The Weekly Sift: May 2023

Monday, May 29, 2023

Handle With Care

These past few years have given me a new appreciation for the fragility of our freedoms.

Of course I am quoting the statement above ironically. What DeSantis has been doing in Florida these past few years is what's been giving me a new appreciation for the fragility of our freedoms.

This week's featured post is "Neglected policy issues I: Life expectancy".

This week everybody was talking about the debt ceiling

Saturday, President Biden and Speaker McCarthy announced an agreement to raise the debt ceiling, which Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen expects to be breached next Monday.

I haven't read the bill's 99-page text, so I'm relying on summaries of what the deal entails. In general, I agree with Josh Marshall:

Something like this set of concessions was more or less baked in the moment Republicans won control of the House.

In other words, Biden seems to have negotiated the kind of deal you would ordinarily expect between a president and speaker from different parties. It doesn't look like McCarthy exacted any special ransom for threatening global economic catastrophe.

Assuming this agreement can be turned into law without further concessions, this has to be counted as a win for Biden.

BTW, this should be a moment of cognitive dissonance for Fox News watchers who hoped for more out of this deal. "You mean the guy with dementia bamboozled our guy?"

and the prospect of another Trump indictment

Numerous sources say that Special Counsel Jack Smith has wrapped up his investigation of the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, and that an indictment is coming soon, i.e. sometime in June. A major reason to think so is that the grand jury hasn't met since May 5, suggesting that Smith has all the testimony he needs and is writing an indictment.

If that's true, it suggests that the Mar-a-Lago indictment will be separate from the January 6 indictment, if such an indictment is coming at all.

A major scoop from the WaPo indicates that the case for obstruction is very strong. Their report has Trump's people moving boxes of documents the day before his lawyers (falsely) told a DoJ prosecutor and the FBI that the 35 documents they were turning over (in response to a subpoena) constituted the entire stash. It looks like Trump kept secrets from his lawyers so that they could make false statements to the government without intentionally lying.

Additionally, WaPo says Trump kept classified documents in his office and sometimes showed them to visitors.

The most explosive and most speculative line of investigation concerns Trump's business relationships with foreign countries, including a lucrative contract from the new Saudi golf tour (LIV) to play tournaments at Trump's courses (including one this weekend). Did the Saudis pay him to get, say, information on Iran's missile programs? That would be espionage.

But as I keep saying, it's a mistake to invest too much energy in speculation. If an indictment really is coming soon, we'll be able to read it and see what's in it for ourselves.

The conventional wisdom says that an indictment won't matter politically, because nothing matters to Trump's supporters. Reporters are constantly talking to various Trump voters, who keep telling them that another indictment or two won't change their mind about him.

But I wonder if that's true. Right now, a Mar-a-Lago or Georgia or January 6 indictment is just an idea. But when those indictments drop, they will tell stories. And stories are more powerful than mere ideas. Right now, his cultists can say, "I don't care if Trump had some classified documents. Biden and Pence had them too. So what?" But it would be much more difficult to say, "I don't care if Trump showed classified documents to the Saudis in exchange for golf money" (if that's what the indictment says).

If the cult does start to turn, it won't happen via former supporters speaking out against him. Instead, they will just go silent. People you would expect to defend him will instead change the subject.

Another indication an indictment might be coming is that Trump's lawyers sent a letter to Attorney General Garland requesting a meeting. I don't put much stock in this sign, because the letter clearly wasn't serious. It was written for public distribution and not to persuade Garland to do anything.

No president of the United States has ever, in the history of our country, been baselessly investigated in such outrageous and unlawful fashion.

That's political rhetoric more likely to anger Garland than to make him sympathize. What's the point of meeting with Trump's lawyers to hear more nonsense like that?

The Oath Keepers convicted in November of seditious conspiracy related to January 6 were sentenced this week. Leader Stewart Rhodes got 18 years. Other conspirators got lesser sentences that were still substantial.

Again, the significance of the three seditious conspiracy trials (all resulting in convictions) is that juries have been convinced that January 6 was not just a mob that got out of control. Somebody intended the mob to do what it did. One of those somebodies was Stewart Rhodes, but it's very unlikely he was at the top of the chain.

and Ron DeSantis' glitchy campaign launch

After a technical delay of around 20 minutes, Ron DeSantis officially announced his candidacy during a live Twitter interview with Elon Musk. DeSantis supporters made a big deal about the 300K viewers, which nearly crashed Twitter's diminished infrastructure. But 3 million watched Trump's CNN town hall a few weeks ago, and 400K watched AOC play a video game over Twitch in 2020.

DeSantis said a lot of false and/or misleading stuff. For example, when challenged on Florida schools removing books from their classrooms and libraries because of his Don't Say Gay and STOP Woke Acts, he deflected onto the left, saying that liberals were banning To Kill a Mockingbird. Here, DeSantis is doing a much worse version of what he accuses the media of doing: calling something a ban that is really a much less serious restriction.

I can't say whether this is a complete view of the topic, but if you google "ban on To Kill a Mockingbird" and look for liberal examples, what comes up is a Washington school district deciding to stop requiring the book for ninth graders, which makes perfect sense. If you assume a required-reading list has a limited number of spaces for novels about the Jim Crow era, it makes sense to shift to one by a Black author with a Black central character. But TKaMB remains available in school libraries and can be assigned by teachers who make that choice.

