The presidency is a performance. You are not just making decisions, you are acting out the things people want to believe about the president.
This week's featured post is "A Big Week in the Trump Trials".
This week everybody was talking about the Trump trials
$355 million, Fani Willis testifying, a trial date for the Stormy Daniels case, presidential immunity goes to the Supremes, and more: It was hard to keep track of which case any particular news story applied to. I sort it out in the featured post.
and Putin's Republican sympathizers
Putin critic and political rival Alexei Navalny died in an arctic prison on Friday. Navalny is an inspirational fighter for democracy who Putin has tried to kill before. Prison authorities attributed the death first to "sudden death syndrome" and then to a pulmonary embolism.
The New Yorker's Masha Gessen (my favorite Russia-watcher) pulls a number of themes together:
Putin appears to be feeling optimistic about his own future. As he sees it, Donald Trump is poised to become the next President of the U.S. and to give Putin free rein in Ukraine and beyond. Even before the U.S. Presidential election, American aid to Ukraine is stalled, and Ukraine’s Army is starved for troops and nearing a supply crisis. Last week, Putin got to lecture millions of Americans by granting an interview to Tucker Carlson. At the end of the interview, Carlson asked Putin if he would release Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter held on espionage charges in Russia. Putin proposed that Gershkovich could be traded for “a person, who out of patriotic sentiments liquidated a bandit in one of the European capitals.” It was a reference to Vadim Krasikov, probably the only Russian assassin who has been caught and convicted in the West; he is held in Germany. A week after the interview aired, Russia has shown the world what can happen to a person in a Russian prison. It’s also significant that Navalny was killed on the first day of the Munich conference. In 2007, Putin chose the conference as his stage for declaring what would become his war against the West. Now, with this war in full swing, Putin has been excluded from the conference, but the actions of his regime—the murders committed by his regime—dominate the proceedings.
Meanwhile, Ukraine withdrew from the city of Avdiivka in Donetsk. AP attributes the withdrawal to lack of artillery.
One reason for that lack is Speaker Mike Johnson, who still refuses to bring Ukraine aid to a vote (because it would pass). Johnson says he won't be "rushed" into voting on aid that President Biden asked for in September. Russian forces may be gaining ground and Ukrainian soldiers may be dying, but what's the hurry?
The elephant in the room here is Trump, who won a narrow victory in 2016 with Putin's help, and has been in Putin's pocket ever since. (Hillary Clinton correctly observed in a 2016 debate that Trump would be Putin's puppet, to which Trump made a typical playground response: "No. You're the puppet.") Trump single-handedly torpedoed the Ukraine/Israel/border bill that the Senate had negotiated a few weeks ago, and was just about the last political figure in the US to make any comment on Navalny. As usual, Trump did not criticize Putin, and instead made his comment mainly about himself.
"The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country," Trump posted, and then the rest is about himself and his troubles.
I'm sure both the beleaguered people of Ukrainian and Navalny's grieving widow take great comfort from that.
While we're talking about Tucker, he followed his Putin interview by going to a Moscow supermarket to show his viewers how great conditions are in Russia.
Lots of people pointed out that things usually are cheap in poor countries, which Russia is at this point in spite of its vast natural resources and educated population. In 2021, Tass reported that sixty percent of Russian citizens spent at least half their income on food. For context, in 2022 Americans spent about 11.3% of their income on food, and the poorest quintile of American society spent 31.2% of its income.
But The Atlantic's Graeme Wood has travelled in Russia and went deeper. Yes, there are some things that are better in Moscow than in New York.
Carlson’s videos never quite say what precisely he thinks Russia gets right. Moscow is in many ways superior to New York. But Paris has a good subway system too. Japan and Thailand have fine grocery stores, and I wonder, when I enter them, why entering my neighborhood Stop & Shop in America is such a depressing experience by comparison. Carlson’s stated preference for Putin’s leadership over Joe Biden’s suggests that the affection is not for fine food or working public transit but for firm autocratic rule—which, as French, Thais, and Japanese will attest, is not a precondition for high-quality goods and services. And in an authoritarian state, those goods and services can serve to prolong the regime.
and another Democratic election victory
Democrat Tom Suozzi flipped George Santos' House seat in a special election Tuesday. Suozzi won by 7.8%, almost exactly reversing Santos margin in 2022.
