The majority disdains restraint and grasps for power

I’m about to travel, leaving Monday after lunch. I might post tomorrow, and might not. I’ll be gone for two and a half weeks. If I post in that time it will probably be travelogue. Yeah, pontificating on Thursday’s debate is still a thing. Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos wrote a review of the debate. In spite of the obvious flubs that are getting all the airtime Biden did give a spirited defense of democracy in the face of the nasty guy lies. The nasty guy’s lying did catch plenty of notice. Alas, there are still many who won’t vote for the nasty guy because of his lies and other behavior, but then saw Biden as old and won’t vote for him. Joan McCarter of Kos reported that Speaker Mike Johnson has found a reason to remove a president. Johnson was an architect of the nasty guy’s attempt to stay in office in 2020 and voted against impeachment twice. His choice in November is the criminal and constant liar. Johnson could have helped remove that president from office. And didn’t. But he’s called on Biden to pull out of the race. Reason? Biden lost a debate.

This is the same Mike Johnson who voted against removing Trump from office after the Capitol insurrection. He’s for removing a president because he’s old, and he’s against removing a president who is old and who tried to overthrow the government. Good to know.

McCarter than quoted CNN’s fact checker, who said the nasty lied more than 30 times. The quote lists them. Kos of Kos says Biden called for the debates and set the rules, so Biden needs to fix it. That does not mean dropping out. There is a problem if the nomination is handed to Kamala Harris. She’s not Biden and would have an extremely hard time winning. But shoving Harris aside for Newsom, Whitmer, or Buttigieg or any other Democrat ready to jump in would create quite bad optics. Also, states want names for the ballot by about six weeks. This was a lost opportunity to shift the narrative from Biden’s age to the nasty guy’s mental decline. But so far the polls have shifted little. The Supremes have issued quite a few rulings over the last few days as they conclude their session. An Associated Press article posted on Kos reported on a ruling about whether cities can enforce bans on homeless people sleeping outdoors when shelters are full. The question before the court is whether the bans were “cruel and unusual” and in violation of the Eighth Amendment. The majority, in the 6-3 decision along ideological lines, said nope, it’s not cruel. The minority, in a dissent read from the bench, said yes, it is. “Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said. The minority sided with the homeless who, in many cases, do not have an option when shelters are full. The number of homeless in the country is more than 650K, the most since 2007. The majority sided with cities, who want to keep their beautiful and safe. The article doesn’t mention how the ruling supports the social hierarchy, which this Court is all about. This ruling is also about oppressing the people already in a difficult and precarious positions. Another AP article reported the Court overturned the Chevron decision. Many articles don’t mention the name of the two cases involved, which can be confusing, so I’ll mention them: Loper v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerce. The main dispute is who has the final say when an agency issues a rule and the supporting law is vague in that area. Back in 1984 the Chevron decision concluded that in such cases deference should be given to the agency who wrote the rule. They’re the experts. Congress cannot foresee every possibility and having Congress wrangle every last detail of what “clean water” means is something they don’t have time or expertise for. So, fine, Congress can’t fill in the details. But corporations say courts can. Environment and consumer protection advocates say, courts aren’t subject experts either. It will take time to teach the courts the relevant science. Filling the courts with these cases (and there will be a lot of cases) will take up a lot of time and in the meantime the corporations could continue their harm to consumers and the environment. (To which corporations say to themselves, yep, that’s the point.) Scott Detrow of NPR talked to law professor Jody Freeman about this case in a six minute, understandable discussion. McCarter reported Justice Elena Kagan issued a strong dissent for these rulings. There’s the part about courts not being subject experts – which Justice Gorsuch demonstrated by repeatedly confusing “nitrous oxide” and “nitrogen oxides.” A bit of Kagan’s dissent quoted by McCarter:

In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue—no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden—involving the meaning of regulatory law. As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar. It defends that move as one (suddenly) required by the (nearly 80-year-old) Administrative Procedure Act. But the Act makes no such demand. Today’s decision is not one Congress directed. It is entirely the majority’s choice. ... Its justification comes down, in the end, to this: Courts must have more say over regulation—over the provision of health care, the protection of the environment, the safety of consumer products, the efficacy of transportation systems, and so on. A longstanding precedent at the crux of administrative governance thus falls victim to a bald assertion of judicial authority. The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power.

A Supreme Court power grab? Yes, because a lot of cases will be appealed to them. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin had several interesting quotes. Jill Lawrence suggested that the nasty guy won simply by showing up because the impeachment process and the courts did not protect the country. He won again when moderators called him “Mr. President.” The rest of Dworkin’s quotes are about the ruling’s the Supremes have issued over the last few days. Just Security talked about another case, this one the Fisher ruling. It narrowed the definition of obstructing an official act. This was used to prosecute many of the Capitol attackers and the official act was Biden’s election certification. For those already convicted there is minimal impact. For those still waiting trial there are other laws to convict them under. Rock Hasen of Election Law Blog says the Fisher ruling probably won’t help the nasty guy because of his fake elector scheme. Inside Climate News discussed the decision to overturn Chevron. Though the actual question involved a small fishing operation the case was funded by the network created by the billionaire Koch family, who made their billions in petroleum and very much want to gut consumer and environmental protections. That original Chevron case was led by Anne Gorsuch, then head of the EPA and fierce opponent of regulations. She lost that 1984 case. Her son Neil wrote a lengthy concurring opinion to overturn Chevron. Noah Rosenbloom of The Atlantic said attacking the federal government’s ability to regulate industry (to protect consumers and the environment) has long been a corporate top priority.

On stage: one man who breaks things, one who fixes things

I didn’t watch or listen to the debate between Biden and the nasty guy last night. If what Biden said that the nasty guy said nothing but lies is true (and I have no doubt that it is) I’m glad I didn’t sit through 45 minutes of him lying. So I didn’t hear about it until this morning. NPR’s Morning Edition looked at every single angle of it – the debate itself, how these people saw it, how those people saw it, etc. Of course, they included audio of the clip where Biden seemed to grind to a stop in the middle of a question. And, of course, that flub was all over the news. Somewhere in all that someone, perhaps Biden, said the only thing that came out of the nasty guy’s mouth was lies. That got me wondering: Who knows they were lies? Who was going to tell at least the undecided, in a way that was as delivered to them as easily as the actual debate, that lies were constantly spouted and this is why they are lies? From all this blather it seems this debate was not as decisive as I (and most Democrats) would like. There were calls from pundits – and Democrats! – that Biden’s performance was so bad he should step aside and let the Convention in August choose someone else. Amazing how many pundits didn’t call on the nasty guy to step aside when he was convicted 34 times. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported on the debate. He posted his observations this afternoon, so it wasn’t the quick take as came from the overnight pundits.

