The Weekly Sift: January 2025

Monday, January 27, 2025

Four Lights

There are four lights.

- Captain Jean-Luc Picard,
refusing to let his Cardassian torturer define reality

This week's featured post is Week One.

This week everybody was talking about Trump

If you're sick of hearing about him, forgive me, because it's Week One of his new administration. The featured post is all Trump, and so is most of this weekly summary.

I continue not to take seriously his threats against Greenland and Denmark (or Canada). But Trump himself does seem to take his threats seriously. Saturday, the Financial Times reported on a pre-inauguration call between Trump and Danish Prime Minister Marie Frederiksen. The Guardian (not behind a paywall) summarizes:

Trump, then still president-elect, spoke with Frederiksen for 45 minutes last week, during which he was described to be aggressive and confrontational about Frederiksen’s refusal to sell Greenland to the US.

The Financial Times reports that according to five current and former senior European officials who were briefed on the call, the conversation “was horrendous”. One person said: “He was very firm. It was a cold shower. Before, it was hard to take it seriously. But I do think it is serious and potentially very dangerous.”

He threatened tariffs targeted against Danish imports, which likely would result in reprisals from the entire European Union. The EU undoubtedly wants to avoid a trade war with the US, but a territorial threat against a member nation is bound to galvanize the whole union.

Also from The Guardian:

Speaking onboard Air Force One on Saturday, Trump said: “I think we’re going to have it,” and claimed that the Arctic island’s 57,000 residents “want to be with us”.

But Greenland's Prime Minister Múte Egede says:

We are Greenlanders. We don’t want to be Americans. We don’t want to be Danish either. Greenland’s future will be decided by Greenland.

And why would they want to be Americans? Unlike the US, Denmark at least offers the full services of a prosperous socialist nation, like free health care. The whole Greenland situation raises an important question: Does the second Trump administration include anyone willing to tell the boss that he's out of his mind?

and the bishop's rebuke

The MAGA movement depends on a couple of head-scratching beliefs:

The richest man in the world (and a bunch of other multi-billionaires) is on the side of ordinary working people.
Christianity requires political positions that are incompatible with the teachings of Jesus.

The second problem got exposed Tuesday when Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, whose home church is the National Cathedral, led the traditional post-inaugural church service. Her sermon, which was grounded across-the-board in the teachings of Jesus, called for honoring the dignity of all people, being honest, and practicing humility. Speaking directly to Trump, she asked for mercy on those who are frightened, including LGBTQ people and refugees. She reminded him that

[T]he vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes, and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches, mosques and synagogues, gurdwara, and temples.

Trump was furious, and repeated a bunch of easily debunked lies. (My links in the quote below.)

The so-called Bishop who spoke at the National Prayer Service on Tuesday morning was a Radical Left hard line Trump hater. She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way. She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart. She failed to mention the large number of illegal migrants that came into our Country and killed people. Many were deposited from jails and mental institutions. It is a giant crime wave that is taking place in the USA. Apart from her inappropriate statements, the service was a very boring and uninspiring one. She is not very good at her job! She and her church owe the public an apology! t

Of course Trump's yes-men had to join in.

Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) said Budde, born in New Jersey, “should be added to the deportation list.”

Others’ attacks were more personal.

Fox News’s Sean Hannity said Budde, whom he described as a “so-called bishop,” “made the service about her very own deranged political beliefs with a disgraceful prayer full of fearmongering and division.” Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire, a conservative media company, said Budde is a “fake bishop” and mocked her appearance.

“Who knew Satan wore granny glasses and stole his haircut from John Denver?” Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld said.

This is what happens when MAGA World is confronted with actual Christianity, rather than the corrupted version Trump's followers preach.

and Musk's Nazi salute

In the post-inauguration rally at the Capitol One Arena in DC, Elon Musk gave a speech, during which he offered the crowd a Nazi salute, pictured above. (It's not any better in the context of the full video.)

Of course, Musk and his fellow Trumpers deny that he did any such thing. The idea that Musk's gesture is a Nazi salute is "legacy media propaganda" and a "dirty tricks campaign" by liberals. (Because who among us hasn't accidentally done a Sieg Heil in a moment of exuberance? Happens all the time.)

Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.

