The Weekly Sift

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.

– Warren Buffett

This week’s featured posts are “Is it 2008 again, or not?” and “Democracy in Israel“.

People who don’t follow financial markets probably need an interpretation of the quote above. What Buffett meant is that an investor can get away with just about anything when the market is going up. But when it starts going down, you see who was using sound principles and who wasn’t.

This week everybody was talking about bank failures

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank is covered in one featured post. Everything’s been happening so quickly that you may not realize what’s at stake.

and Tucker Carlson’s fairy tale

Predictably, Tucker Carlson is using his exclusive access to January 6 security footage (granted to him by Speaker McCarthy), to produce pro-insurrection propaganda. So let’s start by repeating the facts he is trying to whitewash:

In reality, a total of about 140 police officers were assaulted as they defended the Capitol during the riot, which resulted in $2.9 million in damages and costs to the Capitol Police, according to the Department of Justice.

Roughly 1,000 participants in the riot have been arrested so far, according to the most recent update from the Department of Justice. About 326 of them have been charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding officers or employees. Of those, 106 have been charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.

“I was among the vastly outnumbered group of law enforcement officers protecting the Capitol and the people inside it,” Michael Fanone, an officer for the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia, told a congressional committee several months after the attack. “I was grabbed, beaten, tased — all while being called a traitor to my country. I was at risk of being stripped of and killed with my own firearm, as I heard chants of, ‘kill him with his own gun.’”

Carlson, however, presented the situation differently on his March 6 show, describing the “overwhelming majority” of demonstrators as “meek,” saying, “these were not insurrectionists, they were sightseers.”

It’s hard to know what to do with this kind of blatant gaslighting. Being outraged is probably counter-productive, since trolling liberals is part of Tucker’s shtick; his fans love him for it. So maybe the best thing to do is to laugh at his ridiculousness. [Hat tip to Yahoo News for collecting many of these examples.] The Daily Show produced fake footage of Tucker covering the JFK assassination, which he describes as “proud Americans out for a drive on a lovely day in Dallas”. Another Daily Show video edits footage of Tucker himself to have him say the exact opposite of what he actually said. See how easy it is?

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show imagined Tucker covering the events of “Jaws”. Lee Aronsohn uses Tucker’s techniques to show that Hitler and other Nazis came to Paris as tourists. Seth Meyers explains that

When you cherry-pick the footage you’re showing you can prove whatever you want. I could show you footage from John Wick that proves he’s non-violent. Take a look. [clip of Wick feeding his dog] You’re telling me that guy is a trained killer? Give me a break!

The Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit has made it a matter of public record that Tucker (like Fox’s other prime-time hosts) lies to his audience. He says one thing when the camera is on, and something else entirely when it’s off. This week we found out what he wrote in private text messages two days before January 6:

We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait. … I hate him passionately.

Once the camera’s on, though, he’s as dedicated a Trump bootlicker as you’ll find.

One person who appears to be taking Tucker’s BS seriously is Elon Musk, who tweeted “Free Jacob Chansley”. Chansley is the Q-Anon Shaman, who Carlson said was peacefully led through the Capitol by police. “They acted as his tour guides.”

Of course, we already know how Chansley got in: He was right behind uniformed militiamen who broke two windows and then forced open a door.

The response you’re most likely to get from a Carlson fan if you object to his cherry-picking is “Isn’t that exactly what the January 6 Committee did?” (Because “everybody else is despicable too” is the way all moral people respond to criticism.)

In a word: no. Most of what the Committee showed in its hearings came from under-oath testimony by Trump’s own people: Bill Barr, Cassidy Hutchinson, Pat Cipollone, and many others, including even Ivanka and Jared. Any of them could have gone on Fox afterwards to explain how they had been taken out of context, but none of them did.

Mike Pence’s speech at the Gridiron Dinner Saturday night points out how skinny a tightrope he is trying to walk. On the one hand, he described Tucker’s project harshly: “what happened that day was a disgrace, and it mocks decency to portray it in any other way.” He also said that Trump was “wrong” about the vice president’s power to count the electoral votes however he wants, and that “history will hold Donald Trump accountable”.

“History”, though, is not Mike Pence. He’s standing by his effort to avoid testifying to the special counsel. The American people “have a right to know what took place” during the insurrection. Just not from him.

and the threat of national default

Here’s all you need to know at this point: President Biden put forward a budget proposal that preserves Medicare and lowers future deficits by raising taxes on the rich. (Full details here.) Meanwhile, Republicans have been working on their fanciful plan for managing a national default, where the government’s obligations get prioritized for payment as revenue comes in. Not even Koch-funded economists are on board with this.

Brian Riedl, an economist at the Manhattan Institute, said the U.S. government’s computer systems do not have the technology to implement the system and prioritize payments.

“Unless they can build a new system in the next four months, it doesn’t matter,” he said, adding that even then the measure still likely may not address a “bond market panic.”

Several Republican groups say they are working on budget proposals, but none have published one yet, and prospects are slim for the party as a whole taking a position anytime soon. The House “Freedom” Caucus produced a single page that the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, Rep. Brandon Boyle (D-PA), characterized as reading “more like a ransom note than a serious budget proposal”.

It’s big on arbitrary spending caps without specifying what program cuts those caps might entail, other than rolling back the $80 billion already appropriated for the IRS to collect taxes that rich people aren’t paying (which will increase the deficit by reducing revenue), and making sure we burn as much fossil fuel as possible (by reversing all the alternative energy subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act and “unleashing the production of reliable domestic energy by ending federal regulations”).

The ransom note says the members of the “Freedom” Caucus will “consider” voting to raise the debt ceiling after their demands are written into law. In other words, it’s not a good-faith proposal. Even if Biden were to give in to all their demands, they won’t commit themselves to supporting the result.