Just a coincidence, I'm sure:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) signed a bill regarding spaceflight on Thursday just one day after he announced his presidential run in a glitch-filled interview with Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces. ... Florida is a known launching point for [Musk-owned] SpaceX aircrafts, and the new law could potentially shield Musk and other space flight companies from being sued for accidents that injure or kill crew members. ...

Last month, SpaceX’s privately owned spaceport in South Texas launched the most powerful rocket ever built before the spacecraft exploded over the Gulf of Mexico. The explosion reportedly hurled chunks of concrete and metal thousands of feet away into sensitive habitat, and sparked a 3.5-acre fire on state park lands near the launch site.

Or maybe, coupled with his war against Disney, it tells us about DeSantis' theory of government: Use government power to reward your friends and punish your enemies. If Musk turns against DeSantis, this favor from the State of Florida could be revoked, the way DeSantis has tried to revoke Disney's special taxing district.

Along the same lines: NBC reports that Florida state employees are soliciting DeSantis campaign contributions from lobbyists.

NBC News spoke with 10 Republican lobbyists in Florida, all of whom said they couldn't remember being solicited for donations so overtly by administration officials — especially at a time when the governor still has to act on the state budget.

That process that involves DeSantis using his line-item veto pen to slash funding for projects that the same lobbyists whom they are asking for political cash have a professional stake in. Most of the lobbyists said they felt pressure to give to the governor's campaign.

“What the f--- am I supposed to do?” one lobbyist said. “I have a lot of business in front of the DeSantis administration.”

and Ken Paxton's impeachment

Apparently there are limits, even for MAGA politicians. Saturday the Texas House impeached Attorney General Ken Paxton "on articles including bribery and abuse of public trust". Trump and Ted Cruz support him, but the vote was 121-23.

Paxton will be suspended from office while the Texas Senate hears his case.

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won a run-off election yesterday, netting himself a third term in office. In the run-up to the election, there was some hope that an Erdogan defeat might mark a global turning away from autocratic rulers. But it was not to be.

President Biden announced a national strategy for combating antisemitism. Rep. Lauren Boebert complained that Biden will "go after conservatives".

Conservatives get closer and closer to just admitting that they're bad guys. A few weeks ago, Senator Tommy Tuberville took offense at Biden wanting to get White nationalists out of the military. "They call them [White nationalists]. I call them Americans." In a later interview he dug in deeper. "I look at a white nationalist as a Trump Republican. That's what we're called all the time. A MAGA Person."

If he thinks that characterization is unjust, i.e., if sees any difference between a Trump Republican and an actual White nationalist, Tuberville didn't explain what it was.

Of course, sometimes liberals also own the negative labels people throw at them. The Satanic Temple is running the Samuel Alito's Mom's Satanic Abortion Clinic out of New Mexico, providing telehealth abortion services nationwide, particularly to states where abortion is illegal. As the Temple says:

The Satanic Temple, on behalf of its members, objects to government interference with abortion access and contests that laws that impede our faith in bodily autonomy and our ability to perform our Religious Abortion Ritual violate the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

TST Health’s first telehealth clinic will provide medication for safe abortions through the mail for members and for those who wish to perform TST's Abortion Ritual. The goal of this first clinic is to allow our members to have access to safe and legal abortions, no matter where they live or what their financial situation may be.

One of the manifest hypocrisies of conservative legal activism is pushing a notion of "religious freedom" that really only applies to Christians, and in practice grants them special rights. TST is the most out-there group pushing for equality of religious freedom: If Christians have all these rights, explain to us why Satanists don't.

Target has removed some Pride-month merchandise from its stores and moved other items to less prominent locations in response to objections and threats from conservatives

As Target explained in a statement, some customers had knocked down Pride displays at stores while others outraged by Pride-themed merchandise angrily approached workers as well as posted threatening videos on social media. Target has been celebrating Pride month for a decade, but as the company noted, “Since introducing this year’s collection, we’ve experienced threats impacting our team members’ sense of safety and wellbeing while at work.”

Targets in several states subsequently received bomb threats appearing to come from Pride supporters angry about the pullback, but these appear to be hoaxes that originated overseas.

What's not a hoax is the violence-themed rhetoric right-wing pundits have been directing at Target. 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said that Target had "put a target on its back". Charlie Kirk said "the only thing they understand is force. Pain is a teacher". No doubt if they were challenged, each would deny promoting literal violence, but they have to know that some portion of their audience will take it that way.

If you're wondering what's supposed to be so terrible about Target's pride display, the Heritage Foundation produced this video tour of Target's Pride section to outrage you. Strangely, though, I'm not outraged -- at least not at Target.

Heritage's claim is that Target is pushing LGBTQ messages at young consumers, who presumably go in as blank slates without any opinions or intentions or identities of their own. It's a weird point of view for a group that ordinarily is so pro-capitalist. Obviously, Target puts stuff out there because the corporation expects to sell it, and not because Target has some sinister agenda about "grooming" children to be gay or trans.

If you think the products have some negative effect on society -- I don't in this case -- well, that's capitalism, isn't it? Exxon sells fossil fuels and Colt sells AR-15s. Those products have negative effects on society, but I suspect the corporations sell them to make money rather than because of some pact with Satan.

Case in point: a teen-sized sweatshirt that says "Not a Phase". The narrator interprets this as Target "grooming" kids into believing they won't grow out of their "gender confusion". This woman clearly has no memory of being a teen-ager and (whatever you happened to be into) being fed up with condescending adults. The shirt expresses a timeless teen attitude, and I see why Target expects to sell a lot of them.

