The orthodox theory holds that a public opinion constitutes a moral judgment on a group of facts. The theory I am suggesting is that, in the present state of education, a public opinion is primarily a moralized and codified version of the facts. I am arguing that the pattern of stereotypes at the center of our codes largely determines what group of facts we shall see, and in what light we shall see them
- Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1921)
This week's featured post is "Monkey-wrenching the Regulations that Protect Our Lives".
This week everybody was talking about Iowa and New Hampshire
The Iowa caucuses happened last Monday, with Donald Trump getting a little over 50% of the Republican vote. How you interpret that depends on how you frame Trump's role in the GOP. If you think of him as a presidential candidate among other presidential candidates, it's a very strong result; he has more support than all his rivals combined. But if you frame him as the incumbent leader of the party, it's a rather weak result. Imagine, for example, how the press will cover Biden if a Democratic primary is held somewhere, and he barely clears 50%.
In any case, nobody should attach too much importance to the result, because we're talking about very few people. Just 110K Iowa Republicans turned out, out of 752K registered Republicans statewide and over 2 million total registered voters. That was down from 187K Republican caucus voters in 2016.
Last week I said that if DeSantis finished third in Iowa, he should drop out. He finished second, and dropped out yesterday anyway. His withdrawal doesn't seem all that consequential because he didn't have a lot of support anyway (that's why he's dropping out), and it's not clear which way his voters will go. If they supported DeSantis because they liked Trump's policies but realize that the man himself is a threat to democracy, they'll go to Haley. But if they just wanted a younger Trump, they'll go to Trump.
I would interpret the Iowa result this way: If you were hoping for the Republican Party to reject Trump on their own, you need to accept that it's not going to happen.
We should see that confirmed tomorrow in New Hampshire: Trump is leading in the polls, but New Hampshire is a tricky state to predict, as Barack Obama discovered in 2016. So while a Haley victory isn't likely, it is possible.
But even that outcome wouldn't lead to a broader Trump defeat. NH is ideal terrain for Haley, and many Biden-leaning independents may cross over to vote for her. But that's not a winning formula going forward.
There really is only one scenario where a NH loss leads to Trump's undoing, and that depends on him: Everybody will be watching him, so if he responds to an unexpected loss with a racist, sexist, and generally unhinged temper tantrum, even Republicans might begin to wonder about his sanity.
Speaking in Concord, NH on Friday, Trump mixed up Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley, claiming that Haley was in charge of security on January 6. (His usual lie assigns that role to Pelosi.) But we're supposed to worry about Biden's mental acuity.
The other Trump news is all legal: The second E. Jean Carroll defamation trial got underway. The judge, following proper legal procedure, is not letting Trump re-argue something already decided by a previous jury: that Trump really did sexually assault Carroll.
Trump's "defense", if you want to call it that, is to replay the greatest hits of toxic masculinity. A standard claim to throw at rape victims is "Didn't you actually enjoy it?" Well, CNN's Joey Jackson summarized the Trump attorney's opening statement: You weren't injured by Trump's defamation, you benefited from it.
It was sort of like hey, listen, be thankful Trump made you famous, right? The reality is that what do we have to do with social media and mean tweets that you get on social media. If you take on a person apt to be the president, guess what? You're in the position you want to be. You're on TV all the time. Emotional pain and damages, what are you talking about?
When Trump was in the courtroom, he kept muttering and commenting loud enough for the jury to hear, until the judge threatened to remove him. On the campaign trail and on social media, he keeps repeating the remarks that the previous jury had determined were defamatory.
Trump's behavior underlines the need for substantial punitive damages, over and above Carroll's emotional suffering and loss of reputation. The point of punitive damages is to make the defamation stop, which the $5 million original award has failed to accomplish.
In addition to the Carroll trial, we're awaiting the judge's decision in the NY state fraud trial. We're also waiting for an appeals court to rule on Trump's claim of presidential immunity, and for the Supreme Court to hear arguments about whether the 14th Amendment disqualifies him from being president again.
This moment in the Trump trials reminds me of the period between the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 and the first ObamaCare insurance policies in 2014. The program was deeply unpopular then, basically because Republicans could say whatever they wanted about "death panels" or whatever, and ordinary people didn't have any experience that could prove them wrong. Today, though, if you talk about repealing ObamaCare, millions of people understand that they would lose their health insurance. At its nadir in late 2013, only 33% of Americans had a favorable opinion of ObamaCare, while 59% do now.
