Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men the most.
- misattributed to Thucydides
This week's featured post is "Gazan Lives Matter".
This week everybody was talking about the widening war
This feels like one of those recurring nightmares where you know what's going to happen, but can only watch as it does. Biden responded to last week's attack on a US outpost in Jordan by hitting Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, as well as continuing to bomb Houthi rebels in Yemen. It is simultaneously impossible to imagine (1) the US government doing nothing after American soldiers are killed, and (2) our counterattacks achieving anything.
On the one hand, Biden would surely be facing a political firestorm even bigger than the current one if American soldiers died and he did nothing. But I can't imagine that the groups we're striking are saying, "Wow, we need to stop what we're doing." A third alternative would be to hit the source, Iran, but that looks even worse to me.
In a different century, the great powers would get together in some grand conference with everything on the table. I'm not sure why that couldn't happen now.
and sabotage in Congress
When Democrats run against Republican congressmen in the fall, their hardest task is going to be convincing voters that the Republicans really did what they're doing right now. A lot of voters will listen to a true account and just say, "No. Surely not. You must be exaggerating."
So Ukraine, which is fighting for its life against an invasion by Trump's buddy Putin, needs weapons from us to defend itself. At first, supplying them was a bipartisan priority, with only some extremists like Matt Gaetz holding out. Then about half of the Republican conference turned against Ukraine aid, and Speakers McCarthy and then Johnson decided Ukraine aid was a hostage they could get Biden to pay some ransom for. Their rhetoric paired Ukraine with our own problems at the Mexican border (something like "Why are we paying for Ukraine to protects its borders when we're not protecting our own?"), even though the two really have nothing to do with each other.
The result was a three-part package including Ukraine aid, aid to Israel, and money to better protect the border. Republicans decided that wasn't enough, so they insisted on policy changes in addition to money. The Senate negotiated a bipartisan compromise, which included most of what Republicans had been asking for.
But then Trump turned against it, because passing any border legislation at all would allow Biden to say that he has done something about the border. So: It's a terrible, terrible crisis, but let's not do anything about it, because any problem that gets solved (or even addressed) while Biden is president will make it harder to unseat him in November.
In other words: The border is just a talking point for Republicans. They don't actually want to do anything about it.
Even with Trump's opposition, a majority of the House probably supports this Ukraine/Israel/border bill. So Speaker Johnson has decided not to hold a vote on it. Instead, the House will vote on a stand-alone Israel-aid bill.
Even after Trump is out of office, Putin continues to reap benefits from helping him get elected.
With all the border rhetoric, it's hard to sort out what is really happening and how serious it is. The Big Picture blog does a good job with that.
and Biden's South Carolina victory
Remember how "nobody really likes Biden" and "nobody wants to see a Biden-Trump rematch"? Well, Saturday in South Carolina, actual Democratic voters got a chance to cast a protest vote against renominating Joe Biden. They didn't. Biden got 96.2% of the vote, with Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson splitting the remainder.
Now, you can say that those aren't real candidates, not like Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer or whoever your favorite Democrat might be. But if you wanted more choices in the election, the way to ask for them was to vote against Biden. Not many people did.
If Phillips and/or Williamson had gotten 30-40% of the vote, we'd be having different conversation, as the Democrats did in 1968. (LBJ won the New Hampshire primary 48%-42% over Gene McCarthy, but he looked at the level of resistance he was facing and dropped out.) The press would be approaching other prominent Democrats asking "Are you sure you don't want to step in?" But the electorate seems to have no real appetite for that.
James Fallows reviews the long series of "Biden is doomed because ..." narratives mainstream media has given us, and how they've fared.
We're at a point where the polls will tell you whatever you want to hear. Want to believe Biden is in trouble? CNN has Trump ahead 49%-45%. Want to believe Biden is doing fine? Quinnipiac says Biden is ahead 50%-44%.
Personally, I remain optimistic, though I won't fully relax until I'm listening to Biden's second inaugural address. My general impression is that public sentiment is more-or-less even right now, but that Biden has a better story to tell going forward: The economy is doing quite well, and was in terrible shape when Trump left office. (You don't have to blame Trump for the pandemic shutdown to realize that Biden was handed a tough situation.)
Biden will protect a woman's right to make her own health-care decisions, and Trump won't. Biden has taken action against climate change; in a second term he would do more, while Trump would undo what Biden has already done. Biden has strengthened the NATO alliance, which Trump had nearly wrecked. Biden has fulfilled some of the same promises that Trump made but couldn't deliver on: He got Congress to approve money for rebuilding our infrastructure. He got us out of Afghanistan. He has made investments to help American industry compete with China.
