Monday, September 26, 2022

Democratic Process

The Dobbs decision is the culmination of a decades-long effort by Republicans to capture the Supreme Court and use it, not just to undercut abortion rights but also to implement an unpopular agenda they cannot implement through the democratic process.

- Ian Millhiser "The Case Against the Supreme Court"

This week's featured post is "The Court's problems run deeper than Roe".

This week everybody was talking about Trump's bad week

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1016897/whos-the-lunatic

Last week's featured post was Trump-centered, and I refuse to do that two weeks in a row. Fortunately, other people covered the week's developments quite well. The three big events were:

  • The New York Attorney General Letitia James announced a sweeping civil lawsuit accusing the Trump family and the Trump organization of fraud.
  • The special master in the Mar-a-Lago search case has been pinning Trump's lawyers down: They can't just vaguely imply stuff (like that Trump declassified the secret documents the FBI found or that the FBI may have planted evidence). If they want to be taken seriously, they have to make specific claims and back those claims up with evidence.
  • On appeal, the 11th Circuit reversed Judge Cannon's decision to take the documents marked classified away from investigators and turn them over to the special master.

Those last two fulfilled the hopes I expressed last week:

The Justice Department has appealed to the 11th Circuit, which also includes a lot of Trump-appointed judges. Hopefully, though, these are real judges who will insist on applying the law, even to the man who appointed them.

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100054791807944

The NY lawsuit accuses Trump of claiming fraudulent valuations for his properties: high when he needed a loan, low when assessed for taxes.

James says in the suit that she estimates the financial benefits from this “fraudulent scheme” were $250 million. She wants Trump to give up those benefits and be permanently banned from serving as an officer in any New York business entity, and to ban the Trump Organization from buying commercial real estate in the state for five years.

Fraud is a crime, but this is not a criminal case. Other prosecutors investigated this as a criminal matter and decided not to proceed. Probably for two reasons:

  • The standard of proof in a civil case is lower: a preponderance of the evidence rather than proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
  • A jury might not be convinced that the scheme had victims. Banks that would not have made loans based on accurate valuations nonetheless got paid back. (Tax fraud would have to be prosecuted by the IRS, not the State of New York.)

As usual, Trump and his cult are claiming "witch hunt". However, they don't seem to be refuting any of the specific claims in the indictment. They're throwing around a lot of outrage, but not offering a lot of facts.

Trump's two main defenses don't sound very good politically: His lies didn't hurt anybody, and besides, everybody else in his business is a crook too.

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1016941/trumps-next-trick

Trump's claim to Sean Hannity that he could declassify documents "by thinking" drew a lot of ridicule. His lawyers have refused to advance any such claim in court, and I doubt they will. After all, what if Biden's first thought after taking office was to reclassify all Trump's documents?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/22/its-all-mind/

I take the claim as an indication that has no evidence to support his declassification claim. Ultimately, you just have to believe in the telepathic powers of the presidency.

In the same quote, Trump seemed to slip up:

If you’re the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying, ‘It’s declassified,’ even by thinking about it because you’re sending it to Mar-a-Lago or wherever you’re sending it. [my italics]

To me, that implies he has more stolen classified documents hidden away somewhere else.


The weirdest and potentially scariest Trump news has to do with his increasing embrace of the QAnon movement, which is counting on him to save us all from the world-dominating conspiracy of liberal pedophiles by publicly executing thousands of them.

In a recent rally in Youngstown, Ohio (purportedly for Senate candidate J. D. Vance, who Trump belittled), Trump closed with a QAnon anthem playing in the background and people raising their index fingers in an almost religious salute.


The right-wing research I do confuses the social-media algorithms: Facebook has been showing me ads for the Trump Store, which is marking the end of summer with a sale on official Trump-branded sweatshirts. (Only $63.75!) I was going to leave a comment asking if they had any orange jumpsuits, but somebody had beaten me to it.

How about it, liberal entrepreneurs? I'm sure there's a market.

and Russia

As his forces continue to lose on the battlefield, Putin keeps doubling down. Wednesday he announced mobilization of 300K reservists, pledging that he will “use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people.” He was clear that "all the means" includes nuclear weapons, but left vague what threats would make their use necessary.

According to The Economist, Russia has not had a mobilization since World War II.

Reports have emerged of men receiving conscription papers en masse, especially in poorer areas in the east and south of the country such as Chechnya and Dagestan. In Buryatia, an ethnic-Mongolian region in eastern Siberia, men were handed draft papers in the middle of the night, regardless of their experience or profession. According to Alexandra Garmazhapova of the Free Buryatia Foundation, an anti-war group, people were drafted within minutes of Mr Putin’s speech. ...

According to RAND, a think-tank, many of Russia’s reservists lack military training sufficient or recent enough to be effective fighters. Experts suggest that training could take months. Yet in one recent video, officers can be heard telling newly mobilised recruits that they will get just two weeks of training before being sent to Ukraine.

