Your letter makes clear that you lack a basic understanding of the law, its practice, and the ethical obligations of attorneys generally and prosecutors specifically.
- Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis
letter to Rep. Jim Jordan
This week's featured post is "We're all in law school now".
This week everybody was talking about the Trump trials
We're way past the point where I can hold all the details in my head -- even just one week's events. That's what this week's featured post covers.
But that post didn't cover the freshly released report that the Fulton County special grand jury wrote to recommend indictments it didn't have the power to issue. The headline result is that it recommended indictments not just of the 19 people who have now been charged, but of 21 others, including Senator Lindsey Graham and former Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.
The theme of the featured post is that we're all learning law these days, and here's the lesson I draw from this report: The special grand jury and the district attorney have different jobs. The special grand jury was answering a simple question: Is there probable cause to claim that these people broke these laws?
The prosecutor is asking a different question: What charges can I present to a trial jury and convince them beyond reasonable doubt?
A second lesson to draw is that Willis is really trying to win a case, not just make a big splash.
The WaPo has a long and fascinating article about the Reffitt family: The dad (Guy) was an armed 1-6 rioter now serving an 84-month sentence. The son (Jackson) turned him in to the FBI and testified against him. The mom (Nicole) still believes Trump won and Guy is a patriot. The daughters (Peyton and Sarah) are caught in the middle.
For years and years we've been hearing stories about how families get pulled apart when the kids join a cult. But these days, it's the parents who are joining a cult.
and the Covid resurgence
Several people I know have caught Covid lately, and we're heading into the fall, when school begins and social get-togethers move indoors.
But Vox has a reassuring article. The new variant (now named Pirola) doesn't look that dangerous. Yes, infection rates are rising (even if they're still nowhere near previous highs), but
over the last few days, several laboratory studies have led to sighs of relief: On a cellular level, Pirola just isn’t that alarming, meaning that the chance this variant will lead to a massive, emergency room-flooding Covid surge is pretty small. Other, less mutated omicron variants remain the dominant strains, and it seems unlikely Pirola will wreak major havoc.
So: Get the updated vaccine when it comes out (soon), use common sense about exposing yourself to crowds, and try not to worry too much otherwise unless you're specially vulnerable.
More good advice for avoiding Covid: Stay out of Florida. With Governor DeSantis' vocal support, Florida's quack surgeon general Joseph Ladapo is urging Florida residents not to get the new Covid vaccine.
Dr Joseph Ladapo, the governor’s hand-picked surgeon general and a vaccine skeptic previously found to have manipulated data on vaccine safety, falsely claimed the new booster shots had not been tested on humans, and contained “red flags”.
His reasoning seems to be more religious than scientific.
Casting the dispute as spiritual warfare, Ladapo posed a rhetorical question: Why did so many people follow DeSantis instead of guidance to the contrary from the national public health establishment — “all these Ph.D.s and M.D.s?”
He imputed this thinking to those people: “I hear what they’re saying, but what he’s saying feels right.”
He continued: “Because there is something within all of us that resonates with freedom. And that something is part of our connection with God and our connection with every single thing around us, including each and every one of us.
“There are these forces out there who are relentless. And they really are relentless. It’s not that they were ever done trying, and they’re not done now. They are relentless, relentless, with every breath that they take. They are thinking about how they can control you. To what ends, only God knows, but it’s nothing pretty, right?”
That's what passes for thought on the Right these days: It's totally mysterious why public health officials would want to slow the spread of a deadly virus, so they must have some other motive. And it's nothing pretty.
and Tommy Tuberville
Up until now, I've mostly been ignoring Senator Tuberville's holds on military promotions, figuring it was a stunt that would come to nothing. But he's been doing it since February, with no end in sight. More than 300 promotions that need Senate approval are in limbo, and three military services -- the Marines, Army and Navy -- have acting chiefs rather than Senate-confirmed ones. An estimated 650 promotions could be blocked by the end of the year.