One lesson from the election appears to be the mistake House Republicans made by giving in to Trump and scrapping a bipartisan compromise on the border. Suozzi was able to flip the script on the GOP in this race: Democrats tried to do something about the immigration problem, but Republicans blocked them.
The election followed a long string of recent Democratic victories since the Supreme Court ditched Roe v Wade. The great political mystery of recent months has been how polls show Democrats in trouble, but then Democrats win elections anyway.
You might think that another Democratic victory would be good news for other Democrats, like Joe Biden, but you wouldn't guess it from reading the New York Times. In the Times, nothing is good news for Biden.
This is a regular theme in the humorous Twitter account New York Times PItchbot, which suggests how the Times should frame various stories. Tuesday afternoon before the polls closed the Pitchbot tweeted:
If Democrats win today's special election in NY-3, it's further proof that special elections don't mean anything. But if they lose, it's very bad news for Biden in November.
And that turned out to be more-or-less exactly what the NYT's Nate Cohn wrote Wednesday morning.
As we’ve written recently, it’s hard to glean much from special elections. ... If anything, one could advance the idea that the results were slightly underwhelming for Democrats, given all of the aforementioned advantages than Mr. Suozzi seemed to possess. Either way, a single special election result like this one is entirely consistent with polls showing Mr. Biden and Democrats in a close race heading into 2024.
While we're talking about Biden and his prospects in November: In this 25-minute podcast, Ezra Klein makes the most convincing Biden-shouldn't-run argument I've heard yet. Last week, I wrote about my strong belief that the Biden-is-too-old-to-be-president argument is misguided, and how his occasional use of the wrong word should not raise worries that he isn't up to the job. I still believe all that.
But Klein makes a subtly different argument. He acknowledges that Biden has been an excellent president, and says that everyone he talks to who has observed Biden's performance in decision-making meetings agrees that he is still quite sharp. But Klein points out that running for president is different from being president. Yes, the Republic would be in good hands if Biden were president for an additional four years. But is the Democratic Party in good hands with Biden at the top of the ticket in 2024?
Klein thinks not, and says that the kinds of people who run campaigns -- unlike the kinds of people who run governments -- are deeply worried about Biden's reelection.
In the final section of the podcast, he paints an upbeat picture of an open convention choosing candidates the way old-time conventions did: Imagine younger Democrats like Gretchen Whitmer, Kamala Harris, and Gavin Newsom giving speeches that actually mattered, as they tried to convince delegates to pick them. Maybe there could even be a boom for a dark horse like Andy Beshear, who has managed to convince red Kentucky to elect and reelect him as governor. Contrast that with MAGA lackeys kissing up to Donald Trump in the Republican Convention.
I will need to consider that convention fantasy, which could also go wrong in any number of ways. And I'm not sure I'm ready to change my mind, but Klein's podcast definitely gives me a lot to think about.
and two right-wing conspiracy theories collapsed
For years, Fox News talking heads like Sean Hannity have been talking about "the Biden crime family", and House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer has been implying that he had evidence of a bribery scheme where money flowed through Hunter Biden to his Dad, who then did something-or-other in a quid-pro-quo sort of way. This has been the basis of House Republicans' so-far-unsuccessful effort to impeach President Biden.
The evidence for this story was always kind of thin, and depended heavily on the testimony of one guy, Alexander Smirnov, who Hannity and Comer touted as a "trusted FBI informant". But in fact the FBI didn't trust this informant or his story, which is why the investigation never went anywhere, even during the Trump administration.
This week we found out just how much DoJ doesn't trust Smirnov: The special prosecutor handling the Hunter Biden investigation just indicted Smirnov for making up his story, including inventing meetings with people who were provably somewhere else at the time. Jay Kuo has a good summary.
If the Republican effort to impeach Biden were based on anything more substantive than seeking revenge for Trump's well-deserved impeachments, it would fold now. But I bet it won't.
