Strongman rule is a fantasy. Essential to it is the idea that a strongman will be your strongman. He won’t. In a democracy, elected representatives listen to constituents. We take this for granted, and imagine that a dictator would owe us something. But the vote you cast for him affirms your irrelevance. The whole point is that the strongman owes us nothing. We get abused and we get used to it.
I was going to summarize the controversy over Trump’s prediction of “a bloodbath” if he doesn’t get elected, but the length got out of hand, so I made it a featured post.
and Florida
Ron DeSantis suffered two major defeats this month in his war on woke. The first was two weeks ago, when a federal appeals court blocked enforcement of one provision of his Stop-Woke law. The opinion, written by a Trump appointee, lays things out pretty clearly.
Here’s a short version: Among other things, the law bans employers from having mandatory meetings where they promote certain notions that state doesn’t like about discrimination, diversity, and so forth. On its face, this sounds like a violation of the employers’ freedom of speech, but the DeSantis administration claims it’s really a limitation on conduct (holding these meetings), not speech.
The judge rightly points out that mandatory meetings are only banned if certain ideas are presented, so there’s no way to know ahead of time whether a meeting is banned without knowing what people are going to say. That makes it a limitation on speech.
The second defeat was the settlement of a lawsuit against DeSantis’ Don’t Say Gay law. The worst thing about Don’t Say Gay has been the vagueness of it. Nobody knew exactly what ideas the law banned from Florida schools, so teachers and administrators who wanted to be safe just wouldn’t say anything at all about non-traditional gender roles or sexuality.
Under the agreement, the state must clarify the law’s scope to schools across the state, ensuring that, among other things, it does not prohibit references to LGBTQ+ persons, couples, families, or issues in literature or classroom discussions.
and the Trump trials
The trial that we thought was on track fell off track, and another one got rolling again.
The New York state trial for the pre-2016-election cover-up of the Stormy Daniels payments was supposed to start next Monday, but it’s delayed into at least April. At issue are some documents that just got released by the US Attorney’s office, and whether the defense has had adequate time to review them.
In the Georgia RICO trial, the judge has allowed Fani Willis’ office to go forward, after removing Willis’ ex-lover from the prosecution team. If the judge had disqualified Willis, it’s not clear when or whether the case would have proceeded. No trial date has yet been set.
but I want to call your attention to two books
One of my favorite observers of the intersection of technology and society is Cory Doctorow. He currently has two new books out, one fiction and one non-fiction.
The novel is The Lost Cause which takes place in a late-2030s California dealing with a much-advanced climate crisis, as well as the residue of our current political polarization. The country has had 12 years of Green New Deal administrations, and is now going through a backlash that includes a lot of old white guys in MAGA militias. To me, it’s ambiguous whether the “lost cause” in the title is the MAGA effort to maintain white male privilege or the Green New Deal effort to save the world itself.
Two things stand out: Climate-change futurism tends to bifurcate simplistically into we-save-the-world or we-don’t-save-the-world. I found it enlightening to spend time in a world where a lot of bad things have happened, but the struggle goes on. There’s a lot in this novel that is dystopian and a lot that is hopeful.
Second, I think Doctorow is right about where MAGA is headed with regard to climate change. Right now, the MAGA consensus is to ignore the problem. (Trump wants to be a dictator on Day 1 so that he can “drill, drill, drill“.) But in Doctorow’s future, they turned on a dime from “it’s a hoax” to “not everybody is going to make it, so we have to make sure our people do”. Climate change has become one more justification for anti-immigrant fascism.
The nonfiction book is The Internet Con: how to seize the means of computation. He emphasizes that the current tech and social media giants are not natural outcomes of the free market, but stem from changes in the laws, especially antitrust enforcement and copyright laws.
It’s not that there was one magical generation of entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, et al, but that the leading corporations at a particular moment in history were allowed to cement themselves into place and insulate themselves from competition.
For example, your email app doesn’t own your email files, but Facebook owns your Facebook posts, which you’ll lose if you close your account. As a result, you can change email clients whenever you want, but switching from Facebook to some other social media platform is much more arduous. You can send email to people who use other email apps, but you can’t see X/Twitter messages on BlueSky.
The result is what Doctorow has elsewhere called the “enshittification” of the internet. Companies can implement policies for their own advantage rather than yours, and there’s little you can do about it.
The book is full of suggestions for how to turn this around.
and you also might be interested in …
The House passed a ban/forced-sale of TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese company and heavily influenced by the Chinese government. What will happen next is unclear.
Trump abruptly switched his position on this issue: He tried to ban TikTok by executive order when he was president, but now he’s against the legislative ban. The flipflop closely followed a meeting with conservative financier Jeff Yass, who is heavily invested in TikTok.
Have I mentioned that Trump needs a lot of money?
I really enjoy this Biden ad, especially the last few seconds.
Russia held its version of an election, and you’ll never guess what happened: Putin was reelected to a fifth term as president with 87% of the vote. There were other names on the ballot, but only the ones Putin allowed to be there. No candidate was vocally anti-Putin or against the Ukraine War.
Supporters of Alexei Navalny (who wanted to run against Putin, but instead died in prison), staged a subtle protest by all showing up to vote at noon. The long lines at the polling places were, in effect, Navalny demonstrations.
Russian prosecutors threatened any voters who took part in the “noon against Putin” action with five years in prison. In the southern city of Kazan, police detained more than 20 voters who had joined the protest, according to the independent rights monitor OVD-Info. Arrests were also reported in Moscow and St Petersburg.
It will be interesting to see what, if anything, the government finds to charge these people with.
When we talk about climate change, we usually focus on rising air temperatures. But maybe we should be paying more attention to how fast the oceans are heating up.
A rule change could make it much harder to go “judge shopping“.
and let’s close with something timely
Tim Blais is one of those people whose collection of talents seems unfair. He’s musical, does great videos, and also knows a lot of science. His A Capella Science YouTube channel has some amazing stuff, like a Billy Joel parody “The Arrow of Entropic Time“.
I know I may not look like it, but I’ve been around a while. When you get to be my age, certain things become clearer than ever. I know the American story. … My lifetime has taught me to embrace freedom and democracy, a future based on core values that have defined America — honesty, decency, dignity, and equality — ; to respect everyone; to give everyone a fair shot; to give hate no safe harbor.
This week everybody was talking about the State of the Union
They were also talking about Katie Britt’s disastrous Republican response. The featured post covers both.
and Super Tuesday
As expected, Trump locked up the Republican nomination and Nikki Haley withdrew. She didn’t immediately endorse Trump, but I have to believe that’s coming. She sees what he is, but she’s going to bend the knee to him anyway.
On the Democratic side, Biden was not seriously challenged. In fact, Biden has done quite well in the primaries: His vote totals compare favorably with the percentages Obama got when he ran for reelection in 2012.
So here we are: a Biden/Trump rematch in the fall. It’s time for everybody to stop fantasizing that they’ll get some other choice and decide whether they want a democratic future or a fascist one.
Jay Kuo points out an aspect of Super Tuesday that hasn’t gotten much coverage: Polls appear to have a pro-Trump bias. Kuo means “bias” in the statistical sense, not the conspiracy-theory sense. In every state but North Carolina, Trump’s margin of victory was smaller than the polls predicted. Kuo doesn’t accuse pollsters of trying to promote Trump, but apparently something in their technique makes them more likely to include Trump voters in their samples. Kuo links to University of Michigan Professor Justin Wolfers:
By my count Trump’s actual margin in the primaries has underperformed that predicted by the polls by: 0-5%: AL, IA, TX
If the national polls are overestimating Trump’s strength at anywhere near the levels that the primary polls did, then Biden would be leading Trump in all of them.
Super Tuesday also included downballot candidates. North Carolina nominated right-wing crank Mark Robinson for governor, giving Democrats a serious chance to hang onto that office as Governor Roy Cooper term-limits out.
In another widely watched race, Democrat Adam Schiff and Republican Steve Garvey (the baseball player) advanced to the November election for Senate in California.
and the NYT
For weeks I’ve been harping on the NYT’s coverage of Biden: Whatever he says or does, the story is about his age, and no good news about Biden can be presented without “balancing” it with negative possibilities. Biden regularly gets a higher percentage of primary votes than Trump does, but Trump is portrayed as romping to victory while Biden’s results are ominous.
Well, this week the chorus of NYT-critical voices swelled. Salon columnist Lucian Truscott wrote “There’s something wrong at The New York Times”.
I don’t want to bring up but her emails, but for crying out loud, why is the New York Times so clearly making the same mistakes of bias and emphasis they made in 2016 covering Hillary Clinton all over again? …
There are no scandals with the name Biden attached to them, unless you consider the lies Russian spies supplied the so-called impeachment committee with. So The New York Times has apparently devoted half a floor in its Eighth Avenue headquarters to a search for bad news about Biden, and then they reserve a space nearly every day above the fold on the front page for whatever grain of grim shit the Biden hunters have managed to come up with. They’re probably working on a story on how Biden is losing the pro-choice vote as we speak, while pointing out the wild success of Trump’s “move to the middle” on abortion with “centrist” voters.
Dan Froomkin critiqued an interview with NYT’s publisher, and “translated” the underlying message to the NYT’s reporters and editors:
One: You will earn my displeasure if you warn people too forcefully about the possible end to democracy at the hands of a deranged insurrectionist.
And two: You prove your value to me by trolling our liberal readers.
That explains a lot of the Times’s aberrant behavior, doesn’t it?
And you can always count on Andy Borowitz to get to the heart of the issue:
POLL: A majority of Americans now believe that The New York Times, which was founded 172 years ago, is too old to be an effective newspaper.
After pleading to the judge that the bond he needed to post was too high, Trump posted the $91 million on Friday, secured by an insurance subsidiary of the Chubb Group. Chubb chairman Evan Greenberg had been on an advisory committee during Trump’s administration. The bond was required in order for him to proceed to appeal the verdict.
Now he needs to come up with $454 million by March 25 to appeal his civil fraud case.
Where exactly Trump gets this money should be a political issue, because we probably won’t know where it came from or what promises Trump made to get it. I suspect, though, that these questions won’t get the attention they deserve.
Last week I talked about the Nazi tactic of dehumanizing a group by treating their crimes as special, and in particular, how that tactic is being used against undocumented immigrants by presenting the Laken Riley murder as something uniquely horrible.
Gary Andover makes that point more sharply than I did:
Republicans are very concerned about one woman who was killed by a migrant. If she had been killed in a mass shooting by an American citizen with an AR-15 they wouldn’t give a shit. Their response would be to loosen up gun laws even more.
And Fred Guttenberg, father of Jaime Guttenberg who was murdered in the Parkland school shooting, makes it personal:
To all MAGAT’s using Laken Riley, where were you when my daughter was killed by a teenage American male? Where were you when Trump lied about the Parkland murder? You don’t give two f-cks about Laken or her parents, just as you don’t about victims of gun violence by Americans.
He’s a non-controversial figure because he says, “This is the way it’s going to be,” and that’s the end of it. Right? He’s the boss.
One of the ways Orbán has achieved this lack of controversy is that his government and its political allies now own all the major news outlets, and he has stacked the judiciary so that it’s useless to take him to court. He has reorganized the legislature into gerrymandered districts that his party can easily control with a minority of voter support.
I am filled with curiosity about Wilson’s new airless basketball, which is 3D-printed and designed to have the exact weight and bounce of an NBA ball. Unfortunately, the prototype currently goes for around $2500, so I think I won’t get my hands on one for a long time.
But Marques Brownlee did get to play with one, and here’s what he reports.
In some ways, all this is no surprise. Trump the businessman and politician is to a great degree a creation of the American judiciary. Early in his career, he figured out that the legal system was acutely vulnerable to someone with money and total shamelessness. He learned that if he categorically refused to admit defeat, clogging up the proceedings with endless motions and filings, he could rip off his contractors, repeatedly default on his debts, seemingly cheat the IRS out of millions in inheritance taxes, and get away with it just about every time. If you’re a star, they let you do it.
This week everybody was talking about the Supreme Court helping Trump
It would be easy to write at length about this, but I refuse to do it. I would just rant, and plenty of people are rantingalready.
Here’s the gist: Wednesday, the Supreme Court put its thumb on the scale in Donald Trump’s favor, virtually guaranteeing that the most significant case against him — the federal case in DC arising from his plot to stay in office after losing the 2020 election — will not reach a verdict by election day.
Their vehicle for aiding Trump is his absurd claim that ex-presidents are immune to prosecution for any actions they took in office, unless they’ve first been impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate. Basically, this means that a president who retains the support of 34 senators can break any law without fear of facing consequences (including consequences from the voters, because he can break any law to make sure he stays in office). During the oral arguments before the appellate court, Trump’s lawyers had no answer when asked if a president could have the military assassinate his rivals.
If such immunity exists, the trial against Trump cannot progress. So everything has been on hold. Judge Chutkan’s original calendar called for the DC trial to begin today. But Trump’s lawyers filed their immunity claim back in October, and Judge Chutkan rejected it on December 1. When Trump appealed, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith asked the Supreme Court to take that appeal immediately and decide it quickly. The Court refused.
So there was an appellate hearing, resulting in a unanimous ruling rejecting Trump’s claims on February 6. Trump appealed again, but because the appellate ruling was complete and unanimous, many observers felt there was nothing for the Supreme Court to resolve. It could have refused the case and let a trial start in May or June.
Nonetheless, the Court sat on Trump’s motion for seven weeks, and then Wednesday announced that it will hear arguments April 22, which presumably will lead to a ruling near the end of their term in June.
