The Weekly Sift

Monday, March 31, 2025

No Jokes

I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.

- Will Rogers

This week's featured post is "How Bad Was the Signal Fiasco?"

This week everybody was talking about the Signal leak

Last Monday, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg revealed that he had been accidentally included on a Signal group chat where Defense Secretary Hegseth narrated an imminent and then ongoing attack on the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't devote a featured post to an event that had been getting so much coverage all week long, figuring that I'd just be repeating stuff you've already heard. But much of the coverage has been more confusing than enlightening, and Trump administration officials have taken advantage of the complexity of their blundering to deflect responsibility for any wrongdoing at all. Also, having once had a Top Secret clearance myself, I have some background many commentators don't.

So the featured post tries to sort this fiasco out, beginning with the observation that a whole lot had gone wrong before Goldberg ever got there, and ending with another blogger's fascinating theory about how Goldberg's invitation might not have been accidental at all.

And I forgot to mention that Hegseth has brought his wife to high-level meeting with foreign military leaders where sensitive information was discussed. He is not a serious person. My late wife had clearances I lacked, and never told me what went on in meetings where I wouldn't have been welcome. Couples all over the government operate in this way, respecting the commitments they have made to their country.

I have heard a snide comment about what Jennifer Hegseth was doing at these meetings: She was Pete's designated driver.

While I'm entertaining snide comments, here's David Roberts:

The most obvious lesson to draw from the leaked Signal chat is that these people really are morons. It's not a public act, it's not a schtick, there's not some secret back room where they drop the facade. They are genuinely stupid, incompetent people.

and special elections

We don't usually think of odd-numbered years as election years, but some important votes are happening tomorrow: two special elections in Florida to replace congresspeople nominated for Trump's cabinet, and a state supreme court election in Wisconsin that Elon Musk has been spending millions to buy.

When Trump nominated Republican Representatives Matt Gaetz attorney general and Mike Waltz national security adviser, it didn't seem like a big risk. (Gaetz eventually withdrew in response to scandal.) Both come from bright-red districts, so the special elections to replace them should have given Republicans no trouble. And that appears to be true for Gaetz' district (FL-1), which Gaetz won 66%-34% in 2024. But Waltz' district (FL-6), which Waltz won by almost exactly the same margin, is unexpectedly close in recent polls.

Polling always predicts more upsets than actually materialize, so I'll be surprised if the GOP doesn't hold on to both seats. But even a close election will send a shot across the bow of Republicans who so far have been slavishly loyal to Trump. If a +33 district suddenly produces a +5 result, any Republican in a +20-or-less district should be alarmed.

Trump apparently is worried: He withdrew the nomination of a third Republican congressperson, Elise Stefanik, to be UN ambassador. He explained:

With a very tight Majority, I don’t want to take a chance on anyone else running for Elise’s seat.

Stefanik won in 2024 by 24%. So Trump's caution reflects his knowledge that the tide has shifted against him.

If Republicans in Congress are reading the tea leaves similarly, they may be less inclined to support the GOP's budget proposal for FY 2026, which calls for massive cuts in Medicaid and food stamps to pay for massive tax cuts for billionaires -- and still includes a huge deficit. Many Republicans are from rural districts where large numbers of Republican voters rely on Medicaid and food stamps. MAGA supporters who believed claims that Trump and Musk were only targeting "waste and fraud" are going to be surprised to discover that their own benefits are in danger.

Another important election is for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The Court only swung to a liberal majority two years ago, when Janet Protasiewicz won a surprisingly resounding victory. Subsequently, the Court ordered legislative maps redrawn, undoing an extreme Republican gerrymander that had locked in a Republican majority in what is ordinarily a swing state. As a result, Democrats picked up 14 seats in the 2024 elections. In 2026 they might have a legitimate shot at gaining control of the legislature.

That's why Elon Musk has poured at least $17 million into the election, including some spending that appears illegal.

Speaking at a rally Sunday night, Musk said "we just want judges to be judges", before handing out two $1m (£750,000) cheques to voters who had signed a petition to stop "activist" judges.

[Wisconsin Attorney General Josh] Kaul had tried to argue the giveaway was an illegal attempt buy votes. Musk's lawyers, in response, argued that Kaul is "restraining Mr Musk's political speech and curtailing his First Amendment rights".

If that's not illegal, it ought to be.

However, Musk himself has become so unpopular that his attempt to buy the supreme court seat for the conservative may work in favor of the liberal candidate. After all, what does the world's richest man hope to gain from the Wisconsin Supreme Court that makes it worth this kind of investment?

We'll see tomorrow how it all plays out.

Last week, a Democrat won a Pennsylvania state senate seat that Republicans had held for nearly a century. Trump had gotten 57% of the vote there last November. James Malone seems to have tried to nationalize his election, running against Trump as much as against his opponent.

Everyday voters are not liking what they’re seeing at the federal level, they don’t like the chaos. We want to be sure that we, as Pennsylvania, are standing up for our neighbors and are standing up for our state.

and the battles between Trump and the courts

There are so many cases I can't keep track of them all. The NYT maintains a categorized list, if there's a particular case or issue you're trying to follow. So does Just Security.

I'm following the challenge to Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, which is the justification he has used for taking non-citizens off the streets and flying them to a gulag in El Salvador with no due process. As I explained last week: Once they create a hole in habeas corpus rights, anybody can vanish down that hole. If there is some circumstance where they don't have to explain why they've arrested somebody, nothing stops them from falsely claiming you're in that circumstance. You may have proof that they're lying about you, but who cares? You won't get a hearing where you could show your proof to somebody with the power to set you free.

A district judge has issued a temporary restraining order against using the Alien Enemies Act to deport people. That order has been upheld by an appellate court.

The argument in a nutshell: The AEA is a wartime law, and we're not at war against Venezuela. Saying we are at war requires taking literally Trump's rhetorical characterization of undocumented immigration as an "invasion". Trump argues back: It's up to the president, not the courts, to decide whether we're being invaded.

How I hope it turns out: If "invasion" is a close call, the president gets to decide. But if the president's claim is purely a pretext for claiming the emergency powers in the AEA, a court can overrule him. Trump's claim is a pretext, so I hope his executive order gets struck down.

