The Weekly Sift

What I represent is an America that still allows people to fulfill that American dream. … What I wanted people to know about my election is that this dream isn’t closed off.

– Ilhan Omar

This week’s featured posts are “A New ICE Policy Endangers Everybody” and “Reset: Investigations Post Mueller“.

This week everybody was talking about Bob Mueller

Most of my reaction to Mueller’s testimony on Wednesday is in the featured post.

Mueller’s warning about Russian interference in our elections — that it’s real and they’re still doing it — made no impression on Mitch McConnell, a.k.a. “Moscow Mitch”, who killed two election-security bills that had passed the House: One would give states extra money to beef up the security of their election systems and insist on paper ballots (which can be recounted if something goes wrong with the voting machines); and the other would require candidates to notify the FBI if they are offered help by a foreign country.

Republicans are trying to portray these as partisan proposals, because they got almost no Republican votes in the House. But there’s nothing partisan about the content of the bills, unless Republicans believe they can’t win fair elections. For the same reason, McConnell killed H. R. 1, which would ban gerrymandering, eliminate anonymous political ads, and make many other admirable changes in our elections.

and “expedited removal”

This is the subject of “A New ICE Policy Endangers Everybody“.

and this week’s outburst of racism

Last week the Squad, this week Elijah Cummings and Baltimore. Maybe Trump’s purpose is to cut off discussion of Bob Mueller, but if this is just his 2020 strategy — to turn the racism up to 11 — I think he’s starting too early. This is going to get really old by the time we vote.

Most of the time, the media treats Trump’s constant attacks on communities of color as bad in some abstract moral sense. But occasionally someone takes it personally.

Victor Blackwell’s response demonstrates why it’s important for the media to include a wide range of voices. White commentators from professional-class suburbs can tut-tut as much as they like about insults like this, but their words don’t have the power of someone who feels the sting personally.

Blackwell makes a point that you should note, even if you don’t feel like watching the full 2:42: Infested is a dehumanizing term that Trump reserves for communities of color. Whenever Trump refers to a place as being “infested” with something (drugs, rats, crime, etc.), invariably that place has a non-white majority. West Virginia might be poor, and it might be ground-zero of the opioid problem, but Trump would never call it “drug-infested”, because white people live there.

[CORRECTION. Jon Greenberg at Politifact emailed a link I had forgotten: In a 2017 phone call with the president of Mexico, Trump referred to New Hampshire as “a drug-infested den“. In some ways it doesn’t really refute Blackwell’s point, because the remark wasn’t intended for the public. (The call’s transcript was leaked to the Washington Post.) So I should probably revise the statement above to say that “whenever Trump refers in public“.]

Seth Mandel makes a similar point about Trump’s clash with ex-Republican Rep. Justin Amash.

See Trump didn’t go after Amash’s district in their dustup, which is like 80% white. That’s a bit of a tell.

This tweet also raises the notion that it’s weird for a President to “go after” any part of America. I’m sure there are meth-head-infested hell-holes in rural Alabama, but Obama never demonized them, or argued that their representatives shouldn’t criticize him until they fixed their districts.

A number of white Baltimorians also responded to Trump’s attack on their city. Director John Waters pointed to the cowardice of insulting people via Twitter. “Come on over to that neighborhood and see if you have the nerve to say it in person!” (That’s humorous, because Trump is a Twitter warrior. Can you imagine him having the courage to insult Colin Kaepernick or LeBron James face-to-face?)

And David Simon, creator of HBO’s Baltimore-centered “The Wire”, called Trump “a simplistic, racist moron”.

There’s an argument about how to respond to Trump’s appeals to racism.

Tim Wise describes what he learned from David Duke’s campaigns for governor and senator in Louisiana.

if a racist’s political opponent avoids the subject of race and tries instead to appeal to voters with proposals on health coverage and tax reform, that normalizes the racist, whether it’s Duke, Trump or someone else, by treating them like any other candidate, and treating the election at hand as if it’s merely a debate between two legitimate, contrasting public policy visions.

To win an election where the issue of race is front-and-center, anti-racists must make it clear to voters that when they cast their ballots, they are making a moral choice about the kind of people they want to be and the kind of nation in which they want to live.

But Frank Bruni disagrees:

We used all those words in 2016 — racist, demagogue, fascist — and he won. Voters saw indelible examples of this same behavior, and he won. The [North Carolina] rally wasn’t a new Trump, just a bloated one. And the coming election isn’t a referendum on his character, which voters have or haven’t made their peace with. Pointing at him and shouting the direst words from the darkest thesaurus will do limited if any good.

Stop talking so much about the America that he’s destroying and save that oxygen for the America that Democrats want to create.

I wonder if the answer isn’t to borrow an idea from the Serbian resistance to Milosevic: very simple slogans that became nationwide graffiti, like “It’s time” and “He’s finished”. Maybe the right anti-Trump message doesn’t have to detail anything about his racism, sexism, bullying, trolling, authoritarianism, or general boorishness. Just: “Enough!”. Everyone who sees it can decide for themselves what they’ve had enough of. Feel free to steal my version or make a better one of your own.

and you also might be interested in …

Another mass shooting yesterday, this time at the Gilroy Garlic Festival. If even these sorts of fun civic events aren’t safe any more, it says something terrible about our country.

The next round of Democratic presidential debates are tomorrow and Wednesday on CNN. Again, there are 10 candidates each night. The first night is headlined by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on stage the second night.

The first night, I’ll be watching what Warren and Sanders do. On the one hand, they agree on a lot, so they could support each other’s points. On the other hand, there’s probably only room for one of them to make a serious run, so they could try to knock each other out.

On the second night, Joe Biden is the interesting one. The first debate showed that he can’t just coast; he has to put forward ideas and jostle with the other candidates. How does he plan to do that?

Friday, the Commerce Department released its GDP estimates for the second quarter. GDP growth was down to 2.1%, and the growth rate for 2018 as a whole was revised down from 3% to 2.5%. This is far from terrible, but it means that the economy is doing roughly the same under Trump as it did under Obama.

Unemployment rates are lower now because it’s later in the economic cycle; the economy has had more time to create jobs since the Great Recession. If you look at the graph of the unemployment rate since the recession, you can’t pick out any difference between Trump and Obama.

Matt Yglesias elaborates:

Growth under Trump has continued, but there’s no discernible Trump acceleration. What’s more, the data indicates that the growth we have been enjoying has come largely from traditional fiscal stimulus — under Trump, Republicans have stopped caring about budget deficits and spending has gone up while taxes have gone down — rather than from any supply-side magic or boost in investment.

In other words: The Trump tax cut may have stimulated the economy by raising the deficit, but the other stuff it was supposed to accomplish still hasn’t happened. (Business investment, for example, was actually down in the second quarter.) Exports, meanwhile, are a drag on the economy, as Trump’s trade war takes its toll.

Again, this isn’t awful performance any more than Obama’s was. It just points out that we’re getting nothing in exchange for having Trump as president. Nothing in exchange for what we’re giving up in terms of democracy, the environment, race relations, and our national dignity.

The Supreme Court has stayed the injunction of a lower court, and will allow Trump to expropriate $2.5 billion from the Defense budget to start building his wall. This is not a final ruling on the merits of the case, which is proceeding along with other cases.

The Boeing 737 Max is what happens when manufacturers are allowed to perform their own safety assessments.

Boeing needed the approval process on the Max to go swiftly. Months behind its rival Airbus, the company was racing to finish the plane, a more fuel-efficient version of its best-selling 737.

The regulator’s hands-off approach was pivotal. At crucial moments in the Max’s development, the agency operated in the background, mainly monitoring Boeing’s progress and checking paperwork. The nation’s largest aerospace manufacturer, Boeing was treated as a client, with F.A.A. officials making decisions based on the company’s deadlines and budget.

The two crashes that caused the planes to be grounded were caused by a software system [MCAS] that the FAA never examined closely. When MCAS was changed late in the process, making it activate more frequently and make bigger adjustments,

the company never submitted an updated safety assessment of those changes to the agency. … Under the impression the system was insignificant, officials didn’t require Boeing to tell pilots about MCAS. When the company asked to remove mention of MCAS from the pilot’s manual, the agency agreed.

A common libertarian argument says that a corporation’s reputation for safety is so valuable in the market that government oversight isn’t necessary. If that principle held anywhere, it would hold in a corporation like Boeing. But the argument assumes that the full import of decisions comes into play at all times. In actual corporations, though, individual decision-makers often are under pressure to cut corners and hope.

One thing Trump ran on in 2016 was that he would protect and even revive America’s coal industry. (“They want to be miners, but their jobs have been taken away and we’re going to bring them back, folks.”) Obama, he claimed, had been fighting a “war on coal”, regulating the industry out of business. Trump would put a stop to that war.

Well, the Trump administration has definitely rolled back regulations, valuing the dirtiest form of fossil fuel above the environment, and especially above combating climate change. But it turns out that over-regulation wasn’t really the problem: Coal companies are continuing to go bankrupt, with six bankruptcies since October.

Adam Ozimek explains how Trump-think works in these situations:

West Virginia coal miners, big news: we’re cracking down on immigrants. No longer will you live under the crushing burden of the 1.6% of your population that is foreign born.

