of urban devastation.
“OK, I get it,” I keep saying to the TV. “Can we move this along a little?”
Putin, though, has one major advantage over Biden: It’s a lot easier for him to ignore his people’s suffering, and there’s a lot less they can do to challenge him. So the Russian people can be forced to endure economic devastation, but we still don’t know whether the American people have the stomach for a recession. It’s one thing to put a flag decal on your truck and talk about how willing you are to die for freedom. But how long will such patriots be willing to spend over $100 to fill their trucks’ gas tanks?
Stay tuned. It may be several episodes before that question gets answered.
President Zelensky will address Congress (virtually) on Wednesday.
Would the owner of this $700 million yacht please step forward? Otherwise we’re going to think it belongs to Putin.
A professor of strategic studies at Scotland’s St. Andrews University has a fascinating interpretation of the Russian advance: They have enough fuel trucks to supply their army as long as it’s within 90 miles of supply depots. And that’s about how far they’ve advanced into Ukraine. “Logistics Rule,” he says.
Russia and Tucker Carlson have been claiming that the US is funding mysterious bio-weapons labs in Ukraine. The NYT fact-checked and characterized the claims as “baseless”.
And as he so often does, Carlson snuck in another piece of Russian disinformation in an off-hand remark:
In 2014, [Undersecretary of State] Toria Nuland engineered a coup in Ukraine
You remember, that was the Revolution of Dignity that sent Putin’s corrupt puppet (and Paul Manafort’s former client) Viktor Yanukovych running back to Russia, where he still lives in his $52 million house. A central piece of Russian propaganda is that this was an American plot rather than a popular uprising. Carlson buys this, because of course he does.
The Purdue Pharma bankruptcy settlement finally got approved. Unlike a previous version, the Sackler family isn’t immunized against future criminal charges.
For months I was on the Trump mailing list to keep track what he was up to. Often there were fund-raising gimmicks, where contributing would enter you to win something-or-other. It turns out that sometimes he just takes the money and nobody wins the prize. Who could have imagined that the founder of Trump University would con his fans like that?
Last week, the NYT devoted way too much space to University of Virginia student Emily Camp’s complaints about being made to feel uncomfortable when she expresses her beliefs, as if this is a new thing that never happened to anybody but White conservatives.
And that’s what is at the heart of so many of these ‘cancel culture’ complaints; conservatives don’t just want to be bigots, they want to be bigots with friends. They want to say terrible things and still get swiped right on; they want to support legislation that puts people’s lives in danger and somehow still get invited to parties.
But here’s the thing: Expressing unlikeable views often makes you unlikeable. That’s not censorship, it’s life.
What people call cancel culture is really just run-of-the-mill social and moral consequences—which have been around forever. A society decides what kind of values they find important, and which they find intolerable. You are more than welcome to be on the wrong side of history, but it certainly doesn’t entitle you to friends.
and let’s close with something artistic
Check out John Atkinson’s webtoons, many of which are somewhat drastic abridgements of classic books.
Communications in which a “client consults an attorney for advice that will serve him in the commission of a fraud or crime” are not privileged from disclosure.
I pushed all my Ukraine notes into the featured post. But even if you’re not following the war, you should see this little girl entertain the other people in the shelter by singing “Let It Go” in Ukrainian.
I think we can all agree that President Biden is not the orator President Obama was. But at least he’s not the bullshitter that Trump was. He has a good story to tell, and he needs to get more help telling it:
Biden deserves credit for re-unifying NATO after the demoralizing Trump years. The international response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine makes a sharp contrast with Trump’s go-it-alone trade war against China, which accomplished nothing.
Thanks to the fact that 75% of American adults are now vaccinated, we can start getting our lives back to some semblance of normal. The vaccines were developed during the previous administration, but Biden can take a bow for getting shots in arms. (That’s precisely the kind of detailed organizing the previous administration was bad at.)
Thanks largely to the American Rescue Plan, the economy is bouncing back quickly from its Covid slump. As Biden pointed out: “unlike the $2 trillion tax cut passed in the previous administration that benefitted the top 1 percent of Americans, the American Rescue Plan helped working people and left no one behind. And, folks — and it worked. It worked. It worked and created jobs — lots of jobs. In fact, our economy created over 6.5 million new jobs just last year, more jobs in one year than ever before in the history of the United States of America.”
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Plan is actually going to rebuild America in ways that Trump talked about, but never delivered on.
Biden took some credit for Ford and GM’s decisions to invest billions developing and building electric cars in the US; and for Intel’s decision to invest $20 billion outside of Columbus. He quoted Intel’s CEO (who was present) saying that they could invest $100 billion if the Innovation and Competition Act passes.
Much of the rest of the speech was about proposals stalled in Congress: cutting the cost of prescription drugs, combating climate change, subsidizing child care, insisting that corporations pay taxes, cracking down on monopolies and oligopolies, giving Dreamers a path to citizenship, protecting abortion rights and voting rights, and more.
It’s a balancing act: taking credit for what’s been done while holding out hope that we can do more. And this is where Biden’s rhetorical failings hurt him. It’s too easy to lose sight of what’s been done in the face of what hasn’t been done, or to write off what hasn’t been accomplished yet as pie in the sky.
At least one poll shows Biden getting a bounce from the SOTU/Ukraine combination.
The February jobs report came out, and continued to show the progress Biden pointed to. The economy added 678K jobs in February, as unemployment fell to 3.8%. It was 3.5% when Trump proclaimed “the best economy ever“.
The Boebert/Greene heckling of Biden was a new low in SOTU behavior: Boebert heckled Biden (about the 13 servicemen who died during the Afghanistan withdrawal) just as he was talking about the death of his son Beau, whose brain cancer may have been caused by pollution from military burn pits.
Previous congressional heckling incidents, like Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” directed (falsely) at President Obama in 2009, were violations of decorum and showed disrespect for the presidency as well as Congress. But Boebert violated basic human decency. You don’t heckle a guy who is talking about his dead son. I don’t care if it’s the president speaking to a joint session of Congress or a drunk sitting next to you at the bar. You just don’t do it.
and Trump’s crimes
John Eastman, the author of the Mike-Pence-can-overturn-the-election theory, is fighting to keep his papers and emails away from the January 6 committee, claiming they are covered by attorney/client privilege. This week the committee submitted its rejoinder to that claim.
Much of their filing concerns the nuts and bolts of attorney/client privilege. Specifically, Eastman has not documented that he had such a relationship with Trump or the Trump campaign at all, and if he does, he will still need to show how that relationship applies to each of the requested documents, rather than claiming a blanket privilege. (Example: My nephew is a lawyer. But conversations we have during family dinners are not privileged unless I have engaged him professionally and he is giving me legal advice at the time. And even in that case, he could still report to a grand jury that I did indeed eat the brussel sprouts.)
But that’s not the most interesting part of the filing, because even if Eastman could establish all that (the burden of proof being on him in this situation), that’s not the end of the story.
Communications in which a “client consults an attorney for advice that will serve him in the commission of a fraud or crime” are not privileged from disclosure.
The committee goes on to outline the crimes Trump and Eastman might have been plotting together. Particularly noteworthy is that what the committee is asking for — the judge to review the documents in question before deciding whether the privilege applies — doesn’t require the committee to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime occurred. It only requires
factual basis adequate to support a good faith belief by a reasonable person that in camera review of the materials may reveal evidence to establish the claim that the crime-fraud exception applies.
The possible crimes in question are
obstructing an official proceeding
conspiracy to defraud the United States
common law fraud
The basic conspiracy here is one you have undoubtedly already heard about: Trump and his associates attempted to prevent Congress from carrying out its constitutional duty to count the electoral votes that had been certified by the states. They did this by
trying to convince Vice President Pence to illegally claim the power to refuse to count certified electoral votes
promoting a false narrative of a stolen election, which induced multiple people to perform actions based on their belief of the false narrative
A key point here is that we’re not just talking about a difference of opinion: Trump knew that what he was saying was false.
the President and Plaintiff engaged in an extensive campaign to persuade the public, state officials, members of Congress, and Vice President Pence that the 2020 election had been unlawfully “stolen” by Joseph Biden. The President continued this effort despite repeated assurances from countless sources that there was no evidence of widespread election fraud. On November 12, 2020, CISA issued a joint statement of election security agencies stating: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” At around the same time, researchers working for the President’s campaign concluded that several the claims of fraud relating to Dominion voting machines were false.
In December, Attorney General Barr publicly announced that there was no widespread election fraud. By January 6, more than 60 court cases had rejected legal claims alleging election fraud. The New York court that suspended Giuliani’s law license said that certain of his allegations lacked a “scintilla of evidence.” On multiple occasions, acting Attorney General Rosen and acting Deputy Attorney General Donoghue told the President personally that the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigations had found no evidence to substantiate claims being raised by the President. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger likewise rebutted many of the President’s allegations of fraud in Georgia. Despite these refutations and the absence of any evidence to support the allegations he was making, the President and his associates continued to publicly advance the narrative that the election had been tainted by widespread fraud.
The filing then goes into detail about one particular false claim: that “suitcases of ballots” were pulled from under a table in Georgia. It lists all the ways that both Georgia election officials and local media had debunked this claim, only to see Trump repeat it in Facebook ads.
On what Trump knew about his election-fraud claims, Bill Barr now says, “I told him all this stuff was bullshit.”
authored a legal opinion declaring that providing gender-affirming care to minors is “child abuse” according to existing state law. Governor Greg Abbott then directed the Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS), the state’s child welfare agency, to comply by investigating any reports of parents providing gender-affirming care to their children.
has also declared that teachers, doctors, and the general public are all required, on pain of criminal penalty, to report to DFPS any person who provides or is suspected of providing medical treatment for gender dysphoria, a recognized condition with well-established treatment protocols.
Meanwhile, Florida is about to pass its Don’t-Say-Gay law. The bill has already passed the House and made it to the floor of the Senate, where it is expected to pass. Gov. DeSantis has said he will sign it.
Like so many red-state bills to control what can be said in schools, the law is vague and will have a chilling effect on any discussion of gender identity or sexual orientation, whether it is specifically violates the law or not. Like the Texas abortion bill, parents can enforce it by suing their child’s school, something no teacher wants to risk.
The bill that liberals inaccurately call ‘Don’t Say Gay’ would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill. If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children. Silence is complicity.
Like the anti-Critical-Race-Theory laws, Don’t Say Gay is based on fear-mongering about things that aren’t actually happening. Where is the evidence of some statewide epidemic of pedophile grooming based in the public schools? It’s crazy.
SNL’s Kate McKinnon on Don’t Say Gay: “I’m trying to make sense of all this. Does this Don’t Say Gay law have a purpose? … If the 90’s were right and ‘gay’ means ‘bad’, then this is the gayest law I’ve ever seen.”
The outlines of Republican resistance to Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson are becoming clear: She’s too liberal, and her experience as a public defender makes her soft on crime.
I expect dog whistles about race, but no explicit racial attacks. One tactic seems obvious: Find a really bad Black man that Jackson defended, and try to associate her with his crimes. Ideally, she got him off, or got him a light sentence, and then he committed worse crimes later. Nobody will say “Black”, but his picture will be everywhere, as Willie Horton’s was.
