He is a criminal defendant. He is going to have constraints the same as any defendant. This case is going to proceed in a normal order.
This week's featured post is "How did Frederick Douglass become a conservative spokesman?"
This week everybody was talking about the fires in Maui
They're still finding bodies in burned-out buildings in Lahaina, the main city in Maui. As of this morning the toll was up to 96 deaths. As you can see in the picture above, people stuck in traffic had to abandon their vehicles and try to escape on foot.
The wildfire had two main causes: dry grass and high winds. One recent theory is that the winds blew over some power lines, which sparked the grass. Extreme dryness and wind are two symptoms of climate change, and the Maui disaster is just the latest event in our Climate Change Summer, which has also included smoke from Canadian fires blanketing the Northeast, extreme rain and flooding in Vermont and Pennsylvania, and record heat in the Southwest and Florida.
Politicians who deny what we can see with our own eyes, or who want to ignore the whole issue, are not worth arguing with any more. They just need to be voted out.
and Trump's trials
Fulton County DA Fani Willis will seek a Trump indictment this week. The Atlanta Journal Constitution's Tamar Hallerman lays out what to expect from this indictment, which might appear as soon as tomorrow. As I keep saying, I could speculate about the content, but in a few days I can just read it.
Most of the Trump-trial news this week concerned Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the DC trial for the January 6 conspiracy. In a hearing Friday, she issued a protective order barring Trump from using material the government is sharing in the discovery process to badger or intimidate witnesses against him. She also warned that she would be watching Trump's public statements closely.
The fact that he is running a political campaign currently has to yield to the administration of justice. And if that means he can’t say exactly what he wants to say in a political speech, that is just how it’s going to have to be.
It's worth noting that Americans cannot be deprived of their rights "without due process of law". Trump temporarily faces a judge's restrictions because a grand jury of American citizens has found sufficient evidence to indict him for several serious crimes. That's due process of law.
If Trump does appear to be trying to intimidate witnesses or taint the jury pool, Judge Chutkan has a number of possible responses, which include revoking his bail and putting him in jail until the trial is complete. But there has been speculation that Trump would welcome such a move, because he could make political hay out of the "persecution" he had brought on himself. (I doubt this; I think Trump is terrified of jail.) So Friday Chutkan made a novel threat: If Trump won't behave himself, she might have to move the trial along faster to protect witnesses, prosecutors, and everyone else involved (including herself).
Given that Trump's whole strategy has been to delay the trial until he becomes president again -- as I explained last week, he doesn't seem to have any other viable defense -- that threat might have some teeth.
What the people Trump targets might need protection from was underlined last week when the FBI tried to arrest a Utah man who had made detailed threats against President Biden (and other Trump enemies like Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg). A judge deemed these threats credible, so an arrest warrant was issued. The man was armed when agents arrived, and was killed when (according to the FBI) he pointed a weapon at the arresting agents.
Naturally, the man is now considered a martyr by the violent Right. These same people would respond to reports of police killing a person of color with "Why didn't he just comply?" But the laws are supposed to work differently for them.
This is far from the first time an avowed Trump supporter has repeated Trump's rhetoric before threatening or carrying out violent acts.
It's worth remembering how normal American politicians respond to such situations. In 2017, a Bernie Sanders supporter brought a gun to a baseball practice for congressional Republicans and began shooting, badly wounding Rep. Steve Scalise and several others. Afterwards, Sanders made this statement:
I have just been informed that the alleged shooter at the Republican baseball practice is someone who apparently volunteered on my presidential campaign. I am sickened by this despicable act. Let me be as clear as I can be: Violence of any kind is unacceptable in our society and I condemn this action in the strongest possible terms. Real change can only come about through nonviolent action, and anything else runs against our most deeply held American values.
Trump has never made any similar statement, and it is difficult to imagine him doing so. More typically, he makes excuses for his violent supporters, lauding how "passionate" they are. On January 6, Trump explained to Kevin McCarthy that the rioters who had invaded the Capitol and were chanting "hang Mike Pence" were just “more upset about the election” than McCarthy was. When he did eventually ask the rioters to go home, he told them "We love you. You're very special."
So if you belong to Trump's personality cult and you want him to love you, you know what to do.
Trump's apparent approval of violence continues. Saturday at the Iowa State Fair, Rep. Matt Gaetz told a crowd that "we know that only through force do we make any change in a corrupt town like Washington, D.C." Trump was standing right there, and made no attempt to distance himself from Gaetz' rhetoric.
Merrick Garland has taken a lot of criticism lately. Andrew Weissmann, formerly a top assistant to Robert Mueller, put it like this:
We [should] not forget that the predicament Jack Smith is in, racing to get and keep trial dates pre-election, is [be]cause Garland was so slow to pursue a top down investigation.