The NYT wonders why Rep. Seth Moulton keeps running for president despite polling at asterisk levels. Those of us who live in his district wonder the same thing.

It was 109 degrees in Paris on Thursday, but I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything. Just keep on doing whatever you’ve been doing.

Last month, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said Europe’s five hottest summers since 1500 had all occurred in the 21st century – in 2002, 2003, 2010, 2016 and 2018.

Monthly records were now falling five times as often as they would in a stable climate, the institute said, adding that this was “a consequence of global warming caused by the increasing greenhouse gases from burning coal, oil and gas”.

The Washington Post let a former student editor at Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Liberty University describe the oppressive atmosphere he had to live under.

A video of Rep. Ilhan Omar that has been edited to make her sound anti-white went viral inside the conservative bubble. It was shared by Senator Marco Rubio, who apparently doesn’t feel any obligation to verify the stuff he tweets. Here’s the original 10-minute Omar interview, which includes the quote at the top of the page.

In case you’re wondering what was left out in the edited version, it’s the hypothetical nature of her comment that police should be profiling and monitoring white men. They edited out the “if fear was the driving force behind policies to keep Americans safe”. She wasn’t trying to threaten white men (as the edited version implies); her point was that policies like Trump’s Muslim ban have more to do with bigotry than with fear of terrorism. And this much is true: More terrorist attacks in the US are carried out by white supremacists than by jihadists.

and let’s close with somebody else’s problem

Now that Boris Johnson is giving Trump competition in the wild-haired loose cannon division of the head-of-state Olympics, and the possibility of a no-deal Brexit looms, this Tracey Uhlman piece advertising “Paddy Passports” — EU-member Irish passports for British folk who still want to travel in Europe — is relevant again.

No Sift next week. The next new articles will appear on July 22.

Continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.

– Hebrews 13:3

There is no featured post this week.

This week everybody was continuing to talk about our concentration camps

[BTW: I just discovered the Native American cartoonist Richardo Cate’. The cartoon above appeared in his series “Without Reservations“. I predict you’ll see more of his stuff here in coming months.]

Tuesday, “Close the Camps” protests were held in cities around the country.

Please, everybody, don’t let this story go away. I know it’s easy to think “I already protested/wrote to my representatives in Congress/wrote a letter to the editor/gave money last week. This week I’ll move on to something else.”

But the camps are still there. Kids are still being separated from their parents. Abuse is still happening out of the public’s view. If you’ve ever wondered how Germans in the Nazi era ever let things get as bad as they did, this is how. They had other stuff to do. It didn’t seem to be their business. Maybe they even said something once and then let it go.

ICE has a new tactic for threatening immigrants who have taken refuge in churches. (An immigrant is living in my church, for example.) There’s no legal principle that stops ICE from taking immigrants out of churches, but so far they seem to believe that the bad publicity wouldn’t be worth it.

Now they’ve started issuing fines in the hundreds of thousands. Edith Espinal-Moreno has been living in a Mennonite church in Columbus for more than a year.

According to the letter from ICE, provided to ABC News, Espinal-Moreno is being fined $497,777, because she “willfully” refused to leave the country or comply with ICE orders. … “I think they want to push the envelope to see what they can get away with. If they can levy a $500,000 fine against a destitute mother who’s been sitting in a church a year and a half and they can get away with that, then what’s going to stop them from breaking down the door and dragging her out?” [Attorney David] Bennion said.

When Democrats like AOC started calling the border internment centers “concentration camps”, gentile conservatives like Liz Cheney dusted off their imaginary menorahs and objected on behalf of Jews everywhere: It disrespected the memory of the Holocaust to use that term in any other context. Like Babe Ruth’s #3, “concentration camp” should be retired for all time to avoid unworthy comparisons.

No doubt there are a number of actual Jews who feel that way, but another large number believe that they honor the memory of the Holocaust best by responding before a situation reaches Auschwitz proportions. This week, the Jewish group Never Again Action demonstrated in a number of cities around the country. More than 100 were arrested.  The young woman in the picture was arrested a week ago yesterday in New Jersey. (Among the policeman’s many tattoos, the radical gun-rights slogan Molan Labe is clearly visible.)

If you’ve been wondering what kind of person works for the border patrol under these conditions, we’re finding out. Pro Publica uncovered a “secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents”. The group has about 9,500 members. (Currently, the Border Patrol has about 20,000 agents.)

Posts viewed by Pro Publica included “jokes” about migrants who died in custody, as well as “vile and sexist” posts about Congresswomen Veronica Escobar and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who were scheduled to tour a Border Patrol facility.

“These comments and memes are extremely troubling,” said Daniel Martinez, a sociologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson who studies the border. “They’re clearly xenophobic and sexist.”

The postings, in his view, reflect what “seems to be a pervasive culture of cruelty aimed at immigrants within CBP. This isn’t just a few rogue agents or ‘bad apples.’”

This culture of cruelty isn’t going to get better on its own, or under Trump’s supervision. Let me repurpose Trump’s statement about Mexican immigrants: Some Border Patrol agents, I assume, are good people.

But how long can that last? Already, the Border Patrol is a sadist’s dream job, while agents with consciences have to be wondering how much longer they can do this. That’s the typical life cycle of concentration-camp systems, and why they have an inescapable tendency to spiral downward unless outside forces intervene.

and post-debate polls

Everyone expected the post-debate polls to show a tightening of the Democratic presidential race — the immediate consensus was that Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren had done well and Joe Biden badly — but it was impossible to guess how big the change would be. It’s still hard to say, as the various polls have a wide range.

All the polls I’ve seen still show Biden in the lead, but that’s about all they agree on. In the Harvard-Harris poll, Biden is leading Bernie Sanders 34%-15%, with Warren at 11% and Harris at 9%. But Quinnipiac tells a completely different story: Biden 22%, Harris 20%, Warren 14%, and Sanders 13%. If you’d rather see Warren in second place, look at the Economist/YouGov poll: Biden 23%, Warren 19%, Harris 15%, and Sanders 9%.

To me, this suggests there’s more randomness at work than the usual margin-of-error calculations account for. Margin-of-error is an estimate of “sampling error”: Maybe just by luck, a poll interviewed too many (or too few) Biden supporters. In addition to that, though, it looks like there’s some randomness in the voters themselves: Somebody who tells you they’re for Biden in the morning might tell another poll they’re for Sanders in the afternoon or Harris in the evening.

The main thing this tightening means, though, is that Biden can’t coast to the nomination. When he was leading the field by 30 points, Biden could stay aloof from debates over issues: Let’s not bicker among ourselves, and focus instead on uniting behind me and beating Trump in the general election.

In a tighter race, though, Biden will have to actively defend his positions against the party’s progressive wing. He’ll need to explain why he thinks it’s better to add a public option to ObamaCare than to replace the private health insurance industry entirely. He’ll have to put forward a more specific immigration proposal (perhaps along the lines Obama’s DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson outlined yesterday). And so on. All those cases can be made — centrist candidates like Bennet and Delaney were making them in the debate — and might even be persuasive. But Biden has to start doing that persuading himself. In a closer race, he needs to argue that his way forward is best; he can’t just be the likeable Uncle Joe.

The risk is that the party will come out of the convention divided, and that Trump will be able to build on the criticisms raised against the eventual nominee, whoever that might be. The upside is that every part of the party will feel heard.

and the Fourth of July

Trump’s self-glorifying extravaganza wasn’t as bad as many of us feared. He did not make an overtly partisan speech, insult his rivals, brag about his accomplishments, or start the crowd chanting campaign slogans. So in general, he seemed to stay within the letter of the law about using public funds to pay for campaign rallies. (I know that’s a low bar for a POTUS, but as long as I keep expressing my low expectations for this president, I feel obligated to acknowledge when he exceeds those expectations.)

I did not watch his 45-minute speech (life is too short for that) but I did read the transcript on the White House web site. It was largely vacuous, and I found myself agreeing with David Frum:

The speech existed only to provide a reason why he needed to stand in one place long enough for five waves of warplanes to cross the sky.

I also have to agree with Frum’s deeper assessment:

Yet it’s a strange thing about words. Talk long enough, and sooner or later you will say something. Consciously or not, Trump did say things that evening.

As Trump retold the story of the Pacific War, he said this: “Nobody could beat us. Nobody could come close.” When he paid tribute to the Air Force, he said this: “As President Roosevelt said, the Nazis built a fortress around Europe, ‘but forgot to put a roof on it.’ So we crushed them all from the air.” He added: “No enemy has attacked our people without being met by a roar of thunder, and the awesome might of those who bid farewell to Earth, and soar into the wild blue yonder.” Bringing the story to more recent times: “The Army brought America’s righteous fury down to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and cleared the bloodthirsty killers from their caves.”

Were these wars right or just? Why were they fought? What were their outcomes? Except for the mentions of “freedoms” sprinkled randomly through the text, those questions went unconsidered. Instead, Trump would periodically ad-lib “What a great country!” after this or that mention of power and violence. America is great because it crushes all before it.

