The Weekly Sift

Monday, May 27, 2024

Venues

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

- Heather Cox Richardson

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

This week everybody was talking about Alito's flags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and international courts v Israel

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

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

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

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

President Biden denounced the prosecutor's move:

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

Friday, the International Court of Justice

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

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

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

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

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

and the Trump trials

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and Trump's assassination claim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and let's close with something thought-provoking

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

Monday, May 20, 2024

Not the End

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

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

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

This week everybody was talking about Israel and the Palestinians

That's the subject of one featured post.

and the Trump trial moving towards its conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and Alito's insurrection flag

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

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

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

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

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

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

and presidential debates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and that kicker's commencement speech

See one of the featured posts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

and let's close with something peaceful

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

Monday, May 13, 2024

Unconstrained and Revolutionary

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

- Eric Cortellessa, "How Far Trump Would Go"

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

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

This week everybody was talking about Trump's legal problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and Biden's increasing rift with Netanyahu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and the New York Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and let's close with something colorful

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

Monday, April 29, 2024

Incentives

No Sift next week. The next new posts will appear on May 13.

If someone with those kinds of powers, the most powerful person in the world, with the greatest amount of authority, could go into office knowing that there would be no potential penalty for committing crimes, I'm trying to understand what the disincentive is from turning the Oval Office into the seat of criminal activity in this country. ... If the potential for criminal liability is taken off the table, wouldn't there be a significant risk that future presidents would be emboldened to commit crimes with abandon while they're in office?

- Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson during the discussion of presidential immunity

This week's featured posts are "The Manhattan case against Trump is stronger than I expected", "What to make of student protests?", and "The Supreme Court is breaking America's faith in the law".

This week everybody was talking about student protests

This is the subject of a featured post.

After I pushed the button on that piece, I noticed this tweet by GOP opinion-shaper Frank Luntz:

Last night at the [White House Correspondents] dinner, I spoke privately with 4 members of Congress: 2 Dems and 2 GOPers. All 4 are big foreign policy players and all 4 are strongly pro-Israel in every way. However… All 4 spoke with significant and serious concern (bordering on anger) about Israel’s impact on humanitarian aid in Gaza. None of them called for a ceasefire, but all of them were deeply critical of what they believe is Israel’s interference and lack of cooperation in getting aid to the Palestinian people. For more than a decade, some Israeli leaders dismissed what was happening on college campuses. They were wrong then, and they would be wrong now to dismiss this warning about what’s happening in Congress.

and Trump's trial

This is covered in another featured post. I'll include here some details that didn't fit into that article.

The trial has given Trump many things to complain about, from the courtroom being cold to the judge's gag order that takes away "my constitutional rights to speak", i.e. fairly ineffectively preventing him from trying to intimidate witnesses and jurors.

His weirdest complaint, though, was that the trial prevented him from being with his wife Melania on her birthday Friday. The court proceedings ended for the day at 4:30, so there was plenty of time for the Trumps to have a night on the town, if only Melania had decided to leave their Florida home and come to their Trump Tower apartment to support her husband during his trial. But clearly it is Judge Merchan's cruelty and not Melania's indifference that is keeping them apart.

Another reality-denying Trump complaint is that his supporters are being kept away from the trial. He posted:

Thousands of people were turned away from the Courthouse in Lower Manhattan by steel stanchions and police, literally blocks from the tiny side door from where I enter and leave.

None of that is true. In fact, MAGA supporters have almost unanimously ignored his pleas for them to act out. More than a year ago, Trump predicted "potential death and destruction" if he were charged in this case. Again and again, he has warned that the American people would not stand for any attempt to put him on trial, and has done his best to incite January 6 style violence. But it hasn't worked. Every day, a mere handful of docile Trump supporters show up outside the courthouse.

and the Supreme Court

People who believe in our legal system generally found Thursday's discussion of Trump's "absolute immunity" claim not just annoying or enraging, but depressing. Our highest court is corrupt. There's just no getting around that any more. I discuss why in the third featured post.