The mobilization has led to protests, which are illegal in Putin's Russia. Reportedly, 1300 protesters were arrested Wednesday. The NYT reported yesterday that 745 were detained from protests all across the country.

Thousands more have fled since [the mobilization announcement], and many flights to destinations where Russians are not required to have a visa have sold out. Border crossings with Finland and Georgia are clogged with cars.

The Atlantic's Anne Applebaum suggests that Putin's speech itself was a sign of chaos in the Kremlin.

If an American president announced a major speech, booked the networks for 8 p.m., and then disappeared until the following morning, the analysis would be immediate and damning: chaos, disarray, indecision. The White House must be in crisis.

In the past 24 hours, this is exactly what happened in Moscow. The Russian president really did announce a major speech, alert state television, warn journalists, and then disappear without explanation. Although Vladimir Putin finally gave his speech to the nation this morning [i.e. Wednesday], the same conclusions have to apply: chaos, disarray, indecision. The Kremlin must be in crisis.

Putin has also begun changing the definition of "Russia and our people" by holding referendums on whether four parts of Ukraine that his forces occupy will become part of Russia. This opens up the question of whether Putin would use nuclear weapons if Ukraine's current offensive started recapturing Ukrainian territory that Russia is annexing.

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1016939/vlad-in-a-corner

Vox summarizes the reasons Russians give for being confident they will win this war.

  • The West is weak and shiftless; it won't match Russia's staying power.
  • China will be Russia's lifeline.
  • Russia doesn't need sanctioned Western tech all that much.

The author doubts all these points.


That's the Russian point of view, but what about the pro-Russia American Right? What are they telling themselves? Here's a piece from The American Conservative by Trump Pentagon veteran Douglas Macgregor about how badly Ukraine is losing the war.

Moscow’s determination to destroy Ukrainian forces at the least cost to Russian lives prevailed. Ukrainian casualties were always heavier than reported from the moment Russian troops crossed into Eastern Ukraine, but now, thanks to the recent failure of Ukrainian counterattacks in the Kherson region, they’ve reached horrific levels that are impossible to conceal. ... Moscow is in no hurry. The Russians are nothing if not methodical and deliberate. Ukrainian forces are bleeding to death in counterattack after counterattack. Why rush? Moscow can be patient.

Macgregor made the same case to Tucker Carlson Thursday, adding the bizarre charge that it is the West that is threatening poor innocent Russia with nukes. (Zelenskyy, Carlson elaborates, is "demanding that we preemptively nuke Russia", a charge that not even Russian state media outlet RT is making.)

As a reality check, I went back to see what Macgregor was saying in June, when Russia was still grinding out small territorial gains. Western media, he claimed then, was "preparing the public for Ukraine’s military collapse".

Kiev’s war with Moscow is lost. Ukrainian forces are being bled white. Trained replacements do not exist in sufficient numbers to influence the battle, and the situation grows more desperate by the hour. No amount of U.S. and allied military aid or assistance short of direct military intervention by U.S. and NATO ground forces can change this harsh reality.

The problem today is not ceding territory and population to Moscow in Eastern Ukraine that Moscow already controls. The future of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions along with the Donbas is decided. Moscow is also likely to secure Kharkov and Odessa, two cities that are historically Russian and Russian-speaking, as well as the territory that adjoins them. These operations will extend the conflict through the summer.

That take turned out to be totally wrong; summer is over, Ukraine's military hasn't collapsed, and Odessa and Kharkiv are still securely Ukrainian. But why should American conservatives care about the failed predictions of the past? Putin is great! His brilliant plan will prevail! Glory to Trump! Glory to Russia!

BTW: This is another example of the difference between Left and Right in America. Not that liberal pundits always make accurate predictions, but they are much more likely to regard a huge mistake as something they need to explain. Paul Krugman, for example, was wrong about inflation. But he owned up to it and tried to learn from his mistake. Macgregor just charges ahead with new predictions of Ukrainian doom.

and hurricanes

Puerto Rico continues to dig out from Hurricane Fiona. Like Maria in 2017, it took down the electric grid. Nearly 3/4 of a million people are still without power.

Meanwhile, Ian was upgraded to a hurricane this morning and is expected to keep strengthening until it makes landfall somewhere on Florida's gulf coast on Wednesday.

The coverage of these two storms tells you something about the importance of statehood. Florida is going to get far more attention than Puerto Rico.

and you also might be interested in ...

I've gotten my bivalent booster Covid vaccine.


