The Weekly Sift: September 2024

Monday, September 16, 2024

Positive Influences

Haitians are — culturally, my wife Fran and I have seen this when we’ve been down in Haiti — education is prized. So when you look at all of these things, people who want to work, people who value their kids, who value education, you know, these are positive influences on our community in Springfield, and any comment about that otherwise, I think, is hurtful and is not helpful to the city of Springfield and the people of Springfield.

- Mike DeWine, Republican Governor of Ohio

This week's featured posts are "Where the race stands" and "Lessons from the Haitian Fright".

This week everybody was talking about the debate

One featured post discusses where the race stands post-debate. This note is just about the debate itself. [video, transcript]

All week, MAGA has been throwing stuff at the wall to try to explain how their God-Hero got completely outclassed by a Black woman he has claimed is "dumb as a rock". So far I've heard:

It didn't happen. Trump actually won. But apparently that story wasn't convincing even in MAGA-World, so they also had to come up with explanations for Trump's defeat.
The moderators were against him. It wasn't fair to fact-check him more just because he lied more frequently and more outrageously than Harris. Moderators should have sat there stone-faced when Trump claimed babies are being executed after birth, immigrants in Ohio are eating dogs and cats, or that Trump was being "sarcastic" when he admitted that he had lost the 2020 election.
Kamala must have gotten the questions ahead of time. Obviously there is no way Harris could have anticipated that she would be asked about inflation, abortion, immigration ...
Kamala's earring was really an earphone. I suspect this claim is motivated by jealousy. Trump's handlers wish he had been wearing an earphone, so they could have kept yelling "Forget about crowd sizes! Get back to inflation!"
Kamala was using witchcraft. Seriously. Lance Wallnau, the so-called "father of American Dominionism" detected the "occult empowered deception, manipulation, and domination" on Harris' side, and believes that "something supernatural needs to disrupt this counterfeit momentum". Clearly we need to throw her in a lake and see if she floats. This theory has one advantage over all the others: It explains why Trump floundered. (How could Harris knowing the questions cause Trump to sound like a raving lunatic?) But if Kamala is secretly the reincarnation of Marie Laveau -- I can sort of see a resemblance -- it all makes sense. He rambled and told outrageous lies not because he's old and his brain never did work very well, but because she cast a spell of confusion on him. [BTW: MAGA really should thank me for doing that bit of historical research. If it catches on, we'll know they read the Sift.]

Trump managed to pull a bunch of that together into this totally sane and rational Truth Social post:

ABC FAKE NEWS has been completely discredited, and is now under investigation. Did they give Comrade Kamala the questions? It was 3 on 1, but they were mentally challenged people, against one person of extraordinary genius. It wasn’t even close, as is now reflected in the polls. I WON THE DEBATE!

About the polls ... well, no, they don't say Trump won the debate. But why would Trump start telling the truth at this late date?

My favorite post-debate meme went something like: "No wonder Trump thinks Harris is a Marxist. She just publicly owned him."

Trump has taken a lot of well-deserved ridicule for claiming to have only "concepts of a plan" on healthcare. (He's been using that phrase at least since 2019.) Paul Krugman explains what's going on here: The "phenomenal" healthcare plan Trump has been vaguely discussing since 2015 provides affordable coverage to all Americans. But there are really only two ways to do this:

The government insures people directly, as in Bernie's Medicare for All proposal.
The government subsidizes private insurance, as in ObamaCare.

Trump has repeatedly said these options are both "disasters", so he's stuck. He can fantasize about having an all-singing all-dancing program that solves everybody's problems. But there's no way to flesh out that fantasy, so it never develops beyond a "concept".

BTW: Trump's "concepts of a plan" flashed me back to a party scene in "Annie Hall", where you overhear some random guest saying: "Right now it's only a notion, but I think I can get money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea."

The eating-cats-and-dogs thing grew into its own featured post.

and shots fired on Trump's golf course

We don't know much yet. Sunday, Secret Service agents clearing the hole ahead of Trump spotted a gun barrel in the bushes. They engaged a man who ran away. Reportedly, shots were fired, but whether any were fired by the man in the bushes or just by the agents is unclear. Trump was unharmed. The man, a White American, is now in custody. He appears to be strongly pro-Ukraine, but it's not clear whether that was his motive in stalking Trump.