Mitch McConnell is trying to make a thing out of her refusal to denounce proposals that would add justices to the Court. Since the Court plays no role in deciding such things, she has no reason take a position — or even form one, for that matter. McConnell might as well ask her opinion about NATO establishing a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
Tucker Carlson is demanding to see Ketanji Brown Jackson’s LSAT score, a request he didn’t make for any previous Supreme Court nominee. This is a standard racist tactic: When a Black person is up for promotion, suddenly there are issues nobody cared about before. For example, nobody ever cared about a president’s birth certificate until we had a Black president.
Inventing some new requirement is a way of making a Black job-seeker prove things that White applicants can take for granted, and implying that their candidacy is uniquely questionable. Demanding Judge Jackson’s LSATs (or then accusing her of hiding them) is a way of implying doubts about her intelligence. And if she releases her score, what then? Unless it’s a perfect 180 (which only 1 in 1,000 tests are), then Tucker can find a White guy who scored higher and ask why he’s not the nominee — as if LSATs were now the sole criterion. If she got a 179, she’s an affirmative action hire.
One of the fundamental motifs of horror is to literalize some disturbing metaphor. So Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula literalizes the metaphor that aristocrats suck the blood of the productive classes. Mary Shelley’s worries that technologists might metaphorically be playing God, together with her fears that our Creator might be no better than we are, become literal in Dr. Frankenstein. The savagery of middle school becomes literal in Lord of the Flies.
Severance continues that tradition. The Lumon Corporation has developed a procedure that severs work memories from personal memories, so you forget whatever you did at work when you go home (to the extent that you don’t even recognize co-workers if you meet them on the street), but you also forget your personal life when you’re at work. (Do you have a family? You don’t know.) The result is that the work-selves are entirely at the mercy of the corporation: In their experience, they never leave the office. Only the outside-selves can quit, but those personas don’t know any reasons why they should. (You might imagine that Lumon would take advantage of severance to have its workers do horrible things, but the show doesn’t go there: The work we see appears entirely meaningless.)
Several metaphorical fears are being literalized here: that we become different people at work; that the compartmentalization of our work lives is psychologically toxic; that our apparent autonomy is an illusion, because we’re denied the information we need to make prudent decisions; that while we may put the victims of capitalism out of our minds, they are not actually different from us; and a number of others.
and you also might be interested in …
This week I’m down-grading the pandemic to just another short note. New cases are back where they were in July, before the Delta surge, averaging 45K per day. Deaths are still running at 1500 per day, but are dropping at a rate of 31% over the last two weeks. Since cases are falling, deaths should continue falling for some time yet.
and let’s close with a reminder that anybody can be criticized
McSweeney’s imagines negative classroom reviews of Jesus: “Feels like a class for farmers. Hope you like talking about seeds. Wheat seeds. Mustard seeds. Seeds, seeds, seeds.”
“I asked him to sign my accommodations form from the Disability Services Office, and he spit on the ground and rubbed the dirt in my eyes. I can see now, but it was still rude.”
This week everybody was talking about the Ukraine invasion
The featured post covers most of what I have to say about that. But I did want to add something about the role of race and heritage in the American and European identification with Ukraine. To be blunt: Ukrainians get more sympathy because they’re White. Even more than just being White, Ukrainians are perhaps the best exemplars of European standards of beauty (other than maybe Icelanders).
I feel that racial tug myself. (A few years ago, I watched a stage performance of The Grapes of Wrath and realized that I’d be having a much weaker and more ambiguous emotional response if the migrants were Hispanic. These characters were like my grandparents.)
But as in so many situations where we notice unfairness, we should be trying to level up, not level down. (Example: The solution to police disproportionately killing Black people isn’t for them to kill more White people.) The problem here isn’t our empathy for Ukrainians, it’s that we aren’t similarly affected by the plight of Yemenis or the victims of the various struggles in Africa.
One more thing: If you find yourself arguing with Putin apologists on social media, you’re bound to run into the claim that NATO promised in the 90s that it wouldn’t expand further. That’s not true. The New Yorker went into detail about this in January, but I’m more impressed by this Brookings Institute article from 2014: Gorbachev says no such promise was made. He should know.
and Biden’s Supreme Court choice
Probably President Biden hoped to make a bigger splash when he announced Appellate Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as his nominee to replace Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court. But even though the Ukraine invasion was soaking up everyone’s attention, I’m sure he wanted to make his choice before his State of the Union address tomorrow night.
As for how that opposition will go, there will be cover stories that spin something about her into a danger to the Republic, coupled with dog whistles that appeal to racism. Andrew Koppelman predicts that her record as a public defender will be used against her, because undoubtedly that job required her to defend some bad people from time to time. In the Fox News alternate universe, their crimes will become her crimes.
As for racist dog whistles, Tucker Carlson has already started. He says the Brown nomination “tells you that [Biden] is absolutely happy to defile a system built by other people over hundreds of years.”
Yep, that’s what Black people do in Tucker’s universe: defile things.
and the pandemic
The Omicron collapse continues. In the last two weeks, cases are down 62%, hospitalizations down 44%, and deaths down 24%.
The big question is how far this goes before it levels out. The encouraging spin here is that the counties where Omicron hit first have generally been running ahead of the rest of the country, and their numbers have gone significantly lower. In the US as a whole, we’re seeing 20 new cases per 100K people. But Cook County, Illinois (Chicago) is at 11, New York City at 10, and Ohio’s Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) is down to 6.5.
Trump and his people are still colluding with Russia. Here’s Trump being interviewed on a right-wing radio show Wednesday:
I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, “This is genius.” Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine. Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful.
So, Putin is now saying, “It’s independent,” a large section of Ukraine. I said, “How smart is that?” And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s strongest peace force… We could use that on our southern border. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen. There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re gonna keep peace all right. No, but think of it. Here’s a guy who’s very savvy… I know him very well. Very, very well.
Delaying military aid, and threatening to withhold it entirely unless President Zelensky would do him the personal “favor” of investigating the Biden family, was what got Trump impeached the first time. He fired Colonel Vindman for testifying truthfully about that extortion.
On Wednesday, Tucker Carlson attributed Putin’s unpopularity to Democratic propaganda, and tried to level the playing field:
Since the day that Donald Trump became president, Democrats in Washington have told you it’s your patriotic duty to hate Vladimir Putin. It’s not a suggestion. It’s a mandate. Anything less than hatred for Putin is treason.
Many Americans have obeyed this directive. They now dutifully hate Vladimir Putin. Maybe you’re one of them. Hating Putin has become the central purpose of America’s foreign policy. It’s the main thing that we talk about. Entire cable channels are now devoted to it. Very soon, that hatred of Vladimir Putin could bring the United States into a conflict in Eastern Europe.
Before that happens, it might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious: What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs?
These are fair questions, and the answer to all of them is no. Vladimir Putin didn’t do any of that. So why does permanent Washington hate him so much?
Steve Bannon on Thursday repeated one of Putin’s main talking points:
Ukraine’s not even a country. It’s kind of a concept. It’s not even a country .. It’s just a corrupt area that the Clinton’s turned into a colony where they can steal money out of.
Ron DeSantis at CPAC didn’t support Putin, but his use of words like “freedom” and “authoritarian rule” make a mockery of any serious discussion of the issues involved:
There are people that look to Florida as the citadel of freedom who are chafing under authoritarian rule all across the world. I recently got a letter from Samuel from Australia.
Yep, that’s where authoritarianism is rampant: Australia, because (unlike Florida) they have public health rules. He also pointed to Canada as a bad example. (Total Covid deaths per million people so far: Australia 197, Canada 953, Florida 3238.) Russia and Ukraine did not come up in his speech.
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Saturday marked 10 years since the death of Trayvon Martin. On the one hand, that shooting kicked off the Black Lives Matter movement, which continues. On the other, the stand-your-ground law that Martin’s killer invoked has spawned even more laws that invite murder.
Last week I told you about some right-wing concern trolling from the Koch-funded Mercatus Institute, full of supposedly good advice for how Democrats can “save the Republic” by abandoning their entire agenda.
This week brought Part Two of that series, which advises Democrats to embrace “pro-work welfare reform”, fracking and nuclear power, free trade, and a military build-up.
My summary: Now that the Republican Party has abandoned Reaganism, Democrats should adopt it. And my response: If Reaganism is so popular, how did it get pushed out of the Republican Party to begin with?
and let’s close with something of planetary significance
For weeks now I’ve been a Ukraine-invasion skeptic. Not a disbeliever — I don’t understand the situation well enough to convince myself that it’s not going to happen — but I was going to need more than just US intelligence reports to convince me it was.
This week some more sinister things started to happen. Belarus announced that the provocative military exercises it was doing with Russia — ones that put Russian troops on Ukraine’s northern border in addition to its eastern and southern borders — weren’t going to end on schedule. There’s no set date now when Russian troops will go home.
The Putin-backed separatists in Ukraine’s Donetsk region bizarrely announced fears of an invasion by Ukrainian troops, and declared an evacuation to Russia to avoid “genocide”. (Putin’s propaganda goes back and forth about whether Ukrainians are ethnic Russians, or whether they’re inclined to exterminate ethnic Russians.) It defies logic that Ukraine would pick a moment when it is surrounded by Russian troops on high alert to attack a Russian ally, but that’s what they’re claiming. Western experts worry that this imaginary “genocide” might be the cover story Putin needs to invade.
After announcing Tuesday that he was pulling some troops back, Putin apparently did the exact opposite, moving them closer to the border and putting them into attack formations.
So Biden’s claim over the weekend that Putin has already made the decision to invade sounds very credible. At the same time, such a direct roll-the-tanks approach doesn’t seem like Putin to me. He always has some extra card up his sleeve, and I can’t figure out what it would be this time. Some devastating cyber-attack against the US? A coup inside Ukraine? Flipping a NATO ally? I can’t guess.
The kinds of sanctions being discussed in response sound pretty severe to me, and Russia’s economy isn’t in great shape to start with. He probably doesn’t want to get bogged down in a guerilla war in Ukraine, but a quick incursion where he kills a long list of pro-Western activists seems short-sighted. I just can’t believe you can kill your way to popular acceptance.
Just about any time I checked headlines this week, “Trump loses in court” was somewhere near the top of the feed. In case all the losses blended together in your mind, here they are:
Trump and his kids have to testify under oath to New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is conducting a civil investigation of the Trump Organization’s business practices.
His accounting firm ended their relationship, and warned that it no longer stands behind ten years of his financial statements.
In other news, the National Archives verified that the 15 boxes of documents they retrieved from Mar-a-Lago included classified documents. This information has been passed along to the Department of Justice.
Remember what a huge scandal it was that some of the email on Hillary Clinton’s server included classified information? For what it’s worth, I’m trying to stay consistent with the position I took then: Sloppiness with classified information (at least among civilians) is an administrative issue. It is never prosecuted unless it gets connected with some criminal intent, like trying to sell the information, or to make it go away in a cover-up of something else.
So we won’t really know whether Trump should be prosecuted until we know why he took the documents. That should be investigated, but “Lock him up!” is premature, even if it is the standard he wanted to apply to Hillary. (Hypocrisy is a sin, not a crime.)