Women in Iran seem to have had enough with the theocracy. Protest movements like this are hard to gauge, especially from a distance. Who knew the George Floyd protests would spread like they did? An observation from Vox:

One thing that’s certain is that protests in Iran are becoming more frequent, says [Ali] Vaez [an analyst with International Crisis Group], which shows the degree of discontent. “We used to see this kind of outburst of public ire once a decade in Iran,” he told me. “Now it’s becoming every other year, basically, and it’s becoming more ferocious, more violent.”


As the 100th anniversary of Mussolini's March on Rome approaches, Italy looks ready to put another far-right government in power.


DeSantis' stunt of flying Venezuelan asylum-seekers to Martha's Vineyard just keeps getting weirder and weirder.

The Florida Republican refuses to release the state contract that funded the flights.

WaPo's Greg Sargent speculates about the reason: The flights don't match the budgetary language used to fund them. If that's true, DeSantis can't hide it forever.


Vox untangles the Mississippi welfare fraud scandal, which is bigger than NFL Hall-of-Famer Brett Favre.

What happened in Mississippi is less a case of criminal masterminds perpetrating a heist, and closer to walking into a vault that welfare reform left open and unguarded, all while purporting to protect the government from mooching citizens.

It points to the fundamental problem with putting people who don't care about poverty in charge of poverty programs. In their minds, this is all wasted money anyway, so why not steal it?

and let's close with something celebratory

Rosh Hashanah began yesterday and lasts through Tuesday. It is the first of the annual High Holy Days, which will conclude October 4-5 with Yom Kippur. Here's a quick intro to Rosh Hashanah, which notes:

While Rosh Hashanah tends to be a joyful celebration, Yom Kippur is a more somber holiday often marked by fasting.

This musical piece sounds pretty joyful.

Monday, September 19, 2022

Moving On

Even if Durham approached the probe with earnest sincerity, the real reason he was appointed is that Donald Trump’s political con requires the promise of total vindication right around the corner. For a time, Durham provided that hope for Trump backers. But now, as Trump moves on to other ploys, the Durham probe has served its purpose, even though it has produced no major convictions or epiphanies.

- David Graham
"The John Durham Probe Gave Trump What He Wanted"

This week's featured post is "How the Trump Grift Works".

This week everybody was talking about something that doesn't interest me

I have spent exactly zero time these last two weeks watching coverage related to the British royal family. I just don't see what connects the royals to anything I find meaningful. If I'd been running a news network, I would have briefly announced developments on the days they happened: the Queen's death, Charles' coronation, her funeral -- and then moved on to something that might actually matter.

and Ukraine

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1016686/tis-but-a-flesh-wound

After a grinding Russian offensive in the summer made only minimal gains, Ukraine has been striking back surprisingly effectively. It has regained a comparatively large amount of territory in the Kharkiv area, and put Russian forces into a disorganized retreat.

Like the collapse of Russia's Kyiv offensive in the spring, this new series of reverses is raising questions about the effectiveness of the Russian military in general. Putin is also beginning to face criticism from the political right, from Russians who believe in the goals of the war but are disappointed by how it's going.

The main thing to worry about is that Putin will respond by escalating further, which is why Biden warned him not to use tactical nuclear weapons.

and the fall elections

https://mediacloud.theweek.com/image/upload/f_auto,t_single-media-image-desktop@1/v1663248853/20220914edbbc-a.jpg

It's hard to imagine what Lindsey Graham is thinking as he introduces a national 15-week abortion ban. It's obviously not going to pass in this Congress, and it's also giving Democrats a wedge issue for the midterm elections: It unites Democrats and splits Republicans.

Nationally, the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe has motivated Democratic voters in special elections and in the Kansas referendum. The Republican response has amounted to "Calm down. The Dobbs decision is just federalism; it returns the abortion question to the states."

But Graham's bill points out the obvious: National abortion bans will be proposed in every Congress from now on, and Republicans will not be able to stand up to their base and vote them down. So if Americans elect Republican majorities in Congress and regain the presidency, abortion will eventually be banned.

Graham is pitching his bill as a "late-term" abortion ban, but 15 weeks is early in the second trimester, and has never previously been considered "late-term".

Polls show that late-term abortion bans are more popular than general abortion bans. But I encourage Democrats to keep raising this question to women who have ever been pregnant: "At what point in your pregnancy did your judgment become inferior to the government's?" Late-term abortions are nearly all complex situations where difficult decisions need to be made. I can't imagine that any large percentage of those decisions will be made better by Congress than by the people actually involved.

https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2022/09/13/bagley-cartoon-texas-grilling/

One reason I didn't panic when Democrats were doing so badly in the polls was that I expected Republicans to do what they're doing: nominate extreme MAGA candidates who represent about a third of the electorate.

Latest example: Don Bolduc, who is the Republican Senate nominee in New Hampshire. Incumbent Democrat Maggie Hassan won by a whisker in 2016, so she has been an obvious target for Republicans looking to flip the 50-50 Senate. Popular Governor Chris Sununu probably could have won that seat, but decided he didn't want to be part of a Republican Senate caucus with no policy other than blocking whatever President Biden wants to do.

