Monday, December 18, 2023

Selective Outrage

No Sift articles will appear on Christmas or New Years.
So the next new articles will post on January 8.

This is an opportunity that my Republican colleagues denied us in 2017, when committee Democrats called for a hearing six years ago on campus discrimination, when white supremacists marched through the University of Virginia grounds shouting “Jews will not replace us.” We didn’t — couldn’t get a hearing back then.

- Rep. Donald Norcross (D-NJ)
at the "Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confront Antisemitism" hearing

This week's featured post is "Those University Presidents".

This week everybody was talking about university presidents

That's discussed in the featured post. At the risk of appearing to be soft on genocide, I take the presidents' side over Elise Stefanik's.

and COP28

Pretty much across the board, the story of the world's response to climate change is simple: We're doing the right things, we're just not doing them fast enough. The COP28 agreement is more of that trend. So you can spin it positively (it represents progress over all previous international anti-climate-change agreements) or negatively (nations don't commit themselves to the kind of transformation we really need).

The text of the agreement “calls on” countries to “contribute” to global efforts to reduce carbon pollution. It lists a menu of actions they can take, including “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems … accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050.”

What the agreement doesn’t do is require a “phase-out” of fossil fuels. That ambitious language was supported by more than 100 countries, including the United States and European Union, but was fiercely opposed by fossil fuel states such as Saudi Arabia.

The agreement also calls for a tripling of renewable energy capacity and a doubling of energy efficiency, both by 2030.

Of course, none of that constitutes binding commitments.

Fundamentally, the problem is that governments are not going to get too far ahead of their people, and people's willingness to sacrifice to stop climate change is not increasing as fast as it needs to. We can see that happening right here: If Biden imposes too much sacrifice on the American people, he'll lose the 2024 election. And then Trump won't just stop future progress, he'll undo the things Biden has managed to get done.

The best we can realistically hope for is that governments won't be too far behind their people, which can easily happen when special interests have too much influence.

and Rudy

If you watched the January 6 Committee hearings in the summer of 2022, you have to remember Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, the daughter/mother pair of Georgia election workers who were hounded by MAGA yahoos after Rudy Giuliani (and others) made up a lot of nonsense about them stealing massive numbers of votes from Donald Trump, who otherwise would have won Georgia.

How they supposedly accomplished that feat was never precisely spelled out. Maybe they had suitcases of fake ballots, or maybe they did something with a USB drive and those crooked Dominion Voting Systems machines (the ones Fox paid $787 million for lying about).

What isn't in dispute is that their lives were turned upside down. They got death threats, people came to their homes, and (in one particularly disturbing video) Trevian Kutti pressured Moss to "confess to Trump’s voter-fraud allegations, or people would come to her home in 48 hours, and she’d go to jail."

Well, Friday a jury ruled that Rudy owes Moss and Freeman $148 million for defamation, emotional distress, and punitive damages. Of course, Rudy doesn't have $148 million, but now he's going to have nothing, probably for the rest of his life. Fortunately for Rudy, he won't go homeless, because the State of Georgia is offering him room and board for many years to come.


Sadly, this verdict means that Rudy won't have the money to pay Noelle Dunphy, who probably will also win a million-dollar settlement.


Giuliani's refusal to participate in the judicial process or testify in his own defense is the latest example of a pattern in Big Lie trials: In the media, MAGA folks talk big about the evidence they have and the claims they can prove. (Rudy is still making such claims.) But when it's time to provide solid evidence in court, they offer nothing. That was the story in nearly all of the 60 cases Trump lost after the 2020 election. That's what happened in the Fox/Dominion defamation trial. Fox could have saved itself 3/4 of a billion by making a plausible case that Dominion's machines actually were faulty, but they decided not to.


Just for a moment, I'm going to put aside any sense of journalistic responsibility and approach this situation as a fiction writer: If Rudy were a character in a novel, he'd be found dead in a hotel room in a month or two. We'd all be left to wonder if he had committed suicide, or if he just miscalculated how many sleeping pills or pain killers you can take with that much alcohol. And a few conspiracy theorists would say he had been murdered.

I'm not predicting that or wishing it. I'm just saying that's the story arc he's on. Story arcs are not fate, but they can develop momentum.

and Kate Cox

Kate Cox is a married mother of two who wanted to have another baby. She got pregnant, decided not to have an abortion, and looked forward to her due date. But then something went wrong.

The amniocentesis confirmed her fetus was developing with full trisomy 18, an extreme chromosomal abnormality. If her child was born alive at all, they would survive only minutes, hours or days outside of the womb.

The bad news was not just for her fetus, but for her as well: She was making multiple trips to the emergency room, and doctors told her that delivering this baby could affect ability to have children in the future. All things considered, she wanted to have an abortion.

“I do not want to put my body through the risks of continuing this pregnancy,” she said. “I do not want to continue until my baby dies in my belly or I have to deliver a stillborn baby or one where life will be measured in hours or days.”

