The Weekly Sift

– Joe Biden, 8-20-2020

This week’s featured post is “The Underlying Differences Between Liberals and Conservatives“.

This week everybody was talking about the Democratic Convention.

The DNC ran Monday-to-Thursday. Unlike all previous conventions, it was virtual: No big ballroom full of people in funny hats or balloons dropping from the ceiling. To their credit, the organizers didn’t just put together a sad imitation of an in-person convention. Occasionally they took advantage of the new medium and did something creative, like the tour-of-America roll call. I suspect it was actually shorter than a traditional roll call, and much more fun.

The feel-good moment of the convention was when 13-year-old Brayden Harrington spoke about how Biden helped him with his stuttering problem, a disability Biden shares.

It is impossible to imagine Trump doing something like this. Trump never admits to any failing, and certainly doesn’t see himself in people with similar-but-worse problems. They’re nothing like him, because they’re losers and he’s a winner.

The center of every convention is the nominee’s acceptance speech. Biden is never going to be the orator Barack Obama is or Bill Clinton could be at his best, and the virtual-convention format is new and hard. (Trust me on this. I occasionally speak at churches. Talking to a congregation is much easier than talking to my computer and trusting that Zoom is putting my words out there.) But I thought he gave a powerful speech. It takes him a minute or two to get into it, but by the end it’s clear that the text represents what he really believes. (I recognize that too. When I start speaking, my head is full of good advice about where to look and what to do with my hands and which phrases I tripped over in rehearsal. But then the words hit me and I realize: “This is my speech. I want to tell people these things.”)

Here is the text and the video.

The visionary quote at the top comes from the speech’s conclusion, but Biden also laid out an agenda: First, deal with the virus.

As president, the first step I will take will be to get control of the virus that’s ruined so many lives. Because I understand something this president doesn’t. We will never get our economy back on track, we will never get our kids safely back to school, we will never have our lives back, until we deal with this virus. The tragedy of where we are today is it didn’t have to be this bad. Just look around. It’s not this bad in Canada. Or Europe. Or Japan. Or almost anywhere else in the world.

Then: create jobs by building infrastructure, and extend ObamaCare to provide healthcare to more people. Also: college you can access without “crushing” amounts of debt, immigration reform, labor unions, clean energy, protect Social Security, revise the tax code so that the super-rich and the big corporations pay their fair share, and embrace democratic nations and stand up to dictators, rather than the other way around.

But don’t write off the visionary stuff as meaningless, because I think that’s the message that will pull in the voters who can still be convinced: We’re really tired of having fear and hatred thrown at us every day. We don’t want a leader who endlessly focuses on resentments and grievances, and sees an enemy in anyone who doesn’t applaud his every move. We want a leader who will bring out the best in us, not the worst.

Biden’s “American darkness” contrasts with Trump’s “American carnage”. Carnage evokes anger and violence, while darkness is sad and regrettable. We don’t need to strike back at anybody, we just need some illumination.

The video where Biden answers a question about his faith was moving in its own right. And then Comedian Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the emcee for Night 4, delivered this zinger: “Joe Biden goes to church so regularly that he doesn’t even need tear gas and a bunch of federalized troops to get there.”

An interesting tactical choice: Biden did not name Trump. He mentioned “the current president” (twice), “this president” (five times), “the current occupant of the office”, “the President” (twice), and “our current president”. It was like the old commercials where the advertised product is tested against Brand X.

Trump also made some interesting choices during the Democratic Convention. He went to Pennsylvania to do some White Birtherism, claiming that because Biden’s family left when Joe was “8, 9, or 10” (actually 13 — Trump can’t tell the truth about anything), he wasn’t really born in Scranton. (Coming from a medium-size city myself, I know that isn’t how it works. We were always looking for a way to claim famous people, not a way to reject them.)

Kamala’s speech (video, text) had to cover a lot of ground: telling us who she is, explaining how her positions are rooted in where she comes from, acknowledging the historic aspect of a woman of color being on the ticket, making the case against Donald Trump, and explaining why Joe Biden is the right response to the problems Trump has created.

I thought she did a good job, and I look forward to seeing her debate Mike Pence, if that actually happens. I sense something cat-like in Kamala. She seems calm and relaxed, but there’s a spring wound tight in there, and she could pounce at any moment. I wouldn’t want to debate her.

And here’s Trevor Noah’s take on the suggestion that Kamala isn’t “really black” or isn’t “black enough”.

and getting ready for the Republican Convention

One bizarre aspect of the two conventions is that the Democratic one arguably had a more impressive list of Republican participants than the Republican Convention will have: John Kasich, Susan Molinari, Christine Todd Whitman, Colin Powell, and Cindy McCain.

By contrast, the RNC will be all Trump. He plans to appear himself all four nights (though the schedule only lists him as a speaker on Thursday), with other major speaking slots reserved for Melania, all four Trump children, and Don Jr.’s girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle. Ben Carson and Rand Paul are the only speakers who have run for president themselves. Living ex-President George W. Bush and 2012 nominee Mitt Romney will not appear. Neither will ex-Speakers Paul Ryan, John Boehner, or Newt Gingrich. Major Leader Mitch McConnell has no role.

It will be interesting to see how Trump answers the challenge this week. In his 2016 convention speech, he fearmongered about Muslim and Mexican immigrants. They were the primary threats to your safety, and he was going to stop them almost immediately. “Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored.” The obvious sequel would be to fearmonger about Antifa and Black Lives Matter. (But what happened to safety being “restored”? How is it that we’re still threatened nearly four years later?)

If he does that, though, I think he’s playing into Biden’s hand. Biden offered a vision of an America where we aren’t all constantly afraid and angry. If Trump just doubles down on “American carnage”, he makes Biden’s vision that much more appealing.

In preparation for listening to Trump’s 2020 acceptance speech, let’s review my discussion of his 2016 convention speech. I led that off with two quotes, one from the 2015 Sift article “How Propaganda Works”

If your target audience has a flawed ideology, then your propaganda doesn’t have to lie to them. The lie, in some sense, has already been embedded and only needs to be activated.

and another from 2012’s “How Lies Work“:

You can’t be blamed for the false information, irrational prejudices, and ugly stereotypes that already sit inside people’s heads, waiting to be exploited. So good propaganda contains only enough false or repulsive information to leverage the ignorance and misinformation that’s already out there.

From those two, I drew this conclusion:

In other words, the central lie in an effective propaganda campaign is the one you never explicitly say. It’s out there already, sitting in the minds of your followers, so you just need to allude to it, suggest it, and bring it to consciousness in as many ways as you can. Your target audience will hear it, and afterwards most will believe you said it. But because you aren’t saying it in so many words, it’s immune to fact-checkers, and you barely need to defend it at all.

The Big Lie of Trump’s 2016 speech was one he never explicitly stated, but it was the constant background assumption: The main threat to your safety comes from Mexican and Muslim immigrants. That proposition was totally false and could not have been defended with facts. But it didn’t have to be, because he never specifically said it, leaving fact-checkers with no summing-up quote to grab hold of or object to.

So I advise you to look for that this week. Don’t just nitpick his speech with “This is false” and “That is false”. Listen for the Big Lie in the background, the one that goes without saying.

McSweeney’s gives its version of the RNC schedule. Tonight we can look forward to:

9:20 pm
Marjorie Taylor Greene, QAnon congressional candidate, explains why COVID-19 can’t be transmitted through the air because there is no such thing as “air.”

9:40 pm
Scott Baio triggers libs from his hot tub.

10:20 pm
Silicon Valley CEO Peter Thiel shares a PowerPoint about how minimum-wage workers can balance their budgets by scavenging for edible weeds and building traps to catch small rodents.

10:40 pm
Keynote speech: Axulythor, Sorcerer of Darkness, on the importance of restricting women’s access to reproductive healthcare.

OK, conventions have to be strange in this plague year. But one of the stranger moves was the RNC’s decision to keep its 2016 platform unchanged. And so it includes sections like this:

America has been led in the wrong direction. Our economy has become unnecessarily weak with stagnant wages. People living paycheck to paycheck are struggling, sacrificing, and suffering. Americans have earned and deserve a strong and healthy economy. Our standing in world affairs has declined significantly – our enemies no longer fear us and our friends no long[er] trust us. People want and expect an America that is the most powerful and respected country on the face of the earth. … The President appoints judges who legislate from the bench rather than apply the law.

The resolution adopted by the Republican National Committee is, well, weird.

WHEREAS, The RNC enthusiastically supports President Trump and continues to reject the policy positions of the Obama-Biden Administration, as well as those espoused by the Democratic National Committee today; therefore, be it RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda; RESOVLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention;

In the era of Zoom and email, there is no reason a Platform Committee couldn’t put something together, even if they couldn’t get together in the same room. (And what does it say about opening schools, if the RNC Platform Committee thought meeting was too dangerous?) The 2016 platform was assembled when the party was out of power, and focused on running against the Obama administration. But now, four years later, the accomplishments of the Trump administration are apparently so insignificant that no item of the platform needs to be updated, and no sights need to be raised. Nothing at all needs to be said about problems unforeseen in 2016, like Covid-19 or the current economic crisis.

Instead, the RNC resolution makes the GOP precisely what its critics have claimed: a personality cult. The Party has no positions on issues, but it supports whatever Trump’s agenda is.

And then there’s the question about whether the law-and-order President’s convention activities are even legal. He intends to use the White House lawn for his own and Melania’s speeches, which mixes politics with government in a manner that is at best unethical. Although the convention remains technically in Charlotte, many of the speeches will happen in D. C., and many of them on federal property.

The unusual arrangement is already drawing ethical concerns that federal resources will be used for campaign events and that administration officials will violate the law by campaigning for the president on government property. And it’s not lost on Trump critics that the president’s flagship hotel, already a gathering spot for Republicans, will be conveniently located a short walk from the Mellon Auditorium.

