The Weekly Sift

Monday, October 23, 2023

Null and Void

It’s ridiculous that Republicans cannot elect a speaker, but it is also, at this point, unsurprising. A gaping void exists at the center of the populist strain of Republican politics; where the ideas ought to be, you too often find a long, primal scream of “Noooooooo!!!!”

- Megan McArdle
"Republicans have created a void that's becoming harder to escape"

This week's featured post is "The House, still divided".

This week everybody was talking about chaos in the House GOP

The featured post provides a quick summary of where we are and how we got here, and then references a couple of deeper essays about how the House and the House Republican caucus actually work. But if you're looking for some clear this-is-what-happens-next-and-when speculation, I don't have it.

The McArdle quote above (and the article it comes from) makes a good point: Factions compromise with other factions because they have policy goals they want to achieve. But MAGA really has no goals beyond returning Trump to power. Cutting the deficit? No. When Trump was in power and had two years of a Republican Congress, they exploded the deficit with both tax cuts and spending increases. Inflation? They complain about it, but have no plan for addressing it. Crime? Ditto.

I’m sure my Republican readers would add other things they care about: the left-wing capture of schools and education policy, the progressive drift of corporations and the mainstream media, the DEI bureaucracies metastasizing across every class of institutions, the gender-medicine doctors rushing kids onto puberty blockers and hormones. ...

But notice how few of the things on the list are things Congress can actually fix, even theoretically.

Imagine that you're an establishment Republican trying negotiate for MAGA support to become speaker, or that you're Biden trying to make a deal to keep the government open. What can you offer them that they would actually care about enough to give you something back?

If reality mattered, the House Republican infighting would smash once and for all the myth that Trump is a great deal-maker. He claims that if he were president he could bring Ukraine and Russia to an agreement in 24 hours. But the squabbling among his allies in the House has brought Congress to a standstill for three weeks with no end in sight.

Where is he, and why can't he solve it?

In the real world, without reality-TV editing to make him look brilliant, Trump is terrible at making deals. He broke two of Obama's agreements -- the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris Climate Accords -- claiming each time that he would get a "better deal". ("I think the people of our country will be thrilled, and I think then the people of the world will be thrilled," he said about his fantasy Paris renegotiation.) In fact, he got no deal, and in each case the country is worse off than if he had left Obama's agreements in place.

In 2017, he came within one vote of undoing another long-negotiated Obama compromise, Obamacare. He would have taken health insurance away from millions of Americans -- again with no plan to replace it beyond a fantasy.

His big diplomatic "accomplishment", the USMCA, is basically what Obama had already negotiated as part of the Trans-Pacific Parternship, another deal Trump blew up. His flashy negotiations with North Korea produced a great photo opportunity -- which benefited Kim more than anyone -- and no substantive progress on the main issue, North Korea's nuclear missiles. His trade war with China gave him great opportunities to posture, but accomplished nothing.

And then we get to Trump's #1 issue: immigration and the border. The pieces of a deal have been lying around ever since the Gang of Eight compromise passed the Senate and died in the House in 2013. Neither side likes things the way they are and everybody has something to gain from striking a deal. But even with two years of a Republican-controlled Congress, he got no immigration legislation passed, and even shut down his own government to (unsuccessfully) pressure the Republican Congress to fund his wall.

and war

There are lots of individual stories in the Israel/Gaza war, but the fundamental situation didn't change much this week: Hamas still holds hundreds of hostages. Israel is attacking Gaza from the air, but hasn't launched a ground invasion yet. Lots of people in Gaza are dying (though it looks like Israel wasn't responsible for destroying that hospital). A shipment of humanitarian aid made it into Gaza, but it's a drop in the bucket.

If Israel has a plan for resolving this situation without killing a huge number of civilians, nobody seems to know what it is. In Israel's defense, though, I haven't heard a good suggestion yet for what they should do.

Hamas released two American hostages, but there are still other American hostages in Gaza. Why them? Why now? I don't think anybody knows.

Biden gave an Oval Office speech to the nation [video, text], explaining why Israel and Ukraine deserve our support. He also said:

the United States remains committed to the Palestinian people’s right to dignity and to self-determination. The actions of Hamas terrorists don’t take that right away.

But without any viable peace plan, it's hard to take that sentiment seriously, whether it comes from Biden or from Israeli leaders.

Biden also urged Americans not to bring the Gaza conflict home, citing the murder of a six-year-old Palestinian American near Chicago. The article says the boy's mother came to the US 12 years ago, which would make him an American citizen.

We can’t stand by and stand silent when this happens. We must, without equivocation, denounce antisemitism. We must also, without equivocation, denounce Islamophobia.

And to all of you hurting — those of you who are hurting, I want you to know: I see you. You belong. And I want to say this to you: You’re all America. You’re all America.

Times like these are when I'm most grateful that Biden defeated Trump in 2020. I shudder to think of this kind of crisis going on in the world with Trump posturing and grandstanding and appealing to everyone's worst impulses.

I'm impressed that the White House text of Biden's speech includes his handful of verbal stumbles and misstatements. For example, he referred to Netanyahu as "president" rather than "prime minister". The text corrects that mistake with a strikethrough, but doesn't pretend he didn't say it.

Ukraine's summer offense didn't gain much ground, but their increasing drone and missile capability has challenged Russia's dominance of the Black Sea.

Mitch McConnell is still on board with helping Ukraine defend against Russia's invasion:

No Americans are getting killed in Ukraine. We're rebuilding our industrial base. The Ukrainians are destroying the army of one of our biggest rivals. I have a hard time finding anything wrong with that. I think it's wonderful that they're defending themselves- and also the notion that the Europeans are not doing enough. They've done almost 90 billion dollars, they're housing a bunch of refugees who escaped. I think that our NATO allies in Europe have done quite a lot.

I was late finding "How Not to Respond to a Terrorist Attack", which Benjamin Wittes posted the day of the the Hamas attack on Israel. But it's well worth bookmarking and coming back to after future attacks, wherever they occur and whomever they victimize.

Fundamentally, he urges humility on those of us tempted to comment quickly. What needs to be affirmed in the immediate aftermath of murder is not deep or complex, but very simple: Murder is wrong. Not "wrong, but" or "wrong, except", but just wrong. There is a strong temptation, which I feel myself, to segue past the tragedy of individual lives cut short, and to talk instead about the larger context, the need for revenge, what I think will or should happen next, how this event proves some other point I often make, and why people who disagree with me are dangerously misguided.

and the Trump trials

Sidney Powell and Kenneth Cheseboro pleaded guilty and have promised to cooperate with Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis. So three of the original 19 defendants in the Georgia RICO case have now pleaded guilty.