But there was another problem: Her family lives in Texas, which has outlawed nearly all abortions. When the law was being debated, its proponents said not to worry, because it contained exceptions.

Texas’ laws have narrow exceptions only to save the life or prevent “substantial impairment of major bodily function” of a pregnant patient.

Those exceptions have two problems: (1) They're vague. (2) A doctor who interprets those exceptions too loosely might face severe consequences.

The penalties for abortion providers who violate the state’s law include a decades-long prison sentence, a $100,000 fine and the loss of a medical license. When one misinterpretation of the law could mean the loss of your vocation and freedom, it’s no wonder that the legislation has had a chilling effect on doctors in the state providing any abortions at all.

So Kate's doctors wouldn't proceed without a court declaration that her abortion was legal. (Picture the situation: You're in and out of the ER with a difficult pregnancy, you're dealing with tragic news, and you need to scramble to find a lawyer and go to court.) Fortunately, a court agreed with her.

OK, then, you might think; the law is cumbersome, but it works. But then Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton stepped in, asking the Texas Supreme Court to countermand the lower court's decision -- which it did.

The end result was that Kate had to leave the state to get treatment in a strange city from doctors she didn't know. Her lawyers won't announce where she went, but they say that she got the abortion and she's doing fine.

A few observations:

  • Her story has a not-as-bad-as-it-could-have-been ending because she has means. A less well off woman wouldn't have been able to go to court and travel the way she did.
  • The exceptions in abortion bans aren't worth as much as you might think. Pregnancy includes lots of nebulous possibilities, and doctors are not going to risk jail time on anything but a clear-cut case.
  • The reason Kate had somewhere to go is that some states still protect women's rights. If Congress passes a national abortion ban, as some Republicans have proposed, women like Kate will face a much more difficult problem. (Imagine waiting for the State Department to process your passport, and trying to guess how you'll do during the plane flight.)

This case underlines a point I and others have been making for some while: It may sound reasonable to have an abortion ban after some number of weeks -- 15, 20, 30, whatever. And you may think that such a law can have exceptions that avoid all the really bad possibilities.

But fundamentally, what such a law says is that past some point in pregnancy, the government will make better decisions than women can. And cases like Kate's demonstrate that it won't.

That's why I'm against all abortion bans. People will say, "You want to allow abortions right up to the moment of birth?", but that question misses the point. Women are not going to choose to carry a pregnancy for nine months just so they can abort at the last minute for no reason. In the real world, those late-term abortion decisions are complicated, and they need to be made by the people who are present, not by distant legislatures or judges.

and you also might be interested in ...

Ukraine aid is still in limbo in Congress, as Republicans tie it to changes in immigration policy that the Biden administration doesn't want. In the usual Republican logic, Biden's failure to surrender is what's holding everything up. As Senator Cornyn put it: "This is a catastrophe, and it’s a result of the Biden open border policies."

This of course makes no sense, because there is no logical connection between our immigration policy and whether Ukraine should be sacrificed to Russia.

David Frum comments:

Supposedly, all leaders of Congress are united in their commitment to Ukraine—so the new speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, insists. Yet somehow this allegedly united commitment is not translating into action. Why not?

The notional answer is that Republicans must have a border-security deal as the price for Ukraine aid. But who on earth sets a price that could stymie something they affirmatively want to do? Republicans have not conditioned their support for Social Security on getting a border deal. They would never say that tax cuts must wait until after the border is secure. Only Ukraine is treated as something to be bartered, as if at a county fair. How did that happen?

Ukraine’s expendability to congressional Republicans originates in the sinister special relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Meanwhile, Putin's other major ally, Hungarian strongman and CPAC heart-throb Viktor Orban, is blocking Ukraine aid from the EU.


National Review's Jim Geraghty thinks we're all over-reacting to the whole Trump-as-dictator thing. America has checks-and-balances, you know.

Because if our existing checks and balances under the Constitution aren’t strong enough to stop abuses of power by Trump . . . why would you think that they’re strong enough to stop abuses of power by Joe Biden or anyone else?

If Joe Biden wanted to be dictator, if he had already tried to overturn an election he lost, and if he was the center of a dedicated personality cult willing to act on his word in spite of laws or facts, then I'd also be worried about him. Geraghty's essay seems insane to me. But I thought you should see the argument.


Mothers for Democracy have made a powerful ad attacking the thoughts-and-prayers reaction to mass shootings. A mother prays to God to save her drowning child, and numerous others -- including a couple sunbathing in the same swimming pool -- offer their support, but don't do anything. The ad concludes with: "Thoughts and prayers are meaningless when you can act."

I'm sure right-wingers will argue that this is a typical liberal diminishing of religion, but I think plenty of religious people will see the point: Why would you expect God to do something if you choose to do nothing?