It seems clear that the MAGA wing of the GOP won’t be happy with any compromise that avoids a catastrophe, and Speaker McCarthy seems completely in their pocket. I can see only two ways this resolves: Some number of Republican congressmen face reality and join with Democrats to raise the debt ceiling, or Biden pulls a rabbit out of his hat that makes the debt ceiling irrelevant. (The New Republic advocates challenging the debt ceiling in court; I largely agree with their interpretation of the law, but I can’t guess how the Supreme Court would view it.)

After the country gets past the artificial debt-ceiling crisis, then there’s the actual budget compromise to work out. That will be a difficult negotiation, but it’s normal legislating. I see the whole discussion as being like trying to decide what color to paint some room of your house, when your spouse announces that if they doesn’t get their color, they’ll burn the house down. First you have to get an agreement not to burn the house down, and then you can go back to talking about colors.

and Israel

The current protests in Israel, and the threat to democracy that led to them, is the topic of the other featured post.

and debates about Covid

One of the problems with having major chunks of our media (i.e., Fox and its friends) committed to disinformation is that it’s really hard to have a nuanced public discussions of scientific issues. If you’ve been following topics like creation/evolution or climate change, you’ve been seeing the patterns for decades. For example, when the consensus view of evolution shifted from gradualism (where evolutionary change is slow and steady) to punctuated equilibrium (where long periods of relative stability get interrupted by periods where evolutionary change happens more quickly), creationists were suddenly crowing that “New research is proving that Darwin was wrong.” That false message was the only one a lot of people got out of that discussion.

Something similar is happening in response to a recent journal article about the effectiveness of masks in preventing the spread of viral disease like Covid. The researchers did a meta-analysis of 78 other studies.

One big problem in this whole line of research is that the study that would answer the question most directly is unethical: You’d have infected and uninfected people meet in a lab, in various combinations of masked and unmasked, at various distances for various lengths of time. Then you’d see who got Covid. You might end up killing a few of your subjects, but it’s all for the greater good, right?

Since you can’t do that, you try other techniques that don’t get the information you really want. Professor Jason Abaluck (who did a mask study in Bangladesh) summarizes:

The vast majority of the studies assessed by the Cochrane Review ask, “If we give people masks and information about masking, do they get healthier?” Most of these studies find that the answer is, “Not much healthier.”

But there is a problem: giving people masks is not generally enough to get them to wear masks! In piloting in Bangladesh, we found that mask distribution plus information plus involving village leaders increased mask use by less than 10% (we later added other elements that were more impactful). In other scale-ups, masks and information alone did even less. One study in Uganda found that giving people masks and information increased mask use by one percentage point—that is, by 1 in 100 people.

The anti-public-health people are jumping on this to crow that they were right all along: Masks don’t do anything. (“Will the mandaters apologize?” asks the right-wing Washington Examiner.) Columbia Professor Zeynep Tufekci explains in the NYT explains why that’s the wrong interpretation. But no matter, the disinformation is out there. When the next pandemic hits, lots of people will confidently declare that the ineffectiveness of masks was proved during Covid.

You can see a similar kind of thinking whenever there’s a mass shooting in a place that has more gun laws than most other places: See, gun control doesn’t work! But has any community in America actually succeeded in controlling guns? (Chicago’s gun laws just make you get your gun in Indiana.) Until one does, we won’t really know whether gun control works.

Then there’s the origin-of-Covid debate. Pretty much everyone agrees that Covid-19 first appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The two main theories are that a human caught it from an animal (probably a bat) in Wuhan’s live-animal market, or that it escaped containment at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which studies viruses in bats.

The lab-leak theory, while credible at one level, quickly became the root of wild and improbable conspiracy theories: Covid wasn’t just collected and studied in a lab, it was created there. It’s a bio-weapon that the Chinese engineered to attack us. (Never mind that they killed a bunch of their own people first and lost hundreds of billions of dollars worth of economic growth in the subsequent lockdown. It’s all about us. Or maybe it’s all about Trump.)

President Trump, desperate to avoid blame for his own mishandling of the pandemic, got way ahead of the facts and jumped on the lab-leak theory as a way to shift blame to China. (People who think Covid was an intentional attack on the US to destabilize the Trump administration need to explain how the Chinese knew Trump would botch the response. Lots of governors saw their popularity rise during the pandemic. Trump might have done the same had he shown real leadership rather than try to happy-talk his way through a real crisis.) He amplified his claims with openly racist rhetoric about “the China virus” or the “Kung Flu“. Predictably, this led to a rise in anti-Asian violence in the US. (Remember how President Bush urged Americans not to blame all Muslims for 9-11? Trump never did that for Chinese Americans and Covid.)

So the debate was politicized from the beginning. The scientific question “How did this happen?” and the public-health question “What can we learn from this?” quickly turned into the political “Who should we blame?” Often that resulted in Trumpists harassing or even harming innocent people.

Liberals responded by over-estimating the evidence for the natural-transmission theory. The truth is that we don’t know for sure and may never know. The origin of pandemics are often hard to pin down. (After decades of research, some scientists concluded that HIV passed from monkeys to humans in the 1920s. Who had that on their bingo card?) This one is even harder than most, because the Chinese government, also sensitive to claims that it botched its initial response, has been uncooperative.

One US source, the Department of Energy, recently put out a new assessment: A lab leak was the “likely” source of the pandemic, a conclusion it reached with “low confidence”. But various agencies of the US government still disagree, and the overall situation has not changed much since an October, 2021 report from the Director of National Intelligence summarized with this graphic:

But of course the lab leak theory is now considered an established fact on the Right.

and you also might be interested in …

This morning the administration approved the development of a new oil field on the Alaska’s North Slope. I’d like to give President Biden the benefit of the doubt on this, but I’m going to need some convincing.