Trump supporters online have been irresponsibly linking this apparent assassination attempt to the previous attempt, and blaming both on a mysterious "them". Here's Marjorie Taylor Greene:

They are trying to kill him!!! They will do anything to stop him from winning.

As a firmly anti-Trump liberal, let me say this: I don't want him killed and I'm glad nothing came of this attempt. I want Trump discredited, not dead. I want to see him defeated in the election, and I want him to get fair trials on his indictments. If he does go to trial again, I will be rooting for him to be convicted and sentenced to jail. But I don't want him killed. A Trump assassination would probably only unleash something worse on America.

and Laura Loomer

I've decided not to touch the rumors that Trump and Loomer are having an affair. Too often, when a woman rises to some form of prominence, hostile people claim she must be using sex somehow. It's wrong when Trump says it about Harris, and it's wrong here too.

But I don't need to lose my PG-13 rating to criticize Loomer, or to criticize Trump for associating with her. Last week, Loomer responded to a Kamala Harris tweet celebrating her Indian grandparents with a blatantly racist post:

If @KamalaHarris wins, the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center and the American people will only be able to convey their feedback through a customer satisfaction survey at the end of the call that nobody will understand.

That was too racist even for Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lindsey Graham. Always quick to take the high road, Loomer responded to Graham by asking him when he was going to come out of the closet.

The Bulwark's Sam Stein observed that if Republicans are worried about Trump being influenced by a conspiracy theorist, that ship sailed a long time ago. He provided a long list of Trump-promoted conspiracy theories going back to Vince Foster's suicide and questioning whether Osama bin Laden had really been killed.

Marcy Wheeler points out that the Loomer problem is the same as the Putin problem: Trump can be manipulated by flattery.

The problem isn’t Laura Loomer. She’s little different than all the other extremists who remain in Trump’s good graces by performing near-perfect sycophancy. The problem is precisely what Tim Walz warned: Trump’s narcissism and his ego make him weak, vulnerable to any person willing to use flattery to win their objectives. Trump’s aides are making the same argument Tim Walz is: that Trump doesn’t have the self-control to protect against extremists making him their ready tool.

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Just in case you had any doubt that Trump takes everything personally, he posted "I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT" to Truth Social Sunday morning. I love the response from never-Trump Republican Rick Wilson:

Invading Moscow in the winter, fighting a land war in Asia, and going up against the Swifties. These are well regarded as key strategic mistakes in history.

And speaking of Taylor, I am struck speechless by Elon Musk's offer to "give you a child and guard your cats with my life". Usually when I see some outrageous statement, I can imagine some situation or some state of mind where I might be tempted to say something similar. But I've got nothing here. I have no idea what Elon could have been thinking.

In my post about the Haitian Fright, I forgot to mention a Chicago hotdog shop's attempt to make commercial hay out of the controversy:

Don't have time to read the Project 2025 manual? Listen to the song instead.

Various people have speculated that Republicans drummed up the Springfield pet-eating story to distract from something else. Here's one possibility: The Republican candidate running against Sherrod Brown for the Senate has been lying about selling off his business interests, and also about having an MBA.

But I find myself agreeing with David Roberts:

It is getting very difficult to determine which MAGA fiasco is supposed to be a distraction from the other MAGA fiascos.

and let's close with something visual

Some while ago I did a closing featuring a Dad who photoshopped his kids. It seems he's still at it. Here we see a demonstration of a basic principle of physics: Actions produce equal and opposite reactions.

Monday, September 9, 2024

Inaction

We did nothing.

- Donald J. Trump,
summing up his accomplishments on the issue of gun violence

This week's featured post is "The Word of the Week: Sanewashing".

This week everybody was talking about tomorrow night's debate

I'm not going to say much about this because I'm trying not to think about it. It will happen, I can't influence the outcome, and by Wednesday morning we'll know how it went. Kamala Harris is smarter and sharper, but a shameless liar always has a puncher's chance in these things, especially when moderators refuse to fact-check, as they did in the Trump-Biden debate.

