The Weekly Sift: May 2024

Monday, May 27, 2024

Venues

Trump's refusal to take the stand encapsulates the MAGA approach to politics. Since the 2020 presidential election, he and his surrogates have made repeated accusations and statements about how the system is rigged against them and alleged there is evidence that proves them right. Crucially, they make those arguments only in front of television cameras or on podcasts and radio. They refuse to make them under oath in a court of law, where there are penalties for lying.

- Heather Cox Richardson

This week's featured post is "Alito's Flags Aren't the Worst of It", concerning the Supreme Court's ruling (with Alito writing the majority opinion) in a racial gerrymanding case.

This week everybody was talking about Alito's flags

It all started last week, when the NYT revealed that an upside-down American flag flew over Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's home in Virginia for several days between the January 6 insurrection and Biden's inauguration. An upside-down flag is a traditional distress symbol, and was used by the "stop the steal" movement that believed Biden's 2020 win was illegitimate. Alito blamed the flag on his wife, whom he said was responding to some kind of dispute with the neighbors. (He provided no further details, and also said that the dog ate his homework.)

Then Wednesday the NYT reported that a second insurrectionist flag, the Appeal To Heaven flag sometimes associated with Christian nationalism, flew over the Alitos' vacation home on the Jersey shore in July, August, and September of 2023. (It's not clear whether it flew continuously or sporadically.) This flag was also carried by January 6 insurrectionists.

Since its creation during the American Revolution, the flag has carried a message of defiance: The phrase “appeal to heaven” comes from the 17th-century philosopher John Locke, who wrote of a responsibility to rebel, even use violence, to overthrow unjust rule. “It’s a paraphrase for trial by arms,” Anthony Grafton, a historian at Princeton University, said in an interview. “The main point is that there’s no appeal, there’s no one else you can ask for help or a judgment.”

According to the Supreme Court's own Code of Conduct, which it released last November to demonstrate it was not completely lawless following revelations of Clarence Thomas' corruption,

A Justice should disqualify himself or herself in a proceeding in which the Justice’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned, that is, where an unbiased and reasonable person who is aware of all relevant circumstances would doubt that the Justice could fairly discharge his or her duties.

The Court is currently hearing a number of cases related to January 6, and has already ruled that states cannot remove Trump from their ballots on 14th-Amendment participating-in-an-insurrection grounds. Alito's impartiality "might reasonably be questioned" by "an unbiased and reasonable person" in all these cases. But of course he will not recuse himself and Chief Justice Roberts will not demand that he do so, because in practice the Court has no code of conduct and does not recognize any judicial ethics.

Likewise Congress will not solve the problem. The filibuster will prevent the Senate from passing any binding code for the Court, and Republicans would never participate in an impeachment. I agree with Joyce Vance, that the only conceivably effective response needs to come from the voters:

This one, as I’ve written, is up to us, and to investing in the political cycle. Don’t despair, vote! ... If you want a Congress that will pass ethics reform for the Supreme Court, as difficult of an endeavor as it may be to craft rules that will pass constitutional muster, then vote for people who will go on record as supporting it.

It's unlikely we'll get a majority large enough to impeach Alito or Thomas. But if it becomes clear that their in-your-face defiance of all constraints is a drag on the Republican Party, partisan interests may start to rein them in.

and international courts v Israel

This week, international courts made two moves against Israel. Last Monday International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Kahn sought arrest warrants for leaders of both Hamas and Israel.

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and two others are accused of various crimes associated with October 7, including the killings of several hundred Israeli civilians, taking hostages, rape, and so on.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant are accused of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population, and other related offenses.

Judges of the ICC have not yet approved the warrants. If they are approved, they may not have much effect beyond their influence on international opinion. Neither set of leaders is likely to surrender itself, and the ICC commands no military force able to bring them in.

President Biden denounced the prosecutor's move:

The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous. And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.

