The Weekly Sift: September 2024

Monday, September 30, 2024

Keeping Watch

Here’s the guy that inherited $200 million. If he hadn’t inherited $200 million, you know where Donald Trump would be right now? Selling watches in Manhattan.

- Marco Rubio, in a 2016 presidential debate

This week's featured post is "Questions for Donald Trump".

This week everybody was talking about Helene

Hurricane Helene hit the Florida panhandle Friday as a Category 4 hurricane, then proceeded inland through Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and Tennessee "causing 64 deaths and severe damage. Millions lost power, and the storm caused up to $110 billion in losses, with rescue efforts still underway in many areas."

Disaster footage hits harder when you recognize the places the news people are talking about. Here's a news clip from Asheville, NC, where I've vacationed.

There's always an argument about whether any particular storm or disaster is caused by climate change, but Helene's rapid transition from Category 2 to Category 4 is the kind of thing that didn't used to happen. Hurricanes pick up energy from warm ocean waters, and climate change has been warming the oceans.

Page 664 of Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership:

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories

and Mayor Adams' indictment

The most recent Democrat to run afoul of Biden's Department of Justice is New York Mayor Eric Adams, who was indicted Wednesday on five counts, revolving around bribery and illegal campaign contributions from sources related to the government of Turkey. (The NY Post had a classic headline: "Grand Theft Ottoman".) The charges go back to his term as Borough President of Brooklyn.

Adams has pleaded not guilty and pledged to stay in office.

Merrick Garland's Justice Department is supposedly "weaponized" against Republicans, but somehow they've found time to prosecute not just Adams, but also Democratic Senator Bob Menendez and Congressman Henry Cuellar, in addition to Jack Smith's indictments of Donald Trump. Maybe it's time to recognize that DoJ is just enforcing the law.

and Israel's attacks on Lebanon

Israel has followed up last week's pager-attack on Hezbollah with bombing raids against Lebanon. Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed, as well as other Hezbollah leaders and a Hamas leader in Lebanon.

As satisfying as such results are to a country at war, they tend to have little long-term impact. American attacks in Afghanistan were constantly killing high-ranking Taliban officials, and yet the Taliban won the war. Nasrallah himself replaced a previous Hezbollah commander who was killed by an Israeli raid in 1992.

As long as there is grass-roots support for resistance, new leaders will always emerge. And short of genocide, there is no purely military way to stamp out grass-roots resistance. Ultimately, peace has to be negotiated with leaders who have enough popular credibility to make concessions.

Peter Beinart:

Israel’s fundamental problem is that it’s holding millions of Palestinians who lack basic rights and there are many people all over the Middle East who are outraged by that, and some of them are willing to fight Israel over it.

That fact has military consequences, but at its root is not a problem with a military solution.

Thomas Friedman sees Netanyahu's strategy as a blunder that risks Israel's future.

Israel is in terrible danger. It is fighting the most just war in its history — responding to the brutal, unprovoked murder and abduction of women and children and grandparents by Hamas — and yet today Israel is more of a pariah state than ever.

Why? Because when you fight a war like this with no political horizon for this long — one that denies any possibility for more-moderate Palestinians to govern Gaza — the Israeli military operation there just starts to look like endless killing for killing’s sake. That is just what Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran want.

The people I am quoting here are not antisemites or even anti-Zionists. They are American Jews with a strong commitment to Israel who see no future in the current Israeli policies.

and Trump jumping the shark

I was skeptical two weeks ago when Jay Kuo posted "He's jumped the shark" to his Substack blog.

Jumping the shark became a cautionary metaphor for when a show goes awry and is desperate for new ideas and ratings. And since Trump is fundamentally a television personality, and we are all living through his twisted reality show, it is notable that, in desperation over his flagging candidacy and polls showing him trailing Vice President Kamala Harris, the writer, producer and chief protagonist of Unhappy Days has now jumped the shark, too.