Recent polls have Harris up nationally by 2.8%, according to the 538 polling average. Given the Electoral College's thumb on the scale, that's a toss-up. Hillary's popular-vote margin of 2.1% wasn't quite enough, but Biden's 4.5% definitely was. Democrats hold a similar 2.6% edge in congressional generic ballot polls.

The Electoral College shames our country. Twice in this century, it has allowed the candidate who got the second-most votes to claim the presidency. People only support the Electoral College to rationalize the unfair advantage it gives their side. Can you imagine how Trump would scream if he got more votes than his opponent, but still lost the election?

I've decided not to do a state-of-the-race post until after the debate. But here's Ruben Bolling's account of the campaign so far.

and Russia, Russia, Russia

We all know that "the Big Lie" is Trump's claim that he really won the 2020 election, and his victory was stolen from him by fraud. But a lie of similar size is his claim that "Russia, Russia, Russia" was a hoax cooked up by his enemies, and that investigations like the Mueller Report "cleared" him of wrongdoing. (This is covered in Chapter 1 of Steve Benen's new book "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, reality, and the Republicans' war on the recent past".)

John Durham's sham investigation of "the Russia hoax" went on longer than the Mueller investigation, and came up empty when juries quickly dismissed two prosecutions against minor characters in its conspiracy theory. The "crime of the century" Trump advertised was never revealed.

This week we got a reminder that Russia has never stopped trying to promote the American right wing. An indictment released Wednesday charges that the Russian state media company RT funneled $10 million through an American company (obviously Tenet Media, though the indictment does not name the company) to fund right-wing influencers online.

The people who ultimately got the money are all claiming they were duped, and had no idea Russia was funding their work. Author Renée DiResta observes:

Buying authentic influencers is a far better use of funds than creating fake personas, because they bring their own trusting audiences and are actually, you know, real.

The Democratic Mormon X-account Dem Saints notes "The irony of calling Kamala a communist while cashing Russian checks."

and the Georgia school shooting

Wednesday, a 14-year-old brought an AR-type weapon to Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia and began shooting, killing four and wounding nine. He has been charged with murder and will be tried as an adult. His father faces manslaughter and other charges for providing the gun “with knowledge [his son] was a threat to himself and others.”

I'm not sure how I feel about either of those prosecuting decisions. No matter what he's done, a 14-year-old is not an adult. And the father deserves consequences of some sort, but manslaughter seems a bit much. More punishment is not the solution to every problem.

Gun violence (like climate change) is one issue where the difference between the two parties is stark. Kamala Harris responded: "It doesn't have to be this way." Meanwhile, J. D. Vance said: "This is a fact of life." Donald Trump called the shooter "a sick and deranged monster", as if the important issue for a leader to address is how to assess blame. In the past he has said "We have to get over it, we have to move forward.", as if school shootings are acts of God with no policy implications.

Another Republican response came from Governor Kemp:

This is not the day to talk about safety or policy. We need thoughts and prayers for the victims, law enforcement, and educators.

For Kemp, it never is the day. Just two years ago, he signed a law that allows Georgians to carry handguns in public without a license or background check.

And here's Trump, accepting the endorsement of the NRA in May:

In my second term, we will roll back every Biden attack on the Second Amendment.

At an NRA event in February he bragged:

During my four years, nothing happened. And there was great pressure on me, having to do with guns. We did nothing.

This TikTok video is a very raw response from a Mom who says she takes pictures of her kids every day so she will know what they were wearing in case something happens. She contrasts Trump's attention to imaginary issues like schools changing kids' genders with his disinterest in actual problems like kids getting shot at school.

Former Missouri high school teacher (and one of my favorite Substack bloggers) Jess Piper describes how disturbing active shooter drills are for teachers, not to mention students.

I also know that kids who are stuck in the hallway during an active shooter event are left in the hallway. Every single police officer who conducted drills told us the same thing: if you have a student begging to get into your classroom, refuse them. They could be the shooter.

During one drill, complete with explosions and smoke in the hallway, someone pounded on her locked classroom door and begged to be let in. She followed instructions and did not open the door. Even though she knew it was a drill, she felt traumatized afterwards. (Fortunately this was a teachers-only drill with no students present.)

Piper lists the common-sense changes the vast majority of voters would like to see: universal background checks, safe storage laws, and red flag laws.