By all accounts, Powell and Cheseboro got very good deals, which they took just before their trial was supposed to begin. Neither will do jail time.

There are two theories on how they got such good deals: Either they have really juicy testimony to offer against the other conspirators, including Trump, or Willis really, really wanted to avoid revealing all her evidence and strategy in a trial before Trump's trial. (Both Powell and Cheseboro had taken advantage of Georgia's law giving them the right to demand a speedy trial. There's still no trial date for the other defendants.)

Powell and Cheseboro are widely assumed to be two of the unnamed and unindicted co-conspirators in Jack Smith's January-6-conspiracy indictment against Trump, but neither has any deal with Smith so far. As long as that's the case, it's hard to see what they could testify to for Willis. Either might legitimately plead the Fifth Amendment rather than describe crimes Smith could still indict them for.

If either of them makes a deal with Smith, the floodgates will open.

The biggest immediate impact of the guilty pleas is its effect on Trump politically: It's hard to claim there was no crime when your former allies have already confessed to crimes.

As for where each fit into the larger conspiracy: Powell was at the center of spreading the Big Lie, as well as the effort to seize voting machines. Cheseboro organized the fake-elector scheme. I would expect Powell's testimony to be most damaging to Rudy Giuliani and Cheseboro's to John Eastman, if you're looking for the next possible dominos. And Mark Meadows was everywhere, so any new testimony might target him.

Judge Chutkan issued a gag order against Trump

All interested parties in this matter, including the parties and their counsel, are prohibited from making any public statements, or directing others to make any public statements, that target (1) the Special Counsel prosecuting this case or his staff; (2) defense counsel or their staff; (3) any of this court’s staff or other supporting personnel; or (4) any reasonably foreseeable witness or the substance of their testimony.

and then explicitly described what is not included:

This Order shall not be construed to prohibit Defendant from making statements criticizing the government generally, including the current administration or the Department of Justice; statements asserting that Defendant is innocent of the charges against him, or that his prosecution is politically motivated; or statements criticizing the campaign platforms or policies of Defendant’s current political rivals, such as former Vice President Pence.

Trump predictably claimed that this order violates his First Amendment rights. This is in line with Trump's refusal to acknowledge that indictment is a meaningful act. A grand jury of ordinary Americans has found that the evidence of his criminality is sufficiently strong that a trial has to be held. That's not nothing, and it restricts a person's rights in ways that are necessary for holding a fair trial.

For example, unindicted Americans are free to travel wherever they want. But if you've been indicted, you have to be present when your trial starts. The rights you would ordinarily expect as an American have been narrowed to accommodate your trial.

Again and again, Trump pretends that his indictments are nothing, and so his rights should not be restricted in any way.

Meanwhile, Justice Arthur Engoron, who is overseeing Trump's ongoing New York $250 million civil fraud trial, fined Trump $5K for violating his previous gag order and threatened to jail him for future violations. The gag order had been issued after a Trump Truth Social post targeted Engoron's principal clerk.

Consider this statement a gag order forbidding all parties from posting, emailing or speaking publicly about any of my staff

As requested, Trump took down the offending post. But apparently it was still posted on his campaign web site. Trump's lawyers claimed this violation of the order was inadvertent, but at a minimum it shows Trump and his people failing to take the order seriously.

It's just a matter of time before some judge has to jail Trump for contempt, because he is in fact contemptuous.

Forbes is claiming that former Trump Organization CFO Adam Weisselberg committed perjury during his testimony at Trump's New York civil fraud trial. After the report was published, prosecutors cut Weisselberg's testimony short.

Weisselberg is still on probation after pleading guilty at a previous trial and serving three months in prison.

Significantly, perjury in the first degree is also a felony punishable by up to seven years. But perhaps most importantly, the Manhattan district attorney would not have to undertake a new prosecution of Weisselberg for perjury to move to revoke his probation. It would be enough for the DA's office simply to convince Judge Juan Merchan that Weisselberg engaged in new, criminal conduct during that [five-year] period.

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Threats and disasters are more newsworthy than positive trends, so it's easy to imagine the world is in worse shape than it actually is. Brian Klaas calls attention to ten charts of important trends, several of which are encouraging. For example, the percentage of the world's population living in extreme poverty has been falling for two centuries, and falling faster in recent decades.

Rep. Jeff Jackson's podcasts have been offering a great inside view of how the House works. Now it looks like North Carolina will gerrymander him out of Congress.

As I envision my next car, I find [one, two] cautionary tales of road trips in EVs. I am leaning towards a plug-in hybrid.

A San Francisco chef describes how his idea of a restaurant has changed post-Covid: small dining room, short menu, no reservations, and a retail shop to even out revenue. He thinks this model will catch on.

and let's close with something harmonious

A barbershop quartet demonstrates that all music is really barbershop. A song just takes about 20 years to get there.

Monday, October 16, 2023

Oppositional Thinking

What do my worst enemies want me to do — and how can I do just the opposite?

- Thomas Friedman,
"Israel has never needed to be smarter than in this moment"

This week's featured post is "My 9-11 Flashbacks".

This week everybody was talking about war

The featured post is only tangentially about Israel, Hamas, and Gaza. It's more about how memories of all the mistakes we made after 9-11 keep getting in the way as I try to process what's happening in Israel and Gaza.

As usual, I'm not trying to cover breaking news. Israeli troops are massing outside of Gaza, but if you want to know what exactly they're doing, you'll have to look somewhere else.

One thing that I don't think the mainstream news sources are explaining very well is why Egypt isn't letting in Gazan refugees. There are probably a bunch of reasons, but one is the fear that anyone who leaves Gaza won't be allowed back in after the conflict subsides. By letting refugees in, Egypt fears it will be assisting in an ethnic cleansing.

Palestinians and Arab nations are marked by the experience of the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation when Palestinians were expelled or fled to neighboring countries and have not been allowed to return since, a major sticking point in the long defunct peace process.

This is the first major war since Elon Musk destroyed Twitter as a reliable source of raw news reports. As a result, misinformation and disinformation are rampant.

The extremists on both sides are hard to understand. For example: the various people and groups who are standing with Hamas. I suspect there aren't many such people, but they've made themselves hard to ignore.

