A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.
- Gustavo Petro, then Mayor of Bogotá
This week's featured post is "The Supreme Court will have to carry this case to term".
This week everybody was talking about the Key Bridge collapse
My wife and I drive past Baltimore at least twice a year, and we disagree about whether we've ever been on the Key Bridge. (Usually we take the I-895 tunnel.) Nonetheless, I've seen an exit for the bridge many, many times, and it feels like a real place to me.
Anyway, the bridge's collapse looks like a series of unfortunate events: A big container ship lost power, lost control of its steering, and rammed the bridge, bringing it down. Some quick work closing the bridge to traffic saved a lot of lives. (In the video, you can see the last few cars and trucks getting across.) The lives not saved were workers doing maintenance late at night. All six were Central American migrants here legally.
The Port of Baltimore, one of the East Coast's busiest harbors, is closed until the wreckage can be cleared away. That's going to have economic consequences all over the country.
What should happen next is fairly obvious: rebuild. Baltimore needs its outer beltway. People (like me) who drive down the east coast do not need or want to add to the city's congestion. And the two alternate routes are tunnels where it's illegal to carry hazardous materials. If this bridge were in a red state, Congress would quickly approve bipartisan funding and the rebuilding process would begin.
But Maryland is a blue state and Baltimore is the kind of city Republicans like to demonize. So nothing will be simple.
The immediate media response to the disaster illustrated the disadvantage pundits labor under when they care about facts.
TV talking heads who were trying to be honest and responsible had to admit they didn't know what had happened or why. Not so, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who instantly raised the issue of whether this was a terrorist attack. Misogynist Andrew Tate (who had been successfully deplatformed from social media until Elon Musk brought him back) declared the event a "cyber attack" and predicted a "Black Swan event" would follow. Alex Jones then upped the ante, announcing "WW3 has already started."
Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo immediately thought of "the potential for wrongdoing or the potential for foul play given the wide open border". Utah legislator and candidate for governor Phil Lyman tweeted, "This is what happens when you have Governors who prioritize diversity over the wellbeing and security of citizens." Matt Schlapp of the American Conservative Union pointed at "drug-addled" employees and Covid lockdowns as possible causes. Both the Baltimore mayor and the Maryland governor are Black, which has made them tempting targets.
But remember: All the local emergency response people performed admirably. Eventually we'll find out the root causes, which quite probably have nothing to do with the mayor or governor. And the central victims of the tragedy -- the people who died -- were migrants doing hard jobs.
I wish Fox Business had interviewed me. I could have raised my theory that God was angry over the blasphemy of the Trump Bible. It makes as much sense as anything else.
and the Supreme Court
The mifepristone case is the subject of the featured post. But another outrage got comparatively little coverage: the Court's foot-dragging on a South Carolina gerrymandering case.
More than a year ago, a three-judge panel ruled that the congressional districts drawn by the South Carolina legislature were an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. In particular, Black voters were intentionally moved out of the 1st district, currently represented by Republican Nance Mace.
South Carolina appealed to the Supreme Court almost exactly a year ago, and the Court has done nothing. But while the Court was "considering" the appeal, nobody else could do anything either. So there is no alternative map, and the electoral process has to move forward, with the state required to mail overseas and military ballots by April 27 for the primary June 1.
Thursday the three-judge panel relented, giving the state the OK to use the racially gerrymandered map for this election cycle. Quite possibly, this will result in an ill-gotten House seat for the Republicans.
MSNBC's Chris Hayes was apoplectic about this:
We see what they're doing. We know the conservative majority of this Supreme Court decided to let Black voters continue to be discriminated against in South Carolina this year in violation of the Constitution
This was part of a larger segment where Hayes also discussed the Court helping Trump stall his federal January 6 case until after the election.
and other right-wing freakouts
The Fox News silo worked itself into a lather about the ways Joe Biden has "disrespected" Easter. Jay Kuo explains two that Trump raged about in one tweet. The marketer of the Trump Bible described these actions as "blasphemous" and "examples of the Biden Administration's years-long assault on the Christian faith".
First, Biden proclaimed Easter as Transgender Day of Visibility. OK, Biden did make a proclamation recognizing the Transgender Day of Visibility, which has been on March 31 since it was established in 2009. Easter, which is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox, happened to fall on March 31 this year, as it tends to about one year in every 23. If this upsets you, you should blame the Sun and Moon, not Biden.
BTW. The whole idea that Christianity has something to do with gender Identities is suspect. No matter how hard people work to inject their bigotries into the Bible, their bigotries remain their bigotries, not their religious convictions.
Second, Biden supposedly banned religious designs from the White House Easter-egg art contest. This also is true, sort of. But religious designs have been banned from the contest for 47 years, including the four Trump-administration Easters. The contest, it turns out, is partially funded by the Department of Agriculture in cooperation with the American Egg Board as a promotional event for eggs. (There had to be a propaganda purpose somewhere, right?) AEB President Emily Metz explains:
So when we say, "can’t be overtly religious", we just can’t be seen to be promoting one religion over the other, the same way we can’t be seen to be promoting one political viewpoint or ideology over the other. We have to be totally neutral in everything we do and have it just be focused on egg promotion and marketing activities.
If you ever find yourself wondering why MAGA conservatives can't raise any outrage over climate change or mass shootings, just remember that they have far more important things to get upset about.
and Ronna McDaniel
NBC and MSNBC briefly employed former RNC head Ronna Romney McDaniel, until protests from the staff convinced the executives to reverse course.