A lot has been made of the fact that Trump's people have learned from his first administration and will be more focused and effective this time around. But Trump's opponents have learned too. Here's Josh Marshall's response:

Back in the first Trump presidency, Trump’s critics spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get Trumpers to admit they’d done this or that, to apologize, whatever. This was always a mistake. I don’t need anyone to validate what I saw. I saw it. I don’t care what the explanation is.

This is the right reaction. Don't be trolled. Don't be gaslit. Of course Elon, Trump, and his various minions are going to send increasingly blatant signals of support to their fascist allies. Of course they're going to deny doing so. They will acknowledge no shame and make no apologies.

The point of asking for an acknowledgment and/or apology is to support a notion of shared reality: This is what we require before we're willing to admit someone back into the consensus. But as we saw in Trump's first term, that ship has sailed. The Trumpers have no interest in sharing our reality. They want to overwhelm us with their claims until we don't know what is true any more. Asking them to acknowledge truth simply puts the ball in their court; it gives them the power to say "no".

Given that consensus is no longer a possibility, the important thing is to hold onto our own sense of reality. We saw what we saw, and we're not going to let an authoritarian political movement push us into a mindset where maybe we didn't see what we saw.

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Remember when egg prices were too high and Biden was to blame? Well, they're even higher now, and the problem is a public health issue: Bird flu is killing chickens, and entire flocks are being sacrificed to stop the spread of the disease. The lesson here is that presidents, even a chosen-by-God president like Trump, don't have magic wands to wave over such problems. There's a real world out there, with real cause-and-effect mechanisms.

The accusations against author Neil Gaiman have gotten very detailed and compelling.

Friday night, Trump fired inspectors general from more than a dozen federal agencies. Inspectors general are supposed to provide oversight, and to be Congress' eyes and ears in the executive branch, so if you wanted your underlings to break the law, getting rid of the IGs is a good first move. However, firing them without warning or justification is illegal.

The WaPo covered this in a typically Trump-normalizing way, saying only that the firing "appeared" to be illegal. The sun appears bright this morning and the sky appears to be blue, but who can really say?

Trump's attempt to eliminate all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs from the government added a McCarthyite touch. A memo went out to all government employees -- I have a friend who got one -- instructing them to report any DEI programs that might have changed their names lately or otherwise attempted to fly under the radar. Failure to rat out your colleagues could result in "adverse consequences".

and let's close with a rationalization

I can stop buying books any time I want. Cartoonist Tom Gauld understands me.

Monday, January 13, 2025

Apt Comparisons

No sift next week. The next new posts will appear on January 27.

From what I can tell, the manager of your local Applebee’s has more experience managing a bigger budget and more personnel than Pete Hegseth.

- Senator Tammy Duckworth

This week's featured post is "A Disastrous Development in Our Response to Disasters".

This week everybody was talking about the LA wildfires

As I write, the fires in the the Los Angeles area are still burning, driven by dry conditions and hurricane-force winds. A weekly blog is not the right way to cover breaking news, so I won't offer anything more than a few observations.

Fires driven by such strong winds don't look real; it's like somebody has speeded up the video.

The problem wasn’t only a shortage of manpower. Even the most formidable human efforts are useless when bone-dry undergrowth is whipped by the strongest winds the area has experienced in years, with gusts up to 100 mph. “When that wind is howling like that, nothing’s going to stop that fire,” says Wayne Coulson, CEO of the aerial firefighting company Coulson Aviation that’s battling the fires. “You just need to get out of the way.”

The New York Magazine article that quote is taken from gives some context:

Historically, the danger of wildfire has waned with the arrival of winter rains, but in recent years that pattern has changed. “On average, California’s rainy season is occurring about a month later than it did historically,” Swain says. And that increases both the length and the potential intensity of the fire season. By this time of year L.A. normally should have received several inches of rain, but it’s only gotten a fifth of an inch since last July, making the period the second-driest in over a century of record-keeping.

The trend isn’t limited to Southern California. Climate change has increased the number and severity of wildfires around the world, with higher global temperatures leading to drier weather in some regions. The Russian arctic, which hadn’t historically been prone to wildfire, has started to experience it on an epic scale, while southeastern Australia is burning with new intensity. Europe, too, has seen a steady increase in wildfires. Last year’s wildfires in Canada choked the eastern U.S. in smoke and painted the daytime red.