Right-wing media, of course, couldn’t waste much air time on any of Trump’s possible crimes or shady business practices, so they had to fill their programs with some other story pointing in the opposite direction, even if they had to make one up: Hillary Clinton paid people to spy on Trump.
Supposedly, this “scoop” derived from a court filing by Trump-appointed Special Counsel John Durham. But Durham never actually said any of that, and by Thursday he was actively backing away from such claims. (If you want to understand what Durham’s filing really means, look here.)
Christopher Buckley eulogizes recently departed P. J. O’Rourke as “the last funny conservative”, which seems right to me. I confess I haven’t done an extensive survey of conservative humor, but for years O’Rourke has been the only right-leaning humorist clever enough to make me smile even when I disagreed with his point. (“If you think health care is expensive now, wait until it’s free.”)
So what happened to conservative humor? Well, basically there are two comic styles: underdog humor and bully humor. Underdogs can target either those in power (because power makes people clueless about their own ridiculousness) or themselves (for the flaws that contribute to their lack of success). Bullies, on the other hand, laugh at the guy they just pushed into a mud puddle.
During the Rush Limbaugh era, bully humor took over on the Right, and is typified by Trump mimicking a reporter’s disability or “joking” about police roughing up suspects. Remember Obama parodying his inflated image? (“Contrary to the rumors you have heard, I was not born in a manger. I was actually born on Krypton and sent here by my father Jor-El to save the Planet Earth.”) Trump isn’t capable of that kind of thing; he says ridiculously self-aggrandizing things in all seriousness, but his people later claim it was a joke.
Being out of power hasn’t sparked conservatives’ wit, it has just made them angrier. So while there is certainly material for humor in, say, White liberals trying to prove how woke they are, Trevor Noah exploits that angle better anybody on the Right. The apex of current conservative humor is exaggerating Biden’s stutter or making oral sex jokes about Vice President Harris.
P. J. O’Rourke outlived his era. Most conservatives will not miss him, even though they should.
In another political-comedy obituary, The Washington Post’s Graham Vyse mourns the loss of The Capitol Steps, a DC institution that couldn’t survive the pandemic.
That got me thinking about the Steps’ unlikely origins and their considerable success, and about how growing political polarization made their middle-of-the-road approach to comedy harder to sustain — especially in the Trump era.
Political humor had changed. It was less lighthearted, more snarky and sarcastic. Washington had changed, no longer a place where Democrats and Republicans would rib one another without too many hurt feelings. Moreover, America had changed, probably forever.
I hadn’t known the history of the Steps: They started out as a group of staffers for Illinois Senator Chuck Percy, who was a moderate-to-liberal Republican in the days before that tribe went extinct. Today, he would be a RINO wandering in the wilderness.
and the pandemic
The big question is where the post-Omicron statistics will settle. New-infection rates continue to drop like a rock, and are now down to 100K new cases per day rather than 800K five weeks ago. Will they crash down close to zero, or level off at some still-fairly-high level?
The decline has been going on long enough that the hospitalization and death totals have also turned around, though they’re still high relative to pre-Omicron levels in November.
and law
Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern examines two outrageous court decisions that both happened this week. In one, two Trump-appointed judges didn’t just grant an injunction voiding United Airlines’ vaccine mandate for its employees, it created a whole new power to issue injunctions under a law that didn’t allow that before. The panel’s third judge — a Reagan-appointed traditional conservative — penned a stinging dissent, saying that if he ever wrote such an opinion “I would hide my head in a bag.”
In the other case, another Trump judge refused to strike down a racially gerrymandered map in Arkansas, not because it wasn’t an illegal racial gerrymander, but because only the U.S. attorney general could file such a case under the Voting Rights Act. This is a brand new idea that rejects a Supreme Court precedent.
While we’re discussing law, Vox’ Ian Millhiser describes the gap between Amy Coney Barrett’s rhetoric and her behavior.
The Court’s youngest justice drew a distinction between “pragmatists,” judges who “tend to favor broader judicial discretion,” and “formalists,” who “tend to seek constraints on judicial discretion” and “favor methods of constitutional interpretation that demand close adherence to the constitutional text, and to history and tradition.” She placed herself in the latter camp.
The pragmatist/formalist model needs a third category: opportunists. They’re the ones who espouse high principles when they’re in the minority, but do whatever they want as soon as they get majority power.
An article in Columbia Law Review highlights another bit of Supreme Court hypocrisy. Justice Gorsuch purports to be an originalist, arguing that the meaning of a law is whatever it was thought to mean at the time of its passage. Simultaneously, he believes that laws should be governed according to a constitutional principle of nondelegation — a regulation-destroying doctrine that sharply limits the decisions that Congress can delegate to the Executive Branch.
The article explains the problem with that combination: At the time the Constitution was established, no one thought it contained a nondelegation doctrine.
Our conclusion is straightforward. The nondelegation doctrine has nothing to do with the Constitution as it was originally understood. You can be an originalist or you can be committed to the nondelegation doctrine. But you can’t be both.
and you also might be interested in …
It’s been a long time since I linked to the Skepchick blog, produced by Rebecca Watson and a few of her friends. This is an oversight on my part: Skepchick is an always-insightful take on the intersection of science, feminism, and politics.
This week I want to call attention to her take on the Joe Rogan issue. Rogan is a serial distributor of literally deadly Covid misinformation, as well as someone whose I’m-not-politically-correct image allows him to pander to racists and sexists. (Being merely racism/sexism curious rather than racism/sexism committed allows Rogan’s defenders to put together video collages like this one, where he takes all sorts of non-racist, non-sexist positions that he’ll happily undermine later.) Neil Young and several other musicians have taken their music off the Spotify platform in protest, because Spotify produces Rogan’s show and signed him to a nine-figure contract. There’s a move among ordinary people to cancel their Spotify subscriptions.
A few weeks ago, Jon Stewart argued that pressuring Spotify to either control Rogan or fire him was misguided: Better to “engage” with Rogan and change his mind. This is a familiar argument, sometimes summarized as “The answer to free speech is more free speech.” Which sounds great.
Except that “engaging” doesn’t work when you’re dealing with people who argue in bad faith, as Rogan does. Debate in a modern-media setting, where time and attention is necessarily limited, favors people who are willing and able to shovel a lot of bullshit in a short time. In the time it takes to “engage” one BS claim, the bad-faith talker has already spouted ten more — a technique known as the Gish Gallop after the anti-evolution shoveller who popularized it.
And while you’re on her blog, check out “We Will Never Get ‘Back to Normal’“, which is a pretty good summary of how an intelligent science-respecting person manages risk these days.
No. 2019 is never going to happen again, and that’s fine. I’m not getting “back” to normal: I’m settling into the new normal, for me. There’s still a virus out there that’s killing people who aren’t vaccinated or who have comorbidities. Sure, most of the people who aren’t vaccinated are in that position because they’re fucking morons, but they still don’t deserve to die. Neither do the people who can’t get vaccinated because of health reasons, and the people who are vaccinated but are still at risk of dying or being hospitalized from COVID. And I can easily reduce the number of people who are exposed to COVID (and influenza and pneumonia) by simply wearing a mask inside. It’s easy, it’s healthier for ME, and it saves lives.
So when I say I’m going to be normal now, what I really mean is that I’m dropping the anxiety, the isolation from my friends, and the greatest restrictions on my movement around the world. Keeping a mask in my car for the grocery store is simply not a big deal to me, and the good it causes is so great that it just makes sense. After all, people have been doing it in Asian countries for decades. Why should I consider it some ridiculous infringement upon my freedom?
The biggest issue in the 2022 Wisconsin Republican primary might be 2020. An upstart candidate for governor is running to decertify Biden’s 20K-vote victory in Wisconsin, a move that he is (falsely) telling voters could have some impact on the Biden presidency.
In the real world, every legislature in the country could vote to decertify its electors, and Biden would still be president, because (despite the terrorist attack on the Capitol) Congress counted the electoral votes on January 6, 2021, ending the election. Electoral votes are like individual votes: Once they’re cast and counted, that’s it. Changing your mind later makes no difference.
Meanwhile, incumbent Democratic Governor Tony Evers is focusing his reelection campaign on “roads, bridges, infrastructure, broadband, education, health care“. So November may offer Wisconsin’s voters a choice between real issues and fantasy issues. I wonder which they’ll choose.
I’m not sure what to make of the claim that Chinese pressure forced Enes Kanter (who recently added Freedom to his name) out of the NBA. Kanter/Freedom has been vocal about Chinese oppression of the Uyghurs (who are predominantly Muslim, as Freedom is himself). The Chinese stopped airing games played by his team (the Celtics, who are my local team), and now he is out of the NBA.
I was not shocked when the Celtics traded Freedom to Houston, or when Houston released him, and not because I was figuring in the political reasons. He’s the kind of big man who is out of style in the NBA these days: not very mobile, not strong on defense. He played limited minutes for the Celtics, and represented a part of their bench that needed an upgrade.
Still, it’s a little hard to accept that no team has a place for him.
Police finally began arresting the protesters who for six days had shut down the bridge connecting Windsor, Ontario with Detroit. To me, this whole episode is an example of how the legal system treats conservative protesters with kid gloves and liberal protesters more harshly. Does anyone believe that Black Lives Matter protesters would have been allowed to shut down international trade for nearly a week? What do you think the death toll would have been if BLM had stormed the Capitol to protest a Trump victory? How long would an armed liberal group have been allowed to occupy a federal wildlife sanctuary? Would a jury have let them go scot free?
Amarnath Amarasingam doesn’t describe the convoy as fascism, but his version of what’s going on has a lot in common with my definition of the word. He uses populism to denote an ideologically vacuous movement that revolves around the conflict between “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite”. This particular brand of populism is flavored by the “far-right extremism of the organizers”, and an element of racism.
When people keep shouting “true Canadian”, to people like me – a refugee to this country – it feels like they just mean white Canadian, and a very specific kind of white Canadian at that. …
It is in this hatred of the elite that there is often an opening for conspiracy theories, as you can imagine. It is a very short Uber ride from “elite” discourse to “tiny cabal of evil doers”, usually Jews, New World Order, and so on. …
Finally, the people rhetoric is also characterized by (d) a threatened nationalism – that something at the core what makes our country great is being eroded by elites: think MAGA, but also the upside down Canadian flags, etc.
Rupa Subramanya wrote a piece “What the Truckers Want” for Bari Weiss’ “Common Sense” substack. She opens by emphasizing the universality of the backgrounds in the truckers occupying Ottawa: “Vaxxed, unvaxxed, white, black, Chinese, Sikh, Indian, alone or with their wives and kids.” The piece’s subhead says “What’s happening is far bigger than the vaccine mandates.” But when you get down to the actual quotes, it all seems to be about less than vaccine mandates. It’s not even the mandates they’re against, it’s Covid vaccines.