More evidence of how bad things have gotten under Biden:

Murder plummeted in the United States in 2023, likely at one of the fastest rates of decline ever recorded. What’s more, every type of Uniform Crime Report Part I crime with the exception of auto theft is likely down a considerable amount this year relative to last year according to newly reported data through September from the FBI.

It looks like murder blipped up during the 2020-21 pandemic and then went back down. It doesn't seem to be Trump- or Biden-related.


The stock market hit record highs last week. This caused a number of people to recall Trump bragging about the stock market's performance during his term, and predicting that it would crash if Biden were elected.

Now, the stock market is not the same as the economy, and the majority of American citizens benefit little or not at all when stocks go up. However, a rising market does mean that people with money believe the economy is going in the right direction. Joe Billionaire doesn't buy stocks if he thinks a depression is coming.


One reason I love following Rep. Jeff Jackson is the level of insight he gives into the workings of Congress. Maybe you learned how a bill becomes law by watching Schoolhouse Rock or something. But Jeff's experience trying to get parental leave for fathers in the National Guard was a little more complicated than that.


Amanda Marcotte attempts to answer the "Are Trump supporters evil or stupid?" question and comes down on the side of evil.

Trying to convince Trump's loyal supporters that he's a fascist is not worth your time. They know — it's why they like him.

and let's close with something scientific

You have probably seen scientific analyses proving that Santa Claus cannot possibly deliver presents to all the world's good children in one night: the speeds involved, the amount of energy necessary to achieve them, and so on. According to one calculation, the wind resistance alone would vaporize the lead reindeer in 4.26 thousandths of a second.

However, it turns out that this only proves that a Newtonian Santa can't exist. Things work much differently if you apply the superposition concept from quantum mechanics, which allows an object to be in many places at once, but only probabilistically. (This is the principle that allows a quantum computer to do arbitrarily many calculations simultaneously.) Bastett explains:

Santa is a quantum being. His probabilistic nature means he can be in every house at the same time on Christmas. This is why it's vitally important no one sees him. If he's observed, the probabilities collapse and only one house gets presents.

Monday, December 11, 2023

Eyes Open

Doctor, my eyes tell me what is wrong.
Was I unwise to leave them open for so long?

- Jackson Browne

This week's featured post is "More Questions than Answers", a collection of opinions I'm holding tentatively. The opening quote above is in honor of all the people who just don't feel like they can watch the news any more. I feel your pain.

This week everybody was talking about Gaza

The war is back on, and no one seems to have any idea how it ends. Friday, the US vetoed a resolution in the UN Security Council calling for a cease fire.

and Trump's dictator remark

As I've been chronicling the last few weeks, major media outlets are beginning to call attention to the alarming authoritarian rhetoric of the Trump campaign and its plans for a second Trump presidency. This week, The Atlantic devoted a whole issue to "If Trump Wins". David Frum writes:

In his first term, Trump’s corruption and brutality were mitigated by his ignorance and laziness. In a second, Trump would arrive with a much better understanding of the system’s vulnerabilities, more willing enablers in tow, and a much more focused agenda of retaliation against his adversaries and impunity for himself. When people wonder what another Trump term might hold, their minds underestimate the chaos that would lie ahead.

Apparently Sean Hannity thought it would be a good idea to calm down such talk, so in his town-hall interview with Trump, he laid a red carpet down an off-ramp: "They want to call you a dictator. To be clear, do you in any way have any plans whatsoever, if reelected president, to abuse power, to break the law, to use the government to go after people?"

At first Trump gave a whatabout answer: "You mean like they’re using right now." But Hannity circled back: "Under no circumstances — you are promising America tonight. You would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?"

"Except day one. ... I love this guy, he says, ‘You’re not going to be a dictator are you?’ I said no, no, no, other than day one. We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator."

As we all know from history, leaders who achieve dictatorial power for even a day almost never lay it down voluntarily. So like an alcoholic's "I'll quit after one drink", Trump's "no, no, no" isn't a credible denial. He gave this answer as if it were a joke, but that's how bullies always talk: It's a joke until it isn't.

So what does that answer mean?

Hannity was clearly hoping for Trump to say something reassuring, like: "This dictator talk is silly, and is just evidence of how desperate the Deep State and its media allies have gotten. They'll say anything."

But Trump steadfastly refused to reassure anybody. What should we make of that?

Mainly this: Trump likes the dictator talk and doesn't want to shut it down. His cultists love the idea that he'll be dictator, so he wants to feed that fantasy. Conversely, his enemies and potential rivals are frightened, and he wants them to stay frightened. Don't fight back too hard against Trump, because what if he becomes dictator?

and Taylor Swift

Time named Taylor as 2023's Person of the Year, which surprised a lot of people, but in retrospect makes a certain amount of sense. Remember how Time defines the PotY: "the individual who most shaped the headlines over the previous 12 months, for better or for worse". The PotY list includes "fourteen U.S. Presidents, five leaders of Russia or the Soviet Union, and three Popes"

Swift is none of that, but Time's explanation portrays her as a ray of light in a year that was otherwise full of darkness. If not Swift, then the news focus of the year is either people arguing about whether Trump belongs in jail, or Israel and Hamas killing each other's civilians. Or maybe it's all the weather disasters as climate change really started to take hold. Taylor Swift may not be the Person of the Year we deserve, but she's definitely the one we need.