Back when Parkland-massacre-survivor David Hogg was starting his gun-control activism, Fox News host Laura Ingraham mocked him for being rejected by four colleges, because she's classy that way. This week he graduated from Harvard.

Hey @IngrahamAngle you can send my graduation present to: http://Marchforourlives.com/donate

The Supreme Court took power away from the EPA this week by reading the Clean Water Act narrowly. The immediate result is that some wetlands will lose protection, but the precedent may have larger implications. The case deserves more attention than I've been able to give it.

Tina Turner died Wednesday at the age of 83.

and let's close with something natural

The Nature Conservancy has an annual photo contest. This is one of the winners in the "Plants and Fungi" category. These are Dragon Blood Trees. The story behind the tree's name isn't all I was hoping for: apparently it has red sap.

Monday, May 22, 2023

Free to Dominate, Free to Control

Roosevelt’s four freedoms were the building blocks of a humane society — a social democratic aspiration for egalitarians then and now. These Republican freedoms are also building blocks not of a humane society but of a rigid and hierarchical one, in which you can either dominate or be dominated.

- Jamelle Bouie, "The Four Freedoms, according to Republicans"

This week's featured posts are "Summing Up at the End of the Trump/Russia Investigations" and "How I Evaluate Sources".

But if you only read one essay this week, it should be the Jamelle Bouie column quoted above. He looks at the agenda that is passing in red-state legislatures and synthesizes four Republican "freedoms":

Freedom to control, manifested in state control of women's uteruses,
Freedom to exploit, represented by the rollback of child labor laws,
Freedom to censor, exemplified by book banning and preventing schools and universities from teaching about systemic racism and other forms of oppression,
Freedom to menace, demonstrated by laws allowing guns to be carried anywhere, openly or under concealment, and used whenever the bearer feels threatened.

More about this below.

This week everybody was talking about the debt ceiling

It's hard to know what to say. In some sense, it's the most important thing happening. But whatever negotiations are or aren't happening between President Biden and Speaker McCarthy are behind closed doors, so we don't really know anything.

It's also hard to guess what the negotiating positions would mean, even if we knew them. Democrats are worrying that Biden will give away the store and get nothing back other than a promise not to blow up the world economy until next spring.

Americans of either party should worry about whether McCarthy can make a deal at all. Maybe anything he agrees to will be framed by Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz as a RINO sell-out, and lead to McCarthy losing his speakership rather than to a deal.

And finally, does Biden have a Plan B? Could he circumvent the debt ceiling via the 14th Amendment? Or by citing the contradiction between the debt-ceiling and that appropriation bills Congress has passed? Or by minting a platinum coin or selling consol bonds?

There are reasons to worry that this partisan Supreme Court will nix those options, independent of what the laws actually say. (Though I don't see any grounds for objecting to consol bonds or less radical high-interest bonds that would sell above par.)

But all the Plan Bs sound gimmicky, and like an expansion of executive power. Biden will be in better political shape to invoke one if he can argue that he has been driven to his last resort; he did in fact did offer deep concessions that Republicans did not accept, and came to the conclusion that no deal with McCarthy was possible.

So if Biden offers concessions, is he giving away the store or setting up a deft counter-move? There's no way to know.

and the red states' continued decline into oppression and authoritarianism

Thursday morning, The New York Times greeted me with these headlines:

Just another day in red America. Remember when the GOP was supposed to be about Freedom? Each of those three bills is Big Government telling people how to live their lives.

Other headlines I saw this week:

School librarians face a new penalty in the banned-book wars: Prison. "One example is an Arkansas measure that says school and public librarians, as well as teachers, can be imprisoned for up to six years or fined $10,000 if they distribute obscene or harmful texts. It takes effect Aug. 1." The terms obscene and harmful are, of course, undefined. So a prudent librarian will steer clear of any book that any judge might object to -- or if the librarian wants to avoid a court case altogether, avoiding any book that any parent might object to.
School Can Force Trans Girl to Dress as Boy for Graduation, Judge Rules. "A federal judge ruled late Friday evening that the Harrison County [Mississippi] School District can prohibit a 17-year-old transgender girl from attending her graduation Saturday unless she dresses in attire designated for boys" Tim Miller's summary: "The government preventing parents from seeing their child graduate unless they wear state mandated pants."
The Short Life of Baby Milo. Deborah Dorbert knew for three months that the fetus she was carrying had no chance to live, because it lacked essential organs. But Florida's abortion ban forced her to complete the doomed pregnancy. Her son was born and lived 99 minutes.
The staggering fine print of Texas and Florida’s new anti-trans bills. "Chriss laid out a scenario in which [the new Florida law] would apply: A family is living in California, which doesn’t have a ban on gender-affirming care. A parent contesting custody of their child could take them on vacation to Disney World in Orlando, go to the nearby Orange County courthouse, and ask the judge to take emergency jurisdiction over the custody case because the other parent is planning to help the child get puberty blockers."

The outrageous attacks on personal freedom and parental rights are coming so fast that I'm sure I missed a few.

but here's something I've been meaning to tell you

Namely, how I assess unfamiliar sources.

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Wednesday, House Republicans refused to vote on a motion to remove George Santos from Congress.

Dahlia Lithwick asks an important question: What if reporters covered the Supreme Court the way they cover every other branch of government?

Her point, in short, is that reporters on the Supreme Court beat act as if they are covering the Law itself, not a public institution made up of nine immensely powerful human beings.