If election-deniers still show up in your social media feeds, you are bound to have heard about Dinesh D’Souza's 2022 film 2000 Mules, which presents a conspiracy theory about
unnamed nonprofit organizations supposedly associated with the Democratic Party [who] paid "mules" to illegally collect and deposit ballots into drop boxes in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin during the 2020 presidential election.
The film's methodology and conclusions have been widely debunked ever since it came out nearly two years ago. But if you really want to believe that Democrats stole Donald Trump's "landslide", you can ignore all that.
The movie ... uses research from the Texas-based nonprofit True the Vote, which has spent months lobbying states to use its findings to change voting laws.
The group filed claims with Georgia's secretary of state's office, which then launched its own investigation into ballot-harvesting. You'd think that would be the whole point of filing complaints, but True the Vote was strangely uncooperative and refused to give Georgia the evidence it said it had collected. Eventually, Georgia officials lost patience and got a court order.
A Fulton County Superior Court judge in Atlanta signed an order last year requiring True the Vote to provide evidence it had collected, including the names of people who were sources of information, to state elections officials who were frustrated by the group’s refusal to share evidence with investigators.
This week, True the Vote reported to the judge: It has nothing.
This has been the pattern for all of Trump's Big Lie claims, going back to the court cases it filed immediately after the election: Tell the rubes who believe Trump that they have bountiful evidence of election fraud, and then, when challenged in court, produce nothing.
and the Super Bowl parade shooting
At the parade celebrating the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl win, 23 people were shot, including 11 children. One person died.
If you're just talking about deaths or even injuries, this event doesn't rank high on the list of recent mass shootings. But I think it will have a huge impact on the national psyche. Like the 4th of July shooting in Highland Park in 2022 and the 2017 shooting at a Las Vegas music festival, it reinforces the idea that in America, it's not safe to be outdoors in a crowd -- not unless the area has been locked down by police and you had to go through security to get in (like at an inauguration). If you do go to a big outdoor event, you'll have a hard time not wondering whether the people around you are armed, or looking for snipers in the tall buildings.
Being armed yourself is no answer. In Kansas City, there were 800 armed police assigned to the parade area. All those "good guys with guns" couldn't stop this from happening.
Other countries are not like this. The NRA rhetoric about guns "protecting our freedom" has it exactly backwards. We are less free than the citizens of other countries because we live under the tyranny of guns.
Remember those pro-Jesus He-Gets-Us Super Bowl ads? We now have a better understanding of what that's about, thanks to Kristen Thomason at Baptist News. The effort is funded by shadowy conservative political groups that are trying to get churches to partner with them, helping churches with their outreach to local people looking for a church. The political goal is to gather enough information to make personal profiles of people who might be persuadable (through targeted marketing) to support conservative causes.
and you also might be interested in ...
The NYT thinks it has identified Trump's abortion position:
Former President Donald J. Trump has told advisers and allies that he likes the idea of a 16-week national abortion ban with three exceptions, in cases of rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother, according to two people with direct knowledge of Mr. Trump’s deliberations.
Other Republicans have tried to run on this "moderate" position recently, but without much success. That's probably because it doesn't satisfy the anti-abortion zealots, but it still has the logic flaw that the stricter abortion bans have: When you allow any exceptions, you're admitting that the issue is not simple. Even after N weeks, there are still hard cases where difficult decisions need to be made. And then you're assigning those decisions to the government rather than to the people who are actually involved and understand the details of the situation. It doesn't make a lot of sense.
Here's a scenario every ban-supporter ought to run through their exception protocols: A pregnant woman past the ban deadline discovers a cancerous tumor that is currently small but of a very aggressive type. Statistics indicate that if she has an abortion immediately and goes straight into chemotherapy, she has a 90% chance of survival. But if she waits a few months, delivers the baby, and then goes into chemotherapy, she has only 40% chance of survival. She and her husband decide to seek an exception because they really want her to live, and figure they can try again to have a baby later. What happens? Do they get the exception or not?
Can you imagine being in such a situation knowing that somebody else was making that decision for you?
Late to the party: I just noticed this episode of NYT's "The Daily" podcast from December. If you have no idea what the whole phenomenon of Taylor Swift and Taylor Swift fandom is about, this would be a half-hour well spent.