Kuo interpreted the eating-cats-and-dogs libel and "I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!" as shark jumps, desperate pleas for the public attention Trump used to get as a matter of course. Well, maybe. Both took old reliable Trump themes -- immigrants are ruining America and outspoken women are nasty -- and turned them up to 11. But I wasn't convinced.

Lately, though, Trump himself has been convincing me. Another longstanding Trump theme has been: "I'm a billionaire. Can you send me your money?" Initially, of course, he bragged about being so rich he could self-fund his 2016 campaign. ("I don't need anybody's money.") But that didn't last, and much of that early self-funding consisted of loans that were paid back to him by red-hatters from trailer parks who sent his campaign $25 a month.

During his presidency, he continued to run businesses that at times doubled as pipelines for bribes. Want to get the President's attention? Pay a few hundred thousand to join his golf club. Stay in his overpriced hotel when you come to Washington. Hold your favor-seeking organization's executive retreat at a Trump property.

But as Election Day approaches and the possibility of permanent exile from the spotlight looms, Trump may not be campaigning that hard, but he is going all out to fleece his sheep as thoroughly as possible. The latest grifts are dialed up well past 11, to 14 or 15.

Of course there are the $500 gold (or silver, if you're not really a true believer) Trump sneakers, and the autographed Trump Bible for $1,000 -- or $60 without the signature. ($1,000 is cheap. You're thousands of years too late to get Jesus or Moses to autograph your Bible. But it's not too late for Trump.) Those have been available for a long time.

But now you can get a gold-plated coin commemorating him surviving the July assassination attempt. And $99 Trump digital trading cards that (if you buy 75 or more of them) will get you a fragment of the suit he wore when he debated Biden in June.

Even that is just chump change, though. If you're a real Trumper, how can you resist the new Trump Watch? For a mere $100K, you can get 1 of 147 numbered gold watches with diamonds. They don't actually exist yet, will probably be made in China, may not look like the ones in the ad, and Trump has nothing to do with them other than a licensing agreement and a marketing video. But they're guaranteed to be gaudy and say "Trump" somewhere. What more could you ask for?

Too rich for your blood? Get the $499 version (which The Bulwark estimates costs $60 to make; they guess the $100K watch might cost as much as $20K).

And then there are Trump investments. If you had bought Trump Media stock when it went public on March 26, you might have paid $79 a share. Friday it closed at $14.75, so your $10,000 investment would be worth $1,867. And even at that price, investment professionals warn that it's wildly overvalued.

Given that DJT’s main asset is the social media platform Truth Social, with annual revenues less than $5 million, it’s hard to validate an enterprise value above $2 billion.

Have any more capital burning a hole in your pocket? Soon you'll be able to invest in World Liberty Financial, a Trump-controlled cryptocurrency exchange that will have its own digital coin (which you could use to bribe the president should Trump manage to win the election). Now that's a sure thing if I've ever seen one.

Even Melania is trying to cash in before the windows close.

Trump has also been pushing his authoritarian rhetoric past 11. In Erie Sunday, he discussed shoplifting and other retail crime. His solution: Turn the police loose on criminals without any rules.

The police aren’t allowed to do their job. ... You know, if you had one day, like, one real rough, nasty day ... One rough hour, and I mean real rough. The word will get out and it will end immediately. End immediately. You know? It will end immediately.

A right-wing media-watching group says that Google's search algorithm is more favorable to Harris than Trump. Trump's reaction: Prosecute Google.

This is an ILLEGAL ACTIVITY, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant Interference of Elections. If not, and subject to the Laws of our Country, I will request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the Election, and become President of the United States!

Fox News "shouldn't be allowed" to cover Kamala Harris rallies:

And then I have to sit there and listen to her bullshit last night. And who puts it on? Fox News. And they shouldn't be allowed to put it on.

And freedom-of-speech be damned; people who criticize judges he likes should be put in jail.

They were very brave, the Supreme Court. Very brave. And they take a lot of hits because of it. It should be illegal, what happens. You know, you have these guys like playing the ref, like the great Bobby Knight. These people should be put in jail the way they talk about our judges and our justices, trying to … sway their vote, sway their decision.