Altering for circumstances, it was a speech that could have been given by Kaiser Wilhelm or Napoleon or Julius Caesar or the Assyrian Emperor Sennacherib. … No non-American could watch that spectacle at the Lincoln Memorial and feel that America stood for anything good or right or universal. Power worshipped power, for its own sake.

I usually ignore discussions that have no point beyond “Trump is stupid.” However, his praise for how the Continental Army “took over the airports” elicited so much creative ridicule I have to mention it. Check out #RevolutionaryWarAirportStories.

Naturally, Trump didn’t acknowledge making a mistake or laugh at himself. It’s the teleprompter’s fault. Remember when Republicans used to ridicule President Obama for using a teleprompter at all? It was a way to deny that this black man could be as intelligent and articulate as he appeared. Now the teleprompter takes the blame for a president who has no idea what’s coming out of his mouth.

While we’re talking about creative ridicule, I have to mention the #UnwantedIvanka series. Ivanka’s inappropriate attendance at the G-20 meetings in Japan, as if she were herself a world leader rather than just a world leader’s daughter, inspired Photoshop mavens to insert Ivanka into images from Yalta (above) to the Last Supper.

Wired offers this interpretation of the meme:

President Trump is the one copy-pasting his daughter into history. Twitter’s just joining in.

The joke is that Ivanka looks no more out of place at the parting of the Red Sea or at the diner with Hopper’s nighthawks than she did at the G-20.

I will not take the cheap shot. I will not take the cheap shot. I will not … oh, hell, here it is.

Finally, while we’re honoring our military, I want to raise a dissenting view. “America’s Indefensible Defense Budget” by Jessica Matthews in the New York Review of Books.

These days, increasing defense spending seems to be a goal in itself, disconnected from any strategy detailing what our military is supposed to accomplish or any assessment of the risks our nation faces.

Are we actually as threatened as our lopsided spending suggests? Or are we achieving, through a rapidly growing military, valued international aims that are otherwise unattainable? If funds were tight or we were really concerned about deficits—that is, if we were forced to make tradeoffs—could we achieve equal or better security for much less money? In short, do we need to or want to devote three fifths of the government’s discretionary funds to defense? There are no widely agreed-upon answers because the questions aren’t being asked.

and the census

So here’s how things have shaken out: The administration argued that the Supreme Court had to decide by July 1 whether or not the census could have a citizenship question, because otherwise there wouldn’t be time to print the surveys. Then the Court ruled that the reason Secretary Ross had given for including the question was a pretext, which is a fancy legal term for “lie”. The Supreme Court ruling seemed to leave room for the administration to come back with a better reason for adding the citizenship question, but there appeared to be no time.

The government’s lawyers admitted defeat in court, and Secretary Ross announced that the census would be printed without the question. But then Trump tweeted that all that was fake news, and that the administration would go forward with the question somehow. In other words, there is now time for a new legal process to consider a new pretext. (No one really doubts the real reason Trump wants to include the question: It will intimidate Hispanics into ignoring the census. The resulting undercount will raise the political power of white non-Hispanic voters.)

Wednesday’s transcript of the conference call with Judge George Jarrad Hazel, from the lower court where the case started, is amazing to read. Basically, the Justice Department is saying that it has no idea what position it is supposed to be representing, given that the President’s tweets contradict what they had just told the judge. The judge responds:

If you were Facebook and an attorney for Facebook told me one thing, and then I read a press release from Mark Zuckerberg telling me something else, I would be demanding that Mark Zuckerberg appear in court with you the next time because I would be saying I don’t think you speak for your client any more.

The embarrassment of the DoJ lawyer is evident.

I want to back up just a step and say that I’ve been with the United States Department of Justice for 16 years, through multiple Administrations, and I’ve always endeavored to be as candid as possible with the Court. What I told the Court yesterday was absolutely my best understanding of the state of affairs and, apparently, also the Commerce Department’s state of affairs, because you probably saw Secretary Ross issued a statement very similar to what I told the Court.

The tweet this morning was the first I had heard of the President’s position on this issue, just like the plaintiffs and Your Honor. I do not have a deeper understanding of what that means at this juncture other than what the President has tweeted. But, obviously, as you can imagine, I am doing my absolute best to figure out what’s going on.

Sunday, the Justice Department announced it was replacing its legal team on this case. The NYT speculates that the previous team just couldn’t take it any more.

“There is no reason they would be taken off that case unless they saw what was coming down the road and said, ‘I won’t sign my name to that,’” Justin Levitt, a former senior official in the Justice Department under President Barack Obama, said on Sunday.

Two points to make about intimidation and the census:

• It isn’t just the undocumented who will avoid responding to the census, it’s any household that includes someone who isn’t documented. (What if Dad is undocumented, but Mom has a green card, and the kids are citizens?)
• You will hear it claimed that people shouldn’t be intimidated, because the law doesn’t allow census responses to be used for law enforcement. That’s true as far as it goes. But anybody who is confident that this administration will obey that law hasn’t been paying attention. Trump has proclaimed our laws protecting asylum-seekers to be “loopholes” and violates them regularly. The laws protecting census responses could become “loopholes” also.

but I have a book to recommend

A year and a half ago I told you about Cory Doctorow’s novel Walkaway. This week I read his new short story collection Radicalized. There are four stories in Radicalized, and you could read any one of them during an afternoon at the beach. They all have something interesting to say about the social/technological trends we’re in the middle of and where they might go.

The best story is the title piece, “Radicalized”, which follows the evolution of a social media group for men whose loved ones have cancer. First it evolves towards an angry focus: Why my wife? Why my daughter? Then the anger intensifies and focuses on insurance companies that deny treatment. Finally, the group has narrowed down to bereaved men who feel that they have already lost everything, and who blame the insurance companies and the politicians who protect them. And then the suicide bombings start.

To me, the most horrifying horror stories are the ones that make me understand how I could do horrible things.

“Model Minority” is in essence a Superman story, though Doctorow calls his hero “American Eagle” for copyright reasons. (But the Eagle has a girlfriend Lois and a colleague/friend Bruce, so Doctorow’s intentions are clear.) The model minority in the title is the Eagle himself, the last of his kind, who one day finds himself stopping some New York City police from beating up an innocent black man. Suddenly, and for the first time in his century-long career, he is on the wrong side of the system. The story is essentially about white allyship, and the fantasy that your own power and privilege should be able to fix longstanding systemic problems — ones the powerless have been struggling with for decades — as soon as you figure out how to apply it properly. Let’s just say things don’t work out so easily.

“Unauthorized Bread” imagines a near future in which the inkjet-printer model gets applied to all household gadgets. Your computerized toaster makes perfect toast, but it will only function if you’re using authorized bread, which (like HP Ink cartridges) is unjustifiably expensive. Your dishwasher never leaves a spot, but it will only run if it detects authorized dishes. And so on. The story is a meditation on how the technology that was supposed to free us from drudgery has started controlling us.

In “The Masque of the Red Death” a rich guy foresees the collapse of civilization and builds a redoubt in Arizona for himself and 30 friends. His Social Darwinist views about what it takes to survive turn out to be misguided. When it all comes down, maybe being part of a productive community will be more important than hoarding scarce resources.

and you also might be interested in …

If the climate-change computer models seem too complicated for you, here’s a simple fact: June was the hottest month ever recorded.

I’ve been seeing a lot of articles like this lately:

Every few days I am appalled by some Never-Trump Republican who thinks he or she should be allowed to pick the Democratic nominee. I’m sorry you lost your party, folks, but that doesn’t mean you get to take over mine. And I don’t want to be rude, but if any of you were as smart as you think you are, you would never have lost your party to begin with.

A tweetstorm by author Chris Arnade objects to the NYT’s Bret Stephens and all those who claim to speak for the Obama-to-Trump voters:

While my book focuses on all back-row (all races in all places), I did run across a fair number of Obama to Trump voters & voters who voted for Obama then sat 16 out. What they shared in common, politically, was a deep frustration with the status quo. Or with centrist politics! …

In short, @BretStephensNYT Op-ed imagined Obama – Trump voters & their reaction to Dem debates. I spent a lot of last 5 yrs talking to Obama-Trump voters in their own counties (not via polls, or surveys). They don’t want what he says they want. They just want dramatic change.

The pattern: A lone-wolf Republican criticizes Trump, and then decides he must leave either Congress or the Republican Party. Jeff Flake, Lamar Alexander, and now Justin Amash.

The Republican Party has become the Party of Trump, and has no place for anyone else. If you vote for ANY Republican (I’m looking at you, Susan Collins), you’re voting for Trump. It really is that simple.

The effects of gerrymandering in one graphic:

Samantha Bee discusses how the media ought to cover the sexual assault allegations against President Trump.

The difference between this year’s crops and last year’s is visible from space. Here are two images a year apart, from 2018 and 2019. That east-west white line is I-72, connecting Springfield and Decatur in Illinois.

Sift readers are sometimes surprised to discover that I belong to a church and write for a religious magazine. Then there are stories like this one from Jacksonville, Florida. A public library was going to hold a “Storybook Pride Prom for LGBT teens” when conservative Christians organized a protest to “express your disgust that this perversion is taking place in a taxpayer funded library!” The protests forced the library to cancel “amid fears for the teens’ safety”.