So the primary came down to Bolduc against a more mainstream Republican, Chuck Morse.

Bolduc holds a wide variety of extreme beliefs: He wants to eliminate both the FBI and the Department of Education, has backed former President Donald Trump’s lies about the election and called GOP Gov. Chris Sununu a “Chinese Communist sympathizer.”

But Sununu has pledged to support Bolduc, because mainstream Republicans are content to watch the fascists take over their party. Bolduc, meanwhile, has had a sudden conversion on election denial: The day after his primary opponent conceded, he announced that he no longer believes Biden stole the 2020 election from Trump.

One of Bolduc's most charming positions is that voters shouldn't be able to pick their senators at all: He wants to repeal the 17th Amendment and return to the system where state legislatures picked senators.

That's how it's supposed to be. And it worked until the 17th Amendment.

Weirdly, Bolduc sees this as an anti-corruption measure, when the pre-amendment Senate was a big part of what made the Gilded Age notoriously corrupt, as memorialized in the famous political cartoon "Bosses of the Senate". Bolduc clearly doesn't know American history.

So anyway, New Hampshire: If you don't vote for Hassan, you may never get to vote for a senator again.

Another example is the Massachusetts governor's race. Massachusetts is one of the bluest states in the country, but it has a history of electing moderate Republican governors -- like currently popular Governor Charlie Baker, as well as Mitt Romney and Bill Weld in the not-so-distant past.

So there's every reason to believe the GOP could have put up a real fight this year. Instead, they nominated MAGA Republican Geoff Diehl. The lastest poll has him trailing Democrat Maura Healey by a ridiculous margin, 52%-26%.


Of course Republicans are doctoring videos to exaggerate the effects of John Fetterman's stroke. How did I not see that coming?

and the secret documents Trump stole

I've been reluctant to talk about "Trump judges" in a way that implies they're all MAGA cultists. First, because it's too reminiscent of the way Trump himself has talked about "Obama judges", as if the judiciary is necessarily partisan. If we start assuming that every judge is in the tank for the party that appointed him or her, it's hard to see how democracy stands.

But also, a number of "Trump judges" have held the line against his most outrageous attacks against democracy, and even his Supreme Court appointees refused to overturn the election he lost.

However, it's hard to explain Judge Aileen Cannon's rulings in the Mar-a-Lago documents case without assuming some kind of bias or corruption. Her position makes no sense as law, and gives Trump a unique above-the-law status.

Most telling is the way that she takes seriously claims that Trump has made in public, but which his lawyers have not raised in court: that the clearly marked secret documents the FBI recovered may not actually be classified at all, and that this is something for her appointed special master to decide. (Based on what?)

In their court filings, Trump's lawyers imply claims they do not actually state, referring to "purportedly classified" documents and observing that the government "wrongly assumes that if a document has a classification marking, it remains classified in perpetuity".

Any real judge would have pressed them to make a factual claim: Did Trump declassify these documents or not? When? How? I believe Trump's lawyers would have backed down because they know Trump's public claims are lies, just as Trump's lawyers often refused to claim fraud in his election lawsuits. Lawyers can be sanctioned for lying to the court, but not for vague implications that the judge lets stand.

Cannon, however, did not ask the obvious questions, and instead just observed that there is a "dispute" about the documents' classification that the court needs to resolve somehow.

The Justice Department has appealed to the 11th Circuit, which also includes a lot of Trump-appointed judges. Hopefully, though, these are real judges who will insist on applying the law, even to the man who appointed them.

the Martha's Vineyard stunt

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1016733/the-chess-game

You've probably already heard about Florida Governor DeSantis using state funds to fly Venezuelan immigrants from Texas to Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. They arrived not knowing where they were (since DeSantis' people had lied to them), and local officials were not told they were coming. In short, it was a political stunt designed to create maximal chaos. The Martha's Vineyard community seem to have handled it well, and the Venezuelans are now housed at a military base on Cape Cod.

Similar stunts have been going on for a while, as when Texas Governor Abbott bused about 100 Hispanic immigrants to Vice President Kamala Harris' residence, again unannounced.

To some, this is reminiscent of the "reverse freedom rides" that Southern racists organized (again, tricking their victims) in the 1960s. Others wonder about the political reaction from Florida's large Venezuelan population, after seeing how little regard DeSantis has for people escaping the Maduro government.

My reaction to this series of events is to ask: How does dropping migrants in a resort community with no warning make anything better? DeSantis and Abbott seem to share one dominant motive: spite.

The underlying problem is that both treaties and our own laws require the United States to allow people facing persecution in other countries to claim asylum here. (This is largely a response to the shameful way Jewish refugees were treated when they tried to escape the Holocaust.) Once refugees get here and turn themselves in [1], we are legally obligated to hear their claims. Currently, the asylum courts are overwhelmed, and it can take years to decide if someone's claims of persecution are legitimate.