Here’s what I’d like to hear: I’d like to know that there’s a definite plan for getting the country off fossil fuels by a set date. That plan would have targets for exactly how much fossil fuel we expect to need in meantime, and how we’re going to get it in the least destructive way possible. If the new oil field is part of such a plan, I could be OK with it.

If we had that kind of vision, it would put us past the oil-good/oil-bad debate, where environmentalists feel obligated to oppose all fossil fuel development plans everywhere, and pro-economic-growth people feel obligated to support all fossil fuel development plans everywhere. We’d get past the maximize/minimize production debate and agree on a path to zero.

Maybe such a plan exists, but I don’t know it. If there is such a thing, the Biden administration should be publicizing it.

Last week, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) called for cutting funding from any public school that teaches comprehensive sex education. This week, she announced that her 17-year-old son has gotten his even-younger girlfriend pregnant, making Boebert a 36-year-old grandmother sometime next month. According to The Denver Post:

Boebert staffers on Friday confirmed the announcement. Breaking from a meeting for an interview, Boebert verified her son and his girlfriend are not married and declined to reveal the age of the girlfriend, other than to say she’s over 14. [i.e., Boebert’s son didn’t commit a crime under Colorado law.]

My faith (Unitarian Universalism) offers a very comprehensive version of sex education, one that emphasizes giving teens accurate information, teaching them important life skills (like how to buy a condom), and encouraging them to think through the consequences of their actions. As a result, I don’t know any 36-year-old grandmothers. I think Boebert’s son’s girlfriend would have done well to seek us out.

Ron Filipkowski summarizes what we know about the Twitter Files:

1. Musk buys twitter and sets out to prove his premise that the govt used twitter to censor right wingers.
2. He chooses two people to “investigate.” Nobody else can see the “evidence.”
3. He only provides them with evidence that fits his chosen narrative. They admit that they were not given things like the Trump WH seeking to censor people on the Left.
4. They reach Musk’s desired conclusion.
5. Musk then goes to the Capitol and visits McCarthy. He doesn’t meet with Dems.
6. Weaponization Comm is formed.
7. These two people are brought in by Jim Jordan.
8. They say that they can’t reveal who their source is for the information they received, even though the whole world knows it was Musk.

Steve Benen nails the root problem of Jim Jordan’s attempt to expose the “concerted effort by the government to silence and punish conservatives at all levels”: There has been no such effort.

It would be no more productive for House Republicans to create a select subcommittee to investigate Bigfoot. They could hire dozens of investigators, depose countless witnesses, hold hours of hearings, and send out a steady stream of subpoenas, but in the end, things that don’t exist can’t be found.

I’ve seen some discussion that we shouldn’t dignify the committee by using the name House Republicans have given it: “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government”. Some writers would just call it “the Jordan Committee”. I’m starting to like “Jim Jordan’s Bigfoot Committee”.

The Manhattan district attorney has invited Donald Trump to testify voluntarily to the grand jury that is presumably considering charges in the Stormy Daniels payoff matter, as well as possible financial crimes. It’s far from the worst thing Trump has done, but it is one of the most easily proved of his crimes; Michael Cohen has already done jail time for carrying out his wishes.

In New York, an offer to speak in front of a grand jury is typically the last step before a criminal indictment. State law mandates that potential defendants must be given an opportunity to appear before a grand jury to answer questions before they are indicted.

Trump will undoubtedly decline the invitation, just as he has repeatedly pled the fifth in any deposition under oath. In general, innocent people want the truth to come out, but guilty people don’t.

I long ago lost patience with Trump-is-about-to-be-indicted stories, so I’m not getting excited. Call me when there’s an actual indictment.

Ron DeSantis would like you to believe that book-banning in Florida is a “hoax“, and the only books getting banned from Florida school libraries are “pornographic and inappropriate”. But it looks like DeSantis is the one who’s been hoaxing us. And novelist Jodi Picoult would like a word:

In the past six months, my books have been banned dozens of times in dozens of school districts. As sad as it seems, I was getting used to the emails from PEN America’s Jonathan Friedman telling me that yet again, my novel was under attack. But this week, something truly egregious happened. In Martin Country School District, 92 books were pulled from the school library shelves. Twenty of them were mine.

… It is worth noting I do not write adult romance. The majority of the books that were targeted do not even have a kiss in them. What they do have, however, are issues like racism, abortion rights, gun control, gay rights, and other topics that encourage kids to think for themselves.

So whenever DeSantis says the word “pornography”, in your mind you need to interpret that as “Jodi Picoult”.

Also in Florida, the state’s surgeon general has been pushing Covid misinformation that federal agencies warn is harmful to the public.

and let’s close with something that depends on your point of view

Artist Michael Murphy makes sculptures that may look entirely different from different perspectives.

It’s almost gotten to be boring, the degree to which people believe that what they refer to as “free speech” should not only allow them to say whatever they want (which it does), but should also prevent other people from understanding them to be the sort of person who says those things.

– A. R. Moxon “The Case for Shunning“

This week’s featured post is “MTG’s dream deserves a serious response“.

This week everybody was talking about the first anniversary of the Ukraine War

One year in, a few conclusions are obvious:

• It’s amazing that Ukraine, with material help from the NATO countries, is still standing. The Ukrainian military has performed better than anyone expected and the Russian military worse.
• Sanctions have not been as crippling to the Russian economy as many expected.
• NATO has been far more united and resolute than most expected. President Biden deserves a lot of credit for this.
• So far, military failure has not loosened Vladimir Putin’s hold on power in Russia.

In general, I’ve been surprised by the optimism many observers expressed this week about Ukraine’s position. A long war usually turns into a war of attrition, which favors the larger country. (I keep thinking about the American Civil War. Early in the war, Lincoln’s generals maneuvered to preserve their army. But Grant understood that he had reserves to draw on and Lee didn’t, so battles that decimated both armies were actually victories. It was a horrible vision, but ultimately a successful one.)

