Big day today. We get to find out (at what time, I’m not sure) whether Trump can come up with the half-billion dollar appeal bond he needs to avoid having Tish James start seizing his assets, as the state would for any other deadbeat. There’s been a lot of coverage of what might or might not happen, which I’ll try not to duplicate. But in the featured post “Is Donald Trump Still Rich?” I’ll comment on what all this seems to mean. That should be out shortly.
Today’s other featured post (“What Republicans Want”) is a deep dive into the House Republican Study Committee’s report on its budget proposal for FY 2025. Ordinarily, a report like this wouldn’t be a big deal. But I’m calling special attention to this one because there’s very little other evidence of what the Republican Party wants or stands for. Their nominee talks in word salads full of violent imagery, their last national convention didn’t bother to write a platform, and their House majority can’t even pass stuff for the Senate to ignore or Biden to veto. So what are they running on?
Major media reports have provided snapshots of what the report contains (like an abortion ban and a proposed increase in the retirement age), but you can’t really grasp the persistent wrongheadedness of the GOP without going through the full 180 pages — which I did so you don’t have to. I’ll try to get that post out by 10 EDT or so.
The weekly summary covers the last-minute deal to yet again avoid a government shutdown, Gaza, the Moscow terror attack, other Trump trial news, and a few other things. It should appear around noon.
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“.
The week’s most hotly debated line was Trump’s prediction of “a bloodbath … for the country” that will happen “if I don’t get elected”. Biden and others saw this as a call for political violence, while Trump apologists said the statement wasn’t really so bad “in context“.
Let’s unpack all that.
What he said, in context. First off, the reason we’re having a discussion over what Trump meant is that what he actually said is incoherent.
China is now building a couple of massive plants where they’re going to build the cars in Mexico and think, they think, that they’re going to sell those cars into the United States with no tax at the border. Let me tell you something to China. If you’re listening, President Xi — and you and I are friends — but he understands the way I deal. Those big monster car manufacturing plants that you’re building in Mexico right now, and you think you’re going to get that, you’re going to not hire Americans and you’re going to sell the cars to us? No. We’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars if I get elected.
Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That will be the least of it. But they’re not going to sell those cars. They’re building massive factories.
If Biden said something this disjointed, it would be taken as evidence of cognitive decline, because Biden typically makes way more sense than this. But OK, let’s play the what-did-he-mean-by-that game.
Immediate background. Chinese automakers like BYD build some really cheap cars, especially cheap electric cars, that haven’t been marketed widely in the US yet. Apparently there are plans to build such cars in Mexico, and the current trade agreement (which Trump negotiated and bragged incessantly about, remember) might allow those cars to come into the US without a tariff. NHK World (a Japanese news source) says:
A growing number of Chinese automakers have been constructing production plants in Mexico. The trade deal currently in place in North America allows tariff-free vehicle shipments from Mexico to the US if they meet strict conditions.
So at least at the outset, Trump is talking about not letting that happen: He’ll impose a 100% tariff if they try that. [1] The most generous construction to put on Trump’s words (and the one he now says he meant) is that the “bloodbath” is a metaphor describing what will happen to the US auto industry if it has to compete with those cars.
But he also said “that’s going to be the least of it”. It’s an open-ended expansion of the “bloodbath” in the auto industry to “the country”. Is it still metaphoric, referring to large job losses across all US manufacturing, or has it become literal, presaging the “civil war” that many of Trump’s supporters say they want?
Larger background. In his January 6 speech, Trump repeatedly urged his listeners to “fight”, which is a common thing to say metaphorically in a political speech. However, a mob of his listeners then did literally fight, attacking the Capitol and injuring over 100 police with bear spray and flagpoles they used as clubs.
Trump still defends those people. In the same speech where he made the “bloodbath” comment, he called them “hostages”. He has repeatedly promised to pardon them if he’s elected.
So like “fight”, Trump’s “bloodbath” is arguably metaphorical and arguably not. But in any case, it happens in the “context” of Trump’s large number of violent supporters. He knows they’re out there, just as he knew that some of the people listening to him on January 6 were armed. His promise of pardons for the January 6 rioters suggests that people who do violence for him in this election will also be pardoned.