Anyway, the administration has asked the Supreme Court to void the TRO and let the deportations-without-due-process resume.

The appeal goes first to Chief Justice Roberts. Tomorrow, he will receive a response to the government's filing from lawyers for five migrants facing removal. From there he'll decide whether to make a ruling, hold some hearings, or involve the whole court.

and RFK Jr.'s war on vaccination

Dr. Peter Marks, who has been the top NIH official regulating vaccines under presidents from both parties, and oversaw the Operation Warp Speed push to get a Covid vaccine during Trump's first term, has been forced out. He wrote a damning resignation letter.

It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary [i.e. HHS Secretary RFK Jr.], but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.

NPR comments:

The abrupt departure comes as concern has been mounting among many public health experts about moves involving vaccines under Kennedy, who has questioned vaccine safety and effectiveness. Independent federal vaccine advisory committees have been postponed and cancelled, the National Institutes of Health has terminated research on vaccines and a vaccine critic has been picked to conduct a controversial study about vaccines and autism – a link that has long been debunked.

Marks cited special worry about the ongoing measles outbreak in Texas, which has now grown to at least 400 cases. Measles can cause a long list of potentially serious complications and the vaccines provide strong, safe protection, Marks said. Kennedy has promoted alternative treatments during the Texas outbreak.

"Undermining confidence in well-established vaccines that have met the high standards for quality, safety, and effectiveness that have been in place for decades at FDA is irresponsible, detrimental to public health, and a clear danger to our nation's health, safety. and security," Marks wrote in his resignation letter to Sara Brenner, acting commissioner of food and drugs.

About that "vaccine critic" who has been "picked to conduct a controversial study about vaccines and autism"? That line understates the issue.

“It seems the goal of this administration is to prove that vaccines cause autism, even though they don’t,” said Alison Singer, president of the Autism Science Foundation, a nonprofit organization that funds autism research. “They are starting with the conclusion and looking to prove it. That’s not how science is done.”

Maybe you didn't care when bird flu just affected birds. Maybe you still didn't care when you realized that chickens are birds, so egg prices would go up. Well, now it's infecting cats. Care yet?

and you also might be interested in ...

I picked this week's quote and title before Trump's NBC interview on Sunday, where he said that he's "not joking" about trying for a third term.

One of this week's sorriest stories was J.D. Vance's trip to Greenland. Originally, he and his wife were going to do a photo-op tour of the island and promote the idea that Greenland should want to be taken over by the United States. But things didn't work out.

U.S. officials went door to door in Greenland’s capital of Nuuk looking for residents who wanted to greet the second lady, Jesper Steinmetz from Denmark’s TV 2 reported. But everywhere they went, they were rejected. The unwelcoming response forced the second lady to change her plans, Steinmetz said, ahead of her arrival with Vice President JD Vance on Friday.

So instead, the Vances along with national security adviser Mike Waltz and his wife made a quick trip to the American military base in Greenland. They stayed for three hours, saw nothing of the island, met none of the locals, and then gave them this advice:

I think that you'd be a lot better … coming under the United States' security umbrella than you have been under the Denmark security umbrella

Tyranny expert Timothy Snyder unpacks all this. First, if you take the NATO treaty seriously, Greenland is ALREADY under the US security umbrella by virtue of its relationship with our on-paper ally Denmark. We used to have more bases on the island and more troops manning them, but Denmark did not kick them out; we chose to reduce our force. From there, things just get dumber.

The American imperialism directed towards Denmark and Canada is not just morally wrong. It is strategically disastrous. The United States has nothing to gain from it, and much to lose. There is nothing that Americans cannot get from Denmark or Canada through alliance. The very existence of the base at Pituffik shows that. Within the atmosphere of friendship that has prevailed the last eighty years, all of the mineral resources of Canada and Greenland can be traded for on good terms, or for that matter explored by American companies. The only way to put all of this easy access in doubt was to follow the course that Musk-Trump have chosen: trade wars with Canada and Europe, and the threat of actual wars and annexations.

and let's close with an advertisement for myself

Friends at a local retirement home asked me to speak at their forum, which I did Tuesday, on the topic "Nurturing a Healthier Relationship to the News". Here's the video. If you watch it, you may recognize a bunch of the ideas from last week's featured post.

Monday, March 24, 2025

Staring at the Wall

Every time I open my phone to read the news, I kind of just stare at the wall for 10 minutes. It's horrifying what they're doing, not only to the trans community, but also to migrants, to communities of color, to so many marginalized communities that are being systematically targeted by the new administration and having protections revoked. It's cartoonishly evil.

- Vivian Jenna Wilson, Elon Musk's trans daughter

This week's featured post is "Politics in the Attention Economy".

This week everybody was talking about the rule of law

From the moment Trump took office, the big question has been whether his administration would obey court orders. We may be about to find out. Federal Judge James Boasberg ordered that the planes of Venezuelans being renditioned to El Salvador not take off, or be turned around if they had not yet landed. But prisoners were delivered to El Salvador all the same. Now he's trying to get the government to tell him when exactly the planes took off and landed, and he's being stonewalled. (More about that case below.)

Trump's lawyers are claiming that they didn't violate the court order, but their arguments are flimsy. Jack Goldsmith, the former head of George W. Bush's Office of Legal Counsel inside the Justice Department, described the lawyers as "playing games that verge on defiance". Goldsmith's article is a good summary of the legal issues in the case.

Openly defying court orders -- especially a Supreme Court order -- is a clear line that would define Trump as an autocrat.

There's a fundamental fact about rights that I don't think most Americans understand. I was writing about it during the Bush administration, when "enemy combatants" were being whisked away into military custody, and it comes up again now: If there is anybody who doesn't have habeas corpus rights, then nobody has rights.

This comes up now because of the alleged Venezuelan gangsters that the Trump administration took off the streets and flew to a prison in El Salvador. Trump's supporters want the debate to be about whether or not these are bad guys, as in "Why are you taking the side of immigrant gangsters who victimize law-abiding American citizens?"

And who knows? Maybe they are bad guys. (Or maybe not.) Maybe we are all safer because they're locked up. But that's not the most important issue here.

Imagine, just for a moment, that somebody scooped you up and put you on a plane to be imprisoned in El Salvador. Probably your first reaction to that suggestion is "That could never happen because I'm an American citizen. They couldn't do that to me."

