This show is not important.
What is important is that we get to live in a country
that allows us to have a show like this.
This week's featured posts are "What to Make of Charlie Kirk" and "Is Kimmel's return a turning point?"
Ongoing stories
- Trump's assault on American democracy. The assault accelerated, with violations of free speech, using the Justice Department to persecute enemies, and threats against the city of Portland.
- Climate change. So much else happened in these three weeks, I could barely notice anything about the climate.
- Gaza. More and more nations are recognizing a Palestinian state, as Israel's destruction of Gaza continues. Netanyahu gave a defiant speech to the UN.
- Ukraine. Trump apparently did an about-face on this war, suddenly appearing to support Ukraine. Personally, I don't know why anybody pays attention to what he says, since it so seldom leads to action. Currently, Trump is threatening major new sanctions on Russia, but only after Europe completely stops buying Russian oil. There will always be something somebody else has to do first, because Trump is incapable of standing up to Putin.
Recent weeks' developments
Everybody has been talking about Charlie Kirk
That's the subject of a featured post.
and a shutdown
The new fiscal year starts Wednesday, and there's still no funding to keep the government open. The concessions Democrats are holding out for should be popular, but Trump seems to think a shutdown works to his advantage. So I think we'll just have to have one and see who's right.
Also, the new fiscal year marks when all those federal resignation programs take effect. Hundreds of thousands of government workers are affected, with Trump promising to fire many more if the government shuts down.
I think we're about to find out what all those people do.
and ICE
Wednesday, a rooftop gunman later identified as Joshua Jahn fired down on an ICE facility in Dallas, killing two detainees and wounding another before killing himself. No ICE agents were harmed. The killed appear not to have been targeted directly, but were just in the line of fire as he raked the building with bullets.
Official speculation says that Jahn intended to attack ICE agents, though independent blogger Ken Klippenstein talked to Jahn's friends and described a more complex set of motives.
Both Jahn and Charlie Kirk's killer exemplify how different most shooters are from the rest of us. Most of us have murderous fantasies at one time or another, so we imagine that actual murderers are like us, but with less self-control. I don't think that's true. Look inside the mind of a sniper and you'll usually find a lot of weird stuff that has no parallel in your own mind. John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan to impress a movie star he was obsessed with; I can't find any motive like that in my own mind.
Trump regime spokespeople are trying to use the shooting to gain sympathy for ICE and exempt them from criticism. And while I'll grant that no one deserves to be shot at for doing their job, ICE itself does not deserve your sympathy and should be getting even more criticism.
Check out this video from New York, where an ICE agent physically attacks a woman who had been pleading with him for information about her husband, "who had been abducted by masked ICE agents who did not identify themselves, did not present a warrant, did not give any lawful grounds for his detention." (To their credit, ICE removed the agent from duty and put out a statement saying that his actions were "unacceptable". But I am left to wonder how many similar incidents pass without notice because no one turns them into viral videos.)
Meanwhile, the Boston Globe reports:
A Leominster family who has lived in the United States for more than 20 years said federal immigration agents held their 5-year-old daughter, who is a US-citizen and autistic, in custody outside their home in an effort to pressure the parents to turn themselves over to agents.
The family gave the Globe videos of the girl standing in the driveway, surrounded by armed agents. When the father told them not to touch her, one agent taunted back: "You’re more than welcome to come pick her up."
Ian Roberts is the superintendent of Iowa's largest school district. (Des Moines), and the first person of color to hold that position. Or at least he was until Friday morning when ICE arrested him. As of this weekend, he was in a county jail. Trump got elected pledging to round up violent criminals, but that's not at all what he's doing.
Since Trump took office in January, 16 people have died while in ICE detention, compared to 26 in the entire four years of the Biden administration.
Here's what I say to those who accuse liberals of "demonizing" ICE: It's not demonization if your behavior is genuinely demonic.
A Reuters article notes that federal drug prosecutions are way down. That's a hidden cost of shifting law-enforcement resources to mass deportation. I also wonder about white-collar crime, which Trump has no interest in stopping. This ought to be a golden age for would-be Bernie Madoffs.