“Picking a venue across the street from Trump’s D.C. hotel is no coincidence,” said Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.), who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee with jurisdiction over Trump’s Washington hotel. “The Republican National Committee has privately paid Donald Trump throughout his presidency and it’s sadly no surprise that their largest event would continue that shameful practice.”

Mike Pompeo will address the convention even though he is on a government-sponsored trip to the MIddle East.

Matt Yglesias annotates a Federal Reserve chart of job growth to sum up the Trump economic narrative:

and the Senate Intelligence Committee Trump/Russia report

I got daunted by the 966 pages of the report, so I’ve barely looked at it myself. Here’s LawFare’s page of commentary.

One overarching note: There is a fair amount of overlap between this document and the Mueller report. But the Senate report covers a fair bit more ground for a few reasons. For one thing, it was not limited to information it could prove beyond a reasonable doubt in court, as Mueller was. Just as important, the committee included counterintelligence questions in its investigative remit—whereas Mueller limited himself to a review of criminal activity. So the document reads less like a prosecution memo and more like an investigative report addressing risk assessment questions.

The gist: Yes, there was a serious national-security threat for the FBI to look into. Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort was in regular (and encrypted) communication with Konstantin Kilimnik, who the report identifies as a Russian intelligence officer. Lawfare’s summary:

In other words, throughout his work on the Trump campaign, Manafort maintained an ongoing business relationship with a Russian intelligence officer, to whom he passed nonpublic campaign material and analysis.

So what did Kilimnik do with the data—and why did Manafort share it? This was one of the great mysteries left unsolved by the Mueller report, and the Senate was also unable to come up with an answer.

… Perhaps the most tantalizing suggestion in this section involves the redacted pages following the committee’s assertion that “[s]ome evidence suggests Kilimnik may be connected to the GRU hack-and-leak operation related to the 2016 election”—that is, the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.

So a line can be drawn from the DNC and Podesta hacks to Kilimnik to Manafort to Trump. On the other side of the conspiracy, the Russians connect to WikiLeaks to Roger Stone to Trump.

The Senate report does not directly conclude that Trump was lying, but it gets pretty close. It draws this conclusion: “Despite Trump’s recollection, the Committee assesses that Trump did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his Campaign about Stone’s access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions.”

The campaign didn’t just get advance warning about WikiLeaks intentions; they made requests.

After it became clear to Trump associates that the famous Access Hollywood tape would be coming out, Stone sought to time the much-sought-after release of Podesta emails by Wikileaks to divert attention from the tape. Corsi recalled that Stone “[w]anted the Podesta stuff to balance the news cycle” either “right then or at least coincident.”

And Stone got his wish: “At approximately 4:32 p.m. on October 7, approximately 32 minutes after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, WikiLeaks released 2,050 emails that the GRU had stolen from John Podesta, repeatedly announcing the leak on Twitter and linking to a searchable archive of the documents.”

You get the picture. All of the key figures in the Trump campaign—including Trump himself—knew about, and anticipated, the Podesta Wikileaks dump.

and Steve Bannon

Returning to the subject of conservative vulnerability to con-men that I raised two weeks ago: SDNY announced Thursday that former Trump “chief strategist” Steve Bannon had been indicted for fraud. He and three others were charged in connection with the crowdfunding campaign “We Build the Wall”, which supposedly was collecting money to build Trump’s border wall. (Text of indictment.)

In particular, to induce donors to donate to the campaign, [co-defendant Brian] KOLFAGE repeatedly and falsely assured the public that he would “not take a penny in salary or compensation” and that “100% of the funds raised . . . will be used in the execution of our mission and purpose” because, as BANNON publicly stated, “we’re a volunteer organization.”

Those representations were false. In truth, KOLFAGE, BANNON, BADOLATO, and SHEA received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donor funds from We Build the Wall, which they each used in a manner inconsistent with the organization’s public representations. In particular, KOLFAGE covertly took for his personal use more than $350,000 in funds that donors had given to We Build the Wall, while BANNON, through a non-profit organization under his control (“Non-Profit-1”), received over $1 million from We Build the Wall, at least some of which BANNON used to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars in BANNON’s personal expenses. To conceal the payments to KOLFAGE from We Build the Wall, KOLFAGE, BANNON, BADOLATO, and SHEA devised a scheme to route those payments from We Build the Wall to KOLFAGE indirectly through Non-Profit-1 and a shell company under SHEA’s control, among other avenues. They did so by using fake invoices and sham “vendor” arrangements, among other ways, to ensure, as KOLFAGE noted in a text message to BADOLATO, that his pay arrangement remained “confidential” and kept on a “need to know” basis.

Bannon, you might remember, became Trump’s campaign chairman after Paul Manafort left. Manfort was later convicted of multiple felonies.

SDNY is a traditionally independent US Attorney office that Bill Barr tried to take over a few months ago. He got the sitting US attorney to leave, but failed to install a crony. Instead, Geoffrey Berman was succeeded by his assistant Audrey Strauss, who announced the Bannon indictment. Whether a Barr crony would have swept this investigation under the rug is an interesting question. SDNY is also rumored to be working on an investigation of Rudy Giuliani.

Evan Hill tweets:

It gets better: Kolfage used boat he bought with illegally-siphoned “We Build the Wall” funds to sail in the July 4 Trump boat parade in Destin, Florida https://instagram.com/tv/CCRxjWLj6im/?igshid=91tryu76e16p (spotted by @ZacAlf)

And there’s more, gleaned from the We Build the Wall web site.

Kris Kobach is the general counsel of the Build the Wall PAC that Steve Bannon was just arrested for being involved in as chairman. The advisory board includes Erik Prince, former CO congressman Tom Tancredo, Sheriff Dave Clarke and former pitcher Curt Schilling.

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When the extra unemployment payments of the CARES Act ran out at the end of July, and Congress and the President couldn’t agree on a new stimulus package, it was widely predicted that many American households would be in trouble. Well, it’s happening.

In 2018 and 2019, Trump’s niece Mary taped conversations with her aunt, Donald’s sister, retired Judge Maryanne Barry. Mary says she was hoping to gather evidence to prove that Maryanne, Donald, and Robert misrepresented the size of their father (and Mary’s grandfather) Fred Trump’s estate, and so got Mary and her brother to agree to a settlement far lower than they would have sought if they had understood that the estate was worth closer to $1 billion than the $30 million they were told. [Lesson: Don’t cheat your relatives.]

The Washington Post article revealing these tapes doesn’t say whether Mary ever got the evidence she was looking for, but she did record her aunt saying a lot about the current president: “You can’t trust him”, “He has no principles. None.”, “The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit.”, and “It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”

After this story posted online Saturday night, the White House issued this statement from the president that said in full: “Every day it’s something else, who cares. I miss my brother, and I’ll continue to work hard for the American people. Not everyone agrees, but the results are obvious. Our country will soon be stronger than ever before!”

There’s a lot in that statement that I agree with: Almost every day there’s something else. Another major Trump associate indicted. A new Senate report outlining his collusion with the Russians. A new snake-oil coronavirus-cure scam. Putin poisoning a rival and Trump saying nothing. Day in, day out.

And who can deny that the results are obvious? 180,000 Americans dead of a virus that almost all other countries have controlled much better, with another thousand still dying every day. 16.3 million unemployed. An FY2020 budget deficit that will easily top $3 trillion. (That’s more than double the previous record: $1.4 trillion in the Bush-to-Obama transition year of FY 2009.)

But will our country soon be stronger than ever before? Probably not. The virus is far from beaten, and even if there is a vaccine by spring, it will take some time for the country to recover. But Trump is way behind in the polls, so there is a good chance America will be stronger than ever in a few years.

Cy Vance wins again in his bid to see Trump’s tax returns and other business-related documents. Here is Judge Victor Marrero’s 103-page ruling.

Originally, Trump’s lawyers argued the ridiculous claim that as long as he is president he is “absolutely immune” from any legal process, including grand jury investigations into his companies and associates. (They literally claimed that if Trump shot someone on Fifth Avenue “nothing could be done”.) Every court that looked at that claim rejected it, and no justice on the Supreme Court defended it. The Supreme Court sent the case back to the federal district court with the instructions that Trump could challenge the subpoena in the same way that anybody else would, without any blanket immunity from his office.

So Trump did put together a challenge on the grounds that the Manhattan grand jury’s subpoena was too broad was issued in bad faith. His lawyers supported that claim with a narrative rather than a set of facts: Because Democrats in the House were having trouble getting Trump’s documents, they got Cy Vance to subpoena the same documents under his investigation of the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal pay-offs, even though most of the documents have nothing to do with that investigation. Once Vance gets the documents, he will either give them to the House Democrats or leak them to the public. So the subpoena is too broad and issued in bad faith.

Again and again in his rejection of Trump’s challenge, Judge Marrero explained that you can’t just tell a story, you need to back it up with facts. We don’t actually know (and shouldn’t know at this stage) the full scope of the grand jury’s investigation. Grand juries deserve an assumption of good faith, unless there is serious evidence otherwise. And you can’t just assume that somebody in the grand jury or in Vance’s office will break the law and leak the documents.

the Court need not deem plausible the mere possibility of misconduct.

Marrero dismissed Trump’s challenge to the subpoena “with prejudice”, meaning that he will not consider another revision.

The Court also need not ignore that the President has now twice failed to present a valid cause for relief, despite guidance from the Supreme Court, which further counsels against allowing a third attempt at litigating the threshold validity of the Mazars subpoena.

This ruling now goes up the ladder again, to an appellate court. That process has already started, with this announcement Friday:

Trump’s personal attorneys asked the New York-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit to halt Marrero’s ruling from taking effect while they mount an appeal.