This is something to bear in mind whenever someone makes the argument that programs to cut fossil fuel use are expensive or uneconomical. Fossil fuels are a false economy. The reason we keep having these increasingly expensive disasters is that we have burned too much "cheap" fossil fuel. And yes, the money we spend subsidizing electric cars or installing solar panels this year won't lessen our risk of climate-related disasters next year; there's way more lag time in the system than that. But refusing to change at all is going to be much expensive in the 10-20 year time frame.

Republicans may not believe in climate change, but insurance companies do. Why aren't the wealthy climate change deniers funding new insurance companies to take advantage of established companies pulling out of Florida and other climate-threatened places?

As Noah Smith points out, climate change doesn't just increase risk, it breaks the whole model of insurance. Statistically, fire insurance works because house fires are usually uncorrelated: The insurance company can deal with one person's house burning down, because it is still getting premiums from all the other houses in the neighborhood. But when the whole neighborhood burns down at once, the company could be in trouble.

and Jimmy Carter

Carter deserved better than to have his funeral driven out of the headlines by a natural disaster, especially one caused by climate change. If all world leaders had followed Carter's lead in taking climate change seriously, that disaster might not have happened at all.

It's hard not to pair Carter's funeral with Trump's looming inauguration. Americans used to value decency and virtue in their leaders, but on the whole we no longer do.

and Trump's legal issues

Despite a flurry of legal filings, Trump was unable to prevent being sentenced for his 34 felony convictions. His sentence amounts to approximately nothing, but his convictions stand. A week from today he will enter office as the first convicted felon to become president.

While this is a victory of sorts for the rule of law, it also shows how close we are to being a government of men, not of laws. There was no real legal reason to block his sentencing, but four Supreme Court justices wanted to anyway. Trump's argument was based on expanding the reasoning of the Court's immunity decision, which similarly had no legal basis beyond the Court's partisan makeup.

It is notable, however, that even in this low-stakes dispute, four justices dissented. That suggests there is strong support within the Court for reading the July immunity decision very broadly. And, of course, if any one of the five justices in the majority should flip their vote, Trump will prevail the next time this dispute arrives on the Supreme Court’s doorstep.

Two days before that decision, Trump and Justice Alito spoke on the phone.

Alito said in a statement that the two did not discuss the case or any others involving Trump. He said they talked about William Levi, Alito's former law clerk, and if he was qualified for a potential position in Trump's administration.

Alito says this as if his excuse makes the call OK. It doesn't. Quite the opposite, giving Alito's former clerk a position in his administration could be considered a favor. Alito, of course, was one of the four justices who wanted to block Trump's sentencing.

Other legal maneuvers attempted to block release of Jack Smith's report. How that will play out is still up in the air. Obviously, if Trump can run out the clock until his inauguration, he can block release of the report himself. He's hoping to use the courts to do that.

and his fantasies of conquest

As I've mentioned before, I'm having a hard time taking seriously Trump's threats against Panama, Greenland, and Canada. I think he's trying to burnish his image as a strong man, because his weakness is about to be exposed. In The Atlantic, Robert Kagan considers the possibility that Ukraine will fall in the next 12-18 months without more aid from the US.

When Trump said during his campaign that he could end the war in 24 hours, he presumably believed what most observers believed: that Putin needed a respite, that he was prepared to offer peace in exchange for territory, and that a deal would include some kind of security guarantee for whatever remained of Ukraine. Because Trump’s peace proposal at the time was regarded as such a bad deal for Kyiv, most assumed Putin would welcome it. Little did they know that the deal was not remotely bad enough for Putin to accept. So now Trump is in the position of having promised a peace deal that he cannot possibly get without forcing Putin to recalculate.

Kagan puts his finger on the key point: Losing Ukraine weakens America in the eyes of the world. It's the exact opposite of America becoming "great again".

The liberal world order is inseparable from American power, and not just because it depends on American power. America itself would not be so powerful without the alliances and the open international economic and political system that it built after World War II to protect its long-term interests. Trump can’t stop defending the liberal world order without ceding significantly greater influence to Russia and China. Like Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, and Ali Khamenei see the weakening of America as essential to their own ambitions. Trump may share their hostility to the liberal order, but does he also share their desire to weaken America and, by extension, himself?