Those proposals run into the same objections gun-violence apologists always raise: They won't stop every shooter. No solution is perfect, so we should do nothing.

Qasim Rashid rebuts the nine most common NRA myths.

If you're willing to accept school shootings as a "fact of life" and think government should "do nothing" about them, you know how to vote. If you believe that it doesn't have to be this way, you also know how to vote.

and the corporate media covering for Trump's mental decline

That's the subject of the featured post, introducing the term sanewashing, which has been around for a while, but whose usage has recently exploded.

and Trump's legal cases

Judge Juan Merchan delayed sentencing Trump for his 34 felony convictions until after the election. Frustrating as this is, Politico's Ankush Khardori explains the judge's thinking.

The federal January 6 case is back in Judge Chutkan's court, which now has to deal with the Supreme Court's invention of presidential immunity. There are so many issues to sort out that we are still months or maybe even years away from trial, even if Trump doesn't win the election and order the Justice Department to drop the charges. But between now and election day Chutkan may hold evidentiary hearings or request briefs that could allow Jack Smith to introduce evidence the public hasn't seen yet.

Trump must think the E. Jean Carroll defamation cases (where juries found him responsible for sexual abuse and defamation, totaling up to nearly $90 million in damages) works in his favor politically, because he purposefully called attention to it Friday.

He didn't have to show up for the hearing in federal appeals court about his attempt to overturn the initial $5 million verdict, but he did. He also didn't have to make a 49-minute statement to the press afterward, but he did that too.

The appeals court can't just substitute its own judgment for the jury's, because the jury heard witness testimony live rather than reading it in a transcript. So who the jury decided to believe is not reviewable. What the appeal is about is whether the jury should have been allowed to hear one of the witnesses at all, or listen to the infamous Access Hollywood tape, where Trump confessed to doing in general the kind of thing Carroll accused him of specifically.

The witness in question supported Carroll's case by testifying that Trump had groped her on an airplane, something he continues to deny. In his press statement, Trump did what he so often does, saying that the witness wasn't attractive enough to assault.

Frankly, I know you’re going to say it’s a terrible thing to say, but it couldn’t have happened, it didn’t happen, and she wouldn’t have been the chosen one. She would not have been the chosen one.

"The chosen one" -- as if it's an honor, and women are lining up hoping that Trump will grope them. All I can say is: "What an asshole." You can watch the video here; it looks and sounds just as bad as it reads.

Oh, and Trump also lied about Anderson Cooper, as Cooper demonstrated Friday evening.

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The world's most "liveable" city? Vienna.

I was going to write a summary of the Democrats' best chance to retain the Senate, but I was going to say exactly what Jay Kuo says: It all comes down to Jon Tester winning in Montana and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell beating Rick Scott in Florida. Doing both probably keeps the 51-49 margin.

The knock on most renewable energy is that it's unreliable; the sun isn't always shining and the wind doesn't always blow. The answer to that problem is battery storage. The Economist reports on the state of grid-scale batteries.

Massachusetts is making a major investment in offshore wind power.

How fast climate change causes sea level to rise depends to a large extent on what is happening under the glaciers of Greenland -- and nobody really knows.

It's September and Republicans control the House, so it must be time to talk about a government shutdown. The issue House Republicans are pushing this time is to require proof of citizenship to register to vote.

That provision may sound reasonable if you don't think about it too long -- after all, we all want American elections to be decided by Americans. But basically it causes a problem without solving a problem.

It causes a problem because lots of legal American voters can't easily produce proof of citizenship. In general, poor people have little incentive to get a passport, and Americans who have moved around a lot may have lost track of their birth certificates a few hops ago. (Again, there's a socio-economic factor: If you've ever had to leave someplace in a hurry, taking all your important papers with you may not have been a priority.) You can probably go back to the county where you were born and pay a fee to get a new copy, but that's a big enough hurdle to keep many people from voting -- which may be the whole point.

As for the problem this idea is supposed to solve -- noncitizens voting -- it isn't really a problem. Noncitizen voting is already illegal, and there is absolutely no evidence that significant numbers of noncitizens are voting (other than in local elections in cities that allow it). U.S. News summarizes:

Almost all available data says that noncitizen voting in federal elections, though not unprecedented, is incredibly rare.