On stage were one man who derives sick pleasure from breaking things, one man who tries to make everything better, and a network that invited them both into a glass house and handed them mallets. Then, after 90 minutes of watching the first man send shards in all directions, we got to listen to everyone complain that the second man didn’t swing his mallet with sufficient vigor. If you give a minute to Donald Trump, he will use it to lie. If you give a minute to President Joe Biden, he will use it to try and correct the lie—and answer the original question that Trump ignored. If it seems like Trump has the easier task, you’re right. If you think Biden should do something else, you’re on the wrong team.

Sumner said before the debate started host CNN would do no fact-checking. Sumner can’t think of any reason why that would be a good idea. So the nasty guy lied. And all CNN hosts did was say, “Thank you.”

Pundits—even some supposed Democratic pundits—are admiring the massive, nonchalant lying of a convicted criminal while clutching their pearls over Biden trying to set things right, and that tells you everything about them. If the Democratic Party fails to dust itself off, stand in front of the cameras, defend Biden, and explain how a lying felon is worse than laryngitis and some verbal stumbles, then it will say everything about us.

Before the debate Biden posted on X a spoof of the claim he would be on performance enhancers during the debate. The caption says:

I don't know what they've got in these performance enhancers, but I'm feeling pretty jacked up. Try it yourselves, folks.

He holds a drink can showing Dark Brandon and the text:

Zero Malarkey Get Real, Jack. It’s Just Water.

Fans can buy cans at the campaign website.

What could slow down the GOP march toward authoritarianism?

An Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos reports that Biden has pardoned perhaps thousands of US service members who were convicted of consensual gay sex. These convictions came from the military’s criminalization of sodomy in 1951. In 2013 that law was rewritten to prohibit only forcible acts. The pardon allows former service members to recover lost pay and benefits (such as access to VA hospitals). Those now pardoned are able to apply to get proof their conviction has been erased. This is all good news! As great as the news is, those convicted of the same crime but under a different name, such as “indecency,” are not automatically included in the pardon. People with those convictions will need to request clemency which will be handled individually. Mark Sumner of Kos discussed the nasty guy’s criticism on electric vehicles. Yeah, we get that these complaints are a way to signal allegiance for the oil industry. But some of his complaints are quite strange. He has talked about EVs being able to go only 15 minutes between charging while diesel trucks can drive coast to coast without refueling (neither is true). That all EVs are made in China (news to Elon, perhaps he should say something?). That Army tanks need batteries so so big the tank needs to tow a wagon like a child (battery run tanks don’t exist, yet). Since all of these claims are obviously wrong and easily disproven one wonders why no one calls him on them. I’ve mentioned Project 2025 several times now. It’s a document close to a thousand pages long describing how the next Republican president can turn America into an authoritarian state. Joan McCarter of Kos wrote the authors are starting to enact it. The actions so far are to go through the backgrounds, social media accounts, and anything else they can look at of high-ranking civil servants of the Department of Homeland Security. Of course, the purpose of all this inspection is to determine which employees are loyal to the nasty guy. Government employees who are civil servants are not appointed by the president and are protected from politically motivated firings. That’s something the nasty guy wants to elimiate and tried to do during his first term. Once all the info is gathered the group intends to post 100 names to a website. And nothing good came come of that, even if the nasty guy never sets foot in the Oval Office again. The damage will come from the mistrust the list will create among the employees. For those who are loyal to the job and the country they will get threats from the MAGA hordes. And it will come when the list is posted, months ahead of the election. The nasty guy’s first attempt would have affected about 50,000 federal employees. A second attempt will affect far more. And will mean the federal government will stop functioning. Way back in 2021 I saved a tweet by Brian Klass. Yeah, almost three years later I’m looking at that tab. In the meantime Elon Musk bought Twitter and blocked my access to all but the first tweet of a thread. So I found it on Threadreader – with a whole bunch he’s written since. I would have simply closed the tab for something that old. But this one still resonates. Klass is an associate professor in Global Politics at UCL. He’s written a book and contributes articles to The Atlantic. In this thread from Sept. 21, 2021 he is pessimistic about American democracy because of one question: “What could slow down the GOP march toward authoritarianism?” Republicans who don’t bow down to the nasty guy are primaried with someone who will. Gerrymandering means in many places a Democrat has no chance. Because of social media nasty people like Marjorie Taylor Greene aren’t expelled, they’re treated as social media stars. Republicans who defend democracy are treated as pariahs. The Capitol attack didn’t break a the party, instead it became a loyalty litmus test.

The point is this: there are huge pressures pushing Republicans toward embracing authoritarian extremism. And here's the problem: there are no countervailing forces. There's nothing that rewards being a sober moderate who believes in democracy and tries to govern by consensus. ... Here's the bottom line: nobody has come up with a convincing explanation for how this authoritarian trend reverses itself. That's why, as someone who studies these dynamics for a living, I'm worried that the GOP is becoming irreversibly authoritarian. (Sorry to be depressing)

On November 22, 2021 Klass had a bit more to say on that subject.

When a despotic leader emerges in a democracy and captures a party, the party has two choices: push back hard and prioritize democracy, or re-make the party in the image of the would-be authoritarian. The GOP clearly chose the latter.

So how might we as a society get rid of the Republican authoritarianism? Alas, possible methods are implausible. There could be a massive voter rebuke. But so many states are so highly gerrymandered (and made more so before the 2022 election) many Republicans will win anyway. Media could call them out. But media polarization means Republicans don’t watch any source that might. A national crisis could be a jolt. And we had them – the Capitol attack and a pandemic. And they made no difference. All the incentives for zealots, like MTG, are for them to get worse. Incentives for moderates are to move further right or be primaried.

Democrats need to protect democracy, reform institutions to make them more robust, and understand that for the foreseeable future, their political rivals are authoritarian. They must therefore act accordingly.

They’ve done a bit of strengthening institutions, but not nearly enough.

Political reporters treat Republicans as 9-year-old children

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos discussed what is going in to choosing the next leader of Republicans in the Senate since Moscow Mitch is stepping down from leadership at the end of the year. Biden keeps talking about bipartisanship...

But as Republicans scramble to pick a replacement for outgoing Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, there are three big demands on the table: get rid of the seniority system for committee assignments, impose a term limit on leadership positions, and never, ever compromise. The death of bipartisanship is a base requirement.