But then the local Unitarian Universalists jumped in and had the event at their church.

“It was the right thing to do,” Grace Repass, the church’s past president, said in a statement to The Washington Post. “The LGBTQIA+ youth in our community deserve to have their prom and we wanted to support them.”

Repass said the decision to host the prom was swift and unanimously supported by the church’s board, and she said the event featured “happy teens, grateful parents, and a lot of community support.”

“We see our church as a safe place for people who are figuring out who they are,” she said. “Our Unitarian Universalist values call us to respect the inherent worth and dignity of every person. So, it’s a matter of integrity — to act in alignment with who we say we are.”

Those are my people.

A new kind of cancer therapy has worked in mice. It’s two ideas put together: Scientists already knew how to make “nanobodies”, antibody-like entities that mask the proteins that signal the immune system not to attack cancer cells. Get a nanobody attached to a cancer cell, and then the immune system should take care of it.

The problem is to target the nanobodies so that they invade tumors, rather than spread throughout the body and cause the immune system to attack all kinds of things it shouldn’t. Well, it turns out that certain kinds of bacteria hide inside tumors, precisely to avoid the immune system.

Putting those two ideas together, tumor-seeking bacteria were re-engineered to become nanobody factories. The bacteria seek out the tumors, then explode into a swarm of nanobodies.

Of course, if you follow this kind of research, “it works in mice” is a phrase you’ve heard many times. (I’m amazed any mouse ever dies of cancer, given all the viable treatment options.) Application to humans is probably years away, if indeed it works for us.

If you don’t live in California, you may have missed the saga of Rep. Duncan Hunter, who is accused of misusing $250K of campaign money for such purposes as pursuing affairs with five different women. Hunter’s wife has pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring with him, and is planning to testify against him. (Congress really needs a Corruption 101 class for its members. “Never piss off your co-conspirators” should be a basic principle.)

Hunter remains in Congress, but the LA Times is urging him to resign “to spend more time with his lawyers”.  So far he’s resisting such calls; I assume because Congress needs all the morally upright defenders of family values it can get.

Cases like that ought to shame Republicans, but they’ve moved beyond shame. The satire site McSweeney’s nails it in “Before You Call Out Our Hypocrisy, Let Us Remind You That We Don’t Care“.

Seriously, guys, stop trying to appeal to our conscience. We have none. Any semblance of something resembling goodwill to our fellow man was snuffed out when we accused the families who lost loved ones in the Sandy Hook massacre of creating an elaborate hoax and then terrorized them for the past, oh, six years. Or maybe it was when we lost our shit because black players kneeled. Honestly, there have been so many moments for us to have a crisis of conscience, and we just keep consistently plowing straight on through to not giving a shit.

… For a bunch of Ivy League-educated smartypants, you guys are really bad at reading between the lines.

and let’s close with something patriotic

The Device Orchestra presents the national anthem played on seven credit card machines.

The Device Orchestra’s YouTube channel is a hoot. Want to see electric toothbrushes do “Finlandia“? A collection of gadgets do “Take On Me“? “Game of Thrones“? They’ve got it.

A logical fallacy becomes inevitable: If this can’t happen, then the thing that is happening is not it. What we see in real life, or at least on television, can’t possibly be the same monstrous phenomenon that we have collectively decided is unimaginable. … Anything that happens here and now is normalized, not solely through the moral failure of contemporaries but simply by virtue of actually existing.

– Masha Gessen “The Unimaginable Reality of America’s Concentration Camps”
The New Yorker, 6-21-2019

This week’s featured post is “Concentrating on the Border“. The back-and-forth about whether to call immigrant internment camps “concentration camps” shouldn’t distract us from what they are.

This week everybody was talking about Iran

By now we all know the pattern: Trump creates a crisis, does something to prevent the worst possible outcome, and then wants credit for what a great achievement that was. Two weeks ago it was Mexican tariffs. This week it was war with Iran.

By Trump’s own account, we were ten minutes away from an attack on Iran that was estimated to kill 150 people. Plans were in motion, but he called them off. The rest of his account sounds like typical Trump story-telling. (I’ll bet Trump’s military advisors told him immediately what the casualty estimates were; they didn’t wait for him to ask and then say “I’ll get back to you.”) But I believe the gist: An attack plan was set in motion and then cancelled.

Instead, we launched a cyberattack and imposed more sanctions.

The attack was supposed to be a reprisal for Iran shooting down a US drone aircraft. Iran claims the drone was in its airspace, which the US denies.

Nobody seems too sure what happens next.

Mike Pompeo went to Congress to make the unlikely case that Shia Iran is allied with Sunni al Qaeda. It’s a little like the global conspiracy of cats and dogs.

The ties between these two arch-enemies, Pompeo claimed, go back to just after 9/11. In other words, his claims are exactly what would be needed to invoke the post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) to attack Iran. Bogus ties between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein formed part of the justification for the Iraq War.

and Trump’s campaign launch

He’s officially running for re-election. The first Trump 2020 rally was in Orlando Tuesday.

Here’s the transcript with video, if you really want to know what he said. (If you look at any of it, be sure you also read CNN’s fact check, because much of what he isn’t true. The Wall, for example, is not “moving along rapidly”.) In general, it’s the same-old, same-old: Crooked Hillary, witch hunt, his amazing accomplishments.

“The American Dream is back, it’s bigger and better, and stronger than ever before.” I wonder how that sounds to the millions of Americans who didn’t notice their tax cut, are struggling to pay their student debt, and only have health insurance because (1) John McCain cast a last-minute vote to torpedo Trump’s repeal of ObamaCare, and (2) the courts still haven’t ruled on the Trump-supported lawsuit that would declare ObamaCare unconstitutional.

“Republicans do not believe in socialism, we believe in freedom, and so do you. We will defend Medicare and Social Security for our great seniors.” Consecutive sentences: We don’t believe in socialism; we’ll defend the socialist programs that already exist.

The violent neo-fascist group Proud Boys gathered outside the Orlando rally. Police had to block them from confronting anti-Trump demonstrators. Any other candidate would be expected to denounce such a group of supporters, or at least distance himself from them. But this is Trump, so many news outlets didn’t find their presence worth mentioning.

In 2016, Trump’s outrageousness and unpredictability led cable networks to carry his rallies live, giving him far more free media than any other candidate. CNN and MSNBC appear to be trying to change their ways: Neither televised the whole Orlando speech.

Fox News media critic Howard Kurtz found this lack of free media objectionable. Fox televised the whole Orlando speech.

I suppose it’s fitting for a candidate of no particular morals and zero Biblical knowledge to open his rally with a prayer from evangelist Paula White.

Let every evil veil of deception of the enemy be removed from people’s eyes. So right now, let every demonic network who has aligned itself against the purpose, against the calling of President Trump, let it be broken, let it be torn down in the name of Jesus! Let the council of the wicked be spoiled right now. … I declare that President Trump will overcome every strategy from hell and every strategy of the enemy – every strategy – and he will fulfill his calling and his destiny.

Of course, if some nutcase does the obvious thing — tries to break the anti-Trump “demonic network” by killing a bunch of “wicked” people “from hell” — White will be shocked that anyone might blame her.

and you also might be interested in …

Once upon a time, it would have been earth-shaking news if an advice columnist from a major magazine accused the President of the United States of assault verging on rape. Now it’s like: “Take a number, lady. I guess you’re #22.”

Trump denies the allegation, as he has denied all the others. Vox’ Laura McGann uses his denial as an example of how gaslighting works. To begin with, he says “I’ve never met this person in my life” despite the photo of them together. And if he keeps saying things like “people should pay dearly for such false accusations”, how long will it be before one of his violent supporters decides to make that happen?

For years now, Jon Stewart has had a cause: the September 11th Victims Compensation Fund, which pays for care for the first responders whose illnesses stem from their work in the aftermath of the attack. The fund will expire next year, and Stewart has been lobbying Congress to get its funding extended.

Something this popular ought to just sail through Congress, but it never actually does, because politicians see it as the spoonful of sugar that will help the distasteful stuff go down: Why just pass this bill on its own, when you could attach lots of special-interest pork to it and still get it through?

Jon went on Stephen Colbert’s show to take his case to Mitch McConnell.

It’s good to see Turkey’s democracy still works well enough that Erdogan’s party can lose an election.

Wednesday, a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee heard testimony about reparations for slavery.

I’m of two minds about this subject. On the one hand, enslaved Africans and their descendants built a large chunk of America’s wealth and wound up owning none of it. That long-ago injustice (plus Jim Crow plus ongoing racism) still has repercussions, and even those whites whose families never owned slaves have benefited in ways we don’t always appreciate. (In White Like Me, Tim Wise examines his own racial privilege: He inherited little money from past generations, but his family paid for his university education by mortgaging their house. They bought that house at a time when a black family would not have been allowed to bid on it. So a black Tim Wise wouldn’t have gotten that education.)