Convenient ambiguity. Trump could, of course, clear this all up. He could give a speech where he unambiguously denounces political violence and disowns supporters who commit crimes in his name — including the January 6 rioters who are not “hostages” or political prisoners, but criminals who have been convicted by juries of their peers of breaking real laws (like assaulting police officers). He could echo what Biden said in the state of the union, that “political violence has absolutely no place — no place in America. Zero place.”
He won’t do that. Instead, he will keep doing what he did Saturday in Ohio: using violent rhetoric as part of a word salad that has no single obvious interpretation, while defending and offering aid to those who have committed crimes on his behalf. When called to account, he will howl about the biased media taking him out of context, and claim that his word salad should receive the most benign possible interpretation.
But he doesn’t deserve that kind of generousity. Voters and the media should apply a principle that lawyers call contra proferentem: If you write something ambiguous into a contract, a court will resolve the ambiguity against you.
Same thing here. Trump repeatedly and knowingly creates ambiguity about whether or not he is rallying his supporters to commit violence after he loses in November. Until he stops, that ambiguity should be resolved against him.
So yes, he did call for violence on Saturday.
[1] There’s a whole other issue here: One of Trump’s big criticisms of Biden is over inflation. But just about every economic proposal Trump has would make stuff more expensive. This is just one example.
Biden is on the right side of many issues the public cares about, like abortion, gay rights, gun violence, Ukraine, climate change, and democracy itself.
The economy has been improving long enough that the public has started to notice.
The Biden administration’s legislative accomplishments validate his view that government can do good things for the American people, like rebuild our roads and bridges, lower the cost of prescription drugs, or bring broadband internet to rural communities. (Trump’s primary legislative accomplishment was to give the wealthy a big tax cut.)
The electorate continues to change in Biden’s favor, as older MAGA voters die off and are replaced by younger, more liberal voters. [1]
But there is one more reason I’m optimistic — not a positive thing about Biden but a negative thing about Trump: He has fallen into the Autocrat Trap.
Trump has declined since 2016. Before I explain what that trap is, let me point out that I’m not the only one to notice that Trump is off his game. In a recent TPM newsletter, Josh Marshall started with a blunder Trump made in an interview (“there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting”, which sounds an awful lot like a threat to Social Security and Medicare), and expanded to a more general point, that Trump is “rusty” and has “lost his touch”.
Marshall paints a picture of how Trump’s rhetoric has changed since 2016.
Trump’s 2016 campaign’s success stemmed in large part from channeling the cultural and social grievance of middle aged white American men. His 2024 agenda is heavily focused on his personal grievances and doing away with all the restraints on the presidency that hobbled him and led to ego injuries in during his first term
2016 Trump communicated that your resentments were his resentments, but 2024 Trump has turned that identification around: He wants his resentments to be your resentments. 2016 Trump got upset that “the elites” weren’t giving ordinary people a fair shake. But 2024 Trump wants ordinary people to get upset that “the Deep State” isn’t giving him a fair shake.
2016 Trump literally crowd-sourced his message. “Build a wall” and “Lock her up” started as throw-away lines, but when his crowds responded to them they became the center of his campaign. But 2024 Trump’s relationship to the crowd has changed.
Even in Trumpian terms his speeches these days are disjointed, weird, discordant. And again — not by the standard of who you might want within a mile of the Oval Office. I mean even in terms of Trumpian politics. He’s not the same.
Marshall doesn’t assign a definite cause to this “rustiness”, but suspects age might be a factor, together with the sting of his 2020 defeat (which he knows was a defeat, no matter what he says), and panic about the legal peril he faces.
Whatever the precise mix, it also impacts his political agility and feel for the popular mood. It leads to stuff like this wholly unforced entitlements goof. This probably won’t be the only example. It hasn’t gotten much attention yet because even though Trump gets coverage, he hasn’t been in the mix of an actual campaign in years. We’ll see more of it because, again, he ain’t the same.
Actually, it’s already not the only example: Trump gave away his best issue by telling Speaker Johnson to torpedo the border bill that Congress was ready to pass. Now Biden has an answer to criticism on that issue: I tried to solve it, but Trump had his allies stop me. The inaction on the border is now arguably Trump’s fault, not Biden’s. [2]
And while I agree that Trump is showing some decline from aging, I don’t think that’s the main source of his recent (and future) mistakes. I think he’s fallen into what we might call the Autocrat Trap: His successful purge of his inner circle, together with his complete intimidation of the Republican Party, means that he is surrounded by sycophants. Absolutely no one is in a position to tell him “You can’t do that. That’s a bad idea.”