In 2016, North Carolina audited its elections and found that 41 legal immigrants had cast ballots despite not yet being citizens out of 4.8 million votes cast. The state’s election board found that the votes made no difference in any state election.

Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger conducted an audit of the state’s voter rolls in 2022 and found that 1,634 had attempted to register but all were caught and none were actually registered.

God help me, but I agree strongly with Dick Cheney.

In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again

I still hold him responsible for the Bush administration's torture policy and would like to see him tried at The Hague. But he's right this time, and I appreciate him not including some poison pill in his endorsement. I couldn't have made the point better.

In recent weeks there has been a steady drumbeat of Republicans (or former Republicans) endorsing Harris: Adam Kinzinger; Liz Cheney; 238 staffers of the Bushes, Mitt Romney, and John McCain; Jimmy McCain; Rupert Murdoch's son James; and many others.

Other Republicans have not endorsed Harris, but have announced that they won't vote for Trump: Mike Pence, Pat Toomey, Meghan McCain, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan.

The way the announcements are dribbling out makes me wonder if someone in the Harris campaign is orchestrating the timing. But apparently it's not all leading up to George W. Bush, whose office says he won't endorse anyone this year.

In case you still respect Elon Musk: On September 1, he retweeted (with the comment "Interesting observation.") a totally wacko theory that only "high-status" or "high-T" men should have input into political decision-making. The justification is that "people who aren't able to defend themselves physically" process everything through a "safety filter" and aren't free to ask "Is this true?" The ideal is "Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think."

Maybe I'm having a low-T day, but I can't remember ever considering the idea that testosterone might enhance rationality. There's a reason why we talk about guys who "think with their dicks". When the ancient Athenian playwright Sophocles got old and felt his libido waning, he compared it to being freed from a harsh master.

The week's best comeback. The Economist published an article "The hard right takes Germany into uncharted territory". And Jathan Sadowski replied:

Oh I don't know, I think that territory is actually very well charted.

The Economist edited, replacing "uncharted" with "dangerous".

and let's close with something tasty

Have a few thousand gallons of milk you need to do something with before they go bad? Maybe you too can take a run at the Guinness record for the largest ball of string cheese. The UPI story and the YouTube link disagree about the exact weight. (Was it 2200 pounds or just 1400 pounds? I think the YouTube link just did the kilogram/pound conversion wrong.) But it's big. Sadly, the story doesn't say whether anyone will get to eat it.

Monday, September 2, 2024

Cornerstones

It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today: the 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of middle-class security all bear the union label.

- Barack Obama

This week's featured posts are "Can Trump Steal Georgia?" and "A Week in Trump's Declining Spiral".

This week everybody was talking about Trump's downward spiral

As I explained in the Teaser, I didn't really set out to write two Trump articles this week. I planned the Georgia article, but then as the week went on, there was some new Trump outrage every single day. This summary was getting swamped with them, so I moved them all to their own article.

and the Harris interview

Wednesday night, CNN aired a much-ballyhooed interview (transcript, video parts 1, 2, 3) where Dana Bash asked questions and Kamala Harris and Tim Walz answered them. The Democratic ticket survived the interview without blundering, but overall the interview just underlined the point I was making two weeks ago: Mainstream political journalism is broken. Answering their stupid questions does nothing to serve the cause of democracy.

Bash spent the interview asking Harris and Walz to respond to baseless accusations Trump and Vance keep making. Basically, she was playing the role of the trouble-making gossips I knew in junior high. ("Do you know what Marcy is saying about you?") I find myself agreeing with Jeff Tiedrich (who elaborated in more colorful language than I'm going to use here):

“Tim Walz lied about IVF” is a right-wing talking point. “Kamala Harris isn’t really Black” is a right-wing talking point.

pestering Democratic candidates about right-wing talking points is not journalism. it’s being a Republican tool.

The exchange that sums up the interview is this one:

BASH: Speaking of Republicans, I want to ask you about your opponent, Donald Trump. ... He suggested that you happened to turn Black recently for political purposes, questioning a core part of your identity.
HARRIS: Yeah.
BASH: Any—
HARRIS: Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please. (LAUGH)
BASH: That’s it?
HARRIS: That’s it.