Kamal Pannu, 33, is a Sikh immigrant and trucker from Montreal. He doesn’t believe in vaccinations; he believes in natural immunity. He had joined the convoy because the Covid restrictions in the surrounding province of Quebec had become too much to bear. …
Peter, 28, a long-haul trucker from Ontario … refused to get vaccinated, he said, because the whole thing had been so politicized, and you couldn’t be sure who to trust. …
Theo, 24, felt the same way. He wasn’t a trucker—he used to work at a major accounting firm and now works another big company—but he was angry, like the truckers were. “They treated me like a second-class citizen,” he said, referring to his old firm. He explained that he’d refused to get vaccinated. …
Theo’s brother, Lucas, who’s 21, is also unvaccinated for similar reasons. He’d planned to go to law school, but, being unvaccinated, he had to take only online courses, but some of the courses he’d need to graduate were only available in person. Now, his future was uncertain.
And so on. Nobody is saying, “I believe the vaccines work and I’m vaccinated myself, but I think it’s wrong to impose that choice on others.”
I’m reminded of the people who claim that the Civil War was about states’ rights, not slavery. A state’s right to do what, though? Legalize slavery.
Same thing here: People claim it’s not about vaccines, it’s about freedom. But the only freedom they seem concerned about is the freedom not to get vaccinated. They want to be free to make an anti-social choice without facing social repercussions.
and the pandemic
Omicron continues to fade, and the evidence is finally showing up in death statistics. Covid deaths are averaging 2465 per day, down 3% over two weeks. New cases are averaging 175K per day, down 31%. 93K Americans are hospitalized with Covid and 17K are in ICUs, down 35% and 29%. In the next few weeks, I expect the decline in deaths to steepen to match the other stats.
If you find yourself discussing the effectiveness of vaccines with someone, be sure to reference these stats from the CDC:
During October–November, unvaccinated persons had 13.9 and 53.2 times the risks for infection and COVID-19–associated death, respectively, compared with fully vaccinated persons who received booster doses, and 4.0 and 12.7 times the risks compared with fully vaccinated persons without booster doses.
So do three shots guarantee you won’t get sick or die? No. But your risk of getting sick is 14 times lower than an unvaccinated person’s, and your risk of death is 53 times lower.
In his recent piece “Open Everything“, The Atlantic’s Yascha Mounk spoke for a lot of the people who are sick of the pandemic and just want to put it out of their minds. He starts out by establishing his lockdown bona fides — he was for closing everything before you were — and then takes on the objection that most things are already open: You can go to sports events, movies, restaurants, and whatever. But, he notes “An Axios/Ipsos poll found that only 18 percent of Americans say their lives have returned to normal.”
To fix the situation he wants this:
[W]e should lift all remaining restrictions on everyday activities (which were, in any case, unable to prevent the rapid circulation of Omicron cases this winter). Children should be allowed to take off their mask in school. We should get rid of measures such as deep cleaning that are purely performative. Politicians and public-health officials should send the message that Americans should no longer limit their social activities, encouraging them to resume playdates and dinner parties without guilt.
Sure it’s risky, but Mounk recalls our courageous ancestors.
The risk posed by bacteria and viruses remains much lower today than it was for the majority of human history. In the America of 1900, for example, nearly 1 percent of people died from infectious diseases every year, about an order of magnitude higher than today. And yet Americans exposed to such dangers chose to engage in a full social life, judging that the risk of pestilence—however serious—did not justify forgoing human connection.
And that’s where I lose it: Don’t make me list all the ways that life was valued more cheaply in past eras.
I don’t remember 1900, but I do remember the 1960s. The cars were death traps. Practically nothing had a railing on it. People insulated their homes with asbestos and painted their walls with lead. So don’t try to make me nostalgic for the health-and-safety standards of the Good Old Days.
I (along with Mike the Mad Biologist) am one of the people whose lives have not returned to “normal” yet, and it’s got nothing to do with public-health officials making me feel guilty. I just don’t want to get sick. I understand that deaths among the triple-vaccinated are rare now (see above), and if Mounk weighs risks differently and wants to “resume playdates and dinner parties”, I’m not stopping him. Nobody is.
But it sure sounds like he wants my permission, or Tony Fauci’s, or somebody’s. Generate your own permission, Yascha. Stop looking at the rest of us. We’re not the problem.
and fake controversies
This week in the conservative alternative universe:
At an awards show, Adele said something that shouldn’t have offended anybody. She “loves being a woman”. Good for her. It’s great when people love being what they are.
Conservative media freaked out about the “woke Left” taking offense at what Adele said and threatening to “cancel” her.
Notice a step missing? As best I or anybody else can detect, the Left did not interpret Adele’s statement as a slam against the trans community, because there’s no reason to think it was. Nobody is trying to cancel Adele. Ari Drennen from Media Matters tweeted:
As a trans person, I also very much love being a woman, and I’m glad that Adele feels the same. Whether you’re a man, a woman, or nonbinary, it’s good to love yourself and the life you’ve made!
Instead, the Crazy Right imagined what their caricature of a “woke” person would do, and reacted against that. Then they all quoted each other about the (non-existent) insane left-wing freakout, until Fox devoted a segment of Outnumbered to the manufactured controversy, and Joe Rogan monologued on how “intolerant” the “they/them people” are. The Daily Beast has the full story.
Oh, and the widely reported (on the Right) story that the Biden administration was spending millions distributing crack pipes? Not true. But you probably guessed that already.
and Trump
Every week, the picture of Trump’s general lawlessness gains more detail.
While President Trump was in office, staff in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet — and believed the president had flushed pieces of paper, Maggie Haberman scoops in her forthcoming book, “Confidence Man.”
Meanwhile, the National Archives has retrieved 15 boxes of presidential documents, some highly classified, from Mar-a-Lago. By law, those documents belong to the American people, not Trump. Transporting classified documents is a highly regulated process, but nobody seems to know who moved the 15 boxes to Florida.
“He would roll his eyes at the rules, so we did, too,” said Stephanie Grisham, the former Trump White House press secretary who has become an outspoken Trump critic since the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. “We weren’t going to get in trouble because he’s the president of the United States.”
Is it worth pointing out that people with nothing to hide don’t act this way?
It all looks legal, but it’s amazing how efficiently Trump sucks money out of his cultists. Ostensibly he’s seeking contributions for his political movement, but the money has a way of gravitating into his pocket.
The roughly $375,000 [Trump’s political action committee] paid in Trump Tower rent was more than the total of $350,000 that Mr. Trump’s group donated to the scores of federal and state-level political candidates he endorsed in 2021.
Many of those candidates, in turn, redirected funds back to Mr. Trump, holding lavish events at his properties. Herschel Walker, the former football player whom Mr. Trump recruited to run for Senate in Georgia, spent more than $135,000 at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private Florida club. The Republican National Committee forked over $175,000 for a fund-raiser there in the spring.
Mr. Trump’s PAC made two $1 million donations to conservative nonprofits in 2021: the America First Policy Institute and the Conservative Partnership Institute. Both also hosted bigevents at Mar-a-Lago.
but I have a question …
about Substack and who you subscribe to. But before I ask it, I want to say this: I’m not considering turning the Sift into a subscription service, or even asking for donations. There’s something liberating about the Sift being a hobby rather than a job, and I feel lucky to be able to approach it that way. I don’t want that to change.
But anyway, I notice that I’m starting to subscribe to stuff on Substack. Some people do consider writing internet columns to be their jobs, or at least profitable sidelines, and they’re good enough at it that I don’t mind paying them. At the moment I’m subscribed to Heather Cox Richardson, James Fallows, and David Roberts.
Who do you consider worth paying money for? Who should I be keeping track of?
While I’m mentioning James Fallows, check out “Framing the News, an update“, which I’m pretty sure you can see without subscribing. Framing is a concept he didn’t invent and has explained before:
As a reminder, framing involves the unstated, sometimes unconscious assumptions that reporters and editors bring to a story, and why these can make a bigger difference than more visible expressions of partisan slant.
He then talks about the influence of two particular frames that shape a lot of news coverage:
Nothing works in Washington.
That’s just Trump.
Under the first bullet, he draws a distinction between situations that are terrible and ones that are hopeless.
The frame of many stories about “the mess in Washington” is that public life is hopeless. Nothing works, and nothing can. Tim Noah’s story argues: many things don’t work, but some things do—and here is what we can learn from them, even as we consider what has failed.
The power of framing is that painting Washington as hopeless doesn’t require justification; it’s a background assumption that need never be examined closely.
“That’s just Trump” is an example of “grading on the curve”, of “not holding Trump to the standards applied to other politicians, because you know he’s not going to meet them.” He demonstrates with recent Trump stories that would have been front-page, banner-headline scandals for any other president or ex-president, but were reported in the NYT well down the front page, or deep in the interior of the paper: looking for ways to seize voting machines, destroying presidential records, taking classified documents to Mar-a-Lago when he left office.
For contrast, he reproduces that NYT’s front page when Hillary Clinton was accused of mishandling records as Secretary of State. His point isn’t that the NYT has a pro-Trump bias, which would be absurd. It’s that Trump benefits from the NYT’s (and most major media’s) low expectations of him. He broke the law again? That’s just Trump. Nothing to get excited about.
and you also might be interested in …
The Ukraine crisis continues. Maybe there will be war. Maybe not. I’d tell you more, but I’ve just exhausted my knowledge.
It’s rare for common-sense reforms to get bipartisan support in Congress these days, but it looks like a couple of things are going to pass: rescuing the Post Office from ridiculous financial restrictions passed during the Bush administration, and banning members of Congress from trading stocks.
The Super Bowl is the year’s most important event not just in football, but in advertising. This year Coinbase’s floating-QR-code ad was too successful: the resulting traffic crashed their app, which couldn’t have been the impression they wanted to make. Polygon lists their top ten SB commericals. My favorite was the robot dog.
Former Obama advisor David Axelrod gives President Biden some good advice about his State of the Union address, which will come a little late this year, on March 1. The problem is that the national mood is more negative that it ought to be. We’re all tired of dealing with Covid and annoyed by rising prices, but Biden isn’t getting the credit he deserves for job growth, for beginning the infrastructure-rebuilding process (that Trump kept promising but never delivered), and for ending America’s wars. (That hit me during the pageantry before the Super Bowl: They showed troops at a base in Kuwait, not in Afghanistan or Iraq or some other war zone, as in previous years.)
So Biden needs to thread a needle: He needs to remind Americans of all that he’s accomplished, and to envision a hopeful road into the future, while not telling us that our negative feelings are wrong. People don’t become happy just because you tell them that they should be.
Yeah, MTG really did accuse Nancy Pelosi of having “Gazpacho police“, which has me thinking of “Women on the Verge of Nervous Breakdown” for some reason. The jokes and memes have been raining down so hard I can’t even keep track of where they come from: Don’t collaborate with the Gazpacho like the Vichyssoise French did. Nobody expects the Spinach Inquisition. During the London Blintz, the Luftwaffles almost toasted me.
People are accusing MTG of being stupid, but she was probably just hungry.
The Sift used to have an “Expand Your Vocabulary” feature, where I’d highlight terms I had just discovered and found useful. Here’s one. Eric Deggans defines bigotry denial syndrome like this:
the belief that, because you personally don’t view yourself as a bigot, you don’t believe that you can say or do something that is seriously bigoted or damaging
He uses Joe Rogan as an example: Sure, he occasionally says or does something that looks racist, but it can’t really be racist, because he knows he’s not a racist at heart.