Judge Chutkan’s schedule still has about three months for pretrial activities, so if the Supremes take as long as they appear to be doing, the earliest jury selection could begin is the end of September. From there, it would be no trick for Trump’s lawyers to delay the verdict until after the election.
No one thinks the Court will agree that Trump is immune from prosecution, which continues to be an absurd idea, rejected by every judge who has considered it. But they don’t need to. Trump’s strategy has never been to argue his innocence in court, because the evidence clearly says he’s guilty. Instead, he hopes to delay, get reelected, and then tell his Justice Department to withdraw from the case. Even if there is a verdict against him in November or December, he can appeal. And if the Justice Department refuses to fight the appeal, the case dies.
Wednesday, the Supreme Court signed on to Trump’s strategy. It did this because it is even more corrupt and partisan than I had previously suspected.
But I refuse to rant.
Just this morning, the Court released its opinion on the 14th Amendment case to disqualify Trump. It sided with Trump, ruling that states do not have the power to invoke the Amendment’s insurrection clause. The decision reserves that power to Congress.
I haven’t had time to analyze the decision yet, but it’s worth noting that no justice addressed Colorado’s conclusion that Trump did indeed engage in insurrection against the United States.
The other 2020 election case, the state RICO case in Georgia, is also on hold while the judge decides whether Fani Willis should be disqualified as prosecutor. Disqualification would almost certainly delay the trial until after the election, and could scuttle the case completely.
Hearing on that matter concluded Friday, with the judge saying he should rule in two weeks. Unquestionably, Willis’ affair with another prosecutor looks bad, but the question is whether the issue reaches the rights of the defendants: Did Willis have some conflict of interest that compromises the defendants’ rights to a fair trial? I think not, but we’ll see.
The Trump-appointed judge in the Mar-a-Lago case continues to favor Trump in any way possible. Friday she denied Jack Smith’s request for a July trial date, which she called “unrealistic”. When the trial will actually happen is anybody’s guess.
The only case that is on track to produce a verdict before election day is the NY state false-business-records case. According to the indictment, Trump Organization business records were falsified to hide Trump’s reimbursement of Michael Cohen for paying off Stormy Daniels, so that voters would not learn about his affair with Daniels before the 2016 election.
The trial date is March 25, and the heart of the matter — whether the records are false — is pretty much uncontested so far. So if the case reaches a jury, Trump will probably be convicted. The way he could get off is through technicalities: If the crime should have been charged as misdemeanor falsification rather than felony falsification, then the statute of limitations has expired.
Meanwhile, we’re all wondering about Trump’s finances. He says he’s appealing both the $83.3 million judgment against him in the second E. Jean Carroll case and the $454 million judgment in the NY civil fraud case. The rules around appeals require that he post some bond to guarantee that the people who won the judgments will get paid if his appeals fail. Appeal, in other words, is not a way to hang onto money longer.
Judgment in the E. Jean Carroll case was finalized on February 8 and in the NY civil fraud case on February 23. So if I count 30 days right, Trump needs to guarantee the $83 million on Saturday and the $454 million on March 24. (That’s a Sunday, so I might be a day off. AP says NY Attorney General Letitia James could seek enforcement — like seizing property, for example — on March 25.)
In spite of his frequent boasting about his wealth, Trump doesn’t have that kind of money available. So he’s been treating the judgments against him as if they were negotiable: The court has made its claim, then he makes a counteroffer, and so on. (You should try this the next time you get a traffic ticket. “I know the ticket says $50, but how about I give you $15 and we call it even?”) In the Carroll case, he offered that the court should just take his word that he’s good for the money. (Carroll’s responding court filing described his offer as “the court filing equivalent of a paper napkin signed by the least trustworthy of borrowers”.) And in the fraud case he offered $100 million. Both motions were denied by the judges.
I guess we’ll see what happens by next Monday.
and Mitch McConnell
The Mitch McConnell Era in the Senate will end this November. Most liberal commentary on McConnell’s retirement has balanced two thoughts:
McConnell has done terrible damage to the Senate, the judiciary, democracy, and the country as a whole.
Whoever replaces him as leader of the Senate’s Republicans will probably be worse.
Josh Marshall (I’m trying out a feature that allows me to share a members-only article; I hope it works) attempts to give the Devil his due like this: “McConnell was great at doing political evil.”
Mitch McConnell’s great legacy is the thorough institutionalization of minority rule in U.S. politics, especially at the federal level. … These days you often hear reporters and commentators saying matter of factly that legislation requires 60 votes in the Senate. This is truly McConnell’s greatest accomplishment. People say this like it’s in the Constitution, like the two-thirds requirement for conviction at impeachment or to approve a treaty. But it is a novel development and it has radically altered U.S. politics. It transforms the federal Senate into a genuinely Calhounian body in which minority factions exercise a de facto and permanent veto over the majority.
It’s what creates gridlock, the breeding ground of political disaffection and extremism. It also lays the groundwork for McConnell’s other great accomplishment, the corrupted federal judiciary and especially the corrupt Supreme Court.
DailyKos staffer Joan McCarter lists “The 17 worst things Mitch McConnell did to destroy democracy“. She recalls his refusal to hold hearings on Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination (because it was months away from the 2016 election) combined with his steamrolling Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination through (mere weeks before the 2020 election); his unwillingness to regulate either guns on the streets or money in politics; turning the debt ceiling into a permanent political hostage; and his vote to acquit Trump despite admitting that he was guilty.
That last was McConnell’s biggest miscalculation: He thought Trump was finished after January 6, and figured he didn’t need to tick off Trump’s supporters by convicting him. And so he surrendered the old Reagan Republican Party to the new MAGA fascists.
Maybe the deepest critique of McConnell comes from a 2018 NY Review of Books essay by Holocaust scholar Christopher Browning (which is behind a paywall). Browning compared McConnell to the Weimar Republic’s conservative president Paul von Hindenburg, who paved the road Hitler walked to power. Similar to the way Hindenburg hoped for a restored monarchy but wound up with Hitler, McConnell envisioned a plutocratic conservative ascendancy, but wound up enabling populist authoritarianism.
To me, McConnell is a villain who in the end was not quite villainous enough to win out.
and Gaza
Despite continuing rumors that a ceasefire agreement may be immanent, there’s still no agreement. Naturally, each side blames the intransigence of the other.
Israeli troops fired on a crowd of Palestinians racing to pull food off an aid convoy in Gaza City on Thursday, witnesses said. More than 100 people were killed in the chaos, bringing the death toll since the start of the Israel-Hamas war to more than 30,000, according to health officials.
Israel said many of the dead were trampled in a chaotic stampede for the food aid and that its troops only fired when they felt endangered by the crowd.
It’s telling, I think, that the Israeli account says that the situation in a part of Gaza its troops control has become so dire that people are trampling each other to get food. Also, the US has begun airdropping food aid into Gaza. To me, that points to an extreme level of frustration with the border crossings. Airdropping aid is well-known to be extremely inefficient.
The NYT’s Megan Stack wrote an article about children without food in Gaza, but I bet she didn’t choose the headline: “Starvation is Stalking Gaza’s Children“, as if “starvation” were an abstract force that no one is responsible for.
+972 Magazine (a Palestinian/Israeli journalistic consortium named for an area code) reports that Israeli settlers have begun reoccupying Gaza. The first “symbolic” settlement is unauthorized by the government, but soldiers did not interfere.
Israelis are protesting for a variety of reasons: Police broke up a fairly large anti-Netanyahu demonstration Saturday. But other protesters are trying to block convoys of food, water, and medicine from reaching Gaza.
and the continuing IVF fallout
The Alabama legislature is working on bills to get the state’s IVF clinics open again. The state senate passed a bill whose official summary says:
This bill would provide civil and criminal immunity to persons providing goods and services related to in vitro fertilization except acts or ommission [sic] that are intentional and not arising from or related to IVF services.
The house is working on a similar bill, and presumably they’ll work something out. If this gets passed, the official position of the State of Alabama will be that a frozen embryo is a human being and disposing of an embryo is murder, but murder is OK in this particular circumstance.
This is the kind of thing that happens when religious zealots get control of a state.
The majority of Louisiana’s fertility clinics have been shipping patients’ embryos out of state for years, with some ending up in Florida and others as far away as Nevada. The time-consuming and costly process is a result of a 1986 state law that banned the destruction of embryos created during IVF.
a constraint upon a service used primarily by wealthy White couples — IVF treatments run between $15,000-$20,000 for a single cycle — went too far. The logic of the judicial decision — if life begins at conception, embryos must be people — fails against the logic of Christian nationalism — that White people need to reproduce to avoid being replaced.
So if your fundamental mindset is racist, you love IVF because it makes more White babies. But if your fundamental mindset is sexist, you hate IVF because it gives women more control over their lives. If you’re racist and sexist in equal measures, your head explodes.
and the polls
This week a poll showed Trump leading Biden by 5% among registered voters and 4% among likely voters. OK, that’s a real thing that happened. But for some reason, the NYT put this poll at the top of its online news page for more than 24 hours, and fleshed it out with articles about how concerned Democrats are about Biden and how many people think he’s too old.
The SECOND those polls reverse, they will, I promise you, stop talking about them.
Some of the crosstabs of the Times-hyped poll look weird, to use a technical poll-watching term. They says the race is even among women, Trump leads among Hispanics, and that he’s getting around 1/4th of the Black vote — about double what any Republican has gotten in a general election since Gerald Ford got 16% in 1976. There are two ways to analyze this:
Biden is in trouble among core Democratic constituencies.
I have an in-between interpretation: The issues in the headlines right now — Gaza and the border — are ones that split Democrats. Everybody to my left is absolutely horrified that Biden is letting/helping Israel do what it’s doing in Gaza, and that Biden backs a border bill that gives Trumpists a lot of what they want (even if they refuse to take it). Consequently, many liberals are not willing to tell a pollster that they will vote for Biden.
However, I think a lot of these voters will come home in November. They may not have gotten any happier with a few Biden policies, but they’ll look at the choice and realize that even on those issues a second Trump administration would be infinitely worse. (How much do you think Trump cares about children starving in Gaza?) And then there are the issues of democracy and climate change, which Trump links like this: “You know why I wanted to be a dictator? Because I want a wall, and I want to drill, drill, drill.”
The first campaign I have clear memories of was 1968. That year, liberals opposed the Johnson administration’s policies in Vietnam and were also angry about how they had been treated at the Democratic Convention. In August, polls showed Richard Nixon beating Johnson VP Hubert Humphrey in a landslide, with margins as high as 16%. But most of those voters came home, and the November election wound up being one of the closest in history.
A lot of people on social media are calling attention to Trump saying this in Richmond on Sunday. But it’s barely been mentioned in major media.
And I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.
Critics point out that every state, including Virginia, has vaccine mandates. But I haven’t seen enough context to know if he really meant ALL vaccines, or just the Covid vaccine. That’s the benefit Trump gets from his sloppy way of speaking. There’s always room for supporters to say: “He didn’t really mean that.” (Usually right after they claim “He tells it like it is.”) And he never does an interview with a journalist persistent enough to pin him down.
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy analyzed the results of the Trump Tax Cuts. Their study covered “the largest profitable corporations from 2018 through 2022”, 342 of them in all. Ostensibly, the law lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, but in fact the average company studied paid only 14.1%. One out of four paid a single-digit tax rate, and 23 paid no tax at all “in spite of being profitable every single year”.
Companies paying less than 5 percent include T-Mobile, DISH Network, Netflix, General Motors, AT&T, Bank of America, Citigroup, FedEx, Molson Coors, Nike, and many others.
Sometimes (not today) I think the weather in New England is bad. But we never get buried in tumbleweeds, as some towns in Utah have been lately. And here’s something I didn’t know: Tumbleweeds may be icons of the Western countryside, but they’re an invasive species — the Russian thistle.
Adam Rubenstein writes about having been a conservative editor at the NYT. Mainly he’s telling the sad tale of how the higher-ups scapegoated him when the NYT faced a serious backlash for publishing a Tom Cotton op-ed (calling for Trump to send the military into US cities to put down the sometimes violent protests after police murdered George Floyd). Scapegoating is something I can sympathize with, but Rubenstein is hoping for a more general stranger-in-a-strange-land kind of sympathy, which I can’t offer him.
Rather than create sympathy, his essay underlines exactly why conservative points of view are shunned in many reputable newspapers: because they’re based on bullshit, and you can’t publish them without promoting bullshit. Like this:
I often found myself asking questions like “Doesn’t all of this talk of ‘voter suppression’ on the left sound similar to charges of ‘voter fraud’ on the right?” only to realize how unwelcome such questions were.
Well, maybe such questions are “unwelcome” because Republicans’ incessant claims of voter fraud are never backed up by any evidence, while voter suppression smacks you in the face. (Can you name a rural White community where people have to stand in line for hours to vote? Or an acceptable form of voter ID that non-Whites are more likely to have than Whites?) Or think about climate change: Can you publish a conservative view without giving a platform to bullshit? It would be quite a trick.
Riley was indeed murdered; that much is true. What’s false is the “migrant crime wave” invented by Donald Trump and echoed ad infinitum by Fox News.
An NBC News review of available 2024 crime data from the cities targeted by Texas’ “Operation Lone Star,” which buses or flies migrants from the border to major cities in the interior — shows overall crime levels dropping in those cities that have received the most migrants.
“This is a public perception problem. It’s always based upon these kinds of flashpoint events where an immigrant commits a crime,” explains Graham Ousey, a professor at the College of William & Mary and the co-author of “Immigration and Crime: Taking Stock.” “There’s no evidence for there being any relationship between somebody’s immigrant status and their involvement in crime.”