As it did in so many areas, and as Trump continues to do today, the Trump administration dealt with the asylum problem by ignoring the law. The Biden administration refuses to do that, and systemic reforms have been logjammed in Congress for many years.

It's important that we get this figured out soon, because in the coming decades many millions of people will become climate refugees, as their homes are flooded out or their fields become deserts. What's our plan for dealing with the ones who appear on our border? Let them all in? Shoot them?


[1] The Republican rhetoric about "securing the Southern border" is way off-base when we're talking about asylum seekers. They are not avoiding or breaking our laws, they are seeking the protection of our laws. And of course no one worries about our Northern border, because we think of Canadians as White English-speaking people.

you also might be interested in ...

Geoffrey Berman's new book Holding the Line is a good read. Chapter-by-chapter, it's a real-life crime series that covers art fraud, Jeffrey Epstein, street gangs, extortion, international banking fraud, and many other cases, underlining the wide variety of issues that arise in the Southern District of New York, where Berman was the US attorney for 2 years during the Trump administration.

Like any good TV crime series, the episodes have a long-term background plot playing out: How Trump and Bill Barr tried to use the Justice Department to protect Trump's friends and attack his enemies. Berman's refusal to play ball involved strategic resistance, as he was constantly forced to decide which concessions mattered and which didn't. He eventually did get fired, but managed to avoid handing SDNY off to a Trump/Barr puppet.

One point that makes Berman's book topical: When Trump talks about "weaponization of the justice system", it's projection. He spent four years trying to weaponize it.


A legal battle is playing out in Texas over Governor Abbott's and Attorney General Paxton's desire to persecute families of trans youth. In Abbott and Paxton's view, parents who allow their children to receive puberty blockers or other gender-identity-affirming medical care (under a doctor's supervision) should be investigated for child abuse. A state judge disagrees, but Paxton will appeal the ruling.


Whatever happened to the praying football coach? You know, the one that the Supreme Court eviscerated the Constitution's Establishment Clause for? Has he been reinstated, as he demanded and the Court ordered?

Well, not exactly. His reinstatement papers have been sitting around since August 8, but "we haven't gotten so much as a phone call" says a spokesperson for the school district.

Instead, ex-Coach Kennedy has been living large as a conservative celebrity.

Instead, as the Bremerton Knights were prepping for the season in August, Kennedy was up in Alaska, meeting with former Vice President Mike Pence and evangelist Franklin Graham. On the eve of the first game, which the Knights won, Kennedy was in Milwaukee being presented with an engraved .22-caliber rifle at an American Legion convention.

The weekend of the second game, which the Knights also won, Kennedy appeared with former President Donald Trump at the Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey. He saw Trump get a religious award from a group called the American Cornerstone Institute.

Coming up this month, Kennedy’s scheduled to give a talk as part of a lectureship series at a Christian university in Arkansas.

No doubt we can soon expect a book tour and a movie. It sure looks like "the praying coach" is just another right-wing grifter.


The purge continues at CNN: Don Lemon has lost his prime time slot and has been moved to the morning.


The latest "woke" thing that upsets the Right: In the live-action remake of Disney's animated "The Little Mermaid", Ariel is played by a Black actress.

Let me provide some perspective: When I was growing up in the 1960s in the Midwestern White working class, I was still a little uncertain about imitating great athletes like Willie Mays or Bill Russell on the playground, because White boys weren't supposed to identify with Black men. That all changed in my lifetime, and now there's nothing the least bit strange about players of any race or age trying to shoot like Steph Curry.

Same thing here: If you worry that your daughter can't really identify with a Black Ariel, it undoubtedly bothers you a lot more than it does her. And in the future, she will look back on this controversy as something weird about her childhood.

and let's close with something well designed

The Betterdoggos web site picks out dozens of examples of cleverly designed public spaces, like these Bulgarian benches.

Monday, September 5, 2022

Threats to Democracy

NO SIFT NEXT WEEK. THE NEXT NEW ARTICLES WILL APPEAR ON SEPTEMBER 19.

History tells us that blind loyalty to a single leader and a willingness to engage in political violence is fatal to democracy.

- President Joe Biden

This week's featured posts are "Fascist is a description, not an insult" and "The Battle for Voters' Imaginations" (which is about framing the abortion debate).

This week everybody was talking about Trump's crimes

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1016345/hand-in-the-cookie-jar

The breaking news says a judge has granted Trump's request for a special master. But a weekly blog can't cover breaking news, so look for details elsewhere.