The conventional wisdom says that Garland didn't want DoJ to prosecute Trump because he was already wary of the weaponization-of-justice cudgel the Right was going to beat him with. But the House January 6 Committee so clearly demonstrated Trump's criminality that Garland's see-no-evil position became untenable. So that's how we got here, but arrived more than a year late.
Jay Kuo, however, makes an interesting counter-argument: No matter how obvious it might be to the casual observer that January 6 was a great crime against America, the laws were not written with January 6 in mind. So no matter how DoJ proceeded, it was going to have to apply laws in new ways, using interpretations that had never been tested in court.
Making Donald Trump the test case was bound to be fraught. So Garland started at the bottom, with the foot-soldiers who invaded the Capitol. Sure, they were trespassing, but wasn't there more to it that that? What else could they be charged with? Some had attacked police, but what about the ones who hadn't (or at least weren't on video doing so)?
There's a law against obstructing an official proceeding, but the main thrust of that law is about forging official documents, and whether the clause about obstructing a proceeding "otherwise" applied here hadn't been tested. And was the joint session of Congress on January 6 an "official proceeding" under this law? What did disrupting it "corruptly" mean?
So Garland's DoJ went about establishing these points in cases that didn't have to carry the emotional and political baggage of a case against Trump. Appeals of some of those cases did challenge those interpretations, and those appeals weren't resolved until April of this year. One (the meaning of "corruptly") is still pending.
So maybe DoJ was always fated to race against the 2024 election. And maybe Attorney General Garland knew what he was doing.
and the pro-reproductive-rights vote in Ohio
Sometimes politics gets so ridiculous that only a comedian can describe it. Here's Trae Crowder, a.k.a. the Liberal Redneck.
Ohio Republicans found out that the people of their state were likely to pass an amendment that would protect abortion rights in Ohio. And when they heard that, Ohio Republicans said, "The people of Ohio must be stopped." So they tried to pass another law before that which would require 60% of the vote instead of the usual simple majority. So basically they went to the people of Ohio and said "Hey y'all. We want y'all to vote on whether or not your vote should count for shit." And the people of Ohio went, "Uh, I think I'm gonna vote for my vote should count for shit."
And Ohio Republicans just started stomping their feet and making a shocked Pikachu face. Like, I don't know what they expected. Like what do they think? People are gonna line up around the block to disenfranchise themselves? What did they think was gonna happen, you know?
But this is their playbook now, y'all. This is what they do, because they've finally come to understand that they are not actually popular. Right? It took 'em a long time. For years and years they were alienating and demonizing women, Black people, gay people, Mexicans, minorities, immigrants, smart people, poor people, and everybody in between. They've been years doing that, and now they're like "Why don't anybody like us?"
Oh, I don't know, truly a mystery for the ages, that one. But either way, they understand it now. They realize that, generally speaking, the American people do not agree with them on things like abortion, gay rights, civil rights, the economy, healthcare -- none of it.
They've come to realize that and they've arrived at this conclusion: If hearts of the people cannot be won, then the will of the people must be quashed. That's right. They understand that in a functioning democracy, their policies would be relegated to the impotent fringe, and have decided that therefore, from this point forward, this democracy should no longer properly function.
That's what all this is about, y'all, the gerrymandering laws, voter restriction laws, and January 6 and the Big Lie -- all of it.
And it's not just in Ohio. In Wisconsin, Republicans have managed to gerrymander their way into a supermajority in the Senate, in a state where Democrats have been winning statewide races, including a race in April that gave liberals control of the state supreme court.
Now the map that gerrymanders Republicans into power is coming before the supreme court, and Republicans are threatening to use their illegitimate supermajority to impeach the new liberal justice if she doesn't recuse herself.
The people of Wisconsin must be stopped!
and education in Florida
When Governor DeSantis got his Don't-Say-Gay and Stop WOKE Acts through the Florida legislature, the doom-saying of many liberal pundits was written off as "alarmist". Surely when it got down to cases, reasonable interpretations would prevail and it wouldn't be that bad. But developments in recent weeks have shown that in fact it's worse.
One DeSantis priority is that schools stop cooperating with kids who want to try out a different gender identity without their parents' explicit permission. So if Timmy wants to be known at school as Tammy, Timmy/Tammy's teachers are supposed to notify the parents, even if doing so violates the child's trust.
But who's to decide the gender implications of a nickname? Maybe Samantha wants to be Sam not because she's experiencing a crisis of femininity, but because she thinks it sounds cooler. So, do her parents need to be notified? Schools don't want to take responsibility for making such judgments. Hence this email to parents in Seminole County:
If you would like for your child to be able to use a name aside from their legal given name on any of our campuses, we will ask for you to complete the consent form titled "Parental Authorization for Deviation from Student's Legal Name Form."
Orange County announced a similar rule. And yes, it does mean exactly what it says.