Of course, trying to intimidate a judge is exactly what he was doing during his Manhattan trial. But that's the heart of authoritarianism: For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.

and abortion

Republicans continue to discuss abortion in the most ham-handed ways. A little over a week ago, Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno said this:

You know, the left has a lot of single issue voters. Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, "Listen, abortion is it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else." … OK. It’s a little crazy by the way, but — especially for women that are like past 50 — I’m thinking to myself, "I don’t think that’s an issue for you."

It's hard to beat the response of The Daily Show's Desie Lydic:

Yeah. How dare a woman who can't get pregnant care about abortion? Only men who can't get pregnant are allowed to care about abortion. People should only care about issues that effect their bodies. Why do you care about it, Bernie Moreno? It's abortion, not the rising price of extra-small condoms.

More generally, Moreno's "whenever I want" framing shows a profound misunderstanding of the whole concept of Freedom. There may be a lot of things I don't want to do at the moment. But that doesn't I'm OK with the government telling me I can't do them. For example, I may not be planning to read any of the books Moms for "Liberty" wants to ban from public libraries. But I still object to banning them, because Freedom.

And then there's this from Trump, which I'm cobbling together from two sources:

I make this statement to the great women of our country. Sadly, women are poorer than they were four years ago, are less healthy than they were four years ago, are less safe on the streets than they were four years ago, are paying much higher prices for groceries and everything else than they were four years ago. I will fix all of that, and fast, and at long last this nation, and national nightmare, will end. It will end. Because I am your protector. ... You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger. You’re not gonna be in danger any longer. You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector. Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.

My first thought after hearing this was "These are not the droids you're looking for." Trump seems to be making a very inept attempt to do a Jedi mind-trick, and I'm not sure who he expects to fall for it. Women are supposed to forget about their right to bodily autonomy because a man (who has a long history of fraud) offers some vague promises about how wonderful he will make their lives? Who's going to buy that pitch?

and you also might be interested in ...

The Walz-Vance vice presidential debate is tomorrow night. I expect Walz to do well, but VP debates seldom move the needle.

A progressive grass-roots media group in Michigan posts a disturbing report about their experiences at a Trump rally in Warren Friday. I'm not putting too much stock in it, because it is an anti-MAGA group I've never heard of before, and they offer no video or other supporting evidence. But it's worth noting to see if it lines up with any subsequent reports.

The WaPo provides and in-depth look at a Florida woman raising a trans daughter during the DeSantis era.

In Eugene, Oregon you get three choices when you call for help from the city: Police, Fire, and CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets). If somebody is losing control and acting out in disturbing (but not obviously dangerous) ways, maybe they don't need armed police officers shouting orders at them. Some other professionals might be better trained to deal with their situation.

Here, all you have to do is press 3 instead of 1. This is what is meant by “defund the police” (a phrase that we need to eliminate asap). Diverting SOME funds away from police in order to bolster community services like this.

A Wisconsin mother explains why school shootings worry her more than drag shows.

and let's close with something memorable

In honor of Maggie Smith, who died this week at age 89, here's a collection of memorable lines she delivered as the Dowager Countess of Downton Abbey.

Monday, September 23, 2024

Weak Institutions and Special Rules

I don't think anyone can dispute either of those two points: that there's been no coverage of Trump's dementia comparable to the discussion of Biden's age and that hacked Democratic campaign emails would be getting covered. That's a different standard and one that is markedly lower for Trump. It's that simple. It doesn't mean that the Times hasn't taught the public a lot about Trump. There have been a lot of revealing stories. But they are easier on Trump than on other candidates. That's how narcissistic sociopaths work. They get weak institutions to make special rules for them.

-Doug J. Balloon (NYT Pitchbot)

This week's featured post is "Squirrel!"