Bash may have been surprised by Harris' dismissal of her question, but did it deserve any lengthier answer? Like a junior-high gossip, wasn't Bash angling for Harris to insult Trump in some way she could then carry back to him? ("Kamala Harris says you're a racist. How do you respond to that?")

Even the questions that sounded substantive really weren't. For example, Bash started the interview with: "What would you do on Day 1?"

Day 1 is only interesting when there is a change in parties, because -- unless the new president wants to be a dictator, as Trump has said he does -- the only possible actions are executive orders that reverse the previous administration's orders. So Biden's Day 1 was significant because he

rejoined the Paris Climate Accords
reversed Trump's Muslim ban
stopped construction on Trump's border wall
reversed Trump's moves to disengage from the World Health Organization.

Harris doesn't have any similar night-and-day disagreements with Biden's orders. Everything she has been talking about -- restore the protections of Roe v Wade, safeguard voting rights, restore the child tax credit, build more affordable housing, subsidize first-time home buyers, shift some of the tax burden from the middle class to the very rich, pass the border bill Trump had his minions in Congress block, etc. -- requires the cooperation of Congress, which isn't going to get any of it done in one day.

Bash knows this, so why is she asking? To set up critical headlines, like Politico's "Harris Dodged Questions About Her Day One Plans". (Politico's article went on to describe the dramatic actions five presidents took on Day 1. All five, of course, replaced presidents from the opposite party.)

How do maneuvers like this serve the voters, or democracy in general?

Asha Rangappa posts an interesting analysis of why Harris dismissed Bash's turned-Black question, and how this tactic is driving Trump nuts.

Rangappa points to the Karpman Drama Triangle, which simplifies interpersonal conflicts down to three roles: persecutor, rescuer, and victim. From time to time Trump takes any of the roles, but his goal is always to wind up as the Victim, as in "I did everything right, and they indicted me."

By saying "Next question, please", Harris is refusing to strike back at Trump and give him something to play the Victim over.

In contrast to their criticism of Harris for avoiding interviews, the media often gives Trump credit for responding to questions. But they never ask him anything hard, like: "What were you planning to do with the classified documents you were keeping at Mar-a-Lago? And why did you tell the government you had given them all back when you hadn't?"

They don't ask such questions because they know what the response (which doesn't qualify as an "answer") would be: "That's a nasty question. You're the fake media."

Let's be honest: When Trump faces real questions, he never answers them. To this day, he hasn't given a coherent response to the charges in any of his four indictments. (Instead, he attacks the prosecutors, the judges, the FBI, the witnesses, the jurors, and the Biden administration. He makes sweeping denials like "I did nothing wrong." But he never addresses the evidence against him.) He complains that the media doesn't tell his side of the story, but that's because he has never settled on a single story to tell.

In view of all the stuff Trump has gotten away with (so far), I have to laugh at the attempt to drum up some Lilliputian Harris scandal. This week's attempt: She claims she worked at McDonalds, but never listed it on a resume. Does anybody applying for a job after law school list their fast-food summer jobs on their resumes?

The media often digs into the nuts-and-bolts inside-baseball of campaigning -- fund-raising, polls, ads, strategies -- but presents a very naive view of governing. They want a detailed picture of a candidate's policy proposals, as if presidents were kings who could simply decree those proposals into law.

That's how you get questions like Bash's "The steps that you’re talking about now, why haven’t you done them already?" A bunch of those "steps" -- codifying Roe v Wade protections, passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, passing the border bill, restoring the child tax credit -- have gone to Congress and been blocked by the House Republican majority. Others, like shifting the tax burden from the middle class to the billionaires, stand no chance of getting Republican support.

Every administration's policies are a compromise between the president's vision and what can get through Congress. Implicit in all of Harris' proposals is the assumption that Democrats will hold the Senate and regain the majority in the House.

During its first two years, when it had slim Democratic majorities, the Biden/Harris administration managed to get done an amazing number of things -- far more than Trump -- like funding infrastructure (which Trump kept promising but never accomplished), and beginning to transition away from a fossil-fuel economy that is leading to a climate-change apocalypse (a transition Trump wants to reverse with a drill-baby-drill policy, which somehow will make bacon cheaper). But no, they weren't able to implement the full Democratic change agenda. During the last two years, they have artfully kept MAGA nihilists in the House and Republican partisans on the Supreme Court from undoing all that progress, but they haven't managed to push further.