So the justice of paying some kind of reparations seems clear to me. But what gives me doubt is having seen a Smithsonian exhibit on the Japanese internment. After Pearl Harbor, most Japanese-Americans were imprisoned and held for the next four years or so. In 1988, reparations were declared: $20,000 per surviving detainee.

Picture it: You had a life. The government closed it down and moved you and your family to an internment camp for four years. Decades later, somebody hands you a check for $20,000. Does that cover it? Are we good now?

But in addition to the inadequacy of monetary settlement, there’s a bigger problem: For reparations to bring this chapter to a close, our society needs to reach some kind of consensus about what the payment is for and what it means. We’re nowhere close to that. If reparations for slavery were paid tomorrow, the white-nationalist types would believe blacks had used their political power to extort something, and they would want to get it back. A lot of other whites would feel like racism was a dead topic now: “Don’t ever talk to me about racism again. I paid my bill for that.” Meanwhile, blacks would say, “That was slavery. What about Jim Crow?”

I can’t argue with the justice of reparations. But I wonder if paying them would make our racial divisions worse.

Accused child-molester Roy Moore is going to make another run for the Senate in Alabama. Establishment Republicans howled in frustration, but it’s not clear they can beat him, or that Doug Jones can win the rematch.

Even more than Trump, Moore represents evangelical Christianity’s descent into tribalism. If you’re on their side, nothing you do is wrong and any testimony against you must be a lie.

The Washington Post’s Pulitzer-winning David Fahrenthold takes a look at how Trump’s properties profit from his official visits, and from Republican fund-raisers. He has suggested holding the next G-7 meeting at a Trump property.

The Trump Organization claims, “It generates nothing. We charge domestic government entities our costs.” But:

• That’s just their word; no disinterested entity is auditing their claim.
• As Michael Cohen made clear in his testimony, “cost” is a very flexible notion in TrumpWorld. In particular, average cost is very different from marginal cost in the hotel business. If a hotel that wasn’t full fills up, those last few rooms cost virtually nothing to provide.
• The claim ignores the penumbra of business that Trump’s visits generate. For example, if a Trump hotel holds a high-roller fund-raiser, some number of the donors will naturally stay at the hotel.
• The value of the free advertising Trump’s visits give his properties is incalculable.

I’ve been struggling to understand why so many European government bonds ($12 trillion worth, at last count) are selling at a negative interest rate. (The bond theoretically pays interest, but the market price of the bond is more than the principal-plus-interest that the bond will pay out. Example: Suppose I issue a $1,000 bond that will pay 1% interest, with it all coming due next year. So at the end of the year the bond holder will get $1,010 from me. Now imagine that the market bids up the price of that bond so that it sells for $1,020.) Well, a WaPo business reporter asked a “Wall Street god” for an explanation, and he doesn’t have one either.

Basically, you pay $1,020 for the bond because you think somebody else will buy it from you for $1,025 before long. This is known as the Bigger Fool Theory: “I’m a fool to buy this, but I’ll make money by selling it to a bigger fool.”

Rosenberg attributes what’s happening to market forces and momentum, not rational analysis. Even though he and people like him are warning that buying negative-yield bonds is crazy (to use the technical term), prices of these bonds are getting higher and higher, making the yields more and more negative.

“Anyone who’s bought them is way ahead,” Rosenberg said. “People are buying into the bond bubble because they’re watching other people making money” on rising bond prices.

But bubbles always eventually pop, and $12 trillion is a lot of money. This may be how the next worldwide recession starts.

and let’s close with some perspective

I love these change-of-scale videos.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.

– Emily Dickinson

This week’s featured post is “We need hope, not optimism“.

This week everybody was talking about tariffs on Mexico

The Mexican tariffs are over before they started. A deal with Mexico was announced Friday. Trumpists are declaring victory, while anti-Trumpists are saying that Mexico largely reiterated commitments it had already made. (This is similar to the new NAFTA agreement Trump negotiated. Just about everything that wasn’t in the old NAFTA were concessions Mexico and Canada had already agreed to during the TPP negotiations.)

CNBC comments:

Whatever Mexican officials may promise the Trump administration, it’s unclear they would have the capacity to deliver. “Mexico’s immigration and refugee agencies are severely understaffed, under-resourced and overwhelmed by the increased numbers of Central Americans heading north,” [Tony] Wayne [of the Atlantic Council] said.

One way to judge the agreement will be whether the number of migrants apprehended at the US/Mexico border goes down (on an year-over-year basis; we already know apprehensions will go down over the summer because they always do). My prediction: Trump will be unhappy when the apprehension numbers come out, and the tariff threats will be back.

The deal means that we will never know whether Republicans in Congress were serious about trying to block the tariffs.

There are two bits of collateral damage from these negotiations: First, Trump has asserted his right to impose tariffs on any country at any time. So trade deals with the US are basically meaningless; why exactly should any country negotiate one? Second, if indeed more Central American migrants are held in Mexico while their American asylum requests are processed, what will happen to them there? Mexico itself has many of the violence and corruption problems they are fleeing in their home countries. I hope the media will pay attention to the human cost the deal imposes on these already-oppressed people.

The same CNBC article pulls back to take a broader view of the Mexico and China trade disputes.

U.S. economic weapons are the most potent in the world, and 88% of world trade is still done in dollars, although the U.S. share of global GDP has shrunk from nearly half after World War II to 38% in 1969 to about 24% now. That remains the case because for many years a good part of the world viewed this arrangement positively.

It remains to be seen – in Mexico, China and beyond – how much Trump will gain through his unique willingness to use economic weapons.

What’s clear already is that friends and rivals are more interested than ever before in exploring alternatives to the U.S.-dominated system. Such a transition would take many years, involve enormous costs and unfold in stages. However, consistent overuse of U.S. economic power has made the unthinkable more plausible.

Also on Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo downplayed the significance of climate change by saying:

Societies reorganize, we move to different places, we develop technology and innovation. I am convinced, I am convinced that we will do the things necessary as the climate changes.

Of course, if anyone tries to adjust to climate change by moving to the US, we’ll stop them.

and straight pride

Apparently a “straight pride” parade has been scheduled for August 31 in Boston. The announcement garnered widespread derision, which may have been the point.

I find it hard to believe this event will actually happen, or that the organizers even want it to. If it does, I predict it will be a fairly pathetic event, because there just isn’t much pent-up straight pride that has been unable to express itself until now. Growing up, I remember many sources of insecurity; but worrying that it might not be OK to be straight was not one of them.

Whether the parade happens or not, though, announcing it is a very effective trolling stunt, producing outraged quotes that can be cut-and-pasted into blog posts “proving” how much hatred and discrimination straights are expected to live with. You can already watch that happening here and here.

Here’s my view: In general, overclasses just don’t need special celebratory events. A White History Month is unnecessary, because the historical significance of white people is already being covered quite well. (Picture some tearful white boy desperately searching his textbooks for a hero who looks like him.) Ditto for a men’s studies program. No scripture needs to remind us to remember the rich, because who can forget them? A White Lives Matter movement is superfluous, because white lives already do matter. And so on.

and Trump’s European tour

He’s back from Europe without breaking any treaties or calling for regime change in Belgium; I guess I should be happy. He insulted the Mayor of London and the Duchess of Sussex, and told the UK who their next prime minister ought to be, and let’s not even talk about his ridiculous tux, but he didn’t do anything really outrageous like expose himself to the Queen, so the trip was more-or-less a success.

Does it seem like we’re lowering the bar for the President of the United States? I know it was a long time ago (or at least it seems that way), but didn’t we expect more out of Barack Obama?

Isn’t Photoshop wonderful? The picture on the right is fake, but I have to say it does capture something.

The ceremony to honor the sacrifices made by Allied soldiers at D-Day had to be pushed back 15 minutes while Trump gave an interview to Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, in which he described House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as “a disaster” and Bob Mueller as a “fool”. We used to say “politics stops at the water’s edge“, but that is another lost norm of American democracy.

We later found out that French President Macron was the actual cause of the delay, but Trump took credit for it:

Listen to those incredible people back there. These people are so amazing, and what they don’t realize is that I’m holding them up because of this interview, but that’s because it’s you. By the way, congratulations on your ratings. I’m very proud.

Ingraham then told her viewers to disregard what they had just heard the President say, because (you know) he says stuff.

Some of you may have heard or read that President Trump supposedly held up the entire D-Day ceremony in order to do this interview with me,. That is patently false — fake news.

and Biden’s Hyde-Amendment reversal

The Hyde amendment is a piece of legislative boilerplate that has been added to appropriation bills ever since Rep. Henry Hyde got it passed in 1976. It prevents federal funding, i.e. Medicaid, from paying for abortions.

At the time, the amendment was viewed as an abortion compromise: Abortion would stay legal, but people who opposed it would know that their tax dollars weren’t paying for it. In practice, though, it has meant that abortion is an option for wealthy and middle-class women, but not poor women. The result has been to keep women trapped in a cycle of poverty: early pregnancy results in early motherhood, which prevents a woman from finishing her education and starting a career that could launch her into the middle class.

Last week, Joe Biden stood virtually alone as a Democratic presidential candidate who still supported the Hyde Amendment. That position was part of his tolerant, don’t-poke-the-bear attitude toward Republicans in general: show some willingness to make reasonable compromises and trust that they’ll do the same.