There's an ICE processing center in Burlington, MA, a few miles from where I live. Every Wednesday from 11 am to 1 pm, hundreds of people show up to protest. This week I went for the first time.
and corruption
Recent weeks have exposed corrupt acts of both omission and commission. The so-called Department of "Justice" has been using its shield to protect the guilty and its sword to attack the innocent.
In an undercover operation last year, the FBI recorded Tom Homan, now the White House border czar, accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help the agents — who were posing as business executives — win government contracts in a second Trump administration, according to multiple people familiar with the probe and internal documents reviewed by MSNBC.
The FBI and the Justice Department planned to wait to see whether Homan would deliver on his alleged promise once he became the nation’s top immigration official. But the case indefinitely stalled soon after Donald Trump became president again in January, according to six sources familiar with the matter. In recent weeks, Trump appointees officially closed the investigation, after FBI Director Kash Patel requested a status update on the case, two of the people said.
Trump has gotten impatient with DoJ apparently dragging its feet about indicting and convicting his political enemies. Rather than call AG Pam Bondi on the phone, he posted to Truth Social:
Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, “same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam “Shifty” Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.” ... We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!
[It's worth pointing out that the only one "guilty as hell" is Trump himself. On the merits, both impeachments should have resulted in conviction and removal. With the cooperation of the Supreme Court and a puppet district judge, Trump avoided trial on the most serious indictments. The only time a jury heard the evidence against him, he was convicted on all counts.]
For the most part, DoJ prosecutors have been trying to placate Trump without doing too much injury to their personal integrity. The result has been what LawFare's Benjamin Wittes calls "ghost investigations": DoJ announces that it is investigating Trump's enemies, allowing Fox News to tease its viewers with the anticipation of lurid show trials. But since these people have done nothing wrong other than antagonize Dear Leader, the investigations lead to "all talk, no action", just as Trump said.
Announcing such investigations is an ethical violation in itself -- DoJ should shut up until it has an indictment to file in court -- but people unwilling to compromise themselves at least that far don't survive in the Trump regime.
The most urgent enemy for Trump to indict was James Comey, because the statute of limitations was about to run out on his 2020 testimony to Congress. That effort at persecution had been running into roadblocks, mainly because professional prosecutors did not want to violate their integrity or ruin their reputation by pushing a phony indictment for political purposes.
To start with, Trump-appointed US Attorney Erik Siebert refused to try to indict Comey, believing there was no case. So Trump pushed him out and replaced him with his former personal lawyer (who has never prosecuted a case before) Lindsey Halligan. Halligan was met with a memo from her prosecutors more-or-less repeating that point.
It is unclear whether any career lawyers in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia agreed with the decision to seek charges against Comey or will be willing to help conduct the day-to-day work of the prosecution.
One of the points Halligan will have to defend against is malicious prosecution, for which a judge could throw the case out. To guard against that, you would expect the indictment itself to make a strong case, but the Comey indictment does not: It is a mere page-and-a-half, and just lists the charges without giving a hint as to why anybody should credit those charges. Reportedly, the grand jury refused to support a third count, and passed the other two with a bare 14-9 majority. That doesn't speak well for Halligan's ability to get a unanimous beyond-reasonable-doubt judgment from a trial jury.
But that seems to be beside the point: Halligan needs to please Trump, and Trump wants an indictment. So he got one.
and Portland
The latest American city Trump has chosen to invade for no legitimate reason is Portland.
At the request of Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists. I am also authorizing Full Force, if necessary.
Residents of Portland have no idea what he's talking about. The city is not "War ravaged". There have been a few small protests outside ICE offices (probably like the one I participated in Wednesday in Massachusetts), but they are not "under siege from attack by Antifa".
200 troops from the Oregon National Guard have been deployed over the objection of their usual commander, Governor Tina Kotek. Oregon and Portland have come together to file a lawsuit seeking to stop the deployment.