This week everybody was talking about keeping the government open

It looks like House Republicans aren't eager to sacrifice themselves for Trump. Trump had been demanding that any deal to keep the government open include the Save Act, requiring proof of citizenship for a person to register to vote. It's not clear what real-world problem that was supposed to solve, since non-citizen voting is already illegal and there is no evidence that law has been ineffective. But it would reinforce among the MAGA faithful the false impression that non-citizens are voting Democratic in large numbers. That, in turn, might set up all sorts of shenanigans should Trump lose again in November. Wednesday, he posted this on Truth Social:

If Republicans don’t get the SAVE Act, and every ounce of it, they should not agree to a Continuing Resolution in any way, shape, or form. Democrats are registering Illegal Voters by the TENS OF THOUSANDS, as we speak – They will be voting in the 2024 Presidential Election, and they shouldn’t be allowed to. Only American Citizens should be voting in our Most Important Election in History, or any Election!

Wednesday, however, Speaker Johnson was unable to pass such a resolution in the House, leaving him with no negotiating leverage against the Senate, where the Save Act is a non-starter. So yesterday he agreed to a clean continuing resolution that funds the government through December.

and attacks in Lebanon

Israel shifted its attention from Hamas to Hezbollah this week, with airstrikes on Lebanon and a sci-fi-like attack using exploding pagers.

and Mark Robinson

It's time for another round of Republican limbo: North Carolina candidate for governor Mark Robinson just set the bar lower than ever, and the GOP continues to contort its moral standards to pass under it with him.

So CNN found a bunch of messages Robinson posted to a message board on the porn site Nude Africa between 2008 and 2012. (I haven't seen them, but I am told many include disgusting images.) In the printable ones, he proclaimed himself a "black NAZI" and advocated bringing slavery back, saying "Some people need to be slaves."

Robinson denies he posted those messages, but CNN has pretty good evidence it's him. If he's being framed, somebody must have started building the frame back in 2008, when Robinson was not a public figure.

Robinson was already trailing Democrat Josh Stein by 9.4%, largely because of his penchant for ridiculously inflammatory statements, like comparing transpeople to "maggots" and "flies", telling them to "find a corner outside somewhere" rather than use a gendered bathroom, and saying that "Abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of mothers. It is about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down." The posts on Nude Africa are shocking at one level, but on another level they sound like him. Whatever he says, he says bigly. David French puts it like this:

No one, however, should be surprised. Even before the primary, Robinson’s horrific character was on display. Among other things, he had called school shooting survivors who advocated gun control “media prosti-tots,” accused Michelle Obama of being a man, and trafficked in so many antisemitic tropes that his election as lieutenant governor in 2020 was an alarm bell for Jewish leaders in the state.

In other words, Republican voters knew he was a bad man when they chose him. Now they know he is a very bad man.

In the pre-Trump era, something like the Nude Africa posts would have been immediately disqualifying, and members of his own party would be demanding that Robinson leave the race. But the GOP is standing by him, because the only standard the Party has these days is loyalty to Trump, who hasn't rescinded his ringing endorsements, like when he called Robinson "Martin Luther King on steroids".

Instead, Trump is pretending Robinson doesn't exist. Robinson was neither invited nor mentioned at Trump's rally in North Carolina Saturday. But Robinson's staff is running away en masse.

Chris Christie connects Robinson to past MAGA losers like Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania and Hershel Walker in Georgia:

This is the problem for us Republicans. As long as Donald Trump is your recruiting agent for candidates in swing states, we're going to continue to get our rear ends handed to us.

French thinks Trump's damage to his party goes further:

In nine years, countless Republican primary voters have moved from voting for Trump in spite of his transgressions to rejecting anyone who doesn’t transgress. If you’re not transgressive, you’re suspicious. Decency is countercultural in the Republican Party. It’s seen as a rebuke of Trump.

and the race

Since my state-of-the-race post last week, the national polls haven't changed much: from Harris +2.7 to Harris +2.6 in the 538 average, and Harris +1.8 to Harris +2.2 in RCP. Some of the state polls look better, particularly Pennsylvania, which went from Harris +0.6 to Harris +1.3.

Trump's response to the Harris townhall Oprah did:

When I watched her interview yesterday with a woman who is destroying, through her complete and total incompetence, America, I couldn’t help but think this isn’t the real Oprah

It's hard to tell whether "not the real Oprah" is supposed to be metaphoric or whether he thinks she's physically been replaced.