Trump has boxed himself in. The only way to make Putin respect his "strength" is to push a massive new Ukraine aid package through Congress, which is the exact opposite of what his MAGA base wants.

Trump keeps moving the goal posts. During the campaign, Trump said he would solve the Ukraine War in 24 hours. Now his point man on the issue is saying 100 days.

Tuesday, Don Jr. and assorted MAGA influencers like Charlie Kirk went to Greenland for a photo op with "supporters" of the idea that Greenland should join the United States. But later it turned out that the photo op was staged.

Danish media reported Thursday that a series of photos featuring Kirk and Greenlandic residents in MAGA hats was staged. The MAGA cohort reportedly rounded up homeless people from the area—including one person from under a bridge—promising them a meal at the Hotel Hans Egede in exchange for their participation in the pro-Trump photo circuit.

Videos of the trip that circulated on X describe the Greenlandic participants as “the local community in Nuuk,” but several local sources that spoke with DR News described the photographed individuals as “homeless and socially disadvantaged” people who are often outside the supermarket directly across from the hotel where the Trump event was held.

“All they have to do is put on a cap and be in the Trump staff’s videos. They are being bribed, and it is deeply distasteful,” Tom Amtoft, a 28-year resident of Nuuk, told the Danish news outlet.

Trump has floated the idea of using tariffs against tiny Denmark to force the Danes to hand over Greenland. However, Denmark is part of the European Union, so tariffs targeting Denmark would mean a trade war with the whole continent.

Here's the best response to Trump's proposal to change the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

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The Biden administration's last jobs report is stunningly good. 256K new jobs, unemployment falling to 4.1%. Paul Krugman assembles statistics on the health of the economy overall, and comments

the fact that [Trump] inherits an economy in such good shape is actually a problem for his agenda

A statistical analysis in The Lancet claims deaths in Gaza have been underestimated.

Elon Musk is moving the goal posts: Previously he said he'd find "at least $2 trillion" to cut in the federal budget. He now claims there's "a good shot" at cutting $1 trillion.

In some alternative timeline:

The feud within MAGA is real. Here's Steve Bannon commenting on Elon Musk:

He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down. ... I will have Elon Musk run out of here by inauguration day. He will not have full access to the White House. He will be like any other person.

Speaking of Elon, his X platform has turned into a great place to spread racism.

There have been several reports of the newest Grok update being used to create photo realistic racist imagery of several football players and managers. One image depicts a player, who is black, picking cotton while another shows that same player eating a banana surrounded by monkeys in a forest. A separate image depicts two different players as pilots in a plane’s cockpit with the twin towers in the background. More images depict a variety of players and managers meeting and conversing with controversial historical figures such as Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Callum Hood, the head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), said X had become a platform that incentivised and rewarded spreading hate through revenue sharing, and AI imagery made that even easier.

“The thing that X has done, to a degree that no other mainstream platform has done, is to offer cash incentives to accounts to do this, so accounts on X are very deliberately posting the most naked hate and disinformation possible.”

The price of political influence in the Trump administration is rising faster than the price of eggs. Want face time with Trump and his VP on Inauguration Day? It will cost you twice as much as it would have in 2017.

To get access to the candlelight dinner with Trump and the vice-president’s dinner with Vance, donors would need to have contributed at the $1m level. A $500,000 contribution would limit access to only the candlelight dinner, unlike in 2017 when it was enough for both.

Here's the central problem with the idea that "drill baby drill" will lower the price of energy (and eventually everything else"): We have a lot of oil and gas in the ground, but we don't have a lot of cheap oil and gas in the ground. Every time the price goes down, more and more potential drilling sites become unprofitable.

Case in point: Wednesday, the Interior Department held an auction for drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge -- and had no bidders.

The sale, which was required by Congress, marks the second time in four years that an effort to auction oil and gas leases in the pristine wilderness — home to migrating caribou, polar bears, musk oxen, millions of birds and other wildlife — has been a flop.

The repeated failures suggest that oil companies are either not interested in drilling in the refuge or do not think it’s worth the cost, despite insistence by Mr. Trump and many Republican lawmakers that the refuge should be opened up for drilling.

Smartmatic's $2.7 billion defamation suit against Fox News for lying about its software's performance during the 2020 election is still alive. Fox settled a similar suit by paying Dominion Voting Systems $787 million in 2023.