Maybe the weirdest thing about the whole Mar-a-Lago story is how the former president keeps goading the government into revealing details that are damaging to him. He could have kept the whole search secret if he'd wanted, but no. Then he leaked his copy of the search warrant, and demanded a copy of the affidavit DoJ had submitted to a judge to get the warrant. Every new document that came out blew up more of his defenses and pushed his supporters deeper into a corner.

Trump's lawyers' motion to appoint a special master to review the seized documents was full of misinformation that had to annoy DoJ, so it responded Tuesday with a 38-page filing telling the history of the government's efforts to get back the documents Trump illegally took with him when he left the White House.

That's how we know all this:

When the National Archives asking nicely failed to get all the documents returned, DoJ followed up with a subpoena for "[a]ny and all documents or writings in the custody or control of Donald J. Trump and/or the Office of Donald J. Trump bearing classification markings [list of classification markings]."

Trump's lawyers returned more documents, including many classified documents (that Trump no longer has the clearance to possess), and one of them signed off on this statement:

Based upon the information that has been provided to me, I am authorized to certify, on behalf of the Office of Donald J. Trump, the following: a. A diligent search was conducted of the boxes that were moved from the White House to Florida; b. This search was conducted after receipt of the subpoena, in order to locate any and all documents that are responsive to the subpoena; c. Any and all responsive documents accompany this certification; and d. No copy, written notation, or reproduction of any kind was retained as to any responsive document.

This turned out to be a lie. When DoJ began to suspect it had been duped, it got a search warrant. And sure enough, the FBI found what it was looking for.

That the FBI, in a matter of hours, recovered twice as many documents with classification markings as the “diligent search” that the former President’s counsel and other representatives had weeks to perform calls into serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter

The filing closes with the photo below. Even if you believe the bogus argument that Trump had waved his declassification wand over all these documents, they clearly bear classification markings and so are subject to the subpoena.

Tuesday's filing blew up all the bizarre and contradictory defenses Trump and his defenders had been spreading since the search was first announced. All they have left is to threaten violence.

Reading the filing, it's hard to see how Trump can escape being indicted. I've heard a lot of people say that they don't want this kind of case to be what Trump finally goes down for, since the attempt to overthrow democracy on January 6 was so much worse. However, what's unique about this episode in Trump's criminal history is how easy it is to understand.

In all his previous crimes, judgment calls provided wiggle room for people who didn't want to believe Trump did anything wrong. Did Trump's pressure on Ukrainian President Zelenskyy constitute extortion? Did his demand that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger "find" enough votes for him to win cross the line into election tampering? Do we have enough quid-pro-quo evidence to call his pardons of potential witnesses Mike Flynn, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort a conspiracy to obstruct justice? Is it clear that he knew he had lost the election and intended to subvert the will of the voters?

I think a reasonable juror who is shown all the evidence will say "yes" to all of those questions and convict Trump of the corresponding crimes. But there is at least an argument to be made.

In this case there isn't: He took the classified documents. They didn't belong to him. His lawyers signed a statement saying he had given them all back. A search proved that he hadn't. He knew he hadn't, because some of them were in his desk next to his passport.

He's guilty.

https://www.facebook.com/clay.bennett.cartoons

Trump's crowds are still chanting "Lock her up" when he lies about Hillary Clinton.

Steve Benen addresses the difference between Trump's theft of classified documents and the Clinton email affair, which Republicans like John Cornyn and Lindsey Graham surely understand when they're not trying to bullshit the public.

Clinton’s email protocols were, of course, the subject of a lengthy criminal probe. Federal investigators appeared eager to find evidence of wrongdoing: then-FBI Director James Comey privately marveled at the “visceral hatred” some senior FBI officials in New York had for the former secretary of state.

But federal law enforcement nevertheless didn’t charge the Democrat with any crimes because they couldn’t find evidence of criminal wrongdoing. Comey took the extraordinary step of publicly criticizing Clinton anyway, but he grudgingly conceded that the FBI, following an exhaustive investigation, couldn’t indict her.

Trump’s State Department similarly conceded — late on a Friday afternoon — that there was no systemic or deliberate mishandling of classified information from Clinton. The inspector general’s office in Trump’s Justice Department also concluded that the FBI had no reason to charge Clinton.

Trump’s scandal bears little resemblance to his former rival’s. Clinton didn’t take physical documents. She didn’t ignore pleas for cooperation. She didn’t store highly sensitive secrets at a private club that had an unfortunate habit of letting foreign spies walk around.


Bill Barr, of all people, makes this excellent point about the claim that Trump declassified all these documents:

If in fact he sort of stood over scores of boxes not really knowing what was in them, and said, "I hereby declassify everything in here," that would be such an abuse that shows such recklessness that it's almost worse than taking the documents.

Imagine declassifying secrets just for your own convenience, without even bothering to learn why they had been classified in the first place.