The ostensible root issue is abortion, which now trumps national security on the far Right. When the Supreme Court overturned constitutional protections for reproductive rights in its Dobbs decision, and numerous states began restricting abortions to the point of banning them entirely, the Pentagon recognized that that it had ordered tens of thousands of servicewomen of childbearing age to serve in states where they no longer had control over their own medical care.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin responded in October with a policy to:
Establish travel and transportation allowances for Service members and their dependents, as appropriate and consistent with applicable federal law and operational requirements, and as necessary amend any applicable travel regulations, to facilitate official travel to access noncovered reproductive health care that is unavailable within the local area of a Service member's permanent duty station.
This is what Tuberville objects to. (Notice that the policy does not even pay for abortions. It only pays for travel.) The promotions he is blocking have nothing to do with abortion, but they are the monkey wrench he has access to. The Senate usually passes promotion lists by unanimous consent; going through the names one-by-one could take "months" of dropping all other Senate business, according to Majority Leader Schumer. By refusing consent, Tuberville has brought the promotion process to a halt.
Short-term holds have been used before to call attention to individual officers, and even that has been rare. But shutting down the whole promotion system for months at a time is unheard of.
I said that abortion was the "ostensible" issue, because the more Tuberville talks, the clearer his real problem becomes: The US armed forces are not masculine enough to suit him. (BTW, Tuberville has never served in the military.)
This is a common complaint on the Right. In 2021, Ted Cruz attacked our "woke, emasculated military" by comparing a recruiting ad targeted at women with a much manlier ad for the Russian army. (This was before the Russian military flop in Ukraine. Today, Cruz would be laughed at for saying our armed forces should be more like Russia's.) He subsequently claimed that Democrats were "trying to turn [our troops] into pansies". (Cruz also has never served.)
Tuberville likewise attacks our military as too "woke". The meaning of "woke" shifts from one minute to the next, but here it seems to mean "feminine" (or perhaps "pansylike") in some stereotypical sense. On Laura Ingraham's Fox News show, Tuberville said:
Right now, we are so woke in the military. We're losing recruits right and left. Secretary Del Toro of the Navy, he needs to get to building ships, he needs to get to recruiting, and he needs to get wokeness out of our Navy. We've got people doing poems on aircraft carriers over the loudspeaker. It is absolutely insane the direction that we're headed in our military.
I'll let him take the poetry thing up with Rudyard Kipling or maybe the samurai. (If you want to get scholarly, you can trace Western warrior poetry back to Archilochus.) But recruiting is the point of this policy. Of course, if you dismiss the woke idea that women have something to contribute, then any benefit from recruiting or retaining them can be ignored, as Tuberville seems to do.
But think about it, Tommy: How many women are going to join our military if they know they risk being exiled to some backward state like Alabama, where their rights are subject to the local version of the Taliban?
And before we leave this subject, what about the "and their dependents" in Austin's memo? Even the studliest dude in the Marines might have a wife with a problem pregnancy. What about her?
One more thing: Once again we see that the rules of the Senate were written for a different era. Holds, blue slips for judicial nominees, the filibuster -- they all arise from a model of disagreement within a culture of gentlemanly courtesy. The US Senate is not such a place, if it ever was. All those practices should go.
and another week of climate change
The EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service reports that July and August were the hottest months on record by a wide margin. June was the 8th hottest month on record and the hottest June ever, giving 2023 the hottest summer.
A new UN report analyzes how well the world is doing in living up to the Paris Agreement of 2015. I haven't read it yet, but it looks discouraging.
All summer we've been hearing reports of how warm the ocean is. Now that ocean heat is feeding energy into tropical storms. Hurricane Idalia jumped from Cat 1 to Cat 4 in about 24 hours "making it one of fastest rates of tropical cyclone intensification ever observed in the Atlantic basin".
Hurricane Lee jumped from Cat 1 to Cat 5 between 5 a.m. Thursday and 5 a.m. Friday. (It subsequently degraded, and looks like it will miss land.) In the Pacific, Jova went from a tropical storm to Cat 5, also in about 24 hours.
