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.
and you also might be interested in ...
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.