The problem here is that anti-abortion forces are showing no signs of compromise. Instead, they’re pushing to make abortion completely illegal in places like Alabama and Missouri. If they’re going to send doctors to jail, what exactly are we getting in return for our tolerance and understanding?

Thursday night, Biden reversed himself. He’s now against the Hyde Amendment.

This is both good and bad for his candidacy. For many (me, for example) Hyde is a bridge too far: I care more about women trapped in a cycle of poverty than about the sensitive consciences of anti-abortion zealots. (If they want to reduce abortions, they can help us make contraception more easily available.) Biden has never been my top choice among Democratic candidates, but I hadn’t written him off until the Hyde flap. Now that he’s recanted that position, I’ve returned him to convince-me status.

On the downside, the inherent weakness of a moderate position is that it can seem opportunistic or even wishy-washy. It’s one thing to have middle-of-the-road beliefs, and something else to shift with the winds of public opinion. Biden’s change of heart makes it harder to argue that he comes from a place of deep principle.

Any time I criticize or express doubts about a leading Democrat, I feel obligated to remind everyone of this: Biden is infinitely better than Trump. If he gets the nomination, I’ll support him every way I can.

but we shouldn’t lose sight of the abuses on our border

Jonathan Katz at the LA Times urges us to call the border detention camps what they are: concentration camps. He recounts the series of recent incidents: deaths in custody, herding people into small spaces, not providing adequate medical care, isolation cells for people who are not dangerous, locking children in vans for more than 24 hours at a time, and an end to many educational and recreational services for minors at the camps.

He then comments:

Preventing mass outrage at a system like this takes work. Certainly it helps that the news media covers these horrors intermittently rather than as snowballing proof of a racist, lawless administration. But most of all, authorities prevail when the places where people are being tortured and left to die stay hidden, misleadingly named and far from prying eyes.

There’s a name for that kind of system. They’re called concentration camps. You might balk at my use of the term. That’s good — it’s something to be balked at.

He quotes Hannah Arendt:

The human masses sealed off in [the camps] are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of interest to anybody, as if they were already dead.

Andrea Pitzer, who has written a history of concentration camps, posted a tweetstorm on Trump’s camps:

The longer a camp system stays open, the more predictable things will go wrong (contagious diseases, malnutrition, mental health issues). In addition, every significant camp system has also introduced new horrors of its own, that were unforeseen when that system was opened.

What’s especially ominous about Trump’s concentration camps is that the rhetoric of cruelty is already widely accepted among Trump’s supporters: These people shouldn’t have come here, so we can do whatever we want to them.

Of course this system is going to attract sadists and repel people of conscience. And of course the sadists will do as much as they’re allowed to in an environment where no one is paying attention.

and you also might be interested in …

UU World just published my review of three books about fascism: Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works, Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom, and Yascha Mounk’s The People Versus Democracy. I’ve already discussed Snyder’s book at more length on this blog, and the other two have been mentioned now and then.

Here’s how skewed things have gotten in Alabama: Not even rich people can speak their minds without reprisal any more if they support abortion rights. Hugh Culverhouse Jr. denounced the state’s recent decision to criminalize abortion, and called on students to boycott U of A until the state relented.

In reaction, the University’s law school sent back his $26.5 million and took his name off their building. Culverson responded with this:

There will be no winners in the wake of the decision Alabama has made to attack the constitutional rights of women. The state will become more divided and isolated, and it will be people such as the future students of the University of Alabama law school who will suffer the consequences. Whether my name is taken down is unimportant, but I hope university administrators will contemplate all the names that will never appear on their admissions rolls, as well.

The U of A business school will continue to be named for Culverhouse’s father, who also supported abortion rights.

[An update based on a comment below: AL.com, a news site I’ve considered reliable in the past, says that the dispute is more complicated, and that discussions about returning Culverhouse’s money were going on even before he made his comments about abortion.]

Esquire comments on a new report by OpenSecrets on Trump’s widespread conflicts of interest.

It increasingly appears the President of the United States has business holdings all over the world that are drowning in shady money. … The level of lying, corruption, conflicts of interest, and other malfeasance here is just gobsmacking.

And WaPo’s Plum Line column pulls together a series of incidents where people wanting favors found ways to put money in Trump’s pocket.

The White House blocked the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research from submitting testimony to the House Intelligence Committee “on the grounds that its description of climate science did not mesh with the administration’s official stance”.

the Trump administration is debating how best to challenge the idea that the burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet and could pose serious risks unless the world makes deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade.

The Washington Post summarized what the White House found objectionable:

The Bureau of Intelligence and Research’s 12-page prepared testimony, reviewed by The Washington Post, includes a detailed description of how rising greenhouse gas emissions are raising global temperatures and acidifying the world’s oceans. It warns that these changes are contributing to the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.

“Climate-linked events are disruptive to humans and societies when they harm people directly or substantially weaken the social, political, economic, environmental, or infrastructure systems that support people,” the statement reads, noting that while some populations may benefit from climate change. “The balance of documented evidence to date suggests that net negative effects will overwhelm the positive benefits from climate change for most of the world, however.”

The senior director for emerging technologies at the National Security Council, Will Happer, is a long-time climate-change denier. He reportedly is advocating for a panel of climate-deniers to “conduct an ‘update’ of the National Climate Assessment” that will make it more friendly to the fossil-fuel industry.

The government just found a novel way to save $40 billion: reclassify high-level nuclear waste as low-level nuclear waste, so that it can be disposed of more easily. What could go wrong?

The waste is housed at the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina, the Idaho National Laboratory and Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state – the most contaminated nuclear site in the country.

The explanation sounds like it could possibly make sense:

The old definition of high-level waste was based on how the materials were produced, while the new definition will be based on their radioactive characteristics – the standard used in most countries, the energy department said.

The old definition said high-level radioactive waste resulted from a military production stream, [Undersecretary of Energy Paul] Dabbar said. That meant, for instance, that all the waste from plutonium production at Hanford was classified as high level.

It was a “one-size-fits-all approach that has led to decades of delay, cost billions of dollars, and left the waste trapped in DOE facilities in the states of South Carolina, Washington and Idaho without a permanent disposal solution”, the agency said.

But this is where we see the cost of this administration’s constant lying, and the appointment of a know-nothing like Rick Perry as Energy Secretary. (Obama’s first secretary of energy, remember, was a Nobel laureate. Dabbar is a little more qualified than Perry: He may have come to the government from investment banking, but before that he was an officer on a nuclear submarine, though his official bio doesn’t say what his responsibilities were.) There are times when the government really is playing it straight and needs the public to trust that it’s doing the right thing. But how can we?

I agree with Michael Gerson so seldom that I feel like I have to mention it when I do. In a recent WaPo column, he responded to Franklin Graham’s call for a Day of Prayer to support President Trump. Gerson first recalled that praying for a nation’s leaders is fairly common in the Christian tradition and ought to be uncontroversial. But Graham is asking God for a little more than is usually considered proper.

Graham made clear that the real purpose of the event was not to pray for the president, but to pray in his political favor. “President Trump’s enemies continue to try everything to destroy him, his family and the presidency,” Graham said. “In the history of our country, no president has been attacked as he has.” The American Family Association described the day of prayer as a type of “spiritual warfare,” necessary because Trump’s many accomplishments “make him very unpopular with the Devil and the kingdom of darkness.”

Who are the “enemies” that Graham had in mind? Who represents “the kingdom of darkness”? The Democratic Party? Robert S. Mueller III and the “deep state”? Never-Trump Republicans?

However the conspiracy against the president is defined, I suppose I am part of it. Having been accused of serving the Prince of Darkness, I feel justified in making a frank response.

Gerson goes on to call Graham’s event “blasphemy” and “an abomination” and suggests that Graham has sold out Christ in favor of Trump.

For a minister of the gospel, making Christ secondary to anything is the dereliction of a sacred duty. Making the gospel secondary to the political fortunes of Donald Trump is betrayal compounded with farce.

Sean Hannity thinks it’s “despicable” that Nancy Pelosi wants to see a political opponent (Trump) in locked up. “That happens in Banana Republics,” he says.

I’m not sure what I find so morbidly fascinating about incels, the “involuntarily celibate” men who believe their looks unfairly doom them to lives without the hot chicks they otherwise deserve.

New York Magazine’s Alice Hines uncovers the world of incel plastic surgery, where strong jaw-lines and broad shoulders are created in order to turn incels into “Chads” — the incel name for the small percentage of men who get all the sex.

and let’s close with something award-winning

Saturday I was at a birthday party in Vermont when people started telling me about this neighbor they knew, Anais Mitchell, who kind of came from nowhere (other than down the road) and created a musical and would be up for a Tony award Sunday night.

I hardly ever make it into New York, so I don’t keep track of what’s on Broadway, and had never heard of Mitchell’s musical Hadestown, which was the big winner with 8 awards, including one for Mitchell’s score.

Here’s the audio of “Why We Build the Wall” from Hadestown, which was written before Trump became president.

The rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with prosperity and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.

– Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

This week’s featured post is “Two Paths to Impeachment“.