Heather Cox Richardson looks at the history of the Electoral College, and the persistent advantage it gives Republicans. Unlike some historians, she doesn't attribute the origin of the EC to pro-slavery interests, but she believes pro-slavery interests made it impossible to eliminate in the 1830s. I hadn't realized that the winner-take-all provision for each state's electoral votes (other than Nebraska and Maine) wasn't part of the Founders' original vision.

and Trump's armed stalker

It's fascinating to me how quickly the second Trump "assassination attempt" story has come and gone, except inside the MAGA information silos.

One factor is how much less the story turned out to be than the first announcement -- that shots had been fired on a course where Trump was golfing. It turned out the shots had been fired by Secret Service agents at a guy hiding in the bushes with a rifle, who never got a good look at Trump. Without the agents' intervention, it might have turned into an assassination attempt. (So the Deep State saves the day again!) But all it really amounted to was an armed stalking.

And then there were the unnecessary conspiracy theories. Like: Trump's round of golf wasn't on his schedule, so how could the would-be assassin have known? It must have been an inside job! Well, cellphone records say he had been waiting in the woods for 12 hours. If you're looking for Trump, pick out a day when he's not campaigning and stake out his golf course. How much inside knowledge does that take?

Residents say Trump spends almost every Sunday at the West Palm Beach golf club when he is not on the campaign trail.

Then there was how quickly Trump moved to take advantage of the incident. A bunch of social media criticism went something like: "The first thing I do when someone tries to kill me is send out a fund-raising email."

MAGA World's attempts to "connect the dots" with the assassination attempt in Butler in July and from there link to Harris or Biden or the Deep State or some mysterious "they" were implausibly vacuous.

They are going to keep trying to kill Trump. This is only beginning. This stops only when we win in November.

The Butler guy was a conservative gun-nut who wanted to kill somebody important. Trump appears to have been a target of opportunity. Trump's golf-course stalker is more plausibly motivated by politics, but we don't yet know how. Neither appears to have any Biden/Harris connection.

Apparently the stalker did intend to assassinate Trump, but his motives don't sound like they were lifted from any Democrat's speeches.

Trump “ended relations with Iran like a child and now the Middle East has unraveled,” the letter says.

Republicans blaming Democratic rhetoric and calling for them to "tone it down" are just laughable, when Trump continues to call Harris a Communist and say at every rally that Harris and Biden are "destroying our country". Here, in one sentence, he calls out inflammatory Democratic rhetoric while using his own:

Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country.

Trump has never once addressed the death threats his fans make against anybody who gets in his way: Judges Merchan and Chutkan, DAs Fani Willis and Alan Bragg, election workers like Shaye Moss. And he promises to pardon those convicted for committing violence in his name.

Vance complains that Democrats (truthfully) labeling Trump a "threat to democracy" is "going to get somebody killed", but then goes on to lie about Haitians eating people's cats.

It's not working for them.

and how the media covers Trump

NYT reporter Maggie Haberman was interviewed on NPR Thursday, and showed real cluelessness about why her newspaper in particular and the media in general are being criticized.

I think that the media does a very good job covering Trump. ... I think there is an industry, bluntly, Dave, that is dedicated toward attacking the media, especially as it relates to covering Donald Trump and all coverage of Trump. And I think that Trump is a really difficult figure to cover because he challenges news media process every day, has for years. The systems are just fundamentally - they were not built to deal with somebody who says things that are not true as often as he does or speaks as incoherently as he often does. I think the media has actually done a very good job showing people who he is, what he says, what he does. I think most of the information that the public has about Trump is because of reporting by the media. And I guess I don't really understand how this industry that literally exists to attack the press broadly - and the media is not a monolith. It's not a league. But this industry that exists to do that - I don't see how they think they are a solution by undermining faith in what we do. That's been very confusing to me. ... I'm talking about criticism on the left.