The countervailing view is that Ukraine has now seen what Putin intends: to utterly destroy Ukrainian society. So they are motivated in a way that Russian troops aren’t. One apocryphal Sun Tzu quote says that you should “build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across”. But Putin has left Ukrainians nowhere to retreat to, and so they will keep fighting as long as it takes.

The optimists say that Russia has sustained enormous casualties during its recent offensive and has gained little. So they’re expecting a successful Ukrainian counter-attack to begin sometime during the spring months.

All across Europe, people helped Russian diplomats mark the anniversary: In The Hague, a portable barrel organ sat on the sidewalk outside the Russian embassy and played the Ukrainian national anthem. In Berlin, somebody plunked a disabled Russian tank in front of the embassy.

and the East Palestine derailment

On February 3, a Norfolk Southern train that included 20 cars of hazardous chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Wikipedia has the basic facts, and I’m way late in covering this. (I missed it two weeks ago, and then took a week off.) So I’m going to focus on interpretation and reaction.

Basically, the only three things worth paying attention to are

1. The Past. Could either the railroad or its government regulators have prevented this?
2. The Present. Are the people affected by the derailment getting the kind of help they need?
3. The Future. What practices or regulations need to change to keep more stuff like this from happening?

Anybody who talks about the derailment without addressing one of those three questions is just playing political games. For example, Ukraine has nothing to do with any of those questions, so if somebody tries to link Ukraine and East Palestine together, they’re wasting your time and trying to bamboozle you. (I’m looking at you, Josh Hawley.) And the attempt to use suffering of working-class White people to increase racial resentment is just despicable.

About the present, I don’t know what to say. Obviously, after a disaster like this, the people affected have conflicting urges: They want to go home, get back to normal, and be safe. So when to let them restart their normal lives involves a lot of technical questions about testing and balancing long-term risks that I can’t answer. We may not know for years whether those judgments were made well. It’s also too soon to tell what kind of remediation the area will need and where the funding will come from. (I want to see Norfolk Southern pay the brunt of it, though I doubt it will.)

If someone believes the people of East Palestine (and downstream communities) won’t get the help they need, they should make a proposal for help and see if anyone actually opposes it. Any vague they’re-all-against-you talk, though, is just demagoguery.

Long-term, I think the main lesson to be learned from this disaster is that government needs to regulate business. Every year or two I see another study totaling up some awesome quantity of money that government regulations “cost” the economy. ($1.9 trillion a year, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute.) Typically, these studies list every dollar companies spend to avoid killing people and poisoning the land — and they completely ignore the benefits of companies not killing people and poisoning the land. (If it really does cost us $1.9 trillion each year to avoid living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, that sounds to me like money well spent.)

The Obama administration tried to require railroads to improve their braking systems. (A better technology has existed for decades.) It also wanted to strengthen cars that carry hazardous materials, so that they’d be less likely to rupture in an accident. But the industry claimed that installing the new systems would be too expensive, so the regulation was never implemented. The Trump administration then reversed course and slashed railroad regulations — because, you know, regulations just get in the way of corporations who otherwise would always do the right thing.

There’s still debate over whether the Obama regulations might have prevented the East Palestine disaster. (Ironically, the claim that they wouldn’t have rests mainly on the idea that Obama’s regulations weren’t sweeping enough, and so might not have applied to a train that was only partly a hazardous-chemical train.)

Another issue is whether trains like this need more crew to spot problems sooner and take action. This was a major issue in last year’s union dispute, where Congress and the Biden administration averted a national strike by imposing a settlement. The East Palestine train had only two crew members and a trainee to handle 141 freight cars. Is that enough?

What shouldn’t be under debate is that trains could be made much safer, if we only had the will to do so. The people of East Palestine didn’t lose political battle with Ukraine or Black people, they lost a political battle with railroad lobbyists. So Josh Hawley’s statement is easy to fix:

I would say to Republicans: You can either be the party of Ukraine corporate lobbyists and the globalists deregulation, or you can be the party of East Palestine and the working people of this country.

and Fox News

The text of the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News came out, and it is devastating. The claim, which is supported in detail by internal Fox communications, is that Fox knew Trump’s claims about Dominion voting machines stealing the election for Biden were false; but it promoted them anyway because it was afraid of losing viewers to Newsmax. All the major Fox hosts — Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity — were telling each other how ridiculous the claims were, even as their shows pushed them out to viewers.

It’s been clear for decades that much of Fox’ coverage is ridiculous and/or false. But there’s always been a debate about its authenticity: Do the hosts actually believe the crazy theories they peddle, or are they consciously duping their viewers? Now we know the answer: They don’t believe what they’re saying, and are just taking advantage of their viewers’ ignorance and gullibility.

For years, one constant Fox drumbeat has been to tell its viewers “The elites are laughing at you.” That is the root grievance that animates just about every segment of every show. But now we know that it is really Carlson, Ingraham, and Hannity who are laughing at their viewers.

Speaker McCarthy has turned all the January 6 security-camera footage over to Tucker Carlson. We already know that Carlson is dishonest (see above), so what he will do with the video is predictable: He will selectively edit it to spin some conspiracy theory that vindicates the pro-Trump mob. When he does this, no one in the legitimate news media will have any way to check the choices he made: What if you look at the scene from a different angle, or watch a longer clip of the same video?

Jamie Raskin has it exactly right: “If you want to make tens of thousands of hours publicly available, then it should be available for all media, not for just one propaganda mouthpiece.”