This week everybody was talking about impeachment

In the featured post I discuss the Democrats’ internal debate on whether to start impeachment proceedings. On the Republican side, Michigan Congressman Justin Amash became the first Republican in Congress to call for Trump’s impeachment.

This move led a number of other Republicans to attack Amash, often dishonestly, as The Atlantic fact-checks. Until this moment, Amash has been a member in good standing of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, which is demonstrating that all its previous rhetoric about the Constitution has been opportunistic blather.

Mitt Romney also claims to have read the Mueller Report and come to a different conclusion than Amash, that Trump did not obstruct justice. Teri Kanefield finds Romney’s statement to be “astonishing nonsense”, and outlines the analysis technique used in the report. She challenges trained lawyers like Romney to show their work.

People like Sen. Romney who come to a different conclusion should show the public their analysis, and explain which of the three elements [of the definition of obstruction] haven’t been met and why. It would also be helpful if they explained which particular parts of Mueller’s analysis clear Trump and why.

Otherwise, we really have no choice but to conclude that they are telling a politically expedient lie.

and the President’s temper tantrum

Wednesday, Trump walked out of a meeting with House Speaker Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. The White House meeting was supposed to flesh out details of the $2 trillion infrastructure program the three had tentatively agreed to in a previous meeting, but Trump wasn’t having it.

According to a Democratic aide, Trump walked in, didn’t shake anyone’s hand or sit in his seat. He said he wants to do infrastructure, trade agreement, farm bill and other things, but that Pelosi “said something terrible today” when she accused him of a cover-up.

He then went to the Rose Garden, where a podium had already been decked with a “No Collusion, No Obstruction” sign detailing the expenses (but not the results) of the Mueller investigation, and said:

I walked into the room, and I told Senator Schumer, Speaker Pelosi, I want to do infrastructure, I want to do it more than you want to do it. I’d be really good at it, that’s what I do. But you know what? You can’t do it under these circumstances. So get these phony investigations over with.

In other words, he’s back to holding the government hostage: Do what I want, or the roads and bridges get it. Numerous pundits, like NPR’s Ron Elving, noted how unusual this was. During impeachment hearings, Presidents Nixon and Clinton both emphasized that they would not be distracted from doing the people’s business.

His move was widely described as a “temper tantrum”, an accusation that Trump responded to in a typically Trumpian way: He once again described himself as a “stable genius“, and called on his staff to verify one-by-one how calm and rational he had been in the three-minute meeting he walked out of.

It was one of those creepy scenes that Trump stages periodically, like the cabinet meeting where all the department secretaries were obliged to praise Trump and tell everyone what a privilege it was to serve him, or the meeting with black religious leaders where each minister was given an opportunity to thank Trump for all he’s done. Far from persuasive testimony, it was a demonstration of the soul-eating power Trump wields over his staff. (If Obama had ever tried to pull such a stunt, his people would have laughed at him. And once they started laughing, Obama would have laughed at himself.)

It’s important to keep pointing out how strange all this is. People who are actually intelligent, actually sane, and actually innocent don’t act anything like the way Trump does.

It seems like the only sane reaction was to go over the top.

Comedian Stephen Colbert quipped: “All told [the meeting] was over in three minutes. According to Stormy Daniels, that’s two bonus minutes.” Paul Krugman invoked a famous scene from The Caine Mutiny: “it was very clever of Nancy Pelosi to steal Donald Trump’s strawberries, pushing him over the edge into self-evident lunacy.”

Even Trump’s podium sign became a meme.

Next the nation was treated to a smearing of Nancy Pelosi. A video was altered to make her appear impaired, and Trump retweeted it. As usual, he was not embarrassed to be caught doing something dishonest, but claimed only that he didn’t know the video was altered — as if a President of the United States bears no responsibility to verify the truth of what he says before he says it.

and Theresa May’s resignation

Having repeatedly failed to do the one thing she became prime minister to do — pass a plan that would fulfilll the Brexit referendum by taking the United Kingdom out of the European Union — Theresa May resigned Friday morning. She will leave office on June 7, immediately after the ceremonies commemorating the 75th anniversary of D-Day.

Together with a small party representing Northern Ireland’s Protestants, the Conservative Party retains its majority in Parliament, so presumably May’s successor will be another Tory. (The Tories used to have a majority by themselves, but lost it in a 2017 election May had called.) But who that will be or what Brexit plan the new PM will propose remains up in the air. Boris Johnson, a Brexit hardliner, is considered the frontrunner.

I have frequently compared the Tories’ Brexit conundrum to US Republicans’ problems trying to “repeal and replace” ObamaCare, which they failed to do in the last Congress, despite controlling both houses and the presidency. In each case, the popularity of the slogan (“leave” or “repeal and replace”) hides the fact that no majority supports any particular plan.

Another analogy: It’s like being part of a family that unanimously wants to take a big vacation this year, but some of you want to ski in the Alps, some want a beach vacation in Bermuda, and the rest are holding out for an Alaska cruise. You all agree until it’s time to make a real plan.

The biggest problem of any Brexit plan is what to do with the Irish border. Like Trumpists in America, hardline Brexiters want the UK to control its own borders and keep out “undesirable” immigrants from poorer EU countries, as well as non-European refugees that other EU countries have let in. That would mean enforcing a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, where passports are checked and cargo rigorously examined.

Unfortunately, that would undo the Good Friday Agreement that ended “the Troubles“, an irregular civil war between Northern Ireland’s Protestants and Catholics that frequently spilled into the rest of the UK until peace was worked out in 1998. Catholics are a minority in Northern Ireland, but a majority in the Irish island as a whole; many would like to unite with the Republic of Ireland. Northern Ireland’s Protestants, meanwhile, hate the idea of becoming a minority in a united Ireland. Prior to 1998, a fairly large number of Northern Irish on both sides were willing to kill or die over this issue.

The current soft border allows Northern Ireland’s Catholics (and their relatives in the Republic of Ireland) to come and go as they please. They may not be part of a united Ireland, but they all belong to the EU. Largely for this reason, Northern Ireland had a substantial (56%-44%) Remain majority in the Brexit vote. For Northern Ireland’s Protestant party (the Democratic Unionist Party) to cast the decisive votes in a hard-border Brexit plan might push things over the edge.

Scotland had an even larger Remain majority than Northern Ireland: (62%-38%). Scottish independence has been a simmering issue since the Acts of Union turned England and Scotland into Great Britain in 1707. Scotland voted 55%-45% to stay with the UK in a 2014 referendum, but that was before Scots understood that staying in the UK meant leaving the EU. A messy exit plan from the EU will raise that issue again, as the cartoon below illustrates.

It would indeed be ironic if Brexit ultimately takes the Great out of Great Britain.

and Julian Assange’s indictment

The WikiLeaks guy has been indicted for violating the Espionage Act, from when he made public a trove of documents leaked by Chelsea Manning. In many ways this is a tough case to wrap my mind around, because the old ways of thinking about such things were based on categories that don’t necessarily make sense any more, like whether or not Assange is a journalist.

The NYT’s Charlie Savage (who knows a few things about investigative journalism) quotes a source who sees a dangerous precedent:

For the purposes of press freedoms, what matters is not who counts as a journalist, but whether journalistic activities — whether performed by a “journalist” or anyone else — can be crimes in America. The Trump administration’s move could establish a precedent used to criminalize future acts of national-security journalism, said Jameel Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

“The charges rely almost entirely on conduct that investigative journalists engage in every day,” he said. “The indictment should be understood as a frontal attack on press freedom.”

Savage talked to “a Justice Department official who stayed behind to answer questions on the condition that he would not be named” who nonetheless wouldn’t answer the question of

how most of the basic actions the indictment deemed felonies by Mr. Assange differed in a legally meaningful way from ordinary national-security investigative journalism — encouraging sources to provide secret information of news value, obtaining it without the government’s permission and then publishing portions of it.

Here’s what makes this case difficult for me: When the First Amendment was written, “freedom of the press” was very literal. If you owned or otherwise got access to a press, you could print what you wanted, without seeking anyone’s prior approval. (Slander and libel rules applied after the fact, of course, and you might also be challenged to a duel if you defamed someone unfairly.) But in the 19th and 20th centuries, journalism became institutionalized and “journalist” became a profession with professional standards. In effect, journalists were a protected class under the First Amendment as it came to be construed.

With the advent of the internet, though, anyone can claim to be a journalist, so the rights of journalists and the rights of ordinary people have to come into some kind of convergence. An ordinary person who received hacked Top Secret documents and posted them to Facebook would probably be considered a spy. Charlie Savage — obtaining the same documents, applying principles of responsible journalism, and publishing only those parts where he judges that the public interest outweighs the harm — probably shouldn’t be. But the line is not so easy to draw now.

So for me the Assange case is more complicated than just picking a side. The question is how to reconstruct First Amendment protections for the current era.

and Bill Barr’s new powers

For years now, Trump has trying to delegitimize the Mueller investigation by concocting a conspiracy theory about how it started. Before Republicans lost their House majority in 2018, his main accomplice was House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes. Who can forget the Nunes Memo, which was supposed to be an Earth-shaking expose’, until it was finally declassified and proved to amount to nothing?

