It challenged his self-conception as an all-powerful ruler

Alysa Liu won the gold medal in women’s figure skating at the Olympics. This is the first Olympic medal for women of the US in 20 years. The talk isn’t so much that she did it, more on how she did it. Mary Louise Kelly of NPR spoke to Chris Schleichter, a former figure skater, who wrote about it. Schleichter said that much of competitive figure skating is about fear. The stakes are high. The judges are there to record every mistake. The skater has invested years of training a lots of money (coaches and ice time are expensive). One misstep can end one’s dreams, as happened to Amber Glenn in the short program. The result is skating not to lose rather than skating to win. But Liu says she has no nerves. She is joyful. She just wants to skate to show people her art. This level of mental health is rare and refreshing. This allows her to be more relaxed and her jumps are bigger and landings more beautiful. She portrayed a party on ice and the crowd was with her. Liu had retired from skating. But she missed it and came back just for the fun. She had done a quadruple jump, but on her return she decided that was too hard on her body. She was not there to earn a medal (though she got the big one). She was there for the fun. Kelly figured out what the lesson is:

Stop worrying about all these achievement yardsticks that we are constantly always measuring ourselves by. Just go out and have some fun.

Schleichter agreed:

I think, yeah. And it's healthy for so many skaters in the sport. Like, every four years, we're only going to send three women to the Olympics. Does that mean that every other girl skating out there is somehow a failure? Shoot for that Olympic goal, but have other measures of success that are healthier and achievable, and you might actually end up getting those along the way. It's really so refreshing to see someone reframe what success in the sport looks like.

I watched Liu’s performance. It was indeed joyful – she had a broad smile the whole time – and wonderful. This is quite the contrast to Ilia Malinin, the “Quad God” who tumbled in his long program. The one who was expected to win gold placed 8th. There were signs the pressure got to him. I’ve mentioned this before. What if athletes did it for the fun and not for the judging, scores, and ranking? I’m not sure how that would affect hockey. For figure skating that would definitely lessen the stress and heighten the beauty. Which will be the case in the Olympic figure skating gala tonight (I keep waiting for that to appear as I stream both NBC and Canada’s CBC – 75 minutes of prime time left). Would people come if there wasn’t a winner? For several years (perhaps 30 years ago) the prominent figure skaters from the World and Olympic competitions would go on tour as a group and put on well attended (as in filling ice arenas) displays. No pressure, fun encouraged. I attended as many as I could and enjoyed them very much. I had written that I thought the first meeting of the nasty guy’s Board of Peace might have been secret. But it wasn’t. Now that I think about it, of course it wasn’t. The nasty guy wanted as much press coverage as possible to demonstrate how wonderful he is. Oliver Willis of Daily Kos wrote about the meeting. The nasty guy’s pals were there, including a few autocrats. France and Britain were not. Cardinal Pietro Parolin of the Vatican said the topic of the meeting – Gaza – should be discussed at the United Nations. Beyond that Willis had little to say, though he concluded:

The “Board of Peace” is a vehicle for Trump to avoid the United Nations, where he has consistently given poorly received speeches that failed to rally international support to his positions. Trump’s most notable U.N.-related moments have had more to do with ranting about malfunctioning escalators than achieving international cooperation. Trump cannot even work alongside regional partners like Canada and Mexico—but he thinks his joke of a “Board of Peace” can supplant the U.N.

The nasty guy’s tariffs – well, one category of tariffs – were struck down by the Supreme Court. I don’t have a full news article about it, though I do have excerpts and some commentary from today’s pundit roundup by Greg Dworkin for Kos. From the Associated Press:

The Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s far-reaching global tariffs on Friday, handing him a significant loss on an issue crucial to his economic agenda. The 6-3 decision centers on tariffs imposed under an emergency powers law, including the sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs he levied on nearly every other country. The high court ruled his use of an emergency powers law to set import duties without Congress was illegal. It’s the first major piece of Trump’s broad agenda to come squarely before the nation’s highest court, which he helped shape with the appointments of three conservative jurists in his first term.

From the Wall Street Journal editorial board:

This is ugly even by Mr. Trump’s standards. He’s accusing them of betraying the U.S. at the behest of nefarious interests he didn’t identify, no doubt because they don’t exist. Asked about Justices Gorsuch and Barrett, whom he appointed, Mr. Trump called them “an embarrassment to their families.” This is rhetoric that could cause some deranged Trump acolyte to turn to violence against a Justice.