Even a great leader needs such people. George Washington had them. Lincoln had them. FDR had them. Trump doesn’t.
How the Autocrat Trap works. I’m going to make a Hitler comparison here, but not so that I can smear Trump by using his name in the same paragraph as one of history’s most hated people. If you want to object that Trump hasn’t started a world war or set up death camps, that’s fine; it doesn’t affect the point I’m making.
I’m mentioning Hitler because he is a well known and extreme example of an autocrat. If there were some dysfunction typical of autocrats, we’d expect to see it in Hitler. And we do.
By 1936, Hitler had eliminated public political dissent, but he still had to face behind-closed-doors resistance from his general staff (the 1930s German equivalent of “the Deep State”). In a nutshell, Hitler was a risk-taker and the generals were more cautious. The military men recognized Germany’s rearmament was incomplete, and understood that the Fatherland would lose any rematch with France and/or Britain. But Hitler grasped just how traumatized the British and French people still were by the Great War of 1914-1918, and bet that their elected leaders would avoid restarting that war, even if they would surely win it again.
So over the generals’ protests, Hitler ordered one audacious move after another: advancing into the Rhineland demilitarized zone bordering France (1936), Austria (spring of 1938), the western section of Czechoslovakia (fall of 1938), and the rest of Czechoslovakia (spring of 1939). As Hitler had foreseen, the Western Powers did nothing. The invasion of Poland (fall of 1939) brought declarations of war, but no counterattacks. Denmark and Norway (April, 1940) fell with little opposition.
By then, rearmament was complete and Germany was ready to reverse the outcome of the Great War: France, Belgium, and the Netherlands fell in May of 1940, and the air war against Britain began.
Picture Hitler at that point. He was a gambler with hot dice. He had proved again and again that when cautious people tried to hold him back, they were wrong and he was right. So why should he listen to them at all? Events had shown that he was a genius. He had a destiny.
That’s when the big mistakes started. He attacked Russia before he had finished off Britain. He let the Greek campaign delay the Russian campaign. And then, rather than postpone until the next spring, he launched his attack in late June of 1941. Due to the late start, and despite initial military successes, German forces were still short of Moscow when the fall rains turned Russia’s roads to mud. In winter, the Russians counterattacked. Hitler’s generals advised pulling back to a more defensible position and restarting the advance in spring. But why would he listen to them? They had always advised more caution, and they had always been wrong. So: no retreat, not a single inch.
German losses that winter were horrific, turning the Russia campaign into a war of attrition that put Germany at a disadvantage. And though the German advance was able to restart when the weather changed, those first-winter casualties contributed to the decisive defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943. The Allies launched D-Day from the still unconquered British Isles in 1944, and the war was soon lost.
Trump 2024 vs. Trump 2016. When Trump ran in 2016, the Republican establishment was against him. As he won one primary after another, they slowly got on board. But many got off again after the Access Hollywood tape leaked a month before the election. Some even called for him to withdraw. (Luckily for Trump, he managed to keep Stormy Daniels’ story from getting out and making things worse, and his allies at WikiLeaks were able to muddy the news cycle by releasing a batch of Democratic emails hacked by his allies in Russia.)
Thanks to the Electoral College, he won anyway, proving that he was right and the naysayers were wrong. But even as he took office, many power players in Washington had no particular loyalty to him, like Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
A new president has to appoint thousands of executive branch officials. But who? TrumpWorld had never been that big, and McConnell’s Senate was unlikely to confirm Trump yes-men with no relevant experience. So initially, the Trump administration was staffed with veterans of the Bush administration or Congress, CEOs, and military men who saw themselves as Republican or conservative, but not necessarily MAGA. Again and again, such appointees got in Trump’s way: Attorney General Jeff Sessions (the first senator to endorse Trump’s candidacy) appointed Special Counsel Bob Mueller and refused to interfere in his investigation. National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster and Defense Secretary James Mattis repeatedly stopped him from withdrawing from Afghanistan. White House Counsel Don McGahn refused Trump’s order to fire Mueller and regularly warned him that things he wanted to do were illegal.
By 2020, many of the Trump officials more loyal to the law or the nation than to Trump had either been fired or left in frustration. But apparently not enough of them, so Trump appointed John McEntee to conduct a purge of his insufficiently loyal subordinates, many of whom were replaced with “acting” officials the Senate never confirmed.