Of course, the better decision is not to release it at all. Anyone with access to this video will know where all the Capitol’s security cameras are, and can observe in detail where the weak spots in Capitol security were on January 6.

and The New York Times

Fox isn’t the only news site that’s been under fire recently. A week ago Thursday, 200 NYT contributors signed an open letter protesting the paper’s treatment of transgender issues. Several examples are given of the basic charge, which is that the Times has repeatedly laundered the talking points of anti-trans hate groups, turning them into front-page articles, which are then quoted by legislators pushing trans-oppressing bills.

A supporting letter endorsed by numerous LGBTQ-supporting organizations was written by GLAAD.

It is appalling that the Times would dedicate so many resources and pages to platforming the voices of extremist anti-LGBTQ activists who have built their careers on denigrating and dehumanizing LGBTQ people, especially transgender people. While there have been a few fair stories, mostly human interest stories, those articles are not getting front-page placement or sent to app users via push notification like the irresponsible pieces are.

Those letters point to a broader problem: Because national news sources like the NYT, Washington Post, and CNN hate to be characterized as “the liberal media”, conservatives can work the refs to get undeserved attention and credibility for right-wing talking points.

A case in point, this one about race rather than gender: Wednesday the WaPo published an opinion piece: “I’m a Black physician, and I’m appalled by mandated implicit bias training” by Marilyn Singleton.

If you just stumbled onto this article cold (as I did), you might imagine that a female Black doctor with no particular political ax to grind found herself in implicit-bias training and was appalled by what the trainers tried to teach her. That would certainly be an opinion worth hearing.

But if you read the article thoroughly and google up some relevant context, a completely different picture emerges. Singleton is not just a doctor, she’s a politician who ran for Congress in 2012 on a platform opposing the Affordable Care Act. (Her argument, expanded at length in Med City News, was that people’s poor health is primarily due to their own bad habits, which government can do nothing about.) She’s also a contributor for the right-wing Heartland Institute, which is part of the Koch network, and whose top issue is climate change denial. Singleton’s contribution to Heartland was an article protesting the “big government” response to Covid-19, promoting hydroxychloroquine as a “potentially lifesaving drug”, and describing barriers preventing its use against Covid (barriers that turned out to be entirely justified) as “appalling and unforgivable”.

And then (in paragraph 9 of her WaPo article) it turns out that Singleton has not in fact taken implicit-bias training.

I am so disturbed by the state’s mandate that, so far, I have balked at the training.

That admission comes after multiple paragraphs in which she has explained — entirely on her own authority, without reference to any training documents, trainer statements, or trainee accounts — the training’s “malignant false assumption” and “basic message”, as well as characterizing it as a “racially regressive practice”. But how does she know these things about a training she’s never taken?

In short: a right-wing activist who has no actual experience of implicit-bias training repeats right-wing talking points about it. And for some mysterious reason, this entirely predictable set of opinions deserves prominent placement in The Washington Post.

Worse, the only warning WaPo offers its readers that they are about to be propagandized is: “Marilyn Singleton is a board-certified anesthesiologist and a visiting fellow at the medical advocacy organization Do No Harm.” Again, you have to do your own googling to figure out what this means: Do No Harm is a right-wing organization focused on opposing “critical race theory” as it applies to medicine. Its FAQ defines CRT as “a divisive ideology that attributes all societal problems to racism”, an opinion I have never heard expressed by an actual anti-racism advocate.

and culture war battles

You know those conservative white guys who get seriously offended when someone implies they might be racists? Well, here’s a great example: Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert. In this clip (starting at about the 16 minute mark), he explains his new strategy for dealing with Black people:

I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away, cause there’s no fixing this. … So that’s what I did. I went to a place with a very low Black population. … I’m going to back off from being helpful to Black America, because it doesn’t seem like it pays off. Like, I’ve been doing it all my life, and the only outcome is I get called a racist.

Really, Scott? That’s so unfair, that anybody would call you a racist. Clearly there’s not a racist bone in your body, and I’m sure Black America is really going to miss all your sincere helpfulness.

Sarcasm aside, that’s probably the last you’ll see of Dilbert for a while. Just about every newspaper in the country is dropping it. Adams’ statements are part of an hour-long post to his own YouTube channel — not an open-mic moment or somebody recording a drunken ramble on their iPhone — so clearly he planned his transformation into an anti-woke martyr. We’ll see where he takes it from here.

If you’re wondering what inspired Adams’ rant — other than maybe a desire to headline at CPAC or get Trump to say nice things about him on Truth Social — the Reframe blog explains:

There’s a saying that is very popular among white supremacists and neo Nazis and other far right bigots, and that saying is this: “It’s OK to be white.” It’s a catchphrase of theirs, which tries to position people deemed “white” as an oppressed minority, which they are not, instead of an artificially created privileged class, which is what they are.

And there’s a right-wing polling company called Rasmussen, who decided, for some reason they’d probably like us all to pretend is unknowable, to ask people whether or not they agree with the statement “it’s OK to be white”—which is, again, a well-known catchphrase among white supremacists.

Apparently only about half of Black Americans polled agreed with the phrase, which is a pretty high level of acceptance for a well-known white supremacist catchphrase, and which probably only shows the degree to which Black Americans are aware that this is a catchphrase among white supremacists.

Dilbert creator Scott Adams got into the crosstabs and found this little tidbit, and proceeded to have a decidedly non-skeptical meltdown about it. He decided to not know that “it’s OK to be white” is a white supremacist catchphrase (or at least not to mention it), and proclaimed that this result meant that Black people are a hate group, and advocated that white people stay the hell away from Black people, and he said some other racist things, too, which is the sort of thing he does from time to time.

Governor Bill Lee’s signature is all that Tennessee needs to be the first state to ban drag performances “on public property” or “in a location where [it] could be viewed by a person who is not an adult.” SB 3, which has passed both houses of the legislature, lumps drag shows in with other “adult cabaret” performances.