Several TV talking heads with intelligence backgrounds have pointed out the sources-and-methods issue that makes declassification decisions complicated: If you saw a top-secret document saying that Vladimir Putin had oatmeal for breakfast last Tuesday, you might think that was a silly fact to classify and want to declassify it. (Putin already knows, so who are we keeping this secret from?) But if Russian intelligence saw it, they might be able to find the spy who is close enough to Putin to report such facts. That would be very bad.


The most mysterious thing the FBI seized are "43 empty folders with CLASSIFIED banners". Did those folders used to contain documents? Where might they be?

I don't want to go too far out on a limb speculating about them, but I hope we find out eventually.

and semi-fascism

President Biden's calling out of MAGA Republicans is covered in one of the featured posts. I point out that -- unlike when AOC is called a "Marxist" without any reference to public ownership of the means of production -- "fascist" isn't just an insult. The term means something, and that meaning applies to Trump and his personality cult. Calling Trump a fascist is more like calling AOC a New Yorker.

That post starts with the hypocrisy of Trumpists being offended by rhetoric that is much tamer than what their side routinely dishes out. But there is one additional point I didn't mention: Taking offense when you are the greater offender is a telltale sign of assholery, as defined in Aaron James' book Assholes: a theory.

James’s asshole has a sense of ironclad entitlement. He’s superior, immune to your complaints, though he insists you listen to his.

and Jackson's water problem

According to Vox:

The water system in Jackson, Mississippi, the state’s capital and largest city, failed earlier this week.

On Tuesday, most of the city’s 150,000 residents were without running water, prompting the state’s Republican governor, Tate Reeves, to declare a state of emergency. He warned that there wasn’t enough water “to fight fires, to reliably flush toilets, and to meet other critical needs.” As of Wednesday afternoon, there was still little-to-no water pressure for most of the city’s residents.

The crisis has causes at multiple time scales. The immediate problem is twofold: excessive rain washed more contaminants into the system than the city's water-treatment plant could handle. Also, several major pumps went out at the same time.

But this isn't a unique crisis; the city often has problems after major weather events. Consider this Mississippi Today article from March, 2021:

[F]or the better part of the last month, Avalon and her husband Billy heaved buckets of water they retrieved from government tankers, kind neighbors or rainfall into their home to flush their toilet or wash dishes. 

Most Jacksonians lost running water altogether after back-to-back winter storms the week of Feb. 14 stunned unprepared utilities across the Deep South, and the Avalons were some of the roughly 43,000 people whose taps remained dry for more than two weeks. City officials were still telling most residents, 82% of whom are Black, to boil their water a month later.

So the medium-term problem is that Jackson's water infrastructure is crumbling.

"This is a set of accumulated problems based on deferred maintenance that's not taken place over decades," [Mayor Chokwe Antar] Lumumba said. Lumumba estimated it would cost at least $1 billion to fix the water distribution system and billions more to resolve the issue altogether.

But where would that money come from? That question points to the long-term problem. Jackson delayed integrating its schools as long as it could, and when it did many prosperous Whites left. The city is now 83% Black and 25% below the poverty line; the median household income is $52K. So Jackson doesn't have the tax base to generate billions for infrastructure.

It's also a Democratic city in a Republican state, so state government isn't coming to the rescue. Biden's federal infrastructure bill is expected to deliver $75 million to Jackson for water projects -- real money for most medium-sized cities, but not on the scale of Jackson's needs.

And then there's the deep-background problem: racism. The slogan "Black Lives Matter" doesn't just call attention to police shootings of Black people. It points to White Americans' reluctance to take Black suffering to heart.

Take me, for example. I didn't grow up in a KKK-style household, and I wasn't taught to actively hate any racial group. But all the same, I grew up believing that Black people's problems were not my problems. If they were suffering, that was a shame. But why should I do anything about it?

That ingrained attitude has been hard to shake. To this day, my eyes will glide past headlines about suffering Black people, and I have to make myself go back and read the stories. I suspect a lot of White Americans have a similar hole in their compassion.

So as a thought experiment, imagine that some whiter state capital -- Salem, Oregon, say (which is about the same size, but more prosperous) or Des Moines, Iowa (somewhat larger) -- were having similar problems. Would the American public have a similarly detached emotional response? Or would we feel in our bones that this was an emergency that required both immediate action and a complete long-term solution, whatever the cost?

and CNN

At some point in their careers, just about everybody in the news business has to decide whether they're primarily in news or primarily in business.

Back in February, CNN got a new boss, Chris Licht. The buzz at the time was that Licht would emphasize hard news and "dial down the prime-time partisanship". Reportedly, the head of Warner Brothers Discovery -- CNN's new corporate parent after a spin-off from AT&T -- wanted to "move CNN back to the middle", and away from the "partisan and combative" tone it developed during the Trump administration.