Liberal economist Noah Smith explains like this:

It’s one thing to believe that Israel is an apartheid regime and that war against it is justified; it’s another to believe that massacring random festival goers is an acceptable way to prosecute that war. ... People always have a choice whether to cheer for atrocities or to refuse to cheer for them. When your rallies end up with swastikas and “Gas the Jews” and people making fun of dead innocents, well, you made the wrong choice.

He notes a split between Democratic Socialist leaders and the left-wing grass roots:

Bernie Sanders strongly condemned Hamas’ attack, as did AOC. The “Squad” called for Israel not to take military action in response, which is highly unrealistic, but which doesn’t constitute an endorsement of Hamas in the slightest. Elizabeth Warren, who has been consistently pro-Palestinian over the years, broke down in tears at the reports of Hamas’ violence and said “I'm here today to say unequivocally there is no justification for terrorism ever.” And so on. A number of New York leaders from the Democratic party have scolded the DSA rally; AOC denounced the rally’s “bigotry and callousness”.

As an explanation of support for Hamas among the grass-roots leftists, Smith points to the failure of 20th-century leftist projects: Communism fell, decolonization happened largely without revolution, and democratic (i.e., non-revolutionary) socialism has been pretty successful in Europe.

Swedish workers are not going to start a revolution, because Swedish social democracy is pretty damn nice.

Palestine was one of the few places where the old models seemed to fit, so Western leftists have invested much of their identity in it.

So when their chosen heroes — the freedom fighters in whom they invested so much moral cachet — showed up at a concert and started beheading raver kids and Asian workers and abducting grandmas and God knows what else, what were Western leftists supposed to do? In situations like that there are really only two things you can do, without switching your whole ideology — you either tell yourself that your team’s inhumanity is justified in the name of higher goals, and march shoulder to shoulder in the streets with the most belligerent elements, or you pull back and call on both sides to avoid killing civilians. Left-leaning leaders chose the latter, but many on the grassroots chose the former.

And then there's the other extreme, the one rooting for ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

Often in the last few months I've linked to Kat Abu's tweets. Her home page claims "I watch Fox News so you don't have to." Her summaries of what goes on on Fox in a typical week are often both accurate and hilarious.

I had never paid attention to her ethnicity, which turns out to be Palestinian. It wasn't something she focused on much, at least not enough to draw the notice of a casual observer like me. Since the recent conflict started, though, she hasn't been shying away from it.

I've been seeing straight-up calls for Palestinian genocide on my [timeline] for the past 48 hours. If you're someone who carries this view, join me on a livestream so you can describe exactly how my family and I should be annihilated to my face.

She was serious:

I’ve got two takers for the “Tell Kat How You Would Exterminate Her And Her Loved Ones” livestream, which I’m aiming to do Friday afternoon. Anyone rooting for Palestinian extermination can be a guest, so long as (1) you stay on topic (pro-genocide) and (2) your camera stays on.

But the event didn't come off:

Both volunteers for this livestream have backed down — one called me a cunt and the other pretended a day later that he was *actually* just talking about Hamas.

and the House

Steve Scalise's candidacy for speaker has come and gone, but little else has changed this week. Republicans are still unable to unite behind a leader and unwilling to make a deal with Democrats. And so there is no speaker and the House is not functioning.

This has real-world consequences. The most obvious ones are that Israel and Ukraine are going to run out of key munitions if Congress doesn't authorize sending them more, and that the government is on track to shut down on November 17.

The NYT summarizes the state of the House. Last week I noted how unlikely a bipartisan deal seemed, but that it might become the only way out. A week later, that possibility is still unlikely, but its odds are rising as other possible escapes fizzle.

and democracy

Results won't be official for another day or two, but it looks like the Law and Justice Party is going to lose control of Poland. If so, this is huge. Law and Justice is a right-wing populist party that has been undermining democracy since it took power in 2015. Wikipedia says:

The party has caused what constitutional law scholar Wojciech Sadurski termed a "constitutional breakdown" by packing the Constitutional Court with its supporters, undermining parliamentary procedure, and reducing the president's and prime minister's offices in favour of power being wielded extra-constitutionally by party leader Jarosław Kaczyński. After eliminating constitutional checks, the government then moved to curtail the activities of NGOs and independent media, restrict freedom of speech and assembly, and reduce the qualifications required for civil service jobs in order to fill these positions with party loyalists. The media law was changed to give the governing party control of the state media, which was turned into a partisan outlet, with dissenting journalists fired from their jobs. Due to these political changes, Poland has been termed an "illiberal democracy", "plebiscitarian authoritarianism", or "velvet dictatorship with a façade of democracy".

That the voters retain enough power to toss L&J out is amazing, and it bodes well for other illiberal countries like Hungary.

Meanwhile New Zealand is moving rightward. At the moment, though, this looks like the normal back-and-forth of democratic politics, rather than the more fundamental kind of change Poland might be having.

Speaking of places trying to restore democracy, it looks like Wisconsin Republicans won't go through with their plan to impeach newly elected Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz. Protasiewicz' election tipped the court's majority to the liberals, and in particular threatened the heavily gerrymandered district maps that have given Republicans supermajorities in the legistlature, in a state where their party has been narrowly losing statewide races lately.

What better use for a supermajority than to remove a judge who might find that those maps violate the state constitution? But when the Assembly's speaker, Robin Vos, consulted two retired WSC justices on the plan, both poured cold water on it.

Maybe the voters of Wisconsin will once again get a chance to choose the legislature.

and health care

Once in a while, one person's story really captures the insanity of the American health care system. Tuesday, that person was Mary Lou Retton, the gymnast who won five gold medals in the 1984 Olympics, and whose exuberant smile graced Wheaties boxes and other commercial products for years afterward.

Retton is 55 now, and according to her daughter's Instagram post, is in a Texas ICU fighting for her life against a rare form of pneumonia. She has no health insurance, so her daughter is asking for donations to cover her mother's bills.

What do you have to do in this country to be worthy of medical care?

Another example of our national dysfunction turned up two weeks ago in John Oliver's piece on prison health care, which he kicked off with clips of local news anchors trying to get their viewers upset about paying for inmates' medical conditions.

It is just wild to point out that the only place Americans are guaranteed health care is jail, and make it sound like somehow the problem is prisoners, and not our deeply broken system.

This is a standard feature of right-wing framing, which you can also see in this quote from CPAC:

Why, while we have veterans in the street, we have homeless people all over the place, we have inflation going crazy, are we going to send billions and billions and billions of dollars [to Ukraine]?