A day after NBC chief political analyst Chuck Todd told “Meet the Press” viewers that McDaniel “has credibility issues that she still has to deal with,” hosts on the network’s cable affiliate — including Rachel Maddow, Nicolle Wallace, Joy Reid, Joe Scarborough, Lawrence O’Donnell and Jen Psaki — echoed the rebuke, citing her support of Donald Trump’s baseless claims of a stolen 2020 presidential election.
The Detroit News reported that McDaniel was on a phone call where Trump pressured Michigan election officials not to certify the election returns from Wayne County. MSNBC host Joy Reid commented:
We welcome Republican voices. The reality is: This isn’t a difference of opinion. She literally backed an illegal scheme to steal an election in the state of Michigan.
The rationale for hiring McDaniel in the first placed was summarized by NBCUniversal Group Chairman Cesar Conde:
Conde said in his memo that the decision to bring McDaniel on board was made “because of our deep commitment to presenting our audiences with a widely diverse set of viewpoints and experiences, particularly during these consequential times. We continue to be committed to the principle that we must have diverse viewpoints on our programs, and to that end, we will redouble our efforts to seek voices that represent different parts of the political spectrum.”
David Roberts, who has no connection to NBC, summed up my point of view:
The basic dilemma facing media, which they are still trying to wriggle around (see: the McDaniel affair), is that elevating voices genuinely representative of MAGA means tolerating lies, bigotry, & anti-democratic sentiment. You can't have one without the other.
and you also might be interested in ...
I had expected the Right not to start their campaign against the 22nd Amendment (which stops presidents from running for a third term) until Trump had actually won his second. But no.
Conservatives have gritted their teeth for years as the Left, in their hatred of Trump, has attempted to pervert the meaning of first the Twenty-fifth Amendment and, more recently, the Fourteenth Amendment. The case for repealing the Twenty-second Amendment is far more straightforward: As with Prohibition, it is simply a matter of finding the will to get rid of a bad idea that needlessly limits Americans’ freedom.
And don't worry about him being five months older in 2028 than Biden is now because of "the glaringly obvious differences between the men in their brain power, physical strength, and ability to walk in a straight line".
They're clearly not seeing the fat, out-of-shape Trump I see, or listening to the incoherent speeches I hear.
The motivating vision here is of the Great Leader as president for life. Anything that stands in the way will have to go.
Crypto-currency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison for a multi-billion-dollar scheme that caused the collapse of FTX, the crypto exchange Bankman-Fried founded. He simultaneously ran a hedge fund that made risky bets with clients' assets.
The FTX fraud has no direct connection to the Trump real-estate fraud, but it does illustrate a related point: Fraud is fraud, whether the target loses money or not. The FTX collapse started when the relationship to the hedge fund was exposed by CoinDesk. But if everyone had stayed ignorant, the risky bets might well have paid off and everyone would still have their money. That wouldn't make the whole scheme any less fraudulent.
Trump misbehaved in his typical democracy-threatening ways this week. He repeatedly attacked the adult daughter of the judge in the Stormy Daniels case. And he reposted on Truth Social a video involving a truck with a life-sized full-color back-gate image of Joe Biden bound and gagged.
Imagine the impact all of this is having on potential witnesses and jurors in the criminal cases against Trump. If Trump can get away with threatening a Judge’s daughter, if he can do this to the President of the United States, then what’s going to happen to them if they take the witness stand against him or vote to convict?
I don't know whether Judge Juan Merchan could scare Trump straight with a few days of revoked bail pretrial detention, or whether that's what Trump wants to happen, the better to make his victimhood case to the voters. But I'm starting to think the experiment is worth trying.
The October 7 attacks unified Israel, but that unity is starting to come undone again. Sunday evening, thousands protested in Jerusalem.
But an issue most Americans never think about could be what brings down Netanyahu's coalition: the exemption of ultra-orthodox yeshiva students from the draft.
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has now been under arrest in Russia for a year. Many voices in America noted the anniversary, but one did not: Trump. America-First clearly has an exception when it comes to Putin's Russia.
I had no idea how close we are to dealing with driverless trucks.
By the end of this year, the trucks will for the first time start traveling alone, without human minders like Jenkins, as two major companies — Aurora and Kodiak Robotics — launch fully autonomous trucks in Texas. ...
By default, driverless passenger vehicles and trucks can ride anywhere in the United States, unless a state explicitly says they can’t. That means companies can test and operate their vehicles across most of the country. Two dozen states, including Texas, Florida, Arizona and Nevada, specifically allow driverless operations, according to data compiled by Aurora, while another 16 states have no regulations specific to autonomous vehicles.
The number of jobs that could be replaced here is in the millions.
Here's what I predict: The overall accident rate of autonomous trucks will be lower than human-driven trucks, but they will have different accidents. The question is what the public will do when somebody dies in a way that would never have happened if a human were involved.
Kat Abu's summary of the week on Fox News. And I just discovered a similarly guilty pleasure: Jeff Tiedrich's "This week in stupid".
and let's close with something
For reasons I explained in the teaser, I've had to cut corners this week. The closing is supposed to be orthogonal to the news, with a touch of the humorous, amazing, uplifting, or silly. I don't have one this week, so please help me out: Talk among yourselves about suitable closings for a week like this one.
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