One aside, concerning several cases discussed this week: The arguments underline a basic difference between how liberals and conservatives think: Liberals are more grounded in reality. Again and again, the liberal justices referenced things that are actually happening, while the conservative justices were far more interested in imagining scenarios that could happen, but are highly unlikely.

I've made this observation before, with respect to guns.

If you’ve ever wandered into an argument over guns and gun control, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that the two sides talk past each other. Proponents of gun control quote statistics: how many more shooting deaths we have in America than there are in countries with fewer guns, how many more suicides or police deaths there are in well-armed states, and so on.

Pro-gun advocates are more likely to tell stories, and often those stories are dark what-if fantasies: What if home invaders came to kill you, kidnap your baby, or rape your teen-age daughter? What if you were a hostage in a bank robbery? What if you were at a restaurant or grocery store when terrorists broke in and started killing people? Wouldn’t you wish you had a gun then?

Such stories are easily stretched to indict even the mildest forms of gun control, like limiting magazines to ten shots: Picture your wife hiding in a closet with a handgun. Before she hid, she already gotten off a few shots at the invaders, and now she’s not sure how many shots she has left. Don’t you wish now you’d been able to buy her a gun with a larger magazine?

In the featured post on the Court, I described how Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh wanted to discuss just about every possibility other than the one in front of them, where a grand jury has found probable cause to charge Trump with crimes.

Something similar happened in the Court's discussion of how the federal EMTALA law conflicted with Idaho's abortion law. Conservative justices wanted to talk about bizarre hypotheticals in which deceitful women could lie about their suicidal impulses in order to get late-term abortions. Liberals wanted to talk about actual cases in which women with problem pregnancies have to wait until they are near death to get care.

You can see it across the board: Men might claim to be women to get into your daughter's bathroom. Has that ever happened? Well, maybe not, but it could. Librarians could be grooming your children for pedophilia. Can you name one? Transwomen might drive "real" women out of women's sports. Well, we just saw the NCAA basketball tournament. Is that happening? On and on.

and new indictments in Arizona

This week Arizona indicted a number of people involved in the Trump fake-elector plot, including all the electors themselves, Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, and a few other Trump administration insiders.

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Harvey Weinstein's rape conviction was overturned by the New York court of appeals, on the grounds that the trial judge allowed the jury to hear too much about crimes that weren't directly related. The state has the option to try him again, and in the meantime New York can send him to California, where he faces a 16-year sentence.

It's a tricky point of the law, which comes up again in the current Trump trial: You're supposed to be on trial for the specific crime in the indictment, and not for being a bad person in general. But if other crimes indicate a pattern of behavior, they might be relevant. So a judge has to decide: How does the illustrative value of a defendant's previous bad behavior balance against the possibility of prejudicing the jury against him?

Texas Senator Ted Cruz may have thought his arrangement with iHeart Media circumvented both Senate rules banning outside jobs and election laws preventing candidates from coordinating with or directly raising money for their super PACs. But he may have gotten a little too clever.

Here's the arrangement: Cruz hosts a three-episodes-a-week podcast, which would be a full-time job for a lot of people. He does it "for free" in the sense that he does not get direct payments from iHeart, which carries the podcast and sells advertising on it. However, iHeart does make regular payments to Cruz' super PAC, which so far have totaled at least $630K and constitute more than a third of the PAC's total contributions.

It's undeniable that this violates the intention of the laws regulating super PACs. But it's possible Cruz has found an unethical loophole in the law. No one can say for sure at the moment, because Cruz and iHeart refuse to reveal the exact terms of their agreement.

One line of the Texas Observer article on this strikes me as hilarious:

Cruz claims he does the podcast as a service to the public by pulling back the curtain on corruption in Washington.

I can't argue with him there.

BTW, you might wonder how Cruz' podcast differs from a Substack blog I often quote: Quick Update by Rep. Jeff Jackson (D-NC). The difference is that Jackson's blog generates no revenue: subscriptions are free and there are no ads.