[T]he longstanding tradition of covering the cases rather than the Justices meant that, with few exceptions, there have not been a lot of folks in the SCOTUS press corps on the Clarence/Ginni Thomas beat; almost nobody on the Dobbs leak beat; and, aside from routinely reporting the fact of plummeting polling numbers, few court insiders on the “legitimacy beat.” With the notable exception of Politico’s Josh Gerstein, who co-reported the Dobbs leak last year, virtually all of the scoops about Clarence Thomas’ ethical breaches, Leonard Leo’s golden spigot, the rich donor to Supreme Court Historical Society pipeline, Ginni Thomas’ election disruption efforts and the catastrophic leak investigation all came from enterprising investigative reporters, political reporters and “outsiders” at Politico, Pro Publica, and the New York Times.

... But it’s not just that we mostly settle for covering the cases. We further let the cases set the agenda for what we consider “justice.” If the nine Justices decide to revisit affirmative action, and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and federal preemption around labor disputes, we’ll then devote a year to debating both sides of these legal issues—regardless of the fact that they were supposed to be long settled. As long as the court thought it was a good time to breathe life into the Major Questions Doctrine or the Independent State Legislature Theory, we have considered the questions of that theory seriously, despite its manifest unseriousness. And once the Supreme Court started to invent its own facts—as it did in the Coach Kennedy case last term, the affirmative action cases this term, and of course 303 Creative, the refusal of service to same sex couples case, also this term—it began to matter urgently that the press would still routinely be covering “cases” as usual, even though these cases included wholly imaginary “facts”—or, as in 303 Creative, no facts at all. Repeating manufactured narratives with which the court will eventually manufacture legal doctrine serves the Court’s interest. The problem is that it does not serve the interests of the public, and that’s who journalists are supposed to be writing for.

The headline from Noelle Dunphy's $10 million lawsuit against Rudy Giuliani was her accusation that he boasted about selling pardons for $2 million each.

[Giuliani] also asked Ms. Dunphy if she knew anyone in need of a pardon, telling her that he was selling pardons for $2 million, which he and President Trump would split. He told Ms. Dunphy that she could refer individuals seeking pardons to him, so long as they did not go through “the normal channels” of the Office of the Pardon Attorney, because correspondence going to that office would be subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

But when you read the 70-page complaint, that is far from the worst of it. (Even if she can support that claim, he could counter that he was just talking big to impress her.) The complaint makes sickening reading. It paints Dunphy as a vulnerable woman coming out of an abusive relationship. Giuliani lures her by promising a huge salary ($1 million per year) and that he will represent her against her abuser. He then starts his own abusive sexual relationship with her, comes up with excuses to "defer" the vast majority of her pay, strings her along without a formal employment agreement for two years, and then fires her without paying the salary or fulfilling any of his other promises.

She claims to have recorded many of their conversations (including one where he gives her permission to record their conversations), and that (because her job including managing his email) she has his email files, including emails from long before her employment.

And if you're wondering how Giuliani's judgment could be that bad, Dunphy has a ready explanation: He was drunk almost the entire time he employed her.

If any of that is true, Giuliani should just find the $10 million and not let this go to court.

Giuliani faces another lawsuit, a defamation suit filed by two Georgia poll workers whom Giuliani baselessly accused of election fraud. Friday, the judge ordered Giuliani to provide a detailed accounting of his net worth, which is never a good sign.

My Pillow founder Mike Lindell isn't just delusional about the 2020 election, he also doesn't pay his bets. (I looked for a word that packs the same punch as "welsher" without demeaning any ethnic group, but I didn't find one.) In 2021, Lindell was claiming he had computer data proving that the Chinese had interfered in the 2020 election, and he seemed to back up his claim by offering a $5 million Prove-Mike-Wrong challenge. But now that he has lost that challenge, he won't pay up.

Cyber-detective Robert Zeidman quickly did prove Mike wrong.

Coming to this conclusion this apparently wasn’t all that hard. Some of the data, Zeidman recently told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, looked like someone had simply typed random numbers; another data set had been created just days before the contest, not before the 2020 election, which was pretty obvious given that creation dates on the files had not been altered.

Lindell is not a computer expert himself, so one likely explanation is that he was conned by fraudsters who sold him the "proof" he wanted to believe existed. Marks often get emotionally invested in the con they've fallen for, and typically are the last people to grasp what has happened. Successful businessmen like Lindell can be perfect targets for conmen, because they really, really don't want to believe they are suckers.

The rules of his contest stipulated binding arbitration on claims, and the arbitration panel selected by a Lindell company ruled in Zeidman's favor in April. But Lindell is still refusing to pay, so this week Zeidman took his case to federal court.

Zeidman may have to get in line to collect, though, because Lindell is also being sued by Dominion Voting Systems for his lies about their role in the 2020 election. One reason Fox News had to settle with Dominion for $787 million was that Tucker Carlson gave Lindell an uncritical platform to spew his baseless allegations.

David Roberts links to AP's "2024 Republican hopefuls rush to defend Marine who put NYC subway rider in fatal chokehold" and then comments:

I wonder how much evidence will have to accumulate before "objective" reporters are allowed to take note of the *pattern* of rapidly rising support for vigilante violence on the right. And then they could go a step further and connect the rising support for vigilante violence with the relentless push to get more guns into circulation. And then they could go eve[n] further and connect the support for vigilante violence & the push for more guns with the declining demographics that make winning via democratic means increasingly difficult.

The Washington Post asked people attending a gun show why they wanted guns. Nearly all the answers contained the word protection.