Plus, he has achieved some noteworthy liberal goals: The percentage of Americans without health insurance is at an all-time low. The expansion of the child tax credit in Biden's 2021 American Rescue Plan reduced the childhood poverty rate to an all-time low. (Biden tried to make the credit permanent, but Congress wouldn't go along, so the rate rebounded after the credit expired. The pending bipartisan tax bill would reinstate it at a lower level.)
And that's even before you start looking at Trump's personal issues: It's been established in court that he is a sexual predator. His mental lapses (and general tendency to babble) is far worse than anything Biden has shown. Who knows how long he (and the judge he appointed) can delay the trial, but the evidence in the Mar-a-Lago case -- that he took classified documents he had no right to, stored them sloppily, showed them to people not authorized to see them, and lied to the government when it asked for them back -- is quite strong, and Trump has offered no credible explanation for it. (If his indictments were really the politically-motivated nonsense he claims, wouldn't he be eager to get a jury of ordinary Americans to rule on them?) His effort to stay in office after clearly losing the 2020 election (the subject of another federal case as well as the Georgia RICO case) is one of the worst things any American president has ever done.
I think that for now a lot of Americans are withholding judgment about whether Trump is actually guilty -- he is -- or whether the charges are all politics, as he claims. As the cases proceed and the election gets closer, I think a bunch of those voters will turn to Biden.
One additional thing makes me hopeful: There will be a Republican Convention this summer. People will watch, and the MAGA folks will be scary. They can't help themselves, because they believe their own propaganda that says they represent the real American majority.
Trump does have one outstanding talent that we have to watch out for: He's very good at claiming credit and avoiding blame. Why is the stock market at a record high? Because investors are anticipating his return to office, of course. He doesn't need to have a policy for dealing with the Gaza situation, because Hamas would be behaving itself if he were president, so the whole situation wouldn't have come up. Ditto for the Ukraine War; it wouldn't have happened if he'd been re-elected (which he still says he was), and he could solve it in 24 hours now, through some negotiating method that he needn't elaborate on. Any claims he makes about "the Trump economy" conveniently ignore the fourth year of his term, when millions of jobs were lost and the deficit skyrocketed. A large part of what he is selling is a magical return to 2019; Covid was a bad dream that he will wave away with his amazing powers.
and Taylor
I had a Swift picture in last week's Sift and didn't really want to write about her again, but it's hard not to. Last night she won the Album of the Year grammy, her fourth, a record.
Most of this week my social media feed was full of articles about the Right going nuts over Taylor and her boyfriend Travis Kelce, who will play in the Super Bowl Sunday as a star of the Kansas City Chiefs. I had a hard time deciding whether the Right was broadly going nuts, or if a few Trump cultists were going nuts and the liberal side of the media couldn't resist a story that makes the Right look this bad.
It's a little in between, I think. Apparently, the anti-Taylor reaction is a real thing in Trump's inner circles, even though some conservative news sources recognize how crazy it is. And never-Trump-Republican Steve Schmidt raises a good question: How would you break the news to Trump that he's not as popular as Taylor Swift?
A related story I should have covered when it came out two weeks ago was the AI-generated porn images of Swift, which circulated across various social-media platforms before most (but probably not all) of them were taken down. (I can't tell you how easy they are to find now, because I've resisted the urge to look for them. Please don't post links in the comments.) I don't think anyone knows exactly who distributed these images or why, but it seems hard to believe that the timing is a coincidence: Swift runs afoul of MAGA, and then fake porn images of her circulate. Attacking the sexual reputation of a troublesome woman is a tactic as old as time. Jill Filipovic observes:
Swift is also a person who many on the right seek to humiliate, degrade and punish – the same aims as the creators of deepfake porn.
Undoubtedly we'll see more of this, as AI-assisted image-processing tools get into more and more hands. The popular ones supposedly have safeguards against being used this way, but I don't think it takes much know-how to circumvent those protections. We need to start thinking about how ordinary junior-high girls are going to fend off these kinds of attacks.
but here are some interesting articles to think about
The NYT Magazine has a thoughtful article about an atheist chaplain counseling an atheist inmate as he waits on death row for his execution.