In some ways that sounds good, but there's a lot of room for skepticism: How exactly should a "hard news" organization have covered the Trump administration, which was flat-out lying most of the time? How do you accurately report "The President is lying" in a nonpartisan way, or insist that liars take follow-up questions without being "combative"? How do you respond when Trump targets factual CNN reports as "fake news" and labels the news media in general "the enemy of the people"? When administration spokespeople claim the right to assert "alternative facts" that aren't facts at all, what do you do?

You can try to walk a middle road between Left and Right. But how can a news organization walk a middle road between True and False? It doesn't serve your viewers if your coverage amounts to "Biden says it's sunny, Trump says it's raining, and we'll have to leave it there."

So it was a bit ominous in June when Axios reported:

To conservative critics, some on-air personalities, like Jim Acosta and Brian Stelter, have become the face of the network's liberal shift.

Is it up to "conservative critics" to decide when CNN has successfully found the center? Trump himself isn't even happy with Fox News, because it occasionally shows independence. He'll be happy with CNN when it becomes his propaganda agency, and not a moment before.

By August, Brian Stelter was gone and his "Reliable Sources" show was canceled. And now White House correspondent John Harwood is gone too. He leaves saying he "look[s] forward to figuring out what's next", which I interpret to mean that this move may be part of somebody's plan, but not his.

If this really is about a shift to hard news, i.e., more correspondents on the ground in places like Ukraine and fewer talking heads in the studio, that could be good. But if the point is to compete for the Fox audience by telling them what they want to hear, whether it's true or not (which is what Fox does), then that is bad news indeed.

but I'd like to tell you about a book

Possibly the greatest American you've never heard of is John Harlan.

In the rise of Jim Crow, two shameful Supreme Court decisions stand out. In the Civil Rights Cases (1883), the Court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional and gave its official blessing to segregation in the private sector. In Plessy v Ferguson (1896) the Court endorsed legally enforced "separate but equal" policies, and chose to ignore whether the separate facilities provided for Black people would ever truly be equal.

Both decisions would have been unanimous but for one justice: John Harlan. His ringing dissent in Plessy provided the legal roadmap Thurgood Marshall followed when he argued Brown v Board of Education more than half a century later.

Harlan also dissented in other pivotal Gilded Age decisions that are now viewed as mistakes -- cases concerning states' ability to limit working hours or impose a minimum wage, the legality of an income tax, enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act, lynching, whether the United States' colonial subjects are protected by the Constitution, and many others. Again and again, he was ahead of his time, and lit a path for a later generation of lawyers to follow.

The recent book The Great Dissenter by Peter Canellos is a dual biography of Harlan and another man whose very existence was a major influence on Harlan's views: Robert Harlan, an enslaved woman's child who was recognized within the family as John's older half-brother. Robert overcame racial discrimination to become a successful businessman, a canny investor in other Black businesses, an adventurer, a world traveler, and an influential political leader in Cincinnati's Black community.

Lifelong admiration of Robert seems to have immunized John against his era's popular myths of Black inferiority. In reviewing Plessy, John must have wondered why the law needed to protect anyone against sharing a train car with Robert Harlan.

and you also might be interested in ...

Mikhail Gorbachev died. He represented the generation that grew up with no memory of the Czar, and never really knew the idealistic side of Communism. The Soviet Union was what it was, and didn't represent a step on the path to perfect socialism.

He tried to save the corrupt monstrosity the Soviet state had become, and ended up killing it faster. His legacy was an opportunity for Russia to achieve democratic freedom, which it didn't do. He's going to give generations of historians a complicated riddle to solve.


A county librarian in Idaho resigned rather than put up with "the political atmosphere of extremism, militant Christian fundamentalism, intimidation tactics, and threatening behavior currently being employed in the community".

The threats against her have been veiled, but their message is clear, she said. During comments in public meetings, she has been warned with fire-and-brimstone language of her imminent damnation, coming from certain Christian fundamentalists groups who are known to believe they have a call to violence, she said.

The Idaho Statesman article drew six comments, most of them attacking the librarian.


That Texas law requiring all schools to have "In God We Trust" posters is just as sectarian as we all thought. A group that wants church and state to remain separate offered the local school board two alternatives that meet the conditions of the law: rainbow-colored "In God We Trust" posters, and the motto translated into Arabic. The donations were turned down.


When asked to identify "women's issues", Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker pointed to inflation, because "they've got to buy groceries". So don't look for Herschel at the supermarket, because that's women's work.


Ukraine has started a counter-attack aimed at the southern city of Kherson.


Author Barbara Ehrenreich died Thursday. I didn't really understand poverty traps until I read her 2001 classic Nickel and Dimed about trying to survive on minimum wage. Sometimes living cheaply requires an up-front investment (like a security deposit on an apartment) that poor people can't cover.

and let's close with something timely

Today isn't just Labor Day, it's Labor Day falling on 9-5. So we have hear from Dolly Parton.