A tweet by Jonathan Karl:

Wow. President Trump just accused the Supreme Court majority in the tariffs case as "fools and lapdogs" to "RINOs" and the "radical left" and calls the Justices "very unpatriotic and disloyal to the Constitution." He suggests "foreign" influences drove the decision

A tweet by Dan Pfeiffer:

I keep seeing people say that the SCOTUS ruling on tariffs will help Trump by taking economic matches from the baby. That's wrong. It's almost certainly going to make his political problems worse, because the ruling shines a light on the tariffs, and he is going to use other authorities to raise people's prices.

A tweet by Kyle Cheney highlighted a section of Gorsuch’s concurrence:

...our system of separate powers and checks-and-balances threatens to give way to the continual and permanent accretion of power in the hands of one man. That is no recipe for a republic.

And Cheney added:

It's hard to imagine a ruling that cuts more deeply to the heart of Trump's identity in public life — he has linked his presidency to the ability to use tariffs as a deal-making cudgel and bend other global powers to his will.

In the comments a tweet from David Frum:

Trump could have written and submitted a tariff bill for enactment by Congress. It happened often in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He didn't do that, because the point of the exercise was arbitrary presidential power - and the corruption possibilities that flow from arbitrary power. I suspect the above point is the reason Trump erupted so ferociously today. The Supreme Court did not merely strike down Trump's lawless tariffs. It challenged Trump's self-conception as an all-powerful ruler, who can do as he pleases, answerable to no one.

A tweet by Tim Miller:

It brings me no joy to say this but given the presidents shocking announcement that the Supreme Court is compromised by foreign interests, the next president will have no choice but to replace all 9 members with new justices who have no foreign entanglements.

The news today is the nasty guy imposed a 10% tariff for every country using a different law, which means they can last only five months. Then, because he was still angry, he bumped it to 15%. A cartoon posted by Wolfpack and created by MacKinnon shows Andrew sitting in prison writing a note that says, “Dear Donald, Wish you were here. – Andrew” A cartoon by John Auchter shows a conversation between an elephant and a woman:

Elephant: Good news! As part of $38.3 billion in new federal spending, your government is going to develop a detention center in Romulus, Michigan! Woman: Wait, wait, wait, wait. You’ve been telling me for years there’s no money for heealthcare, education, transportation, energy infrastructure, food – but now there’s plenty for a concentration camp?! Elephant: Look, you gotta understand – government spending is good! It creates jobs! It stimulates the economy! Deficit spending helps pick winners in the marketplace of ... of the ... Woman: Who are you anymore?! Elephant: I ... I don’t know...”

The New York Post tweeted a video of dancers at the Lincoln Memorial protesting by enacting the shootings by ICE of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The video is less than 2 minutes.

The big divide isn’t left v right, it’s top v bottom

There is a thing called the Streisand effect. Photographer Kenneth Adelman photographed the coastline of California from a helicopter and posted them online. One of the photos was of Barbra Streisand’s home. She sued to have it taken down. Before she filed the suit the photo had been viewed six times and two of those were her own lawyers. After the suit, which was highly publicized, the photo was viewed more than 400,000 times and can still be found online. This follows a Chinese saying that translates to, “Trying to cover things up only makes them more evident.” The same effect happened when, last week at the Olympics, the Committee demanded a Ukrainian skeleton athlete remove photos of Ukrainian soldiers from his helmet. He refused. They blocked him from competing. The story got a lot more exposure than if they had let the guy wear the helmet without comment. And another example. Emily Singer of Daily Kos wrote about CBS telling Stephen Colbert he could not interview Democratic Texas state Rep. James Talarico who is running for US Senate. The claim is that the interview would violate the Federal Communications Commission’s “Equal-time” rule, though the rule has an exception for talks shows and comedy shows. Colbert discussed the situation on the show (even though CBS didn’t want him to). Then after the regular show ended, he recorded an interview with Talarico and posted it to the show’s YouTube channel. Where it quickly got more than 2.6 million views. Google searches for Talarico from across the US jumped up 20 times and from just Texas they jumped about 7 times. Singer included both Colbert’s rant on why he couldn’t interview Talarico during the regular show (about 8 minutes) and the actual interview (about 15 minutes). FCC chair Brendan Carr pressured CBS because Republicans want their Senate candidate to face Talarico’s primary rival Jasmine Crockett. This interview happened after early voting had already started. Which means Republicans just boosted interest in the guy they want to lose in the primary. In that second video I see that Talarico is definitely a candidate I could vote for. I can’t say whether I would prefer him to Crockett, who is in the US House and quite fierce in calling out the nonsense from the nasty guy and Republicans. But I don’t live in Texas. Talarico is a student at a seminary of the Baptist Church, though he doesn’t sound like the Southern Baptist Convention. He and Colbert talked about Christian Nationalism, which he described as wanting to take over the government in the name of Jesus, though Jesus never would have approved of using his name that way. Talarico also referred to Matthew chapter 25 in the Bible, which includes the criteria for separating the sheep from the goats, a way of saying the criteria for who gets to heaven and who doesn’t. The criteria includes such things as feed others, welcome strangers, and visit the sick and those in prison. He also noted the things not in the list – something I’ve also been talking about lately – things that have nothing to do with getting to heaven. Something not in the list is how you vote. Talarico was very much opposed to a bill in the Texas Legislature that would require schools to display the Ten Commandments. He said Jesus commands us to love and shoving your religion down other people’s throats is not love. The separation of Church and State is also important to the Church because one of the things they should do is to speak truth to power, difficult to do if the Church is the power. Also, as Colbert pointed out, if you say that Jesus is aligned with one political party and that party loses, what does that say about Jesus? Talarico closed by saying the culture wars are a smokescreen. The big divide isn’t left v. right, it’s top v. bottom. Kos community member A Bleeding God wrote that when the right began screaming about trans women in sports, trans folk tried to sound the alarm. Trans folk were told they were overreacting. The same thing happened when the right screamed about bathrooms and then banned care for trans minors. Now that the right is moving to block all trans care, even for adults – which is trans genocide – will the rest of the liberals now listen?