Even so, after Trump lost the 2020 election, his effort to stay in office anyway was repeatedly hindered by members of his own administration. Vice President Mike Pence refused to cooperate in the January 6 plot. Joint Chiefs Chair Mark Milley made it clear the military would not intervene in his favor. Acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen wouldn’t sign Jeff Clark’s bogus letter telling the Georgia legislature that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election”, and also led a department-wide threat to resign if Trump named Clark to replace him. The previous attorney general, Bill Barr, publicly denied that the Department had found any evidence of the election fraud Trump was claiming.
All those people are gone now. They have been branded as turncoats and banished from any future Trump administration. Even Ivanka and Jared have withdrawn. [3]
In the meantime, the MAGA cult has expanded. Much of the attention this has gotten has focused on a potential second Trump administration: The Heritage Foundation has launched Project 2025 to collect resumes of loyalists hoping to staff the next administration.
Unlike previous presidential transition teams, this one is focused on personal loyalty, not experience or other qualifications. (A question from the application: “The president should be able to advance his/her agenda through the bureaucracy without hindrance from unelected federal officials. Agree/Disagree/Neither.”) So when Trump-47 decides to overthrow democracy, the only question he’ll face is “How do you want us to proceed, sir?”
But something similar has happened elsewhere, and the consequences have gotten less attention. Trump’s lawyers have become little more than mouthpieces for what he wants the public to believe about his trials, whether that strategy helps or hurts him inside the courtroom. (Judging from the size of the civil judgments against him, it hurts.) On the political side. Trump has made his daughter-in-law head of the RNC and started a purge of the staff.
So across the board, anybody who might have the independent stature to say, “I know you’re the boss, but this is dumb” is long gone. Even after a mistake is in motion, nobody is going to point it out to him.
So far, his blunders haven’t hurt him much, largely because he hasn’t been getting that much attention. He stayed away from mass-viewer events (like debates) during the primary campaign, and the mainstream media has all but stopped covering his rallies. Most voters have barely seen the 2024 version of Trump, and have barely paid attention to his pronouncements on major issues.
That has started to change, and will change more and more as the election approaches. This summer’s Republican Convention, I predict, will be a major disaster for Trump, because he will have complete control of it. And day after day, all the way to the election, a sycophant-supported Donald Trump on the campaign trail will be Joe Biden’s greatest asset.
[1] The replacement-by-illegal-immigrants story Trumpists tell is nonsense, but the fact that they are being replaced — by their children and grandchildren — is true. Trumpists helped this trend along by refusing to be vaccinated during the pandemic.
[2] Whether or not Trump’s prediction of a “bloodbath” if he doesn’t get elected is such a mistake was a point of contention this week. I’ll cover that in detail in the next post, the weekly summary.
[3] In the 2017-2021 administration, Ivanka and Jared were believed to have the ability get Trump to see reason. That’s why Susan Collins called Ivanka during the January 6 riot.
This week lacked one single dominating story. So in the featured post I’ll take a step back and explain “The Other Reason I’m Optimistic” about the fall elections. Short version: Trump has gotten rid of anybody (including Ivanka) who can tell him he’s had a bad idea. That’s a recipe for disaster, and we’re already starting to see it play out. That post should appear shortly.
The weekly summary has a few things to choose from. Fani Willis got reprimanded and her ex-lover had to leave the prosecution team, but the case will go forward. Ron DeSantis suffered some major defeats in his war on woke. The House passed a TikTok ban. And Russia had what it called an election. There was a big flap over Trump’s “bloodbath” prediction, which I’ll unravel as best I can.
One other thing: One of my favorite observers of the tech scene, Cory Doctorow, has both a novel and a nonfiction book out. They’re worth a look.
I’ll try to get the weekly summary posted by noon EDT.
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 his State of the Union address, President Biden claimed credit for his accomplishments, drew the contrast with “my predecessor”, announced goals for his second administration, and demonstrated a mental stamina and dexterity that he’s not supposed to have. By contrast, Senator Britt’s Republican response was creepy, dishonest, and insubstantial.
Where was that addled, feeble old man I’ve been hearing so much about?