Personally, I'm not a Swifty -- not because I dislike her or her music, but because I mainly hear current music when I'm in a shopping mall. I intend to sit down and listen to a few of her biggest hits someday, and I'm sure I'll recognize some when I do. But at the moment nothing is labeled in my mind as a Taylor Swift song.

Anyway, the Time article makes a good case for her: her fame, her wealth, her larger-scale cultural and economic impact, and so on. One thing that surprised and impressed me is her regimen:

In the past, Swift jokes, she toured “like a frat guy.” This time, she began training six months ahead of the first show. “Every day I would run on the treadmill, singing the entire set list out loud,” she said. “Fast for fast songs, and a jog or a fast walk for slow songs.” Her gym, Dogpound, created a program for her, incorporating strength, conditioning, and weights. “Then I had three months of dance training, because I wanted to get it in my bones,” she says. “I wanted to be so over-rehearsed that I could be silly with the fans, and not lose my train of thought.”

I'm reminded of the professionalism of athletes like Tom Brady or LeBron James. There was a time when athletes were just guys blessed with talent, who would gain weight in the off-season and get back in shape during training camp. After 30, they'd develop a Babe-Ruth-style paunch, and then they were old-timers by 35. But in this era, being an athlete is a full-time job. Apparently, being a pop star is too.

I feel like Time made too little of her political impact, which USA Today described like this:

Sept. 19 was National Voter Registration Day. With one Instagram post, Swift helped the nonprofit group Vote.org register more than 35,000 new voters, a nearly 25% increase over the same day last year. The group also saw a 115% jump in 18-year-olds registering to vote. One day. One Instagram post.


Conservatives are seeing some vast liberal conspiracy in the Taylor/Time team-up. Stephen Miller tweets:

What’s happening with Taylor Swift is not organic.

Here's what cracks me up most: The party likely to make a reality-TV star its presidential nominee for the third straight time is now horrified that media celebrities have political influence. Trump co-conspirator Jeff Clarke tweets:

If we reach the point where Dwayne The Rock Johnson and Taylor Swift run for office together we will have truly reached full-on Idiocracy

I've got some bad news for you, Jeff. Your party has been there since 2016.

but we need to talk a little about crime

Crime as a political issue operates in a weird way: Obviously, if you feel less safe in your neighborhood -- or worse, if you've been the victim of a crime -- that's a huge issue to you, as it should be. But a great deal of the political impact of the crime issue consists of people's impressions about crime in general, or even crime in places totally unlike the places they live.

Media plays a huge role in creating those impressions. In particular, if you live in rural or small-town America, but you watch Fox News, you've seen countless stories about how crime is spiking in those big Democrat-run cities. Joe Biden's America, you may think, is a lawless place that needs a new sheriff. And if you believe that visiting any big city means taking your life in your hands, of course you won't do it. So you won't have the experience of walking down Michigan Avenue in Chicago -- as I did a few weeks ago -- and feeling perfectly safe.

Friday, the NYT debunked a big piece of that panic: the supposed "shoplifting epidemic" that allegedly was lowering retail profits and causing companies like Walgreens to close some high-crime stores. The National Retail Federation got a lot of coverage for its claim that "organized retail crime" was responsible for half of all the "shrink" in the industry. ("Shrink" is the industry term that covers all forms of lost inventory, including stuff that gets misplaced or stolen by employees.) Heads of big retail chains testified before Congress, demanding action.

The claims have been fueled by widely shared videos of a few instances of brazen shoplifters, including images of masked groups smashing windows and grabbing high-end purses and cellphones. But the data show this impression of rampant criminality was a mirage.

In fact, shrink has been fairly flat over the last eight years, bouncing between 1.3% and 1.6% of sales. External theft of all sorts is only about 1/3 of that number. And organized retail theft, it turns out, is a tiny fraction of that: around .07% of sales.

The NTF has since backed off its claim, and so has Walgreens. The NYT continues:

In fact, retail theft has been lower this year in most of the country than it was a few years ago, according to police data. Some exceptions, including New York City, exist. But in most major cities, shoplifting incidents have fallen 7 percent since 2019.

So do you think Fox will retract its stories, or that your uncle out in the farm country will notice if they do? Probably not.

and you also might be interested in ...

Senator Tuberville's blockade on military promotions has ended. In terms of policy, he got exactly nothing for dropping his opposition. But he did get a lot of attention and raised a lot of money, so maybe he feels good about the whole episode.