[O]ver and over, people told me they needed their guns to keep themselves safe. Safe from what? Most couldn’t answer; they simply had a feeling that the world had become a more dangerous place. ... Republican leaders, including Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, have resisted calls for increased gun regulation after shooting deaths, arguing that the root problem is mental illness. But the paranoia that fuels gun-buying has come to seem like a mental health issue in its own right.

The New Yorker visits the Gathering of Thought Criminals, a New York salon for those who "simply feel persecuted for holding unpopular opinions". Apparently, if you profess ideas that most people deem objectionable, and they dare to object, then you've been "cancelled" and are entitled to sympathy.

Meanwhile, Florida parents who want their child to receive gender-affirming care can now have that child taken away. Is there a salon for them somewhere?

Jim Brown died Thursday night at the age of 87. He was arguably the greatest running back in NFL history. In 2010, NFL Network ranked him #2 on a list of the greatest NFL players ever, behind only Jerry Rice. (At that time, Tom Brady had only three of his seven Super Bowl wins, and was ranked #21.)

Brown also had social significance as a key member of the second generation of Black athletes in the national spotlight. The first generation, led by Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis, had mostly kept their heads down, avoided making waves, and let their performance do the talking. The second generation, led by Brown, Bill Russell, and (a few years later) Muhammad Ali, could be more outspoken, and were frequently portrayed in the media as troublemakers.

Today, the NFL is a quarterback's league and runners only rarely make headlines. But in Brown's era, the NFL was a runner's league, and he was the best anyone had ever seen. Here are some highlights. (Copyright issues aren't letting me embed the video.)

and let's close with something from down under

Normally, I pick a closing to be amusing and not at all political. This one does involve a political issue, but I'm hoping it's amusing enough to get by. Australia, the video claims, has all kinds of deadly dangers. But at least it doesn't have AR-15s.

Monday, May 15, 2023

No Time for Truth

We don't have enough time to fact-check every lie he told.

- Jake Tapper, hosting the wrap-up of Trump's CNN town hall

This week's featured posts are "Why the Carroll verdict might matter" and "Normalizing Trump normalizes political violence".

This week everybody was talking about the border

Title 42 was always a pretext. At a time when Trump was denying the seriousness of the Covid epidemic, his administration invoked a public-health law from 1944 as an excuse to stop migrants from legally seeking asylum in the United States.

At the same time, our system for processing asylum seekers is swamped, and Congress has refused to fix it. So the Biden administration, believing it had no better option, continued the policy until Thursday night, when the government's declaration of a Covid emergency officially lapsed.

Ending the policy resulted in a surge of people crossing the border from Mexico, though apparently not quite as large a surge as had been expected. Resources to deal with migrants have been strained, particularly in border communities like El Paso, but also in Northern cities like New York or Chicago, where migrants often end up while they wait for their asylum cases to be adjudicated.

and George Santos

George Santos leaped into the headlines after being elected to Congress in 2022, because his entire biography was almost comically false. Now he's been indicted for a variety of crimes. One charge is that he created a false campaign PAC and got people to donate to it, then used the money for personal purposes. Another is that he falsely claimed unemployment payments while making a six-figure salary.

The indictment had the same comical quality as most Santos news. Reading it, you have to wonder why he thought he could get away with any of this.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy is refusing to ask Santos to resign from Congress, because he represents a swing district in New York that could easily go for a Democrat in a special election.

If you're not following North Carolina Rep. Jeff Jackson, you should be. He blogs and posts a video on Twitter every week, describing what's going on in Congress in a very down-to-Earth way. Here's what he says about the Santos situation:

Normally, if one of your co-workers gets arrested for a bunch of felonies related to their job, they don't get to just come back to the office the next day. But he did, and it was really weird.

and the Carroll verdict

A jury in New York federal court found Donald Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. It awarded his accuser E. Jean Carroll, $5 million in damages. I discuss the implications of that verdict in one of the featured posts.

Trump's attempt to spin the verdict focused on two things: The jury did not rule that Carroll had proved Trump raped her, and "you can’t get a fair trial" in New York City.

As he did with Russian collusion in the Mueller report, Trump is claiming vindication when in reality there just wasn't enough evidence to condemn him. The jury did not say Trump hadn't raped Carroll, just that she hadn't proved it. The sexual assault was enough to invoke the damage claim, so I imagine there was not a big effort to reach unanimity on the rape claim.

The verdict makes a certain amount of sense when you consider the evidence presented. On the Access Hollywood tape, Trump confessed to a pattern of sexual assault -- grabbing women "by the pussy" -- but didn't confess to rape. And the two witnesses who described being attacked by Trump told about attacks that were interrupted. So the rape claim was a purer he-said/she-said case, while sexual assault had more support.

Still, as I talk about in the featured post, being guilty of sexual assault is nothing to brag about.

Trump is appealing to federal appellate court. (The case was already in the federal court system, because the two parties were from different states.) But an appeal is not an automatic do-over. He'll have to convince the appellate court that the original judge's rulings were illegal in some way.

and CNN's Trump town hall

The day after being found liable for sexual assault and defamation, Trump appeared on CNN with an audience of New Hampshire voters who had been pre-selected to be favorable to him. I discuss that in one of the featured posts.

For the most part, Republicans haven't been willing to go after Trump, despite all the material lying around in plain sight. But Liz Cheney narrates this anti-Trump ad.

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The Ukrainian spring offensive may be starting, as Ukrainian forces gain territory around Bakhmut. But so far it's slow going.