The circuit court on Friday afternoon agreed to hold a Sept. 1 hearing on the issue, but declined Trump’s request for an emergency stay. It’s unclear if Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. will attempt to enforce the subpoena in the interim, and his office did not respond to a request for comment.

The earliest day Vance could enforce the subpoena is next Friday.

Again, grand jury investigations are secret, so Vance getting the documents doesn’t necessarily mean we the people will ever see them.

In a somewhat clueless effort to attract women’s votes, Trump pardoned Susan B. Anthony on Tuesday. Anthony was convicted of illegally voting in the 1872 election. Since accepting a pardon requires admitting committing a crime, which Anthony never did, the Anthony Museum rejected the pardon on her behalf.

I wish my memory allowed me to attribute this quip to the proper source: It’s not the first time Trump did something to a woman without first seeking consent.

The Good Liars pranked Trump Jr. by changing his book’s dust jacket.

The Arkham Board of Health comments on the reopening plans of Miskatonic University.

Attorney General Barr met with media mogul Rupert Murdoch in October, 2019. That’s been widely reported before, and already it should raise suspicions. I mean, Barr has power over a lot of stuff Murdoch would care about. So what conversation could they possibly have that fits within ethics guidelines?

Now a new book tells us they had the worst possible kind of conversation: Barr told Murdoch that Fox News commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano had annoyed the President, and that Fox should “muzzle” him. They did.

Though Barr’s words to Murdoch “carried a lot of weight”, Stelter writes, “no one was explicitly told to take Napolitano off the air”. Instead, Stelter reports, Napolitano found digital resources allocated elsewhere, saw a slot on a daytime show disappear, and was not included in coverage of the impeachment process.

Eddie Glaude’s book Democracy in Black includes an anecdote about a family getting evicted by the police in the middle of the night. No warning, just breaking into the house to throw them out and pile their possessions in the street.

“When they came for me at three in the morning, they didn’t have a place for me and my family to go, but the animal shelter came because they knew that there were dogs there. They came with a place for my dog.”

Goodyear banned political attire at its plants, including both MAGA hats and Biden hats. Trump took offense and called for a boycott of the Ohio tire maker. So: first his bungling of the virus response causes Ohio State to cancel its football season, and now he’s going after one of the state’s major employers. A few weeks ago I didn’t expect Biden to carry Ohio, but now I wonder.

and let’s close with something to waste your time

The reddit subgroup r/disneyvacation (don’t ask me why) is a series of recaptioned images from WikiHow. Like this one:

How to describe 2020 to your future grandkids.

Or this:

How to forget your contacts and think you’ve spotted an old college buddy.

People are adding new ones constantly, so you can say “I’ll quit after the next one” more or less forever.

Today I find the mask useful

along with sunglasses

to hide my tear streaked face,

not wanting to scare the barista

who has enough to deal with

behind his own mask.

– “Transitions” by Tammi Truax,
poet laureate of Portsmouth, NH

This week’s featured posts are “The NRA and the Long Con” and “Those Executive Orders“.

This week everybody was talking about executive orders

Saturday, Trump responded to the impasse in negotiations to extend provisions of the CARES Act by signing an executive order and three memoranda. He claimed they provide all sorts of relief to people economically stressed by the Covid-19 epidemic, especially the unemployed and those facing eviction. However, as one featured post points out, what the orders actually accomplish is much less than Trump claims, and yet they still threaten the constitutional order.

and the NRA

The other featured post discusses the legal problems of the National Rifle Association, which is threatened with dissolution by the New York Attorney General’s lawsuit. (The article uses that example to segue into a discussion of the conservative vulnerability to scams and con artists.) Basically, the NYAG claims that the NRA has become more about Wayne LaPierre’s luxurious lifestyle than about the Second Amendment, and that the corruption enabling this abuse is so pervasive and so top-to-bottom that no solution is possible that leaves the NRA intact.

The Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri takes that first point and runs with it, suggesting a fund-raising letter for people who have never given to the NRA before.

We bet that what’s been holding you back all this time is the belief that if you donated to the NRA, it would help put more guns in more places and that such a goal, in your opinion, would make the United States a more dangerous place. Well, we urge you to take a second look and ask: Is that really what the NRA is doing?

A misconception that a lot of people have about the NRA is that we are some sort of gun lobby, trying to put guns into and keep them in the (cold, dead) hands of as many people as possible. But as allegations in a recent lawsuit demonstrate, the NRA is about so much more than that. We are also about subsidizing the personal travel of CEO Wayne LaPierre, his family members and a few trusted affiliates! We’re not just a gun lobby whose annual convention did not take place this year and which seems as though it hasn’t been very active around the coming election. We also believe in the power of travel, and the need to support America’s small-ship owners, or large-yacht owners, depending on your perspective.

An obvious question I didn’t get around to answering in the featured post  is why these are civil lawsuits rather than criminal indictments. The answer has to do with jurisdiction. In the Daily Beast, former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade (who appears fairly ofteny on Rachel Maddow’s show) wrote:

this easily could have been framed as a criminal case. Filing false registration and disclosure documents as part of a scheme to defraud can serve as the basis for federal mail or wire fraud, and often does in public corruption cases.

Her article strongly implies that criminal jurisdiction here belongs to Bill Barr’s Justice Department, which has no interest in prosecuting Trump’s friends. The NYAG is using a civil suit because that’s the tool at hand. However, the NYT quotes James:

It’s an ongoing investigation. If we uncover any criminal activity, we will refer it to the Manhattan district attorney. At this point in time we’re moving forward, again, with civil enforcement.

and the virus

Deaths seem to be peaking, which makes sense given that cases peaked 2-3 weeks ago. In the US, we’re up to about 165,000 dead, a number still rising at the rate of about 1,100 a day.

I worry that we are once again just seeing a transition. As the center of the virus moved from the Northeast to the South, there was an in-between period where the national numbers dropped. Now it is shifting again from the South to the Midwest, and staging a bit of a comeback in the Northeast. The national numbers may drop for a while now, but it remains to be seen if we’re really turning the corner as a nation.

Trump’s pro-mask conversion didn’t last very long.

An 8th-grade teacher from central Iowa lists nine ways that the current discussions about schools are off-base. If you picture real kids having the kinds of classroom experiences they’ll actually have if their schools reopen, the conversation changes.

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Another executive order this week bans “transactions” with Chinese companies ByteDance and WeChat, beginning in 45 days. ByteDance owns TikTok, a popular social media platform that I know literally nothing about. (I also own a small amount of stock in the Chinese company TenCent, which owns WeChat, another app I have never used.)

A good summary of the possible security threats posed by a Chinese social-media app that has been downloaded onto millions of American phones is at LawFare. (A sequel discussing the current executive orders is here.) As I read that post, the risks posed by TikTok and WeChat are more-or-less the same as the ones posed by Facebook or Twitter or any other social media app, compounded by the possibility that the Chinese government might get hold of the data it collects and use it for nefarious purposes.

I’m reminded of an old Travels With Farley comic strip where Farley talks to the strip’s military character, Major Mishap. Mishap explains that it’s his job to keep nuclear weapons from falling into the wrong hands. And Farley asks, “Does that mean you think they’re in the right hands now?”

If the Chinese angle on TikTok gets everyone to take seriously what a nefarious actor could do with Google’s data trove (and why we’re so convinced that Google isn’t already that nefarious actor), that would be great. But I worry that this is just Trump acting out against a social-media universe populated by people who don’t like him, like Sarah Cooper.

If at the beginning of the year you’d asked me to list the threats to democracy, I don’t think I’d have come up with “a purge at the Post Office“.

Pulitzer-prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson’s new book Caste: the origins of our discontents has her out doing interviews. Here’s an amazing anecdote she recounted during her appearance on NPR’s Fresh Air, beginning around the 29 minute mark:

I had this experience in Chicago years ago when I was reporting a story that was fairly routine. I had made arrangements to interview all these people. I made the arrangements over the phone to interview a number of people for this story, and all the interviews had gone well, until I got to the last one. It was the last interview of the day. I was very much looking forward to it.

The person that I was speaking with, or going to speak with, had been very excited to talk with me over the phone. But when I got there, he happened not to have been there at the time, and the place where I went — it was a retail establishment — happened not to have other people in it, so I was waiting for him to get there. The door opens and this man comes in. He was vary harried, and he’s got this overcoat on. He’s very late for an appointment, ultimately, with me. But he’s harried, he’s frazzled, he’s anxious, and the clerk who had helped me earlier told me to go up to this man, that this was the man I was there to interview.

And I went up to him and he said, “Oh no, no, no, no. I can’t talk with you right now.” And I was flummoxed by that. I mean, we’re here for the interview, why are you saying you don’t have time to talk? And he said, “No, I can’t talk with you right now, I’m getting ready for a very, very important interview. I cannot talk with you right now.” And I said, “Well, I think I’m the person interviewing you. I’m Isabel Wilkerson with The New York Times.”

And he said, “Well, how would I know that? How do I know that you’re Isabel Wilkerson?”  And I said, “I am here. This is the time. It’s 4:30. You were here for the interview.” And he said, “Do you have a business card?” And I said, I actually happened not to have had any, because it was the end of the day and I’d been interviewing people all day and this was the last interview, which I was very much looking forward to. And I said, “I’m sorry, I’m out of business cards right now.” And he said, “Well, do you have something that … do you have some ID? Could I see some ID?”

And I said, “I shouldn’t have to show you ID. We’re already into the time where we were supposed to have the interview. We should be talking right now.” He said, “Well, I need to see some ID.” And so I pulled out my driver’s license to show it to him, and he said, “You don’t have anything with The New York Times on it?” And he said, “I’m sorry, I’m going to have to ask you to leave, because I have a very important interview coming. She’ll be here any minute. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

So I was actually accused of impersonating myself, because I was not perceived as being the person, I was not perceived as being someone who should have been in the position of a New York Times national correspondent there to interview him.