If that’s who you were expecting to see at the State of the Union, you got a shock: While President Biden did occasionally stumble over his prepared text (the way he has since the beginning of his career), he was focused, coherent, and energetic. After standing and speaking for an hour, he was still smartly getting the best of his Republican hecklers (just as he did last year).
It’s hard to overstate how important that demonstration of mental acuity was. For years, Fox News has been selectively editing Biden to make him look confused (and ignoring all the comparable Trump moments). Fox talking heads (like Britt Hume) have been claiming — based on neither personal interactions nor expert medical analysis — that Biden is senile. And Trump has been telling his crowds that Biden “barely knows he’s alive“. More recently, the NYT and other mainstream sources have been echoing lesser versions that talking point, looking for every opportunity to highlight Biden’s verbal stumbles and emphasize Democrats’ anxiety over an issue that they themselves had been fanning.
Biden has had a hard time breaking through this negative narrative, because every story becomes a story about his age — similar to the way that every Hillary Clinton story became a story about her bogus email scandal in 2016.
Finally, though, the American people got a chance to see Biden in his entirety, rather than edited to fit some preconceived frame. They saw Joe Biden as he has always been: a politician not terribly skilled in oratory, but possessing a clear mind, a straightforward manner, a record of practical accomplishments, and a basic decency that contrasts well with the self-centered dishonesty of his general election opponent (a contrast Senator Britt’s response unintentionally emphasized with an outright lie).
As important as the optics of the speech were, it also had significant content, both in how it discussed issues of the present as well as an appealing vision of the future.
So let’s talk about that content, before going on to discuss the unintentionally revealing response given by Alabama Senator Katie Britt. (Like the speech itself, the summary is lengthy. Feel free to skip ahead.)
What he talked about. The early part of Biden’s speech was devoted to issues where large majorities of the American people agree with him, but Trump and congressional Republicans don’t: Ukraine, January 6, and reproductive rights. He linked the three as “freedom and democracy”, which are “under attack at home and overseas”.
Ukraine was the “overseas” part. Biden took credit for making NATO “stronger than ever”, and said that the aid Ukraine needs to defend itself from Russia’s invasion was being “blocked by those who want to walk away from our world leadership”.
I say this to Congress: We have to stand up to Putin. Send me a bipartisan national security bill. History is literally watching. History is watching. If the United States walks away, it will put Ukraine at risk. Europe is at risk. The free world will be at risk, emboldening others to do what they wish to do us harm.
January 6 was democracy under attack at home. He accused “my predecessor” (in the entire speech he never said Trump’s name) and “some of you here” of “seeking to bury the truth about January 6”. Here, he didn’t call for legislation, but for a more subtle kind of bipartisan action.
Many of you were here on that darkest of days. We all saw with our own eyes the insurrectionists were not patriots. They had come to stop the peaceful transfer of power, to overturn the will of the people. … I ask all of you, without regard to party, to join together and defend democracy. Remember your oath of office to defend against all threats foreign and domestic. Respect free and fair elections, restore trust in our institutions, and make clear political violence has absolutely no place — no place in America.
The rollback of reproductive rights Biden framed as “another assault on freedom”, and he challenged Republicans to guarantee access to in vitro fertilization. (A bill to do that is being blocked by Republicans in the Senate.) He pointed to state bills banning abortion and to Republican proposals for a national ban after some number of weeks.
My God, what freedom else [see footnote 1] would you take away? … If you, the American people, send me a Congress that supports the right to choose, I promise you I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.
The second chunk of the speech was Biden’s telling of the story of his administration, beginning with what a shambles the country was when Trump left office. [2]
Four years ago next week, before I came to office, the country was hit by the worst pandemic and the worst economic crisis in a century. Remember the fear, record losses? Remember the spikes in crime and the murder rate? A raging virus that took more than 1 million American lives of loved ones, millions left behind. A mental health crisis of isolation and loneliness.
He described the comeback from those lows as “the greatest story never told”.
Folks, I inherited an economy that was on the brink. Now, our economy is literally the envy of the world. [3]
He listed his administration’s economic accomplishments:
15 million jobs created
unemployment at 50-year lows
16 million new small businesses
800,000 new manufacturing jobs
more Americans have health insurance than ever before
the smallest racial wealth gap in 20 years
billions of private-sector investment in high-tech manufacturing and clean energy
rebuilding infrastructure around the country (repairing roads and bridges, replacing lead pipes, extending rural broadband, …)
He segued from the past to the future by talking about prescription drug costs: Insulin now costs Medicare patients at most $35 per month, down from as much as $400. Medicare has started to negotiate down the prices of several drugs, a number that will rise to 500 drugs over the next ten years. He has capped total prescription drug costs at $2,000 per person under Medicare, and wants to extend that cap to everyone. He has outlawed a number of hidden fees and wants to get rid of more of them.