The constant refrain is that if you find (or imagine) an example of unfairness, the solution is to level down rather than level up: Rather than do something to help veterans in the street or other homeless people, cut off Ukraine aid. Don't provide more people with health care, take it away from prisoners. In the name of fairness, everybody should suffer.

Three Alabama hospitals will soon stop delivering babies, leaving two entire counties without a birthing hospital. This is in a state that already has high rates of maternal and infant mortality. The hospitals attribute the closings to staffing shortages and funding problems. None of the articles I read made a connection between the difficulty getting ob-gyn doctors to come to Alabama and the state's draconian abortion laws. But I have to think it plays a role.

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George Santos and Bob Menendez both got superceding indictments. The charges are that Santos conned his contributors by abusing their credit card information, and that Menendez was an agent of Egypt.

Moms for Liberty is a dark-money-funded astroturf movement to move public schools in a conservative direction by banning books and introducing right-wing curricula. Salon highlights a group of parents in Bucks County, Pennsylvania that is trying to fight back.

When RFK Jr. was running as a Democrat against Biden, Sean Hannity promoted him hard, giving him an hour-long interview with softball questions. But then Kennedy announced he was running as an independent, and polls showed him potentially pulling votes away from Trump. So Hannity turned on a dime and became a hostile interviewer.

Fox News hosts don't work for their viewers, they work on them.

and let's close with something rare

I didn't see the ring-of-fire eclipse Saturday, which was better in the western states. The photo above is from Panama.

Monday, October 9, 2023

Unaffordable Luxury

As a nation, Israelis acted as if we could afford the luxury of a vicious internal fight, the kind in which your political rival becomes your enemy. We let animosity, demagogy and the poisonous discourse of social media take over our society, rip apart the only Jewish army in the world. This is our tragedy. And it carries a lesson for other polarized democracies: There is someone out there waiting to gain from your self-made weakness. This someone is your enemy.

-Shimrit Meir

This week's featured post is "The Weirdness in the House".

This week everybody was talking about Kevin McCarthy's downfall

This, and what might happen next, is the subject of the featured post.

and war in Israel and Gaza

Hamas, which controls Gaza, launched a surprise attack on Israel Saturday. The attack was unusually vicious, even by Hamas' previous standards, and included a massacre of hundreds of Israelis attending a rave. I don't do breaking news, so I advise you to follow developments through some more comprehensive news source.

I have a muddle of feelings about this:

The attacks on Israeli civilians are morally repugnant and should not be tolerated, either by Israel or by world opinion. Israel has every right to defend its citizens.
The people of Gaza live under awful conditions and feel abandoned by the outside world. When human beings live in a constant state of despair and hopelessness, some percentage of them will respond violently, even if their violent options are equally hopeless. This should surprise no one. You don't have to side with Hamas to realize that any outcome leaving Gazans in despair is not a long-term solution.
I worry that Israel's retaliation will be so extreme that those Americans currently saying "I stand with Israel" will be horrified. I will be happy if in the weeks to come I can confess to misjudging the nation and its government. (For comparison, think about all the regrettable things we did after 9-11.)

Predictably, American politicians are using this moment to take potshots at each other. But this did not happen because Biden showed weakness in dealing with Iran, or because Trump and other MAGA Republicans have "embraced the language of isolationism and appeasement" (as Mike Pence charged). This war isn't about the US. Israel has plenty of deterrence capability on its own, and Hamas attacked anyway.

The most partisan thing I can legitimately say is that the US government would have an easier implementing its response if we had a confirmed ambassador in Jerusalem, our military didn't have 300 promotions frozen, and the House had a speaker who could put through emergency aid if Israel needs it. But even if we had a full team ready to tackle the crisis, this would have happened anyway. It's not about us.

and Trump

Every time I think Trump can't shock me any more, he proves me wrong. This week we heard him go full Nazi in an interview with National Pulse. Talking of migrants at the southern border he said:

Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they're terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we're witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It's poisoning the blood of our country. [my emphasis]

The phrase "poisoning the blood" does two things: It's a fairly direct racial reference, and it dehumanizes the people it targets. Hitler said something similar in Mein Kampf.

All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.

At the time, Hitler was just a crazy little man who said outrageous things. Sophisticated Germans knew better than to take his rhetoric seriously.

The other thing we found out about Trump this week is that he disclosed secrets about our nuclear submarines to a foreign national who belonged to his Mar-a-Lago club. I wonder if it ever occurred to Chinese or Russian or Iranian intelligence to give agents $200K so that they could give it to Trump and join Mar-a-Lago.

In 2016, Republicans were beside themselves at the thought that classified information might have made it onto the server in Hillary's basement, which foreign governments might have been able to hack into. Now we know that Trump just blabs secrets to random people, and they don't care. Fox News waited nearly 24 hours before briefly mentioning this story.

When he was in office, Trump's clubs and businesses functioned as conduits for bribery.

Trump has lashed out at his former chief of staff, John Kelly, who recently confirmed reports about Trump's disrespect for soldiers who died or were wounded in the line of duty. Kelly joins a long list of high Trump administration officials who have bad-mouthed their former boss, calling him "a f**king moron" and many other colorful names.

Can you imagine anything like this happening to Obama? There's virtually no such thing as an Obama-administration tell-all book. Every Obama-administration account I've read paints the President as sharp, compassionate, and basically decent.

and life expectancy

By now probably most of you have heard that life expectancy in the US flattened out in the 2010s (after decades of steady increase) and then started going down even before the Covid pandemic. This week two articles in The Washington Post and one in Vox provided more insight into that phenomenon.

Here's how Dylan Matthews sums up the public's prior understanding in Vox:

For the past decade or so, Princeton economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case have been promoting a particular story about death in America. Less-educated Americans, particularly those without college degrees, have seen their life expectancy outcomes diverge from those of more-educated Americans. Much of this divide can be explained through a category that Deaton and Case call “deaths of despair”: deaths from suicide, opioid overdoses, and liver cirrhosis and other alcohol-related causes. The deaths are concentrated in non-Hispanic whites. This phenomenon indicates something is deeply wrong with the way American society treats its most marginalized citizens, including lower-class whites.

But five WaPo reporters tell a somewhat different story: Yes, addiction and suicide are cutting into life expectancy, but the big problem is chronic diseases:

Chronic illnesses, which often sicken people in middle age after the protective vitality of youth has ebbed, erase more than twice as many years of life among people younger than 65 as all the overdoses, homicides, suicides and car accidents combined, The Post found.