She’s goes on to explain that when something like that happens, you don’t tell your editors, for fear that they’ll lose faith in your ability to do the job. You just figure out some other way to get the story.

Recently released police body-cam video from Phoenix proves that cops kill white people too. An upstairs neighbor complained about noise from a video game Ryan Whitaker was playing with his girlfriend, and so the police showed up. AZ Central reports:

As they approach the apartment, no sounds of fighting or loud noises are heard coming from the unit.

Moments later, [Officer John] Ferragamo knocks on the door, identifying himself as Phoenix police. The officers stand to either side of the door, making it impossible for anyone looking out of the peephole to see who was there.

Whitaker opens the door, with the gun in hand and rapidly takes a couple of steps out of the apartment as Ferragamo flashes a light in his face. Ferragamo greets Whitaker and then repeatedly yells, “Hands,” according to the footage.

Whitaker is seen in the video starting to get on his knees, putting his left hand up and putting the gun behind his back when [Officer Jeff] Cooke fires into Whitaker’s back.

In the video, Whitaker appears to realize that these people are cops and start putting the gun down just before he was killed.

In addition to its influence on the national police-are-out-of-control discussion, this video also points out the problem created by the ubiquity of guns. Whitaker’s gun pushes Cook into a snap decision, which he makes badly. The number of guns in the US raises the possibility of deadly force in way too many situations, and limits people’s time to think.

After Trump pronounced Yosemite as “Yo Semite”, I joked on Facebook that soon Fox News would claim that was the actual pronunciation, and before long conservatives would all be saying “Yo Semite” just to prove they were on the right side. (The National Museum of American Jewish History is now selling “Yo Semite” t-shirts.)

Turns out it’s no joke. Two days later, Trump mispronounced Thailand as Thighland (and hilarity ensued). Conservative author (and Trump pardon recipient) Dinesh D’Souza tweeted in all seriousness:

This is actually the correct pronunciation. Most Americans say it wrong. Thailand is pronounced phonetically. It’s “Thighland,” not “Tai-land.”

When everyone laughed at him, D’Souza doubled down.

Let me clarify. I’m not saying “Thighland” is how it is said in the Thai language. The French say “Paree” but that’s not how it is pronounced in English. “Thighland,” not “Tai-land,” is how English speakers around the world say it.

That’s how it is in TrumpWorld. If the Great Leader says something out of step with reality, reality needs to change. He doesn’t speak Truth, he defines Truth. I can hardly wait for the Exalted One’s tour of Thighland to take him to Fuck It (Phuket).

Kathleen Parker’s “Covid-19 isn’t going anywhere. So schools must reopen.” isn’t wrong so much as it’s just clueless. Everyone want schools to be able to open safely, and businesses to be able to open safely, and voting to be safe, and on and on and on. The question is, “What do we do when it’s not safe?” Parker has no answers for that.

I wanted to have watched Trump’s Axios interview. I really did. But even the prospect of the interviewer pushing back couldn’t sustain me through Trump’s endless bullshit. I include the link for those of you with more endurance.

and let’s close with something electric

like Toto played on Tesla coils. That much electrical discharge is likely to bring the rains down in Africa.

I am sleeping on a time bomb,
And I am waiting for the light to come.

– Vertical Horizon “We Are“

This week’s featured post is “The Cancel Culture Debate“.

This week everybody was talking about Portland’s resistance to Trump’s secret police

It’s hard to be sure until we get actual polls on the subject, but I don’t think Trump’s invasion of Portland is turning into the vote-getting stunt he’d hoped for. The plan was to create riveting scenes of heroic police clashing with “violent anarchists” from Black Lives Matter, crush the protests and restore “law and order” to a city whose Democratic officials were too weak-willed to handle these America-haters.

Instead Trump got the Wall of Moms, Dads with leaf-blowers, a wall of veterans, and another one of nurses. Portland grandmothers have adopted the hashtag #Grantifa and joined the protests. The goons from Homeland Security have man-handled all comers.

Paramilitary thugs dragging away terrified women who resemble somebody’s Mom from across the street — maybe that’s not the best optics for a federal police action. (Many of the Moms are annoyingly white, which wasn’t in the script at all.) So Trump has been driven to his ultimate defense against reality: declaring it all to be Fake News.

The “protesters” are actually anarchists who hate our Country. The line of innocent “mothers” were a scam that Lamestream refuses to acknowledge, just like they don’t report the violence of these demonstrations!

Reporters on the ground — those from The Oregonian/OregonLive, for example — tell a different story.

Thousands of Portland moms have come together over the past week to join nightly demonstrations in downtown.

They stand arm-in-arm at protests, placing themselves between federal officers and younger protesters in an act of protection. As the number of moms turning out in Portland grew with each protest, mom protest groups began to spring up across the nation in places like New York City, St. Louis and Philadelphia.

I’m a little skeptical of the “thousands” claim, but I have friends here in the suburbs who are searching their closets for yellow t-shirts (the Wall of Moms’ uniform of choice) in case Boston is next on Trump’s list. They’re real moms, and I don’t recall any of them ever mentioning their hatred of America.

The Guardian’s take:

If Trump’s intent was to calm things down, he has failed. But if, as some suspect, the president wanted to ratchet up confrontation for political gain, then it is not clear that it has been a success either.

“It’s a power play by Trump. He thinks he’s going to get his base all riled up by pitting the forces of law and order against the anarchists,” said Josh O’Brien, who travelled from Seattle to join the protests. “But he’s fucked it up like he fucks everything up. Look who’s here with us. Grandmothers. Doctors. Because like most Americans they don’t think people should be abducted from the streets by the president’s secret police.”

Acting Deputy DHS Secretary Ken Cuccinelli tried to push the violent-anarchists narrative by tweeting a picture with this comment:

Here is a shield and a couple of gas masks from a rioter arrested in Portland. Not a sign with a slogan that someone expressing their first amendment rights might carry, but preparations for violence. Peaceful protester? I don’t think so.

Cooch clearly didn’t think this out (or is trying to appeal to people who don’t think clearly): You carry a shield and gas mask when you expect to be a victim of violence, not a perpetrator.

Former Celebrity Apprentice staffer turned stand-up comedian Noel Casler paints a different picture:

If you’re dressed up like a soldier and you’re tear-gassing a mom wearing a bicycle helmet to protect her from your batons, you are not an American soldier or a Patriot. You are the kind of person American soldiers killed to protect us from. Stop it now @DHS_Wolf.

If you wonder what the Portland attack is for, Trump campaign advisor Boris Epshteyn gives a hint: It’s for scary campaign messages aimed at voters far away from Portland. He tweeted video of a violent clash between police and demonstrators with the message “This would be @JoeBiden’s America. It’s a very scary place.”

As many other tweeters pointed out, the video is quite literally Donald Trump’s America. His three years of presidential race-baiting exacerbated the racial tensions that exploded in the George Floyd protests, and the brutality of his secret police increased the violence in Portland.

And if you don’t find all that disturbing enough here’s Thomas Friedman’s take:

when I heard Trump suggest, as he did in the Oval Office on Monday, that he was going to send federal forces into U.S. cities, where the local mayors have not invited him, the first word that popped into my head was “Syria.”

and what might happen in other cities

Over the weekend, protests broke out in several other cities, some of which had been quiet for weeks.

It’s hard to know whether provoking those protests was part of Trump’s plan or not. Certainly, he has talked about sending his DHS police to other cities. More than 200 federal agents have already been in Kansas City long enough for Attorney General Barr to lie about their accomplishments.

Barr said Wednesday that Operation Legend had netted 200 arrests in two weeks as the Department of Justice announced plans to deploy additional federal law enforcement agents in Chicago and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

So far, federal authorities have announced one arrest — a 20-year-old KCMO man wanted for warrants and allegedly spotted in a stolen vehicle, where two stolen handguns were found — though it has not been connected to a homicide or shooting investigation.

Similar numbers of agents are supposed to be heading to Chicago, Albuquerque, Cleveland, and possibly Philadelphia and Baltimore, but what they’ll do there is not at all clear. What problem are the agents trying to solve, and what will they do about that problem that local police aren’t already doing?

Operation Legend is named for LeGend Taliferro, a 4-year-old boy shot and killed in his bed in Kansas City on June 29. How exactly federal agents would prevent similar crimes has never been spelled out.

Of all those cities, Chicago is the one that I know best, so I’ll focus there.

It’s worth remembering that policing was a serious issue in the 2019 Chicago mayoral campaign. So if the federal government changes the way Chicago is policed, or stops Chicago from making its own changes, that raises a democracy issue: Do the people of Chicago get to decide how their city will be policed, or is that up to Trump?

Channel 5 asked all the candidates for mayor the same seven questions; the second one was about policing and the consent decree the city had recently negotiated with the State of Illinois to reform the Chicago Police Department. Lori Lightfoot answered:

I am the only candidate in this race that has a broad depth of experience in dealing with issues related to police excessive force and abuse, accountability and reform. My perspective on these issues stems from my roles as a federal prosecutor and the head of the former Office of Professional Standards, in which I made countless recommendations to terminate police officers who failed to properly perform their duties, including in police-involved shootings. More recently, I led the Police Accountability Task Force (PATF), whose report served as the underpinnings for both the Obama DOJ report and recommendations on the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and the consent decree. There would be no consent decree without the PATF. I also served as the president of Chicago Police Board, where I held officers accountable for misconduct. Before resigning from the police board to run for mayor, I significantly increased the number of officers that were terminated for serious misconduct or received lengthy suspensions.

In the first round of the multi-candidate race, Lightfoot was the leader with 17.5% of the vote. In the runoff between the top two candidates, she got 73.7%. I think it’s fair to say that the voters of Chicago want a policing approach like Lightfoot’s, and not a tear-gassing baton-swinging approach like Trump’s goons have implemented in Portland.