Stopping the seniority system for committee assignments means members would be chosen more for their purity of beliefs. Mitch was wrong about many things, most wrong about the nasty guy impeachment votes and stealing two Supreme Court seats. But he was right about a few things, like the Ukraine aid bill. But for his successor...

Compromise makes government possible. A refusal to compromise makes it impossible. But the choice is only obvious for those who want government to work.

Sumner also wrote the nasty guy’s VP pick is likely North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum. He’s rich, though not in the billionaire range. Even so, he is an ambassador to the only group the nasty guy really cares about – billionaires. Burgum has another great quality he doesn’t care whether he gets the job.

But Burgum has given a clear signal that he’s willing to lie for Trump, be his bagman, and never step near the spotlight. That’s a combination that no other hopeful seems to match.

In a third post Sumner said that while billionaires love the nasty guy, corporate CEOs don’t. Out of the Fortune 100 CEOs, zero have sent money to the nasty guy, even though a majority are Republicans. The reason is simple. The nasty guy terrifies them. Even though Biden calls them out for their greed Biden has guided the best economy in decades. Biden has shown clear goals and consistent regulation. In contrast, the nasty guy’s economic plans are shown to be a disaster. In his first term the nasty guy attacked individual companies and their executives and he has talked of retribution. They like their corporate diversity programs and cringed when the nasty guy called the Charlottesville protesters “very fine people.” They’re afraid of Project 2025, ready to fill the government with incompetent idealogues who have no idea how business works.

CEOs may be dragging in far more money than they deserve. They may be failing to protect their companies by failing to stand up for employees. But, says [head of Chief Executive Leadership Institute at Yale Jeffrey] Sonnenfeld, CEOs are “not protectionist, isolationist or xenophobic, and they believe in investing where there is the rule of law, not the law of rulers.”

Fernando Oliver posted a cartoon of Lisa Simpson (forgive me if I have the name wrong, I didn’t watch the show) appearing to lead a seminar where on the screen are the words, “‘Billionaires won’t create jobs if we tax them,’ is a myth made up by billionaires so we won’t tax them.” In a fourth post Sumner talked about nasty guy surrogates laying the groundwork for tomorrow’s debate between the nasty guy and Biden. The example shown here is a surrogate declaring the CNN moderators are biased and the nasty guy would be in a hostile environment. So if the nasty guy doesn’t show or he clearly loses the excuses are already there. And if Biden commits a flub that dominates the news the surrogates can say the nasty guy wonderful because he won despite the environment. Yeah, the situation is that if Biden flubs it will be all over the news – even if he gets a date wrong or mispronounces a name. Yet, the nasty guy can flub a whole lot worse in lots more ways and the news will ignore it. I will ignore the debate, being satisfied with summaries I can read on Friday. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Paul Glastris of the Washington Monthly who wrote that Biden is the oldest leader in NATO – he was born before it was founded – and as he has aged his clout and respect has increased.

It was Biden who warned European leaders in early 2022 that Vladimir Putin was going to send his military into Ukraine, a warning many of them initially refused to believe. When the invasion happened as predicted, it was Biden who rallied Western and other allied countries to Ukraine’s defense. It was also Biden who authorized a dramatic increase in U.S. natural gas exports to Europe as Russia cut off supplies. It was Biden who picked up the phone and called the heads of Finland and Sweden with a quiet suggestion that they join NATO. And it was Biden and his team who overcame the resistance of Turkey and Hungary to make NATO expansion a reality, thus turning Putin’s military quagmire into a geo-strategic disaster for Russia.

Dworkin added: “Experience matters on the world stage.” Dworkin quoted a couple tweets by John Stoehr and his Editorial Board:

Because the press corps' lens though which it sees politics is a family drama in which Trump is the child and Biden is the dad, and no one but a crazy person would question the mental fitness of a child. Dad, however ... If you're ever confused about how political reporters treat Republicans, stop seeing the Republicans as grown men and women and start seeing them as 9-year-old boys and girls. Things will make a ton more sense.

In the comments exlrrp included a meme from Turning Point USA that says, “If conservatives are being silence, then why don’t they ever shut the f--- up?” West Central Tribune posted a cartoon by Adam Zyglis that shows a classroom shooter and behind the stream of bullets are the Ten Commandments with “Thou Shalt Not Kill” legible. One kid cowering under a desk says to another, “At least our shooters will know they’re sinners.” A couple tabs that have been sitting there perhaps too long. In the comments of a pundit roundup from mid May kurious quoted an article from The Guardian about Justice Alito and the upside down flag. The Supreme Court should be a check on a radical Republican Party, but has become its ally.

The rule of law cannot be relied on to stem the tide of rising authoritarianism, because our legal institutions have been captured by the authoritarians… The justice is perfectly aware that he does not need to pretend to neutrality, or hide his partisan loyalties, or behave, with anything like a convincing effort, like his work on the court is motivated by the law and not his own reactionary political preferences. Alito knows that he does not need to maintain any pretext of integrity, intellectual commitment or seriousness in his work. The supreme court has accumulated enough power to itself – and the justices have done a sufficiently good job of insulating themselves from any accountability or consequence – that he doesn’t even think he needs to lie any more. He’s comfortable being a partisan operative right out in the open.

From about the same time Rep. Jamie Raskin tweeted:

Justice Alito turned the flag upside down. Donald Trump turned the Bible upside down. MAGA turned the Capitol upside down. The Roberts Court turned the Constitution upside down. Let’s set America right side up in November.

Masculinity contest cultures

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos wrote Republicans can’t decide if Biden is senile or superhuman. They’ve been portraying Biden as senile every chance they get (have you heard that Biden is old?). Then Biden does something, like his State of the Union address in March which showed him vigorous and with a competent mind. So what to do? Accuse Biden of being on drugs. Several have proposed Biden be given a drug test just before Thursday’s debate (of course, no need to give on to the nasty guy). Claiming Biden is on drugs is an all purpose excuse. On NPR this evening I heard it phrased as “performance-enhancing drugs,” which athletes take for physical improvements. Thankfully, NPR was reporting on the Republican tactic, not buying into it. Sumner wrote:

But the silliest thing about all this may be the idea that there are “performance-enhancing drugs” someone can take to overcome dementia. The sad fact that millions of American families face every day is that most forms of dementia are a one-way street. Treatments may slow the progress of the condition, but nothing can pull someone back once they have gone far down that path. All the stimulants in [Trump doctor Ron] Jackson’s little black bag can’t drag someone from the kind of senile state that Fox News and Republicans claim Biden lives in and restore them to vigorous, determined competence. If only it were possible. Everyone would love to lay their hands on these magic pills.