President Biden at the White House Correspondents' Dinner:

The 2024 election is in full swing, and yes, age is an issue. I'm a grown man running against a six-year-old.

I don't know what to make of South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem's account of killing her 14-month-old dog Cricket. She tells the story in her new book No Going Back, which isn't out yet. The Guardian, which got an advance copy, summarizes:

She includes her story about the ill-fated Cricket, she says, to illustrate her willingness, in politics as well as in South Dakota life, to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it simply needs to be done.

Maybe this is where the Republican Party is these days. In 2022, many GOP candidates carried or shot guns in their ads. So maybe the next step is to show you're not afraid to kill. Or maybe Noem is sending a message specifically to Trump, who is said to be considering her as a possible VP candidate: Mike Pence wasn't willing to betray the Republic for you, but I'll do whatever ugly things need doing. (And Trump famously hates dogs.)

and let's close with something ominous

I suspect I'm not the only one who sees himself Tom Gauld's "To Be Read" cartoon.

Monday, April 22, 2024

Trustworthiness

I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarized.

- potential juror not seated for Trump trial

This week's featured post is "Defending American Values: Trial by Jury".

This week everybody was talking about the dysfunction of the House GOP

I guess all's well that ends well. Saturday, pro-Russia House Republicans were finally overcome and the Ukraine aid President Biden requested last September was approved. The aid passed with Democrats voting 210-0 in favor and Republicans 101-112 against.

The road to that vote was very strange. Typically, passing a bill begins with passing a set of rules for the vote. The rules resolution defines the process for passing the bill, including the timing of the vote and what amendments will be in order. This is done through the Rules Committee, which typically is a rubber-stamp for the Speaker, whose party has a majority on that committee. Rules Committee votes are often party-line.

This time, though three Republicans voted against the rule, which only got out of the committee because Democrats supported it. Similarly on the floor of the House, 55 Republicans voted against the rule, which would have failed without Democratic support.

The Senate is expected to pass the Ukraine aid package tomorrow, and the weaponry (some of which is already stockpiled in Europe), should start arriving within days.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, who Colorado Republican Rep. Ken Buck accused of "mouthing Russian propaganda", reiterated her threat to oust Johnson (in the same manner Kevin McCarthy was removed in October after refusing to shut down the government), but did not bring her vacate-the-chair resolution to the floor before the House adjourned.

That could mean that she knows she doesn't have the votes, but it's hard to say for sure.

This whole episode points out the dysfunction of the House's right wing. They managed to delay Ukraine aid, but not stop it. And they got nothing in exchange for letting it pass.

In February, Senator Lankford (R-OK) had negotiated a Ukraine-aid package that included very much of what the GOP wanted in a border bill. But Trump decided he wanted the border as an issue in November, so he torpedoed that compromise.

So now Republicans get to complain that we are spending money to secure Ukraine but not to secure our southern border, but it's empty rhetoric. Democrats were willing to take action on the border, but Republicans weren't.

One of the most ridiculous stories of the week was the Freedom Caucus worrying that Speaker Johnson was going to launch a surprise attack on them.

Conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus are signing up to take shifts to monitor the chamber floor in order to prevent their own party leaders from making unilateral moves that could curb their power.

This group called itself the Floor Action Response Team, a.k.a. FART. You can't make this stuff up.

and Trump's trial

Last week I was hearing that it might take as long as a month to find a jury for Trump's Manhattan trial, which began last Monday. In fact, 12 jurors and six alternates were in place by Friday. Opening statements are happening this morning.

The most unsettling story of the week (other than the disturbed man who set himself on fire to send a message that no one has been able to decipher) was MAGA-world's attempt to rig and intimidate the jury. In the featured post, I take a step back and consider Trumpists' attacks on the jury system as part of their larger authoritarian project.

Trump has quite obviously been defying Judge Merchan's gag order. The judge will hold a hearing tomorrow. What he decides to do should tell us a lot about how the trial will proceed.