“Adult cabaret performance” means a performance in a location other than an adult cabaret that features topless dancers, go-go dancers, exotic dancers, strippers, male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest, or similar entertainers, regardless of whether or not performed for consideration;

The law follows the pattern of other recent repressive laws in red states, in that its vaguely defined terms seem intended have a chilling effect on a wide variety of activities. For example, what exactly does an impersonator have to do to “appeal to a prurient interest”? The law does not say. Is simply standing around in a showgirl costume enough? And is any trans person a “male or female impersonator” under Tennessee law? Suppose a trans woman headed for a night out wears something slinky (but no different from what another woman might wear). If she walks down a public sidewalk, she could be breaking the law.

Conservatives are supposedly for local rights, but cities and towns are forbidden to have their own standards. They’re supposedly for parental rights, but parents who want their child to see a drag show can’t. They’re all for the First Amendment when it protects Nazis on Twitter, but not here.

Rep. Justin Jones from Nashville knew he couldn’t win the vote, but he could call out the hypocrisy:

If we want to talk about what is seriously harmful to children, let’s have a bill to ban children from going to these Bible camps where they’re being sexually assaulted with the Southern Baptist Convention. Let’s go after real threats to our youth. Let’s go after the predatory behavior in your own districts, clergy in your own congregations, harming youth. Weekly we read about this in the news, my colleagues.

That’s a statistic somebody needs to tabulate: How does the number of kids sexually assaulted by drag queens compare to the number sexually assaulted by ministers?

Another recent culture-war hoo-hah has to do with the publisher editing children’s books by the late Roald Dahl to eliminate a few words and phrases that present-day readers might find offensive, like saying that Augustus Gloop (in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) is “enormous” instead of “fat”.

The changes have drawn objections from a wide range of critics, left and right. (The objection that most resonates with me is that the people making these changes are exactly the kinds of adults Dahl liked to make fun of.)

But whether you like or don’t like the changes, let’s attribute them to the right source: As with the great Dr. Seuss uproar of 2021, this isn’t primarily a political-correctness thing; it’s just capitalism. Helen Lewis nails it:

The Dahl controversy will inevitably be presented as a debate about culture—a principled stand in favor of free speech versus a righteous attempt to combat prejudice and bigotry. But it’s really about money. I’ve written before about how some of the most inflammatory debates, over “cancel culture” and “wokeness,” are best seen as capital defending itself. The Dahl rewrites were surely designed to preserve the value of the [intellectual property] as much as advance the cause of social justice.

Some government agency demanding these changes would be a completely different issue. It would even be different if some left-wing group were threatening a boycott. But this is just brand protection, and apparently it’s going to lead to a New Coke/Classic Coke outcome.

In general, I stand by what I said two years ago:

What should be done about [dated phrases and illustrations] depends on what you want Dr. Seuss to be in 2021. If he’s to be a historical figure — a leading children’s-book author of the mid-to-late 20th century — then his work should speak for itself. Leave it alone, and organize a conversation around it, as HBO Max did when it briefly withdrew and then re-launched Gone With the Wind. …

But if Theodore Geisel’s legacy is supposed to be timeless — [his widow’s] vision — if his work is supposed to live through our era and beyond, then it needs to be curated. Parents and grandparents should be able to trust the Dr. Seuss brand. When you sit down to read to your four-year-old, you should be able to pick up a Dr. Seuss book without worrying that you might put something bad into a developing mind.

People can reasonably disagree about how to curate beloved children’s literature of the past. But if you argue that the texts should be left alone, you’re turning them into museum pieces. Over time, more and more parents will do the curation themselves by not introducing their children to authors they see as problematic.

Becoming seldom-read historical figures may or may not be what authors would prefer, if that’s what it takes to preserve their original texts. But turning popular works into historical artifacts is definitely bad for business.

and you also might be interested in …

A week ago Friday, newly elected Senator John Fetterman checked into a hospital to get treatment for his clinical depression. His office is talking in terms of weeks, not days.

Fetterman had a serious stroke not long after winning the Democratic senatorial primary, and has lingering effects related to understanding spoken words. He stayed in the race in spite of the stroke and won his seat last fall. According to stroke.org

Depression is a common experience for stroke survivors. It’s often caused by biochemical changes in the brain.

Experts keep going back and forth about whether the Covid-19 pandemic started through natural transmission from animals or leaked out of a laboratory. The Department of Energy now believes (with “low confidence”) that it was a lab leak, though several other government agencies still disagree.

Whichever way you go on this question, it’s important not to jump to the conclusion that the virus was constructed rather than naturally-occurring. Among scientists, even lab-leak proponents overwhelmingly believe the lab was collecting viruses for study rather than building them.

The Southern Baptist Convention is kicking out Saddleback Church, the megachurch founded by best-selling author Rick Warren. Saddleback’s crime? It named a woman to its pastoral team. When Warren retired as lead pastor last fall, he named Andy Wood as his successor. Andy’s wife, Stacie Wood, became a “teaching pastor” at the same time. That breaks the SBC’s rules.

Keeping women out of the ministry is one of those rules that can only be enforced strictly. Because once your people see their first woman minister, it will be obvious to most of them that excluding women was always senseless bigotry. Amazingly quickly, the men-only pulpit starts to look like the Jim-Crow-era whites-only drinking fountain. You think: “Really? We used to do that?”

Mike Pence is trying to dodge a subpoena from Jack Smith with a bizarre constitutional argument that I won’t even go into. If you get lost in details like that, you’ll miss the fact that if Trump did nothing wrong Pence should want to testify, so that the truth will come out. Why does there even need to be a subpoena? What does Pence want to cover up? Why won’t he say things under oath that he has already written in a book?