Friday, the International Court of Justice

ordered Israel to “[i]mmediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

The Court also ordered Israel to open the Rafah crossing, to allow United Nations fact-finders to enter Gaza, and to report to the Court within one month regarding its compliance with the Court’s orders. The Court also reaffirmed its prior orders and reiterated its call for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages held by Hamas and other armed groups.

Again, the international court has little ability to enforce this order, but it may have some effect on popular opinion around the world.

If you're like me, you may not have previously realized the the ICC and the ICJ are separate entities. Both are located in The Hague. The difference seems to be that the ICC prosecutes individuals, while the ICJ adjudicates disputes among nations.

Another diplomatic blow to Israel: Spain, Ireland, and Norway will formally recognize a Palestinian state tomorrow.

and the Trump trials

Both sides have now rested their cases. The judge declared a break so that summations and jury instructions could occur without interruption by the holiday weekend. Summations begin tomorrow, and the jury should be ready to deliberate later this week.

What they will do is anyone's guess. An outright acquittal seems unlikely, given the strength of the prosecution's case. But to prevent a conviction the defense only needs to convince one juror. That juror doesn't even have to believe Trump is innocent, just that the case against him hasn't been proved beyond reasonable doubt.

To no one's surprise, Trump himself did not testify, despite saying many times that he would.

He would have been better off not offering a defense at all. It would have looked like a power move: The government hasn't proved its case, so we have nothing to answer.

Instead, the defense called one technical witness and then Robert Costello, who was a disaster. Not only was Costello disrespectful of Judge Merchan, leading the judge to clear the courtroom to tell Costello how close he was to a contempt of court ruling, but his presence allowed the prosecution to introduce emails Costello wrote that captured just how mob-like TrumpWorld is.

Emails between Costello and Cohen were read aloud to leave the indelible memory in the minds of the jurors that Trump and Giuliani were conspiring with Costello to make sure Cohen didn't cooperate with the government. There is even an email from Costello to Cohen saying, "Rudy said this communication channel must be maintained...sleep well tonight, you have friends in high places," and one from Costello to his law partner saying, "Our issue is to get Cohen on the right page without giving the appearance that we are following instructions from Giuliani or the President," (which they clearly were.) When Cohen didn't sign on with him right away he told his law partner Cohen was "slow-playing us and the President...What should I say to this asshole? He's playing with the most powerful man on the planet." Didn't he know who he was messing with?

Costello was supposed to undermine Michael Cohen's credibility, but I suspect he enhanced it. The defense was trying to make Cohen look like a thug, but they overshot and made everyone connected with Trump look like a thug.

and Trump's assassination claim

At some point years ago, "Trump lies" stopped being a headline; it happens every day, so it's not news. But this week included a lie so brazen and so outrageous that it deserves attention.

In a fundraising email responding to right-wing media reports that offered a distorted reading of a newly-unsealed court filing in Trump's classified documents case, Trump falsely claimed Biden was "locked & loaded ready to take me out" when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago in August of 2022.

In a separate post on his Truth Social platform Tuesday evening, Trump further said he was "shown Reports" that Biden's DOJ "AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE" in their search of the property for classified documents.

So what's real? FBI search warrants have boilerplate language that is actually about limiting lethal force:

law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force only when necessary, that is, when the officer has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.

In a court filing in the Mar-a-Lago case, Trump's lawyers left out the "only", leaving "may use deadly force when necessary". That document recently got unsealed, and Trump conspiracy theorists jumped on it online, eventually leading Marjorie Taylor Greene and Fox News hosts like Jesse Watters and Jeanine Pirro to start discussing the "assassination plot" like it was a real thing, including imagining shoot-outs with the Secret Service. From there the wild story got back around the Trump, who pushed it for all it was worth. It's not clear whether he realized that he started the misperception himself.

In reality, it has been known since the day it happened that the FBI had coordinated with the Secret Service and timed the raid so that Trump would be out of town. Trump knows this. MTG knows this. Jesse Watters and Jeanine Pirro know it.