Jeff Sessions never wanted to get involved in this attempt to slander the Justice Department he led, not to mention the US intelligence community. But Bill Barr is the unscrupulous attorney general Trump always wanted. Two weeks ago Barr named Connecticut US Attorney John Durham to lead the investigation into those who dared to investigate the Great Leader.

Thursday, Trump gave Barr the authority to review and possibly declassify any documents related to the origin of Russia investigation. This has produced two widespread fears, which I share:

• Given the deceptive way he has spun the Mueller Report in Trump’s favor, Barr may do the same thing with the classified record: He might cherry-pick documents to find ones that can be spun to support Trump’s conspiracy theory, while leaving classified any documents that provide refuting context.
• Along the way, valuable intelligence sources (for example, sources close to Putin) might be compromised. Not only will this allow Putin to clean house — yet another dividend from his support of Trump — but it will discourage future sources in all countries from trusting US intelligence services.

Trump has already announced the conclusion he wants this investigation to reach: FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, FBI Director James Comey and Assistant Director Andrew McCabe, as well as “people probably higher than that”, have committed treason. People higher than the FBI director might be Obama’s Attorney General Loretta Lynch, or maybe President Obama himself.

The charge, by the way, is ridiculous from the outset. Treason is defined in Article III, section 3 of the Constitution:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

It’s outrageous to think that investigating the President, or a candidate for president, equates to “levying war against the United States”. To date the only evidence for the conspiracy theory are the tweets Strzok and Page sent each other, in which it is clear they didn’t want Trump to become president (perhaps because they feared he had been compromised by Russia).

Well, more than 65 million Americans didn’t want Trump to become president. Are we all traitors? Will Bill Barr be unleashed on us also?

One possibility we can’t lose sight of is that Barr’s investigation is supposed to be ridiculous. The point probably isn’t to prove anything, but to delegitimize the whole idea of finding truth through investigations. This is the reverse-cargo-cult propaganda technique pioneered by the Soviets and carried forward by Putin.

but we should talk more about legislation the House is passing

One of the charges against House Democrats pushing impeachment is that they’re investigating instead of legislating. But the problem isn’t a lack of legislation, it’s that the news media isn’t covering the bills the House passes. The real graveyard of legislation is Mitch McConnell’s Senate, which has devolved into a judge-confirming machine that shows no real interest in governing.

Vox produced a list of the 49 bills the House has passed since the Democrats took over.

House Democrats have passed a wide range of bills since they came to power in January, ranging from a sweeping anti-corruption and pro-democracy reform known as HR 1, to bills to save net neutrality, establish background checks for guns, and put the United States back in the Paris Climate Accord.

They have also put a large emphasis on health care, a defining issue of the 2018 election after Trump and Senate Republicans attempted to pass a bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Democrats have focused on bills to lower prescription drug costs, protect preexisting conditions, and condemning the Trump administration’s legal battle to strike down the ACA in the courts.

Much of this agenda is sitting in the Senate.

and you also might be interested in …

Another step towards autocracy happened Friday:

The Trump administration has declared an emergency to bypass Congress and expedite billions of dollars in arms sales to various countries — including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — citing the need to deter what it called “the malign influence” of Iran throughout the Middle East.

Presidents typically declare states of emergency in order to act quickly in situations that are moving too fast for legislation. Such actions go back at least as far as the Civil War, when President Lincoln defended the capital while Congress was in recess, and asked Congress for its after-the-fact approval later.

But Trump uses emergencies differently. He is not just getting ahead of a slow-moving Congress; he’s doing things that Congress has already disapproved. In the case of his border-wall emergency, he re-directed money to wall construction after Congress had already had the time to debate and turn down such an appropriation. This arms-sale “emergency” seems similar.

“President Trump is only using this loophole because he knows Congress would disapprove of this sale,” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, said in a statement. “There is no new ’emergency’ reason to sell bombs to the Saudis to drop in Yemen, and doing so only perpetuates the humanitarian crisis there. This sets an incredibly dangerous precedent that future presidents can use to sell weapons without a check from Congress.”

Congress has already passed a ban on support for the Saudi war in Yemen, with bipartisan support. Trump vetoed that bill, and the Senate failed to override.

Speaking of the border wall, a federal judge temporarily blocked the administration from constructing the wall using the money Trump “reprogrammed” from the Pentagon budget via an emergency declaration. The judge wrote:

According to Defendants [i.e., the Trump administration]: “If Congress had wanted to deny DOD this specific use of that [reprogramming] authority, that’s something it needed to actually do in an explicit way in the appropriations process. And it didn’t.” But it is not Congress’s burden to prohibit the Executive from spending the Nation’s funds: it is the Executive’s burden to show that its desired use of those funds was “affirmatively approved by Congress.”

… Congress’s “absolute” control over federal expenditures—even when that control may frustrate the desires of the Executive Branch regarding initiatives it views as important—is not a bug in our constitutional system. It is a feature of that system, and an essential one. … In short, the position that when Congress declines the Executive’s request to appropriate funds, the Executive nonetheless may simply find a way to spend those funds “without Congress” does not square with fundamental separation of powers principles dating back to the earliest days of our Republic.

The Washington Post summarizes another point:

The law the administration invoked to shift funds allows transfers for “unforeseen” events. [Judge] Gilliam said the government’s claim that wall construction was “unforeseen” “cannot logically be squared” with Trump’s many demands for funding dating back to early 2018 and even in the campaign.

The injunction applies to $1 billion that has been reprogrammed so far. This is only part of the DoD money Trump has announced he is transferring, but is the only money to be specifically identified.

A March study by the Federal Reserve (summarized by MarketWatch) finds that wealth is continuing to concentrate at the top. The top 1% of Americans now control 32% of the nation’s wealth, up from 23% in 1989.

Deutsche Bank economist Torsten Sløk largely blames the Fed itself.

“The response to the financial crisis was for the Fed to lower interest rates which in turn pushed home prices and stock prices steadily higher over the past decade,” Slok said. “And another consequence of the financial crisis was a decline in homeownership and stock ownership among households,” he said.

A number of people in my social-media universe flagged the USA Today opinion piece “Rural Americans would be Serfs if we abolished the Electoral College“, but none of them really put their finger on what’s wrong with it.

The obvious problem, of course, is that the essay is essentially a guy explaining why his vote should count for more than other people’s. But the problem goes deeper than that if we decode his arguments:

This is why Hillary Clinton lost in 2016. Instead of winning over small-town Americans, she amassed a popular vote lead based on California and a few big cities. She won those places with huge margins but lost just about everywhere else. And the system worked. The Electoral College requires more than just the most raw votes to win — it requires geographic balance. This helps to protect rural and small-town Americans.

“California” is code for Hispanic/Asian voters and “a few big cities” is code for black voters. “The system worked” because “rural and small-town Americans” (i.e. white voters) got their candidate elected, even though he lost by 2.8 million votes. It’s impossible to imagine the author taking a similarly sanguine view if the candidate supported by white voters had lost in spite of getting more votes. (“Geographical balance” apparently is still satisfied if you can’t carry cities.)

The headline itself reprises a historic bit of rhetoric. Throughout American history, it has been non-whites who have been the “serfs”. But there’s a long history of whites expropriating the moral capital of their victims, and warning about their impending “slavery”. When John Calhoun gave the famous speech “Slavery a Positive Good” in 1837, he clearly meant to defend only African slavery. He begins by denouncing compromise with the abolitionists of the North in these terms.

I do not belong to the school which holds that aggression is to be met by concession. Mine is the opposite creed, which teaches that encroachments must be met at the beginning, and that those who act on the opposite principle are prepared to become slaves.

So in the first paragraph of the very speech where he extols the virtues of African slavery, he warns that white Southerners will become slaves if they fail to defend this principle.

Ditto here: Rural American whites are not and have never been serfs, slaves, or anything similar. Abolishing the Electoral College would eliminate their disproportionate influence and reduce their votes to the same value as everyone else’s. Horrors!

This is yet another example of the phenomenon I noted in “The Distress of the Privileged“: When you are accustomed to privilege, being treated like everyone else feels like oppression.

Treasury Secretary Mnuchin is postponing the Obama administration’s plan to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with Harriet Tubman. But artist Dano Wall has a work-around: a way to stamp Tubman’s picture over Jackson’s.

and let’s close with a nightcap

Travis Rupp and Patrick McGovern are “beer archeologists“. From the recipes in ancient documents, the residues embedded in ancient vessels, and a variety of other clues, they attempt to reproduce what our ancestors were drinking.

One of the weirder beverages they have each independently reproduced is chicha, which was brewed in Peru before the Inca.

The recipe for the Peruvian corn-based beer, cobbled together from bits of pre-Incan archaeological evidence, called for chewed corn partially fermented in spit.

McGovern’s version was eventually brewed by Dogfish Head Brewery in Delaware (one of the classiest brewers around). I’m intrigued, but would I drink it? Maybe instead I’ll order a Midas Touch, a drink from ancient Turkey combining “grape wine, barley beer and honey mead”, which might also have had grated cheese sprinkled on top.