I would have definitely given those magic pills to my mother, if they existed. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Jerusalem Demsas of The Atlantic and her interview of Dr. Alice Evans about the increased sexism of young men worldwide. Part of the issue is young men are facing such things as higher home prices and differing outcomes for men with and without college degrees. Another factor is because women have increased opportunities they are able to reject men that don’t give them enough economic security, love, respect, or even fun. These women don’t have to “make do” with what society expects. Wrote Evans:

They’re guys with emotions—and nobody wants to be ghosted, to be rejected, to feel unwanted. So if men go on these dating apps, and they’re not getting any likes, and even if they speak to her, when she doesn’t have the time of day, it just bruises and grates at your ego, your sense of worth. And so then, men may turn to podcasts or YouTube, and if you look at that manosphere, if you look at what people are talking about, it’s often dating. And so they’re often saying, Oh, women have become so greedy. They’re so materialistic...

In the comments exlrrp posted memes to show a church (likely Catholic) where the Ten Commandments are not displayed. And they would not be displayed in the nasty guy’s prison cell. In a second comment exlrrp posted a photo of the sign on a Grace United Methodist Church that says, “If your version of Christianity wants to put the 10 Commandments in schools but take free lunches out of them, you are worshiping something other than Jesus.” Pedro Molina posted a cartoon on Kos. An elephant in a pinstripe suit is in a classroom pointing to the Ten Commandments posted behind him. He says to a schoolboy, “...And do you know what happens to those who break them?” They boy replies, “They become your presidential candidate!” Back in mid May Wailin Wong and Adrian Ma of NPR’s Planet Money talked to June Carbone, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who was one of the authors of the book Fair Shake: Women And The Fight To Build A Just Economy. Carbone and colleagues saw that efforts to close the gender pay gap between men and women college grads had been stalled for about 30 years. And it didn’t look like old fashioned sexism. What the researchers found is a winner-take-all approach to business that wasn’t so widespread 30 years ago. Ma said:

Companies that adopt a winner-take-all approach prioritize winning at all costs. They do ethically questionable or sometimes straight-up illegal things in pursuit of short-term goals, like pumping up the stock price.

Carbone explained why this put women at a disadvantage:

First, if you don't compete on the same terms as the men, you lose. Second, if you do compete on the same terms as the men, you lose because women are disproportionately punished.

An example: Women in finance are less likely than men to commit financial misconduct. And if they do they are more likely to be to be fired. Ma said these kinds of work environments are “masculinity contest cultures.” They attract people who tend to engage in high levels of sexual harassment, bullying, and favoritism. The companies can’t maintain diversity because they push women out. Carbone and co-authors argue for changes to reduce winner-take-all culture, “like people speaking out against abusive behavior, more gender diversity, government investment in childcare and paid family leave, and stronger regulation of misbehaving companies.” I see increasing gender diversity will be difficult in an organization that tends to push women out. And men tend not to speak out against abusive behavior because they want to participate in it. Mark Sumner of Kos, as part of his 7 stories post included at the bottom a video by Mr. Who’s the Boss explaining the “ensh**ification” of the internet, or why the internet is getting worse. He started with Uber as an example, then explained that many other internet companies do the same things. The video is 25 minutes. When Uber started they made it really easy and cheap for the rider. Soon riders thought the service was essential. Then the made it better for the driver to sign up more of them and lock them in. Then it made it better for the shareholder – how to get the most out of customers and spend least on suppliers. They introduced tiering. That means better service if one pays more. If it stopped there that is good. But it soon meant worse service for those that didn’t pay more. Then they began to hide or misdirect the true price. So it was to find what is the worst service at the highest price before we scare off the customer. Now that there are a lot fewer taxis the Uber price is more expensive than taxis were. Add to that a subscription, giving one a discount. It makes the customer more loyal. But soon fewer things are included in the subscription. An example is Amazon charging for shipping that is supposed to be included and defaulting to the slower and cheaper shipping method, hoping the customer doesn’t notice. Facebook knows it has you because leaving is social suicide. So Facebook shows ads and other content not because it thinks that’s what you want (though many times it is) but what makes Facebook the most money. Then there are dark patterns. The biggest is how difficult it is to unsubscribe. He had an example of how difficult it could be. Add to that the free month – which requires a credit card – that they hope you forget about when it comes time to start billing. Streaming services used to be a great deal. Except now one needs to subscribe to several to get all the hit shows. The more there are the worse each one gets. He found he was paying over a 1000 pounds a month for all the streaming services. Things one can do: When trying a service for that free month subscribe, then immediately turn off auto renew (or unsubscribe). Instead of paying for all the streaming service every month, rotate between them. As part of planning my summer travels that include New York City and a couple Broadway shows I got an email showing where previous Broadway hits can be found on streaming services. Some were recorded straight off the stage, some rewritten as movies. Many I thought were intriguing turned out to not make the transition well. One that did was a show I saw on tour in Detroit. It is the musical Come From Away and I wrote about how much I loved it here. The story is straightforward. The 9/11 terrorist attacks closed US airspace. Planes already in the air had to go somewhere. The town of Gander, Newfoundland, population of 10 thousand, had been a refueling station on trans-Atlantic flights before the time of jets. When the US airspace closed Gander suddenly had 6,500 guests to care for until the airspace reopened several days later. The guests were amazed at how well they were treated. So when I heard the stage version had been filmed I wanted to share so you can see it too. Come From Away is on Apple+. And if I get a subscription to Apple+ (keeping the suggestions above in mind) I just might enjoy it again.