If you do care about the legalities here, iconic conservative Judge J. Michael Luttig, the very guy Pence consulted when he wanted know exactly what his constitutional powers would be on January 6, has written an op-ed explaining why Pence’s argument against the subpoena doesn’t hold water.

It is Mr. Pence who has chosen to politicize the subpoena, not the D.O.J.

and let’s close with something moving

Much as I try to empathize with people everywhere, events hit me harder when I have a personal connection. For example, last summer’s 4th of July shooting in Highland Park stuck with me more than most shootings, both because I used to live in the Chicago area and because Highland Park has been the backdrop for so many movies and TV shows I’ve seen (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Risky Business, The Good Wife). Highland Park has become Hollywood’s archetype of an insulated suburban enclave.

Well, I’m a Michigan State graduate, so the mass shooting of students on campus on February 13 had a bigger impact on me than the general run of mass shootings. (Think about that phrase for a moment: the general run of mass shootings. The United States is the only country where someone would say those words.)

One emotion that surfaces after a lot of disasters is collective pride in the human spirit, which keeps going in the face of tragedy. One way the MSU community expressed that pride after the shooting was by circulating this YouTube from 2012: the MSU Men’s Glee singing “We Rise Again“.

Our merchants frequently complain of the high wages of British labor as the cause of their manufactures being undersold in foreign markets; but they are silent about the high profits of stock. They complain about the extravagant gain of other people; but they say nothing of their own.

– Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

This week’s featured post is “How did we get $32 trillion in debt?“. It’s a somewhat nerdy look at the history of the national debt, preparing the way for posts later this spring about what (if anything) can or should be done about it.

This week everybody was talking about police reform

Some issues in America wear me down. Mass shootings are one. They’re almost a constant feature of American life; if you forget to pay attention to one, don’t sweat it, because there will be another one soon.

Once in a while one is so much more horrific than the usual run of mass shootings — Columbine, Sandy Hook, that Las Vegas music festival, Uvalde — that national attention lingers for more than a day or two. And for a little while, in spite of all experience, I think, “This can’t go on. Now something will have to change.”

Then nothing changes, and I feel foolish for imagining that something would. And it gets a little harder to raise my interest the next time.

Police killing innocent people of color (or even an occasional innocent white person) is another issue that wears me down. Last week I mentioned Tyre Nichols’ death, but didn’t give it the attention it deserved. I had been worn down. I mean, I’ve already lived through the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice. And I got focused on each of them for a while and thought something would have to change.

And I can’t even say that nothing has changed. Derek Chauvin is in jail for killing Floyd, and his anticipated release date isn’t until 2035. So in this age of cellphone cameras, a cop can’t get away with killing a guy slowly in front of witnesses any more. That’s something. Tyre Nichols’ killers were fired and charged pretty quickly, and that’s something too. It rises above the very low bar set in the past.

But NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie put his finger on what I think is the core issue: “the institution of American policing lies outside any meaningful democratic control.”

What little accountability exists for American police is easily subverted. Internal-affairs departments are often more interested in exonerating colleagues than investigating misconduct, and police unions do everything they can to shield bad actors, attack critics and secure more due process for cops accused of abuse than their victims ever get. … Without a strategy to curb or break the cartel power of police departments — meaning their ability to undermine, neuter and subvert all attempts to regulate and control their actions and personnel — there is no practical way to achieve meaningful and lasting reform, if that is your goal.

In our current media and political culture, it’s way too easy for opponents of reform to frame the discussion as a dichotomy of bad choices: Either you are pro-police (which means you defend their right to kill people with little accountability) or you are anti-police (which means you want to abolish police and leave Americans at the mercy of violent criminals). What gets lost in that framing is any distinction between good policing and bad policing. Surely there must be some way to support police trying their best to do a difficult and dangerous job without giving bullies-with-badges carte blanche to beat or shoot anyone who looks cross-eyed at them. There has to be a way to empower a police department to protect the community without licensing it to prey on the community.

The Atlantic’s David Graham:

Since the rise of Black Lives Matter, activists had been pressing for reform of the troubled police department, yet starting in 2020, Memphis also saw a sharp rise in violent crime, including murder. The result was a city that was both underpoliced and overpoliced. Memphians, especially Black ones, complained of rampant crime and unchecked gang violence, and they didn’t want to defund the police. But they also reported that officers were focused on rinky-dink arrests and pretextual stops instead of violent crime, and feared that they or their family members would be brutalized by police—a fear that Nichols’s death chillingly validates.

Last week I linked to a clip of Tucker Carlson telling his audience that Antifa was using the newly released Tyre Nichols video as a pretext to start riots across the country. (The riots didn’t happen.) Apparently, that segment and many others on Fox News were based on a poster of dubious provenance that was said to be “circulating in the underground of New York City”.

Where that poster actually seems to have circulated was on right-wing sites trying to frighten their audiences. Disinformation researcher Caroline Orr has been able to trace the image through right-wing media back to NYPD sources, but hasn’t been able to find any earlier references. She describes it as a “likely disinformation narrative”.

One fact about the current era that conservatives are desperate to ignore, deny, or explain away is that right-wing political violence is a much bigger problem than left-wing political violence. (“Right-wing extremists perpetrated two thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020.”) So any potential for left-wing violence is going to spread widely on the right, whether there’s any basis for it or not.

and Kevin McCarthy’s revenge

Thursday, the House voted on party lines to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar from from the Foreign Affairs Committee. Ostensibly, the removal was a punishment for past anti-Semitic remarks, but it was a fairly transparent reprisal for the Democratic House majority removing Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar from committees in the previous Congress.

Previously, McCarthy had removed Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from the House Intelligence Committee, which is a select committee that the Speaker has arbitrary power over. Again, reasons other than revenge were given, but the WaPo awarded McCarthy four Pinocchios for them. Schiff was the lead House manager in Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, and Swalwell was on the Judiciary Committee for both impeachments. That’s what this is about.