The opposite view is one I try to implement in my own life: I occasionally catch myself thinking, saying, or doing something that is racist, sexist, or bigoted in some other way. I take that as a sign that I’ve still got stuff to work on. That stuff doesn’t become OK just because I know I’m a good person. Conversely, I don’t have to redefine myself as a monster because I still have some bigotry in me. I’ve just got stuff to work on.
It’s weird how many Evangelicals don’t get this, when they understand the Seven Deadly Sins perfectly: You’re not a monster just because you’re occasionally motivated by Greed or Envy, but you do have something to work on. Just make Bigotry an eighth deadly sin and you’ve got it.
Trevor Noah has an occasional feature on The Daily Show called “If you don’t know, now you know.” This one explains how racism got built into the interstate highway system. One question I’d like to ask Pete Buttigieg, though, is why he thinks the process is reversible. Once a highway displaces people and disrupts a neighborhood for several decades, I don’t see how moving the highway fixes anything.
and let’s close with something cute
I love the way border collies herd various animals by silently staring them down. Here, the technique is applied to ducklings.
In certain critical ways, the NFL is racially segregated and is managed much like a plantation. Its 32 owners — none of whom are Black — profit substantially from the labor of NFL players, 70% of whom are Black.
This week’s featured post is “Racism in the NFL“. It gives some long-term historical background on the dearth of Black NFL coaches, which Brian Flores lawsuit made topical this week.
This week everybody was talking about censorship
When I wrote about the Maus controversy last week, I was inclined to interpret the school board’s actions as generously as reason allowed, a position several of the commenters disagreed with. Sadness for McMinn County’s 8th-graders was my main reaction, rather than anger at the small-minded board members.
The censorship stories in the news this week, though, are worse. McMinn County, after all, was just preventing teachers from assigning a book; they weren’t doing anything to stop kids from reading it if they want to. (And if that’s what they intended, their action backfired spectacularly. Maus is selling out all over the country.)
Hundreds of titles have been pulled from libraries across the state for review, sometimes over the objections of school librarians, several of whom told NBC News they face increasingly hostile work environments and mounting pressure to pre-emptively pull books that might draw complaints.
Records requests to nearly 100 school districts in the Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin regions — a small sampling of the state’s 1,250 public school systems — revealed 75 formal requests by parents or community members to ban books from libraries during the first four months of this school year. In comparison, only one library book challenge was filed at those districts during the same time period a year earlier, records show. A handful of the districts reported more challenges this year than in the past two decades combined.
Books related to race are another target, including one absurd request to remove a children’s biography of Michelle Obama because “it promotes ‘reverse racism’ against white people”.
It’s one thing to object to books the school tries to make your child read, but it’s something else entirely when you try to control the books made available to other people’s children.
Back in Tennessee, a church in the Nashville ex-urb of Mount Juliet took things one step further with an honest-to-Hitler book burning on Wednesday. The tinder included young-adult series the church deems “demonic”, like Harry Potter and Twilight, as well as anything related to Masonry.
I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around this plan, because to me re-enacting Nazi rituals seems like a good way to raise demons, not fight them. But I guess my ceremonial magick training was just different from theirs.
I think if I were one of the authors whose books are being burned, I’d put out a statement saying that I did indeed embed demons in my books, but I designed the spell so that the demons are released by fire. (So you just possessed your own church, you idiots. Pay me if you want the banishing spell.) Burning the book works like Obi-Wan explained to Darth Vader:
If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
But back in the world of practical politics, I have to wonder when the civic establishments in these places are going to realize how much damage these stories are doing to their public image. Say I’m an educated professional with school-age kids and I’m on the job market. The absolute last place I’m going to move is somewhere that puts my kids’ education under the thumbs of Christian Taliban yahoos. Similarly, if I’m a business that needs to attract an educated work force, I’m not going to locate anywhere near such towns.
and the pandemic
Omicron case totals are going down as fast as they went up. The current daily average just crossed under 300K, down 57% in two weeks. As always, hospitalizations and deaths lag a few weeks behind. Hospitalizations are down only 23% in two weeks, and deaths-per-day are still increasing by that measure, though on a shorter time scale, it looks like they peaked at 2632 on Thursday.
Apparently white-tailed deer also get Covid. My first thought was not to worry, because I seldom find myself sharing an elevator with a deer. But today’s NYT speculates on the possibility that the virus might mutate in the deer population and then come back to us.
I keep coming back to the dumb, crushingly obvious point that everything about Covid in the US would be better if we were 80% vaccinated and 60% boosted (like Denmark)
Karl Rove wrote a Wall Street Journal column in response to the death of his sister from Covid. I think of Karl as one of the villains of American politics in recent decades, but that doesn’t matter in a situation like this. Today, I hope he finds comfort.
and January 6
The Republican National Committee went full fascist Friday. If they want to censure Republican congresspeople, that’s their business, but their censure resolution against Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger gave these reasons:
WHEREAS, Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger are participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse, and they are both utilizing their past professed political affiliation to mask Democrat abuse of prosecutorial power for partisan purposes …
Nothing in the resolution draws a line between good and bad participants in the January 6 riot, so the clear implication is that the whole event was “legitimate political discourse”. Beating up Capitol police and breaking into the Capitol building to prevent Congress from overseeing a peaceful transfer of power — that’s just how Republicans do politics these days. Attempting to figure out what happened that day and why (which is all the January 6 Committee can do; they have no “prosecutorial power”) is “persecution”.
The rest of the resolution is full of conspiracy-theory thinking and Orwellian gaslighting. Among other things, Republicans need to get the House majority back in order to stop the Democrats’ “systematic effort … to create record inflation designed to steal the American dream from our children and grandchildren”. So inflation — which nowhere near 1979’s record of 13%, but never mind that — isn’t an unfortunate byproduct of (successful) policies to get the economy moving again; it’s an intentional plot with nefarious purposes!
If I run and if I win [in 2024], we will treat those people from January 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons. Because they are being treated so unfairly.
Two things to note about that: First, he’s attempting to influence witnesses who might be able to pin responsibility for the riot back on him. That’s illegal. And second, he’s encouraging people to use violence on behalf of his 2024 run: Don’t worry about it; if we win I’ve got you covered.
Trump has a record of making good on pardon-for-silence deals: Mike Flynn, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort successfully obstructed the Mueller investigation by refusing to talk. All have been pardoned.
If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or corrupt, we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere.
And if one of those protests turns into a violent attempt to intimidate public officials, no worries — he can pardon the terrorists after he’s back in office.
Witness tampering leads us to the Vindman lawsuit. In his role as the National Security Council’s Director for Eastern European Affairs, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman was on the infamous 2019 call in which then-President Trump made delivery of military aid to Ukraine (that Congress had already appropriated) contingent on Ukraine participating in Trump’s attempt to smear his most-feared challenger, Joe Biden.
Recognizing that Trump’s linking of US aid to his personal political interests was “improper, if not unlawful, and risked national security”, Vindman properly reported his concerns to NSC Legal Counsel John Eisenberg. After someone else with knowledge of the call made a whistle-blowing complaint to Congress, Vindman was subpoenaed to testify at Trump’s first impeachment hearing. Later, Trump retaliated by firing both Vindman and his brother (who had no role in the impeachment) from the NSC. Trump also attempted to prevent Vindman’s promotion to full colonel, and Vindman subsequently retired from the Army.
Wednesday, Vindman filed suit in federal court against Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani, and two Trump White House staffers: Deputy White House Communications Director Julia Hahn, and Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino. Vindman’s complaint charges that they participated in
in an intentional, concerted campaign of unlawful intimidation and retaliation against a sitting Director of the National Security Council and decorated military officer, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, to prevent him from and then punish him for testifying truthfully before Congress during impeachment proceedings against President Trump. …
The attacks on Lt. Col. Vindman did not simply happen by accident or coincidence, nor were they the result of normal politics or modern newscycles. Rather, the coordinated campaign was the result of a common understanding and agreement among and between President Trump, Defendants, and others comprising a close group of aides and associates inside and outside of the White House, to target Lt. Col. Vindman in a specific way for the specific purpose of intimidation and retaliation. The coordination and agreement on purpose and strategy is exactly what made this unlawful campaign against Lt. Col. Vindman so damaging.
This is a civil lawsuit. Vindman is seeking compensation for the “significant financial, emotional, and reputational harm” he suffered as a result of this illegal conspiracy.
But the suit is not just about financial damage: Witness intimidation and retaliation against witnesses are crimes. Reading the lawsuit makes me realize all over again how extensively Trump has worn down the nation’s conscience. We’ve gotten used to the idea that of course he and his people break the law; they do it constantly.
Speaking of ignoring the law, Trump regularly tore up documents that crossed his desk, even after being informed that he was breaking the Presidential Records Act. He also illegally took boxes of documents with him to Mar-a-Lago.
“He didn’t want a record of anything,” a former senior Trump official said.“ He never stopped ripping things up. Do you really think Trump is going to care about the records act? Come on.”
Do innocent people act like that?
We also learned this week that the Trump White House plan to seize voting machines got a lot closer to implementation than we had previously realized.
It’s hard to tell yet how seriously we should take the recent Republican gestures pushing back against Trump, his coup, and his encouragement of political violence.
Friday, former VP Mike Pence uttered the unthinkable phrase “President Trump is wrong.” Pence was denying that he could “overturn the election”, as Trump had wanted him to do when he presided over the counting of electoral votes on January 6. He added:
Frankly, there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.
And Lindsey Graham on January 30 disagreed with Trump about January 6 pardons: “I don’t want to send any signal that it was OK to defile the Capitol.” How weird is it that this is a courageous statement in today’s GOP?
The Ukraine tension continues, and I continue not to know what to make of it.
Friday’s January jobs report was surprisingly good. Analysts had expected the Omicron surge to slow the economy down, but instead there were 467K new jobs. In addition, the November and December estimates were revised upward, each by hundreds of thousands of jobs.
One of the more bizarre media clips circulating this week is of the Fox & Friends hosts gleefully anticipating a bad report that they could use in their Biden-is-a-failure narrative, only to be disappointed by the good news for American workers.
As I’ve been saying for months, inflation stories and jobs stories should be melded together, because they result from the same policies. Inflation is the price of getting the post-Covid-shutdown economy going again.
Mississippi Today describes an actual Critical Race Theory class at the University of Mississippi Law School. It doesn’t resemble the Republican propaganda about CRT.
and let’s close with something a little bit creepy
Before the advent of tape recorders, Soviet music-lovers discovered they could make samizdat recordings of banned Western music on used X-ray film, which they could grab (illegally) out of hospital garbage. The result became known as “bone music“.
Often in this blog, I encourage people to trust the experts. Unless you have some really solid reason not to, listen to the CDC about Covid, and to the climate scientists about global warming. If a bipartisan election commission certifies your state’s results, believe them. And so on.