In other words, we're doing a really bad job taking care of people who need low levels of care over long periods of time, like people with diabetes, high blood pressure, or cardiovascular disease. Or maybe people who have survived one bout with cancer and are vulnerable to a recurrence. We're also bad at helping people live in ways that avoid chronic diseases.

But we're not failing everybody with chronic diseases, just the poorest and least educated Americans.

Wealth inequality in America is growing, but The Post found that the death gap — the difference in life expectancy between affluent and impoverished communities — has been widening many times faster. In the early 1980s, people in the poorest communities were 9 percent more likely to die each year, but the gap grew to 49 percent in the past decade and widened to 61 percent when covid struck.

The Vox article narrows this down further: The epicenter of the problem is high school dropouts in rural areas. Part of the problem is probably lifestyle choices like smoking and bad diet. Access to healthcare is also part of the story. (In the small town where I grew up, well-to-do people take for granted that you need to seek care in a major city if you have a serious problem. Less well-off people don't have that option, and poorly educated people may not get good advice on where to go, even if they assemble the resources.)

Matthews makes a good point: While it would be great if the US could implement better health policies generally, narrowing the problem description makes it more tractable.

People dying now cannot wait for the whole US economy to transform to be more worker-friendly, as nice as that might be. They need solutions that are tailored for their specific problems, that can be implemented soon.

A second WaPo article looks at the influence of politics: It compares three demographically similar counties on the shore of Lake Erie: one in red Ohio, one in purple Pennsylvania, and one in blue New York.

New York advances policies that promote public health, while Ohio doesn't, and Pennsylvania is in between. So New York discourages smoking with high taxes on cigarettes, it enforces seat belt laws more rigorously, and its Medicaid benefits are comparatively generous. The results show up in death rates. And we can only guess how much worse this is going to get, as MAGA politics causes people to lose faith not just in Covid vaccines, but in vaccines and medical expertise generally.

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If you're worried about President Biden's mental acuity, you should watch this interview with Pro Publica's John Harwood. Admitttedly, Harwood asks friendly questions and doesn't aggressively try to fluster the President. But the questions are substantial, and Biden answers them thoughtfully. He sometimes has to search for words, but he has no trouble grasping what Harwood is getting at, and he gives coherent answers from the heart. He doesn't have to control the conversation in order to follow it, so he can address the questions Harwood asks, rather than constantly steering the conversation back to some other topic.

You know what else Biden doesn't do? Lapse into canned talking points or go off into long well-rehearsed monologues about how unfairly he's been treated. When asked about something tricky, his answers are carefully nuanced. (For example, when asked about former Democrat Joe Lieberman's work for the No Labels third-party movement, Biden carefully explains that he thinks No Labels is a mistake, but that Lieberman is acting within his rights as an American.)

I've been saying for a while that Trump displays far more signs of mental decline than Biden does. I think if you compare this video to any recent Trump speech, you'll see it.

When Democrats scare themselves about the 2024 election, the possibility always comes up that a third-party candidacy might siphon votes away from Biden and get Trump elected again. But as The Nation notes, it's not obvious that such candidates won't pull more votes away from Trump.

Suppose you're a Republican whose main gripe with Trump is that he promoted the Covid vaccine. You can protest by voting for RFK Jr.

The economy added 336K new jobs in September, and previous monthly estimates were revised upwards by 119K.

One way you can see the slant in American news coverage is the way the monthly employment reports get covered.

The US economy added 336,000 jobs in September, highlighting concern that the labor market isn't cooling as fast as the Federal Reserve would like in its battle against inflation.

Bad news: More people are working and their wages are rising.

OK, that's Yahoo Finance, so you'd expect their coverage to be aimed at investors rather than working people. But the same themes showed across the board: More people working for more money is at best mixed news, rather than the outcome our economic policies should be trying to achieve. Matt Yglesias tweeted an image of the headlines on the NYT home page, and commented:

The NYT covered the jobs report from four different angles, none of which involved the possible benefits of more people getting jobs.

I don't think there's anything intentionally sinister in this kind of coverage, but it does reflect the skewed motivations built into our commercial media: News companies rely either on people with enough disposable income to subscribe, or on advertisers, who want to reach consumers with money to spend. So news coverage is aimed primarily at people with money, rather than at people who are working for hourly wages or trying to find a job.

Fox News' coverage, on the other hand, was sinister: They felt a need to actively misrepresent the report. Jesse Watters says "the Biden administration" (actually the nonpartisan Bureau of Labor Standards, the same career bureaucrats who produced these reports under Trump) is "cherry picking and double counting", because government jobs (73K new jobs in state and local government, but still 2K below the pre-Covid level) shouldn't count (because public school teachers don't really have jobs, I suppose), and jobs in the hospitality industry "like bartenders hostesses, waitresses" are "not really careers". And Charles Payne declared "it was not a strong jobs report" because leisure and hospitality jobs (accounting for 96K of the 336K new jobs) are "the lowest paying jobs in America" -- ignoring the fact that average hourly wages rose slightly (by 0.2%) during the month and the average workweek was unchanged.

While we're discussing Fox, The Five's co-host Greg Gutfeld started out talking about a Philadelphia DA's light treatment of shoplifters and looters, segued to how unfair it was that 1-6 rioters didn't get a similar "criminal mulligan", and then went totally off the rails, claiming that "elections don't work" and "you need to make war" like we did to end slavery.

The race-baiting in Guttfeld's rant was barely cloaked at all. "They" (the looters) get off easy because they're "the oppressed", while "we" (1-6 rioters) don't because we're "the oppressors". In case you didn't catch that, Black criminals get treated better than White patriots.

About shoplifting and other retail theft: Retailers appear to be using crime as an excuse to close stores that they wanted to close for other reasons. "Shrink", the technical term for inventory losses as a percentage of sales, rose only slightly from 2021 to 2022. 2022's shrink was the same as it was in 2019 and 2020. Crime appears to have been no worse at the stores Target closed than in similar stores that stayed open.

The NYT ran an apparently even-handed story about two families who moved to a different state for reasons related to politics: the Nobles moved from red Iowa to blue Minnesota, and the Huckinses from blue Oregon to red Missouri.

I'm biased here, but the two cases don't look that similar to me. The Nobles move from suburban Des Moines to suburban Minneapolis because they have a transgender son whose treatments and school-bathroom use have become illegal in Iowa. That's a genuinely political motive.