Jack Smith has responded to this incident by noting the possible danger the rumor poses to FBI agents involved in the raid, who could be witnesses in Trump's Mar-a-Lago trial, if Judge Cannon ever allows it to happen. He has asked Cannon to modify Trump's terms of release "to make clear that he may not make statements that pose a significant, imminent, and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agents participating in the investigation and prosecution of this case."

I can't imagine the boot-licking Judge Cannon acknowledging that Trump lied or that his violent supporters predictably threaten the people his rhetoric targets. But she'll have to respond somehow.

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I can't say I'm surprised that Nikki Haley has finally said that she's voting for Trump. Did she previously say a lot of bad things about the Great Man? Join the club. Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Ron DeSantis -- they all said bad things about him before abasing themselves to kiss the ring.

But the people who think Haley is now in the running to be Trump's VP are crazy. Trump's VP has to satisfy these conditions:

You can't outshine the boss. (That eliminates not just Haley, but MTG and Vivek as well.)
You can't have your own following independent of the boss. (So: not DeSantis or Haley.)
You have to be willing to commit treason for Trump. (He's not making the Mike Pence mistake again.)
You must be willing to repeat whatever claim the boss makes, no matter how absurd or counterfactual. (That's why so many VP wannabees showed up at Trump's courtroom wearing matching suits and red ties.)

Just to remind us that there's no situation so good that a person can't screw it up, former NFL star Antonio Brown, who earned $80 million during his 12-year career, has filed for bankruptcy.

If you were worried at all about Amy Klobuchar's ability to hang onto her Senate seat in Minnesota, you can stop. Republicans looks set to nominate an absolute loon.

Cory Doctorow says that "AIs and self-driving cars are the new jetpacks". It turns out that there was never any reason to think Jetson-style jetpacks were feasible.

In a terrific new 99 Percent Invisible episode, Chris Berube tracks the history of all those jetpacks we saw on TV for decades, and reveals that they were all the same jetpack, flown by just one guy, who risked his life every time he went up in it. The jetpack in question — technically a “rocket belt” — was built in the 1960s by Wendell Moore at the Bell Aircraft Corporation, with funding from the DoD. The Bell rocket belt used concentrated hydrogen peroxide as fuel, which burned at temperatures in excess of 1,000'. The rocket belt had a maximum flight time of just 21 seconds.

But Moore was a great showman, and got it into our heads that jetpacks were an inevitable part of the future -- to the point that many people my age lament "Where are our jetpacks? We were promised jetpacks."

Doctorow explains how the same kind of hucksterism is happening today with self-driving cars and AI in general. Big things are always just a year or two away, and if the impressive demo videos are mostly fake, they're not lies, they're "premature truths".

and let's close with something thought-provoking

If you're looking for blogs to read, let me suggest Jess Piper's "The View from Rural Missouri". She has that rare touch for telling personal stories that capture something larger. Two posts to get you started: "Losing My Religion", about how she drifted away from her Evangelical upbringing, and "Daddy Died a MAGA" about how the right-wing echo chamber turned her father into someone she couldn't recognize.

Monday, May 20, 2024

Not the End

The cabinet, the prime minister, they signal to the Shin Bet that if a Jew is killed, that’s terrible. If an Arab is killed, that’s not good, but it’s not the end of the world.

- former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon
quoted in "The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel"

This week's featured posts are "Wide Right: that kicker's commencement speech" and "Two Significant Articles about Israel".

This week everybody was talking about Israel and the Palestinians

That's the subject of one featured post.

and the Trump trial moving towards its conclusion

I'm resisting the urge to write about the trial at length, because there's one big thing we all want to know right now, and we can't know it yet: What is the jury making of Michael Cohen's testimony? I could speculate, I could link to other people's speculations, or I could cast a hexagram from the I Ching, but in the end there's nothing worth saying. We won't know what the jury thinks until it produces a verdict.

Cohen is not quite done testifying yet. Today marks the third day of the defense's cross-examination and Cohen's fifth day on the stand altogether. Given how long it's been since Cohen's original testimony, the prosecution will probably want to question him in a redirect.