It's obvious that Trump believes he can't be jailed, and that any fines will just be the cost of doing business. I'll be curious to see how Merchan punctures that confidence. I hope he has had somebody working on the logistical problem of jailing a man with Secret Service protection. A good first step would be to send Trump on a tour of the facilities Merchan has picked out.

Trump is having trouble accepting the fact that he has been indicted by a grand jury of American citizens, and so is a criminal defendant.

Case in point: Barron Trump's high school graduation. Trump asked Judge Merchan to adjourn the trial for a day on May 17 so that he can go to the ceremony. Merchan said maybe; if the trial is on schedule then, an adjournment might happen. Trump took this as a rejection and complained bitterly on social media, inciting his followers to denounce the judge. (Michael Cohen then posted that Trump had never attended his other children's graduations, which seems not to be true.)

But the upshot is that Trump is being treated like what he is: a criminal defendant. Defendants don't typically get to arrange the court schedule for their own convenience. They also don't get to control the court sketch artist or the room's thermostat, or to prevent reporters from mentioning that they fall asleep in court.

Merchan is simply using the levers he has to keep Trump under control: If Trump keeps trying to delay the trial any way he can, he won't get to go to Barron's graduation. In other words: If you want something from me, behave yourself.

My conclusion: Trump knows he won't behave, and is already setting up to deny that it will be his own fault when he misses the graduation.

Trump scheduled a rally Saturday in North Carolina, but cancelled it due to weather. It's got to be wearing on him to go so long without the encouragement of a worshiping crowd.

If there's one person who's enjoying all this, it's Jimmy Kimmel. While he was hosting the Oscars over a month ago, Kimmel read aloud Trump's social-media rant against Kimmel's performance, and then addressed Trump directly:

Thank you for watching. I'm surprised you're still [up]. Isn't it past your jail time?

Five weeks later, Trump hasn't been able to let that go, so Wednesday he used his day off from court to post another rant about Kimmel and the Oscars, pretending it was Kimmel who couldn't get over it.

Stupid Jimmy Kimmel, who still hasn’t recovered from his horrendous performance and big ratings drop as Host of The Academy Awards, especially when he showed he suffered from TDS, commonly known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, to the entire World by reading on air my TRUTH about how bad a job he was doing that night, right before he stumbled through announcing the biggest award of all, ‘Picture of the Year.’

Wednesday night, Kimmel took this apart line by line: Ratings were up, and as the host, Kimmel didn't present any awards.

The person who presented the [Best Picture] award was Al Pacino, not me. We are different people. ... You’d think he would know that because I’m pretty sure ‘Say hello to my little friend’ is what he said to Stormy Daniels that got him in all this trouble.

Kimmel later suggested that if he hosted again next year, Trump might be able to watch "on the TV in the Rec Room at Rikers". The whole monologue is worth watching, and proves that a politician should never get into a back-and-forth with a comedian.

The phrase "Trump derangement syndrome" is a classic projection, as Kimmel pointed out. ("There's only one person who suffers from Trump derangement syndrome. His name is Donald Trump.") The surest way to get yourself diagnosed with TDS is to look at facts about Trump, apply ordinary standards of morality and decency, and reach the obvious conclusion that the man is a piece of shit.

But what's truly deranged is the way Trump cultists distort reality to justify whatever their idol does. Take sexual assault, for example. At least two dozen women have publicly accused Trump of some form of inappropriate sexual advances, up to and including rape. Their stories are remarkably similar, and they track with the behavior Trump bragged about on the Access Hollywood tape.

The Trump cult explanation is simple: All the women are lying, and Trump's confession was meaningless "locker room talk".

Who's deranged here?

Kevin McCarthy is trying to normalize Trump's denial of the 2020 election by asking "Has Hillary Clinton ever said she lost the 2016 election?" Yeah, she did. On national TV. There's video.

and Israel/Iran

Cooler heads may be prevailing. The tit-for-tat between Israel and Iran seems to be dying down and may have ended. After Israel bombed Iran's diplomatic compound in Damascus, Iran vowed to retaliate. On April 13, it sent over 300 drones and missiles flying towards Israel, nearly all of which got knocked down. Then it was Israel who vowed to retaliate, which it did early Friday morning.