Trump and Fox are using an old Nazi tactic that can dehumanize any group. The Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer loved to publish articles about sensational Jewish crimes. Some of the crimes the paper made up or exaggerated, but probably not all of them. After all, Jews are people, and people occasionally commit crimes. If your ideology calls for making “Jewish crime” a special thing, you can.
Same thing here. Migrants are people, and people occasionally commit crimes, including murder. That doesn’t mean “migrant crime” is a significant issue.
The Atlantic’s Ian Bogost says TV resolution has gotten out of hand: HDTV was a noticeable improvement over the previous standard. But you won’t sit close enough to your 4K TV to tell the difference from an HDTV. And now 8K is coming!
and let’s close with something edifying
I suspect that the difference between good science education and bad science education is bigger than just about any other educational field. Bad science education quickly becomes tedious, while good science education has a mind-blowing oh-wow effect.
Take a look at the videos at Branch Education, where I’ve been having a number of oh-wow experiences lately. Some are explanations of fundamental scientific devices, like How Do Electron Microscopes Work?, while others undo some popular misconception or answer a question you’ll wonder why you never thought to ask.
In the popular misconception category: We all understand the inaccuracy of the sound effects in movie battles between starships, because you wouldn’t actually hear explosions in space. Sound is a wave traveling through a medium. And deep space is a vacuum, so it should be totally silent. Except when it’s not.
This week everybody was talking about the Trump trials
$355 million, Fani Willis testifying, a trial date for the Stormy Daniels case, presidential immunity goes to the Supremes, and more: It was hard to keep track of which case any particular news story applied to. I sort it out in the featured post.
and Putin’s Republican sympathizers
Putin critic and political rival Alexei Navalny died in an arctic prison on Friday. Navalny is an inspirational fighter for democracy who Putin has tried to kill before. Prison authorities attributed the death first to “sudden death syndrome” and then to a pulmonary embolism.
The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen (my favorite Russia-watcher) pulls a number of themes together:
Putin appears to be feeling optimistic about his own future. As he sees it, Donald Trump is poised to become the next President of the U.S. and to give Putin free rein in Ukraine and beyond. Even before the U.S. Presidential election, American aid to Ukraine is stalled, and Ukraine’s Army is starved for troops and nearing a supply crisis. Last week, Putin got to lecture millions of Americans by granting an interview to Tucker Carlson. At the end of the interview, Carlson asked Putin if he would release Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter held on espionage charges in Russia. Putin proposed that Gershkovich could be traded for “a person, who out of patriotic sentiments liquidated a bandit in one of the European capitals.” It was a reference to Vadim Krasikov, probably the only Russian assassin who has been caught and convicted in the West; he is held in Germany. A week after the interview aired, Russia has shown the world what can happen to a person in a Russian prison. It’s also significant that Navalny was killed on the first day of the Munich conference. In 2007, Putin chose the conference as his stage for declaring what would become his war against the West. Now, with this war in full swing, Putin has been excluded from the conference, but the actions of his regime—the murders committed by his regime—dominate the proceedings.
Meanwhile, Ukraine withdrew from the city of Avdiivka in Donetsk. AP attributes the withdrawal to lack of artillery.
One reason for that lack is Speaker Mike Johnson, who still refuses to bring Ukraine aid to a vote (because it would pass). Johnson says he won’t be “rushed” into voting on aid that President Biden asked for in September. Russian forces may be gaining ground and Ukrainian soldiers may be dying, but what’s the hurry?
The elephant in the room here is Trump, who won a narrow victory in 2016 with Putin’s help, and has been in Putin’s pocket ever since. (Hillary Clinton correctly observed in a 2016 debate that Trump would be Putin’s puppet, to which Trump made a typical playground response: “No. You’re the puppet.”) Trump single-handedly torpedoed the Ukraine/Israel/border bill that the Senate had negotiated a few weeks ago, and was just about the last political figure in the US to make any comment on Navalny. As usual, Trump did not criticize Putin, and instead made his comment mainly about himself.
“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” Trump posted, and then the rest is about himself and his troubles.
I’m sure both the beleaguered people of Ukrainian and Navalny’s grieving widow take great comfort from that.
While we’re talking about Tucker, he followed his Putin interview by going to a Moscow supermarket to show his viewers how great conditions are in Russia.
Lots of people pointed out that things usually are cheap in poor countries, which Russia is at this point in spite of its vast natural resources and educated population. In 2021, Tass reported that sixty percent of Russian citizens spent at least half their income on food. For context, in 2022 Americans spent about 11.3% of their income on food, and the poorest quintile of American society spent 31.2% of its income.
But The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood has travelled in Russia and went deeper. Yes, there are some things that are better in Moscow than in New York.
Carlson’s videos never quite say what precisely he thinks Russia gets right. Moscow is in many ways superior to New York. But Paris has a good subway system too. Japan and Thailand have fine grocery stores, and I wonder, when I enter them, why entering my neighborhood Stop & Shop in America is such a depressing experience by comparison. Carlson’s stated preference for Putin’s leadership over Joe Biden’s suggests that the affection is not for fine food or working public transit but for firm autocratic rule—which, as French, Thais, and Japanese will attest, is not a precondition for high-quality goods and services. And in an authoritarian state, those goods and services can serve to prolong the regime.
One lesson from the election appears to be the mistake House Republicans made by giving in to Trump and scrapping a bipartisan compromise on the border. Suozzi was able to flip the script on the GOP in this race: Democrats tried to do something about the immigration problem, but Republicans blocked them.
The election followed a long string of recent Democratic victories since the Supreme Court ditched Roe v Wade. The great political mystery of recent months has been how polls show Democrats in trouble, but then Democrats win elections anyway.
You might think that another Democratic victory would be good news for other Democrats, like Joe Biden, but you wouldn’t guess it from reading the New York Times. In the Times, nothing is good news for Biden.
This is a regular theme in the humorous Twitter account New York Times PItchbot, which suggests how the Times should frame various stories. Tuesday afternoon before the polls closed the Pitchbot tweeted:
If Democrats win today’s special election in NY-3, it’s further proof that special elections don’t mean anything. But if they lose, it’s very bad news for Biden in November.
And that turned out to be more-or-less exactly what the NYT’s Nate Cohn wrote Wednesday morning.
As we’ve written recently, it’s hard to glean much from special elections. … If anything, one could advance the idea that the results were slightly underwhelming for Democrats, given all of the aforementioned advantages than Mr. Suozzi seemed to possess. Either way, a single special election result like this one is entirely consistent with polls showing Mr. Biden and Democrats in a close race heading into 2024.
While we’re talking about Biden and his prospects in November: In this 25-minute podcast, Ezra Klein makes the most convincing Biden-shouldn’t-run argument I’ve heard yet. Last week, I wrote about my strong belief that the Biden-is-too-old-to-be-president argument is misguided, and how his occasional use of the wrong word should not raise worries that he isn’t up to the job. I still believe all that.
But Klein makes a subtly different argument. He acknowledges that Biden has been an excellent president, and says that everyone he talks to who has observed Biden’s performance in decision-making meetings agrees that he is still quite sharp. But Klein points out that running for president is different from being president. Yes, the Republic would be in good hands if Biden were president for an additional four years. But is the Democratic Party in good hands with Biden at the top of the ticket in 2024?
Klein thinks not, and says that the kinds of people who run campaigns — unlike the kinds of people who run governments — are deeply worried about Biden’s reelection.
In the final section of the podcast, he paints an upbeat picture of an open convention choosing candidates the way old-time conventions did: Imagine younger Democrats like Gretchen Whitmer, Kamala Harris, and Gavin Newsom giving speeches that actually mattered, as they tried to convince delegates to pick them. Maybe there could even be a boom for a dark horse like Andy Beshear, who has managed to convince red Kentucky to elect and reelect him as governor. Contrast that with MAGA lackeys kissing up to Donald Trump in the Republican Convention.
I will need to consider that convention fantasy, which could also go wrong in any number of ways. And I’m not sure I’m ready to change my mind, but Klein’s podcast definitely gives me a lot to think about.
and two right-wing conspiracy theories collapsed
For years, Fox News talking heads like Sean Hannity have been talking about “the Biden crime family”, and House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer has been implying that he had evidence of a bribery scheme where money flowed through Hunter Biden to his Dad, who then did something-or-other in a quid-pro-quo sort of way. This has been the basis of House Republicans’ so-far-unsuccessful effort to impeach President Biden.
The evidence for this story was always kind of thin, and depended heavily on the testimony of one guy, Alexander Smirnov, who Hannity and Comer touted as a “trusted FBI informant”. But in fact the FBI didn’t trust this informant or his story, which is why the investigation never went anywhere, even during the Trump administration.
This week we found out just how much DoJ doesn’t trust Smirnov: The special prosecutor handling the Hunter Biden investigation just indicted Smirnov for making up his story, including inventing meetings with people who were provably somewhere else at the time. Jay Kuo has a good summary.
If the Republican effort to impeach Biden were based on anything more substantive than seeking revenge for Trump’s well-deserved impeachments, it would fold now. But I bet it won’t.
If election-deniers still show up in your social media feeds, you are bound to have heard about Dinesh D’Souza’s 2022 film 2000 Mules, which presents a conspiracy theory about
unnamed nonprofit organizations supposedly associated with the Democratic Party [who] paid “mules” to illegally collect and deposit ballots into drop boxes in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin during the 2020 presidential election.
The film’s methodology and conclusions have been widely debunked ever since it came out nearly two years ago. But if you really want to believe that Democrats stole Donald Trump’s “landslide”, you can ignore all that.
The movie … uses research from the Texas-based nonprofit True the Vote, which has spent months lobbying states to use its findings to change voting laws.
The group filed claims with Georgia’s secretary of state’s office, which then launched its own investigation into ballot-harvesting. You’d think that would be the whole point of filing complaints, but True the Vote was strangely uncooperative and refused to give Georgia the evidence it said it had collected. Eventually, Georgia officials lost patience and got a court order.
A Fulton County Superior Court judge in Atlanta signed an order last year requiring True the Vote to provide evidence it had collected, including the names of people who were sources of information, to state elections officials who were frustrated by the group’s refusal to share evidence with investigators.
This week, True the Vote reported to the judge: It has nothing.
This has been the pattern for all of Trump’s Big Lie claims, going back to the court cases it filed immediately after the election: Tell the rubes who believe Trump that they have bountiful evidence of election fraud, and then, when challenged in court, produce nothing.
and the Super Bowl parade shooting
At the parade celebrating the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl win, 23 people were shot, including 11 children. One person died.
If you’re just talking about deaths or even injuries, this event doesn’t rank high on the list of recent mass shootings. But I think it will have a huge impact on the national psyche. Like the 4th of July shooting in Highland Park in 2022 and the 2017 shooting at a Las Vegas music festival, it reinforces the idea that in America, it’s not safe to be outdoors in a crowd — not unless the area has been locked down by police and you had to go through security to get in (like at an inauguration). If you do go to a big outdoor event, you’ll have a hard time not wondering whether the people around you are armed, or looking for snipers in the tall buildings.
Being armed yourself is no answer. In Kansas City, there were 800 armed police assigned to the parade area. All those “good guys with guns” couldn’t stop this from happening.
Other countries are not like this. The NRA rhetoric about guns “protecting our freedom” has it exactly backwards. We are less free than the citizens of other countries because we live under the tyranny of guns.
Remember those pro-Jesus He-Gets-Us Super Bowl ads? We now have a better understanding of what that’s about, thanks to Kristen Thomason at Baptist News. The effort is funded by shadowy conservative political groups that are trying to get churches to partner with them, helping churches with their outreach to local people looking for a church. The political goal is to gather enough information to make personal profiles of people who might be persuadable (through targeted marketing) to support conservative causes.
Former President Donald J. Trump has told advisers and allies that he likes the idea of a 16-week national abortion ban with three exceptions, in cases of rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother, according to two people with direct knowledge of Mr. Trump’s deliberations.
Other Republicans have tried to run on this “moderate” position recently, but without much success. That’s probably because it doesn’t satisfy the anti-abortion zealots, but it still has the logic flaw that the stricter abortion bans have: When you allow any exceptions, you’re admitting that the issue is not simple. Even after N weeks, there are still hard cases where difficult decisions need to be made. And then you’re assigning those decisions to the government rather than to the people who are actually involved and understand the details of the situation. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Here’s a scenario every ban-supporter ought to run through their exception protocols: A pregnant woman past the ban deadline discovers a cancerous tumor that is currently small but of a very aggressive type. Statistics indicate that if she has an abortion immediately and goes straight into chemotherapy, she has a 90% chance of survival. But if she waits a few months, delivers the baby, and then goes into chemotherapy, she has only 40% chance of survival. She and her husband decide to seek an exception because they really want her to live, and figure they can try again to have a baby later. What happens? Do they get the exception or not?
Can you imagine being in such a situation knowing that somebody else was making that decision for you?
Late to the party: I just noticed this episode of NYT’s “The Daily” podcast from December. If you have no idea what the whole phenomenon of Taylor Swift and Taylor Swift fandom is about, this would be a half-hour well spent.
Trump has a new explanation for why he repeatedly said “Nikki Haley” when he was talking about Nancy Pelosi: He meant to do that. He was being “sarcastic”. (I don’t think he actually understands what that word means.)
As I’ve said often before, we all knew people like Trump when we were six years old: They were never wrong. Anything they did was something they meant to do. Any game they didn’t win was rigged, and anybody who beat them cheated.
Maintaining such childish character traits into his late 70s is far scarier than saying the wrong name occasionally.
Vox explains the rush in several states to ban lab-grown meat, which barely exists yet, and is nowhere near being a marketable product. The associated politicians may give all kinds of reasons, but what this effort comes down to is protecting the meat industry as it currently exists.