Cohen is the prosecution's last witness, and the defense has been cagey about who it might call. Maybe Trump? Maybe no one? The burden of proof-beyond-reasonable-doubt is on the prosecution, so the defense could simply rest its case and claim that the burden has not been met. There's no guessing how long the summation presentations to the jury will take, but we're probably looking at the trial finishing either this week or next.

One major task for the prosecution's summation will be to emphasize just how few points of its case rely on Cohen, and how unlikely all the alternative explanations are.

For example, without Cohen we already know that the payoff to Stormy Daniels happened and that Trump CFO Allen Weisselberg agreed to a plan for covertly reimbursing Cohen for fronting this payment. (We know the reimbursement was covert because Cohen was repaid double the amount he had paid Daniels in order to account for taxes. But taxes are unnecessary for a reimbursement. Only that fact that the reimbursement was hidden as "legal fees" accounts for the doubling.) Multiple witnesses have established that Trump was worried about Daniels' story getting out, and that his worry centered on the election rather than on personal considerations (like Melania's reaction). Multiple witnesses attest that nothing happened in the Trump empire without Trump's personal approval.

Only Cohen's testimony puts Trump in the room when the decisions were made. But if you disbelieve him on this point, what's the alternative story? That Cohen paid Daniels $130K of his own money without Trump's knowledge, that Weisselberg and Cohen fooled Trump with the reimbursement scheme, and that Trump signed $35K monthly checks to Cohen for a year without knowing what he was paying Cohen for. Really?

Various Republicans hoping for Trump's favor have shown up at the courthouse looking like the Dear Leader's mini-mes. And they wonder why we call it a cult.

Trump continues to be embarrassed that he hasn't been able to get protesters to show up outside the courthouse, so he falsely claims that police are keeping them away.

and Alito's insurrection flag

I'm not sure why it took more than three years for this to come out, but an upside-down American flag -- the symbol of the pro-Trump Stop the Steal movement -- flew over Justice Alito's home for several days in the weeks following the January 6 insurrection.

Alito's response to the revelation was ridiculous: His wife did it, in connection with some kind of dispute with the neighbors.

Alito’s statement is notable because, as the Times reporter Michael Barbaro pointed out, it does not deny that the flag was flown in solidarity with the insurrectionists. It also does not disavow the insurrectionist claim that the 2020 election was stolen, and it does not condemn the Trump-directed attempt to overthrow the constitutional order that Alito has sworn an oath to uphold.

Alito is the second justice whose behavior -- sorry, sorry, his wife's behavior -- casts doubt on his ability to be impartial to cases involving January 6. (Clarence Thomas' wife was actively pushing the false story of a stolen election in the lead-up to January 6.)

That raises the most important issue here, which is that Alito and Thomas sit on the nation’s highest court and are poised to rule on matters related to Trump’s attempts to unlawfully hold on to power. In one case, they already have—deciding that the Constitution’s ban on insurrectionists holding office does not disqualify Trump from running for president. The Court is set to rule on a challenge to a federal law used to prosecute the January 6 rioters, and in another case about Trump’s claim that former presidents have “absolute immunity” to prosecution for crimes committed as “official acts” in office. The 6–3 right-wing majority has made its partisan lean unmistakable. But there is still a difference between an ideologically conservative, or even partisan, Court and one with sitting justices whose worldview is so deranged by fanaticism that they would prefer the end of constitutional government to a president from the rival party.

An ethical judge would recuse himself from these cases. But when we're talking about Alito and Thomas, the good ship Judicial Ethics sailed a long time ago.

and presidential debates

After a back-and-forth of taunts, it looks like there will be two presidential debates. The first is June 15 on CNN, moderated by Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. The second is September 10 on ABC, with moderators not named yet. Both debates will be open to candidates polling at least 15% among likely voters in four national polls. Whether RFK Jr. and his brain-worm will meet that standard remains to be seen.