And you're right: They couldn't do it legally. But what if your name wound up on a list either by mistake or because you have an enemy somewhere inside the Trump administration or because some ICE officer was too enthusiastic about rounding people up? What if you were put on that plane without a hearing, the way the supposed gang members were? When would you have had a chance to offer evidence that you are an American citizen?

If the answer is "never", then yes, they can do it to you. Because who stops them?

Habeas corpus means that anybody who is imprisoned has a right to state their case to somebody who is (1) impartial between the prisoner and his accusers, and (2) has the power to order the prisoner's release.

If there's a loophole in habeas corpus, then anybody -- literally anybody -- can vanish down that hole.

The Homeland Security Department is firing the people who worry about stuff like that: 100 people from three oversight offices have been let go.

“These offices have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS’s mission,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.“

That's the problem in a nutshell: Inside the Trump administration, human rights like habeas corpus are "bureaucratic hurdles". If the immigration enforcement people want to do something illegal, nobody should slow that operation down.

The administration seems to be obeying court orders to rehire many of the government workers it fired. Some are returning to the job, some have been put on administrative leave, and others are still waiting to hear.

When a probationary worker goes from being fired to being on leave, that may not look like much of a victory. But the bureaucratic fiction behind the firing was that the workers were all fired "for cause", which means they would be ineligible to collect unemployment benefits. So rather than being cut off from all income, they're getting their regular paycheck again.

It's worth pointing out that in the name of "government efficiency", we're paying people to stay home. Also, many of the contracts DOGE has cancelled will eventually have to be paid for. When all is said and done, I wonder if Musk isn't costing taxpayers money rather than saving us money.

Vox' Ian Millhiser says that of the 132 lawsuits against the Trump administration, you should watch two: the ones about impoundment and birthright citizenship.

No competent lawyer, and certainly no reasonable judge, could conclude that Trump’s actions in either case are lawful. There is no serious debate about what the Constitution says about either issue. If the Court rules in favor of Trump in either case, it’s hard to imagine the justices offering any meaningful pushback to anything Trump wants to do.

MAGA folks sometimes claim they have nothing against immigrants, just illegal immigrants. But why then is Trump shutting down avenues for legal immigration? Friday, DHS announced that (as of April 24) it is revoking the legal status of half a million Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who came here as part of a Biden-administration humanitarian parole program. Participants had to have US sponsors. They were granted work permits and a two-year parole from deportation.

Like so many Trump actions, this order is needlessly cruel. These people did nothing wrong, trusted US government promises, and made plans accordingly. Many of them presumably have jobs and leases. Trump could have just waited for their two-year paroles expire. But no, they have a month to leave the country.

Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik described "the imperial boomerang effect":

[T]echniques developed to repress colonised territories and peoples will, in time, inevitably be deployed at home. Repressive policing, methods of detention and controlling dissent, forcing humans to produce goods and services for overlords in the metropolis, or even mass enslavement and killing: all “boomerang” back into that metropolis. First, they are used against those who are seen as inferior; then, they are deployed even against those citizens with full rights and privileges if they dare to question authority. In short, the remote other eventually becomes the intimate familiar.

and Social Security

Since my wife made more money in her career than I did, I am eligible for higher Social Security benefits as her survivor than on my own employment record. The system is swamped because the SSA is understaffed, so I had to spend a lot of time on hold when I applied over the phone in February. But at least I was home and able to do other things while I waited.

Thank God I got that done before the new rules kicked in:

The Social Security Administration (SSA) says it will no longer allow beneficiaries and those applying for Social Security to confirm their identity over the phone and will instead require that they do so online or in person at a local office to complete the application process.

Simultaneously, SSA is closing local offices and firing staff.

In 2023 about 119,000 people visited local Social Security offices daily to get help or receive services. The SSA announced plans last month to reduce its workforce by 12 percent, from about 57,000 employees to 50,000, and multiple offices have been closed in recent weeks, according to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the office established by President Donald Trump to slash federal spending. ... SSA staffing was already near a 50-year low when the agency initiated the planned reductions.

The Popular Information blog draws the obvious conclusion:

The combination of fewer workers, fewer offices, and a massive increase in the demand for in-person services could sabotage the Social Security system — effectively denying many Americans the benefits they are due.

According to MAGA propaganda, Democrats are out of touch with ordinary Americans. Well, listen to this: Billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggests that the best way to find fraudsters in the Social Security system would be to just not send out checks some month.

Let's say Social Security didn't send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who is 94, she wouldn't call and complain. She just wouldn't. She'd think something got messed up, and she'll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.

Elon [Musk] knows this by heart. Anyone who's been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find a fraudster is to stop payments and listen. Because whoever screams is the one stealing!

Before Social Security, elderly Americans were more likely than any other age group to be living in poverty. (Elderly and disabled poverty are the most hopeless kinds, because your earning prospects are so low.) Now they are the least likely to be poor. That's what Social Security has meant to America.

But if you're a billionaire like Lutnick, or a centi-billionaire like Musk, you find it hard to imagine that a check not arriving some month might mean that you don't get to eat, or that you might care enough about not eating that you might complain. Those are the kind of people who are running our country now.

and sabotaging the US tourism industry

Becky Burke from Wales was on a backpacking trip across North America when she was arrested by ICE and held for 19 days. Then she was taken to an airport in leg irons and sent home to the UK. Her crime? She did housework in exchange for a free room, which apparently broke the no-employment condition of her tourist visa.

How many tourist dollars does the US lose every time there's a story like this?

Similar stories are being told by Germans.

Here's another story, this time from a Canadian: Nathan Kalman-Lamb, a sociology professor at the University of New Brunswick. Having previously been denied entry to the US, he went through the bureaucratic steps necessary to be assured of admittance, which included an interview with someone from the State Department. This time he was detained for three hours and thoroughly searched, causing him to miss his flight.

Both times, Kalman-Lamb was coming to the US to promote his new book The End of College Football. Exploitation of college athletes has been his special focus in recent years.