The House Oversight Committee released a 65-page memo about its investigations of the Biden family, which so far have been a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

The House GOP accused Joe Biden and his family on Wednesday of engaging in business with foreign entities—but were unable to provide any actual evidence linking the president to any wrongdoing.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer released a 65-page memo detailing a sprawling investigation into Biden and some of his relatives, particularly his son Hunter Biden. Nowhere in the massive document was there a specific allegation of a crime committed by Biden or any of his relatives. During a press conference explaining the investigation, Comer was asked if he had evidence directly linking Biden to corruption. The Kentucky Republican hemmed and hawed but ultimately admitted he didn’t.

Conservatives are defending Daniel Perry (the guy who killed homeless man Jordan Neely on the New York subway) as a "Good Samaritan". (Examples: Ron DeSantis, National Police Association.)

It's one more example of making the Bible say whatever you want. Anyone who knows and respects the Bible ought to respond similarly to David Roberts:

No way to exaggerate how fucked up and dystopian it is that the reactionaries are transmuting the parable of the Good Samaritan from "he helps the person having problems" to "he kills the person having problems but who's making everyone else uncomfortable."

Perry has been charged with manslaughter. Here's the background on the story.

At this point there's no way to quantify what race might have had to do with this incident and people's reactions to it. (Neely was Black, Perry is White.) But if anybody is wondering what "Black Lives Matter" is supposed to mean, this is it: OK, Neely was creating an incident on the subway, though he had not actually attacked anybody. There's an argument to be made for someone stepping in to restrain Neely until some authority takes charge of the situation. But restraining Neely with a chokehold until he dies is only a "solution" if Neely's life doesn't matter.

Maybe Neely being Black had nothing to do with why his life didn't matter. Maybe it was because his behavior was outside normal subway behavior, or some other reason. But if Neely's life did matter to Perry, he'd have handled the situation differently.

Turkey had an election yesterday. President Erdogan, who has been in power since 2003, has been accused of instituting one-man rule. But it looks like Turkey is not so far gone towards autocracy that he can't be voted out.

The upshot seems to be that no one got a majority of the vote, so Erdogan will face a runoff later this month.

A sidebar to the Turkish election is Twitter giving in to the Erdogan government's demands to censor opposition tweets.

In response to legal process and to ensure Twitter remains available to the people of Turkey, we have taken action to restrict access to some content in Turkey today.

Elon Musk defended the decision by making a lesser-evil argument:

The choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales answered that question:

What Wikipedia did: we stood strong for our principles and fought to the Supreme Court of Turkey and won. This is what it means to treat freedom of expression as a principle rather than a slogan.

And Matt Binder points out:

Twitter used to routinely challenge Turkey’s takedown requests. Erdogan actually had Twitter banned in Turkey in 2014 for refusing to comply. (the courts later ended the ban.) but that was on the “censorship” version of Twitter, not this new “free speech” one

I'll add this: An authoritarian government can always use its power to manipulate lesser-evil thinking. No matter what it wants you to do, it can make something worse happen if you refuse.

And maybe it's just a coincidence that another Musk company, SpaceX, has a business relationship with Erdogan's government.

Are you conservative? Do you think America has gotten too "woke" to be livable? Good news: Russia wants you!

In general, Grist is a good source for environmental news. Here's an interesting article about green steel, i.e., steel produced without fossil fuels.

Relating to the normalization issues discussed above: Joe Biden should not debate unless and until a more legitimate challenger emerges. Currently, only RFK Jr. and Marianne Williamson have announced their candidacy. RFK Jr., in particular, is someone who should not be normalized. He is an endless font of anti-vax misinformation, from his vaccines-cause-autism days to more recent lies about Covid vaccines. He shamelessly repeats stuff that has been authoritatively debunked, and keeps misquoting scientists after they've asked him to stop. Watch SkepChick's RFK Jr. takedown.

In general, sitting presidents running for re-election don't participate in debates. There's an argument for Biden breaking that tradition in order to challenge the perception that age has addled him. And I could see that if it meant sharing a stage with candidates of stature, like say, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, California Governor Gavin Newsom, or maybe Elizabeth Warren. But he shouldn't give a platform to RFK Jr at all, and I don't see what he gains by debating Williamson.

From the MAGA translation of the New Testament:

and let's close with something adorable

An animal rescue shelter found Nibi when she was a week old. She's never seen another beaver, but she seems to know how to build dams.

Monday, May 8, 2023

What They Rule

What we're really talking about is this plan to capture the U.S. Supreme Court, to install people on it who are sure things. Not to choose people because they have reputations for being fair (or we think they might be fair), but because the people who are at the decision-making table -- Leonard Leo, who chose the judges that Trump chose from -- believes that they will be sure votes. ... We are seeing this revolution that Leonard Leo has put in place. It is one that the American people didn't ask for, didn't give consent to, weren't informed that this is why these judges were chosen. In fact, they were said to be judges who were "rule of law judges". ... Their definition of "rule of law" is not the same as most people's, which is following precedent, respecting those rules. Instead, their definition of "rule of law" appears to be to change the law to be what they rule.

- Lisa Graves, interviewed by Dahlia Lithwick

This week's featured post is "Does the US have a spending problem?"

This week everybody was talking about the debt ceiling

When House Republicans began threatening a debt-ceiling showdown shortly after winning a majority last November, most commentators (and most voters who were paying attention) assumed it would lead to the usual dance: a lot of posturing leading up to the deadline (which might come as early as June 1), then a temporary increase to give negotiations more time, and then a deal seconds before the extra time ran out.

As the date of the catastrophe gets closer, more and more people are warning that we could really go over the cliff this time.