Defense and foreign policy, though, is one place where I get skeptical. I don’t usually characterize national-security-state insiders as villains, but I also don’t always believe what they say. I remember how they misled us into the Iraq invasion, and how victory in our 20-year Afghan War was always just a few months away. I also remember how easily respected news platforms like The New York Times and The Washington Post let themselves be used to spread Iraq-invasion propaganda.
So now the experts are warning us that Russia might invade Ukraine at any moment, and they could be right. I certainly have no reason to think Putin is on the side of the angels, or that he was satisfied by the chunks of Ukraine he stole away in 2014.
But still. This is one of the hidden costs of the Iraq deception: The Pentagon and the State Department have lost a lot of credibility with Americans like me. It’s going to take a long time to win it back, if in fact they deserve to win it back — which they might not.
So who do we believe in all this?
The most convincing thing I read this week was written by Ukrainians. The gist is that Putin does threaten Ukraine, but not as immediately as Western sources make it sound.
According to our estimates, supported by many of the indicators below, a large-scale general military operation can’t take place for at least the next two or three weeks. As of Jan. 23, we do not observe the required formation of several hundred thousand troops, not only on the border with Ukraine, but also on Russian territory behind the front line.
They’re not seeing behind-the-lines mobilizations necessary for a major invasion, like medical infrastructure for handling mass casualties. Overall troop deployments, they say, haven’t changed since April.
Russia could mobilize for an invasion — that’s where the “two or three weeks” comes from — but the Ukrainian writers don’t think it’s likely.
Overall, a large-scale offensive operation with an attempt to hold large occupied territories is a gamble that has no chance of a positive outcome for Russia. It is impossible to calculate the course of such an operation, and when implemented, it will quickly move to an uncontrollable point.
When we add non-military components to this formula, such as international isolation and sanctions, then the result of an invasion will be politically suicidal for the Kremlin. We believe that, if Putin and his team have not lost their ability to think rationally, they will not go for such a scenario.
More likely, they say, is a multi-faceted pressure campaign aimed at “destabilization and demoralization of the population”. The troops on the border are part of that, but so are
cyberattacks, which are already taking place, … psychological operations, such as active disinformation, mass bomb threats at schools, subway systems, administrative offices, and other facilities, along with the spread of disinformation and other methods.
A Putin talking point that I’ve seen repeated on both the Left and the Right is that NATO promised Russia in 1991 that it would stop expanding. This seems not to be true.
One striking thing about the media debate in America is how quickly the MAGA-right repeats Putin’s propaganda. Peter Navarro parrots Putin’s line that “Ukraine is not really a country.” Tucker Carlson on multiple occasions has wondered why the US would side with Ukraine rather than Russia. The distinctions between aggressor and target, or between democracy and authoritarianism, seem to elude him.
Meanwhile, Tucker’s identification with the authoritarian nationalist government of Hungary gets ever more explicit. The new “documentary” Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization that Carlson has made for the subscriber channel Fox Nation supports Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban’s Nazi-themed tropes: Jewish money is behind Hungary’s troubles.
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the three liberals remaining, announced his retirement Thursday, kicking off what is sure to be an epic battle over his replacement.
President Biden had promised during the campaign that he would nominate the first Black woman to the Court, and he appears ready to make good on that promise. There are many worthy candidates, as you would suspect from the fact that previous presidents haven’t used up any of the good choices.
Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi characterized Biden’s unnamed nominee as “a beneficiary of affirmative action”, and without knowing any more about her than her race and gender, predicted that “this new justice will probably not get a single Republican vote”.
I will point out that Jackie Robinson was an “affirmative action” pick in exactly the same sense: Branch Rickey went looking for a Black player to sign, because he saw the Negro Leagues as an untapped source of talent for the Dodgers.
and the pandemic
The Omicron wave is now clearly receding in most the country, particularly in the Northeast. But case-numbers are still high: 519K new cases per day in the US, down 35% in two weeks. Hospitalizations seem to have peaked also — 144K, down 8% in two weeks — but have not yet begun to fall sharply. Deaths still haven’t peaked: 2524 per day, up 28%.
Weirdly, at this moment when deaths are higher than they’ve been in about a year, we’re seeing a lot of calls to end special Covid precautions entirely and go “back to normal”. You know how when you get an infection, the doctor tells you to finish the antibiotic prescription even if you start feeling better? It’s like that. Historian John Barry, author of The Great Influenza, explains what we can learn from that pandemic.
Nearly all cities in the United States imposed restrictions during the pandemic’s virulent second wave, which peaked in the fall of 1918. That winter, some cities reimposed controls when a third, though less deadly wave struck. But virtually no city responded in 1920. People were weary of influenza, and so were public officials. Newspapers were filled with frightening news about the virus, but no one cared. People at the time ignored this fourth wave; so did historians. The virus mutated into ordinary seasonal influenza in 1921, but the world had moved on well before.
We should not repeat that mistake. …
As in 1920, people are tired of taking precautions.
This is ceding control to the virus. The result has been that even though Omicron appears to be less virulent, the seven-day average for daily Covid-19 deaths in the United States has now surpassed the Delta peak in late September.
The FDA is withdrawing monoclonal antibody treatments that were based on antibodies to previous versions of the virus and that provably don’t work on Omicron. But Ron DeSantis and other anti-public-health conservatives have embraced monoclonal antibodies as the one Covid-fighting method they can support, and they’re having trouble backing away from it.
Rand Paul has gone so far as to put forward a conspiracy theory: The FDA is taking away an effective treatment in order to “punish” conservative states like Florida.
A new low in Fox News’ deadly Covid-disinformation project: Tucker Carlson listens attentively while his invited guest Alex Berenson says:
The mRNA COVID vaccines need to be withdrawn from the market. No one should get them. No one should get boosted. No one should get double boosted. They are a dangerous and ineffective product at this point.
I don’t usually link to those gloating look-who-died-of-Covid stories, but I’m going to make an exception for Robert LaMay, a former Washington state trooper who in October made a viral video out of his decision to lose his job rather than comply with Governor Inslee’s vaccine mandate for state employees. “Jay Inslee can kiss my ass,” he broadcast from his patrol car. The video was clearly a planned stunt, because the dispatcher was prepared to respond with a list of LaMay’s accomplishments.
LaMay went on talk shows “non-stop” for a day or two afterward, including Laura Ingraham’s show on Fox News. “What’s next for you?” Ingraham asked. “Other than being a celebrity.”
I’ll bet that Ingraham won’t do a follow-up, now that her question has an answer: LaMay died of Covid on Friday, about three months after he made his video and appeared on her show. At least he wasn’t able to use his status as a state patrolman to infect members of the general public, who aren’t allowed to socially distance themselves from the police. Thank you, Jay Inslee.
BTW: Fox News itself has a vaccine mandate, which it doesn’t like to talk about. Tucker Carlson, in spite of spreading misinformation about vaccines night after night, always refuses to say whether he has been vaccinated. If he himself were the kind of anti-vax hero he frequently praises, don’t you think he’d say so?
and censorship
The featured post delves into a Tennessee school board’s decision to cancel an 8th-grade reading module based on the Holocaust-survivor graphic novel Maus.
Newly inaugurated Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin has set up an email address for concerned parents to report teachers who engage in “divisive practices” like teaching critical race theory. Because that’s what freedom-loving people do: They snitch on each other to the government.
He appears not to have thought this out very well, though, because a very predictable thing happened: The account has been deluged with prank reports like “Albus Dumbeldore was teaching that full blooded wizards discriminated against mudbloods!”
For shame, people! You should definitely NOT send prank emails to
The most nerve-wracking part of the James Webb telescope mission has passed. The million-and-one things that had to go right for the Webb telescope to wind up fully unfolded and positioned at L2 have gone right. Now comes a few months of aligning and calibrating.
I don’t pretend to know whether Bitcoin and its relatives will rebound from the latest slump. But the recent 50% drop reinforces the reasons I’ve stayed away from it. First, when the market started worrying about inflation, crypto-currencies behaved like speculative investments, not like the inflation hedges they’re supposed to be. And second, because I don’t see what you tell yourself to avoid panicking when it starts to crash. Any investment can fall, but when the value of your house crashes, you can just keep living in it. If the dollar falls, the US government will still let you pay your taxes with dollars. When a blue-chip stock slumps, you keep collecting the dividend. When the market turns against your stock in some speculative company, you can reassure yourself that the long-term trends are in place. (Businesses are still buying robots and moving their IT to the cloud.) But cryptocurrencies have no underlying fundamentals. When they fall, they just fall.
Despite devoting an indefensible amount of my time to watching sports, I usually don’t discuss sports on this blog. I’ll make an exception for this week’s vote on the Baseball Hall of Fame, in which Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens failed to get in on their final year of eligibility.
Fans have strong opinions both ways about this, and here’s mine: It’s not a Hall of Virtue, it’s a Hall of Fame. The point of going to Cooperstown isn’t to worship role models, but to revisit your memories of being a fan, and to imagine what it was like to be a fan in the distant past.
If you were a baseball fan in the 1990s and early 2000s, most of your memories are of Bonds, Clemens, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, and a bunch of other guys who are not in Cooperstown because of suspicion of steroid use. Maybe you loved those players and maybe you hated them, but you can’t remember the era without them. The story of baseball in those years was their story, but the Hall has decided to pretend none of that happened.
I’d extend amnesty to to other eras as well. Joe Jackson should be in the Hall, and Pete Rose. Gaylord Perry threw an illegal spitball most of his career, but he got in, and I’m fine with that. These guys aren’t supposed to be heroes, just baseball players.
No Sift next week. New articles will appear on January 31.
As these decisions show, the Court’s future hinges less on the text of federal law and the Constitution than on the capricious process by which conservatives define what it means to be one of them.
Ever since Georgia passed its new voter-suppression law last March, Democrats at the federal level have been talking about protecting voting rights. But with a zero-vote margin in the Senate, and voting rights not fitting into any of the existing holes in the filibuster, talking is about all they’ve managed to do.
The conversation started with the For the People Act, which Senator Manchin said he couldn’t support. But then he seemed to do the responsible thing: He spelled out what he could support, and what he claimed enough Republicans would support to overcome a filibuster. A compromise Freedom to Vote Act was worked out, which Stacey Abrams — the avatar of voting rights — endorsed.
Unfortunately, Manchin was wrong; Republicans unanimously reject his bill too, and none of them came forward with a plausible counterproposal. They also successfully filibustered the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, with Lisa Murkowski the only Republican voting yes. So the question boiled down to the filibuster: If the filibuster lives, federal protection of voting rights dies.
Manchin and fellow right-leaning Democrat (I’m refusing to use the much-abused media label “moderate“) Kyrsten Sinema have been saying all year that they didn’t want to change the filibuster. But as with Biden’s Build Back Better bill, many Democrats continued to insist their minds could be changed.
They couldn’t. Sinema in particular has laid out her thinking on the topic, in an argument that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense: Democrats will need the filibuster when Republicans get back into power. Jonathan Chait responds:
But how many times did the filibuster stop [Trump] from carrying out an abuse of power? Not one. You can go through a long list of Trump’s norm-shattering behavior without finding a successful filibuster. Sometimes he appointed unqualified or pliant cronies to executive-branch positions, but those votes already have a 50-vote threshold. Other times, he ignored norms or laws, but he didn’t need Senate approval to do that. In theory, Trump needed Senate approval to build a border wall in the South, but in practice, he just did it anyway through executive action.