Imagine if everyone Fox has lied about had the deep pockets of a major corporation.

and let's close with something colorful

The Guardian published an unusual year-in-review piece: 2024's best photos of the Northern Lights.

Monday, January 6, 2025

Con and Context

For journalists, failing to situate Trump’s words and actions in the context of an ongoing con is tantamount to deception. It’s not just failing to tell the whole story, it’s failing to tell the central story.

- Dan Froomkin, "Trump coverage needs to change and here’s how"

This week's featured post is "A Meditation on American Greatness"

This week everybody was talking about the new Congress

The headline news was that on Friday Mike Johnson hung on to the speaker's gavel. Initially, it looked like he had failed to win a majority on the first ballot, with all 215 Democrats voting for Hakeem Jeffries, 216 Republicans for Johnson, and three Republicans not voting for Johnson. (Six other Republicans expressed their reluctance in a minor way by passing during the alphabetical rollcall. They voted for Johnson when called a second time.) But the vote was held open long enough for Johnson to negotiate with two of the holdouts and President-elect Trump to call them. They flipped their votes, giving Johnson a 218-vote majority.

Johnson's reelection avoided all kinds of chaos and a possible constitutional crisis: The House and Senate are constitutionally obligated to meet today in joint session to count electoral votes, but the House can't function without a speaker. If no speaker had been elected yet, the country would be in uncharted territory.

What Johnson's narrow first-ballot election portends is open to interpretation. Until Republicans took control of the House in 2023, speaker elections typically weren't very newsworthy. The majority party hashed out its differences between the November election and the January vote, and the identity of the new speaker was not in doubt when the new Congress convened. In 2023, though, Kevin McCarthy needed 15 ballots over five days to win the speakership, a position he held for only nine months before losing a motion to vacate the chair. The House was then incapacitated for three weeks before the Republican majority united around Mike Johnson.

Compared to what McCarthy went through, and what the House endured trying to replace him in October 2023, Johnson's reelection was smooth sailing. But compared to any other recent speaker election, this one was full of drama and anxiety. In "normal" years, the visible intervention of the President-elect would have been frowned upon; electing a speaker is the internal business of the House, and not a matter for the executive branch to weigh in on.

It's also worth bearing in mind that Johnson was originally the candidate of the right wing of the Republican caucus, the very people who were dragging their feet about reelecting him. What happened in the meantime? Reality happened. The right-wing "Freedom" Caucus is a movement of ideological purity. But the Speaker has a responsibility to govern the nation. Again and again, the House would need to pass some kind of bill to keep the government functioning, and no ideologically pure bill could pass the House, much less get through the Democratic Senate and be signed by President Biden. So Johnson, like McCarthy before him, was forced to either compromise with Democrats or lead the country into disaster. His decision to avoid disaster made him impure, causing "Freedom" Caucus Republicans to support him only with reluctance and as a favor to Trump.

Going forward, Johnson's majority in the House is narrower than McCarthy's, but the GOP also holds the White House and a majority in the Senate. So in theory, Johnson should not have to compromise any more. He'll be negotiating with Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune rather than with Biden and Chuck Schumer.

However, reality is due to raise its head in a new way: Trump comes into office having raised impossible expectations. MAGA voters expect him to cut taxes, shrink the federal deficit, strengthen the military, and do wildly expensive things like round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants -- all without touching Social Security and Medicare. All this is supposed to happen in "one big beautiful bill" that presumably will also deal with the looming debt ceiling crisis.

At some point, somebody is going to have to write that bill. And all but two House Republicans (maybe fewer if Trump's nominees from the House are approved and not yet replaced) are going to have to vote for it.

Friday's vote for speaker is only the overture to that opera.

and two terrorist attacks

Within about eight hours on New Years Day, the United States suffered two terrorist attacks: A man drove a pickup truck down Bourbon Street in New Orleans and then began shooting, and a Cybertruck exploded outside the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas. The New Orleans attack had more casualties: 15 killed (including the driver during a police shoot-out) and 35 injured. The Cybertruck attack killed only the perpetrator, but seven other people were injured.

It's striking how differently the two attacks have been covered. The New Orleans attack fit a familiar pattern: A native-born American from Houston with a Muslim-sounding name, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, became radicalized, presumably online. While there is no indication of foreign direction or assistance in the attack, he claimed to be inspired by ISIS and had a ISIS flag in the truck.