It’s not clear how Lightfoot’s approach will affect the frequency of violent crime in Chicago over the long term. But doesn’t the city have a right to find out?

Really American describes itself by “We believe it is our duty as patriotic Americans to stand up against fascism in all of its forms.” They’ve been making some really biting anti-Trump videos. Like this one.

A number of voices are expressing disappointment that the militia-Right or libertarian-Right, after decades of warning us about the threat of government tyranny, has so totally failed to notice the rise of real authoritarianism, and at times has even applauded it. But if you’ve been paying attention, you shouldn’t be surprised. Anti-government rhetoric has long been applied only in very particular ways: If the government is using its power to counter either white supremacy or the dominance of the super-rich, that’s tyranny. But if it’s using its power to keep the lower orders in their places, that’s OK.

Jonathan Korman has altered the Gadsden flag to capture what it really means these days.

and the next stimulus package

Back in May, Democrats foresaw that the virus would not be gone by summer, and that the economy would not have a V-shaped recovery. So they passed the next stimulus bill, the $3 trillion HEROES Act. Mitch McConnell reacted by denouncing it as a “liberal wish list”. He predicted that if more stimulus was needed “the President and Senate Republicans are going to be in the same place. We’ll let you know when we think the time is right to begin to move again.”

But as so often happens in this post-policy era of the Republican Party, the time has come and the President and Senate Republicans are not in the same place. That’s the problem when a party focuses on marketing to the exclusion of policy. When they do realize they need to do something, it’s hard to figure out specifically what, because up until that moment they have only been thinking about how to spin an issue, not how to resolve it. The White House in particular has been completely focused on the spin of the V-shaped recovery. (On June 5, Trump responded to a positive jobs report by saying that the economy is “not on a V-shaped recovery, it’s a rocket ship.”)

But there is no V-shaped recovery. Like so many Trump policies, reopening the country produced only a short-term effect. He got his good jobs report in June, but the subsequent surge in Covid-19 cases has states shutting down again, and layoffs are rising. So we’re back to the same problem as in March and April: People need to eat and pay the rent, but there are few jobs, and no jobs at all that many people with Covid risk factors can do safely.

The extra $600 per week of unemployment insurance, which was part of the previous Covid-response package, the CARES Act, expires Friday. In practice, that means that many people have already gotten their last increased unemployment check. This extra money has been key, not just to keeping those 20 million households afloat, but the entire economy. For example, August rent or mortgage payments might be hard to scrape together for many families — a problem that will cascade to real estate companies and banks.

McConnell is still predicting a new bill, but now says it will take “weeks“, and began his statement with “hopefully”. He wants a $1 trillion bill, with maybe $200 a week in additional unemployment, rather than $600.

and the rising Covid-19 death rate

After not having a thousand-death day since June 4, the US had four this week, not counting the 993 on Saturday. By WorldoMeter’s count, which runs a little higher than some others, the US had its 150,000th death today. Other counts are lower, but in all versions of the stats we’ll probably pass 150,000 this week.

If you squint at the graph just right, it looks like the US Covid-19 case count might have peaked this week. I wouldn’t count on that, but that’s the appearance at the moment.

Trump’s cancellation of the Republican Convention’s events in Jacksonville led to a series of sarcastic ” … but it’s safe to send your kids to school” social media posts. In addition to the convention,

• Barron Trump’s school won’t be fully opening, and won’t decide whether to offer any in-person classes at all until August 10, but you should be planning to send your kids to school five days a week.
• Florida Senator Rick Scott’s grandchildren will be “focused on distance learning right now” to “make sure they’re safe”, but schools should be open for your kids, especially if you’re poor and looking to cash in on “a subsidized meal”.

and AOC

I had been resisting paying attention the the AOC/Ted Yoho flap, because it looked like one of those somebody-said-a-bad-word kerfuffles that get people upset but never go anywhere.

But it eventually got my attention, because AOC gave a truly epic speech on the floor of the House. The provocation was not just Yoho arguing with her rudely on the steps of the House, and then walking away saying “fucking bitch” (as overheard by a reporter). But when his remark came out in the press, Yoho took to the floor of the House to offer one of those I’m-didn’t-really-do-anything-but apologies. His was particularly self-righteous, concluding that “I cannot apologize for … loving my God”, as if the Ancient of Days Himself had whispered “fucking bitch” into Yoho’s ear.

AOC’s response was masterful. She avoided all the usual ways such complaints are type-cast and pushed aside: It wasn’t that Yoho said a bad word or that her feelings were hurt. She spoke not with the attitude of someone pleading helplessly for justice, but as a person wielding moral authority. The question is not what Yoho’s judgment has done to her, but what hers does to him.

Mr. Yoho mentioned that he has a wife and two daughters. I am two years younger than Mr. Yoho’s youngest daughter. I am someone’s daughter too. … What I am here to say is that this harm that Mr. Yoho levied, tried to levy against me, was not just an incident directed at me, but when you do that to any woman, what Mr. Yoho did was give permission to other men to do that to his daughters.

He — in using that language, in front of the press, he gave permission to use that language against his wife, his daughters, women in his community, and I am here to stand up to say that is not acceptable.

… What I believe is that having a daughter does not make a man decent. Having a wife does not make a decent man. Treating people with dignity and respect makes a decent man. And when a decent man messes up, as we all are bound to do, he tries his best and does apologize. Not to save face, not to win a vote. He apologizes genuinely to repair and acknowledge the harm done so that we can all move on.

Lastly, what I want to express to Mr. Yoho is gratitude. I want to thank him for showing the world that you can be a powerful man and accost women. You can have daughters and accost women without remorse. You can be married and accost women. You can take photos and project an image to the world of being a family man and accost women without remorse and with a sense of impunity. It happens every day in this country. It happened here on the steps of our nation’s Capitol. It happens when individuals who hold the highest offices in this land admit, admit to hurting women, and using this language against all of us.

More and more I’m coming to believe that AOC is a once-in-a-generation political talent. Whether you agree with her positions on particular issues or not, her abilities are on a par with Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. Whether she’ll achieve what they did is still up in the air at this point in her life. But she has the talent.

and you also might be interested in …

It can’t be complete week without a Trump corruption story. Tuesday, the NYT reported:

The American ambassador to Britain, Robert Wood Johnson IV, told multiple colleagues in February 2018 that President Trump had asked him to see if the British government could help steer the world-famous and lucrative British Open golf tournament to the Trump Turnberry resort in Scotland, according to three people with knowledge of the episode.

NPR adds:

Lewis Lukens, the embassy’s former second-in-command, confirmed in a text to NPR that Johnson told him about the president’s request. “I advised him that doing so would violate federal ethics rules and be generally inappropriate,” Lukens wrote.

But Johnson apparently went ahead and raised the matter with David Mundell, then secretary of state for Scotland, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

The State Department inspector general — presumably the one Trump fired in May — investigated and wrote a report, which has not been released.

538 has a fascinating breakdown of why Florida was a bellwether in 2008, 2012, and 2016, but resisted the blue wave in 2018. Some factors that helped Republicans in 2018 won’t be there this year. Meanwhile, CNN observes that Trump hasn’t led in a Florida poll since March. The RCP polling average has Biden up in Florida by 7.8%.

The best explanation of defund-the-police I’ve seen so far:

The baseball season launched (finally) on Thursday, with the Yankees beating the Nationals 4-1 in a stadium with no fans. An interesting compromise: Both teams knelt on the field prior to the national anthem, but no one knelt during the anthem.

It’s a 60-game season. If anybody is going to hit .400 in our lifetimes, this is the year to do it. And then we can all argue about whether it should count.

The Miami Marlins have postponed their home opener because 11 players and two coaches have tested positive for coronavirus. That this has happened already raises doubts about the plans for the whole season.

and let’s close with something realistic

People are having fun with photo-realism software.

Dutch photographer and digital artist Bas Uterwijk shines a light on what iconic figures from history might have looked like in real life. By using various digital manipulation tools, he is able to create photorealistic portraits of famous artists, leaders, mummies, philosophical thinkers, and even the models of paintings.

I’m not sure exactly what he bases this on, but this is his Jesus of Nazareth:

Doesn’t he look like he would forgive your sins?

And somebody else has used Roman statues to produce photorealistic images of the Roman emperors.

I conceive that the President ought not to have the power of pardoning, because he may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself. It may happen, at some future day, that he will establish a monarchy, and destroy the republic.

– George Mason, at the Virginia Ratifying Convention of 1788

There is one security in this case to which gentlemen may not have adverted: if the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty.

– James Madison, responding to Mason

This week’s featured post is “Back to School“. I have an unpredictable week ahead of me, so I’m not sure whether there will be a Sift next week or not.

This week everybody was talking about the Trump Crime Family

I decided not to do a featured post on this, because all the points I would make are already being widely discussed. In all of American history, I can’t come up with a presidential action as blatantly corrupt as Trump commuting Roger Stone’s sentence. (Leave a comment if you want to suggest a rival.) It’s like he’s saying: “Sure, I’m obstructing justice. What are you going to do about it?”

Benjamin Wittes lays it out:

Roger Stone isn’t just Trump’s confidante or friend. According to newly unsealed material in the Mueller Report, he’s also a person who had the power to reveal to investigators that Trump likely lied to Mueller—and to whom Trump publicly dangled rewards if Stone refused to provide Mueller with that information. Now, it seems, the president is making good on that promise.

As Judge Amy Berman put it when she sentenced Stone:

He was not prosecuted, as some have complained, for standing up for the President. He was prosecuted for covering up for the President.

Stone hasn’t exactly been subtle. He talked to Howard Fineman Friday, and Fineman recounted the conversation in Saturday’s New York Times:

“I had 29 or 30 conversations with Trump during the campaign period,” he reminded me. “He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t. They wanted me to play Judas. I refused.”