The proposed bans are part of a longtime strategy by the politically powerful agribusiness lobby and its allies in Congress and statehouses to further entrench factory farming as America’s dominant source of protein. …
The cell-cultivated meat bans and the plant-based labeling restrictions represent one side of agribusiness’s policy coin: proactive measures to weaken upstarts that could one day threaten its bottom line. The other side of that coin is sweeping deregulation that has made meat abundant and cheap, but at terrible cost to the environment, workers, and animals.
Agriculture is exempt from the federal Animal Welfare Act, and most farms are exempt from the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, loopholes that have resulted in awful conditions for animals and widespread pollution.
Family farmers (like my Dad once was) are the poster children of this effort, but the money and political clout comes from the giant corporations that are pushing family farms into extinction.
I imagine that someday we’ll get lab-grown meat figured out, and some future generation will be able to enjoy all our favorite dishes without slaughtering sentient creatures. Probably they’ll look back on this era the way we look back on slavery, and be appalled that so many people worked so hard to hang on to their gory practices.
Speaking of animal welfare: One of the week’s stranger stories concerns plans for a 200-acre “mini-city of monkeys” in Georgia. The proposed breeding facility would house up to 30,000 long-tailed macaques for use in medical research. The plan faces protests from two sides: Residents of nearby Bainbridge (human population 14,000) are afraid the macaques will be bad neighbors, and animal rights activists oppose the cruelty of using such intelligent creatures for research.
Medical researchers argue back that they need primates precisely because they are so similar to humans. Without primate research, the first round of human tests of some possible medical advance would be far more dangerous.
About 70,000 monkeys a year are still used across the US in tests for treatments to infectious diseases, ageing and neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s, with researchers warning that the US is running low on available primates for tests.
I am reminded of some hard-won wisdom from a friend who studied psychology in graduate school: If a lemur gets loose and finds its way into a suspended ceiling, it’s almost impossible to catch.
and let’s close with a question
Usually, my closings are little amusing snippets, and if you’re looking for one, the story above about the “city of monkeys” is pretty close.
[W]atching the frenzy over President Biden’s age, I am, for the first time, profoundly concerned about the nation’s future. It now seems entirely possible that within the next year, American democracy could be irretrievably altered.
And the final blow won’t be the rise of political extremism — that rise certainly created the preconditions for disaster, but it has been part of the landscape for some time now. No, what may turn this menace into catastrophe is the way the hand-wringing over Biden’s age has overshadowed the real stakes in the 2024 election.
I’ve talked before about why I think Biden will beat Trump in the fall, but like Krugman (and like most of you, I suspect), I have moments when I just can’t believe where the national conversation has gotten to, and I get a vertiginous feeling in my stomach that says I don’t really know what can happen.
There’s something paralyzing about that fear, and I think we need to talk openly about it so that we can support each other these next several months. And even if we’re not paralyzed, actions taken out of fear are usually not effective. We’re going to do a better job saving the country if we have faced our fears and found our courage.
So here’s my question: If you have those moments of paralyzing or reactive fear, what do you do? Does it help? Do you have any insight in how to push through fear and come out the other side?
This week everybody was talking about Biden’s memory
That’s the subject of the featured post. One of the things I learned during my father’s final years was the difference between aphasia (inability to find the right words) and dementia (inability to grasp situations). Biden’s occasional flubs look completely verbal to me, so they don’t seem worrisome. He knows what’s happening and is thinking clearly about it, even if he sometimes calls something or someone by the wrong name.
Trump makes similar mistakes all the time (probably as often as Biden) but the media doesn’t cover them the same way. I guess I understand why: It seems silly to worry about Trump saying the wrong words when the words he intends to say are so reprehensible. What if, when he wanted to call Democrats “vermin“, or accuse immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country“, he had accidentally said something else? Would that be worse?
What happened to her husband? Where is he? He’s gone. He knew. He knew.
I haven’t seen a clear explanation of what Trump imagines Michael Haley knows. But where Haley has gone is no mystery: He’s a major in the South Carolina National Guard, and has been deployed to Africa since June. The Republican Party used to respect military service, but apparently it no longer does. Wherever Major Haley is, though, he has access to the internet, because he tweeted back:
The difference between humans and animals? Animals would never allow the dumbest ones to lead the pack.
Former President Donald Trump said Saturday he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” if it attacked a NATO country that didn’t pay enough for defense.
When he says that kind of stuff on purpose, who has time to cover his misstatements?
and the Trump trials
The big news from early in the week was the DC Appeals Court ruling against Trump’s claim of “absolute presidential immunity”. The court rejected Trump’s arguments across the board, summing up its opinion like this:
For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant. But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution.
For weeks, observers have been speculating about what was taking the court so long — nearly a month — to rule, and their opinion validated most of that speculation: The three judges were ironing out their differences so that they could write a single opinion in the name of the court. It seemed obvious from the beginning that none of the three agreed with Trump’s lawyers’ arguments, but if they had disagreed about why Trump was wrong, they would leave issues for the Supreme Court to resolve. As it is, the Court has the option to refuse Trump expected appeal and let the lower court decision stand.
Trump is expected to file his appeal to the Supreme Court today, because the appellate court’s stay on his DC trial runs out today, leaving Judge Tanya Chutken free to restart proceedings. Jay Kuo explains:
But here’s a fun fact: While it only takes four justices to agree to hear a case, it takes five justices to issue a stay. And a stay is what Trump really, really needs to keep running out the clock.
I feel like commentators are doing the public an injustice when they observe that Trump is trying to “run out the clock”, as if that were a natural thing to do. An innocent candidate for office would want to get his cases settled before the election, but Trump wants to delay past the election because he is guilty. His only hope to stay out of jail is to regain the presidency and use its powers to obstruct justice, so that no jury ever sees the evidence against him.
Thursday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in another Trump case, the one about whether the 14th Amendment bans him from office as an insurrectionist. The questions asked by almost all the justices were skeptical, and most observers have concluded that the Court really doesn’t want to be the reason Trump doesn’t become president again.
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick discusses what she finds “The Most Galling Thing About the Supreme Court’s Trump Ballot Arguments“: taking seriously the idea that finding for Colorado would open a can of worms, as red states would then start throwing Democratic candidates off their ballots. The assumption behind this argument is that our justice system is incapable of distinguishing frivolous cases from well-founded cases.
Remember when Trump said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support? Well, imagine if he did and the State of New York charged him with murder. Trump could then argue that the prosecution shouldn’t be allowed, because otherwise red states would start charging Democrats with murder.
Does that make any sense? I don’t think so, and I don’t think a similar argument in this case makes sense either.
We’re still waiting for a verdict in Trump’s New York civil fraud trial.
and the Gaza War
Since the ground attacks on Gaza started, Israel has been pushing the civilian population south, towards Rafah. CNN estimates that 1.3 million of Gaza’s two million people are now taking refuge there. The only place further south is Egypt, which is not accepting refugees.
Over the weekend, airstrikes on Rafah began. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society claims that over 100 people have been killed, but says the exact death toll is hard to know because people may still be trapped under rubble.
Last night, an Israeli raid into Rafah rescued two Israeli hostages.
There is beginning to be some daylight between the Biden administration and the Netanyahu government. In the press conference where President Biden responded to the Hur report, he characterized the Israeli response to the October 7 attacks as “over the top” and said
There are a lot of innocent people who are starving, a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying, and it’s got to stop.
Secretary Blinken has been trying to negotiate a ceasefire. The most recent Hamas proposal was for
a ceasefire of 4-1/2 months, during which all hostages would go free, Israel would withdraw its troops from Gaza and an agreement would be reached on an end to the war.
Prime Minister Netanyahu described this proposal as “delusional” and instead pledged to push on for “total victory” over “all of Hamas”.
and the failed Mayorkas impeachment
Something about the conservative mindset that’s been true for a long time: They’d rather focus on good and bad people than good or bad policy. So a scapegoat or a savior is more important than a plan to make things better. (You can see this happening in the presidential campaign: The point is to glorify Trump and promise that everything will be better after he’s back in power. But what will he do differently than Biden? Don’t worry about that.)
Case in point: The border. The Senate negotiated a tough bipartisan compromise to try to improve things at the border, but then Trump and his minions rejected it without any alternative proposal beyond “Elect Trump”. Simultaneously, House Republicans tried to impeach the secretary of Homeland Security, Aleyandro Mayorkas, for not solving the problems at the border. So: We don’t need new policies or new funding, we just need to punish somebody we don’t like. That’ll fix everything.
There are really no grounds for impeaching Mayorkas: no criminal activity, no personal scandals, etc. He’s just overseeing a badly broken immigration system that Congress has been refusing to fix for decades. All the problems would still be there if he were gone.
Not to worry, though, because in the end Speaker Johnson counted his votes wrong, and the impeachment failed 214-216. This kind of thing never happened to Nancy Pelosi: If she brought something to the floor, she had the votes to pass it.
Republicans are going to try again, though, because Rep. Steve Scalise may return soon from cancer treatment, and because they have nothing else to do.
Meanwhile, the Senate is trying to repair the damage done when Trump turned against the border/Israel/Ukraine compromise that was set to pass. Originally, the parts of the bill dealing with the border were put in because Republicans demanded them as a price for Ukraine aid. (Otherwise, they seem content to let Putin take over Ukraine. One fascist hand washes the other, I suppose.) But then Trump decided that solving a problem (which his party keeps saying is an existential crisis for our country) would give Biden a victory and help him claim that he is actually governing. Can’t have that, so the bill had to die.
So a bill with just Israel and Ukraine aid is moving through the Senate, having jumped a couple of procedural hurdles this week. (Bizarrely, Lindsey Graham wants to add amendments with border funding, creating a Groundhog Day causal loop.) It might move faster, but Rand Paul is blocking the unanimous consent necessary to vote sooner.
and you also might be interested in …
Yesterday, two pro-Christian Super Bowl ads promoted the slogan “He gets us” — “he” being Jesus. This campaign has been around for a while, but it seems that many people noticed it for the first time yesterday. The leftist magazine Jacobin traced the money. It comes from the billion-dollar Servant Foundation, which also has contributed $50 million to the Alliance Defending Freedom. The “freedoms” ADF defends are the states’ right to take over women’s healthcare decisions, and businesses’ right to discriminate against LGBTQ people.
So maybe the “us” in “He gets us” isn’t as all-encompassing as the ads make it sound.
Meanwhile, my social media feed was blowing up with the observation that If Jesus had that many millions on hand, he would probably use it to feed the poor rather than to buy Super Bowl ads. It does seem like a rather mysterious way for the Lord to work.
It was widely reported before the game that Tucker Carlson threatened to kill himself if Taylor Swift’s boyfriend’s team won the Super Bowl. (The claim appears to be false.) Yesterday, Travis Kelce’s Chiefs did win, starting a Tucker death watch.
Unfortunately for Tucker’s career, which has gone into eclipse since Fox News sacked him, Putin did what dictators often do: gave a long boring speech that few Americans will be interested in. Putin has this theory of history, going back to the Middle Ages, saying that Ukraine is not really a country and has no right to exist separate from Russia.
It’s not hard to imagine King George making a similar speech about his 13 American colonies, so Americans are unlikely to be persuaded. To Americans, nationhood is a covenant between people, and is not based on some essentialist theory about race, language, and culture. If a bunch of people get together and declare themselves a nation, who are you to tell them they’re not?
Anyway, it appears that the point was to impress Russians with how seriously Putin’s ideas are taken by Americans, and not to actually convince American viewers of anything. It was an internal propaganda victory similar to the victory Kim Jong Un got by meeting with Trump.
Prior to the interview, Tucker put out a video defending his decision to do it. I have no real argument with the points he was making, but I think he was making them in bad faith: Yes, Americans should hear from voices that the American mainstream paints as villainous, but those people should be asked hard questions, challenged when they lie, and fact-checked afterward. Tucker did none of that.
Also, I suspect he won’t apply his reasoning evenly. For example, the same logic would lead him to interview the leaders of Iran and the Taliban, something I suspect he won’t do. He interviewed Putin not for any noble journalistic reason, but because he supports Putin.
Climate scientist Michael Mann won his defamation lawsuit against two conservative critics. He was awarded only $1 from each in compensation, but one of the two was hit with $1 million in punitive damages.
and let’s close with something in bad taste
Everybody who tries to cook has had the experience: You look at a recipe, have high hopes, and then something else happens entirely. In the end, you see that the outcome was completely predictable, but somehow that wasn’t obvious beforehand.
Well, you can always laugh. The Tasty Area website has collected extreme kitchen fails that will make you feel brilliant by comparison. My favorite is the guy who cooked his pasta from both ends at once.
This week everybody was talking about the widening war
This feels like one of those recurring nightmares where you know what’s going to happen, but can only watch as it does. Biden responded to last week’s attack on a US outpost in Jordan by hitting Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, as well as continuing to bomb Houthi rebels in Yemen. It is simultaneously impossible to imagine (1) the US government doing nothing after American soldiers are killed, and (2) our counterattacks achieving anything.
On the one hand, Biden would surely be facing a political firestorm even bigger than the current one if American soldiers died and he did nothing. But I can’t imagine that the groups we’re striking are saying, “Wow, we need to stop what we’re doing.” A third alternative would be to hit the source, Iran, but that looks even worse to me.
In a different century, the great powers would get together in some grand conference with everything on the table. I’m not sure why that couldn’t happen now.
and sabotage in Congress
When Democrats run against Republican congressmen in the fall, their hardest task is going to be convincing voters that the Republicans really did what they’re doing right now. A lot of voters will listen to a true account and just say, “No. Surely not. You must be exaggerating.”