I continue to be mystified by the negative coverage Biden's presidential campaign is getting. Trump is currently ahead by less than 1% in the RealClearPolitics polling average, which looks pretty close to even to me. Several polls either have Biden ahead or see the race as tied. And yet Ezra Klein is examining "Why Biden is Losing". If you just read headlines and don't bother with the article "Biden is losing" is the only message you'll get.

Josh Marshall discusses a related issue in "Is Biden in 'Denial' about the polls?" Biden, Marshall says, believes the polls don't show his true strength for a number of reasons. But is that "denial" really?

The factual questions here aren’t terribly complicated and they’re not really the reason I note this article or write this post. Most polls currently show Biden just behind Trump in a tight race. Others show him either tied or just ahead. And there is a theory of the election that those polls, with a greater emphasis on high propensity voters and the concentrating effect of the final months of the campaign, will put Biden on top in November. I’ve tried to air these different arguments here in the Editors’ Blog. You can believe one or the other.

He attributes this pervasive pessimism to a psychological difference between Republicans and Democrats:

If a race is at all close, Republicans think they’re winning, or at least say they think they’re winning. Democrats are the reverse. And if they’re demonstrably winning, they worry that they’re not winning by enough or should be winning by more.

I have my own reasons to believe the polls will swing towards Biden as the election gets closer: Various voting blocs that have been Democratic in recent elections are down on Biden for one reason or another, like Gaza, and are not really thinking about Trump at all. But will young voters really let Big Oil elect a pro-fossil-fuel president? Do pro-Palestinian voters think Trump will be better for them? Do Hispanics really want to see their cousins rounded up in detention camps? I think a lot of those disaffected Democrats will eventually come home.

It doesn't have to be all of them. I mean, we're talking about covering a 1% gap.

Trump teased a third-term possibility in a speech to the NRA. In the same speech, a teleprompter malfunction had him completely stymied.

and that kicker's commencement speech

See one of the featured posts.

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The president of Iran has died in a helicopter crash. Maybe it was bad weather. Maybe it was that Iran's helicopter fleet has a hard time getting parts, given American sanctions. Maybe it was foul play by either foreign interests or domestic rivals. Too soon to tell.

Governor Abbott pardoned a guy in prison for murdering a Black Lives Matter protester. One of the featured posts discusses how crimes by Israeli settlers against Palestinians have been routinely ignored by the authorities. Well, we have the same pattern here: If you agree with Abbott and kill somebody who disagrees with Abbott, that's not really murder in Texas.

There's a strong Nazi parallel here. In the early days of Hitler's rule, the police were not nearly as scary as they eventually became. But the Brownshirts -- non-government Nazi thugs -- could do whatever they wanted and the police would look the other way.

A fascinating article in yesterday's NYT about conservative Christian parents trying to create space in their lives for their transgender children.

The problem with basing a political movement on fiction is that once people get elected they get confronted with reality. Courtney Gore won a school board seat in Texas, pledging to stop the national campaign to indoctrinate children with progressive messages on sex, gender, and race. Once in office, she looked hard for such indoctrination, and didn't find it. So she changed her mind.

The UAW's effort to unionize Southern auto plants hit a pothole: The Mercedes plant in Alabama said no. This follows a UAW victory at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee.

and let's close with something peaceful

It turns out there's a whole genre of videos showing natural beauty accompanied by relaxing music. This one focuses on Norway. I haven't watched the whole thing -- who has the time to get THAT relaxed? -- but it looks fabulous.

Monday, May 13, 2024

Unconstrained and Revolutionary

Every election is billed as a national turning point. This time that rings true. To supporters, the prospect of Trump 2.0, unconstrained and backed by a disciplined movement of true believers, offers revolutionary promise. To much of the rest of the nation and the world, it represents an alarming risk.

- Eric Cortellessa, "How Far Trump Would Go"

This week's featured post is "What Trump Would Do".

On my week off I led a Sunday service at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois. The topic may be of some interest to Sift readers: "Hope, Denial, and Healthy Relationship with the News".