He proposed a number of plans to lower housing costs, both for buyer and renters; also education costs and the burden of student loans.
Biden recognizes that none of that is possible without the wealthy and corporations “paying their fair share” of taxes. He pointed to Trump’s budget-busting tax cut, and to Republican plans to give the wealthy more tax breaks. [4] The current tax rate on the nation’s 1,000 billionaires, he claimed, is 8.2%, “far less than the vast majority of Americans pay”. He proposed a minimum billionaire tax rate of 25% that he said would raise $500 billion over the next ten years, and invited America to imagine what could be done with that money: affordable childcare, paid leave to take care of family members, home care that keeps the elderly and disabled out of nursing homes.
Then he got to Republicans’ favorite issue, the border.
In November, my team began serious negotiations with a bipartisan group of senators. The result was a bipartisan bill with the toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen.
This, of course, is the bill Republicans asked for, supported, and then turned against when Trump told them that he would rather run on the border problem than let Biden do something to improve the situation. Biden listed what the bill would have provided:
That bipartisan bill would hire 1,500 more security agents and officers, 100 more immigration judges to help tackle the backload of 2 million cases, 4,300 more asylum officers, and new policies so they can resolve cases in six months instead of six years now. [To catcalling Republicans] What are you against?
One hundred more high-tech drug detection machines to significantly increase the ability to screen and stop vehicles smuggling fentanyl into America that’s killing thousands of children.
This bill would save lives and bring order to the border. It would also give me and any new president new emergency authority to temporarily shut down the border when the number of migrants at the border is overwhelming. [5]
When Biden began to explain how Trump instructed Republicans in Congress to tank the bill, Marjorie Taylor Greene (apparently seeing the effectiveness of the point Biden was making) broke in with a yell of “Say her name” about Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, who allegedly was murdered by an undocumented immigrant. Biden took the challenge, but pronounced her name wrong before pointing out that thousands are killed by people who are here legally. [6] He went on to explain that making our system for evaluating asylum claims more efficient (as the proposed bill would do) would lower the incentives for people without legitimate claims to cross the border in the first place.
Biden challenged Trump to join him in urging passage of the law, but then drew a contrast.
I will not demonize immigrants, saying they are “poison in the blood of our country.” I will not separate families. I will not ban people because of their faith. … Look, folks, we have a simple choice: We can fight about fixing the border or we can fix it. I’m ready to fix it. Send me the border bill now.
Like most SOTU’s the end of the speech was full of a list of proposals too long to go into here, leading up to this conclusion:
I see a future where [we’re] defending democracy, you don’t diminish it. I see a future where we restore the right to choose and protect our freedoms, not take them away. I see a future where the middle class has — finally has a fair shot and the wealthy have to pay their fair share in taxes. I see a future where we save the planet from the climate crisis and our country from gun violence.
Above all, I see a future for all Americans. I see a country for all Americans. And I will always be President for all Americans because I believe in America. I believe in you, the American people. You’re the reason we’ve never been more optimistic about our future than I am now.
So, let’s build the future together. Let’s remember who we are. We are the United States of America. And there is nothing — nothing beyond our capacity when we act together.
Senator Britt’s response. Republicans choose 42-year-old freshman Senator Katie Britt of Alabama to make their official response. [video, transcript] I’m sure this seemed brilliant to them in a high-concept way: Britt is young and female, while Biden, Trump, and most of the Republican base are old and male. They want to paint Biden as a creature of Washington out of touch with American families, so it made sense to choose a newcomer to Congress who has no previous national profile, and to place her at a typical-family’s kitchen table.
But then she opened her mouth and it all fell apart. As with Biden’s speech, it’s possible to comment at length about either the form or the substance. The form has gotten a lot of criticism elsewhere, most notably from SNL’s cold open, where Biden cuts his remarks short because “I caught a glimpse of the Republican senator’s response to my speech, and I think she’s going to help me more than anything else I can say here.” Then Scarlett Johansson does a spot-on Britt impersonation, saying “tonight I’m going to be auditioning for the part of Scary Mom”.