The ease and comfort in which he spouts his racism

My Sunday movie was Love & Vodka. I attended the premier of the movie as the closing film of the Cinetopia Film Festival in Ann Arbor. Yeah, I actually sat in a movie theater, something I’ve done little of in the last four year. The movie is so new that perhaps it isn’t quite done, or maybe it’s just that the post production team, who scrambled to get it done, haven’t been fully paid yet. This is the story of Bobby and Katya and is based on real life. The two meet when he nearly bumps into her. They like each other right off, but Katya is going home to Ukraine the next day. They message each other over the next year. Katya then challenges Bobby if you want to take this further come visit me. And he takes the gamble. A good chunk of the movie is Bobby in Ukraine visiting the family at their dacha and making one cultural gaffe after another, yet falling in love with Katya. The vodka comes in at a pivotal scene where various toasts prompt Bobby to drink too much of it. This story of a lover making a mess in a foreign culture has been told many times. I enjoyed the movie but I don’t think any of the actors will be getting Oscars. I heard about this movie only last Friday (I hadn’t heard Cinetopia was in progress) in an episode of Stateside on Michigan Public (the last twenty minutes or so here). Host April Bear talked to director Heidi Philipsen-Meissner, associate producer Amber Galkin, and Zach Bradley, the actor who played Bobby. After the movie was shown those same people and several more came on stage to talk of the experience and answer questions. The original Bobby Fox is known as RJ Fox and teaches film at a high school in Ann Arbor. His experience in Ukraine was in 2001. He published a book with the same name in 2015. Heidi Philipsen-Meissner’s son was in Fox’s class and the teacher knew the mother was a movie producer. He had written a screenplay based on the events of the book and asked her to look at it. She was intrigued. First, there were lots of rewrites. Then a pandemic. Then a war. Then an actor’s strike. So a lot had to change, including more rewrites to take the war into account. Bradley talked about joining the cast about four days before shooting started. The Ukraine part of the story could not be shot there. So the pine forests of northern Michigan were substituted for the forest around the family dacha. And the Midland – Bay City – Saginaw airport got Bobby from Michigan to Kyiv (the outside for the departing scene, the inside for the arrival). Associate producer Amber Galkin was got the job because she was a link to the Ukrainian community in Michigan. She was able to verify the cultural details, supply actors from her community who still spoke Ukrainian, and to go through the script and replace all the Russian words with Ukrainian – when Fox visited in 2001 the region he was in did speak Russian, but would not do so now. They even debated whether the word “vodka” was too Russian, but decided it now had international use. I knew before watching that the movie was shot in Michigan, not Ukraine. When Bobby and Katya are sitting in the forest and we hear the birds singing I thought of a bird specialist. He had said that a movie set in the Black Forest of Germany was ruined when he heard the birdcall of an American bird that is not seen in Europe. So as I heard the birds in this movie was I hearing Ukrainian birds added to the soundtrack or was I hearing Michigan birds? I doubt they went through the effort of recording Ukrainian birds. Adrian Florido of NPR talked to Jill Lepore, professor of US History at Harvard about the US Constitution. It was adopted on June 21, 1788 when New Hampshire was the ninth state to ratify it. So it is 236 years old. As the document that governs the government it had a lot of tremendously important innovations for the time. But even a document that important needs to be able to change, to be amended. The last meaningful amendment was 50 years ago. It hasn’t been amended since then because of polarization. It must get two-thirds approval in both houses of Congress. Then three-quarters of the states must ratify it. In a Congress known for doing nothing getting enough votes is not going to happen. When the amendment procedure was written that wasn’t considered a high bar. There are three ways to change fundamental law. First, we can amend the Constitution. Second, we can convince the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution differently. Third, revolution. Option 1 is impossible. Option 2 isn’t working because this particular Supreme Court is working to restore the original document, shed all the interpretations that have made life better. And option 3: “The danger of having an unamendable Constitution is that the risk of insurrection rises. ... Amendment was meant to be the remedy against insurrection.” A way to look at America’s Constitutional problems is to study all the proposed amendments that didn’t pass, even ideas that were proposed that didn’t get as far as actual amendment language. Constitutional scholars rarely look at all that. If the Constitution is going to be adapted only through the Supreme Court, “we really need a richer, fuller past.” Also on NPR Hawaii Public Radio's Savannah Harriman-Pote talked about the lawsuit a dozen young plaintiffs brought against the state over climate change. A while back I wrote about a similar case in Montana which, like other states fought against the suit as hard as it could. Last summer a Montana judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, saying the state must consider climate impacts when issuing permits for fossil fuel projects. The government appealed. In Hawaii the outcome is different – Governor Josh Green agreed with the plaintiffs. Harriman-Pote said:

Under the settlement, the state has agreed to develop a comprehensive plan to reduce carbon emissions from transportation, which is the largest source of climate pollution in Hawaii. It also agreed to create a special council of young people to advise on the process, including some of the plaintiffs.

Alas, there are only two or three other states that have environmental rights in their state constitution, making this sort of suit possible. A few days ago I wrote about the silly claim that America needed to abandon clean energy initiatives because the power needs of computers to run AI is so high. Mark Sumner, in this week’s 7 Stories for Daily Kos, wrote about why the claim is so silly – solar power and corresponding battery storage is getting so cheap and expanding so fast we can cover the power needs of AI. The amount of electricity generated by solar passed nuclear and oil about 2017. This year it passed the capacity of hydro. Within a year it will pass the capacity of gas and coal. Back at the beginning of June Jennifer Gerson, in an article for The 19th posted on Kos, wrote that a few mass shootings prompted state changes in law. The shootings were in East Lansing and Oxford, Michigan; Buffalo, New York; Lewiston, Maine; and Albuquerque, New Mexico. The common piece in those five shootings is that their governors are all women and they made gun safety a priority. They are Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Kathy Hochul of New York, Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, and Janet Mills of Maine. Gun laws used to be the third-rail of politics. They aren’t so much anymore. Yeah, the laws they passed – secure storage, background checks, removing guns from dangerous people, banning guns from parks and playgrounds – are a big help, but not enough to end the menace. Much more needs to be done. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Tyler Austin Harper of The Atlantic who wrote about vandals at Stonehenge who protested the lack of movement on environmental issues. The paint was easily removed, so there was no harm. The videos of the act got more than 30 million views and lots of outrage. A bit of what Harper said:

But the protest left me frustrated: yet another example of environmental activism that produces more rancor over its means than focus on its message.

Much better, wrote Harper, was sneaking onto Stanstead Airport outside London and spray-painting two private jets. The owners were rich people whose use of private jets mean they are much more responsible for climate change than the rest of us. Down in the comments are several interesting cartoons and memes. Jesse Duquette posted a cartoon with the caption “Louisiana.” It shows Jesus in a red cap saying to his disciples, “Forty-seventh in education? Just put my Dad’s weird rules up all over the place and pretend you’re helping.” Hil.i.am suggests the large, legible display of the commandments required for every classroom be shown in the original Hebrew. Make it Stop has a meme with the words:

Posting the Ten Commandments in Louisiana Public Schools should open the doors for also posting the Five Pillars of Islam, the Five Precepts of Buddhism, the 613 Jewish Mitzvot, the Rastafarian Commandments, the Dharma of Hinduism, the Five Principles of Shinto, and the Disasporic Religion of Haitian Vodou, to mention but a few of the over 6,000 estimated religions practiced on earth.

Rambler797 include a couple videos about Project 2025. The first was posted by TrumpFile, who wrote,

Here's Trump alluding to the fact that Project 2025 will end free and fair elections. “In four years you don't have to vote, ok. In four years don't vote, I don't care... We'll have it all straightened out so it'll be much different.”