This week everybody was talking about Trump's legal problems

As I reported two weeks ago, the prosecution continues to build a very strong case. The fireworks this week were over the testimony of Stormy Daniels, but it's important to remember where she fits into the overall case: Trump is accused of falsifying business documents to cover up reimbursing Michael Cohen, who paid $130K for Daniels' agreeing not to tell her story before the 2016 election.

So the actual truth of Daniels account isn't relevant. The point is that her story would have damaged Trump politically, motivating him to pay her off and cover up doing so. I've heard a commentator describe her as an "exhibit" rather than a "witness", i.e., the important fact is that her story exists. If it's true, that's just a bonus.

A great deal of Trump's lawyer Susan Necheles' cross-examination of Daniels attempted to make the jury doubt that her story is true. (Personally, I think Daniels sounds credible, and did a good job fending off the attempted slut-shaming.) But the fact that this story would have been damaging (especially in the weeks between the Access Hollywood tape and the election) seems indisputable. Even if you believe Trump's claim that Daniels made her story up to extort money from him, you can still find him guilty.

After her testimony, Trump's lawyers asked for a mistrial, on the grounds that the details of her alleged encounter with Trump were unnecessary and prejudiced the jury against him. Judge Merchan denied the motion, essentially saying that the defense had created the problem itself: It invited a detailed account by claiming in its opening statement that Daniels was lying, and failed to object to the questions that elicited the prejudicial information.

As I observed two weeks ago, the defense still tells no plausible story. The only part of the prosecution's case that isn't totally nailed down is that Trump knew about the payment and the reimbursement scheme. (This is the one undocumented part of the prosecution's account. Like a Mafia boss, Trump is famously reluctant to use email or put anything in writing. Cohen will start testifying today about his instructions from Trump, but there are no corroborating documents or other witnesses.) But Trump is the only one with a motive to set the scheme in motion. Otherwise, you have to believe that Cohen completely on his own borrowed $130K to pay Daniels, that Trump CFO Allen Weisselberg came up with the reimbursement plan without telling his boss, and that the notoriously stingy Trump signed over $400K worth of checks to Cohen with no explanation beyond "legal fees".

That's a story, I suppose. But I don't find it plausible enough to create reasonable doubt.

I wish this trial could be televised, because the transcript makes it look like Daniels won the battle of wits with Necheles. When Necheles characterized Daniels' porn-directing career as "a lot of experience making phony stories about sex", Daniels shot back: "If that story was untrue, I would’ve written it to be a lot better."

After Daniels' testimony, Trump asked for his gag order to be amended to allow him to respond. That motion was denied for an obvious reason: If Trump wants to respond to Daniels sworn testimony, he can take an oath and testify himself, facing the threat of perjury just like she did.

But that's not what Trump wants. He wants to smear her in forums where he can lie without consequences.

He's bound to make a similar request after Michael Cohen testifies, and he'll get the same result. Trump claims it's unfair that Daniels and Cohen aren't gagged, so they can criticize him and he can't respond. But they aren't under indictment, and they have no record of inciting violence against people they attack online.

Meanwhile, the most open-and-shut case against Trump, the Mar-a-Lago documents case is indefinitely delayed. Judge Cannon plans a public hearing where Trump will get to air his baseless "malicious prosecution" theory.

ProPublica and the New York Times report on a tax problem that might cost Trump $100 million.

If you've ever wandered around downtown Chicago, you've undoubtedly seen the 92-story Trump International Hotel and Tower, which sits on the Chicago River proclaiming Trump's name in giant letters. It looks like a monument to wealth and success.

Actually it's anything but. The Tower opened into the worst of the Great Recession, and has been a money-loser from Day 1. Losing money, though, isn't entirely bad, because it produces a tax write-off. The problem is that Trump appears to have written off the loss twice.

and Biden's increasing rift with Netanyahu

Israel has begun attacking Rafah and is showing intentions to launch a full-scale invasion of the one piece of Gaza where civilians have been taking refuge. Wednesday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Congress that the administration was "pausing" shipments of certain weapons to Israel.