Joe Manchin has announced that he won't mount a third-party run for president.
Trump has a new explanation for why he repeatedly said "Nikki Haley" when he was talking about Nancy Pelosi: He meant to do that. He was being "sarcastic". (I don't think he actually understands what that word means.)
As I've said often before, we all knew people like Trump when we were six years old: They were never wrong. Anything they did was something they meant to do. Any game they didn't win was rigged, and anybody who beat them cheated.
Maintaining such childish character traits into his late 70s is far scarier than saying the wrong name occasionally.
Vox explains the rush in several states to ban lab-grown meat, which barely exists yet, and is nowhere near being a marketable product. The associated politicians may give all kinds of reasons, but what this effort comes down to is protecting the meat industry as it currently exists.
The proposed bans are part of a longtime strategy by the politically powerful agribusiness lobby and its allies in Congress and statehouses to further entrench factory farming as America’s dominant source of protein. ...
The cell-cultivated meat bans and the plant-based labeling restrictions represent one side of agribusiness’s policy coin: proactive measures to weaken upstarts that could one day threaten its bottom line. The other side of that coin is sweeping deregulation that has made meat abundant and cheap, but at terrible cost to the environment, workers, and animals.
Agriculture is exempt from the federal Animal Welfare Act, and most farms are exempt from the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, loopholes that have resulted in awful conditions for animals and widespread pollution.
Family farmers (like my Dad once was) are the poster children of this effort, but the money and political clout comes from the giant corporations that are pushing family farms into extinction.
I imagine that someday we'll get lab-grown meat figured out, and some future generation will be able to enjoy all our favorite dishes without slaughtering sentient creatures. Probably they'll look back on this era the way we look back on slavery, and be appalled that so many people worked so hard to hang on to their gory practices.
Speaking of animal welfare: One of the week's stranger stories concerns plans for a 200-acre "mini-city of monkeys" in Georgia. The proposed breeding facility would house up to 30,000 long-tailed macaques for use in medical research. The plan faces protests from two sides: Residents of nearby Bainbridge (human population 14,000) are afraid the macaques will be bad neighbors, and animal rights activists oppose the cruelty of using such intelligent creatures for research.
Medical researchers argue back that they need primates precisely because they are so similar to humans. Without primate research, the first round of human tests of some possible medical advance would be far more dangerous.
About 70,000 monkeys a year are still used across the US in tests for treatments to infectious diseases, ageing and neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s, with researchers warning that the US is running low on available primates for tests.
I am reminded of some hard-won wisdom from a friend who studied psychology in graduate school: If a lemur gets loose and finds its way into a suspended ceiling, it's almost impossible to catch.
and let's close with a question
Usually, my closings are little amusing snippets, and if you're looking for one, the story above about the "city of monkeys" is pretty close.
But today I want to ask a question, which I invite you to answer in the comments. First, some background: Last Monday, when I was defending Joe Biden's mental competence, Paul Krugman was taking a step back and reacting to the whole national conversation on that issue in "Why I Am Now Deeply Worried for America".
[W]atching the frenzy over President Biden’s age, I am, for the first time, profoundly concerned about the nation’s future. It now seems entirely possible that within the next year, American democracy could be irretrievably altered.
And the final blow won’t be the rise of political extremism — that rise certainly created the preconditions for disaster, but it has been part of the landscape for some time now. No, what may turn this menace into catastrophe is the way the hand-wringing over Biden’s age has overshadowed the real stakes in the 2024 election.
I've talked before about why I think Biden will beat Trump in the fall, but like Krugman (and like most of you, I suspect), I have moments when I just can't believe where the national conversation has gotten to, and I get a vertiginous feeling in my stomach that says I don't really know what can happen.
There's something paralyzing about that fear, and I think we need to talk openly about it so that we can support each other these next several months. And even if we're not paralyzed, actions taken out of fear are usually not effective. We're going to do a better job saving the country if we have faced our fears and found our courage.
So here's my question: If you have those moments of paralyzing or reactive fear, what do you do? Does it help? Do you have any insight in how to push through fear and come out the other side?
No comments:
Post a Comment