So far, these are just unusually strong storms and not record-breakers. But no one should be surprised if new categories have to be invented before hurricane season ends in November.
Hong Kong, which had endured a Cat-2-equivalent typhoon the previous weekend, was hit with massive rains Friday. Some parts of the city got nearly 20 inches, the most rainfall there since official records began in 1884.
Grist points out that climate-related deaths are routinely undercounted. It's a challenging problem that requires case-by-case analysis. If someone with a history of heart trouble dies when it's 105 and a brown-out has shut down his air conditioning, that might just be counted as a heart attack without noting the role of the heat. Similarly, suppose people die of a disease they caught by drinking polluted water after a hurricane shut down their clean water source. They may not be listed as victims of the hurricane.
and you also might be interested in ...
The big news this week is the earthquake inn Morocco, which so far has led to nearly 2,500 confirmed deaths. But I have no special insight into that; I'm just watching the news like anybody else.
So Elon Musk significantly overpaid for Twitter, and has since run it into the ground. But he's a Wiley-Coyote-level super-genius, so it can't really be his fault. Somebody else must be to blame. I know! It's the Jews, isn't it? It's the Anti-Defamation League, which has scared off advertisers by pointing out that Musk has made X/Twitter a haven for Nazis, white supremacists, antisemites, and haters of every sort.
What is being done to the ADL on Twitter right now has little to do with the group’s conduct and everything to do with the symbolic role Jews play in the conspiratorial imagination. Rather than face up to the hate that has enveloped his platform, and the errors that led to the site’s degradation, Musk is claiming that the victims have had it coming.
Nate Silver is writing a new blog these days. In this post, he gives good advice to people who are freaking out about 2024 election polls: There's a long way to go.
There are exactly four things you need to know about the horse race right now: Joe Biden could win. Donald Trump could win. Someone other than Biden or Trump could win. The odds of these scenarios do not shift very much from day to day.
I’d argue that 1 (Biden winning) is more likely than 2 (Trump winning) which, in turn, is more likely than 3 (someone else winning). But unless you’re making trades of some kind, there probably isn’t a lot to be gained from further precision than that right now.
The push to get right-wing propaganda into public schools continues. Oklahoma has joined Florida in allowing PragerU videos to supplement civics and government lessons. (I discussed PragerU's slick distortions of history last month.)
And the board of the Pennridge School District in Bucks County, Pennsylvania (30 miles north of Philadelphia) is mandating
a new social studies curriculum that will require teachers to incorporate lessons from the 1776 Curriculum, a controversial K-12 course of study developed by Hillsdale College, a private Christian institution that promotes right-wing ideologies.
Like the PragerU videos, Hillsdale's 1776 Curriculum minimizes slavery's role in American history and whitewashes the Founders' racism.
This is a consistent pattern on the Right: Lies about liberals doing something (like "indoctrinating children") invariably lead to conservatives doing that very thing in the name of "balance" or to "set things right". The starkest example is Trump's stolen-election lie, which justified his own attempt to steal the 2020 election. Similarly, false claims about Biden's "weaponization of the Justice Department" have led to open planning by Trump to weaponize the Justice Department if he gets back in office "because they're doing it to us". It's tit-for-tat where the "tat" is manufactured specifically for the purpose of justifying the desired response.
That "praying coach" who got reinstated by the Supreme Court? He quit. I'm sure he'll make a lot more money on the right-wing talk circuit than any school district would pay him to be a part-time assistant football coach. That was probably the point all along.
and let's close with something clever
The last couple of years have demonstrated the resilience and ingenuity of the Ukrainian people in all sorts of ways. So suppose you're a Ukrainian farmer, and you want to plant and harvest your fields like you usually do. But the war has swept through, and who knows who might have planted mines where? There are official government minesweeping units, but they've got higher priorities than your wheat or sunflowers. What to do?
Well, wrecked Russian tanks are an abundant raw material, so why not jury-rig something to do the job yourself?
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