“When the president and I spoke yesterday, I told him in plain language that there is no insurrection or threat to public safety that necessitates military intervention in Portland or any other city in our state," Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek said in a news release Sunday. "Despite this — and all evidence to the contrary — he has chosen to disregard Oregonians’ safety and ability to govern ourselves. This is not necessary. And it is unlawful. And it will make Oregonians less safe."
and autism
The great thing about being a crank is that you're never wrong. Any bit of evidence that supports your view is reliable, while anything pointing the other way is fake. So as soon as Trump appointed well-known crank RFK Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services, you had to know what was coming: an announcement that a simple cause for rising numbers of autism diagnoses has been found, and that it has something to do with either a vaccine or a drug people take.
We got that predictable announcement Monday. Trump and RFK appeared together to announce that autism is caused by taking Tylenol late in pregnancy.
Trump kicked the meeting off by expressing the classic crank fantasy: I know way more than the experts and I always have.
It's probably 20 years ago, in New York. I was a developer, as you probably heard, and I always had very strong feelings about autism and how it happened and where it came from. ... It's turning out that we understood a lot more than a lot of people who studied it.
In a word: no. The best reference I found on this topic was in Stat News. The gist is that there is a (small) correlation between women taking Tylenol during pregnancy and autistic children. But this has been studied for years and nobody has found any causation.
[W]hat researchers debate is whether Tylenol might cause autism, or whether Tylenol is simply more often used by people who experience certain conditions during pregnancy, such as infections or migraines, which might also be linked to autism. This is a key problem in science. Ice cream consumption increases in the summer, as do sunburns and shark attacks. But ice cream does not cause sunburns or shark attacks — they all just happen more often during the summer.
Nothing in the science justifies Trump's unequivocal statement: "So taking Tylenol is not good. All right. I'll say it. It's not good."
And even if the entire correlation were due to Tylenol causing autism, it's way too small to explain the increase in autism diagnoses.
Oh, and there was a bunch of nonsense: Cuba and the Amish do indeed have autism, among other bits of misinformation.
The other headline from the announcement was an "exciting new therapy" for autism: leucovorin. This also is not new. There are some very small studies that show that leucovorin might help somewhat. The normal course of research would be to commission larger studies and see if the small-study result can be replicated -- not to announce an "exciting new therapy".
Remember: Trump pushed two quack remedies for Covid -- invermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Neither was effective.
Finally, even though what they were presenting had nothing to do with vaccines, Trump just couldn't couldn't stop himself from babbling about them.
The other thing that I can tell you that I'll say that they will maybe say at a little bit later date. But I think when you go for the shot, you do it over a five-time period, take it over five times or four times, but you take it in smaller doses and you spread it out over a period of years. And they pump so much stuff into those beautiful little babies, it's a disgrace. I don't see it. I think it's very bad. They're pumping -- it looks like they're pumping into a horse. You have a little child, a little fragile child and you get a vat of 80 different vaccines, I guess, 80 different blends and they pump it in. So ideally, a woman won't take Tylenol. And on the vaccines, it would be good instead of one visit where they pump the baby, load it up with stuff, you'll do it over a period of four times or five times. I mean, I've been so into this issue for so many years just because I couldn't understand how a thing like this could happen and you know it's artificially induced. It's not like something that -- when you go from all of those, you know, healthy babies to a point where I don't even know structurally if a country can afford it and that's the least of the problems. To have families destroyed over this is just so, so terrible. I also -- and we've already done this. We want no mercury in the vaccine. We want no aluminum in the vaccine. The MMR, I think should be taken separately. This is based on what I feel. The mumps, measles and the three should be taken separately. And it seems to be that when you mix them, there could be a problem. So there's no downside in taking them separately. In fact, they think it's better.
Biden once said "Mexico" when he meant "Egypt", and it was headline news. But I don't think he ever gibbered quite this badly.
and Jimmy Kimmel
That's the subject of another featured post.
and H1-B visas
A little over a week ago, I was flying back from a vacation in the Azores. (America and the Trump regime seemed very far away, thank you for asking.) My girl friend was sitting next to a doctor from Germany whose wife has a research job in the Boston area. The Azores seemed like a central point for the two to meet for a vacation, but they had to cut the vacation short due to an emergency.