But the Huckinses move from a neighborhood in Portland where they didn't feel safe to a small town in Missouri where they can leave their truck unlocked and play with their grandchildren, who already lived there with Ginger Huckins' daughter from a previous marriage.

Both families say they're happier in their new homes. But Steve and Ginger Huckins are better off for reasons only tangentially related to politics: their grandchildren and the small-town lifestyle. I'm sure Oregon also has small towns where they could feel safe, and Missouri includes St. Louis, where they might be no safer than in Portland. (I live in a blue Boston suburb where people aren't very rigorous about locking things up and I never worry about walking home after dark.)

The Nobles, on the other hand, are running away from acts of the state legislature, which would create problems for their family in any part of Iowa. The article makes me wonder if there are any blue-state refugees who are truly parallel to the Nobles. I suppose someone might move to avoid taxes (one of the Huckinses' complaints) or regulations on a business, but even those reasons seem weak compared to the state persecuting your son.

We don't know the whole story yet, but Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders might be taken down by a scandal centering on a $20K podium.

My Facebook friend Jennifer Sheridan (who designed the t-shirt I'm wearing in my FB profile photo) wrote:

I think I have figured out something important about the Book Banners.

When I was a kid in school, I was a book nerd, and my friends were book nerds, and we all knew which books had "dirty parts." We would read them, probably giggle a bit, and then get on with our lives. No one ever made a big deal about it, it was nothing.

And I realize looking back, that if you weren't a book nerd in school, you probably don't know there have ALWAYS been library books that had dirty parts.

If you are a grown person now, and are hearing "filthy" passages from some books that are popular today, you might find it shocking that books with those kinds of passages can be found in public school libraries.

But because you didn't read as a kid, you think this is all something new. It isn't new; you've just shown you never cared about books.

I'll just add that I went to a religious elementary school, so I knew where all the dirty parts of the Bible were.

and let's close with something untranslatable

One of my favorite books to randomly page through is As They Say in Zanzibar by David Crystal, a collection of proverbs and sayings from other cultures. How else would I discover that in Ukraine they say "Those who have been scalded with hot soup blow on cold water."

Sometimes these words of wisdom seem to contradict each other. For example, Canadians are credited with "Crooked furrows grow straight grain" while on the Ivory Coast they say "A crab does not beget a bird."

And then there are sayings that are just obscure, like the Slovenian "When you are chased by a wolf, you call the boar your uncle."

Almost as much fun are idioms from other languages. When a someone is very stubborn, Russians say "You can sharpen an ax on his head." To the Portuguese, taking the blame for something you didn't do is "paying the duck".

Where we say that something easy is "a piece of cake", the Poles say "It's a roll with butter."

Monday, October 2, 2023

Simple Propositions

You guys, the UAW — you saved the automobile industry back in 2008 and before. You made a lot of sacrifices. You gave up a lot. And the companies were in trouble. But now they’re doing incredibly well. And guess what? You should be doing incredibly well too. It’s a simple proposition.

- President Joe Biden,
on a picket line in Belleville, Michigan on Tuesday

This week's featured posts are "MAGA and the Swifties" and "When should public officials resign?"

This week everybody was talking about the close call on a government shutdown

*McCarthy's sudden reversal made all this week's cartoons obsolete.*

The government did not shut down Sunday morning, and will not shut down until at least November 17.

The shutdown, which had appeared nearly inevitable, was avoided when House Speaker Kevin McCarthy changed his position Saturday morning: He allowed a vote on a short-term continuing resolution. Once the resolution came to the House floor, it passed easily, 335-91. It then went to the Senate, where it passed 88-9. The bill was signed by President Biden Saturday evening with an hour to spare.

The resolution was opposed almost entirely by Republicans: 90 representatives and nine senators. Rep. Mike Quigley of Illinois was the lone Democrat in opposition. Two House Democrats, Rep. Katie Porter of California and Rep. Mary Peltola of Alaska, did not vote. The Republican opposition came mostly from the party's right wing, the likes of Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.

The resolution continues funding government departments at the same levels as fiscal 2023, which ended on September 30. It also added $16 billion for disaster relief, but included no additional aid to Ukraine. (A similar bill in the Senate had $6 billion for Ukraine, but the House bill got through first.)

President Biden believes he has a promise from Speaker McCarthy to allow a separate vote on Ukraine aid soon. However, Biden also believed McCarthy had committed himself to funding the government back when the debt-ceiling deal was reached in June. McCarthy ultimately came through, but not without considerable drama.

It also remains to be seen if McCarthy will continue as speaker. Gaetz and his right-wing allies in the "Freedom" Caucus had threatened to withdraw their support from McCarthy if he made a deal to get Democratic votes, as he did Saturday.

McCarthy has clearly been frustrated by the nihilism of his party's right wing, which never proposed a government-funding deal it could support. McCarthy told reporters after the vote:

If you have members in your conference that won’t let you vote for appropriation bills, [don’t] want an omnibus and won’t vote for a stopgap measure, so the only answer is to shut down and not pay our troops: I don’t want to be a part of that team.

The next question is whether Gaetz and his allies will carry out their threat to submit a motion to vacate the chair, which would remove McCarthy from the speakership unless Democrats decided to save him. (They say they won't without getting something in return.) Over the weekend he said he would submit the motion sometime this week. McCarthy responded with bravado: "Bring it on. Let's get this over with."

Also: Will anything be different as we approach November 17? McCarthy bought himself (or his successor) some time, but if he has some plan for achieving a less chaotic outcome, he hasn't revealed it yet.

One final point: The fact that McCarthy's change-of-mind resolved the issue so quickly is pretty convincing evidence that Republicans were causing the problem.

and the Trump trials

The New York Attorney General's lawsuit against the Trump Organization won a big victory Tuesday: Judge Arthur F. Engoron issued a partial summary judgment on the case, declaring that Trump had committed fraud by inflating his net worth when applying for bank loans. Because Trump Organization's fraud is ongoing, the judge

cancelled all of the business licenses for the Trump Organization and its 500 or so subsidiary companies and partnerships after finding that Trump used them to, along with his older two sons, commit fraud.

His gaudy Trump Tower apartment, his golf courses, his Boeing 757 jet and even Mar-a-Lago could all be disposed of by a court-appointed monitor, leaving Trump with not much more than his pensions as a one term president and a television performer.