And so, in the fullness of time — which is to say, about an hour later — the White House made official what Stone already knew: Trump was commuting Stone’s felony convictions for lying to Congress and tampering with witnesses. At 67, Stone would not have to report to a federal pen to serve his allotted 40 months.

Stone’s statement is not hard to interpret: He can testify to something Trump did that a prosecutor would make a deal to learn about — crimes, in other words. Stone deserves his commutation because he didn’t rat out his criminal boss.

Recall the larger plot Stone was part of: Russia hacked Democratic emails, and then sent them to WikiLeaks to be released in a fashion designed to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign and help Trump’s. Stone was the connection between WikiLeaks and Trump — not just the Trump campaign, Trump himself. In written testimony to the Mueller investigation, Trump claimed to remember no conversations with Stone about WikiLeaks. If Stone had testified, the President could have been charged with perjury. That’s when Trump began tweeting about how “brave” Stone was and raising speculation about a pardon.

Wittes again:

[T]he commutation means that the story Mueller tells about potential obstruction vis a vis Stone did not end with the activity described by the Mueller Report. It is a continuing pattern of conduct up until the present day.

That’s not all that happened this week on the ending-the-rule-of-law front. On the same day (Friday, of course) that Trump was giving Stone his pay-off for respecting the Trump Family omerta, Consigliere Bill Barr was shutting down another possible source of legal jeopardy: He replaced the US attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

This is the third time Barr has pulled this trick: He previously installed a lackey at the US Attorney’s office in the District of Columbia (who promptly rewrote the Roger Stone sentencing memo and is trying to walk away from the conviction of Mike Flynn), and tried to do the same thing at SDNY. Each time, he started by making the incumbent US attorneys offers they couldn’t refuse: some cushy job elsewhere in the Trump administration. SDNY’s Berman did refuse, and got fired (but did manage to get his deputy to replace him rather than a Barr-bot).

EDNY is not as famous as its neighboring district SDNY, but it does have its finger in the Trump-corruption pie as well. Newsday reports:

Why Barr has been busily ousting U.S. Attorneys in New York City has been a subject of intense debate and speculation. Several criminal probes and prosecutions in Manhattan have rankled as a thorn in the side of the Trump administration, from the campaign-finance crimes of the president’s former fixer Michael Cohen to the impeachment-related allegations against Rudy Giuliani’s former associate Lev Parnas.

As Trump’s Senate trial played out in February, Politico reported that Donoghue had been in charge of vetting and managing all Ukraine-related efforts. His district reportedly had been heading an investigation into Tom Barrack, a Trump confidant who headed the president’s inauguration committee and whose fundraising for that event allegedly caught the scrutiny of federal prosecutors.

Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman violated omerta by testifying during the impeachment hearings in February. He and his twin brother (who had no connection to the impeachment hearings) were then fired from their jobs at the National Security Council. Wednesday, Vindman announced he is retiring from the military after 21 years, due to what his lawyer called “a campaign of bullying, intimidation, and retaliation” by President Trump.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court gave Trump a split decision on his tax cases: They rejected his argument that he was completely beyond the reach of the law, but allowed him to run out the clock. It’s extremely unlikely that anyone will get to see his tax returns or other business records until after the election.

Last week I mentioned the Commerce Department’s attempt to delay its inspector general’s report on SharpieGate. Now it’s out, and it makes infuriating reading. To make a long story short: Trump couldn’t admit even a trivial mistake, so Mulvaney pressured Ross who pressured NOAA to put out a statement rebuking National Weather Service forecasters for being right and doing their jobs. The process of putting out that cowardly statement consumed NOAA management’s attention while a actual hurricane was still raging.

Ross delegated the problem to Commerce Dept. Chief of Staff Mike Walsh, who denies he ever told anybody at NOAA their jobs were on the line. However, some of the phone conversations with him happened at 2:30 in the morning, so you might understand how the NOAA folks got that impression.

Reading the report, I kept wishing somebody would defend the NWS forecasters and tell the sycophants in the White House to go fuck themselves. (You want to fire me? If you think this looks bad in the media now, wait until you start firing people over it.) But it never happened.

It’s a small incident, but it explains so much about how the last three years have gone: Defending the President’s fragile ego absorbs so much of the government’s attention that there’s not much left to devote to governing. And precious few people (like Colonel Vindman) are willing to risk their careers to stop it.

and schools

It’s time to decide what school-age children are going to do in the fall. It would be nice if communities could make those decisions based on local conditions, using the best scientific insight available, but this is the Trump Era. If you’re for him, you want schools 100% back to normal, and if you don’t, it must be because you hate him. More in the featured post.

Colleges and universities are a different subject, which I didn’t get to this week. I noticed some developments in the college-sports world, though.

The Ivy League won’t have a football season this year. No Harvard vs. Yale game. An Indiana University sports blogger thinks this won’t start a trend.

The Big Ten and the others will do everything in their power to play football this season, simply because there is so much money involved. They can do what the Ivy League can’t — play games without fans and still make a ton of money because of their television contracts — so that will happen if it’s at all possible.

The Big Ten subsequently announced that it will play only conference games, and has not yet committed even to them.

By limiting competition to other Big Ten institutions, the conference will have the greatest flexibility to adjust its own operations throughout the season and make quick decisions in real-time based on the most current evolving medical advice and the fluid nature of the pandemic.

The main problem right now is getting the teams together for practice when players keep testing positive for Covid-19. Makes you wonder what’s going to happen when all the students show up for fall term.

and the virus surge

Since the surge in Covid-19 cases began around June 8 or so, we’ve experienced the mystery of how cases could surge while deaths kept going down. Two obvious explanations were (1) The newly infected people are younger and so less likely to suffer dire consequences. (2) Hospital treatments, particularly of the most serious cases, are getting better.

Those are probably both factors, but there was a third explanation: the time lag between infection and death. As I heard Chris Hayes put it: “We’re between the lightning and the thunder.”

This week the thunder arrived. The low point in deaths appears to have been 217 on July 5. Two weeks ago I predicted:

[N]ationwide, the new-case curve started rising around June 10. That would suggest deaths will begin rising about July 4.

There have been 4980 deaths in the last seven days, compared to 3334 the seven days before that.

The surge in cases is continuing. Depending on when you start the clock on a day, we either did or didn’t break the 70,000-new-case mark on Friday. That number was around 20,000-per-day in early June.

The Trump administration is now treating Dr. Fauci as if he were a political rival. Anonymous sources at the White House distributed a list of supposedly inaccurate statements Fauci has made, “laid out in the style of a campaign’s opposition research document”. CBS’ Face the Nation has been trying to interview Fauci for three months, but the White House has refused permission for that as well as many other interviews. He no longer briefs Trump or appears in White House briefings for the public.

Fauci has committed the unforgivable sin of refusing to let Trump dictate reality. He has directly contradicted Trump’s ridiculous claim that the recent spike in cases is simply a reflection of more testing, and told 538 “As a country, when you compare us to other countries, I don’t think you can say we’re doing great. I mean, we’re just not.”

Fauci is a civil servant rather than a political appointee, so firing him would be difficult. He could quit, but people close to him say he wants to keep overseeing vaccine development.

There has been a virus outbreak in the Mississippi legislature, leading this embarrassing result:

Gov. Tate Reeves is warning the public to get tested for coronavirus if they have been in contact with a state lawmaker.

Here in Massachusetts, we’re currently doing well, but I worry about complacency. I think the Northeast in general is imagining that we had our outbreak, so the area is immune now. We’ve opened restaurants for indoor dining, which has to be a mistake.

Pittsburgh is a cautionary tale. Allegheny County had zero new cases on June 17, but was back over 200 by July 2.

An economic consequence of the surge is that it has stalled the recovery of the economy. Jobs will come back much more slowly, unemployment is running out, and so far Republicans in Congress are resisting any further stimulus. One expert projects that 20 to 28 million Americans face eviction by September.

and the Supreme Court’s contraception decision

As usual, there was a flurry of end-of-term decisions. In addition to the Trump tax cases mentioned above, the Court issued a 7-2 opinion upholding the Trump administration’s reworking of the religious exemption to ObamaCare contraception mandate. An exemption that the Obama administration originally crafted so that religious organizations that object to birth control wouldn’t have to provide it to their employees has now been stretched to cover any organization — even publicly traded corporations — that claim either a religious or moral objection. What’s more, the Obama administration had a work-around so that the employees would continue to get their birth control covered. The Trump people have thrown that out, with the result that some number of women will now not have contraceptive coverage.

This was just one more step down a wrong path, so I have a hard time criticizing the liberal justices (Kagan and Breyer) who sided with the conservatives. Like Roberts in the Louisiana abortion case last week, Kagan and Breyer had precedents to consider.

The case goes back to a lower court, so it’s still possible that the Trump rule will be thrown out ultimately. But it will be allowed to take effect in the meantime.

Longtime readers know that I am deeply skeptical of all these “conscience” provisions. I think employer-supported health insurance should be like a paycheck: What the employee does with it is none of the employer’s business. Whether somebody works for Little Sisters of the Poor or the Taliban or whoever, their health insurance should cover contraception, and the employer’s moral or religious beliefs should have no bearing on the subject. Again, it’s like a paycheck. If a woman can use her paycheck to buy contraceptives, she should be able to use her health insurance just as freely.

Once you let the employer’s religious or moral values into the picture, though, you’ll never find a place to draw the line. That’s why these cases keep going to the Supreme Court: There’s no clean rule that lower courts can apply unambiguously.

and cancel culture

A large number of well-known people signed “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” that will appear in Harper’s. Some of the names are quite famous, like Margaret Atwood, Noam Chomsky, and Salman Rushdie, while others are people you will frequently see me quoting in this blog, like Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Vox’s Matt Yglesias.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.