Lots of people saw Britt’s performance as scary, including Kat Abu, who closed her weekly stories-you-missed-on-Fox summary with
I hope all of you stay safe, and when you go to sleep, make sure to check under your bed for the Alabama junior senator.
Others described her as a Stepford wife, and many women took offense at Republicans placing a female United States senator in a kitchen, as if to say that’s where women really belong, regardless of their accomplishments. You can find lots of such criticism if you look for it.
But I’d like to focus on the content of her remarks, because it epitomizes something basic about Republican politics: She emphasized identity and emotion without any hint of how Republican policies might help the people she supposed cares so much about.
For example, she said:
We strongly support continued nationwide access to in vitro fertilization.
But she did not address the fact that Republican-appointed judges are the ones who put IVF in jeopardy, and a Republican senator is blocking consideration of a bill to guarantee IVF access. So what does the GOP’s “support” mean in any practical sense?
Or consider this guy:
I’ll never forget stopping at a gas station in Chilton County one evening. The gentleman working the counter told me that after retiring, he had to pick up that job in his 70s so he didn’t have to choose between going hungry or going without his medication. He said, “I did everything right, everything I was told to do — I worked hard, I saved, I was responsible.”
Much of Britt’s response focused on the border. I’ll let Rachel Maddow provide the proper context:
She was one of the senators who was involved in the negotiations to create a border bill. She helped create the bill. And then voted against it when Trump called on Republicans to pull the plug on the bill that they themselves negotiated
So again: Britt appears to care deeply about the situation at the border. She just doesn’t want to do anything about it. And then she tossed the Republican base some red meat with an egregiously dishonest anecdote that the WaPo fact-checker rated as a four-Pinocchio lie:
She told the story of a woman who “had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12”. Britt made it sound like her deal was a consequence of “Joe Biden’s border crisis”, a phrase that she used both before and after the story.
The woman is real enough (her name is Karla Jacinto Romero) and there’s no reason to doubt that she was trafficked and repeatedly raped. But those events had nothing to do with Biden or US border policies: They happened in Mexico during the Bush administration.
WaPo goes on to explain that Britt’s lie is part of a bigger lie:
When Donald Trump was president, he regularly decried human trafficking that he claimed was happening at the border, including that “thousands of young girls and women” were being smuggled across the border for prostitution. In 2019, we investigated that claim and found no evidence to support it. Most human trafficking prosecutions generally involve legal border crossings, visa fraud and travel into the United States on airplanes. Victim organizations say there are relatively few cases that involve forced kidnapping across the border. This might be one reason Britt regularly cites a case that happened long ago and did not involve crossing the border.
In other words, while the problem might be real at some level, building a wall or shutting down the border would have no effect on it.
Britt closed with a message for “my fellow moms”:
We see you, we hear you, and we stand with you.
But apparently we’re not going to do a damn thing for you. Because that’s not how Republicans see Congress: It’s a place to strike poses and make outrageous statements that you hope will go viral and get mentioned on Fox News. It’s not for passing legislation that might help Americans deal with real problems.
[1] “what freedom else” is typical of a number of small manglings in this speech, and demonstrates the kind of verbal mistakes Biden has been prone to his entire career. I guarantee you “what freedom else” never appeared on a speechwriter’s computer screen.
As someone who occasionally speaks in public from a prepared text, I recognize this type of mistake, because I make a lot of them during my rehearsals. (I’m a little better than Biden at getting words out, so I’ve usually ironed these glitches out before the public presentation.) Mistakes on this level are not evidence of some larger cognitive decline, as Biden’s critics would have you believe.
[2] Trump and his supporters like to forget 2020 happened at all. For example, Tim Scott bragged about Trump’s economic record by quoting 2019 unemployment statistics.
[3] “Envy of the world” is a phrase we’ll hear a lot during this campaign, because while US economic situation is not perfect, the problems our economy faces are global problems that America is handling better than just about any other country.
Every country’s economy tanked during the pandemic, and every government (including the US under Trump) spent massively so that people who couldn’t go to work wouldn’t starve, and businesses that had to close their doors temporarily would have the resources to reopen. When the vaccine did allow economies to reopen, prices rose everywhere, and every central bank raised interest rates to try to rein inflation in.