The second one was posted by TrumpsTaxes:

Project 2025, straight from the horse’s mouth (President of the Heritage Foundation). Note the ease and comfort in which he spouts the racism, misogyny and conspiracy theories that will be central to policy in a 2nd Trump term. Wake up, folks.

Drew Sheneman posted a cartoon of a man looking at his basement’s damage because... “There’s three feet of climate change hoax in my basement!” And way down in the comments in among the artwork Onomastic I recently discovered is posting every day is this:

I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight. – Malcolm X

In another pundit roundup are more good cartoons and memes. Bill Bramhall showed a classroom where the Ten Commandments are posted beside the ten points of an active shooter drill. exlrrp posted a couple memes. The first shows Jesus comforting the nasty guy: “Don’t worry, you’ll enjoy Hell. There’s people just like you there.” The second says, “Republicans want to impose the Ten Commandments on schoolchildren, but not on their candidate.” Way down in the comments is a post by Billy Goat Tavern on June 23:

On this date in 1944, the Republican Convention began at the Chicago Stadium. Billy “Goat” Sianis put up his famous “No Republican’s Allowed” sign, causing his bar to be filled with Republicans demanding to be served and leading to Billy’s most profitable day ever.

A law trapped in amber

Last September Anna Liz Nichols of Michigan Advance wrote about “gay panic” as a defense used by those who committed violence against an LGBTQ person. It was in the news then because the Michigan House began hearings on banning its use. Rep. Laurie Pohutsky, who is bisexual, is leading the effort. Pohutsky said this defense is based on LGBTQ people being considered inherently less human. Research out of St. Edward’s University found that 104 cases across 35 states attempted to use a “gay panic” defense between 1970 to 2020. Yeah, that’s only about two cases a year (which is still too many). Michigan had four cases and ranked sixth among the states. Examples of gay panic are an 18 year old getting bludgeoned to death when her attacker realized she had male anatomy. A 15 year old boy wore a dress and heels to class and the next day was shot in front of other students. That the “panic” happened the next day is one of the absurd parts of its use. Back in 2013 the American Bar Association asked federal, state, and local governments to ban the use of the “gay panic” defense. Even so the majority of states still allow its use. That article was posted before the House voted to approve the ban. Yesterday, Jon King of Michigan Advance reported that it did pass the House, though King didn’t say how long ago. It passed with a vote of 56-53 along party lines. King wrote about it because it has now passed the Senate, 24-14, and included four Republicans joining all the Democrats. The bill now must return to the House for one more vote, then on to Gov. Whitmer for her expected signature. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported that Moody’s Analytics analyzed the economic plans of both Biden and the nasty guy. It tempered its forecasts with “and can implement his plans.” Then it went on to say under Biden inflation would drop below 2% and the economy would continue steady growth. Under the nasty guy and because of his plans for mass deportation there would be a sharp increase in inflation and interest rates, followed by depressed growth and a recession next year. That would happen because mass deportation would choke a labor market that’s already tight. Disrupting immigrant lives would be especially hard on agriculture, leading to food shortages and high food prices. One reason for this analysis is Florida is already trying it. Republicans limited immigrant workers on farms that are now unable to get the help they need. Sumner concluded:

This is just one more area where it seems like the choice should be blindingly obvious. And that’s before even considering the other effects, like the damage done by tearing apart immigrant families and destroying environmental progress.

Sumner also reported on current campaign fundraising in May. Biden did quite well, pulling in $60 million. The nasty guy pulled in $141 million, $53 million on just one day after his conviction. The nasty guy’s haul didn’t come entirely from the little people enamored with him. One check of $50 million came from Tim Mellon, whose wealth is in banking and was begun three generations back. Mellon also donated another $25 million to the nasty guy and $25 million to RFK Jr. That means he may be the first person in history to donate $100 million in one election cycle. There was also a $10 million check from Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein. Their money comes from beer and also began three generations back. That means neither one of these families has experience with why people are poor, so their comments about the poor are rather stupid. Yet, their donations to the nasty guy are a pretty big bribe for him to trash the already shaky social safety net. Aldous Pennyfarthing of Kos has yet another post on all the Ten Commandments the nasty guy has violated, even though he say how much he loves them. In the comments of a pundit roundup by Greg Dworkin for Kos are a few good cartoons and memes. Phil Hands has Ten Commandments by the nasty guy for Christians who support him. A few of them:

1. Thou shalt have no other politicians before me. 4. Remember my Supreme Court nominees and keep them holy. 7. Thou shalt not admit adultery.

Rambler797 posted a tweet by Thomas Horrocks with a quote by Kurt Vonnegut that essentially asks why the commandments of Moses and not the Beatitudes of Jesus? These are the verses that include “Blessed are the merciful,” and “Blessed are the peacemakers.” exlrrp posted a meme showing when it gets really hot in New York City, as it is now, the Statue of Liberty drops the robe and stands there in her bikini. And way down in the comments is a tweet by Jane of the North showing a woman holding a protest sign that says, “‘He who hath not a uterus should shut the fucketh up.’ ~Fallopians 13:13” For my non Christian readers, the Bible doesn’t have that book but it does have a book with the name “Philippians.” Now back to one of the pundits. Dworkin quoted CNN writing about the Supreme Court upholding the ban on domestic abusers having guns.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative who has been raising concerns about the Supreme Court’s approach on history in recent cases, penned a brief concurrence criticizing how some lower courts were looking for near-identical historical gun laws when examining modern regulations. “Imposing a test that demands overly specific analogues has serious problems,” Barrett wrote. “It forces 21st-century regulations to follow late-18th-century policy choices, giving us ‘a law trapped in amber.’”

Dworkin added:

Amy Coney Barrett is clearly the sharpest of the court’s conservatives. I would not be surprised to see her as Chief Justice some day. That’s an observation, not an endorsement.