Kalman-Lamb's crime seems to be having opinions about Palestine and Israel. He signed a statement supporting a pro-Palestinian protest encampment at the University of Toronto (where he is an alum) and is a supporter of the movement to divest from Israel. (He has also written articles whose titles include words like gender and intersectionality.) His opinions have caused him to be fingered by the pro-Israel website Canary Mission as "pro-Hamas" and "antisemitic".

Kalman-Lamb posted Friday:

Well, I have successfully made it in (and now, thank god, out) of the United States. Idk if/when I will be back—which is sad, because I love US folks.

Tourism has been a major industry in the US. Expect it to crater this year. The US is becoming known as a risky place to travel.

and you also might be interested in ...

I think Jon Ossoff has the right Democratic message in this one-and-a-half minute clip.

RFK Jr.'s war on vaccines has begun:

National Institutes of Health officials have urged scientists to remove all references to mRNA vaccine technology from their grant applications, two researchers said, in a move that signaled the agency might abandon a promising field of medical research. ... The mRNA technology is under study at the NIH for prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, including flu and AIDS, and also cancer. It was deployed in the development of covid-19 vaccines credited with saving 3 million lives in the U.S. alone — an accomplishment President Donald Trump bragged about in his first term.

A scientist at a biomedical research center in Philadelphia wrote to a colleague, in an email reviewed by KFF Health News, that a project officer at NIH had “flagged our pending grant as having an mRNA vaccine component.”

“It’s still unclear whether mRNA vaccine grants will be canceled,” the scientist added.

In some ways RFK Jr. is worse than an ideologue; he's a crank, the kind of amateur who thinks he's smarter than the consensus of the scientific community. Anti-scientific ideas get into his head and no amount of evidence will get them out.

He has already cancelled research into vaccine hesitancy, i.e., public resistance to being vaccinated. It may cost countless lives every year and allow the resurgence of previously eradicated diseases like measles, which now has more than 300 cases in Texas alone. But to him it's not a public health problem. Worse from his point of view, research would probably attribute much of the problem to disinformation-spreaders like Kennedy himself.

On the subject of cranks, I like this exchange from the 1967 version of Bedazzled.

Stanley Moon: You're a nutcase! You're a bleedin' nutcase!
George Spiggott: They said the same of Jesus Christ, Freud, and Galileo.
Stanley Moon: They said it of a lot of nutcases too.

The Guardian examines vaccine hesitancy in one American city: Sarasota.

I'll let a WaPo editorial sum up the situation in Gaza:

In Gaza, a ceasefire deal that came into effect when Trump took office — and for which he took full credit — has effectively collapsed. With Israel and Hamas at a stalemate over whether to extend the ceasefire or move on to fresh talks on ending the conflict, Netanyahu has resumed a full-scale bombing of the enclave. More than 400 Palestinians were killed and hundreds of others were injured on Tuesday, one of the deadliest days of the war.

The official death toll in Gaza is now over 50,000.

The NYT documented the losses of the Abu Naser family, four generations of which lived in a single five-story apartment building in Gaza. 132 of them died in a single Israeli attack. The entire neighborhood is now rubble.

At a time when DOGE is cancelling many government contracts, Elon Musk's businesses are in line to get much bigger contracts than they've ever had before.

The dismantling of the Department of Education has begun.

Sunday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan jailed his most serious challenger in the next elections. Protesters across the country were met with substantial police violence. Over 1000 protesters have been arrested.

The day before, Saturday, Trump’s chief negotiator Steve Witkoff said this to Tucker Carlson:

the President had a great conversation with Erdogan a couple of days ago. Really transformational, I would describe it. I think it’s been underreported, to tell you the truth. ... I think the President has a relationship with Erdogan and that’s going to be important. And there’s some good coming – just a lot of good, positive news coming out of Turkey right now as a result of that conversation. So I think you’ll see that in the reporting in the coming days.

I have to wonder if part of the conversation was "Go ahead. Crack down on the opposition." Or if the current unrest is part of the "good news" Witkoff was expecting.

Witkoff's comments about Ukraine are also striking. Up front, he grants most of what Putin wants: Russia will get the parts of Ukraine it currently occupies. Ukraine will not join NATO. What Ukraine will get out of this deal is left vague. And he takes seriously the referendums Russia held in the occupied Ukrainian provinces, as if those were fair elections:

They’re Russian speaking. There have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule.

He also promises to back down any time Putin threatens nuclear war, even if it means not getting a "fair deal" for Ukraine.

And while I think we have to get a fair deal for Ukraine, we cannot allow that country to drag us into World War Three.

And he completely ignores Putin's rhetoric about Ukraine being an illegitimate country that has always been part of Russia.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think the Russians want to march across Europe?

STEVE WITKOFF: 100% not.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why would they want that? I wouldn’t want those countries. Like, why would they.

STEVE WITKOFF: First of all, why would they want to absorb Ukraine? For what purpose, exactly? They don’t need to absorb Ukraine. That would be like occupying Gaza. Why do the Israelis really want to occupy Gaza for the rest of their lives? They don’t. They want stability there they don’t want to deal with. But the Russians also have what they want. They’ve gotten—they’ve reclaimed these five regions. They have Crimea, and they’ve gotten what they want. So why do they need more?

I don't know. After Chamberlain gave Hitler the Sudetenland at Munich, why did he need the rest of Czechoslovakia?

And the idea that Putin doesn't want to reclaim dominance over Warsaw Pact countries like Estonia and Poland, what does Witkoff base that on? And "I wouldn't want those countries"? How do Polish-Americans feel about that?

Trump is using the power of government to extort concessions from non-government institutions: Columbia University and a major law firm are the latest trophies for Trump's mantle. This is the Orban model from Hungary.

and let's close with an opportunity

You still have until Sunday to enter the National Wildlife Federation's annual photo contest. Here's the second-place photo from the bird section of last year's contest: a parakeet attacking a lizard.

Monday, March 17, 2025

Dangerous Confrontations

We are inevitably headed, whether it’s in this case or another, to a confrontation between a president who has rejected the rule of law and a judge sworn to enforce it. We are in an exceedingly dangerous moment for democracy.