This week's featured post is the third in my debt-ceiling series.

Speculation about ways to circumvent the debt ceiling is getting more serious. Lawrence Tribe explains why he believes the debt ceiling is unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment:

The right question is whether Congress — after passing the spending bills that created these debts in the first place — can invoke an arbitrary dollar limit to force the president and his administration to do its bidding.

There is only one right answer to that question, and it is no.

And Eric Levitz describes how consol bonds get around the debt ceiling:

In simple terms, a consol bond is one that never matures. A normal bond commits a borrower to paying back the principal on their loan plus interest at a set date. A consol bond, by contrast, requires the borrower to make annual interest payments forever but does not require them to pay off the loan’s full value at any particular point in time.

This is handy since the legislation establishing the U.S. debt limit defines the federal debt as the amount of principal that the government is obligated to repay. Thus, while a normal U.S. Treasury bond increases the national debt as defined by the debt ceiling, a consol bond does not. If the government borrows money via bonds that have no principal — only interest-payment obligations — then it can continue funding its operations indefinitely, even in the absence of a debt-ceiling hike.

A less extreme version could resemble a traditional bond but take advantage of the same loophole: Suppose a bond had a principle of $1,000, but paid $100 a year in interest? The Treasury could sell it for a lot more than $1,000, but it would only count $1,000 towards the debt limit.

and we're still finding out more about Clarence Thomas' corruption

Two new Thomas scandals broke this week: Harlan Crow (the billionaire who we already knew takes the Thomases on annual vacations that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for them to replicate on their own) paid the private-school tuition of Thomas' grandnephew, whom Thomas was "raising as a son".

And Leonard Leo (who is at the center of a network of dark-money groups whose purpose is to make our courts more conservative) directed groups he influences to pay at least $100K to Thomas' wife's consulting firm. Leo's instructions say nothing about work to be done, but just to "give" Ginni Thomas money, with "no mention of Ginni, of course".

Vox is keeping a running count of the revelations. Another good summary comes from New York Magazine's Eric Levitz, who also sums up the problem they outline:

In a world where low-level civil servants get nervous about letting friends buy them lunch, it is not easy to explain why it is totally fine for a man entrusted with enormous, democratically unaccountable power to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of gifts from partisan political activists, let alone fail to disclose them.

Chris Hayes did a good job covering the Thomas scandals on his Friday show. His opening block reviewed the new developments and raised the question: "Just how much money has secretly flowed from right-wing donors and interests into the household of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas?" His conclusion is that we just don't know, but that it's clearly quite a lot.

A later block of that show felt validating to me personally. Last week, I presented my theory of what Crow has been doing: He is Thomas' "minder", and the point of showering Thomas with expensive favors is not to "buy his vote on any particular case", but to "give him something to lose if he should start seeing the charms of liberal philosophy" -- as previous Republican-appointed justices like David Souter and John Paul Stevens had.

That interpretation seemed obvious to me, so I was wondering why I wasn't hearing it from other commentators. Well, Friday Chris made precisely that case. So did Levitz:

The claim that none of these payments actually influenced Thomas’s jurisprudence seems plausible. Thomas was a reactionary long before he met Harlan Crow. It is possible that Crow’s largesse was motivated by a desire to insure against the risk of Thomas converting to liberalism à la David Souter.

Senator Whitehouse tells the Judiciary Committee that Clarence Thomas' acceptance of luxurious unreported vacations has a precedent: Justice Scalia took more than 70 free vacations at expensive resorts, and declared none of them.

If you want to dig deeper into the dark-money network that is pushing the courts to the right in ways that undermine democracy, listen to the "Clarence Thomas and the Billionaires" episode of Dahlia Lithwick's Amicus podcast. That's where the quote at the top of the page comes from.

and the case(s) against Trump

Closing arguments are happening today in E. Jean Carroll's defamation suit against Trump. The case, which hangs on whether Trump raped Carroll in the 1990s, will then go to the jury.

The Trump team mounted no defense, while Carroll not only described the rape under oath, but presented supporting evidence:

Two women testified that Carroll told them about the rape soon after it happened.
Two other women testified that Trump attacked them in similar fashion.
The jury saw the Access Hollywood tape from 2003 in which Trump bragged about assaulting women.
The jury also saw a Trump deposition from October. In the course of that testimony, Trump said that Carroll was "not my type", but also mistook a photo of Carroll for his second wife, Marla Maples. (He also told Carroll's lesbian lawyer that she wasn't his type either. The lawyer was unfailingly polite during questioning, but I would have loved to hear her say, "With all due respect, you're a fat old man. Nobody cares whether they're your type.")

The weakness of Carroll's case is that

No third person saw the rape happen.
Carroll can't say when it happened any more precisely than late 1995 or early 1996.

The standard of proof in a civil case is more-likely-than-not. So while I can imagine deciding that Carroll hasn't proved her case beyond a reasonable doubt, given the vagueness of the timeframe, it's hard for me to see how Trump's non-defense can seem more likely than what Carroll has presented. (Trump's lawyer is portraying the whole case as a conspiracy of Trump-hating women. But the judge will undoubtedly remind jurors that what either lawyer says is not evidence.) The defense has to be hoping that the jury contains at least one die-hard Trump cultist.

Whichever way it goes, we're likely to get a verdict this week. It will be the first time a jury has ruled on Trump's behavior.