New Republic has an article on a topic I hadn't seen before: The Red State Brain Drain.

Republican-dominated states are pushing out young professionals by enacting extremist conservative policies. Abortion restrictions are the most sweeping example, but state laws restricting everything from academic tenure to transgender health care to the teaching of “divisive concepts” about race are making these states uncongenial to knowledge workers.

The precise effect of all this on the brain drain is hard to tease out from migration statistics because the Dobbs decision is still fairly new, and because red states were bleeding college graduates even before the culture war heated up. The only red state that brings in more college graduates than it sends elsewhere is Texas. But the evidence is everywhere that hard-right social policies in red states are making this dynamic worse.


A big piece of the current sustainable-future vision is electric vehicles, which is why people are debating the significance of the latest EV sales figures: They're up 25% from 2022, so 2023 is the first year when a million EVs will be sold. Sounds good, right?

Well, maybe not. EV sales doubled from 2020 to 2021, and doubled again from 2021 to 2022. So up 25% looks like a loss of momentum. Maybe it's a glitch, caused by Elon Musk's image problems bleeding into Tesla, or people waiting for the new models promised for 2024, or some other passing problem. Or maybe there's a more serious problem.

BTW: It doesn't look like the industry can count on Tesla's new cybertruck to turn things around.


With anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish hate speech rising online, you might expect to find it's a tit-for-tat situation: Jews abuse Muslims because they're sick of Muslims abusing Jews, and round and round forever.

But no. Actually a better explanation is "Haters gonna hate". Right-wing extremists abuse either group, depending on what the current headlines are. The rise in hate speech of all kinds actually tracks the rise in right-wing extremism, rather than any escalation of Muslim/Jew conflicts.

Contemporary discourse often pits Muslims and Jews against one another. But our research demonstrates that a large amount of seemingly disconnected hateful rhetoric about both—at least in 2017—originated from the same far-right extremist communities.


Speaking of far-right extremist communities, Alex Jones is back on X/Twitter.


Norman Lear died Tuesday at the age of 101. If you weren't alive during the run of the hits he created, especially All in the Family (1971-1979), it's hard to grasp his impact.

Before All in the Family, TV sitcoms were escapist entertainment, centering on either absurd characters (like the Clampetts from Beverly Hillbillies) or ideal families dealing with a series of homespun problems that were easily solved. Children (like Opie Taylor of The Andy Griffith Show, the role that made Ron Howard famous) never ran into a problem that was too big for their parents to sort out by the end of an episode. Authority figures were good, systems worked, and adults always had children's best interests at heart.

Lear's shows changed all that. AitF centered on a young liberal couple forced by economic stress to live with the wife's conservative parents. Episodes dealt with racism, war, and even rape.

That much you can understand by streaming AitF now (if you can find it). What you can't grasp is the influence AitF had on the national conversation. At the time there were three major networks, no streaming, and no way to record a show: You either watched a show at the same time everybody else did or you missed it.

Picture what that meant: If you watched some popular show, you could go to work or school the next morning expecting that maybe a third to a half of the people you met had seen it too. So whatever argument Archie Bunker and his son-in-law had been having might well continue among your friends or coworkers.

Nothing fills that role today.

and let's close with something to pass the time

Roadtrips -- I've been on a couple lately -- are a chance to try out new podcasts. I've recently found two you might want to try.

How God Works by David DeSteno examines the intersection of science and spirituality. A meditation teacher, for example, might tell you to focus on your breath, or breathe in a different pattern. Physiologically, what does that do? Or what do various spiritual traditions from around the world tell us about gender diversity?

If you're looking more for entertainment than information, check out "Welcome to Night Vale". Night Vale is a small desert town that either has an exceptional level of weirdness, or is being covered by a very weird local radio reporter.

Monday, December 4, 2023

Accountability vs. Immunity

Defendant's four-year service as Commander in Chief did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens.

- Judge Tanya Chutkan

There's no featured post this week.

This week everybody was talking about the war in Gaza

Which is back on. Fighting resumed on Friday morning, with each side blaming the other.

During the seven-day ceasefire, Hamas agreed to release 110 people from Gaza, including 78 Israeli women and children. As part of the deal, 240 Palestinians were also released from Israeli jails. They had been accused of a range of offences, from throwing stones to incitement and attempted murder. ... It is estimated that about 140 Israeli hostages remain in captivity in Gaza.

Israel has resumed bombing, and its forces have begun moving into the southern part of Gaza. Hamas is again firing rockets into Israel.


Thursday, the NYT revealed that Israel had the Hamas attack plan for over a year. Israeli officials apparently ignored the plan, which Hamas "followed with shocking precision" on October 7.

The document circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders, but experts determined that an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’s capabilities, according to documents and officials.

Josh Marshall adds:

Very recently, ground-level analysts monitoring video surveillance of activity in Gaza saw evidence that Hamas was war-gaming and running drills for attacks that looked like components of Jericho Wall. One analyst repeatedly pressed the issue with higher-ups, but her effort to raise the alarm was again disregarded.