The rule would impact everyone from students who prefer using a shorthand nickname ("Tom" versus "Thomas," for instance), to those who prefer a different name altogether, including transgender students
All my life, I've gone by Doug rather than Douglas, the name on my birth certificate. And my parents never had to fill out a form to make that OK.
Last week, I reported on the controversy over whether the College Board's AP Psychology course could be taught in Florida schools. As of last week, the state Department of Education was saying it could be taught “in a manner that is age and developmentally appropriate.” Nobody knew what that really meant, so several school districts announced they still wouldn't teach the course.
And in a phone call Tuesday, a spokesperson for Brevard Public Schools, a district about 50 miles east of Orlando, said it was also abiding by the Education Department's initial guidance, referring NBC News to a statement from the district last week.
"In essence, if we don’t teach all of the content, our students will not receive AP credit. If we do teach all of the content, our instructors will violate the law," the statement said. "Therefore, we will not offer AP Psychology at any of our high schools this year."
Wednesday, Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. tried to make the state's position clearer:
It is the Department of Education’s stance that the learning target, 6.P ‘Describe how sex and gender influence socialization and other aspects of development,’ within Topic 6.7, can be taught consistent with Florida law
But even with that explicit permission, some school districts are not willing to take the chance that the way they do teach AP Psych will match Diaz's official view of how it can be taught. So the class won't be reinserted into their course catalogs.
This week something similar happened with Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet may be a classic, but fundamentally it's about two teens who have sex despite their parents' disapproval. And sure, it's a tragedy and (spoilers!) they both wind up dead. But still, the whole love-and-death saga is kind of glorious somehow, especially from an emo-adolescent perspective. (According to "Don't Fear the Reaper" they're "together in eternity" and "we can be like they are".) Is this "age appropriate" for high school students? In Ron DeSantis' Christo-fascist Florida?
So, citing the bard's overall "raunchiness", Hillsborough County announced that it would only teach excerpts of Shakespeare, not whole plays, and several other counties were considering following that example. The bad press from those decisions caused FDoE to issue another explicit permission:
The Florida Department of Education in no way believes Shakespeare should be removed from Florida classrooms.
So R&J is back in sophomore English, and all's well that ends well, so OK then. But still, these episodes underline something I find disturbing: In practice, Florida schools have become a place where everything not explicitly permitted is forbidden. So what happens to literature less canonized than Romeo and Juliet or topics that don't have the College Board lobbying for them? As the vagueness of Florida's new laws causes schools to steer clear of anything that might fall into the enormous gray zone those laws have created, how many valuable works -- full of ideas that might engage teens, make them think, or spark meaningful discussions -- are being swept out the door without making headlines?
Plutarch once wrote (more or less): "The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled." But teachers are never fired for failing to kindle young minds. Being dull and demonstrating to your students that education is pointless can be the safest course -- especially in Florida.
But the development that best displays the Orwellian nature of DeSantis' "Freedom from Indoctrination" slogan is Florida's approval of Prager University videos for use in the public schools. That's discussed in the featured post.
and you also might be interested in ...
The ongoing war between red states and their blue cities has claimed a new victim: Houston school libraries. Houston schools have been taken over by the state, leaving locally elected school boards with little say.
In Houston, Texas, dozens of public schools won't have librarians and traditional libraries when classes start later this month. It's part of a controversial reform effort in the state's largest school district. The new superintendent says schools in working-class areas need good teachers more than they need librarians.
While we continue to worry about inflation, China is experiencing deflation. This can be an even more serious problem, because it can lead to cascading bankruptcies: As money gains value, debts become harder to repay. So people and businesses sell assets to raise cash, depressing prices further.
What an inflating West and a deflating China means for the world economy is hard to predict.
Using government power to make "woke" corporations toe the conservative line isn't just a DeSantis thing, it's catching on in Republican circles generally. Here, Fox News' Laura Ingraham warns Apple and Disney that when Republicans regain power "everything will be on the table -- your copyright and trademark protection, your special status within certain states, and even your corporate structure itself".
Recall that Mussolini's definition of fascism was the merger of state and corporate power.
I can't explain why the Montgomery dock brawl went viral the way it did, but it inspired some great creativity, including this version using the theme to "Good Times" and ending with some white folding chairs painted into a Harlem Renaissance artwork.
If you're not following Kat Abu on social media, you should be. She watches Fox News so you don't have to, and summarizes it in a way that will usually make you laugh rather than fume.
I sometimes picture a gaggle of blond Fox News hosts watching Kat and saying, "Girl, if you just used more make-up and changed your hair, you could get a job here."
and let's close with something artificial
If there's one thing AI is perfect for, it's producing stereotypes. Most of the time that's a problem. If you're trusting AI to write your term paper on Transylvania, for example, you'll need to make sure you aren't repackaging a bunch of vampire mythology as fact. But somebody used AI to create images of the most stereotypical person from each of the 50 states.
They aren't intended to be funny, just stereotypical. Here's the Californian.
No comments:
Post a Comment