James Fallows responded on X by suggesting someone at the Times address the specific criticisms people are making: like why Biden's cognitive issues got highlighted while Trump's are ignored, and "Why framing / headline / social-promo of stories takes a certain shape so predictably as to have given rise to the Pitchbot".

This drew the satirical NYT Pitchbot into the discussion, which Jonathan Chait slammed as a "hacky, tin-eared comedy account". That caused the Pitchbot's author to drop his comedy mask and engage, making some very good points.

I don't think anyone can dispute either of those two points: that there's been no coverage of Trump's dementia comparable to the discussion of Biden's age and that hacked Democratic campaign emails would be getting covered. [The press has refused to publish the Trump emails Iran hacked.] That's a different standard and one that is markedly lower for Trump. It's that simple. It doesn't mean that the Times hasn't taught the public a lot about Trump. There have been a lot of revealing stories. But they are easier on Trump than on other candidates. That's how narcissistic sociopaths work. They get weak institutions to make special rules for them.

I'll add my two cents: The media in general, the NYT, and Haberman in particular have been doing a bad job covering Trump. They've been applying lower standards to him, for example, often covering what-he-meant rather than what-he-said, when they refused to give Biden that consideration. Lots of serious journalists like Fallows have noticed, as well as humorists like the creator of the NYT Pitchbot. It takes real arrogance to lump together the people who notice your failings and dismiss them as "an industry dedicated to attacking the media".

and you also might be interested in ...

The Federal Reserve finally has started cutting interest rates, signalling that it believes inflation is no longer a major threat to the economy.

In Brazil, Elon Musk and his X social media platform have been fighting the law. The Guardian reports: "The law appears to have won."

The platform bowed to one of the key demands made by Brazil’s supreme court by appointing a legal representative in the country. It also paid outstanding fines and took down user accounts that the court had ordered to be removed on the basis that they threatened the country’s democracy, the New York Times reported.

Musk had been resisting removing the accounts (basically for denying that former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro had lost his reelection bid) citing his commitment to free speech. However, he only seems to resist requests from liberal democratic governments. He has been much more cooperative with the governments of Turkey and India, the article notes.

If you want to dig into the nuts-and-bolts of creating a sustainable economy, particularly how that economy will generate and distribute electric power, you should be reading David Roberts' "Volts" blog on Substack. (Like most Substack blogs, Volts will ask you to subscribe, but let you read the content even if you don't.)

I don't quote Volts that often, usually because it delves deeper into the details than this blog ought to. But one recent post worth your while is his interview with Heather Boushey, a member of President Biden's Council of Economic Advisors and the chief economist for his Invest in America Cabinet. She's discussing the "$910 billion in announced investments all across the country in semiconductors, clean energy, manufacturing, batteries and EVs, bio-manufacturing, heavy industry, and clean power" that has come from the big bills Biden got passed before Republicans took over the House: the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the CHIPS Act.

What I find interesting here is not so much the specifics as the public/private investment approach she describes. As she puts it: "Markets don't always deliver optimal outcomes. But, on the other hand, markets are amazing." Markets themselves are neither blind nor all-wise, but they do certain things very well. Government incentives should lay out the playing field, but private-sector players should play the game.

It seems to be working. The public investment capital is drawing in many times that much in private investment. New productive capacity is being built and jobs are being created -- many of them in the parts of the country that need jobs most. The public investments are not just in basic research -- a role Roberts notes that even many libertarians endorse -- but in opening the bottlenecks that keep research advances from being implemented.

Interestingly, this public money is turning into the exact opposite of patronage. By targeting areas that have suffered from disinvestment and job flight, the Biden administration has wound up channeling most of this investment money to Republican counties.

and let's close with something graphic

When I joined BlueSky, not that many people were on it yet. So the first people I followed were just about anybody I had heard of, like comic-book creator Kurt Busiek ("Astro City"). From there, by following people other people followed, I wound up with a social-media feed very different from what I see on X: odd and creative and whimsical.

That's how I discovered Sarah Andersen. Sarah's cartoons tend to be witchy, cat-oriented, and just slightly dark. I've been enjoying them.

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.