His column doesn't identify a source for that information.


Politically in the US, the Gaza War has been bad for Biden, but not for the reason a lot of people think. He is undoubtedly losing votes on the left for being too pro-Israel, but he would probably lose more votes if he were more critical of Israel. ("Biden is siding with the terrorists!")

Biden will lose votes whatever he does, because Israel/Palestine is a wedge issue that splits Democrats, but not Republicans. Republicans would probably be happy with anything Israel did, even to the point of an actual genocide. (Aside: Whatever you think of Israel's treatment of Palestinians, it's not genocide. Genocide is too important a word to ruin through misuse.)

Similarly, the Ukraine War is a wedge issue that splits Republicans, but not Democrats. Democrats are united behind Ukraine. Meanwhile Putin remains a hero to many MAGA Republicans, even as establishment Republicans agree with Democrats in supporting Ukraine.


I know it's too much to expect that people will take a step back and think rationally about an issue, but if they did, they'd see that the Gaza War validates a liberal rather than conservative view of how to maintain peace. In its simplest form, the conservative idea is peace-through-strength: If we're strong enough and tough enough, no one will attack us because they'll know they will suffer more than we will.

The liberal vision is peace-through-justice: If everyone is getting a square deal, they won't want to risk it by going to war.

In their purest forms, both visions are naive; real peace requires both strength and justice. But I think liberals understand that, while I don't think conservatives do. The Hamas attack exposed the folly of the Netanyahu peace-through-strength policy. If people feel aggrieved enough, they won't care that a war will hurt them more than you. They'll risk their lives to bite your ankle.

and the Trump trials

Trump' claims of presidential immunity were denied by two different D. C. federal courts Friday. A three-judge panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals rejected his motion to dismiss a civil lawsuit filed by two U.S. Capitol police officers and several Democratic lawmakers against Trump and a few other individuals and groups they want held responsible for the January 6 violence. And District Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected his motion to dismiss Jack Smith's election interference indictment.

Nothing in the Constitution explicitly immunizes a current or former president from legal processes. However, certain kinds of immunity have been recognized by the courts: Presidents are immune from lawsuits against the consequences of carrying out their duties. And longstanding DoJ policy, based on a memo by its Office of Legal Counsel, says that a sitting president can't be indicted. (That doctrine has never been tested in court.) And courts have recognized a vague principle that at some point, legal harassment of a president might reach the point that it violates the separation of powers between the executive and judicial branches of government.

In his motions, Trump was asking the courts to expand that immunity to vast proportions. His arguments were slapped down in both cases.

Both motions were for dismissing the cases without a trial. Dismissal motions have to clear a very high bar, because they're claiming that a trial can't possibly reveal anything that would matter. So the judge has to assume that the claims made by the prosecutors or plaintiffs are true, and conclude that no penalty would apply anyway.

The appeals court ruled that the civil case against Trump needs to go forward, because it's not obvious that Trump's actions related to the January 6 riot were part of his job.

The President, though, does not spend every minute of every day exercising official responsibilities. And when he acts outside the functions of his office, he does not continue to enjoy immunity from damages liability just because he happens to be the President.

This kind of compartmentalization has never registered with Trump. In his mind, there was no separation between his person and his presidency. If the president had some power, then he had that power, to wield as he saw fit, independent of whether he was carrying out some official duty.

Judge Chutkan ruled similarly: Committing crimes is not part of a president's job, so crimes allegedly committed while in office can be prosecuted. (Whether those crimes were or were not committed should be decided at trial.) And she need not settle the presidential-indictment question here, because Trump is not president.

Whatever immunities a sitting President may enjoy, the United States has only one Chief Executive at a time, and that position does not confer a lifelong “get-out-of-jail-free” pass. Former Presidents enjoy no special conditions on their federal criminal liability. Defendant may be subject to federal investigation, indictment, prosecution, conviction, and punishment for any criminal acts undertaken while in office

Chutkan also denied a motion claiming that the Smith indictment should be dismissed because it criminalizes speech protected by the First Amendment.

[I]t is well established that the First Amendment does not protect speech that is used as an instrument of a crime, and consequently the Indictment—which charges Defendant with, among other things, making statements in furtherance of a crime—does not violate Defendant’s First
Amendment rights.

The question of whether Trump's false claims about the 2020 election were part of a criminal plot has to be decided at trial.

While Defendant challenges that allegation in his Motion, and may do so at trial, his claim that his belief was reasonable does not implicate the First Amendment. If the Government cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt at trial that Defendant knowingly made false statements, he will not be convicted; that would not mean the Indictment violated the First Amendment.


Meanwhile, there are the gag orders. WaPo keeps track of which ones are active: Judge Chutkan's order preventing Trump from disparaging prosecutors, witnesses and court personnel involved in his trial is suspended while the appellate court considers it. They might rule any day now.