The emergency had nothing to do with medical care, either needing it or needing to provide it. It had nothing to do with houses or kids or parents or any of the other emergencies we typically think of when we think of cutting short a foreign vacation. No, this was a political emergency. Trump has just signed an executive order saying:
entry into the United States of aliens as nonimmigrants to perform services in a specialty occupation under section 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b), is restricted, except for those aliens whose petitions are accompanied or supplemented by a payment of $100,000
That new policy would take effect at midnight on September 21. Our plane was landing around 8 p.m. on the 20th. Our seatmate's wife had one of those 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b) (i.e. H1-B) visas, and was panicked that she'd owe $100K if she didn't get back to the US before midnight.
Eventually the Trump regime clarified its order; in fact they wouldn't have owed the money. The $100K is a one-time payment for new visas, not something H1-B holders owe every time they cross the border. But our doctor friend and his wife were not alone in his interpretation:
For a tense 24 hours, workers feared they could be locked out of the United States altogether. Tech companies and banks sent urgent memos advising employees not to leave the country. Bags were packed, tickets bought and families left behind as visa holders scrambled to beat what they believed was a looming deadline.
Video verified by NBC News showed chaos and confusion on a flight from San Francisco to Dubai after Trump’s announcement. The captain is heard citing “unprecedented” circumstances, saying, “There’s a number of passengers that do not wish to travel with us.”
Maybe your eyes glaze over when you see a bureaucratic phrase like "H1-B visa", and maybe sometimes you even succumb to the regime's dehumanization of H1-B holders as "immigrants" or "foreigners". But they're all real people. They have families, they take vacations, and sometimes they sit next to you on airplanes.
Here's a less technical way to think about "section 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b)": When most immigrants come to America, the impetus comes from them. They are either running from an unliveable situation somewhere else, or just seeking a better life here. Many Americans are afraid that if we let in everybody who wants to come, our society will be swamped. They'll drive down wages; we'll lose our unifying values, and so on. So we construct all sorts of legal hurdles people have to jump before they can come and stay for anything longer than a vacation.
But occasionally the impetus to bring someone to America comes from us. They have some rare (or even unique) talent that we need, so we want those people to be able to jump the line and come here quickly, without a bunch of barriers or hurdles. That's what the H1-B visas are for. Every year, we let in about 85K foreigners under this program. They get a three-year visa which they can extend to six years. Many use those six years to apply for a green card and stay permanently.
A variety of exemptions have stretched the numbers in recent years, to 265,777 in 2022. That might be too many. There aren't a quarter-million Einsteins trying to get into the country every year, and one reason entry-level jobs in technology are hard to find might be that companies are bringing in cheap programmers from India and other low-wage countries.
So the justifications given for Trump's executive order were not entirely wrong:
[A]buse of the H-1B visa program has made it even more challenging for college graduates trying to find IT jobs, allowing employers to hire foreign workers at a significant discount to American workers. ... Reports also indicate that many American tech companies have laid off their qualified and highly skilled American workers and simultaneously hired thousands of H-1B workers. ... American IT workers have reported they were forced to train the foreign workers who were taking their jobs and to sign nondisclosure agreements about this indignity as a condition of receiving any form of severance. This suggests H-1B visas are not being used to fill occupational shortages or obtain highly skilled workers who are unavailable in the United States.
So the program is ripe for reform, and it shouldn't be hard to build a bipartisan consensus around some simple changes. But why use a scalpel when you have a hatchet? Paul Krugman summarizes all the ways that Trump's new rule will hurt the US economy and our standing in the world.
But I keep thinking about our seatmate. How many foreigners like him and his wife are getting the impression that the US is bad news? Getting involved with the United States or American companies means giving an unstable autocrat permission to pull your strings.
which all leads to an overwhelming question
All my life, I've been taught to respect the law. But what should we do when the law stops being respectable? Vassar Professor Daniel Mendiola raises this in a Guardian column "The US government is facing a crisis of legitimacy".
Much of the blame for this lies with the Supreme Court, which decided to give Trump immunity for all official acts, whether they are legal or not. And through its shadow docket, it has repeatedly overturned injunctions that forced the Trump regime to obey the laws.