While I continue to respect a lot of the signers, I have to say I don’t get it. Maybe I’m just not in plugged into the academic community and don’t appreciate the pressures on campus today. But none of the cases I hear about impress me. For example, NYT opinion-page editor James Bennett resigned (presumably under pressure) after the outcry surrounding his publication of Senator Tom Cotton’s call to use the military to suppress the rioting/protesting after George Floyd’s murder. That seemed like a serious act of bad judgment to me, and was one of a series. (See David Roberts’ article.)

Ta-Nehisi Coates, I think, offers some appropriate perspective:

any sober assessment of this history must conclude that the present objections to cancel culture are not so much concerned with the weapon, as the kind of people who now seek to wield it.

Until recently, cancellation flowed exclusively downward, from the powerful to the powerless. But now, in this era of fallen gatekeepers, where anyone with a Twitter handle or Facebook account can be a publisher, banishment has been ostensibly democratized.

He reminds us of the more serious cancellations that are just part of business-as-usual: Colin Kaepernick got drummed out of the NFL for his views; Christine Blasey Ford got death threats for telling her story. It would be nice to live in a more forgiving world, Coates says, but we would need to construct it from scratch. Just going back to the day when the powerful could be forgiven for whatever they say or do, but the powerless could not, is not that world.

and you also might be interested in …

At long last, the Washington Redskins are going to change their name. The new name hasn’t been announced yet. I’m hoping they pick a name unrelated to Native Americans, rather than just dialing back to something like Warriors or Braves and keeping a Redskin-like logo.

It’s funny what does and doesn’t fly as an athletic team name. Only certain breeds of dogs work (bulldogs or wolves). Insects are OK if they sting (hornets or yellowjackets, but not ants or crickets). The Washington Spies would have an appropriate local flavor, but violates some sort of taboo I can’t put my finger on. The Washington Generals ordinarily would work, but that’s the name of the hapless team the Harlem Globetrotters have been beating up on for decades. I could go for Agents or G-Men. If it were up to me, though, I’d play off the Capitol area’s neo-classical architecture and name the team the Centurions.

Peter Wehner of The Atlantic talks to an unnamed Christian minister about the price Christians have paid for supporting Trump:

“Yes, Hollywood and the media created a decidedly unattractive stereotype of Christians. And Donald Trump fits it perfectly. Made it all seem true. And sadly, I now realize that stereotype is more true than I ever knew. It breaks my heart. In volleyball terms, Hollywood did the set, but Trump was the spike that drove the ball home. He’s everything I’ve been trying to say isn’t what the church is all about. But sadly, maybe it is.”

The only thing worth mentioning about Tucker Carlson’s claim that Tammy Duckworth “hates America” is Duckworth’s response:

They’re doing it because they’re desperate for America’s attention to be on anything other than Donald Trump’s failure to lead our nation, and because they think that Mr. Trump’s electoral prospects will be better if they can turn us against one another. Their goal isn’t to make — or keep — America great. It’s to keep Mr. Trump in power, whatever the cost.

It’s better for Mr. Trump to have you focused on whether an Asian-American woman is sufficiently American than to have you mourning the 130,000 Americans killed by a virus he claimed would disappear in February. It’s better for his campaign to distract Americans with whether a combat veteran is sufficiently patriotic than for people to recall that this failed commander in chief has still apparently done nothing about reports of Russia putting bounties on the heads of American troops in Afghanistan.

The Lincoln Project doesn’t mess around.

When my nephew gave me the insider’s tour of the Tennessee State Capitol a few years ago, we had to pass a bust of KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest to get into one of the two chambers of the legislature. It looks like that bust is finally leaving the capitol. The war criminal behind the Fort Pillow massacre will no longer guard that chamber, warning African American legislators that Tennessee will never really be their state.

If you want to understand why the fact-checking model doesn’t work any more, consider this Reuters fact-check: “Metal Strip in Medical Masks is Not a 5G Antenna“.

Fact-checking is based on the idea that the information environment is basically clean, so when there’s a disinformation spill, we can go clean it up. But now the insanity has gotten too dense. There’s no way to play whack-a-mole with this stuff any more.

and let’s close with something violent

Jan Hakon Erichsen destroys things on YouTube. Mostly he destroys silly inanimate things, like balloons or pasta, and does it in ways that are either creative or stupid, depending on your mood at the time you watch. But on days when the world has pissed you off and something needs to pay, an Erichsen video may be just the thing.

At every crucial moment, American officials were weeks or months behind the reality of the outbreak. Those delays likely cost tens of thousands of lives.

– “How the Virus Won”
The New York Times (6-25-2020)

The president thinks so much about what he’s doing in terms of the show he’s putting on that there’s been very little attention paid to how the government is functioning. … What does the dog do when it catches the car? Turns out the dog just keeps running and barking. I had this thought in the Lafayette Square madness. Trump puts on this show. And then he gets there and has nothing to do. He’s just standing there. His whole presidency is like that.

– Yuval Levin

This week’s featured post is “Back to Square One“. The reason there was no Sift last week was that I was virtually talking to churches in Illinois and Wisconsin (which answers the Firesign Theater question: “How can you be in two places at once when you’re not anywhere at all?”). The topic was “Hope and Realism in Difficult Times”. You can read the text and watch my dress rehearsal.

This week everybody was talking about the virus breaking loose again

That’s the topic of the featured post. Here are some extras that didn’t make it into that post.

A reporter at Oklahoma Watch tested positive for Covid-19 after covering Trump’s Tulsa rally. Ever the objective observer, the reporter says, “I can’t say definitively that I got it at the rally.”

McSweeney’s provides “A Message from Your University’s Vice President for Magical Thinking“.

Our university will proceed as if everything will be okay because we really, really want it to be.

It goes on from there.

Wednesday night was an interesting lesson in the divergence of American news bubbles. If you watched any of the major evening news shows on CNN or MSNBC, the main story was that the number of new Covid-19 cases in the United States had hit a new high that day, with new state records in the biggest states: California, Florida, and Texas. The second major story was that whistleblowers had testified to the House Judiciary Committee about political interference in Bill Barr’s Justice Department. (See below.) Those two stories dominated the conversation.

Throughout the evening, though, I would occasionally jump over to Fox News to see what stories Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham thought were most important. I didn’t watch any of those shows end-to-end, so I can’t definitely say they never mentioned the two stories that were dominating the other news networks. But I never caught them talking about either one. Instead, they wanted to talk about the excesses of the protests that were still going on in many major cities: statues being pulled down, the CHOP autonomous zone in Seattle, and so on. These were presented as very scary developments; our cities are dissolving into chaos.

To see if I was hearing this right, I bopped over to FoxNews.com. And yes, there was a story about the rising coronavirus case numbers — down in the third level of headlines. The impression I got was that, if you really must know about the spread of the virus, they would tell you; but they weren’t going to insist that you pay attention.

The image below was FoxNews.com Thursday morning. There are no stories about either the virus-case spikes or the Justice Department whistleblowers in the top two rows of headlines, or near the top of the two sidebars. The sidebar headlines you can’t make out are “Iraq War vet on destroying statues: ‘We don’t solve problems via mob rule'”, “Trump touts powerful alliance and relationship with Poland”, “Dr. Nesheiwat: ‘Exciting’ experimental COVID vaccine proved ‘robust immunity'”, and “Ari Fleischer: ‘We’re having the summer of violence’, you’re seeing one-sided lawlessness”.

In the main column, you had to go down to the 13th headline to find “L.A. mayor reveals ‘troubling trend’ after uptick in coronavirus cases“. (I’ve noticed this since: If Fox does talk about the rising case numbers, it focuses on blue California rather than red Texas or purple Florida.) And your reward for going that far was a 2fer in the 14th story. You could vicariously indulge both your virus-denial and your racism by reading: “Arizona councilman chants ‘I can’t breathe’ before ripping off face mask“.

FoxNews.com Thursday morning

and Russia offering bounties to kill American troops

The New York Times broke the story Friday:

American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops — amid the peace talks to end the long-running war there, according to officials briefed on the matter. …

Islamist militants, or armed criminal elements closely associated with them, are believed to have collected some bounty money, the officials said. Twenty Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019, but it was not clear which killings were under suspicion.

The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.

Several other news organizations have independently corroborated parts of this scoop. CNN was told a similar story by “a European intelligence official”. ABC got it from “a military official”, The Wall Street Journal from “people familiar with” a “classified American intelligence assessment”, The Washington Post from “officials”, and so on. So nobody is willing to identify a source, but it’s pretty clear the NYT didn’t just make this up; other news organizations looked for a source and found one.

The Post added this important detail: actual American deaths.

Russian bounties offered to Taliban-linked militants to kill coalition forces in Afghanistan are believed to have resulted in the deaths of several U.S. service members, according to intelligence gleaned from U.S. military interrogations of captured militants in recent months.

Trump and various other top officials spent the weekend using a Sergeant Schultz I-know-nothing defense. Sunday morning — what took him so long? — Trump tweeted:

Nobody briefed or told me, @VP Pence, or Chief of Staff @Mark Meadows about the so-called attacks on our troops in Afghanistan by Russians, as reported by an “anonymous source” by the fake-news @nytimes. Everybody is denying it and there have not been many attacks on us.

Marcy Wheeler points out that Mark Meadows wasn’t Chief of Staff at the time, which “makes it clear that whoever wrote this tweet didn’t actually refer to any records.”

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe tweeted:

I have confirmed that neither the President nor the Vice President were ever briefed on any intelligence alleged by the New York Times in its reporting yesterday.

Ratcliffe himself was took office at the end of May.

The Times insisted otherwise on Saturday:

But one American official had told The Times that the intelligence finding that the Russians had offered and paid bounties to Afghan militants and criminals had been briefed at the highest levels of the White House. Another said it was included in the President’s Daily Brief.