So Ukraine, which is fighting for its life against an invasion by Trump’s buddy Putin, needs weapons from us to defend itself. At first, supplying them was a bipartisan priority, with only some extremists like Matt Gaetz holding out. Then about half of the Republican conference turned against Ukraine aid, and Speakers McCarthy and then Johnson decided Ukraine aid was a hostage they could get Biden to pay some ransom for. Their rhetoric paired Ukraine with our own problems at the Mexican border (something like “Why are we paying for Ukraine to protects its borders when we’re not protecting our own?”), even though the two really have nothing to do with each other.
The result was a three-part package including Ukraine aid, aid to Israel, and money to better protect the border. Republicans decided that wasn’t enough, so they insisted on policy changes in addition to money. The Senate negotiated a bipartisan compromise, which included most of what Republicans had been asking for.
But then Trump turned against it, because passing any border legislation at all would allow Biden to say that he has done something about the border. So: It’s a terrible, terrible crisis, but let’s not do anything about it, because any problem that gets solved (or even addressed) while Biden is president will make it harder to unseat him in November.
In other words: The border is just a talking point for Republicans. They don’t actually want to do anything about it.
Even with Trump’s opposition, a majority of the House probably supports this Ukraine/Israel/border bill. So Speaker Johnson has decided not to hold a vote on it. Instead, the House will vote on a stand-alone Israel-aid bill.
Even after Trump is out of office, Putin continues to reap benefits from helping him get elected.
With all the border rhetoric, it’s hard to sort out what is really happening and how serious it is. The Big Picture blog does a good job with that.
and Biden’s South Carolina victory
Remember how “nobody really likes Biden” and “nobody wants to see a Biden-Trump rematch”? Well, Saturday in South Carolina, actual Democratic voters got a chance to cast a protest vote against renominating Joe Biden. They didn’t. Biden got 96.2% of the vote, with Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson splitting the remainder.
Now, you can say that those aren’t real candidates, not like Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer or whoever your favorite Democrat might be. But if you wanted more choices in the election, the way to ask for them was to vote against Biden. Not many people did.
If Phillips and/or Williamson had gotten 30-40% of the vote, we’d be having different conversation, as the Democrats did in 1968. (LBJ won the New Hampshire primary 48%-42% over Gene McCarthy, but he looked at the level of resistance he was facing and dropped out.) The press would be approaching other prominent Democrats asking “Are you sure you don’t want to step in?” But the electorate seems to have no real appetite for that.
James Fallows reviews the long series of “Biden is doomed because …” narratives mainstream media has given us, and how they’ve fared.
We’re at a point where the polls will tell you whatever you want to hear. Want to believe Biden is in trouble? CNN has Trump ahead 49%-45%. Want to believe Biden is doing fine? Quinnipiac says Biden is ahead 50%-44%.
Personally, I remain optimistic, though I won’t fully relax until I’m listening to Biden’s second inaugural address. My general impression is that public sentiment is more-or-less even right now, but that Biden has a better story to tell going forward: The economy is doing quite well, and was in terrible shape when Trump left office. (You don’t have to blame Trump for the pandemic shutdown to realize that Biden was handed a tough situation.)
Plus, he has achieved some noteworthy liberal goals: The percentage of Americans without health insurance is at an all-time low. The expansion of the child tax credit in Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan reduced the childhood poverty rate to an all-time low. (Biden tried to make the credit permanent, but Congress wouldn’t go along, so the rate rebounded after the credit expired. The pending bipartisan tax bill would reinstate it at a lower level.)
And that’s even before you start looking at Trump’s personal issues: It’s been established in court that he is a sexual predator. His mental lapses (and general tendency to babble) is far worse than anything Biden has shown. Who knows how long he (and the judge he appointed) can delay the trial, but the evidence in the Mar-a-Lago case — that he took classified documents he had no right to, stored them sloppily, showed them to people not authorized to see them, and lied to the government when it asked for them back — is quite strong, and Trump has offered no credible explanation for it. (If his indictments were really the politically-motivated nonsense he claims, wouldn’t he be eager to get a jury of ordinary Americans to rule on them?) His effort to stay in office after clearly losing the 2020 election (the subject of another federal case as well as the Georgia RICO case) is one of the worst things any American president has ever done.
I think that for now a lot of Americans are withholding judgment about whether Trump is actually guilty — he is — or whether the charges are all politics, as he claims. As the cases proceed and the election gets closer, I think a bunch of those voters will turn to Biden.
One additional thing makes me hopeful: There will be a Republican Convention this summer. People will watch, and the MAGA folks will be scary. They can’t help themselves, because they believe their own propaganda that says they represent the real American majority.
Trump does have one outstanding talent that we have to watch out for: He’s very good at claiming credit and avoiding blame. Why is the stock market at a record high? Because investors are anticipating his return to office, of course. He doesn’t need to have a policy for dealing with the Gaza situation, because Hamas would be behaving itself if he were president, so the whole situation wouldn’t have come up. Ditto for the Ukraine War; it wouldn’t have happened if he’d been re-elected (which he still says he was), and he could solve it in 24 hours now, through some negotiating method that he needn’t elaborate on. Any claims he makes about “the Trump economy” conveniently ignore the fourth year of his term, when millions of jobs were lost and the deficit skyrocketed. A large part of what he is selling is a magical return to 2019; Covid was a bad dream that he will wave away with his amazing powers.
and Taylor
I had a Swift picture in last week’s Sift and didn’t really want to write about her again, but it’s hard not to. Last night she won the Album of the Year grammy, her fourth, a record.
Most of this week my social media feed was full of articles about the Right going nuts over Taylor and her boyfriend Travis Kelce, who will play in the Super Bowl Sunday as a star of the Kansas City Chiefs. I had a hard time deciding whether the Right was broadly going nuts, or if a few Trump cultists were going nuts and the liberal side of the media couldn’t resist a story that makes the Right look this bad.
A related story I should have covered when it came out two weeks ago was the AI-generated porn images of Swift, which circulated across various social-media platforms before most (but probably not all) of them were taken down. (I can’t tell you how easy they are to find now, because I’ve resisted the urge to look for them. Please don’t post links in the comments.) I don’t think anyone knows exactly who distributed these images or why, but it seems hard to believe that the timing is a coincidence: Swift runs afoul of MAGA, and then fake porn images of her circulate. Attacking the sexual reputation of a troublesome woman is a tactic as old as time. Jill Filipovic observes:
Swift is also a person who many on the right seek to humiliate, degrade and punish – the same aims as the creators of deepfake porn.
Undoubtedly we’ll see more of this, as AI-assisted image-processing tools get into more and more hands. The popular ones supposedly have safeguards against being used this way, but I don’t think it takes much know-how to circumvent those protections. We need to start thinking about how ordinary junior-high girls are going to fend off these kinds of attacks.
but here are some interesting articles to think about
There is an adage that says there are no atheists in foxholes — even skeptics will pray when facing death. But Hancock, in the time leading up to his execution, only became more insistent about his nonbelief. He and his chaplain were both confident that there was no God who might grant last-minute salvation, if only they produced a desperate prayer. They had only one another.
Personally, I am not an adamant there-is-no-God atheist, but I’m also not anticipating any particular afterlife. I’ve watched both believers and non-believers face the reality of death, and I can’t see that it makes any real difference in how well they deal with the experience. One misperception I think a lot of believers share, though, is that idea that unbelievers could believe if they just wanted to. I don’t think it’s that simple. Some things, to some people, are just unbelievable.
I will add that I would much rather go to a nonsectarian funeral than one based in a religion with a lot of dogma. Too often, church funerals are more about propping up the dogma than about the life of the deceased. If we’re just going to talk about Jesus and Heaven and God’s plan, it could be anybody in the casket.
Eric Klinenberg previews some ideas from his forthcoming book on 2020 “the year everything changed”, by claiming that we’re not fully appreciating what the pandemic did to us: It isn’t just that people died and the rest of us missed out on a lot of experiences. More fundamentally, the pandemic shook our faith in our whole society.
I’ve come to think of our current condition as a kind of long Covid, a social disease that intensified a range of chronic problems and instilled the belief that the institutions we’d been taught to rely on are unworthy of our trust. The result is a durable crisis in American civic life. … [L]oneliness was never the core problem. It was, rather, the sense among so many different people that they’d been left to navigate the crisis on their own. How do you balance all the competing demands of health, money, sanity? Where do you get tests, masks, medicine? How do you go to work — or even work from home — when your kids can’t go to school?
The answer was always the same: Figure it out. Stimulus checks and small-business loans helped. But while other countries built trust and solidarity, America — both during and after 2020 — left millions to fend for themselves.
Last year, Mary Wood got reprimanded for teaching Ta Nahisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me in her AP English class in Chapin, SC. This year, she has read all the relevant rules, checked all the boxes, and is trying again.
To me, Wood represents a living refutation of the “Great Man” theory of history. When big waves wash across society, like the anti-woke movement of the last few years, lots and lots of ordinary people either resist or submit. And that’s what determines how it all shakes out.
Remember when rising healthcare spending was going to swamp our whole economy? Something happened right about the time ObamaCare kicked in — claiming cause-and-effect is probably a bit much at this point — and healthcare’s percentage of the economy leveled off.
and you also might be interested in …
The Trump trials are still mostly on hold while we wait for judges to decide things. Reporters keep telling us that something could happen any minute on a variety of topics, but I’m going to wait until something actually happens before I comment again.
Idaho was trying to repeal its ban against public subsidies for religious schools, and then a spokesman for Satanic Idaho spoke in favor of the bill.
I look forward to the opportunity to be able to start a Satanic K-12 performing arts school, and being able to have access to the same funds that any other religious school would have.
Apparently the proposal is on hold now. God alone knows when we’ll get to see that Satanic performing-arts school.
Pregnancy from rape has long been a headache for the anti-abortion movement. If some man forces you to have sex, you get pregnant, and then the government forces you to spend nine months turning your rapist’s DNA into a baby — that doesn’t sound much like “freedom”, does it? And even if the man eventually gets sent to jail, his genes have already won the struggle to survive for another generation. So the government has validated rape as a viable evolutionary strategy.
Over the years, forced-pregnancy defenders have dealt with this problem in a variety of ways. Back in 2012, US Senate candidate Todd Akin just denied it altogether: Rape pregnancies don’t really happen, he claimed, because
If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.
Sadly for him, that appeal to biological wishful thinking didn’t go over well, and he lost a very winnable seat in Missouri to Claire McCaskill by 15%.
Also in 2012, Senate candidate Rich Mourdock of Indiana confronted the challenge in more religious terms:
I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize life is that gift from God, and I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.
But that didn’t fly either. PIcturing rape as just another one of God’s mysterious ways, and even implicitly suggesting a woman ought to be grateful for a “gift” that bears an unfortunate resemblance to her worst nightmares — it was too much of a stretch, even in a heavily Evangelical state like Indiana. Mourdock lost to Democrat Joe Donnelly by 6%, and the Republicans missed their shot to control the Senate.
By 2021, then, Republicans had learned a few lessons. So after a six-week abortion ban with no rape exception took effect in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott came at the issue from a different angle, one more in line with the GOP’s tough-on-crime image: Forced pregnancy wasn’t going to be a problem for much longer, because Texas was going to eliminate rape. How could any feminist be against that?
Texas will work tirelessly to make sure that we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas by aggressively going out and arresting them and prosecuting them
According to their study, 26,313 rape-related pregnancies occurred in Texas during the 16 months after the state legislature banned abortion. That figure comprises nearly 45% of all such pregnancies estimated to occur among the nine ban states that did not make a legal exception for rape.
That’s 26K Texas women who have had their most basic freedoms taken away from them.
Here’s a suggestion for Governor Abbott: How about trying this in the opposite order? Eliminate rape first, and then the grateful women of Texas might be ready to listen to your ideas about abortion.
While we wait for the Supreme Court to rule on Trump’s eligibility for office, consider the legislator-eligibility case in Oregon: The rules of the state senate require a 2/3rds quorum to do any business, which means that a minority of senators can delay any bill they don’t like by just not showing up.
Republicans have been the minority in Oregon for some while, so walkouts are seen as a partisan tactic. Jay Kuo notes
Republicans in Oregon began walking out in 2019 and didn’t really stop. They did it again in 2020, and again in 2021. By summer of 2023, they had walked out a total of seven times in four years.
In 2022, voters overwhelmingly passed Measure 113, which says that legislators with 10 or more unexcused absences are ineligible for reelection. But in 2023, Republicans shut down the senate for six weeks to stop an abortion-rights law. As a result Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade ruled ten of the 11 Republican senators ineligible to appear on the 2024 or 2026 ballot.
The Republicans sued, and Thursday the state supreme court unanimously upheld the exclusion. So it can happen. As Kuo notes, there’s no reason some other Republican couldn’t win one of those 10 seats.
But it might give serious pause to any future senator thinking about walking out but actually planning to stay in office longer than one term.
Judd Legum’s Popular Information blog documents just how far off the deep end Moms for Liberty have gone and how crazy the response has been in Florida. The Indian River County school district has begun drawing clothes onto naked characters in children’s books, including Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen. The book was published in 1970 and was named a Caldecott Honor Book, but apparently it’s been corrupting Indian River children for the last half century. The whole article reads like parody, but I don’t think it is.
While we’re talking about Florida, the state where American freedom goes to die, Gov. DeSantis is backing a law to make lab-grown meat illegal. A senator promoting the bill, Jay Collins of Tampa, gives this odd justification:
Let’s look at what you’re doing here. You’re growing cells in a cultivated petri dish and creating protein to eat. There are many ethical boundaries that this steps in and frankly, over.