- Joyce Vance

This week's featured post is "Rights, Privileges, and Mahmoud Khalil"

This week everybody was talking about the shutdown that didn't happen

Congress passed a continuing resolution keeping the government open for the rest of this fiscal year, i.e. until September 30. I have to own up to some disappointment here. Three weeks ago I wrote this:

The real test happens when the government runs out of money on March 14. It’s easy to be for or against things until somebody puts price tags on them and adds them all up. In order to get the bill he wants, Trump will need support from almost all of the Republicans in the House. If Democrats stay united and only two Republicans vote against a spending deal, it fails.

If that happens, that’s when congressional Democrats begin to have negotiating leverage.

But Speaker Mike Johnson wrote his continuing resolution without any input from Democrats, and he passed it through the House because he lost only one Republican vote. Heather Cox Richardson summarizes what's in it:

The new measure is not a so-called clean CR that simply extends previous funding. Instead, the Republican majority passed it without input from Democrats and with a number of poison pills added. The measure increases defense spending by about $6 billion from the previous year, cuts about $13 billion from nondefense spending, and cuts $20 billion in funding for the Internal Revenue Service. It forces Washington, D.C., to cut $1 billion from its budget, protects President Donald Trump’s ability to raise or lower tariffs as he wishes, and gives him considerable leeway in deciding where money goes.

When that CR went to the Senate, Democrats could have blocked it if they had hung together. (It takes 60 votes to kill a filibuster, and Republicans only have 53 senators.) For a while it looked like that would happen, with many people speculating about whether 7 Democrats would break ranks.

Then Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer flipped to support the CR. This move is very unpopular inside the Democratic base, and was denounced by Democrats from AOC to Nancy Pelosi.

Schumer wrote an op-ed to explain. I'm going to try to express his view more convincingly than he did, not because I agree with it, but because I'm trying to evaluate it.

Ordinarily, a government shutdown is like a labor strike against a company: It hurts both sides, and the conflict is over who can endure the most pain before giving in. In a typical shutdown, both Republicans and Democrats understand that the American people don't like it. So they maneuver to blame each other while looking for some acceptable compromise that will end it.

But what if Trump likes ruling over a shut down government? What if he'd be content to let the shutdown run until the end of the fiscal year in September? During a shutdown, only "essential" services are provided: the military stays on duty, Social Security checks still get mailed, and so on. But isn't the whole point of all the DOGE firings and cutbacks to eliminate anything not "essential"?

If that's the case, then Trump doesn't feel pain and doesn't come under more and more pressure to make a deal as the shutdown continues. Eventually the Democrats have to capitulate and get nothing, so why not capitulate and get nothing now?

I admit that I have trouble evaluating whether or not that's how a shutdown would play out. Maybe it would. But even if I grant Schumer that point, I'm not impressed with his leadership, because he apparently didn't see this situation coming and had no plan to deal with it when it arrived.

OK, I admit I also didn't think Speaker Johnson would keep his ducks in a row and get a CR passed without Democrats. But it was always at least a possibility. Somebody on the Democratic side should have gamed out how to respond. There should have been a plan and a message: "We can't fight Trump this way, so we're going to fight him that way." There should have been talking points, and major Democrats should have united in pushing those points.

Instead, Schumer was talking about defeating the CR right up until the moment he turned around. Democrats are presenting no plan for resisting Trump going forward, and they're bickering among themselves about what they just did. They look weak and Trump looks masterful. Good going, Chuck!

The one saving grace in all this is that a shutdown itself is not in the headlines. Instead we can focus on the ever-weakening Trump economy, the assault on constitutional rights, and the crashing stock market. If only there were an opposition party with a plan to turn everything around.

and Mahmoud Khalil

His deportation case, and what it means for freedom of speech in general, is the subject of the featured post.

A related issue is the Trump administration's attack on Columbia University, where Khalil was a student. The Harvard Crimson writes "First They Came for Columbia", charging that "The administration has weaponized the fight against antisemitism as a means to another end: punishing and weakening universities." It says that no university is in a better position to lead a fight against this than Harvard, which so far is doing nothing.

and the rule of law

With the failure of Congress to check Trump in any way, the full burden falls on the courts. From the beginning, two questions have loomed over all the cases challenging Trump's illegal actions:

Will the Supreme Court invent new law to justify whatever Trump does?
What happens if the Trump administration doesn't obey court orders?

We're getting closer and closer to finding out. This week, hundreds of non-citizens were deported under the aegis of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. This is one of the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts you may remember from US History class. Heather Cox Richardson summarizes the history:

That law, which applies during wartime or when a foreign government threatens an “invasion” or “predatory incursion,” permits the president to authorize the arrest, imprisonment, or deportation of people older than 14 who come from a foreign enemy country. President James Madison used the law to arrest British nationals during the War of 1812, President Woodrow Wilson invoked it against Germans during World War I, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used it against Japanese, Italian, and German noncitizens.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump said he would use the Alien Enemies Act to deport gang members, and in an executive order signed Friday night but released yesterday morning after news of it leaked, Trump claimed that thousands of members of the Tren de Aragua gang have “unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.” In connection with the Venezuelan government, he said, the gang has made incursions into the U.S. with the goal of “destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.”

This is pretty fanciful stuff. Maybe Tren de Aragua is operating in the US, though Trump has a long history of exaggerating immigrant gangs, so I'd be amazed if we're really talking about "thousands" of members. But the idea that they aren't just trying to make money the way all gangs do, but are instead "conducting irregular warfare" while conspiring with the Venezuelan government to "destabilize ... the United States" -- that seems like a fever dream to me. Is there any evidence to back that up?

So this was the justification for deporting 200 supposed gang members to El Salvador. El Salvador is getting paid $20K per man/year to imprison them (prior to any graft), so you can imagine the conditions they'll be held in.

The ACLU filed suit pointing out that the administration had presented no evidence these actually were gang members, or that Venezuela was using them to wage war against us, so a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against invoking the AEA in this way. And then things got interesting.

Ryan Goodman of Just Security put together the timeline of what came next. At 5:00 last night, Judge Boasberg asked whether deportations would happen in the next 24–48 hours. The government’s attorney said he didn’t know; the ACLU attorney said the government was moving rapidly. Before 5:22, Boasberg ordered a break so the government attorney could obtain official information before the hearing resumed at 6:00.

At 5:45, Goodman reports, another flight took off.