Austin said that the US is pausing the shipment of “high-payload munitions” due to Israel’s possible operations in Rafah without a plan for the civilians there.

Friday, a State Department report to Congress gave mixed reviews to Israel's usage of American weapons so far.

The US says it is “reasonable to assess” that the weapons it has provided to Israel have been used in ways that are “inconsistent” with international human rights law, but that there is not enough concrete evidence to link specific US-supplied weapons to violations or warrant cutting the supply of arms.

Netanyahu continues to have no plan for governing Gaza after the killing stops. This is not just a political problem, it has turned into a military problem as Hamas reinfiltrates areas that had already been cleared.

Criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has increased within the IDF and includes Defense Minister Yoav Gallant who want to know who will replace Hamas. procrastination, they say, has given the terror group space to regroup and force the IDF back into Gaza in larger numbers.

Netanyahu has argued that deciding on a new political manager for Gaza must wait until the war is over, but the IDF and Gallant have countered that during the last few months in which the military have had operational control of nearly all of Gaza avoiding a decision was a missed opportunity.

In my opinion, it is Biden and not Netanyahu who is truly looking out for Israel's best interests. Netanyahu appears to me to think of Hamas as a leadership structure commanding some number of fighters; capture or kill all those people, and the problem is solved. But I think it's more accurate to think of Hamas as an idea: Peace with Israel is impossible.

If at the end of this campaign Palestinians are convinced more than ever that peace with Israel is impossible, Hamas will reform -- no matter how many of its current members Israel kills.

Meanwhile, the current war erodes the possibility of finding Arab partners to administer Gaza after the war ends. Yesterday, Egypt announced that it would support South Africa's genocide charges against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

Pro-Palestine voters who are thinking of not supporting Democrats in the fall need to consider what Republicans will do if they get into power. Here, Lindsey Graham defends how Israel is prosecuting the war in Gaza by invoking the US nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

That was the right decision. Give Israel the bombs they need to end the war they can't afford to lose.

When violent counter-protesters broke up the pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA, the obvious people to suspect were pro-Israel students. But that appears not to be true.

researchers studying hate and anti-government groups have confirmed the presence at the counter-demonstrations of several far-right activists who have been involved in anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-vaccine protests across southern California over the past three years.

This is in line with previous reporting that anti-Muslim and antisemitic online trolls are often the same people. Spreading hate is the point. Any target of opportunity will do.

and the New York Times

I've seen a certain amount of debate in opinion columns about whether the NYT slants left or right. The answer, from my view, is complicated, because I think different things are happening at different levels.

You can't really understand left/right journalistic bias without this observation: Most MAGA positions rely on believing (or at least arguing) things that simply aren't true: an immigrant crime wave is sweeping through America's cities, crime in general is up, climate change isn't real, the Covid vaccine did more harm than good, the economy is terrible, Trump really won the 2020 election (which entails its own full basket of untruths: undocumented immigrants voted, dead people voted, voting machines were rigged ...), healthy fetuses get aborted up to (and even past) the moment of birth, Putin's invasion of Ukraine is justified, the Southern border is "open", January 6 was a peaceful protest led by patriots, the Black Lives Matter protests burned American cities to the ground, and so on. (I'm sure I missed a few.)

At the reporter level, the NYT remains committed to accuracy, so to that extent it has a liberal bias. On any given day, a MAGA true believer who scans the front page of the Times will almost certainly find something to offend his beliefs about the world.

Similarly, NYT columnists are more likely to lean left than right, and conservative NYT columnists are likely to by anti-Trump. (Of course, yesterday they published a guest essay headlined "Biden is Doing it All Wrong.") I have little doubt that as the November election approaches, the Times will officially endorse Biden.

But at the level where decisions about what to cover get made, the Times has been showing a decidedly conservative bias. Here's some data gathered by the CSS Lab at the Annenberg School for Communication.