Enough of that guy. Let’s talk about his opponent. Sumner wrote that one of Biden’s greatest achievements is one no one knows about. I’ll try to summarize. Back in 2020 as the economy was heading into recession and the highest unemployment rate in 90 years the nasty guy went to Saudi Arabia and demanded they cut production to keep oil prices up. When Biden took office prices rose sharply as renewed demand outpaced supply. In 2022, as Russia began to be sanctioned, Biden went to Saudi Arabia to ask them to keep the oil flowing. They refused. The US is both the world’s largest oil producer and has the largest reserves. And Biden was able to manipulate the reserves. He released oil to counteract the price surge from Russia’s war, then bought back reserves and made a profit for the US treasury. And for US oil companies. Who look to be supporting the nasty guy. Back at the start of the month Dartagnan of the Kos community reported that Biden’s 200th and 201st nominees for the federal judiciary had been confirmed. That’s a lot of nominees (though there are still seats to fill). It also means Biden has nominated and gotten confirmed more black women to Courts of Appeal than all prior presidents combined. While the nasty guy’s appointments were 65% white men, Biden’s appointments have been just 13% white men. This article doesn’t say the number of LGBTQ people appointed, also much larger than before. Biden said, “Judges matter.” They can uphold basic rights or roll them back. Over the last four years (and longer than that) we can see judges are not totally objective and unbiased. The difference between judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans have been stark. Alito, Thomas, and district judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, appointed by Republicans, routinely make the news. The headlines are about denying rights and often are abrupt departure from law or precedent. But judges should not be making news. They should be upholding laws and the Constitution. And the ones appointed by Democrats don’t seek or attain notoriety. Dartagnan then reviewed how much judges and justices have strayed from that job into having the only goal of upholding Republican goals and domination.

So it’s important that Americans appreciate what Biden has done. He has nominated judges not simply to correspond to the racial demographics in this country, and not simply to give more deference and representation to women, though he’s done both of these things. More importantly, he is appointing jurists whose vocation is to simply apply the law fairly, not in the service of some radical dogma they feel they must adhere to. Put simply, Biden is appointing judges who are doing their jobs. And that’s a very, very good thing.

The original lawgiver was Moses. "Say what?" says Hammurabi

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported on Louisiana’s new law requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in every classroom kindergarten through college. I had mentioned this yesterday. In signing the bill Gov. Jeff Landry said, “If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.” Sumner noted the Code of Hammurabi and Code of Ur-Nammu were earlier. Landry also said, “I can’t wait to be sued.” Four civil liberties groups say he doesn’t have to wait. Suits have been filed. There are a lot of details in the law that supporters think will help it get past the Supremes. One is the law doesn’t allocate money, counting on churches and conservative groups to “volunteer” copies. But even if enough copies aren’t volunteered posting the Top Ten is still required. While four of the Top Ten are appropriate for civil affairs (Don’t kill...) and two others (respect your parents...) are good moral teaching, the last four are about religion. The way this Supreme Court has been ruling they just might defy the First Amendment and give their blessing. Sumner also listed nine outrageous things about the law. The version of the Top Ten in the law didn’t come from any translation of the Bible, it came from a 2006 Supreme Court case featuring text from the Fraternal Order of Eagles. The minimum poster size is specified. As mentioned, there is no funding. It tries to use the Mayflower Compact and its many references to God to override the First Amendment. And if that doesn’t work there is the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, passed by the Confederation Congress before the Constitution was approved. On to the other stuff in the law that is getting less news but may be more important. Schools are prohibited from asking students their vaccination status. Teachers can be sued for using a student’s preferred name or pronouns. There is a section that is worse than Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law. Schools can appoint a “volunteer” chaplain. Bill in Portland, Maine, in a Cheers and Jeers column for Kos wrote about the Louisiana Top Ten. Bill added the Satanic Temple would like the right to post their 7 Tenets. The Satanic Temple does not worship Satan. It does like to push freedom of religion boundaries – if you want to put up a religious display you have to give us equal space. Their 7 Tenets in abbreviated form:

1. Be compassionate to all creatures. 2. The struggle for justice is ongoing and necessary. 3. One’s body is subject to one’s own will alone. 4. Respect the freedom of others. 5. Don’t distort science to fit one’s beliefs. 6. If one makes a mistake, rectify it and resolve any harm. 7. Compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over written or spoken word.

These tenets look pretty good! In a pundit roundup by Greg Dworkin for Kos I’m going to start with the cartoons in the comments because they go with the discussion above. First is a cartoon by Ann Telnaes showing the nasty guy violating nine of the Top Ten. Perhaps it is a stretch for “Honor thy father and they mother” to use Mother Earth instead, upon which the nasty guy is flinging gunk. But not much of a stretch. That was followed by a cartoon by Clay Jones that has Ten Commandments for the nasty guy and Republicans. A few of them:

Thou shalt not make Trump a false idol. Thou shalt not tell 30,000 lies. Thou shalt not be Putin’s puppet. Thou shalt not separate families.

Much further down is a cartoon by Banx. Two office workers are walking and one says, “Elon Musk just earned more that I’ll ever earn in my whole life in the time it took me to say Elon Musk.” Not so far down in the comments Rambler797 posted a tweet by Aaron Nagler showing a video discussing black ball players (which I didn’t watch) and adding, “This is why ‘Make America Great Again’ is so insulting. It wasn’t great, for a lot of folks, for a long time. The country moved forward. Stop trying to drag us back.” Now back up to the body of the post for a pundit. This one is David Rothkopf of “Need to Know” on Substack. He is talking about modern American capitalism destroying democracy. I believe he is accurate on every point.

It is not that capitalism is, as its critics have suggested, inherently evil. However, neither is it, as American political and business leaders have asserted since time immemorial inherently good. It must be regulated. When it is not and it is allowed to morph from being an engine of economic growth to an engine of economic inequity, it undermines not only the principles of democracy but as we have seen, it underwrites the perversion of our institutions from serving us all to serving a wealthy few. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis summed it up perhaps better than anyone else when he said, “We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few but we can’t have both.” For Americans today, this can be easily illustrated. The Citizens United Supreme Court decision enshrined as US law the “principle” that spending money on campaigns is a form of protected free expression and therefore could not be regulated. By asserting that “money is speech” it by extension enshrined as the law of the land in the U.S. that those with more money have “more speech,” greater influence, more political power.

In a post from two weeks ago (yeah, I’m looking at articles hiding in browser tabs) KyivGuy wrote about Texty a small journalism outlet in Ukraine. They’ve been doing journalism for several years, winning a respectable list of international awards. At the start of the Russian invasion in 2022 they put their skills to work to monitor and combat Russian propaganda in the internet. They also visualized the amounts of grain Russia stole from Ukraine and mapped Russian war crimes, as well of several other things. All of it well-researched and well-presented. As part of that propaganda mapping last year they published “The Germs of Russian World” that listed

over 1,300 individuals and some 900 organizations [based in Europe] that met the following criteria: voting for pro-Russian decisions and issuing statements in support of the war or calling to drop the sanctions, taking part in pro-Russian propagandist shows, partnering with the institutions which facilitate Russia’s cultural expansion etc.