Under the New York General Business Law you can only do business in your own name as a sole proprietor or with a business license, which the state calls a “business certificate.” All of Trump’s businesses were corporations or partnerships that require business certificates.

The judge's ruling found that a trial was unnecessary to determine fraud, because all the arguments Trump's lawyers presented in his defense were beside the point.

[The Office of the Attorney General] need only prove: (1) the [statements of financial condition] were false and misleading; and (2) the defendant repeatedly or persistently used the SFCs to transact business.

The instant action is essentially a "documents case". As detailed [elsewhere in this ruling], the documents here clearly contain fraudulent valuations that defendants used in business, clearly satisfying OAG's burden.

Trump's attorneys instead argued a number of legally irrelevant points, like that the banks in fact did not lose money, or that the SFCs contained a clause warning the banks to do their own valuations, or that property valuations are subjective. Their stubbornness in repeating arguments the judge had already rejected as frivolous led the judge to sanction the attorneys $7500 each. (David Cay Johnston notes that this ruling could be cited in some future disbarment hearing.) University of Michigan business law professor Thomas elaborates:

What we've seen with Donald Trump over and over again is that often arguments that gain traction with his supporters are flatly inconsistent with the law.

Underlining that point, Trump has continued making the irrelevant arguments rather than addressing the actual ruling.

I've heard a number of analogies capturing why the nobody-lost-money argument fails. Here's my favorite: What if as you were closing up at your job, you stole $100 from the till, then went to the racetrack and bet it on a horse that won? In the morning you could replace the $100, so your employer didn't lose money. But you're still a thief.

Probably the most egregious overvaluation was of Trump's apartment in Trump Tower, which he claimed was three times its actual size and valued accordingly. The judge comments:

In opposition, defendants absurdly suggest that "the calculation of square footage is a subjective process" ... A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud.

Of course Trump will appeal, but an appeal is not just a do-over. He'll have to support an argument that the judge did something wrong. The judge's reasoning is simple and doesn't seem to rely on esoteric points of law, so an appeal doesn't seem to have much to work with.

Meanwhile, a trial on the rest of the state's charges, including insurance fraud, will begin today. Thursday, the appeals court refused to delay that trial pending a ruling on Trump's appeal. The trial will also determine the fines Trump will have to pay. The state is asking for $250 million.

Trump has said he's going to appear in court today, though it's not clear what he plans to do there, since it's not time for him to testify, if he intends to do that at all (which I doubt). Trump says a lot of things, so I'll believe he's coming when I see him.

In political terms, one consequence of this decision isn't getting the attention it deserves: Like sexual assault, Trump's involvement in fraud is no longer just an accusation: It is a finding of a court of law. Trump is no longer just "alleged" to have committed fraud. He committed fraud.

Fani Willis got the first guilty plea from one of her 18 RICO defendants. (It's kind of amazing this isn't even the lead story under "Trump trials".) Scott Hall pleaded guilty to five misdemeanors and was sentenced to five years of probation. He is also committed to testify in future proceedings, and if he doesn't testify truthfully, the deal is revocable.

Hall's role in the Georgia election-stealing scheme is both low-level and easily established: When Trump allies were trying to assemble (or invent) evidence of voter fraud in Georgia, they illegally accessed voting machines in Coffee County.

The security breach in the county about 200 miles southeast of Atlanta is among the first known attempts by Trump allies to access voting systems as they sought evidence to back up their unsubstantiated claims that such equipment had been used to manipulate the presidential vote. It was followed a short time later by breaches in three Michigan counties involving some of the same people and again in a western Colorado county that Trump won handily.

... Authorities say Hall and co-defendants conspired to allow others to "unlawfully access secure voting equipment and voter data." This included ballot images, voting equipment software and personal vote information that was later made available to people in other states, according to the indictment.

In a RICO case, specific crimes like these are used to establish the existence of a corrupt organization that other defendants belong to. Hall's guilty plea raises the question of whether it will start a stampede to make a deal with Willis before the other defendants do. A defendant's only leverage in such a deal is if s/he can testify to something Willis can't already prove.

In other Georgia-election-case news, former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark and three of Trump's fake electors lost their bid to move their cases to federal court. Mark Meadows' similar motion had already been denied, and Trump surprisingly announced he will not try to shift his case to federal court.

Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro are the first of the 18 (now 17) RICO defendants facing trial. They requested a speedy trial, which will begin October 23. CNN has speculated that they will be offered plea deals to avoid this trial, which would preview the state's evidence to the other defendants.

and the sham impeachment hearing

Like the rest of the House Republican investigations of Joe Biden, the opening session of their impeachment inquiry did not live up to its billing. None of the witnesses called were "fact" witnesses, i.e., none of them saw or heard President Biden doing anything impeachable. The witnesses also made much weaker claims than the Republican congressmen did.

Forensic accountant Bruce Dubinsky: "I am not here today to even suggest that there was corruption, fraud or wrongdoing. More information needs to be gathered before I can make such an assessment."

Law professor Jonathan Turley: "I do not believe that the current evidence would support articles of impeachment. That is something that an inquiry has to establish."

That's a far cry from the claim House Oversight Chairman Rep. James Comer made, that the GOP probes have “uncovered a mountain of evidence revealing how Joe Biden abused his public office for his family’s financial gain.”

A rule of thumb: Investigations that are going somewhere get more and more specific. For example, the Manhattan case about Trump's Stormy Daniels payoff -- widely considered the weakest of the four Trump indictments -- has come down to this: 34 Trump Organization documents are fraudulent business records.

The longer the Republican investigation of Biden stays at the level of "Hunter did shady things and Joe must have been involved somehow", the more likely it is to go nowhere.

A tip on interpreting headlines: When a headline attributes some wrong-doing to "the Biden family", that means the article contains no new information about President Biden himself. If they had anything on Joe, that would be the headline.

and the rain

Climate Change Summer has turned into Climate Change Fall. Friday, as much as 8 inches of rain fell on parts of New York City, shutting down the subways and producing flash floods. The storm was not due to a hurricane or tropical storm. Instead, seemingly innocuous systems came together unexpectedly to produce a hurricane-like rainfall. The NYT explains:

It has been raining a lot in New York, which hasn’t seen a September this wet in over a century. Climate change is very likely stoking more ominous and lengthy downpours because as the atmosphere heats up, it can hold more moisture, said Andrew J. Kruczkiewicz, a senior researcher who specializes in flash floods at Columbia Climate School at Columbia University.