I mean, if you believe cattle-raising is an important industry that state government ought to protect from competition, that’s at least a coherent thought that reflects certain political realities. But the whole point of lab-grown meat is for people to be able to eat a hamburger without participating in the death of a conscious being, and (one hopes) without the strain our meat habit currently inflicts on the environment. And that’s unethical? Plus: Of all the lab-produced things that wind up in our food, this is the one that bothers you?
The group that got the Supreme Court to outlaw affirmative action in civilian universities now has a lawsuit challenging affirmative action at West Point, the Army’s primary officer-training institution. Students for Fair Admission has been seeking a restraining order that would stop race-based admission practices at West Point until the lawsuit could be resolved. Friday, the Supreme Court denied that request in a terse order saying that “the record before this court is underdeveloped”, and giving no hint as to its views on the merits of the case. Vox’ Ian Millhiser elaborates.
the Supreme Court has historically shown a great deal of deference to the military. As the Court said in Gilligan v. Morgan (1973), “[I]t is difficult to conceive of an area of governmental activity in which the courts have less competence” than questions involving “the composition, training, equipping, and control of a military force.” … So there’s a real chance that this Court, despite its recent opinion in Harvard, could decide that the judiciary’s long tradition of deferring to the military on personnel and related matters should continue to hold in the West Point case.
The military has long been a bit ahead of the rest of the country on racial issues. For example: An executive order from President Truman in 1948 said:
It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.
Brown v Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that struck down “separate but equal” public schools, didn’t happen until 1954, and segregation in public accommodations (i.e., businesses open to the public) wasn’t banned until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
As Trump left the courtroom after his testimony, he remarked loudly, “This is not America. Not America. This is not America.” The bad news for the former president is that it is. This is the America where the rule of law still holds and where he too is required to abide by it.
This week everybody was talking about E. Jean Carroll
Friday, after about three hours of deliberation, a New York jury ordered Donald Trump to pay E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million: $7.3 million for the emotional distress Trump caused her, $11 million for the damage to her reputation, and $65 million in punitive damages. The punitive damages are there because Trump just won’t shut up about Carroll; a previous case that cost him $5 million hasn’t discouraged him from continuing to attack her in his rallies and on social media. Maybe, the jury figured, $65 million will be more effective.
I can’t quite imagine what audience Trump thought he was playing for in this trial: muttering during Carroll’s testimony, stomping out during her attorney’s summation speech, jousting with the judge, obsessively continuing the defamation over Truth Social during the trial, and so on. Obviously, this behavior didn’t impress the jury or endear him to the judge. I’ve got to think that most female voters are thinking: “He sexually assaults this woman, repeatedly drags her reputation through the mud, inspires his cultists to harass and threaten her for years … and he thinks he’s the victim.” I suppose some men might be happy that some other man is finally standing up to all the uppity women in the world, but I doubt they’re a winning political coalition.
And of course, the main thing Trump’s antics did was draw attention to the case, which (to put it mildly) does not cast his image in the best light. He has reminded us not just of Carroll’s accusations (which now, in the State of New York, legally have to be considered facts), but also of all the other women who have told similar stories about him and stuck by them, and of the Access Hollywood tape, where he bragged that he can grab women by the pussy and get away with it.
I mean, if you want to badly enough, I suppose you can believe that all 26 women (who have no apparent connection other than being women) are lying, and that Trump’s taped confession was just “locker room talk” to impress Billy Bush. But seriously. After you’ve tied your brain into a knot like that, can you do anything else with it?
In his first response to the verdict on Truth Social, Trump posted: “THIS IS NOT AMERICA!” Joyce Vance has the right response:
The bad news for the former president is that it is. This is the America where the rule of law still holds and where he too is required to abide by it. I look forward to more of this.
Lots of people are wondering whether Carroll will ever see this money or if Trump will ever pay it. What you may not realize is that those are two different questions. Consider the $5 million a jury awarded Carroll last year. Trump is appealing that verdict, so Carroll hasn’t gotten the money yet. But Trump has had to pay it: He posted the money to a court-controlled account that will be distributed to Carroll after Trump runs out of appeals, assuming none of them succeed.
So no matter how long Trump strings out this $83.3 million verdict, he’s going to have to put up a big chunk of the money fairly soon.
I often point out when Fox News ignores some story that breaks its preferred narrative, so I have to give it credit here. Shortly after the verdict was announced, I flipped over to Bret Baier’s show, where famous torture-memo lawyer John Yoo commented:
The whole point of this unprecedented damages is to tell Donald Trump to shut up. … It’s not just that he should stop insulting Jean Carroll, but he has to stop disrespecting the justice system.
Their take wasn’t terribly different from the one I was hearing on MSNBC and CNN.
I can’t believe I’m writing this, but we’re waiting on judges to rule in two more serious Trump cases. I mean, any other politician in the country would be ruined by the jury verdicts in the Carroll case, but that case is less “serious” because it only concerns Donald Trump’s behavior as an individual, and doesn’t directly affect the institution of the presidency or the rule of law in the United States.
In the Carroll case, I stand at a distance and reflect on one man’s shameless lack of any moral code. But Trump’s sweeping claim of presidential immunity could determine whether I continue to live in a democracy. That claim arose in an attempt to delay Trump’s federal January 6 trial, previously scheduled to being in March. The case can’t proceed until the legal system decides whether Trump can be tried at all.
At first, it looked like the appeals court wanted to get this done quickly. They held a hearing on January 9, and all three judges seemed skeptical of the whole immunity idea. But nearly three weeks have gone by without a ruling. MSNBC legal blogger Jordan Rubin speculates what might be going on: The court would like to present one unanimous opinion, with agreement on the justification and not just the outcome. That would make a clearer statement to the public and stand up better if it’s appealed to the Supreme Court. But the judges are having trouble ironing out their differences.
The other judge we’re waiting on is Arthur Engoron, who is expected to make a ruling on the New York civil fraud trial against the Trump Organization sometime in the coming week. As in the Carroll trial, Trump’s guilt has already been established in a summary judgment, and the recent trial was just to assess damages. The NY attorney general is asking for a $370 million payment and restrictions on the Trump family’s ability to do business in New York.
As noted above, Trump can still appeal a judgment he doesn’t like, but he can’t avoid putting up a large sum of money while appeals play out.
Also pending is whether or not Trump is disqualified from holding the presidency again by the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause. The case has made it to the Supreme Court, which will hearing arguments on February 8.
Deborah Pearlstein urges the Court to give the country a clear answer to the hard questions, rather than find an easy way out.
No matter what the Court does next, its popular legitimacy will be sorely tested. Tens of millions of Americans are going to believe that it got the answer wrong, and that the result of the 2024 election is at best unfair because of it. Punting will only make already bad matters for American constitutional democracy worse. For there is no legitimacy, or democratic stability, in governing institutions that do nothing but race to see who can avoid taking responsibility for the hardest issues for the longest time. … In an era of rising antidemocratic sentiments in the United States and around the world, constitutional democracies have to be able to show that they are capable of fulfilling the most basic functions of governance. In this case, at the very least, that means deciding to decide.
She makes this interesting observation: The legal arguments for the various outcomes run counter to the justices’ political leanings. (For example: Conservatives typically favor an “originalist” reading of the Constitution, which would disqualify Trump.) So it would look very bad for the Court if the decision fell along the usual 6-3 partisan lines.
I heard on TV that the initial note from the Carroll jury used the abbreviation M, which they had to explain meant “million”. I was reminded of an exchange in the opening episode of The Beverley Hillbillies. Jed is explaining to his skeptical cousin Pearl that some city guy has bought his swamp for between 25 and 100 of “some new kind of dollars”. When Pearl protests that “There ain’t no new kind of dollars”, Jed asks: “What’d he call ’em Granny?”
And Granny says, “Milly-an dollars.”
News channels occasionally interview Trump’s former lawyers about what’s going on with his cases. Sometimes they are still on his side and sometimes not. But the networks never tell us a central piece of information for evaluating the lawyer’s opinion: Did Trump pay his legal bill or not? Is the lawyer talking about a paying former client or a deadbeat former client? Seems like that would make a difference.
and the Gaza War
The International Court of Justice made a preliminary ruling in the genocide case that South Africa has brought against Israel. Vox has a good summary.
The ICJ is the body specified by the Convention Against Genocide (a treaty signed by both Israel and South Africa) for adjudicating disputes about whether the parties are fulfilling their treaty commitments. As such, the ICJ ruled that it has jurisdiction to hear this case and that South Africa has standing to file it. Israel had asked the ICJ to dismiss the case without further investigation, which it declined to do. Instead, the ruling finds the South Africa’s claims “plausible”. Any final judgment will require a more detailed investigation and could be years away.
The ruling describes the dire conditions inside Gaza, and says
[T]he catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip is at serious risk of deteriorating further before the Court renders its final judgment.
South Africa had asked for an injunction requiring an immediate ceasefire, which the court did not provide. It did place a number of limitations on Israel’s Gaza campaign, “to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip”, and instructed Israel to preserve all evidence that could be relevant to a genocide investigation.
The immediate practical effect of the ruling is likely to be small, because ICJ rulings are enforced by the UN Security Council, where the US can veto any substantive penalties against Israel. But the ruling further isolates Israel and the US from world opinion.
The war continues to ooze outward, with a rising risk that the US will get drawn into a larger conflict with Iran. A drone hit a US outpost in Jordan early Sunday morning, killing three US soldiers and wounding more than 30. BBC summarizes the situation:
Since mid-October, US military installations in Iraq and Syria have repeatedly come under attack by Iran-backed militias, injuring a growing number of US soldiers. The US has repeatedly retaliated by striking targets in both countries.
Iran has denied involvement, but a group it supports, Islamic Resistance in Iraq, has claimed responsibility. President Biden has pledged to “hold all those responsible to account”.
The outpost is called Tower 22, and is in the far north-east corner of Jordan, near the border with both Syria and Iraq. It is part of a deployment of around 30,000 US troops in the region, mapped by CNN.
Trump is saying the kind of stuff he always says: Bad things wouldn’t happen if he were president, because he is “strong” while Biden is “weak”. But he hasn’t specified what he would do differently. He alternately sounds isolationist and like he would strike back harder.
and the border
This week House Republicans have been demonstrating why it’s so hard to work out any compromise with them: They don’t actually want anything other than power. Their apparent policy positions are just postures they strike for Fox News and for their base voters.
The Biden administration actually does want something: more military aid to Ukraine, which is fending off an invasion by Trump’s pal Vladimir Putin. Originally, Biden hoped to get that aid included in budget deal at the beginning of the fiscal year (October 1). Most Senate Republicans and about half of House Republicans claim to back Ukraine aid, but it didn’t make the first FY 2024 continuing resolution. Or the second one in November.
Back in October, Biden repackaged Ukraine aid with Israel aid, figuring that strong Republican support for Israel would put it over the goal line. But no deal. He included money for increased enforcement at the Mexican border, because Republicans appeared to care about that. No deal: Republicans said they wanted policy changes, not just more money.
OK, then. Biden and Senate Republicans have negotiated policy changes that cause Democrats some real heartburn:
Components of the deal include a new authority that allows the president to shut down the border between ports of entry when unlawful crossings reach high levels, reforming the asylum system to resolve cases in a shorter timeframe, and expediting work permits.
Under the proposed deal, the Department of Homeland Security would be granted new emergency authority to shut down the border if daily average migrants crossing unlawfully reach 4,000 over a one-week span. Certain migrants would be allowed to stay if they proved to be fleeing torture or persecution in their countries.
It’s impossible to close the border to asylum seekers because of current law, despite multiple attempts by Trump to do so while he was in office.
Republican senators like Lindsey Graham are telling their colleagues in the House that this is a better deal than they are likely to get if Trump takes office in 2025, because Democrats would likely filibuster. (But of course Trump is going to be a dictator in his second term, so why should Republicans worry about what Congress will or won’t do?)
But there’s still a problem: Republicans don’t want to do something about the border, they want to have the worst possible situation so that they can blame Biden for it. Trump wants the border as a campaign issue. If the situation were to improve, that would be bad news for him. (In general, good news for America is bad news for Trump. He is openly rooting for an economic crash, and seems downright cheerful while predicting a “major terrorist attack“. The fact that the stock market continues to set records is an unfortunate development for him.)
So Trump instructed Speaker Johnson to torpedo any border deal, no matter what is in it. “It’s not going to happen, and I’ll fight it all the way.” Mitch McConnell said: “When we started this, the border united us and Ukraine divided us. The politics on this have changed.
Mitt Romney, who still has one more year in the Senate, made a moral critique:
The fact that [Trump] would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is really appalling. Someone running for president ought to try and get the problem solved as opposed to saying, “Hey, save that problem, don’t solve it, let me take credit for solving it later.”
I think if Democrats were holding up funding for the defense of three allies unless we got an unrelated thing, and then we said no to the very thing we demanded because our nominee told us to kill it, that the media would justifiably go thermonuclear on us.
Speaking of the border, what’s going on in Texas is truly outrageous. (And Dan Fromkin wants to know why the major media outlets are ignoring it. ) Texas has recently taken a variety of actions that essentially claim that it — and not the federal government — controls its border with Mexico.
Texas erected razor wire barriers along a river in Eagle Pass, Texas, that physically prevented federal Border Patrol agents from entering the area, processing migrants in those areas, or providing assistance to drowning victims. According to the DOJ, the Border Patrol was unable to aid an “unconscious subject floating on top of the water” because of these barriers.
Federal law, moreover, provides that Border Patrol agents may “have access to private lands, but not dwellings, for the purpose of patrolling the border to prevent the illegal entry of aliens into the United States.” So Texas claimed the power to use razor wire to prevent federal officers from performing their duties, in direct violation of a federal statute.
Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in the federal government’s favor, but only 5-4. The order was very terse, so we have no idea why Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh weren’t on board. Do they really want to reinterpret the supremacy clause of the Constitution?
Even so, you might think a 5-4 Supreme Court decision would end the matter, but apparently not.
On Monday the Supreme Court said the federal government has the authority to remove razor wire that Texas installed at the southern border. Homeland Security said Texas had until Friday to give federal authorities access to Eagle Pass. But Governor Abbott is doubling down saying he’ll increase state patrol of the border, adding more barriers and more razor wire.
Texas has two related disputes with the federal government: The feds want to remove a floating barrier Texas has put in the Rio Grande, and a Texas law (set to take effect in March) would give state judges the power to issue deportation orders.
On his excellent blog Popular Information, Judd Legum goes into more detail, explaining how Governor Abbott is recreating the nullification crisis from the Jackson administration.
I forget where I first heard this suggestion, but if we simultaneously let Texas secede and admit Puerto Rico, we don’t have to change the flag.
and the 2024 campaign
The Democratic side of the New Hampshire primary was muddled, because the DNC wants South Carolina to be the first primary. So NH was unofficial, Joe Biden was not on the ballot, Biden did not campaign in NH, and a bunch of Democratic-leaning independents probably voted on the Republican side for Haley. Nonetheless, Biden’s write-in campaign got 64% of the vote, easily beating back challenges from Rep. Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson, whose campaigns never caught fire.
I forgot to mention last week that the general public is also starting to catch on: consumer sentiment has jumped in recent months.
After losing in New Hampshire, Nikki Haley has just one possible winning strategy (other than hoping that some court takes Trump out of the race; see above): Her continued presence in the race annoys Trump, and if she needles him enough he might act out in ways that even his supporters will have to see as crazy.
This week she characterized Trump’s notably ungracious victory speech in New Hampshire as a “temper tantrum” and called him “unhinged”. She’s also alluded to his apparent cognitive decline: “We’ve seen him get confused.“
For some time I’ve been pointing to the media magnifying symptoms of Biden’s age while minimizing Trump’s far more serious mental glitches. Apparently they needed some Republican’s permission before they could raise Trump’s cognitive issues.
If I were running Haley’s campaign, I would want her to hammer on the point that he won’t debate because he’s not up to the challenge. Make it a real playground put-up-or-shut-up thing. I double-dog dare you to debate me.
Since Trump’s New Hampshire victory made his nomination seem inevitable, news-network talking heads have been speculating about his VP choice. What’s weird to me is that hardly anybody is saying the obvious: Trump thinks he made a mistake picking Mike Pence, because Pence eventually realized he had a moral code and a responsibility to America. So he didn’t help Trump stay in office after losing the 2020 election. Like Meat Loaf, Pence would do anything for Trump, but he wouldn’t do that.
Trump doesn’t want to make that same mistake again. So what he is mainly looking for is someone with no moral code, no loyalty to America, and no will of his or her own that might conflict with Trump’s will.
In All the King’s Men, the Boss explained his choice of the comically unctuous Tiny Duffy as lieutenant governor: “You get somebody somebody can trust maybe, and you got to sit up nights worrying whether you are the somebody. You get Tiny, and you can get a good night’s sleep.”
If you’ve ever wondered where those media takes on “real Americans” come from, Tom the Dancing Bug explains:
It looks like Taylor Swift is headed to the Super Bowl. Apparently some fans are annoyed with how often the cameras show us Swift in a luxury box at Kansas City Chief games, but I’m amused. From what little I know of Swift’s biography, she missed a lot of typical schoolgirl stuff while she was working to make it in the music business. Now, in her 30s, she finally gets the quintessential high school experience of rooting for her boyfriend’s football team and wearing his team jacket. I’m happy for her.
The orthodox theory holds that a public opinion constitutes a moral judgment on a group of facts. The theory I am suggesting is that, in the present state of education, a public opinion is primarily a moralized and codified version of the facts. I am arguing that the pattern of stereotypes at the center of our codes largely determines what group of facts we shall see, and in what light we shall see them
This week everybody was talking about Iowa and New Hampshire
The Iowa caucuses happened last Monday, with Donald Trump getting a little over 50% of the Republican vote. How you interpret that depends on how you frame Trump’s role in the GOP. If you think of him as a presidential candidate among other presidential candidates, it’s a very strong result; he has more support than all his rivals combined. But if you frame him as the incumbent leader of the party, it’s a rather weak result. Imagine, for example, how the press will cover Biden if a Democratic primary is held somewhere, and he barely clears 50%.
In any case, nobody should attach too much importance to the result, because we’re talking about very few people. Just 110K Iowa Republicans turned out, out of 752K registered Republicans statewide and over 2 million total registered voters. That was down from 187K Republican caucus voters in 2016.
Last week I said that if DeSantis finished third in Iowa, he should drop out. He finished second, and dropped out yesterday anyway. His withdrawal doesn’t seem all that consequential because he didn’t have a lot of support anyway (that’s why he’s dropping out), and it’s not clear which way his voters will go. If they supported DeSantis because they liked Trump’s policies but realize that the man himself is a threat to democracy, they’ll go to Haley. But if they just wanted a younger Trump, they’ll go to Trump.
I would interpret the Iowa result this way: If you were hoping for the Republican Party to reject Trump on their own, you need to accept that it’s not going to happen.
But even that outcome wouldn’t lead to a broader Trump defeat. NH is ideal terrain for Haley, and many Biden-leaning independents may cross over to vote for her. But that’s not a winning formula going forward.
There really is only one scenario where a NH loss leads to Trump’s undoing, and that depends on him: Everybody will be watching him, so if he responds to an unexpected loss with a racist, sexist, and generally unhinged temper tantrum, even Republicans might begin to wonder about his sanity.
Speaking in Concord, NH on Friday, Trump mixed up Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley, claiming that Haley was in charge of security on January 6. (His usual lie assigns that role to Pelosi.) But we’re supposed to worry about Biden’s mental acuity.
The other Trump news is all legal: The second E. Jean Carroll defamation trial got underway. The judge, following proper legal procedure, is not letting Trump re-argue something already decided by a previous jury: that Trump really did sexually assault Carroll.
Trump’s “defense”, if you want to call it that, is to replay the greatest hits of toxic masculinity. A standard claim to throw at rape victims is “Didn’t you actually enjoy it?” Well, CNN’s Joey Jackson summarized the Trump attorney’s opening statement: You weren’t injured by Trump’s defamation, you benefited from it.
It was sort of like hey, listen, be thankful Trump made you famous, right? The reality is that what do we have to do with social media and mean tweets that you get on social media. If you take on a person apt to be the president, guess what? You’re in the position you want to be. You’re on TV all the time. Emotional pain and damages, what are you talking about?
When Trump was in the courtroom, he kept muttering and commenting loud enough for the jury to hear, until the judge threatened to remove him. On the campaign trail and on social media, he keeps repeating the remarks that the previous jury had determined were defamatory.
Trump’s behavior underlines the need for substantial punitive damages, over and above Carroll’s emotional suffering and loss of reputation. The point of punitive damages is to make the defamation stop, which the $5 million original award has failed to accomplish.
This moment in the Trump trials reminds me of the period between the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 and the first ObamaCare insurance policies in 2014. The program was deeply unpopular then, basically because Republicans could say whatever they wanted about “death panels” or whatever, and ordinary people didn’t have any experience that could prove them wrong. Today, though, if you talk about repealing ObamaCare, millions of people understand that they would lose their health insurance. At its nadir in late 2013, only 33% of Americans had a favorable opinion of ObamaCare, while 59% do now.
Similarly, today everybody knows that Trump has been indicted, but since the cases haven’t gone to trial (largely due to Trump’s stalling tactics), he can say whatever he wants about the evidence, the prosecutors, and the judges.
If you live in the Fox News echo chamber, you’ve heard Trump’s claims, but you know nothing about the seriousness of the crimes he’s accused of or the strength of the evidence against him. It’s all just a witchhunt, a “weaponization” of the Justice Department and the legal system. He didn’t do anything wrong. If he did do something wrong, everybody does it. And if everybody doesn’t do it, there would still be “bedlam” if he were ever held to account.
But despite Trump’s stalling, at least one case is likely to go to trial before the election, and probably result in a conviction. That will be harder to spin away.
BTW: Think about that stalling. If Trump really believed that he had done nothing wrong and the indictments were all a coordinated political witchhunt, he’d be eager to go to trial so he could poke holes in the flimsy evidence against him. When a jury found him innocent after some minimal deliberation, he could crow about being vindicated. But in the real world, Trump knows he’s guilty and that the government has the goods on him, so stalling until he’s president again (and has the tools to obstruct justice) is his best bet.
and the Gaza War
The shock of the October 7 attacks by Hamas welded together a lot of people with divergent views. In Israel, a unity government was formed, a startling departure from recent years when Netanyahu has hung on by finding allies to cobble together narrow majorities in the Knesset, and a new election is needed every year or two. The Biden administration also signed on to the coalition, and has stood with Israel whenever it has been challenged in the UN and elsewhere.
The war is increasingly becoming a slog, which is causing the world to forget Israel’s October 7 suffering and focus instead on the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Meanwhile, military operations are failing to find and rescue the hostages, and the goal of eradicating Hamas seems ever more distant. Polls indicate that Netanyahu’s goose is cooked once elections are held, which the government doesn’t want to hold during wartime. And that makes critics wonder how committed the prime minister is to ending the war.
and something you probably didn’t know you should care about
Probably the words “Chevron doctrine” make your eyes glaze over. But they shouldn’t. In the featured post, I try to explain why the Supreme Court’s looming revision of Chevron means that six corporate-tool foxes are about the seize control of the agencies that regulate all of America’s hen houses.
We used to think the power sector was really, really hard. The power sector was the biggest source of [carbon] emissions in the US. Then cheap wind and solar happened (and we switched from coal to natural gas) and very rapidly power emissions fell.
And then … transportation became the most polluting sector of the US economy. But what’s about to happen in the next few years [as EV prices drop] is that transportation’s about to fall to second place, and industry will be the most polluting sector of the economy.
And what I suspect will happen is, just as happened with the power sector and the transportation sector, is that once industry is the most polluting sector of the economy, and people really start to focus on it, we’re going to see all these easy-to-abate emissions, that we just haven’t really noticed yet. And we’re going to get rid of them really quickly. And so, to some degree steel, chemicals, [agriculture], these are huge, challenging problems. On the other hand, they’re challenging problems because we just haven’t paid attention to them yet.
Meanwhile, there’s one fossil-fuel-reducing project that has bipartisan support: ethanol made from corn. If only it weren’t such a bad idea. If, rather than fueling internal-combustion-engine cars with ethanol, we charged EVs with solar energy, one acre of solar panels could power as much transportation as 100 acres of corn. At least that’s what 200 science faculty at 31 Iowa colleges and universities think.
“Everyone on this stage is committed to a future of net-zero income tax payments.”
Did you hear that Biden has decriminalized crime? That’s one of the many things you don’t know because you don’t watch Fox News. Fortunately, Kat Abu does.
and let’s close with something fake
When you work hard to get things right and not be fooled by misinformation, once in a while it feels good to revel in complete fraud. Kueez.com has collected viral photos that weren’t all they appeared to be. Some are amusing, some are head-shaking, and others are laugh-out-loud funny. Probably my favorite is a water-surrounded rock and a castle getting photoshopped together.
The actual rock is in Thailand and the castle in Germany, but the combination has the single quality all successful misinformation must have: You look at it and you want it to be real.
Now, we got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best, power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on.
This week everybody was talking about the Yemen attacks
Thursday, the US and the UK, supported by a number of other allies, launched air attacks on the Houthi rebels in Yemen. If you responded to that news by asking “The Who rebels Where?”, I sympathize. Yemen is a pretty much godforsaken place south of Saudi Arabia, where the Red Sea turns a corner and becomes the Gulf of Aden. You probably don’t own anything imported from Yemen. It has few resources, it’s running out of water, and its people are desperately poor.
Yemen also has a civil war that’s been going since 2014, because no matter how poor a nation is, it can always afford more guns. There’s a Sunni government backed by the Saudis, and the Shia Houthi rebels are backed by Iran. The Economist reports:
The UN estimates that 223,000 people have died from hunger and lack of medical care since the war began. 80% of the population now lives in poverty.
Last week I talked about terrorist strategy, where sometimes it makes sense to provoke someone much stronger than you in hopes that their over-reaction will win you international sympathy and new recruits. That seems to be what is happening here. The US doesn’t want to get involved in the Yemen war, where there really are no good guys. But for weeks the Houthis have been using Iran-supplied drones and missiles to attack ships in the Red Sea, which is one of the world’s busiest and most important trade routes. (More geography: The Suez canal sits at the other end of the Red Sea, so the Red Sea is the most efficient way for ships to pass between Europe and India or East Asia. It’s also how oil tankers from the Persian Gulf get to Europe.)
The Houthi attacks were starting to have a significant effect on world trade, so the Biden administration felt like it had to do something.
But the attacks are unlikely to end the Houthi rebellion, or even to deter it much. The Houthis have already endured much worse at the hands of the Saudis. At best, we have destroyed a chunk of their offensive capacity, so their attacks on shipping will have to die down until Iran can resupply them. The Economist again:
Conflict with the West could have other benefits for them. Their supposed blockade of Israel has already won them new admiration across the Arab world, tapping into pro-Palestinian sentiment at a time when Arab states are feckless bystanders to the war in Gaza. Being targeted by America, while anti-Americanism is running high because of Mr Biden’s support for Israel, will add to their popularity.
and the looming government shutdown
The observation that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it is attributed to Santayana, and the underlying idea goes back to Cicero. Usually when we quote that, we’re talking about things that happened decades or centuries ago, but in the current situation “history” is what happened in September and November, which we are now repeating.