The coverage of the attack otherized Jabbar, painting him as a radical Islamist attacking the United States from the outside, and playing down the fact that he was a US Army veteran. Right-wing media pushed the false claim that he was foreign-born, and "crossed the U.S.-Mexico border at the Eagle Pass crossing just two days ago". In reference to the attack, Trump posted "the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country".

At first, the Las Vegas attack seemed anti-MAGA, pairing a Musk-related vehicle with a Trump-related target. But as details emerged, Matthew Alan Livelsberger proved to be a Trump supporter. An decorated active-duty special forces soldier from Colorado Springs, Livelsberger's first marriage broke up in 2018 at least partially due to his support for Trump. He had told people he intended to vote from Trump again in 2024.

His political manifesto seems pretty clear:

Consider this last sunset of ‘24 and my actions the end of our sickness and a new chapter of health for our people. Rally around the Trump, Musk, Kennedy, and ride this wave to the highest hegemony for all Americans! We are second to no one.

That aspect of the story has been almost completely buried. Instead, the narrative has shifted into another familiar pattern: Livelsberger is a victim, a troubled soul with PTSD.

We see this again and again in our news coverage: Muslims who kill are evil members of a global conspiracy, while right-wing White Christians who kill are troubled loners. Tom Scocca:

Two disturbed guys rent trucks and commit public acts of violence to deliver explicit ideological messages: one gets the scare story about who radicalized him, the other gets a sympathetic, nonpolitical account of his trauma

Amanda Marcotte notes the similarities rather than the differences between the two attackers: They were both men who had a certain amount of professional success while making a mess of their personal lives. Both found an extremist ideology through which to channel their rage and deflect blame for their problems, ultimately resulting in violence.

and it's January 6 again

Four years ago, Donald Trump inspired rioters who attacked the US Capitol and delayed a constitutionally mandated joint session of Congress to count electoral votes from the 2020 election. The point of doing this was to reverse a free and fair election that he lost.

At the time, both parties were united in condemning this attack. But within months, Trump had pulled the Republican Party back into his orbit.

Last March, the Supreme Court ruled that section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which appears to ban insurrectionists from holding public offices like the presidency, has no real meaning. It was therfore unnecessary to determine whether Trump's actions on January 6 amounted to insurrection. A few months later, after delaying long enough to make further prosecution impossible before the election, it ruled that presidents are, for nearly all practical purposes, above the law.

This November, 49% of voters decided that attempting to overthrow democracy was not a deal-breaker. Today, Congress will certify his election, setting up his inauguration on January 20.

One thing that won't happen today: Democrats won't riot, and the Capitol won't be occupied by a violent mob. That's because Democrats are not traitors, as so many Republicans are.

By all accounts, Trump is getting ready to pardon people convicted of January-6-related crimes. Many of the low-level trespassers and minor offenders have probably learned their lesson and won't commit further Trump-inspired crimes. But I expect that a core of folks are learning the opposite lesson: that crimes committed in Trump's name are not really crimes and will be tolerated.

An essential piece of any fascist movement is a Brownshirt contingent of violent followers who will do the Leader's will in ways that the official police can't or won't. I expect the pardoned rioters to form the core of Trump's Brownshirts.

and Trump's sentencing

Friday, Trump will be sentenced for his conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records. The judge has indicated that there will be no jail time.

Trump's rhetoric is all about the prosecutor and the judge, but he was found guilty by a jury of 12 ordinary Americans. His attorneys had full opportunities to make their case, but the jury unanimously found him guilty beyond a reasonable. doubt.

and the growing subservience of The Washington Post

Meanwhile, at The Washington Post, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes submitted a cartoon showing media barons -- including Post owner Jeff Bezos -- making offerings before a statue of Trump.

Along with Bezos, Telnaes depicted Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman shown bringing Trump sacks of cash. Los Angeles Times owner and billionaire medical innovator Patrick Soon-Shiong was shown bearing a tube of lipstick. Also lying prostrate was Mickey Mouse — the avatar of the Walt Disney Co. Last month, Disney settled a Trump defamation suit against ABC News by agreeing to pay $15 million to an as-yet non-existent Trump foundation and $1 million toward his legal fees.