John Bolton happened to be on Jake Tapper’s Sunday show anyway to promote his book, so he got to comment:

The fact that the President feels compelled to tweet about the news story here shows that what his fundamental focus is, is not the security of our forces, but whether he looks like he wasn’t paying attention. So he’s saying well nobody told me therefore you can’t blame me

CNN national security analyst Samantha Vinograd described this as “gross incompetence any way you cut it”.

It would be disastrous not to get to the bottom of this. Either someone sat on this intelligence, or the President didn’t pay attention, or he decided to do nothing about it. Worse than doing nothing, Trump has continued to carry water for Putin internationally: At the beginning of this month, Trump was still pushing to get Russia invited to the G7 meetings. And regardless of who knew what when, Trump has heard about it now. Is he going to once again take Putin’s word over US intelligence and say it’s not true? Is he going to do anything about it?

and Justice Department corruption

An appeals court ruled 2-1 that the judge must accept the Justice Department’s decision to drop the Michael Flynn case, in spite of all the reasons to think that undue political influence was at work. So: obstruction of justice works.

In addition, Attorney General Barr got rid of the US attorney heading SDNY, which has been investigating several Trump-related cases. Rudy Giuliani is rumored to be under investigation, and the trial of his former friends Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman  is supposed to begin in February. Barr had previously gotten rid of the US attorney in DC, which is how Roger Stone’s sentencing memorandum got rewritten.

Congress heard testimony from two Justice Department whistleblowers. Prosecutor  Aaron Zelinsky testified that “What I saw was that Roger Stone was being treated differently from every other defendant. … This leniency was happening because of Stone’s relationship with the president.” And John Elias alleged political interference in antitrust cases.

and Biden’s huge lead

Biden has held a lead over Trump in head-to-head national polls more-or-less from the beginning of this race, but those leads almost always came with two caveats:

• It’s way too early to take polls seriously.
• Even if he wins the national popular vote by as much as 5%, he might still lose in the Electoral College.

But in recent weeks Biden’s lead has extended to 9.4% in 538’s polling average and 9.2% in Real Clear Politics’ differently weighted average. The most recent NYT/Siena poll has him ahead of Trump 50%-36%. That’s enough to put the Electoral College out of reach. 538’s state-by-state analysis now has Florida as the “tipping point”, the state that puts Biden over the top. He leads there by 7.4%.

In addition to the polls, there are anecdotes, like 2016 Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina supporting Biden over Trump.

Democrats are constantly reminding each other not to be complacent, so I’ve been seeing references to Mike Dukakis’ 17-point lead over George Bush in July of 1988, a race Bush ultimately won by nearly 8%. That’s not a compelling parallel, though: Dukakis was relatively unknown compared to Biden, so his public image was easier to tar with negative ads. Also, Bush’s approval had been near 90% during the First Gulf War, so most voters could at least remember a time when they thought he was a good president. Trump, conversely, has never had majority approval.

The real reason to maintain focus, though, is that Trump bound to try to cheat. His claim that mail-in ballots are inherently unreliable is false, but it justifies his followers in whatever shenanigans they can come up with. The bigger Biden’s margin is, the harder it will be for fraud to take it away.

The failure of Trump’s Tulsa rally made me think of the entertainment term “jump the shark”. Trump is trying to run his old playbook in a different world, and when confronted with that fact he just tries to push it harder.

In 2016, the country was facing no immediate crises, so culture-war messaging and identity politics could carry the day for Trump. But in 2020, the world looks grim, and the public wants to know that the next president has some idea what to do about it. Trump clearly does not. Witness the word salad Sean Hannity evoked by asking the softball question: “What are your top priorities for a second term?”

As Yuval Levin put it in the quote at the top: Trump is the dog who caught the car, and all he knows to do now is keep running and barking.

and abortion

Just this morning, the Supreme Court blocked a Louisiana law that would have had the effect of closing every abortion clinic in the state. John Roberts crossed over to vote with the Court’s four liberals.

Legally, the case should have been a slam-dunk, because a nearly identical Texas law was thrown out four years ago. The only thing that has changed since then is the composition of the Court, particularly Justice Kavanaugh replacing Justice Kennedy. So this should have been a 9-0 decision: Quote the precedent and move on.

This is the third recent victory for the Court’s liberals, joining the LGBTQ-rights case and the DACA case.

This may sound paranoid, but I have the feeling John Roberts is setting up something awful in the remaining big case concerning Trump’s taxes. Roberts has some control over the order in which decisions come out, and it would fit his pattern to buffer the pain of a horrible decision by releasing more popular decisions first.

Meanwhile an appeals court held that Trump’s emergency seizure of otherwise allocated funds to build his border wall is invalid.

The panel held that the Executive Branch lacked independent constitutional authority to authorize the transfer of funds. The panel noted that the Appropriations Clause of the U.S. Constitution exclusively grants the power of the purse to Congress. The panel held that the transfer of funds violated the Appropriations Clause, and, therefore, was unlawful.

… The Federal Defendants cite drug trafficking statistics, but fail to address how the construction of additional physical barriers would further the interdiction of drugs. The Executive Branch’s failure to show, in concrete terms, that the public interest favors a border wall is particularly significant given that Congress determined fencing to be a lower budgetary priority and the Department of Justice’s own data points to a contrary conclusion.

and Trump’s push to invalidate ObamaCare

The Justice Department has filed a brief in a case about ObamaCare that the Supreme Court will decide in its next term. It argues that the whole law is unconstitutional, and would have the immediate effect of throwing tens of millions of people off of their health insurance, as well as making tens of millions of other people worry about their pre-existing conditions.

Naturally, Trump claims these horrible outcomes would never really come to pass, because once ObamaCare has been tossed aside he will finally reveal the magic replacement plan he has been talking about for five years without revealing any details.

In his entire first term, we have seen no sign of the “beautiful” health plan that Trump promised would replace ObamaCare, the one that would “cover everybody” and leave nobody worse off financially.

By now it should be obvious that Trump never had a plan; he was just stringing words together. Republicans in general have no plan. That became obvious when they tried to “repeal and replace” ObamaCare in 2017. “Replace” was just a word that polled well; it meant nothing.

If Trump gets his wish and the Supreme Court invalidates ObamaCare, no fairy godmother will tap a pumpkin and turn it into a Republican healthcare plan. ObamaCare will just be gone and nothing will replace it until Democrats get back in power.

BTW: If you’re a young person who has recovered from Covid-19, or who imagines that recovering from it would be no big deal: Decades from now, you would still have a pre-existing condition. Your insurance company might point to any subtle scarring on your lungs or other long-term organ damage as a reason not to cover whatever health problem you might have then.

Biden responded to Trump’s attack on ObamaCare with a good speech on health care.

and DC statehood

The House voted to make Washington D. C. a state. The bill is expected to go nowhere in the Senate and Trump has promised to veto it.

This is a voter suppression issue. The District of Columbia has a population over 700K, which makes it bigger than Wyoming or Vermont, and not far behind Alaska and North Dakota. But DC is 49% black and only 44% white. It would be a reliably blue state with two Democratic senators and a congressperson. (Let’s not even get into Puerto Rico, which would be the 31st-largest state, between Utah and Iowa. But, I mean, they’re Puerto Ricans! Can’t give them a say in how the national government is run.)

It doesn’t take much interpretation to see that the Republican opponents are saying those people shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Here’s Mitch McConnell:

They plan to make the District of Columbia a state—that’d give them two new Democratic senators—Puerto Rico a state, that would give them two more new Democratic senators. […] So this is full bore socialism on the march in the House. And yeah, as long as I’m the majority leader of the Senate, none of that stuff is going anywhere.

Socialism on the march … yeah, it must have been Karl Marx who described governments as “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed“.

And Tom Cotton:

Yes, Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population, but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging and construction, and ten times as many workers in manufacturing. In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state.

So people in Wyoming work for a living, unlike all those bureaucrats and welfare mothers in DC. The WaPo’s Karen Tumulty responds.

Wyoming is an interesting example. Nearly half of Wyoming’s territory is federal acreage — a much higher proportion than in the District (less than one-third). And among states, Wyoming ranks top in the nation when it comes to the percentage of its workforce employed by federal or local governments.

Which makes you wonder what, precisely, is the senator’s criterion for deeming a group of people “well-rounded.”

Cotton also raised the argument that the kind of people who live in DC are just not ready for self-government.

Would you trust Mayor Bowser to keep Washington safe if she were given the powers of a governor? Would you trust Marion Barry?

Why not just go ahead and use the N-word, Tom? You know you want to.

you also might be interested in …

The New York Times does a great job of annotating video to show how police over-reaction in Seattle turned a peaceful demonstration into a violent encounter.

It looks like Mississippi is going to remove the Confederate stars-and-bars from the state flag.

#ByeIvanka is a bit harsh, but you have to wonder at the administration’s decision to make her the face of skills-based hiring. The implication seems clear: The federal government is doing away with “outdated career or licensure requirements” so that it can hire more relatives of well-connected people.

I’ve written before about defunding the police: It makes sense to divert some large portion of local police-department budgets to fund other kinds of first-responders, who can answer 911 calls that don’t require guns or handcuffs, like marital disputes or mental health problems. Those incidents might get handled better, and fewer people will wind up dead.

However, we need to watch out for a trap: The Covid-19 crisis and the ensuing economic collapse have made a shambles of local budgets; expenses are up and revenues are down. There’s going to be pressure to cut across the board, including laying off teachers and not fixing potholes.

In this environment, the path of least resistance is to substantially cut the police budget, as protesters have been demanding, but not to fund any alternative first-responders. That scenario looks like the nightmare painted by right-wing critics of police defunding — you call 911 and no one answers. When that turns out badly, as is bound to happen somewhere, it will be easy to convince the public that the defund-the-police approach has been tried and discredited.

and let’s close with a marching tune

“March, March” from the trio formerly known as The Dixie Chicks. Here are the lyrics.