We are not overreacting, we never were, what we have been, what we have always been, is the canary in the coal mine. They come for our rights first because we're a tiny minority that most folks don't understand and many, even those on the left, find "icky".

In the comments was a mention of the famous Martin Niemöller poem that has a refrain, “I did not speak out because I was not a ___.” A Bleeding God replied:

Funny thing about that poem, it did the same s--- They didn't come for the communists first. They came for the trans people first. Germany in the 30s went after trans people as their very first target.

Another commenter noted one of the first Nazi attacks was on the Institute for Sexual Science. Its books were burned in the street. One thing that Institute did was trans health care. Nathaniel Rakich, in an article for Votebeat posted on Kos discussed the SAVE America Act, which passed the US House. It now goes before the Senate where a filibuster will likely prevent its passage. The act gives the federal government more oversight in voting with the goal to prevent illegal voting, which is already quite rare. This act would require people to provide proof of US citizenship and a photo ID when they register to vote. Its provisions would go into effect immediately on the nasty guy’s signature. It is essentially a way to stop people from voting. Perhaps 9% of citizens can’t produce their birth certificate and only about half have a passport. Also, remember when TSA rolled out Real ID requirements? They had to keep postponing the date where such an ID would be required to fly because handling the paperwork took so long to work out, both by citizens and the driver’s license offices. Proof of citizenship requirements were tried in Kansas back in 2013. 12% of those who tried to register couldn’t prove their citizenship. The state could identify only 39 noncitizens who voted in the previous 14 years. A court struck down the law in 2018. Secretary of State offices say implementing citizenship verification simply can’t be done by the midterms. They are already doing a lot (such as protecting against election interference) and would get no additional money to make it happen. Verifying documents would take about ten minutes for each person. Doing so for hundreds of thousands people means a lot more staff would be needed.

Ultimately, as long as the filibuster remains in place in the Senate, the SAVE America Act has little chance of becoming law before the midterms. But that may be the point: The bill wasn’t introduced with the goal of making elections run more smoothly; it was introduced to make the point that elections aren’t as secure as they could be. If, as expected, the bill fails and voters don’t have to prove their citizenship or show photo ID in 2026, it could make it easier for Trump and his allies to claim that the results are tainted by fraud. That could be a different type of nightmare scenario.

In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a tweet from Blue Georgia discussing the FCC and Colbert.

David Frum: One of the ways that authoritarian regimes get themselves in trouble is they cut themselves off from knowing bad news in time because they demand endless flattery of the leader. The leader does not know that there aren't sausages in the shops. That what Brendan Carr is doing here.

In the comments Bill Bramhall posted a cartoon of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor being hauled away by police. King Charles says, “No one is above the law.” The nasty guy retorts, “Some king you are.”