The sacks of cash refer to the million-dollar contributions the aspiring oligarchs have made to Trump's inaugural fund. Most of the legal opinions I've seen say that ABC would have won the lawsuit and didn't need to pay Trump anything. The contributions to Trump's inaugural fund dwarf what the same rich men gave to the comparable Biden fund.

The WaPo refused to publish the cartoon, whereupon Telnaes quit after working at the WaPo since 2008. She explained on Substack:

While it isn’t uncommon for editorial page editors to object to visual metaphors within a cartoon if it strikes that editor as unclear or isn’t correctly conveying the message intended by the cartoonist, such
editorial criticism was not the case regarding this cartoon. To be clear, there have been instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary. That’s a game changer…and dangerous for a free press.

The American Association of Editorial Cartoonists released a supporting statement:

With the resignation of editorial cartoonist and Pulitzer Prize winner Ann Telnaes from The Washington Post, corporate billionaires once again have brought an editorial cartoon to life with their craven censorship in bowing to a wannabe tyrant. Her principled resignation illustrates that while the pen is mightier than the sword, political cowardice once again eclipses journalistic integrity at The Washington Post.

The AAEC called on its members to draw cartoons supporting Telnaes and use the hashtag #StandWithAnn. Here are a few responses:

And while we're talking about Bezos and the Orbanization of the press, Amazon is bowing down to Trump in another way: Amazon Prime will be releasing a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump. Melania herself is the documentary's executive producer, a position which typically implies editorial control.

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There's an ever-growing consensus that what Israel is doing in Gaza really is genocide. Here's Amnesty International's report. Germany's Der Spiegel reports that "The Israeli army is systematically destroying towns in northern Gaza and expelling the population ... laying the groundwork for a military occupation - and for the possible construction of new Jewish settlements."

Not to be missed: A guy who infiltrated right-wing militias and gave his files to ProPublica.

Every year, TPM announces its Golden Duke Awards, for outstanding achievement in political corruption and scandal. This year, the best general interest scandal was the Supreme Court. I interpret this as a collective award, encompassing the particular scandals of Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, as well as the general political hackery of John Roberts. The best sex scandal is Matt Gaetz. And so on.

Jess Piper expresses her frustration with the voters in her state of Missouri, who repeatedly pass progressive referenda, but then also vote for Republican legislators and other state officials who will circumvent whatever the people have just voted into law.

In spite of Trump's rhetoric, the US is actually in pretty good shape right now:

For the first time since that transition 24 years ago, there will be no American troops at war overseas on Inauguration Day. New data reported in the past few days indicate that murders are way down, illegal immigration at the southern border has fallen even below where it was when Mr. Trump left office and roaring stock markets finished their best two years in a quarter-century.

Jobs are up, wages are rising and the economy is growing as fast as it did during Mr. Trump’s presidency. Unemployment is as low as it was just before the Covid-19 pandemic and near its historic best. Domestic energy production is higher than it has ever been.

The manufacturing sector has more jobs than under any president since Mr. Bush. Drug overdose deaths have fallen for the first time in years. Even inflation, the scourge of the Biden presidency, has returned closer to normal, although prices remain higher than they were four years ago.

We can expect to hear negative views of the US for at least another couple months, and then Trump will start taking credit for Biden's good results, which much of the country will begin to notice for the first time.

Helen Cox Richardson notes that Biden's strong economy results from a policy change that Trump is likely to reverse:

Trump has promised to swing the country away from Biden’s investment in rebuilding the middle class. Biden’s focus on employment meant that unemployment dropped dramatically during his term, more people got access to affordable health care, labor unions showed historic growth, and real wages went up so much that according to economist David Doney, workers now have the highest real hourly wages since the 1960s.

Good news for workers was good news for everyone: the country’s economic growth was more than double that of any other country in the Group of 7 (G7) economically advanced democracies.

But Trump has been very clear that he rejects this system and intends to take the country back to supply-side economics, in which the government encourages the concentration of wealth at the top of the economy.

Oh, and what about inflation? Paul Krugman notes how closely US inflation tracked Europe's inflation, and concludes that Biden's policies probably weren't at fault.

One of my regular walking partners has Covid. Be careful out there, folks. It's not over.

and let's close with something practical

Over the holidays, I flew for the first time in a year and a half. So of course the question came to mind: Why is it so hard to get people on and off and airliner?