Nancy Pelosi had used her power over select committees to refuse to seat possible Trump conspirators Jim Jordan and Jim Banks on the January 6 Committee. MAGA Republican Rep. Chip Roy compared McCarthy’s reprisal to pitchers throwing at batters in baseball: “My view is, you hit my guy. You come to the plate, we’re gonna pop your guy.”

By making this a tit-for-tat situation, House Republicans are denying that any standards apply to their behavior. Jim Jordan was refused a seat on the January 6 Committee because, as a likely witness, he had a conflict of interest. (Jordan later defied a subpoena from the committee.) Gosar and Greene were cited for promoting violence against other members of Congress: Gosar posted a video in which he killed Democratic colleague AOC. Greene told a crowd that Nancy Pelosi deserved the death penalty for treason. None of the sanctioned Democrats did anything remotely similar.

If the tit-for-tat logic continues to motivate Republicans, soon we can expect them to impeach Joe Biden for something-or-other.

Ilhan Omar represents Minneapolis and part of its suburban ring. She was first elected to Congress in 2018, and in November was elected to her third term with 74% of the vote. She is a Muslim who was born in Somalia. Her family fled the Somali civil war, and she spent four years in a refugee camp. Her family came to the United States in 1995, when she was 12. She became an American citizen at age 17.

Omar has played a unique role on the Foreign Affairs Committee, as Peter Beinart explained in the NYT, describing her as “the only person who consistently describes American foreign policy as it is experienced by much of the rest of the world.” She does not immediately assume that American actions are motivated by the commitment to freedom and democracy our officials claim, but reminds her colleagues of uncomfortable facts about the repressive governments we have sometimes supported.

Across the world, many people encounter American foreign policy when they see a drone flying overhead, a hospital that U.S. sanctions have deprived of medicine or a dictator’s troops carrying American-made guns. Ms. Omar asks the kinds of questions that these non-Americans — whether they reside in Pakistan, Cuba or Cameroon — might ask were they seated across from the officials who direct America’s awesome power. She translates between Washington and the outside world.

Whether you always agree with her or not, she has a point of view that Congress needs to hear.

and a balloon

This week’s dumbest story was the Chinese spy/weather balloon that floated from Alaska to the Carolinas before being shot down by an F-22 on Saturday. Currently, the Pentagon is trying to recover the equipment, which fell into 47-foot-deep water.

What makes it a dumb story is that none of us have the information we need to evaluate the situation, and possibly we never will. What were the Chinese looking for? Were they in control of the balloon or was it a runaway, as they claimed? What could a balloon tell them that their spy satellites can’t? Did it pose any actual threat?

I know of no way to answer those questions, short of getting myself hired by the NSA or some other agency with the appropriate clearances. Since that’s not going to happen, I can compare the US government’s official version to the Chinese government’s official version and decide who I want to believe, if anybody. Or I could just make something up.

Hardly anybody who has been commenting on TV knows any more than I do, so the balloon turned into a pure Rorschach test on whether or not you trust the Biden administration. I more-or-less do, so I’m willing to believe that watching the balloon for a few days and then shooting it down before it returned to international waters was a sensible response. If you don’t trust the Biden administration, on the other hand, you might disagree with me and imagine all kinds of dire scenarios.

But neither of us know anything.

and you also might be interested in …

There’s been a major earthquake centered in Turkey with effects extending into Syria. I don’t do breaking news on this blog, so you might want to check a source that does.

The January jobs report came out: The economy added 517K jobs in January, far more than analysts had expected. That pushed the unemployment rate down to 3.4%, which is lower than at any time during the Trump administration. The last time unemployment was this low was May, 1969.

It’s weird that Biden gets so little credit for this. Vox discusses how hard it is to find economic optimism, in spite of numbers that look pretty good.

Mike Pence wants credit for being “part of it when George W. Bush proposed Social Security reform in 2005”, and still wants to “give younger Americans the ability to take a portion of their Social Security withholdings and put that into a private savings account”.

That was an extremely unpopular idea back in 2005, and I can’t quite imagine why Pence thinks it will be more popular now. Elder care is a problem in the real economy, not the financial economy, and nothing magic happens when you move financial responsibility for it from the public to the private sector. Such a move can only “take us off this trajectory of massive debt” if it means that some people will be left without care.

It’s also a bad idea on the individual level. Fundamentally, Social Security is an insurance program, not a pension program. The risk it’s supposed to insure you against is having no money after you’re too old to earn more. Putting that money in the stock market, which might collapse at precisely the moment you need it, increases your risk.

Over decades, investing in the stock market can make the difference between a passable retirement and an enviable one. But the stock market is for money you can afford to lose. Your old-age-cat-food money, on the other hand, should be guaranteed by the government.

and let’s close with some ingenuity

I don’t want to get into a discussion of the practicality of this. (I mean, what do you do with all that plastic wrap after you’re ready to break camp?) But I have to admire the inventiveness involved in turning 10 rolls of plastic wrap into a wilderness shelter.

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

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

– Speaker Kevin McCarthy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

meanwhile, everybody has been talking about the Speaker election

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

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

Democrat Katie Porter brought a good book for the occasion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and the debt ceiling

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

and the second anniversary of the insurrection

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

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

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

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

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

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

and the pandemic

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

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

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

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

and the economy

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

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

and you also might be interested in …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and let’s close with something sweet

Here’s a teacher’s story from 2018:

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

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

– Rep. Jamie Raskin

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

This week everybody was talking about Trump’s crimes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and President Zelenskyy’s visit to Washington

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and the closing days of a sane Congress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and you also might be interested in …

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

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

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

Eric Swalwell tweeted:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and let’s close with something cranky

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