The Senate plans to debate both the Freedom to Vote and the John Lewis bills tomorrow, but both seem doomed.
New developments in the case this week are discussed in one of the featured posts: 11 OathKeepers were indicted for seditious conspiracy, and the multi-state plot to produce fraudulent Electoral College votes started coming to light.
The other featured post covers the Court’s contradictory opinions on vaccine mandates. It’s hard to find any coherent legal reasoning here, but John Roberts’ political patterns explain everything.
In other legal news: The Ohio Supreme Court struck down a pro-GOP redistricting map. The Court believes Ohio voters actually meant what they said when they passed an anti-gerrymandering ballot proposition in 2018.
We reject the notion that Ohio voters rallied so strongly behind an anti-gerrymandering amendment to the Ohio Constitution yet believed at the time that the amendment was toothless
The Omicron wave seems to be peaking. Or rather, the peak has passed in the Northeast, while the rest of the country is still on the up-slope. Currently, the US is averaging 802K new cases per day, up 98% in two weeks, but down fractionally from 807K on Friday. Hospitalizations are at 156K, up 61%, and deaths are at 1964, up 57%. The West has now passed the Northeast as the region with the most per capita new cases.
Bob Wachter provides a useful tweetstorm explaining what will and won’t change over the next month, and why he believes we’ll face less Covid risk then.
and you also might be interested in …
MLK Day should be our annual reminder not to turn Martin Luther King into a moderate. Conservatives would reduce him to that one “content of their character” quote and claim he supported the superficial kind of color-blindness where people pretend not to notice what race anybody is. There was much more to King than that, and most of it was pretty radical in its day. A lot of it still is.
I haven’t said much about the Russia/NATO/Ukraine thing because I don’t understand it. It’s hard for me to tell what is a bluff, what is overreaction, and what is real.
When we discussed CRT in our short workshop, we were taught the basic premise of critical race theory — that the underlying cause of racism within our country is institutional oppression built into American government and law. This structural racism shows up in systems such as the electoral college, which allowed slaveholding states disproportionate representation, and the prison-industrial complex, which upholds forced labor to this day.
But he wasn’t taught to hate White people, to hate the United States, or any of the other things CRT opponents denounce.
Talking Points Memo reader JS is a lawyer-turned-teacher who explains why the pandemic experience is going to hurt teacher morale and retention for years to come.
Maybe we should just say, well, if waitstaff at restaurants and everyone else can be forced to show up, then so can we, and I think there’s something to that. But if you want to destroy the morale of an entire class of people, point out that [their] biggest anxiety is well founded: in other words, you are basically like a fast food employee despite what we say about your education and training and your job requirements.
A lot of the trends in education of late are to deprofessionalize the job and make teaching into commodity work. The low pay tickles that anxiety. We have as many units as an MBA or an MFT just to get credentialed. We have the student loan debt to match, but it can seem like it’s all a lie. We’re really just babysitters.
Novak Djokovic left Australia Sunday, concluding the long back-and-forth about whether the unvaccinated tennis star could play in the Australian Open, which starts today.
I’ve never cared about the British royal family, to the extent that I had to look up which prince Andrew is. (He’s the Queen’s second son.) But the Jeffrey Epstein scandal is taking him down too. He hasn’t been convicted of anything, but he has lost his royal titles and faces a lawsuit from a woman who claims Epstein forced her to have sex with Andrew when she was 17.
and let’s close with something musical
Have you ever listened to a new popular song and felt like you’d heard it before? Sir Mashalot went further than that: He proved it by remixing six popular country songs into one seamless whole.
For the first time in our history, a president had not just lost an election, he tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power as a violent mob breached the Capitol. But they failed. They failed. And on this day of remembrance, we must make sure that such attack never, never happens again.
… We must be absolutely clear about what is true and what is a lie. And here’s the truth: the former president of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election. He’s done so because he values power over principle. Because he sees his own interest as more important than his country’s interest and America’s interest. And because his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our constitution.
But my favorite line was “You can’t love your country only when you win.”
Meanwhile, the Maricopa County Elections Department put out a report that systematically went through all the conspiracy theories about the 2020 election in Arizona’s largest county, concluding
The November 2020 general election was administered with with integrity and the results were accurate and reliable. … The Elections Department followed all state and federal laws.
The report responds to the questions raised by the pro-Trump-biased Cyber Ninja election audit, typically concluding that the Ninjas were confused by their own ignorance of election law and the county’s voting systems, and that they then interpreted their confusion as evidence of nefarious activity.
We determined that nearly every finding included faulty analysis, inaccurate claims, misleading conclusions and a lack of understanding of federal and state election laws.
The Elections Department operates under the supervision of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which has a Republican majority.
In other Arizona election news, the Cyber Ninjas are insolvent and are shutting down. I’ve gotta wonder what happened to the millions of dollars MAGA fans contributed to them.
and the pandemic
The vertical ascent in the new-cases graph continued this week. New cases are averaging 678K per day, more than tripling in the last two weeks. Hospitalizations have also turned upwards, but not as steeply: up 82% in two weeks, to roughly the same level as last January’s peak. Deaths have turned upward as well, but are nowhere near previous peaks: The seven-day average is 1674 now, compared to 1160 two weeks ago, but 2555 on September 22 and 3344 last January 16.
Those numbers remain hard to interpret: Many of the new cases will undoubtedly progress to hospitalizations or deaths in the coming weeks. But it also increasingly looks like the Omicron variant is somewhat milder than Delta. (Though possibly worse here than in Europe.) Unfortunately, the case-numbers are so huge that even smaller percentages turning serious will still produce a lot of serious cases. And 1674 deaths each day from a single disease is a toll that would have shocked us two years ago.
So it’s hard to answer the questions we all really want to ask: How risky is it to go to the grocery or eat in a restaurant or have people over for dinner? You’re more likely than ever to catch Covid, but maybe you’ll throw it off, especially if you’ve had three shots. Personally, I’m erring on the side of caution.
The really difficult question right now is when/whether to open the schools. I think there’s a broad consensus that distance learning didn’t work very well for a lot of kids, and that we should have had more in-person school last year. But now? With 600K+ new cases per day?
I can hear the debate inside my own head: “Wouldn’t it make sense to stay closed for a week or two until the surge passes?” “But everybody was saying ‘two weeks’ when we first closed the schools in March, 2020. How do we know that two weeks won’t turn into six months?”
On January 1, at least 800K unused Covid tests expired in a Florida warehouse. A state official explained: “We tried to give them out prior to that, but there wasn’t a demand for it.”
and the Supreme Court
which heard arguments about President Biden’s vaccine mandates, one applying to health care workers (including those at nursing homes), and the other to businesses with more than 100 employees.
You might think this should be just another note under the pandemic headline, but that’s not really what this case is about. The Court’s conservative justices have been looking for a chance to make a sweeping “nondelegation” ruling that cripples federal regulating agencies in general. Vaccine mandates are just an opportunity for six unelected judges — half appointed by a president who lost the popular vote — to remake American government.
In other words, the vaccine cases reach a Supreme Court that appears to be on the verge of reining in the ability of federal agencies to regulate any and all private conduct — a trend that has nothing at all to do with the Covid pandemic or the Biden administration’s responses to it.
Congress enacted the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act), which gives a similarly named agency — the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) — sweeping authority to protect workers from health hazards. Among other things, Congress gave OSHA the power to issue binding rules that provide “medical criteria which will assure insofar as practicable that no employee will suffer diminished health, functional capacity, or life expectancy as a result of his work experience.”
Ordinarily, OSHA must complete a lumbering process that requires years of study and consulting with employers before it can hand down a new rule, but a provision of the OSH Act permits OSHA to issue an “emergency temporary standard” if the agency determines that “employees are exposed to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful,” and that such a standard is “necessary to protect employees from such danger.”
If anything qualifies as an emergency, you would think that a plague killing over a thousand people a day would, especially given that several of the early outbreaks were in workplaces. So this is exactly the kind of situation Congress had in mind when it passed OSH in 1970 (and sent it to be signed by that flaming socialist Richard Nixon).
But not so fast. The OSH Act, like the founding legislation of most of the federal regulatory agencies, violates a principle that conservative jurists invented precisely for the purpose of wrecking federal regulatory agencies: nondelegation. According to the nondelegation doctrine, Congress violates the Constitution if it delegates too much of its power to agencies of the executive branch. So it doesn’t matter what OSH says, because it’s unconstitutional. Congress should have to pass a new law every time the country needs a new regulation — or at least a regulation that the Court’s conservative majority doesn’t like.
Have you seen what we have to go through to pass a law these days? Imagine needing to overcome a filibuster every time there’s a new carcinogenic food additive.
Ominously, Chief Justice Roberts drew attention to OSH being more than 50 years old. Recall that his main rationale for gutting the Voting Rights Act in 2013 was that “things have changed”, a legal principle I am unable to find in the Constitution. No wonder Vox’s Ian Millhiser believes
NFIB is likely to be a turning point in the right-wing Roberts Court’s relationship with the elected branches — and it could permanently disable the federal government’s ability to address crises like the Covid-19 pandemic in the future.
If everyone had been driving electric vehicles, this mess could well have been worse. … It is a scientific fact that batteries of all kinds lose capacity more rapidly in cold weather, and that includes the sophisticated lithium-ion ones used by Teslas and other EVs. … Absent some breakthrough in mobile charging technology, out-of-juice EVs in out-of-the-way places will need a tow. If Monday’s nightmare had been an all-electric affair, they might have littered the highway for miles.
A few quick observations:
Dissing EVs is a hobby horse for Lane. He’s also done it here and here, where he described EV-skepticism as his 10-year “fixation”.
An electric-vehicle driver running the heater and wondering when his battery will die is in basically the same situation as a gas-powered-vehicle driver watching his fuel gauge go down.
Mobile charging doesn’t require a “breakthrough”. Systems “designed to be carried by a standard roadside-service truck” already exist, it’s just a matter of deploying them — which service stations should be eager to do as the number of EVs on the road increases. In the same way that a gas-powered car can be rescued with a single can of gas, and doesn’t require a complete fill-up, a stranded EV would just need enough juice to get to the next charging station rather than a time-consuming full charge. So in an I-95-type situation, one truck should be able to get many EVs moving again.
In the meantime, you can put your Tesla in neutral and push it into the breakdown lane, right next to all the cars that have run out of gas.
Lane waves off the popularity of EVs in frigid Norway, but his reasons for doing so are sketchy. For example, the link supposedly supporting his claim that Norwegian EVs are almost all second cars goes to a 2014 survey. Could anything possibly have changed since then?
As I know from driving my hybrid Accord, cold weather does have an effect on batteries, but it’s nothing to panic about. The cold also lowers the mileage of my gas-only second car.
The lesson I draw: Change is scary, so light-on-facts horror stories about the New often sound more convincing than they should. Remember when same-sex marriage was “presaging the fall of Western Civilization itself“?