If courts can’t issue an injunction to stop the government from doing illegal things, then no matter how blatantly the government is violating people’s rights, it can keep doing it unimpeded so long as the case stays tied up in appeals – a process that often takes years. In this scenario, law exists in theory, but there are virtually no limits to what the government can do in practice.
American law rests on a social contract: We accept the laws, and the government accepts its legal limits. But what if there no longer are any legal limits? What if the government can kidnap people off the streets and send them to foreign prisons to be tortured? What if it can tell employers to fire people who criticize the president? What if it can make rules based on obviously bogus "science"? What if its officials can accept bribes, but its opponents can be prosecuted for no reason?
Then the social contract is broken. We all have to think about what that means.
and you also might be interested in ...
We had a violent weekend:
At least four people were killed and eight others injured after a gunman opened fire at a Mormon church in Michigan and then set the building ablaze, authorities said. ... In North Carolina, another 40-year-old Marine veteran who served in Iraq was the suspect in a shooting that killed three people and wounded five others less than 14 hours before the Michigan incident. ... In Texas, about 12.15am on Sunday, two people died and five more were injured in a shooting at the Kickapoo Lucky Eagle casino in Eagle Pass, near the US-Mexico border, the local news outlet KSAT reported. ... Meanwhile, in New Orleans, on the first block of Bourbon Street, the well-known entertainment thoroughfare, a triple shooting killed one woman, wounded two other women and injured a man, local police said. According to Guardian reporting partner WWL Louisiana, the slain woman was pronounced dead at the scene while the other three who were wounded were taken to a hospital.
Wired asked hundreds of federal employees what it was like last spring to have DOGE overlords roaming about. The gist: A lot of trivial harassment resulting in no actual savings or efficiencies. An anonymous woman from FEMA tells this story:
The women’s restroom was out of toilet paper within a week or so of us coming back to the office. I brought this up to Facilities, like, "Hey, this is kind of a sanitation and dignity issue, can you hook us up with more toilet paper?" They were like, "We’d love to, but we can’t purchase anything until they unfreeze the cards, and we don’t even know what the process is, because they have them sort of indefinitely frozen." For five months we were instructed to bring in our own toilet paper. I literally kept two rolls at my desk. I wish I were joking.
Speaking of DOGE: We all remember hearing that DOGE shut down programs like USAID, cut a bunch of medical research grants, and fired lots of people. This was supposed to save money. But what happened to that money?
Across federal agencies, the Trump administration’s aggressive slash-and-burn approach to federal programs, grants and contracts has repeatedly challenged Congress’ power of the purse. The administration has claimed it has the discretion to redirect funds to programs aligned with Trump’s agenda — and Republican congressional leaders have largely let them do it.
The outcome: Billions in taxpayer dollars have become virtually untraceable — a level of opaqueness in government funds that’s raising questions around the legality of the administration’s actions.
Nobody is very good at predicting financial collapses, so you should always take economic doomsaying with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, one of the things pessimists look for is the possibility of a vicious cycle, where things briefly going bad (for any reason) might suddenly produce other reasons for things to go bad in a more serious way. The 2008 collapse was like that. Everything was fine as long as people kept bidding up house prices. But as soon as the housing boom faltered, banks started failing, causing more people to need to sell their houses.
The Guardian's Larry Elliott has identified such a potential cycle. He starts out by noting the oddity of the current moment: Stock markets are setting records at a time when the underlying economy doesn't look so good; growth stalling, inflation and unemployment both creeping up, and so on. If you're in the bottom half of the economy, you're probably worried about your future. But at the same time, things look pretty good for the wealthy.
The top 10% of earners account for almost half of consumer spending – the highest level since the late 1980s.
So if something made the well-to-do uneasy enough to cut back, they could start a recession all by themselves. What might make them do that? A drop in the stock market.
So we're in a situation where some shock -- say, an unexpected corporate bankruptcy or something -- could cause a short-term drop in the markets, which would then start a recession, which would then lead to a bigger drop.
and let's close with something out of this world
NASA and the European Space Agency regularly put videos on YouTube based on what they're seeing through they Hubble Space Telescope. HubbleCast is up to its 133rd episode. Here's Episode 1 to get you started.