Before 6:52, Judge Boasberg agreed with the ACLU that the terms of the Alien Enemies Act apply only to “enemy nations,” and blocked deportations under it. Nnamdi Egwuonwu and Gary Grumbach of NBC News reported that the judge ordered the administration to return the planes in flight to the United States. “Any plane containing these folks that is going to take off, or is in the air, needs to be returned to the United States,” the judge said. “Those people need to be returned to the United States.”

The plane did not turn around. Law Dork looks into the details. It appears that the administration's position is that the judge's order did not apply once the plane had left American airspace.

Of course that’s absurd — as many others also noted Sunday — because the U.S. government was still in control of the planes, and the Justice Department lawyer before Boasberg on Saturday evening had literally argued, albeit unsuccessfully, that there was no irreparable harm here — a factor in deciding whether to grant a TRO — because the challenge could continue even if individuals had been deported.

One thing you can see across multiple court cases: Trump administration lawyers are not operating in good faith. They say whatever will allow illegal policies to continue. And if they have to say the opposite tomorrow, they don't care.

Jay Kuo summarizes the week's other legal news, which was pretty good.

A federal judge ordered the administration to rehire tens of thousands of the probationary workers it fired. Basically, the administration took advantage of a loophole allowing probationary workers to be fired for poor performance, and pretended that all probationary workers had performed poorly. The judge called this scheme "a sham".

A member of the National Labor Relations Board returned to work after a court found her firing illegal.

Perkins Coie, a private law firm targeted by a Trump executive order, won a temporary restraining order against enforcement of the executive order.

and you also might be interested in ...

Paul Krugman looks at the purely economic cost of Trump trashing America's image. He starts with Canada cancelling its order for F-35 fighter jets, which makes sense because "sophisticated military equipment requires a lot of technical support, so you don’t want to buy it from a country you don’t trust." Several European countries are also reconsidering buying new American weapon systems.

I had not appreciated how big US military exports are: $318.7 billion in 2024. That's 15% of total exports and twice as big as agricultural exports. And then there's tourism ($100 billion) and education ($50 billion). As the US becomes more suspicious of foreigners and less welcoming (not to mention Trump trashing our universities), those numbers should go down.

One way to think about this is to say that Trump is doing to America what Elon Musk is doing to Tesla, destroying a valuable brand through erratic behavior and repulsive ideology. ... Trump’s belief that America holds all the cards, that the rest of the world needs access to our markets but we don’t need them, is all wrong. We are rapidly losing the world’s trust, and part of the cost will be financial.

Krugman recognizes that as an academic economist, he's not particularly good at predicting short-term business cycles. So he interviews somebody who does that for a living. The upshot is that numbers look decent right now, but it wouldn't take much to change them. Both hiring and firing have been soft recently, so it wouldn't take much in the way of layoffs to spike the unemployment rate.

You know those measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere and how it increases every year? Those come from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Well, maybe not for long. The NOAA office in Hilo that oversees the observatory is being closed.

Remember when Trump wanted to limit Covid tests so that the number of reported cases would go down? Same thing here. If we stop measuring CO2 it won't be a problem any more.

Elon Musk has claimed that no one has died from his cutoff of foreign aid funds. Nicholas Kristoff provides some names and pictures of the victims Musk is denying.

Robert Morris, a Texas megachurch founder with connections to Donald Trump, was indicted in Oklahoma Wednesday for molesting a girl in the 1980s, when he was living with her family. I mention this not out of animus towards either Morris or the branch of Christianity he represents, but to make a point.

Certain cases become the center of movements; laws are named after them. For example, Lakin Riley was a nursing student murdered by an immigrant who had entered the US illegally. That led to the Lakin Riley Act, which requires the government to deport immigrants accused of certain crimes, even if they aren't convicted.

Whether a case takes on that kind of symbolic value depends on the popularity of the people in question. Undocumented immigrants are unpopular, so crimes they commit are candidates for becoming the center of campaigns, depending not at all on whether the perpetrators are typical of some larger trend.

Drag performers are also unpopular, and various laws restricting them have been pitched based on the threat they pose to children, despite the fact that there seems to be no such threat. But imagine what would happen if a single drag performer raped a single child. That child would become famous, and very likely would end up with a law named after him or her.

Christian ministers, on the other hand, are popular. So of course there will be no Cindy Clemishire Act, (named for Morris' victim) that puts restrictions on Christian ministers or abridges their rights in some way. It doesn't matter how many ministers molest children. None of those cases will become the kind of cause célèbre that Lakin Riley's murder was.

Trevor Noah's "What Now?" podcast is consistently good. I recommend his interview with Robert Putnam of "Bowling Alone" fame.

and let's close with something outrageously classical

A four-woman quartet turns Vivaldi and Mozart into a confrontational stage performance.

Monday, March 10, 2025

Crossed Lines

When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism

- Steven Levitsky

This week's featured post is "Those Mysterious Tariffs".

This week everybody was talking about Ukraine

Pundits struggled to make sense of the Oval Office meeting between Trump and Zelenskyy on February 28, but nobody nailed it better than Jon Stewart: Trump and the Republicans just like Putin better. Stewart made an extended metaphor about a pro wrestling scene in which apparent good-guy John Cena sneak attacks a fellow good-guy wrestler.

Creating tension with Ukraine in the Oval Office meeting “was a ‘heel turn’ designed to create the alliance Trump always wanted in the first place,” Stewart explained, referring to the pro-wrestling narrative device in which a fan-favorite character changes to become a storyline’s villain.

Another way to understand the meeting is to take "Trump is Putin's puppet" literally. Trump told Zelenskyy exactly what Putin would have told him had he been there: Surrender or World War III starts.

I have to wonder whether Trump can speak while Putin drinks a glass of water.

After the meeting, Trump withdrew all military aid from Ukraine, including intelligence. Time reports:

The Ukrainians have lost the ability to detect the approach of Russian bombers and other warplanes as they take off inside Russia. As a result, Ukraine has less time to warn civilians and military personnel about the risk of an approaching airstrike or missile.

The result: "hundreds of dead Ukrainians".

Since the end of World War II, the United States has stood for collective security based on alliances with other democratic nations and resistance to aggression by dictators. We haven't always applied those principles consistently, but we never explicitly rejected them. Now we do. If dictators want to take over their neighbors, that's their business.