But the US is virtually alone in pulling off a “soft landing”: getting inflation down while continuing to create jobs. It’s a major accomplishment and Biden is right to take pride in it.
[4] This provoked exactly the kind of protests from Republicans that Biden was probably counting on, and allowed him to ad lib the way he did last year on Social Security and Medicare cuts.
We have two ways to go. Republicans can cut Social Security and give more tax breaks to the wealthy. I will — [shouts from the audience]
That’s the proposal. Oh, no? You guys don’t want another $2 trillion tax cut? I kind of thought that’s what your plan was. Well, that’s good to hear. You’re not going to cut another $2 trillion for the super-wealthy? That’s good to hear.
[5] This led to another back-and-forth with Republicans.
Oh, you don’t think so? Oh, you don’t like that bill — huh? — that conservatives got together and said was a good bill? I’ll be darned. That’s amazing.
One of the most satisfying clips from the speech was Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, the lead Republican senator negotiating the bill, saying “That’s true” as Biden listed the bill’s virtues. To his credit, Lankford didn’t deny it afterward.
Trump’s decision to tank the border bill was a major blunder that gives Biden a way out of an issue that otherwise worked against him. Now he can say something like: “I tried to solve the problem, but my opponent had his Republican allies in Congress block me. They would rather have a talking point than any real progress.”
[6] The larger point is that while the undocumented (like every other segment of the population) do occasionally commit crimes, on the whole there is no discernible “migrant crime problem”. Cities with a large population of undocumented immigrants do not have more crime than other comparable cities.
I’m still running a little behind from the time change yesterday.
The big news this week was Biden’s State of the Union address, which I saw as a major victory for the President. His oratory will never be studied and copied like Obama’s, but it was an extremely effective speech that (in addition to its content) belied all the claims that Biden’s age won’t let him to do the job. Far from the addled old man of Republican imagination, Biden was master of the situation. He didn’t just read somebody else’s words from a teleprompter, but bantered with Republican hecklers and largely got the better of them for more than an hour.
What’s more, the speech demonstrated Biden’s major advantage going into the general election campaign: He has a good story to tell, full of clear accomplishments, and a better vision for the future than Trump can offer.
So the featured post will discuss that speech, as well as the embarrassing and dishonest response from Republican Senator Katie Britt of Alabama. That post should appear between 10 and 11 EDT.
The weekly summary will talk about the beginning of the Biden/Trump campaign, the state of the Trump trials, the growing Democratic disgust with the NYT’s campaign coverage, an appeals court’s slap at DeSantis’ STOP-woke law, anti-Semitism in America, the crazy guy Republicans nominated to be North Carolina’s governor, and a few other things. I’ll try to get that out by noon.
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.
I’m restraining myself from writing a post about the Supreme Court’s decision to delay Trump’s January 6 trial for another few months. I’m sufficiently angry at them that I doubt my comments would add much to my readers’ understanding of the situation. I’m also annoyed at myself for underestimating the extent to which the Court has been corrupted by partisanship. Plenty of other people are ranting about this, and I’ll link to some of them.
At the same time, focusing on something else this week seemed silly, so I won’t have a featured post.
I will cover the Court’s decision in the weekly summary, because it’s news. I’ll do my best to stick to the facts, acknowledging my personal opinion, but not belaboring it. I’ll also review where Trump’s other criminal cases stand. Short version: The least significant one is the only one that’s on track. (It’s weird to think that there’s a “least significant” criminal case against an apparent major-party nominee, or that people can (unfairly) dismiss the Stormy Daniels case as “just about sex”, but that’s the world we live in now.) Also, I continue to wonder where Trump will get the money to cover his NY civil judgments.
Another confession: I have to force myself to look at Gaza. I really don’t want to believe what’s happening there. That’s why my comments on the situation tend to be terse.
Other stuff the summary covers: Mitch McConnell is retiring so that somebody worse can get that job. People are still reacting to the Alabama IVF decision. The NYT decided that a favorable poll for Trump was the most important thing happening in the world that day. “Migrant crime” is the latest conservative bogus issue, replacing voter fraud and critical race theory.
I almost used Utah tumbleweed inundation as a closing, but I eventually decided that — as funny as it may seem when you’re 2000 miles away — it’s actually news. So instead the closing will introduce you to an amazing set of explanatory science videos.