Young girls were just the bait, extortion the payoff

In the comments of a pundit roundup for Daily Kos there is a discussion of the arrest of Andrew Mountbattan-Windsor (disgraced brother of King Charles of Britain). Commenter rugbymom wrote:

The charges against Andrew, from what I understand, don't have to do with having sex with underage girls -- but rather with giving Epstein access to highly classified information when Andrew served as a Trade Envoy for the UK government. The UK authorities and media have been far more attentive to what to me is the scariest (but also promising) aspect of the files: the possibility that the young girls were just the bait, and the money-laundering, political influence, insider information, espionage for Putin and others? was the real payoff. Oh, plus the blackmail and extortion opportunities. To me “Did Trump rape underage girls?” is the least important question. More pressing (and frankly more likely to result in charges?) is who else in the Administration, in Congress, possibly on the Court, was and remains part of a highly compromised circle that included foreign oligarchs, blackmail and extortion, etc. etc. And the UK authorities are looking hard at that, while our social media and even members of Congress are all focussed on “Did he Do It?” (even though he’s likely immune from being prosecuted while he's in office, is probably already incompetent to stand trial, and certainly will be by Jan. 2029).

Jen Fifield of ProPublica and Zach Despart of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, in an article posted on Kos, wrote that the Department of Homeland Security released a tool called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE. It originally checked immigrants’ eligibility for public benefits but has been expanded under the nasty guy. It now collects confidential data from across the federal government and is promoted to give states a way to look for noncitizens in their voter rolls. The claim is that “millions” of noncitizens are voting. The first finding is that the people flagged as ineligible are actually quite eligible. The error rate is high and verifying their true status causes county election officials extra work. There is no guidance from DHS on procedures to deal with matches. One reason for the false positives is SAVE doesn’t know about immigrants who become citizens. The other finding is that across seven states with a combined 35 million registered voters, the system “identified roughly 4,200 people — about 0.01% of registered voters — as noncitizens.” That’s definitely not “millions.” Which means this is a great deal of effort expended to fix a non-problem, and that means the real goal is something else, such as casting doubt in the security of elections to give a reason to stop actual citizens from voting. Carrie Johnson and Tamara Keith of NPR discuss a particular case of the nasty guy abusing executive power.

The president wants the government he leads to pay him billions of dollars. Trump has filed multiple claims arguing he's been hurt by Justice Department investigations and the leak of his tax returns years ago. Now it's up to his own political appointees to determine whether to settle with their boss — and for how much taxpayer money. "There is a glaring conflict of interest with Trump being on both sides of the claim," said Edward Whelan, a former lawyer at the Justice Department and a political conservative who once clerked for the late Justice Antonin Scalia. "It is outrageous that he and those answering to him would be deciding how the government responds to these extravagant claims."

Even the nasty guy has said he “will negotiate with myself.” One of the cases for which he is seeking damages comes from when federal agents seized classified documents from his Mar-a-Lago estate. Even in the worst cases the Justice Department rarely pays out more than $10 million. So the nasty guy is asking for at least 100, maybe 1000, times the rare highest payouts. The nasty guy thinks accepting all this taxpayer money is just fine because he’ll give the money to charity. And I’ll believe that only if the charities publish acceptance letters.

But at a time when Americans say their top concern is the cost of living and making ends meet, the idea of the president receiving a massive windfall from the government he leads may not sit well with voters — even if it is donated to charity.

The nasty guy’s Board of Peace met for the first time. The primary topic was Gaza. Leila Fadel of NPR didn’t talk about what happened at the meeting (it was likely secret). However, she did talk to Aaron David Miller, who served more than 20 years at the State Department, advising on Arab-Israel peace negotiations. He’s now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. One good thing about the Board of Peace is that it is trying to internationalize this problem. Gaza cannot be resolved by Israel and the Palestinians. There are three main issues. Who will govern Gaza? The Palestinian movement is a mess. Who will provide security in Gaza? There’s little hope there. Who will pay for humanitarian assistance, current shelter, and reconstruction? Maybe the Board of Peace can help with that last one. Internationalize means being able to bring in the huge required resources. But if Israel and Hamas can’t align their visions of the future no outside pressure or assistance will help. The Board of Peace does have a huge problem in that there is no Palestinian representation. One reason why that is a problem is that Israel has stated their policy is annexation. Miller said:

In the end, you need leaders who are masters of their politics in Israel and Palestine and leaders who are willing to overlook those politics to a degree to try to address not only their own constituencies' needs but the needs of others. And we do not have those kinds of leaders in the region. And frankly, we don't have them in Washington either.

As for a stabilization force, as long as Hamas and Israel are still shooting at each other, in spite of a cease-fire, no party is going to put boots on the ground.