When Tesla couldn’t get the chips it had counted on, it took the ones that were available and rewrote the software that operated them to suit its needs. Larger auto companies couldn’t do that because they relied on outside suppliers for much of their software and computing expertise.
and you also might be interested in …
The Webb Space Telescope has successfully deployed its mirror, which had been folded up to fit inside the launch vehicle. The unfolding in space required 178 separate release mechanisms to work, and they did.
The three men who lynched Ahmaud Arbery while he was out jogging were sentenced to life in prison. Only one of the three will be eligible for parole.
Notable deaths seem to come in clusters. This week: Sidney Poitier. There was a time in my childhood when Poitier was the only bankable Black actor. And of course, he only played characters that were specifically written as Black. The idea of a general-purpose Black movie star like Denzel Washington or Morgan Freeman, who might compete for any role not specifically written as some other race, was far in the future.
[W]ithout him, many filmgoers of previous generations might never have imagined an educated, Black authority figure.
Follow-up question: Who’s the female version of Poitier, or of Washington and Freeman?
What if you didn’t have to fund Fox News through your cable subscription? The goal of this campaign is to not to get cable systems to drop Fox, but to offer a Tucker-Carlson-free cable package that people can choose if they want.
Personally, I’d probably get the with-Fox package, because I think I need to keep an eye on the Right in order to do this blog properly. (Just this week, I wanted to check whether Sean Hannity was leading his show with the Sean-Hannity-tweet story that MSNBC was focusing on. He wasn’t. I didn’t watch the whole show, but Uproxx claims he never got around to mentioning it.) But I sympathize with the desire to know that your subscription money is not being used to promote White supremacy and knowingly spread disinformation.
Novak Djokovic appears to have won his battle with the Australian government. Today a judge ruled that he can enter the country without vaccination and play in the Australian Open.
As the son of a small farmer — I mean, he was 6’1″, but the farm was just 160 acres — I have mixed feelings about John Deere’s prototype “fully autonomous tractor“. Driving a tractor up and down the rows is repetitive and boring — exactly the kind of thing that an AI should be able to handle — but it’s also kind of peaceful and meditative. The idea that in a decade or two no one will do that job brings out the Luddite in me. Or maybe the John Henry.
Perversely, I think capitalism is about to achieve the Soviet vision of massive farms under unified management. It will happen not via worker collectives, but by eliminating the workers altogether.
This week everybody was talking about the Omicron surge
The vertical ascent in the case-count continued this week, reaching record levels. New cases are averaging over 400K per day, a record, more than tripling in the past two weeks. Hospitalizations are at 93K, up 35%. Deaths remain relatively flat, averaging 1254 per day, down 3%.
Bad as the case numbers are, the surge is still primarily restricted to the big cities east of the Mississippi. (Miami-Dade County in Florida is leading the pack with 525 new cases per day per 100K people. NYC isn’t far behind at 442.) You know it won’t stay there.
Hospitalizations and deaths always lag increases in new cases by 2-3 weeks, but the case-count started upwards around Thanksgiving, more than a month ago. So maybe Omicron is a less deadly variant. Maybe hospitalizations won’t skyrocket and deaths will flatten out.
That optimistic take is still speculative, but a theory I mentioned last week got some confirmation this week from animal studies: Omicron isn’t as likely as previous Covid variants to go deep into the lungs. That would explain the lower death toll. But animals aren’t people, so that opinion should still be held lightly.
Putting aside the possibility of death, the other nightmare outcome is long Covid. It’s way too soon to tell whether Omicron leads to more or less of that.
There are no ICU beds in all of Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, or Arkansas. Ask me how I know. Important clarification, no STAFFED icu beds that they will allow me to put a patient in.
Another interesting tweetstorm by a doctor: A medical team made up of “a Jewish physician, a Black nurse, and an Asian respiratory therapist” fight to save the life of a Covid patient with Nazi tattoos. The doctor realizes that this is getting harder for him as the pandemic wears him down, and thinks “Maybe I’m not OK.”
Conservative WaPo columnist Michael Gerson points out that the religious exemptions from vaccine and mask mandates that Evangelicals want have no basis in actual Christianity.
Most evangelical posturing on covid mandates is really syncretism, a merging of unrelated beliefs — in this case, the substitution of libertarianism for Christian ethics. In this distorted form of faith, evangelical Christians are generally known as people who loudly defend their own rights. They show not radical generosity but discreditable selfishness. There is no version of the Golden Rule that would recommend Christian resistance to basic public health measures during a pandemic. This is heresy compounded by lunacy.
Thursday is the one-year anniversary of the climactic event in Trump’s attempted coup: the invasion of the US Capitol that temporarily stopped Congress from counting the certified electoral votes that made Joe Biden president. I expect to see a number of summary articles about what we know now that we didn’t know then, which I’ll link to next week.
The NYT’s editorial board kicked that process off with a reminder that “Every Day is January 6 Now”, begging the country to face the reality that Trump’s (and his party’s) attempt to subvert democracy continues.
Countless times over the past six years, up to and including the events of Jan. 6, Mr. Trump and his allies openly projected their intent to do something outrageous or illegal or destructive. Every time, the common response was that they weren’t serious or that they would never succeed. How many times will we have to be proved wrong before we take it seriously?
On Sunday talk shows, members of the January 6 Committee indicated that they have “first-hand testimony” of what was going on inside the White House during the invasion of the Capitol by Trumpist rioters. CNN noted the significance in the Committee penetrating “Donald Trump’s wall of obstruction about what was going on inside the White House and his own family while he refused to stop the mob attack on the US Capitol”.
One thing should be obvious and can’t be repeated often enough: If Trump were proud of his actions, he wouldn’t be trying so hard to keep the American people from finding out about them.
The Washington Post and University of Maryland ran a very weird poll related to January 6.
A few of the questions were interesting, like “How proud are you of the way democracy works in America?” In 1996, very/somewhat garnered 79% compared to not-too/not-at-all’s 16%. Then there was a post-9/11 surge of pride that got that margin up to 96%-3%. Now it’s at 54%-46%.
Another interesting question was “How much responsibility do you think Donald Trump bears for the attack on the US Capitol?” 60% said a “great deal” or “good amount”, while 38% said “just some” or “none at all”. Among Republicans, though, the split was 27%/72%, with 48% choosing “none at all”.
But it starts getting odd when the poll asks about the Capitol invaders: Were they mostly violent or mostly peaceful? (violent 54%, peaceful 19%.)
So why exactly does that matter? What if “most” of the 1200 Capitol invaders were just opportunistic trespassers who came in nonviolently after the doors and/or windows were already broken, while only 400 or so intended to harm members of Congress and hang Mike Pence. Would that make the incident OK?
Apparently WaPo/UM asked the question that way so that they could compare it to a parallel question in a June poll about the George Floyd demonstrators — where, bizarrely, the result was 46%-46%. (My small town had a series of BLM demonstrations that were 100% non-violent, as did towns all over the country. Some protesters in some cities got violent, and in some cases the police were the ones who initiated violence. I can’t quite grasp the level of propaganda necessary to convince 46% of Americans that the demonstrators were “mostly violent”.)
But postulating some kind of equivalence between the Floyd demonstrations and January 6 is a right-wing trope, so asking parallel questions about them is already biased. (The events were different in kind. Whatever violence spilled out of a few of the BLM demonstrations was no threat to the Constitution; January 6 was such a threat.)
Question 7 asks whether Joe Biden’s election was “legitimate”. (Yes 69%, No 29%.) That’s a fine question to ask, but then the result is compared to a similar question about Trump in 2016. (Yes 57%, No 42%.) But circumstances make those two questions completely different in spite of their similar wording: In 2020, “illegitimate” meant legal illegitimacy based on imaginary election fraud. (In a separate question, 30% express a belief in “widespread voter fraud”.) In 2016, it was moral illegitimacy based on the Electoral College anointing the loser of the popular vote — which actually happened.
And most bizarre of all, the WaPo chose to headline a question about whether it is EVER justified for citizens to “take violent action against the government”. (34% Yes, 62% No.) I mean, seriously, the amazing thing to me is why the Yes number is so low. So, the people who tried to assassinate Hitler were unjustified? The 1776 revolutionaries were unjustified?
and the new year
It’s usually a mistake to assume that my particular acquaintances are typical of the world, but I can’t help noticing an overall sense of pessimism about 2022. People who let themselves feel hopeful about 2021 don’t want to get burned again.
But one lesson all the investing books teach is contrarianism: When everybody seems to be in the same mood, you can get an advantage by acting out of the opposite mood. So if you invest confidently when everyone else is panicking, or show caution when everyone else is taking chances, most of the time you’ll do well.
Consider the possibility that the same thing works on a larger scale. What if the current widespread pessimism means that there are opportunities lying around waiting to be seized? You would need to choose them carefully and judge them wisely, but there’s time to do that, because the optimists who would ordinarily beat you to them are temporarily sidelined.
Last night [i.e. New Year’s Eve], the subject of what year was worse — 2020 or 2021? — came up. And the very fact that we could talk about this with friends we were welcoming the new year in with answered that question. 2021 sucked, but don’t let recency bias fool you. It wasn’t as bad.
Betty White died just weeks away from her planned 100th birthday party. People magazine celebrated prematurely.
Several news sites picked out one moment in 1954 as her finest hour: She ignored demands not to host African-American tap dancer Arthur Duncan on her TV variety show.
“And all through the South, there was this whole ruckus,” White remembered in the [2018 documentary “Betty White: First Lady of Television”]. “They were going to take our show off the air if we didn’t get rid of Arthur, because he was Black.”
… Duncan appeared on the show at least three times. On another episode, White interviewed a Black child during the kids’ segment.
It’s unclear if her decision to keep Duncan affected the show’s fate, but it was repeatedly rescheduled for different time slots before quietly being taken off the air that same year.
For a couple days, Harry Reid’s death dominated the news on Democratic-leaning outlets like MSNBC. I found myself changing the channel a lot.
Reid, like Chuck Schumer after him, led Democratic senators through an era during which Mitch McConnell was destroying the institution, producing our current dysfunctional Senate. Today, when the Senate avoids blowing up the world economy with a debt-ceiling crisis, it’s considered an accomplishment. The Senate was designed to be the nation’s center of debate, but in the current era the most important issues never even come to the floor.
In general, institutions based on good faith are hard to defend against determined bad-faith actors, so I’m not sure what Reid, Schumer, or any other Democratic leader should have done differently. But I also have a hard time celebrating their achievements.
Trump just endorsed his fellow fascist, Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban, who is facing a more unified opposition in an upcoming election.
At this point in Donald Trump’s term he had gone golfing 91 times
Of course, Trump was more motivated to take golf vacations to his clubs in Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster, because he made money off the government every time he did.
Twitter just deplatformed Marjorie Taylor Greene for violating their Covid disinformation policy. Essay question: Is limiting the public’s exposure to Greene’s insanity good or bad for Republicans in general?
US oil production in 2021 is going to come out well ahead of the average figure from the Trump years, and I feel like neither party is going to want to say that.
and let’s close with something philosophical
Gingerbread Land is not just an eat-or-be-eaten society. Gingerbread people face ethical conundrums too.
The Weekly Sift 