Similarly, today everybody knows that Trump has been indicted, but since the cases haven't gone to trial (largely due to Trump's stalling tactics), he can say whatever he wants about the evidence, the prosecutors, and the judges.
If you live in the Fox News echo chamber, you've heard Trump's claims, but you know nothing about the seriousness of the crimes he's accused of or the strength of the evidence against him. It's all just a witchhunt, a "weaponization" of the Justice Department and the legal system. He didn't do anything wrong. If he did do something wrong, everybody does it. And if everybody doesn't do it, there would still be "bedlam" if he were ever held to account.
But despite Trump's stalling, at least one case is likely to go to trial before the election, and probably result in a conviction. That will be harder to spin away.
BTW: Think about that stalling. If Trump really believed that he had done nothing wrong and the indictments were all a coordinated political witchhunt, he'd be eager to go to trial so he could poke holes in the flimsy evidence against him. When a jury found him innocent after some minimal deliberation, he could crow about being vindicated. But in the real world, Trump knows he's guilty and that the government has the goods on him, so stalling until he's president again (and has the tools to obstruct justice) is his best bet.
and the Gaza War
The shock of the October 7 attacks by Hamas welded together a lot of people with divergent views. In Israel, a unity government was formed, a startling departure from recent years when Netanyahu has hung on by finding allies to cobble together narrow majorities in the Knesset, and a new election is needed every year or two. The Biden administration also signed on to the coalition, and has stood with Israel whenever it has been challenged in the UN and elsewhere.
But this week we began to see cracks in that coalition. Netanyahu is increasingly hostile to the Biden administration, and Israel's internal political divisions are re-emerging.
The war is increasingly becoming a slog, which is causing the world to forget Israel's October 7 suffering and focus instead on the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Meanwhile, military operations are failing to find and rescue the hostages, and the goal of eradicating Hamas seems ever more distant. Polls indicate that Netanyahu's goose is cooked once elections are held, which the government doesn't want to hold during wartime. And that makes critics wonder how committed the prime minister is to ending the war.
and something you probably didn't know you should care about
Probably the words "Chevron doctrine" make your eyes glaze over. But they shouldn't. In the featured post, I try to explain why the Supreme Court's looming revision of Chevron means that six corporate-tool foxes are about the seize control of the agencies that regulate all of America's hen houses.
and you also might be interested in ...
This week's hopeful take on climate change comes from Chris Hayes' interview with climate journalist Robinson Meyer. Near the end of the interview, Meyer talks about about lowering carbon emissions sector by sector:
We used to think the power sector was really, really hard. The power sector was the biggest source of [carbon] emissions in the US. Then cheap wind and solar happened (and we switched from coal to natural gas) and very rapidly power emissions fell.
And then ... transportation became the most polluting sector of the US economy. But what's about to happen in the next few years [as EV prices drop] is that transportation's about to fall to second place, and industry will be the most polluting sector of the economy.
And what I suspect will happen is, just as happened with the power sector and the transportation sector, is that once industry is the most polluting sector of the economy, and people really start to focus on it, we're going to see all these easy-to-abate emissions, that we just haven't really noticed yet. And we're going to get rid of them really quickly. And so, to some degree steel, chemicals, [agriculture], these are huge, challenging problems. On the other hand, they're challenging problems because we just haven't paid attention to them yet.
Meanwhile, there's one fossil-fuel-reducing project that has bipartisan support: ethanol made from corn. If only it weren't such a bad idea. If, rather than fueling internal-combustion-engine cars with ethanol, we charged EVs with solar energy, one acre of solar panels could power as much transportation as 100 acres of corn. At least that's what 200 science faculty at 31 Iowa colleges and universities think.
Reportedly, climate change is "on the back burner" for the plutocratic overlords at Davos this year. Also, they're sanguine about Trump regaining power and continuing to cut their taxes and deregulate their businesses. I'm reminded of Krupp and I. G. Farben in the early 1930s.
Did you hear that Biden has decriminalized crime? That's one of the many things you don't know because you don't watch Fox News. Fortunately, Kat Abu does.
and let's close with something fake
When you work hard to get things right and not be fooled by misinformation, once in a while it feels good to revel in complete fraud. Kueez.com has collected viral photos that weren't all they appeared to be. Some are amusing, some are head-shaking, and others are laugh-out-loud funny. Probably my favorite is a water-surrounded rock and a castle getting photoshopped together.
The actual rock is in Thailand and the castle in Germany, but the combination has the single quality all successful misinformation must have: You look at it and you want it to be real.
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