BTW: Trump's cocksure assertion that Zelenskyy "doesn't have the cards" because Ukraine is losing on the battlefield is another example of Putin's puppetry. The battlefield is not going well for either side. Both countries are facing exhaustion, and while Russian forces are advancing slowly, at this pace it will take many years to conquer Ukraine.

and tariffs

Trump whipsawed the markets these last two weeks with a series of announcements about tariffs being imposed or postponed. That's the topic of the featured post. But in that post I didn't get around to making the obvious prediction: Capital spending is going to collapse, and is probably already collapsing, because companies and investors can't trust their projections of where the economy is headed. Ditto for households, who can't predict whether the government spending cuts are going to affect their jobs. (Maybe you can build that new bedroom onto your house, or maybe you're going to need a cushion in case you'll be unemployed.) So money is going to sit on the sidelines, and that is going to start a recession.

and the budget

Thursday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office confirmed what should have been obvious to everyone: The budget outline that the House passed recently is going to make substantial cuts to Medicaid.

House Republicans last week narrowly passed a budget instructing the energy and commerce committee, which is responsible for federal healthcare, to cut spending under its jurisdiction by $880bn ... The independent in-house agency confirmed that it would be impossible to reduce spending by $880bn without cuts to Medicare, Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (Chip). That’s because after excluding Medicare, Medicaid and Chip, the committee oversees only $381bn in spending – much less than the $880bn target – the CBO said.

There's a pretty clear game-plan of deceit here.

Start by claiming to protect safety-net programs Americans -- especially Americans in the poorer, more rural Republican districts -- depend on.
Announce plans to cut those general areas, but deny that the cuts will affect those programs, even if the math doesn't work without such cuts.
Cut those programs, but claim that only "waste and fraud" will be affected.
Refuse to pay for your kid's healthcare and/or kick your mother out of her nursing home.

We're already hearing rhetoric about how deep cuts in federal spending are "necessary", because the $36-trillion-and-rising federal debt is unsustainable. But no matter how dire a picture Republicans paint of our fiscal situation, taxing rich people is never an option.

House Republicans are committed to not negotiating with Democrats about either the FY 2026 budget or the continuing resolution to fund the rest of FY 2025, which is needed to prevent a government shutdown on Friday. Democrats want a commitment that whatever funding they pass is meaningful, and won't just get frozen by Musk or Trump. Republicans want to give Trump maximum flexibility, even if it means surrendering Congress' power of the purse.

In order to do that, they'll need to hold all their members together, which they've never managed before. But maybe this time they can.

and Trump's speech to Congress

which I didn't watch (though I did quickly scan a transcript). I don't see the point, since nothing Trump says can be believed. The Guardian fact checks the speech's biggest whoppers. Since Trump has been corrected on these fake facts before, they are clearly intentional lies.

The biggest one was his claim that Elon Musk has uncovered "massive fraud". So far, Musk has said the word "fraud" a lot, but he hasn't provided any evidence of it. Quite likely, Musk has not uncovered any fraud.

Trump's speech lasted a record-setting 100 minutes, reminiscent of the hours-long speeches dictators like Cuba's Fidel Castro used to give.

Like me, James Fallows more or less ignored the speech's content, focusing instead on its symptomology. He noticed four things:

Trump's rhetorical range is shrinking. He used some form of his "like nothing ever seen before" cliche 20 times during the speech. By contrast, he said it only once in his first inaugural address, and it rarely appeared in his first-term State of the Union addresses. Similarly, "incredible" has become his dominant positive adjective, appearing six times.
More alarmingly, Fallows notes that all types of Trump speeches -- MAGA rallies, presidential addresses, press conferences, televised Oval Office talks -- have collapsed into one form. The broader press commented on how rally-like this speech was, but missed the larger point that all Trump speeches are basically the same now.
Recent presidential addresses to Congress have included heckling from the opposing party (going back to Joe Wilson's "You lie" directed at Obama in 2009). But this was the first time a president has abused members of Congress: Trump called Elizabeth Warren "Pocahontas" from the podium.
Presidents almost always spin or shade the truth in these speeches, and occasionally have even lied outright. But Trump's lying has reached a completely different level. Lying is no longer an attempt to fool people, because some of Trump's lies are so transparent -- Social Security is paying benefits to people it thinks are 200 years old -- that no one will believe them. Instead, lying has become an expression of power. "To me, Trump’s body-language—his bearing, mood, and presentation—suggested that the grossness of the lies was the point of the exercise. Preening in the knowledge that he could get away with it, and that he could make his minions applaud."

Newly elected Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin needed only 10 minutes to respond.

We just went through another fraught election season. Americans made it clear that prices are too high and that government needs to be more responsive to their needs. America wants change. But there is a responsible way to make change, and a reckless way. And, we can make that change without forgetting who we are as a country, and as a democracy.

She talked about the economy:

President Trump is trying to deliver an unprecedented giveaway to his billionaire friends. He's on the hunt to find trillions of dollars to pass along to the wealthiest in America. And to do that, he's going to make you pay in every part of your life. Grocery and home prices are going up, not down — and he hasn't laid out a credible plan to deal with either. His tariffs on allies like Canada will raise prices on energy, lumber, cars — and start a trade war that will hurt manufacturing and farmers. Your premiums and prescriptions will cost more because the math on his proposals doesn't work without going after your health care. Meanwhile, for those keeping score, the national debt is going up, not down. And if he's not careful, he could walk us right into a recession.

And national security:

[T]hat scene in the Oval Office wasn't just a bad episode of reality TV. It summed up Trump's whole approach to the world. He believes in cozying up to dictators like Vladimir Putin and kicking our friends, like Canada, in the teeth. He sees American leadership as merely a series of real estate transactions. ...

[O]ur democracy, our very system of government, has been the aspiration of the world. And right now, it's at risk. It's at risk when a president decides he can pick and choose what rules he wants to follow, when he ignores court orders or the Constitution itself, or when elected leaders stand idly by and just let it happen. But it's also at risk when the President pits Americans against each other, when he demonizes those who are different, and tells certain people they shouldn't be included. Because America is not just a patch of land between two oceans. We are more than that. Generations have fought and died to secure the fundamental rights that define us. Those rights and the fight for them make us who we are.

and Tesla

For years, Elon Musk's public image worked to Tesla's benefit. He was Tony Stark. He was to our world what Hank Rearden was to Atlas Shrugged. And Tesla had a technology lead over rival electric-car companies. So Teslas weren't just good cars, they were cool. Driving a Tesla was a virtue signal; it told the world you were serious about climate change.