Scientific American gives the larger context:

The 2018 National Climate Assessment (a new version of which is due sometime this year) found that the amount of rain that fell during the heaviest 1 percent of rain events had increased by 55 percent across the Northeast since 1958, with most of the increase happening since 1996. That trend will only get worse as global temperature rise, causing more evaporation from oceans and lakes and giving storms more water to fuel deluges.

and Taylor Swift

The right-wing attacks against Swift are the subject of one of the features posts.

and two speeches aimed at workers

Biden and Trump each talked to auto workers, but in very different ways. Biden went out on the picket line with UAW strikers and addressed them with a bullhorn. In addition to the quote at the top of this post, he said:

Wall Street didn’t build the country. The middle class built the country, and unions built the middle class.

Biden handed the bullhorn to UAW President Shawn Fein, who said:

These CEOs sit in their offices, they sit in meetings, and they make decisions. But we make the product. They think they own the world, but we make it run.

Whether we’re building cars or trucks or running parts distribution centers; whether we’re writing movies or performing TV shows; whether we’re making coffee at Starbucks; whether it’s nursing people back to health; whether it’s educating students, from preschool to college — we do the heavy lifting. We do the real work. Not the CEOs, not the executives.

The next day, Trump was invited by management to speak at a non-union auto parts shop.

About 400 to 500 Trump supporters were inside a Drake Enterprises facility for the speech. Drake Enterprises employs about 150 people, and the UAW doesn't represent its workforce. It wasn't clear how many auto workers were in the crowd for the speech, which was targeted at them.

One individual in the crowd who held a sign that said "union members for Trump," acknowledged that she wasn't a union member when approached by a Detroit News reporter after the event. Another person with a sign that read "auto workers for Trump" said he wasn't an auto worker when asked for an interview. Both people didn't provide their names.

In other words, Biden lent his support to an event workers started on their own, while Trump staged a event for the cameras, complete with extras playing phony roles. His support for working people is about as authentic as his property valuations or his marriage vows.

and Cassidy Hutchinson's book

I read Cassidy Hutchinson's new book Enough. A lot of what's in it is stuff you already know if you watched her testimony and followed the news about her.

But it does make it easier to understand how she could fall under Trump's spell: She had a psychologically abusive father whose approval she valued but could never secure. He was a head-of-the-household type who had big plans, but was never wrong. It was up to Cassidy's mother to make the details of those plans work, and to take the blame if things fell apart. So that role was already in Cassidy's head, waiting for Trump to slide into it.

Her description of the Trump White House resembles an abusive family in a lot of ways. Hutchinson and her boss Mark Meadows lived in fear of Trump's temper. And if he did erupt, the explanation that he's an over-coddled asshole wasn't available to them. Instead, they believed they should have foreseen and prevented whatever set him off.

The book also underlines a problem in our justice system: It's expensive, even if you did nothing wrong. When Hutchinson got her first subpoena from the January 6 Committee, everyone told her she needed a lawyer. She was driven to use a TrumpWorld lawyer when an independent lawyer quoted her a six-figure price. Only after she got disgusted with herself and wanted to change her testimony did she ask Liz Cheney for help. Cheney gave her a lead on a firm that took her case for free.

This raised a question in my mind: If you're a witness and not a target of an investigation, and if you intend to answer all questions truthfully, why do you need a lawyer? All the coverage I've seen takes the necessity of counsel for granted, so I asked a lawyer I know to spell it out.

He made three points:

You don't always know for sure that you won't eventually be a target, even if you're innocent.
A lawyer can negotiate about how you'll testify, to minimize how much the investigation will disrupt your life.
If you're not familiar with all the relevant laws, you may not realize that you violated one. If you did, you may need to negotiate a plea deal or a cooperation agreement.

With Trump and his allies threatening retribution if they ever get back in power, both sides need to think about this problem. Merely witnessing a suspected crime shouldn't bankrupt you.

and you also might be interested in ...

Senator Dianne Feinstein died at the age of 90. Politico looks back at her career.

Governor Newsom is wasting no time in naming her successor: Laphonza Butler, the president of Emily's List. The official announcement is expected later today.

Newsom had made two pledges, both of which this appointment fulfills: He said he would appoint a Black woman, and that he would not give any of the candidates already running for this seat in 2024 an advantage by naming them as the interim.

I didn't watch the second Republican presidential debate. In reading accounts of it, nothing made me feel like I missed out.

Ron DeSantis is a terrible strategist. He was riding high immediately after last fall's midterm elections for a simple reason: He won his race handily, while Trump's favorite candidates almost all lost. His potentially winning message against Trump was obvious: I can win and Trump will lose again. (If Trump wanted to respond by claiming he didn't lose, let him. It makes him sound like a whiner. Ask: "So are you living in the White House now or not?" When that sets off another rant, respond with an eye roll and "Whatever.")

DeSantis' policy positions should have sounded conservative while remaining vague, giving a wide range of Republicans room to fantasize about the wonderful things he might do after he won.

Instead, he committed to very specific and not very popular policies, like a six-week abortion ban, taking books out of libraries, and seizing control of universities. It's been all downhill from there.

and let's close with something out of this world

In 2024, NASA is planning to launch a probe to study Europa, a moon of Jupiter where scientists hope to find an ocean of salty water under a thick crust of ice. The presence of water, kept in a liquid state by friction-producing tides powered by Jupiter's gravity, opens up the possibility of finding extra-terrestrial life for the first time.

The probe, which NASA is calling the Europa Clipper, would go into orbit around Jupiter in 2030.

Over several years, it will conduct dozens of flybys of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, gathering detailed measurements to determine if the moon has conditions suitable for life.

"OK," I imagine you thinking, "but what's that got to do with me?"

NASA is offering a variety of ways for you to engage with the mission. Inspired by the thought of Europan life, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón has written a poem for the mission "In Praise of Mystery: a Poem for Europa". NASA's "Message in a Bottle" campaign invites you to cosign Limón's message.

The poem will be engraved on the Clipper, along with participants' names that will be etched onto microchips mounted on the spacecraft. Together, the poem and participant’s names will travel 1.8 billion miles on Europa Clipper’s voyage to the Jupiter system.

Other suggested activities have a more educational flavor: NASA provides material that might nudge you to write your own space poetry. Or you can download a line-drawing of the Clipper and Europa suitable for coloring. The coloring can get even more interesting if you put textured surfaces under the paper.