The short version is that Republicans have a small majority (down to two seats now) in the House, while Democrats control the Senate and the White House. In order for the government to spend money (which it needs to do to keep the doors open), all three have to agree. MAGA radicals in the House believe that this position should allow them to dictate large cuts in federal spending (which are popular in the abstract, but unpopular when implemented). Democrats disagree, believing that the public will blame Republicans for any pain caused by a government shutdown. So they’re not inclined to roll over and accept the MAGA-demanded cuts, which probably can’t even pass the House.
In September, Speaker McCarthy saw this reality and negotiated a continuing resolution which more-or-less left federal spending intact until November. That act of rationality could not be allowed to stand, so MAGA Republicans forced McCarthy out. After much turmoil, he was replaced by Speaker Mike Johnson, whose conservative bona fides are much stronger than McCarthy’s were.
But reality is reality, so Johnson had to make a similar deal in November, cutting the federal-spending can into two pieces and kicking them to different points on the calendar. The first can comes up Friday, and reality still has not changed.
Last night, Johnson and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer released the text of a continuing resolution that would kick both cans into March. The House “Freedom” Caucus is outraged again, but what it will do is unclear.
and the Trump trials
Trial season is gearing up, and it’s hard to tell the players without a program. Closing arguments in New York State’s civil fraud trial against the Trump Organization happened last week. It’s a bench trial, so now we’re waiting on the judge rather than a jury. Judge Engoron has already issued a summary judgment that the Trumps committed fraud, so the trial was largely to assess damages.
Engoron will consider whether to grant the attorney general’s request to fine Trump $370 million, ban him from the state’s real estate industry for life and bar him from serving as the officer or director of a New York corporation.
Engoron knows Trump is looking for grounds to appeal, so he will be very careful in how he justifies his judgment. Observers are predicting a decision in “weeks” rather than days or months.
The second E. Jean Carroll defamation trial starts tomorrow. Basically, Carroll says Trump raped her in a department store dressing room in 1995. Trump met those charges (in a book Carroll wrote) with insults, so Carroll sued him for defamation. The statute of limitations had passed for accusing him of the original assault, but New York changed the law in 2022. So she sued for damages from the assault and for insults he made after he left office. She won a $5 million settlement, which Trump is appealing.
Now the original defamation suit is coming to trial, having been delayed by all sorts of wrangling about when presidents can be sued. The judge is refusing to let Trump relitigate issues resolved in the first trial, such as whether the assault happened and whether his comments were defamatory.
We’re waiting for a federal appeals court to weigh in on whether presidential immunity prevents the government from trying Trump on January 6 charges. They are unlikely to agree with Trump on this, but how exactly they refute his claim of immunity will be important. Also important: how long they take to rule and how much time they allow for an appeal to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court has agreed to review the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision that Trump is disqualified from the presidency by the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment. Oral arguments are scheduled for February 8. It’s hard to imagine this Court kicking Trump off the ballot, but it’s not clear how exactly they’ll get around the text of the 14th Amendment.
Elected Republicans almost universally ignore all this. It’s just become accepted that Trump will goad on his violent supporters, and that crossing Trump will entail physical risk. It’s the modern version of the Nazi brownshirts.
but I wrote about the Evangelical heresy of Christian Nationalism
The Iowa Caucuses are tonight. I can’t remember the last time these were a smaller deal. Democrats aren’t having one, and Trump will obviously win the Republican caucuses. The only suspense is whether Nikki Haley can finish second. If she does, Ron DeSantis should drop out.
The Hunter Biden circus continues. Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee debated citing Hunter Biden for contempt because he refused a subpoena to be interviewed behind closed doors and insisted on testifying in public. Who should show up for this hearing but Hunter himself?
The debate went forward, underlining what a farce it all is. Republicans would say that the American people deserve answers from Hunter, and Democrats would respond: “There he is. Let’s ask him”, which the Republicans would refuse to do.
I’m adding this Oversight Committee Democrat, Texas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, to my list of politicians I would pay money to hear. Watch this clip from Wednesday night’s Chris Hayes show.
Under international humanitarian law, proving allegations of genocide is incredibly difficult. And even if South Africa does prove that Israel is committing genocide — or that it is failing to prosecute incitement to genocide or prevent genocide from occurring — ICJ decisions aren’t necessarily easy to enforce. But these initial arguments aren’t yet entering that complicated territory.Instead, they’re about whether the ICJ will issue a preliminary order for Israel to stop its onslaught in Gaza immediately; the court will rule on that issue after hearing arguments from South Africa and Israel Thursday and Friday. Though Israel could ignore that ruling if it’s issued, it could make Israel’s allies less inclined to support the war.
The word “genocide” rings loudly in our imagination. We think of Rwanda, Bosnia, the Armenians, the Trail of Tears and, of course, the Holocaust. I have heard many people balk at the suggestion that Gaza could be experiencing genocide. The Holocaust, after all, wiped out over 60 percent of European Jews. Israel’s war — instigated, no less, by the murder of Jews — has killed about 1 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza. One percent is terrible, of course, but genocide?
Under the genocide convention, though, the term describes an intent to wipe out a defined group of people and taking steps to achieve that end. There is no threshold of death, or proportion of death, that must be reached. It is possible to kill a relatively small number of people, but still commit an act of genocide.
Saturday, the people of Taiwan shrugged off Chinese threats and elected another president from the Democratic Progressive Party.
The result shows voters backing the DPP’s view that Taiwan is a de facto sovereign nation that should bolster defenses against China’s threats and deepen relations with fellow democratic countries, even if that means economic punishment or military intimidation by Beijing.
It is also a further snub to eight years of increasingly strongarm tactics towards Taiwan under Xi who has vowed that the island’s eventual “reunification” with the mainland is “a historical inevitability”.
Yeniifer Alvarez was an uninsured woman living in a part of central Texas without good health care, particularly prenatal care. She was overweight, diabetic, and had a history of pulmonary edema “in which the lungs fill with fluid, that strains the heart and can be fatal”.
Her pregnancy was obviously risky, and a wealthier or better-insured woman would have been under constant observation. In a state with different laws, a precautionary abortion might have been performed, under the theory that the risks were too high. When the crisis came, it took too long to get her to a hospital capable of handling her case, and she died in an ambulance.
Life-of-the-mother exceptions in abortion laws tend to assume binary choices: She gets the abortion or she dies. The less solid notion of unacceptable risk just doesn’t enter the picture.
I made a New Year’s resolution to highlight more positive news about the climate and efforts to cut carbon emissions. In that vein, the Dutch company Elysian is trying to develop the first practical electric airliner. Previous electrical plane designs have carried few passengers relatively small distances, but Elysian is picturing a 90-seat plane that can go nearly 500 miles on a charge.
For comparison, New York to Boston and New York to D.C. are each a little over 200 miles.
The New York Times Magazine raises an interesting question: Could an engineering project divert warm-water flows away from a Greenland glacier and prevent it from sliding into the ocean and melting? If that idea is feasible, how big an expense would it justify?
and let’s close with something adorable
The young of just about any species can be cute. But baby rhinos? Yes, baby rhinos.
On the subject of magnetic elevators, Trump said, “Think of it, magnets. Now all I know about magnets is this, give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets.
In the inspiring words of the Insane Clown Posse: “Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?”
But, you know, it’s Biden whose mind we are supposed to worry about.
In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s failed coup, the GOP establishment and conservative commentariat almost universally recognized 1-6 for what it was: un-American, over the line, terrorism, etc. Over the last three years, they have completely changed their tune. Rep. Elise Stefanik, chair of the House Republican conference, is typical: Sunday she referred to those who have been tried, convicted, and sentenced for crimes committed on January 6 as “hostages“.
I believe we’re seeing the weaponization of the federal government against not just President Trump, but we’re seeing it against conservatives.
She refused to commit to certifying the 2024 election.
We will see if this is a legal and valid election. What we’re seeing so far is that Democrats are so desperate they’re trying to remove President Trump from the ballot.
Of course, President Trump will only be removed from ballots if the conservative majority on the Supreme Court finds that the Constitution disqualifies him. “Democrats” can do nothing on their own.
and 2023 becoming 2024
2023 was another great year for jobs. The economy added 2.7 million jobs during the year, bringing the 2-year total to 7.5 million new jobs. The unemployment rate held steady at 3.7% in December, and has stayed below 4% for 23 consecutive months. The Trump administration’s longest streak below 4% was 13 months.
The Economist combined “inflation, inflation breadth, GDP, jobs, and stock market performance” into a single index to rank 35 “mostly rich” countries’ economic performance in 2023. The US came in third, behind Greece and South Korea, and I might quibble about ranking us that low: Greece’s advantage is mainly in its stock market, which was up 44% compared to the US’ 4.3% gain.
2023 was the hottest year on record by a wide margin, as global warming teamed up with an unusually strong El Nino. As anyone who follows sports knows, that’s how records get set: a trend gets topped off by special factors. (For example, Barry Bonds’ 73 home runs in 2001 was the best season of the best hitter in the home-run-happy steroid era. Between 1998 and 2001, three hitters posted six seasons of 63+ home runs, a figure no one else has reached before or since.)
The El Nino is expected to continue into this year, so 2024 could be equally hot or hotter. But it might not be, and by 2025 we can expect some regression to the mean. (In other words: Outliers are typically followed by something less outlying. For example, Shaquille O’Neal is 7’1″, but his son is only 6’10” — tall, but not as tall as Dad.) What that would mean in this case is that 2024 or 2025 will be hot, probably hotter than the average of 2018-2022, but probably not as hot as 2023. When we look back from 2030 or so, the upward trend will continue to be clear, but 2023 will probably stick up above the trend line.
1998 was a year like that: significantly hotter than any year before, but also hotter than several years after. And you know what we saw? Climate-change-denying authors writing that global warming ended in 1998. You can guess what they did: If you start your graph at 1998, it looks like global average temperature goes sideways for several years. (The two graphs here aren’t tracking precisely the same things, so they don’t perfectly match up.)
Warming trend? What warming trend?
So don’t be fooled over the next few years if you see articles claiming that the danger has passed, because global warming peaked in 2023 or 2024. It won’t have passed; the trend will just be catching up to a year with some special circumstances.
Sec. 3129.02. (A) A physician shall not knowingly do any of the following: (1) Perform gender reassignment surgery on a minor individual; (2) Prescribe a cross-sex hormone or puberty-blocking drug for a minor individual for the purpose of assisting the minor individual with gender transition; (3) Engage in conduct that aids or abets in the practices described in division (A)(1) or (2) of this section, provided that this section may not be construed to impose liability on any speech protected by federal or state law. …
Sec. 3129.05. (A) Any violation of section 3129.02, section 3129.03, or section 3129.06 of the Revised Code shall be considered unprofessional conduct and subject to discipline by the applicable professional licensing board.
So, Ohio doctors who provided gender-affirming care for minors (with or without parental consent) would lose their licenses.
On December 30, Governor DeWine, a Republican, announced that he was vetoing this bill. He said:
Were I to sign Substitute House Bill 68 or were Substitute House Bill 68 to become law, Ohio would be saying that the State, that the government, knows what is best medically for a child rather than the two people who love that child the most, the parents.
In other words, the people who are actually involved in the specific case should make the decision, not the government. I wonder when DeWine or any other Republicans will grasp that this is also a reason to oppose abortion bans at any number of weeks. In some particular cases, you may not agree with the decision made by the people on the ground, but on the whole they’ll do better than the legislature.
and you also might be interested in …
the sad story of a public library in upstate New York. When the library scheduled a Drag Queen Story Hour, protests erupted, and the event was never held. You might think the anti-LGBTQ side would say, “Yay, we won!” and be happy. But no. Next they went after all the queer-themed books in the library. They harassed the librarians until they resigned. Several trustees also resigned (leaving the board without a quorum to hire new staff), and the library has been closed for four months.
As so often happens, the minister leading the anti-library charge accuses the librarians of pushing an “agenda” on the town, when in fact he is the one pushing an agenda. The librarians saw their mission as serving everyone in the town, while the minister wants the library to serve people only to the extent that they are like him.
Wednesday, the quack doctor that Ron DeSantis made Florida’s surgeon general called for a halt on the use of mRNA Covid vaccines (like Moderna’s and Pfizer’ vaccine’s), because of the claim that such vaccines can contaminate a recipient’s DNA. If you’re curious, Scientific American explains the alleged risk and why it’s not worth worrying about.
Carbon offsets can be kind of an iffy thing. The credits that get bought to offset carbon emissions are often from, as Grist puts it, “distant and questionable” projects. But there is at least one offset program Grist likes: the Alaska Carbon Reduction Fund, which offsets emissions from local eco-tourism by paying for Juneau residents to replace fossil-fuel-powered furnaces with electric heat pumps.
Another environmental development worth watching: JAC Motors, a Chinese automaker backed by Volkswagen, as about to launch an EV with sodium-ion rather than lithium-ion batteries. Mining lithium is one of the major environmental trade-offs of EVs.
January 1 is a typical time for new laws to take effect. This year,
Twenty-two states and more than three dozen cities and counties increased their minimum wages in January, providing a boost to millions of the country’s lowest-paid workers.
Washington state has the highest minimum: $16.28 per hour. Just about the entire South has stuck with the federal minimum of $7.25. We can think of this as an almost-controlled experiment. Eastern Washington sits right next to the Idaho panhandle, where $7.25 is still the standard.
and let’s close with something cold
Over the weekend, my town had its first real snow of the year. So in honor of the beauty of winter, here’s a contest-winning photo.
The Weekly Sift 