There is an adage that says there are no atheists in foxholes — even skeptics will pray when facing death. But Hancock, in the time leading up to his execution, only became more insistent about his nonbelief. He and his chaplain were both confident that there was no God who might grant last-minute salvation, if only they produced a desperate prayer. They had only one another.
Personally, I am not an adamant there-is-no-God atheist, but I'm also not anticipating any particular afterlife. I've watched both believers and non-believers face the reality of death, and I can't see that it makes any real difference in how well they deal with the experience. One misperception I think a lot of believers share, though, is that idea that unbelievers could believe if they just wanted to. I don't think it's that simple. Some things, to some people, are just unbelievable.
I will add that I would much rather go to a nonsectarian funeral than one based in a religion with a lot of dogma. Too often, church funerals are more about propping up the dogma than about the life of the deceased. If we're just going to talk about Jesus and Heaven and God's plan, it could be anybody in the casket.
Eric Klinenberg previews some ideas from his forthcoming book on 2020 "the year everything changed", by claiming that we're not fully appreciating what the pandemic did to us: It isn't just that people died and the rest of us missed out on a lot of experiences. More fundamentally, the pandemic shook our faith in our whole society.
I’ve come to think of our current condition as a kind of long Covid, a social disease that intensified a range of chronic problems and instilled the belief that the institutions we’d been taught to rely on are unworthy of our trust. The result is a durable crisis in American civic life. ... [L]oneliness was never the core problem. It was, rather, the sense among so many different people that they’d been left to navigate the crisis on their own. How do you balance all the competing demands of health, money, sanity? Where do you get tests, masks, medicine? How do you go to work — or even work from home — when your kids can’t go to school?
The answer was always the same: Figure it out. Stimulus checks and small-business loans helped. But while other countries built trust and solidarity, America — both during and after 2020 — left millions to fend for themselves.
Last year, Mary Wood got reprimanded for teaching Ta Nahisi Coates' book Between the World and Me in her AP English class in Chapin, SC. This year, she has read all the relevant rules, checked all the boxes, and is trying again.
To me, Wood represents a living refutation of the "Great Man" theory of history. When big waves wash across society, like the anti-woke movement of the last few years, lots and lots of ordinary people either resist or submit. And that's what determines how it all shakes out.
Remember when rising healthcare spending was going to swamp our whole economy? Something happened right about the time ObamaCare kicked in -- claiming cause-and-effect is probably a bit much at this point -- and healthcare's percentage of the economy leveled off.
and you also might be interested in ...
The Trump trials are still mostly on hold while we wait for judges to decide things. Reporters keep telling us that something could happen any minute on a variety of topics, but I'm going to wait until something actually happens before I comment again.
Ukrainian drones sunk a Russian guided-missile corvette in the Black Sea a few days ago, and released some amazing video afterward.
Idaho was trying to repeal its ban against public subsidies for religious schools, and then a spokesman for Satanic Idaho spoke in favor of the bill.
I look forward to the opportunity to be able to start a Satanic K-12 performing arts school, and being able to have access to the same funds that any other religious school would have.
Apparently the proposal is on hold now. God alone knows when we'll get to see that Satanic performing-arts school.
Pregnancy from rape has long been a headache for the anti-abortion movement. If some man forces you to have sex, you get pregnant, and then the government forces you to spend nine months turning your rapist's DNA into a baby -- that doesn't sound much like "freedom", does it? And even if the man eventually gets sent to jail, his genes have already won the struggle to survive for another generation. So the government has validated rape as a viable evolutionary strategy.
Over the years, forced-pregnancy defenders have dealt with this problem in a variety of ways. Back in 2012, US Senate candidate Todd Akin just denied it altogether: Rape pregnancies don't really happen, he claimed, because
If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.
Sadly for him, that appeal to biological wishful thinking didn't go over well, and he lost a very winnable seat in Missouri to Claire McCaskill by 15%.
Also in 2012, Senate candidate Rich Mourdock of Indiana confronted the challenge in more religious terms:
I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize life is that gift from God, and I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.
But that didn't fly either. PIcturing rape as just another one of God's mysterious ways, and even implicitly suggesting a woman ought to be grateful for a "gift" that bears an unfortunate resemblance to her worst nightmares -- it was too much of a stretch, even in a heavily Evangelical state like Indiana. Mourdock lost to Democrat Joe Donnelly by 6%, and the Republicans missed their shot to control the Senate.