If Joe Biden gave a deposition like Trump's, Fox News would be replaying it 24/7 as evidence of dementia. Trump not only misidentified his second wife Marla Maples in a photo, but also says he can't remember whether his affair with her started before or after his divorce from Ivana. In fact that affair was headline news at the time.

But nobody worries about that second thing being dementia, because we all -- even his supporters -- assume he's lying under oath.

Ditto for his previous written responses to Robert Mueller's questions. His answer to almost every question was that he didn't remember.

Four members of the Proud Boys, including their former leader Enrique Tarrio, were convicted of seditious conspiracy Thursday. This is the third trial in which the Justice Department has gotten seditious conspiracy convictions against people involved in January 6. (Two previous trials convicted members of the Oath Keepers, including their founder Stewart Rhodes.)

Tarrio was convicted despite spending January 6 in Baltimore. He is the first person to be convicted of conspiring to organize the attack without directly participating in it. This suggests that DoJ is finally moving up the chain, and could eventually get to Trump.

Collectively, the three trials demonstrate that DoJ has gotten good at proving that there indeed was a seditious conspiracy on January 6. The question now is just: Who were the conspirators?

None of the convicted conspirators have been sentenced yet, but the DoJ just made its sentencing recommendation for Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes: 25 years in prison. We'll see if the judge agrees. Meanwhile, a man convicted of attacking police with a chair and bear spray was sentenced to 14 years, the most any January 6 defendant has received so far. Prosecutors had asked for 24 years.

Sentences like that increase pressure on conspirators to flip on someone higher up the chain.

Speaking of flipping, The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that at least eight of the 16 fake electors Trump lined up to cast Georgia's electoral votes for him (in spite of the fact that he lost the state to Joe Biden) have accepted immunity deals from Fulton County DA Fani Willis.

It's not immediately clear what they're going to testify to or who they're going to testify against, but it is an indication that Willis will be seeking indictments against people higher in the fake-elector conspiracy. Willis has already warned local officials to be ready for indictments to come down (with possible violent responses from protesters) during the July 11 to September 1 grand jury term.

She hasn't said whether she plans to indict Trump, but it's hard to see why indictments against John Eastman or Rudy Giuliani would provoke violence.

and you also might be interested in ...

King Charles III was crowned in England Saturday. I'm not sure why anybody cares about this, but a lot of people seem to.

President Biden did not attend, because no American president has ever attended an English coronation. (No offense, but kings just aren't our thing.) He was represented by the First Lady.

The National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center gives a 62% chance of El Nino developing by July. If so, that will likely mean record global temperatures.

My somewhat oversimplified understanding of El Nino and the climate is that the temperature measurements we usually see are air temperatures, but global warming also affects the oceans. El Nino releases ocean heat into the air.

Jordan Neely was a homeless man acting weird on the New York subway, until someone killed him. Everyone knows who did it, but the killer hasn't been arrested or charged with anything. Some people regard him as a hero.

To me, this is the urban version of shooting a stranger who rings your doorbell. These days, everyone who exhibits unexpected behavior seems like a threat, and many seem to believe that potentially deadly force is a reasonable response, especially if the object of your fear fits into some easily dehumanized category.

Ted Cruz has a challenger in 2024: Congressman Colin Allred, who faced an interesting choice when he graduated from college. Allred hadn't been drafted by the NFL, but he had gotten into law school. He took the risky path and went to an NFL training camp anyway. He made the squad, and had a four-year career as a Tennessee Titans linebacker. Then he returned to the law.

I wonder if Allred has read Josh Hawley's book on manliness yet.

Ted is already rattled. His fund-raising text against Allred used a picture of Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg instead of Allred. (Those Black people -- they all look alike. Right?)

Another mass shooting in Texas and once again Republican officials are calling for prayer. They need to read the Book of Amos, which quotes God saying this:

I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the peace offerings of your fattened animals, I will not look upon them. Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

In other words: "It pisses me off when you expect me to fix problems you caused and refuse to work on."

Early indications can be misleading, but the mall shooter looks like a right-wing extremist.

Governor Abbott repeats the other popular meaningless response to our gun-violence problem:

The long-term solution here is to address the mental-health issue.

But of course he's been cutting mental-health funding. Because he doesn't actually care about mental health; he just wants to shift attention away from gun control.

This is a popular rhetorical tactic on the Right: minimize one problem by comparing it to another, when in fact you don't want to address either one.

So if you want to talk about how many unarmed people of color are killed by police, they'll ask why nobody on the Left cares about the much more serious problem of black-on-black crime. But their interest in black-on-black crime goes away as soon as you stop talking about the police. Or they'll ask why we're sending money to Ukraine when there are homeless veterans here in the US. "OK, then," you say, "let's do something about homeless veterans." Never mind. They only cared about the veterans to argue against aiding Ukraine.

Who in 1967 suspected that the unknown young Cat Stevens was writing an anthem for the 2020s, "I'm Gonna Get Me a Gun"?

Also in Texas: A car plowed into a crowd of people outside a shelter serving migrants and homeless people in Brownsville, while the driver shouted anti-migrant obscenities. Seven dead, ten injured.

Deborah Fallows borrows her husband's Substack blog to tell her story of long Covid.

Brexit was the UK's version of Trump's America First policy: The rest of the world has been taking advantage of us and we're going to put a stop to it.

Well, it's now pretty clear that was a huge mistake, and the British economy is in bad shape.

and let's close with something retro

The next big thing in transportation might be a ship with sails. Not big cloth ones like the old clipper ships, but huge vertical wings. Cargo ships may never against be completely wind-powered, but what if wind assistance could cut fuel use by 30% or so?