During the week that [Special Counsel Hur's] report [on Biden's retention of classified documents] came out, we examined the top 20 articles on the Times’ landing page every four hours. In that time, they published 26 unique articles about Biden’s age, of which 1 of them explored the possibility that Trump’s age was of equal or more concern. This seems like a lot of articles in a short amount of time, but it’s hard to say whether or not it is excessive without some other equally relevant issue to compare it with. Helpfully, an obvious comparison arose when, on February 10, 2024, Trump announced that if he regained power he would pull the US out of NATO and even encourage Russian invasions of democratic allies if their financial commitments were not to his liking. This announcement that Trump would upend the world’s core military alignment of the last 75+ years, garnered 10 unique articles in the timeframe.

Less quantitatively, I've been noticing slanted coverage of Trump/Biden polls. Polls that show Trump leading are highlighted, and sometimes garner multiple articles. Polls that show Biden leading get much less coverage. (Again, the polls themselves are reported accurately; reporters seem to be honest and objective.) Among the polls included in 538's polling average so far in May, Biden leads in four, Trump in two, and they are tied in one. Would you have guessed that from reading the Times?

In general, if the Right wants the public to pay attention to some issue, that issue will get extensive coverage in the Times. It won't always be covered in the (false) way the Right wants it covered, but the Times will draw its readers' attention in that direction.

I have no inside knowledge about the NYT. But from the outside it looks like pro-Trump bias at higher levels competes with commitment to accuracy at lower levels.

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Wednesday, the House voted 359-43 to table Marjorie Taylor Greene's motion to oust Speaker Mike Johnson. Democrats joined Republicans to avoid yet another protracted leadership battle. It's not clear what Greene thought she would gain by presenting this motion, which protests all the times in recent months Johnson has allowed bipartisan majorities to pass legislation.

"This is the ‘uni-party’ for the American people watching," Greene said, as if the two parties working together for common goals constituted some kind of betrayal.

A couple of what-Trump-would-do things that have come in recently: He says he'd deport pro-Palestinian protesters and eliminate protections for transgender students.

Not so long ago, "Will you accept the election results even if your side loses?" wasn't considered a gotcha question. But today's MAGA Republicans seem to think it is. Watch Tim Scott squirm around answering it. When the interviewer tries to insist, Scott accuses her of bias: "This is why so many Americans believe that NBC is an extension of the Democrat Party."

What Scott is indirectly pointing to is the main difference between the parties: Democrats remain committed to democracy even when they lose, but Republicans don't.

Steve Bannon's conviction for contempt of Congress was upheld by a federal appeals court. Former US attorney Joyce Vance comments:

Bannon is effectively out of appeals. He can delay a little bit longer, asking for the full court to review the decision en banc & asking SCOTUS to hear his case on cert, but neither one of those things will happen. Bannon is going to prison.

Remember how horrible it was when Biden said "Mexico" instead of "Egypt"? Well, Saturday Trump said "Beijing" when he seems to have meant "Taiwan". And I have no idea what his tribute to "the late, great Hannibal Lecter" was about.

More serious than replacing one word with another, Trump increasingly utters noises that aren't words at all, like "carrydoubtitebyrite" and "bordeninriviv". We all call something by the wrong name occasionally, but I know I've never heard my verbal centers glitch like that. Something is wrong.

I was glad to see Brian Broome answer Jerry Seinfeld's old-man complaint that America has lost its sense of humor due to "the extreme left and PC crap".

I remember my Mom telling me that nobody was funny any more, not like Bob Hope or Red Skelton or the comedians she remembered. This was during the prime of people like Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, and Robin Williams, who I found hilarious.

I remember many of Mom's favorite comedians. They made fun of drunks and mothers-in-law and so forth. At some point that stopped being funny, because comedy is always changing. If Seinfeld's routines have stopped being funny, that's on him, not "the extreme left".

and let's close with something colorful

A cloudy evening caused me to miss this weekend's spectacular display of the northern lights across much of the world. This photo comes from Brunswick, Maine.