In this environment, ten-step plans are beside the point. Voters need to understand the sharp contrast in the underlying values of the two parties.

Women have rights vs. wombs belong to the state.
Save the planet for future generations vs. drill-baby-drill.
Stand up for democracy vs. give in to Putin.
Focus policy on the middle class vs. cut billionaires' taxes and wait for prosperity to trickle down.
Support the rule of law vs. let presidents commit crimes and become autocrats.

How many details do you need to pick a side?

and the hostages

Six more Israeli hostages were found dead in Gaza over the weekend. According to AP:

Three of the six hostages found dead — including an Israeli-American — were reportedly scheduled to be released in the first phase of a cease-fire proposal discussed in July.

The deaths sparked massive protests in Israel yesterday, with protesters charging that the Netanyahu government is not doing enough to get the remaining hostages returned. The nation's largest union has announced a nationwide general strike to begin this morning.

The Biden administration perpetually claims to be on the verge of getting a hostages-for-ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, but something always falls through at the last minute. Naturally, each side blames the other for not negotiating in good faith and not really wanting peace. It is difficult to criticize one side without seeming to endorse the other.

According to local authorities, more than 40,000 Palestinians have died as a result of the fighting in Gaza. It is never clear how many of them were Hamas warriors and how many were civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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I've been wondering for some while about the persistent charges that Democrats support "abortion after birth". Since I've never seen a Democrat endorse the idea, or heard any examples of an after-birth abortions happening somewhere, I've assumed these are just lies.

But lies are usually based on something, even if reality has been grossly distorted by the time the claims get made. I think I've finally found the something in this case.

Back in 2022, California passed a law AB 2223, which protected women from prosecution after miscarriages.

The law came in response to the prosecution of two Kings County women who were criminally charged after having miscarriages. Though charges in both cases were dismissed, one woman spent 16 months in jail and the other spent nearly four years. The Kings County District Attorney has vowed to bring new charges in one case, according to CalMatters. According to Wicks’ office, at least 1,300 people have been criminally prosecuted for having miscarriages, stillbirths or self-managed abortions in the last 20 years.

AB 2223 and its author drew heavy criticism from the conservative anti-abortion movement, with some organizations, such as the California Family Council, alleging that the bill would effectively decriminalize infanticide. That is not true. The law does prevent pregnant people from being criminally charged in the event that an infant dies due to pregnancy-related causes. It does not decriminalize the killing of infants.

So if a miscarriage or self-managed abortion results in a baby who is alive but fatally damaged, the woman can't be charged if the baby dies from that damage.

Other states have since passed similar laws, resulting in the after-birth abortion rhetoric.

I still haven't got a handle on the feud between Elon Musk and Brazil's supreme court. But this week it led to the court ordering Brazilian ISPs to block the Twitter/X platform.

The dispute stems from X's usefulness as a tool for spreading dangerous disinformation, like bad health advice or incitement to political violence. Brazil demanded that X block certain disinformation-spreading accounts, which Musk called "censorship" and refused to do.

I'm sure many other countries are also worried about X and disinformation, so they are watching to see how this plays out.

Back in the 2000 campaign, Republicans would sum up Bush's charm advantage over Gore by asking which candidate you'd rather have a beer with (ignoring the fact that Bush was a recovering alcoholic who couldn't drink any more). In 2024, I propose a different test: Who would you rather go to the state fair with?

and let's close with something that takes training

Throwing out the first pitch is a longtime baseball ceremony that is typically used to call attention to some local celebrity or community leader. Some honorees wilt under the pressure of being watched by thousands, and bounce the ball to the plate or toss it so wide of the mark that it can't be caught.

But Wednesday, Shohei Ohtani's dog Decoy delivered a memorable first pitch for a game between Ohtani's Dodgers and the Baltimore Orioles. With Shohei behind the plate, Decoy squatted on the pitching rubber waiting for the sign, then picked up the baseball with his mouth and delivered it directly to his master, dropping it onto home.

Shohei also had a good game, hitting a home run and stealing two bases.