Israel attacked a military base very close to a major Iranian nuclear facility. So the attack was mostly a message: If we had wanted to strike something much more important, you couldn't have stopped us. So far, Iran seems to be ignoring this attack, at least in public.

So we can hope that this particular episode is over, and Iran will go back to fighting Israel through proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah.

and the Supreme Court

The Court has some interesting cases lined up this week, which is the final week of arguments in this term. Thursday, it will hear arguments on Trump's claim of criminal immunity. The big question here is not whether it will find in his favor, but whether it will continue playing along with his delay strategy. (I have a fantasy in which the Biden administration files an amicus brief, urging the Court to decide this case quickly so that Biden knows what laws he can break before his term ends. In particular, can he order the assassinations of certain justices while he still has time to nominate replacements?)

Liz Cheney writes:

Mr. Trump believes he can threaten and intimidate judges and their families, assert baseless legal defenses and thereby avoid accountability altogether. Through this conduct, he seeks to break our institutions. If Mr. Trump’s tactics prevent his Jan. 6 trial from proceeding in the ordinary course, he will also have succeeded in concealing critical evidence from the American people — evidence demonstrating his disregard for the rule of law, his cruelty on Jan. 6 and the deep flaws in character that make him unfit to serve as president. The Supreme Court should understand this reality and conclude without delay that no immunity applies here.

Today, the Court is hearing arguments in Grants Pass v Johnson, which involves a longstanding principle of American law: In order to break the law, you have to do something, not just be a certain kind of person.

The issue here is homelessness. Grants Pass has such sweeping laws against sleeping in public that it is nearly impossible for a homeless person to live there and stay within the law. On the one hand, it seems like it shouldn't be illegal simply to be homeless. On the other, municipalities want to have some way to regulate homeless encampments, which can be health hazards.

Wednesday, it's time for Idaho v United States. Here the issue is a Reagan-era law known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, Emtala for short. Emtala requires emergency rooms to treat people who show up there (or risk losing Medicare and Medicaid funding).

The case was brought after Idaho imposed a near-total abortion ban that allowed doctors to perform an emergency abortion only if a pregnant patient was on the brink of death.

That law is in direct conflict with Emtala, which requires doctors to stabilize emergency patients so they won’t face severe health consequences – a radically lower bar for intervention than Idaho’s. Shortly after Roe was overturned, the Biden administration issued a guidance stating that the federal law pre-empts state abortion bans, ultimately suing Idaho over its ban.

So if a woman with a problem pregnancy shows up at an emergency room in Idaho, and isn't at death's door, but needs an abortion to, say, preserve her future fertility or prevent some problem that may lead to death in a week or two, what should happen?

These cases should all be decided by the end of the term in June.

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Not content to simply waste its own time, the House Republican majority tried to waste the Senate's time as well. The Senate refused.

The House had impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas essentially for policy differences. Ostensibly, he was charged with refusing to observe a 1952 law requiring applicants for asylum to be detained until a decision is reached -- something no administration has done in recent years, largely because Congress hasn't appropriated the money to do it. (One of the goals of the border bill that Trump torpedoed was to streamline the asylum process by funding more courts and judges.)

Once an impeachment has been voted by the House, the Senate is supposed to drop all its other business and hold a trial. Republicans were hoping for a grand show trial that would give them a stage to pontificate about border issues.

Democrats refused to play ball. In short order, a party-line vote (where Republican Lisa Murkowski voted Present rather than No) ended the trial because the bill of impeachment "does not allege conduct that rises to the level of a high crime or misdemeanor” as required in the Constitution.

Workers at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga overwhelmingly voted to join the United Auto Workers. The factory had rejected the union in 2014 and 2019, but this time the union held nearly a 3-1 majority. Historically, the South has not been welcoming to unions.

and let's close with something spectacular

Two of nature's most striking spectacles are the Northern Lights and a volcano erupting at night. In Iceland, you can sometimes get both.