By 2021, then, Republicans had learned a few lessons. So after a six-week abortion ban with no rape exception took effect in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott came at the issue from a different angle, one more in line with the GOP's tough-on-crime image: Forced pregnancy wasn't going to be a problem for much longer, because Texas was going to eliminate rape. How could any feminist be against that?
Texas will work tirelessly to make sure that we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas by aggressively going out and arresting them and prosecuting them
So how's that been working out? According to a study published in the medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine, not so well. Austin TV station KXAN explains:
According to their study, 26,313 rape-related pregnancies occurred in Texas during the 16 months after the state legislature banned abortion. That figure comprises nearly 45% of all such pregnancies estimated to occur among the nine ban states that did not make a legal exception for rape.
That's 26K Texas women who have had their most basic freedoms taken away from them.
Here's a suggestion for Governor Abbott: How about trying this in the opposite order? Eliminate rape first, and then the grateful women of Texas might be ready to listen to your ideas about abortion.
While we wait for the Supreme Court to rule on Trump's eligibility for office, consider the legislator-eligibility case in Oregon: The rules of the state senate require a 2/3rds quorum to do any business, which means that a minority of senators can delay any bill they don't like by just not showing up.
Republicans have been the minority in Oregon for some while, so walkouts are seen as a partisan tactic. Jay Kuo notes
Republicans in Oregon began walking out in 2019 and didn’t really stop. They did it again in 2020, and again in 2021. By summer of 2023, they had walked out a total of seven times in four years.
In 2022, voters overwhelmingly passed Measure 113, which says that legislators with 10 or more unexcused absences are ineligible for reelection. But in 2023, Republicans shut down the senate for six weeks to stop an abortion-rights law. As a result Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade ruled ten of the 11 Republican senators ineligible to appear on the 2024 or 2026 ballot.
The Republicans sued, and Thursday the state supreme court unanimously upheld the exclusion. So it can happen. As Kuo notes, there's no reason some other Republican couldn't win one of those 10 seats.
But it might give serious pause to any future senator thinking about walking out but actually planning to stay in office longer than one term.
Judd Legum's Popular Information blog documents just how far off the deep end Moms for Liberty have gone and how crazy the response has been in Florida. The Indian River County school district has begun drawing clothes onto naked characters in children's books, including Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen. The book was published in 1970 and was named a Caldecott Honor Book, but apparently it's been corrupting Indian River children for the last half century. The whole article reads like parody, but I don't think it is.
While we're talking about Florida, the state where American freedom goes to die, Gov. DeSantis is backing a law to make lab-grown meat illegal. A senator promoting the bill, Jay Collins of Tampa, gives this odd justification:
Let’s look at what you’re doing here. You’re growing cells in a cultivated petri dish and creating protein to eat. There are many ethical boundaries that this steps in and frankly, over.
I mean, if you believe cattle-raising is an important industry that state government ought to protect from competition, that's at least a coherent thought that reflects certain political realities. But the whole point of lab-grown meat is for people to be able to eat a hamburger without participating in the death of a conscious being, and (one hopes) without the strain our meat habit currently inflicts on the environment. And that's unethical? Plus: Of all the lab-produced things that wind up in our food, this is the one that bothers you?
The group that got the Supreme Court to outlaw affirmative action in civilian universities now has a lawsuit challenging affirmative action at West Point, the Army's primary officer-training institution. Students for Fair Admission has been seeking a restraining order that would stop race-based admission practices at West Point until the lawsuit could be resolved. Friday, the Supreme Court denied that request in a terse order saying that "the record before this court is underdeveloped", and giving no hint as to its views on the merits of the case. Vox' Ian Millhiser elaborates.
the Supreme Court has historically shown a great deal of deference to the military. As the Court said in Gilligan v. Morgan (1973), “[I]t is difficult to conceive of an area of governmental activity in which the courts have less competence” than questions involving “the composition, training, equipping, and control of a military force.” ... So there’s a real chance that this Court, despite its recent opinion in Harvard, could decide that the judiciary’s long tradition of deferring to the military on personnel and related matters should continue to hold in the West Point case.
The military has long been a bit ahead of the rest of the country on racial issues. For example: An executive order from President Truman in 1948 said:
It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.
Brown v Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that struck down "separate but equal" public schools, didn't happen until 1954, and segregation in public accommodations (i.e., businesses open to the public) wasn't banned until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
and let's close with something cool
I have no idea when or whether the Aptera solar-powered car will hit the market. But it's fun to look at.
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