Judge Engoron's order preventing Trump from attacking court personnel is currently in force as an appeals court evaluates it.


After normalizing Trump for many years, many voices in the mainstream media finally seems to be acknowledging his threat to America's constitutional democracy. Thursday, WaPo editor-at-large Robert Kagan published "A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending."

Today's NYT has an article "Why a Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical than His First". The authors note that Trump has always had "autocratic impulses", dating back to his praise of the Chinese massacre of the Tiananmen Square demonstrators, and reflected in his admiration for autocrats like Saddam Hussein or the Philippines' Rodrigo Duterte, not to mention Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

What would be different in a second Trump administration is not so much his character as his surroundings. Forces that somewhat contained his autocratic tendencies in his first term — staff members who saw their job as sometimes restraining him, a few congressional Republicans episodically willing to criticize or oppose him, a partisan balance on the Supreme Court that occasionally ruled against him — would all be weaker.

Princeton Professor Jan-Werner Müller has a similar article in The Guardian. He observes that establishment-Republican institutions like the Heritage Foundation are now on board with a Trump autocracy.

Trump is not hiding anything; nor does a figure like the Heritage president, who considers Hungary “not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model”.


Liz Cheney's book Oath and Honor comes out this week. Early reports portray it as an insider's view of how the Republican Party officials caved in to Trump, even as they criticized and even laughed at him privately.

and Elon's breakdown

Elon Musk is further gone than I thought. In an interview Wednesday at the NYT DealBook summit, he told companies who have responded to his antisemitic tweets by pulling their ads from X to "Go fuck yourself."

If someone is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. GO. FUCK. YOUR. SELF.

You can watch the video. He clearly expected the audience to applaud his courageous stance, but instead there was a stunned silence. The interviewer (Andrew Ross Sorkin) then asked about "the economics of X", which relies on advertising revenue to survive. And Elon responded:

What this advertising boycott is going to do, it's going to kill the company. ... And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company. We'll document it in great detail.

When Sorkin explained how the advertisers would justify themselves, Musk countered:

Tell it to Earth. ... Let's see how Earth responds to that.

Elon seems convinced that he is the hero of this story, and that the People of Earth will frame events the way he does. How dare companies like Disney choose to spend their advertising dollars somewhere else? How dare they decide that displaying a trailer for "Wish" next to some white supremacist rant doesn't serve their purposes? The People of Earth are so attached to the X platform and so enamored of Elon himself that they will make Disney pay for such arrogance.

Unsurprisingly, advertisers did not flock back to X after Musk's threat to expose them to "Earth".

Three things are worth pointing out here: First, Musk's attempt to turn this into a free-speech issue falls flat. Sure: Antisemites, racists, misogynists, and even outright swastika-waving Nazis have a right to speak their minds and try to make converts. But they are not entitled to have someone else sponsor a platform for them.

And second, I see Elon's stewardship of X as part of what Cory Doctorow calls "the Great Enshittening" of the internet. I would gladly spend my X-time elsewhere if some alternative platform achieved a critical mass of users, and I welcome X's looming demise because it might create space for something better to emerge.

As for Musk himself, I see him as the kind of tragic figure Aeschylus would have found fascinating. Like the Trump saga, Elon's story demonstrates that being worshiped is bad for mortals. Almost no humans have enough strength of character to stay sane once they've been surrounded by a cadre of worshipers the way Elon has.

One of the things I admire most about Barack Obama is that he has shown the good sense to keep our admiration at arm's length.

and the Biden economy

GDP growth after inflation was 5.2% in the third quarter, which is a stunning number. At its peak in the third quarter of 2019, the Trump economy posted 4.6% growth.

The US economy continues to lead the G7 countries.

The inflation rate is now lower than when Biden took office.

And what about the claim that Biden has been bad for US oil production?


The continuing good economic news contrasts with the public view that the economy is in bad shape. David Roberts refers to this as the "vibes" problem, which Democrats have to get better at addressing.

Substantive accomplishments -- even the ones the public says on polls they want/like -- are not enough, in & of themselves, to win political approval. They don't advertise themselves or tell their own story. The channels through which the public has traditionally been informed about political accomplishments have become fragmented, polluted, and dominated by lavishly funded right wingers. They can't be relied on. ... In other words, Dems are winning the war of substance but losing the vibes war, largely because they don't seem to realize that those two fights have drifted almost entirely apart.

and you also might be interested in ...

Henry Kissinger died at 100, inspiring obituaries like "Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies". Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Chile ... if you live long enough, all your crimes start to sound like ancient history.

But what I had thought was Kissinger's most lasting contribution to American culture turns out not to be true: He wasn't the model for Dr. Strangelove.