Then he bought Twitter and made the online world safe for Nazis. He spent $290 million to elect Donald Trump. He addressed a rally for the AfD, calling that neo-Nazi party "the best hope for the future of Germany."

His Trump contributions bought him the extra-constitutional power to cut government programs, fire civil-service workers, and shut down agencies created by Congress. (The Atlas Shrugged character he most resembles now is Wesley Mouch, head of the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources.) Has medical research ground to a halt in Musk's America? Are children starving in Africa while food rots in US ports? What a shame.

Suddenly, people who had been willing to pay a virtue premium for a Tesla are instead looking for a vice discount. It isn't just that competitors have caught up to Tesla (which they have). In many people's minds, a Tesla would have to be a lot better than the next best EV to make up for the stigma of driving a "Swasticar".

And in case you hadn't noticed that stigma, anti-Musk demonstrators are showing up at Tesla showrooms to remind you. Saturday, Tesla Takedowns erupted all over the US, with 350 protesters in Manhattan alone.

In Europe as well, Tesla's problems are growing: In Germany, sales were down 60% in January and 76% in February.

Maybe you were horrified by Musk's statement (in a Joe Rogan interview) about empathy.

The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said. “There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.

Well, you should know that seeing empathy as an exploitable weakness isn't just a psychological quirk Musk has because he's on the spectrum. It's become a thing on the Right. A conservative Christian author has a book out called Toxic Empathy: How progressives exploit Christian compassion.

We are told that empathy is the highest virtue—the key to being a good person. Is that true? Or has “empathy,” like so many other words of our day—“tolerance,” “justice,” “acceptance”—been hijacked by bad actors who exploit compassion for their own political ends?

Yep. If you find yourself feeling sorry for bombed-out communities in Gaza, hungry children in Africa, or working-class families losing their health insurance in the US, it's a trap. Jesus wouldn't want you to fall for it. "Love your neighbor" now means something else entirely.

David French comments:

That’s one reason you’ll often see a shocking amount of derision online when anyone starts talking about the human toll of Trump’s decisions. His MAGA evangelicals are broadcasting that you cannot reach them with anything that looks like an appeal to the heart. ... It’s also just bizarre to argue that describing the consequences of a policy is somehow emotionally manipulative when avoiding those consequences was the purpose of the program that’s being frozen or cut.

So, yes, you say that children might die without a certain program when the very purpose of the program is to prevent children from dying. That’s not manipulation. It’s confronting individuals with facts. It’s making them understand exactly what they are choosing to do.

and you also might be interested in ...

Paul Krugman looks at Trump's "Strategic Cryptocurrency Reserve" plan and concludes that it's a gigantic pump-and-dump scheme. Even if you believe it's somehow on the up-and-up, this observation should trouble you:

What would the U.S. government do with this reserve? Make payoffs to gangsters? Buy favors from rogue governments like North Korea? I guess it could, in a pinch, sell the stuff to raise money if people have lost trust in the U.S. government’s solvency, but surely it would be a better strategy to stay solvent — among other things by not borrowing to buy assets that will probably crash in value if and when America tries try to sell them.

HHS has notified the State of Maine that its policy allowing transgender athletes to compete in school sports violates Title IX

by denying female student athletes in the State of Maine an equal opportunity to participate in, and obtain the benefits of participation, "in any interscholastic, intercollegiate, club or intramural athletics" offered by the state by allowing male athletes to compete against female athletes in current and future athletic events.

The Maine Attorney General’s Office was notified on Feb. 21 that the DHHS Office for Civil Rights started a compliance review of the Maine DOE, including the University of Maine System. A spokesperson for the Maine Attorney General's Office said federal investigators did not interview anyone in their office.

Whenever we talk about trans issues, especially trans athletes, it's important to realize just how few cases, and how little impact on cis-women's rights, we're talking about. HHS' letter identifies two cases:

A trans pole vaulter won the state Class B championship.
A trans skier finished third and fourth in events at the state Class C championships.

In the 2023 Maine Integrated Youth Health Survey, 4.5% of high school students reported a transgender identity. (That seems high to me, but what do I know?) If we picked some random group comprising 4.5% of students, that group would also probably contain a few successful athletes. So I don't see evidence that Maine's policy is distorting girls' sports in any meaningful way.

A BlueSky poster brings the numbers home:

As of today, there are more kids infected with measles than there are trans athletes playing in college sports in the U.S.

In general, I disapprove of the Right's tendency to make policy by anecdote. (Another example is to base immigration policy on anecdotes about misbehaving immigrants. Hitler's Nazis used to publicize every "Jewish crime" they could find, for similar reasons.) Anecdotal policy lends itself to prejudice, because only the anecdotes that fit the ruling bias are allowed to count. For example, there are countless stories of boys and girls being abused by Christian ministers. Should Christian churches be shut down to prevent this? Of course not, because Christians are much more popular than transfolk.

The upshot of HHS' letter is a referral to the Department of Justice for enforcement.

Various free-trade agreements have established an Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) process "to protect foreign businesses from state corruption and theft", but these days it's being used by companies whose investments are affected by a nation's environmental laws. Right now, Greenland is being sued by a mining company because it shut down uranium mining in 2021. The company says it had invested $100 million in the site, but it is suing for $11.5 billion, based on what their mine would be worth had it been successfully developed.

That case motivated The Guardian to look at other ISDS suits, and the "chilling effect" they have on governments' attempts to limit fossil fuels. In short, every time a country tries to protect its environment, it may have to pay a ransom to the parties who feel entitled to exploit that resource.

The Netanyahu government's war against the independence of the judiciary branch has resumed.

and let's close with a great relief

A Chilean kayaker was scooped up by the mouth of a humpback whale, and then spit back out. He was unharmed.

Humpback whales aren't actually looking for large prey like humans. They typically suck in large quantities of seawater and filter it for krill and other small morsels. But that's probably hard to remember when you find yourself in one's mouth.