It is frequently claimed the character was based on Henry Kissinger, but Kubrick and Sellers denied this; Sellers said: "Strangelove was never modeled after Kissinger—that's a popular misconception. It was always Wernher von Braun." Furthermore, Henry Kissinger points out in his memoirs that at the time of the writing of Dr. Strangelove, he was a little-known academic.


Sandra Day O'Connor also died. The first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, she lived to be 93. Appointed by Ronald Reagan, she was the kind of conservative justice that today's conservatives abhor. She wasn't driven by ideology. Instead, the facts of the case mattered to her, and you couldn't predict her vote without examining them. Politico summarizes:

[H]er decisions and her reasoning demonstrated a constant attention to the proper role of the Supreme Court as a nonpartisan arbiter of hot-button issues in American life, to the actual facts about the actual parties, and to the way in which the bench’s rulings would be experienced by the American public. ... The strategy of the Roberts Court, however, has been strikingly different.


Republicans have begun talking about having a health care plan again. I say "again" not because they have had a health care plan in the past, but because they talk about having a plan every now and then.

Back in 2015 Trump promised a "terrific", "phenomenal", and "fantastic" system to replace ObamaCare. But once in office, he left the details to Republicans in Congress, who never united around any particular proposal. Their slogan of "repeal and replace" was always light on the "replace" side. When John McCain delivered the final vote needed to save ObamaCare in 2017, his office's statement said:

While the amendment would have repealed some of Obamacare's most burdensome regulations, it offered no replacement to actually reform our health care system and deliver affordable, quality health care to our citizens.

Nothing has changed in the last six years. Trump is now talking again about repealing ObamaCare.

Trump’s campaign is drawing up a health care proposal, although it is unclear when that will be released or if it will propose a full replacement plan (Republicans have struggled to put one together for years).

Not to be outdone, Ron DeSantis is also talking about a health care plan.

We need to have a health care plan that works,” he said when asked whether he will repeal and replace ObamaCare. “ObamaCare hasn’t worked. We are going to replace and supersede with a better — better plan."

When?

DeSantis said details of the plan will likely be worked out in the spring and that his campaign would “roll out a big proposal.”

By spring, of course, DeSantis will be an ex-candidate and whatever proposal he might have come out with will be moot.

The basic conservative health-care problem is that market competition will never deliver a good health insurance system. There's a simple reason for that: The way to make money in health insurance isn't to deliver quality care at an affordable price. Instead, the path to high profits is to insure people who don't get sick, and to encourage people who likely will get sick to insure with somebody else. The less government regulation a system has, the more this market imperative will assert itself.

Almost no other market works this way. For example, if you're a car company, there's no group of consumers that you hope doesn't buy your car.


Sports Illustrated got nailed for apparently letting AI write articles and then crediting them to fake reporters with AI-generated photos.

What's weird to me is the deception. I mean, why not be up-front about it? There's nothing inherently immoral about letting ChatGPT write an article if you then fact-check, edit, and take responsibility for it. I have no plans to produce Sift articles that way, but if I did, I wouldn't be ashamed to admit it. (I'm trying to inform people and promote my point of view rather than validate some claim about my abilities.)

In high school I worked for my local newspaper, and occasionally my job involved writing intro paragraphs for box scores of minor sporting events we hadn't sent a reporter to: "Joe Blow scored 23 points to lead West Nowhere High to a 79-53 rout of its crosstown rival East Nowhere." I was essentially doing the work of an AI: not reporting anything new, but applying common narrative templates to information already in the box score.

In the WaPo, Josh Tyrangiel takes a similar view: He used to work at Bloomberg, which quickly processed company earnings reports to produce headlines that its subscribers would trade on. But rapidly searching through numbers to find the most significant ones is something computers do better than humans.

Bloomberg shifted to automated earnings headlines in 2013 and has used AI to create its earnings summaries since 2018. It also employs more journalists and analysts now than it did back then — some 2,700, all of whom get to do more interesting work than writing earnings headlines and summaries.


As expected, George Santos was expelled from the House of Representatives. What's surprising is the 114 votes not to expel him.


More evidence how out-of-it I am: The word of the year is "rizz", which I had never heard of until I read the article. Reportedly, it is Gen Z slang for "a person’s ability to attract a romantic partner through style, charm or attractiveness".


If you're one of those people who does the bulk of your charity giving at the end of the year, consider the Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the Wikipedia. It doesn't have any poster children or sad animals to show you, but Wikipedia has become central to our basic information infrastructure. I rely on it constantly for historical information, and it actually isn't a bad way to keep track of evolving news stories, like natural disasters and mass shootings. Typically, the first reports in the media aren't terribly accurate, and over a period of days it can be hard to sort out what was rumor and what is still considered reliable. Wikipedia collects and curates that stuff.

and let's close with a visual pun

The artist Gustav Klimt had a very distinctive style, as you can see from one of his most famous works: The Woman in Gold.

The similarity in names inspired Carl Tétreault to produce this image of The Man With No Name: "Klimt Eastwood".