That was considered boring. Russian experts in Europe said, “Thanks Texty,” and everyone moved on. Those people were already known. This month Texty reported the same kind of information about the US. They covered 388 US individuals and 76 US organizations. This time the criteria for being listed wasn’t necessarily direct support for Russia. Merely stating opposition to aid to Ukraine would do.

The data set includes active politicians (Congress members), political activists, media personalities and bloggers, political organizations, “experts”, think tanks, and businessmen.

Some are well known. Tucker Carlson openly cooperates with Russia to spread Russian lies. Marjorie Taylor Greene may not cooperate, but she has voiced Russian talking points. Many of the people named in this US report are mad! Spreadsheets are no longer boring! There are conservative calls to defund Texty. I didn’t realize the US funded them, but we do through the USAID program supporting Ukrainian media. I followed the links to Texty’s US report. It appears to be quite thorough. As you scroll through it give time for photos and diagrams to load in the blank spaces.

When they talk about freedom, they mean freedom from empathy

A couple weeks ago I listened to an episode of Gaslit Nation hosted by Andrea Chalupa. It was sufficiently worth discussing that instead of trying to take notes from the audio I decided to wait until the transcript was available, which it was a few days later (as in a couple weeks ago). Some of the main points: Merrick Garland is the worst choice for Attorney General, head of the Department of Justice. He let two years go by before getting serious about bringing cases against the nasty guy and this accomplices. In the meantime coup plotters are free, enriching themselves and working how to complete the coup that started with the Kremlin’s help in 2016. That the nasty guy still walks free and maybe getting only probation is an absurdity that has disillusioned America. It erodes faith in our institutions, which are crumbling and complicit. Paul Manafort, a Kremlin asset, had worked to destabilize Ukraine as he had done here in America as part of the nasty guy campaign and administration. The difference is that Ukraine removed the traitors from power and in America we gave them power. Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon (who will soon be spending four months in jail) are getting the storm troopers ready should the nasty guy go to prison. These troops will intimidate and terrorize poll workers in close precincts. The precincts important only because of the Electoral College,which is a major national security vulnerability that makes election stealing too easy.

So what do we do? Round up all the traitors and throw them in prison as Ukraine did? Ban all disinformation TV networks and media, like Fox News, like Ukraine did. I wish. That's one of the many reasons MAGA hates Ukraine because Ukraine forces accountability. Ukraine stands up to the Kremlin and exposes it for the terrorist state that it is, and has the moral courage to stand up to their traitors. Whereas we're continuously getting steamrolled by ours. And I've been saying for years now, what's long hurt Biden's approval ratings is worthless Merrick Garland and the impotent DOJ enabling all this.

President Ford pardoned Nixon to keep the national tranquility that had developed. But that tranquility was there because people knew the wannabe dictator Nixon had been indicted and faced trial. Proceeding with the trial would have kept that tranquility, not broken it. Ford established the precedent that criminals that threaten our democracy could go free.

So the warning is loud and clear. Trump must go to prison. No accountability leads to larger and more dangerous crimes. Trump and his crime machine are worse than Nixon because Nixon escaped prison. Nixon crawled so Trump could run. That is why Trump must go to prison, for the safety of our future of every American, the world. This isn't complicated.

There’s a question: Is America better off to avoid the violence that will happen if the nasty guy is put in jail with the certainty that if he regains the Oval Office, with violence to help him get there, he’ll become a dictator? Or is it better to put him in jail and be ready for the violence?

The thing Trump fears most is accountability. Getting away with crimes is a literally Trump's brand. That's what he's campaigning off of. His supporters throw money at him, even to pay his legal bills because they all get off on seeing him live above the law because that's what they want to do. That's why they support him. It was the same with Hitler. They got a surge of pride and power, feeling invincible, feeling free of societal norms. That's the appeal. When they talk about freedom, they mean freedom from empathy, freedom from the collective good freedom from having to care about others. ... That is the entire appeal of Trump and that is why he must go to prison to show consequences for trying to live above the law.

No, house arrest isn’t good enough. Manafort committed crimes under house arrest. Also, Mar-a-Lago is a pretty big house with a lot of visitors, including foreign adversaries. Once in prison the nasty guy should not get the big suite. He needs to be treated like everyone else. “You don't coddle criminals or you end up with more criminals in the White House.” Perhaps the nasty guy will flee? Great. Make sure the ticket is one way. And goes to Russia. All that grievance the nasty guy spews is being fed by the Kremlin. Prison is the only option. It also tells Putin the Hague is waiting. The talk turned to a third member of the transnational crime syndicate (Putin and the nasty guy being first and second), Israel’s Netanyahu. Protests in Israel are demanding he accept Biden’s cease fire deal. But if he does the far-right members of his governing coalition threaten to leave, bringing down his government. Netanyahu would rather cling to power than end the war. And yet Netanyahu may soon be speaking to the American Congress. That leaves many Democrats with a dilemma. Boycott the speech or use it as a time to confront Netanyahu? One way to confront is to stand with their back to the podium. Bernie Sanders issued a statement explaining why he won’t go. While Israel does have the right to defend itself against Hamas, it does not have the right to go to war against the entire Palestinian people, killing huge numbers and destroying massive amounts of housing and infrastructure. Netanyahu’s speech was scheduled for a week ago and hasn’t happened yet. Towards the end Chalupa said:

Congratulations to Mexico for electing your first female president as well as the first Jewish president, climate scientist Claudia Scheinbaum, a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who was part of the intergovernmental panel on climate change that won the 2007 Nobel Prize for its research into the climate crisis. Scheinbaum brings with her a master's degree from UC Berkeley, a progressive agenda and a mandate to stand up against the brutal corruption across Mexico where a female mayor, Yolanda Sanchez was just gunned down after facing death threats and kidnapping.

That’s good news! In the comments of a pundit roundup on Daily Kos are a few good cartoons. One by Ted Littleford shows Justices Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito with Thomas saying, “I don’t see why Trump shouldn't have total immunity. After all, we do.” Below Thomas are bags representing four million dollars in gifts and three million behind Alito. The comments include a tweet my Rev. Benjamin Cremer in response to a new law in Louisiana.

“When I was hungry” you put up posters of the Ten Commandments in my classroom while making sure I didn’t get lunch at school. “Whatever you do for the least of these, you do unto me.” –Jesus

Just below it is a tweet of a new ad by the Lincoln Project showing that the nasty guy has broken five of the Ten Commandments. This is the guy the Christian Nationalists, the ones putting up posters of the Ten Commandments, are supporting.

A world where everyone is walking around with tracking devices

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos takes another look at the claim that the more the nasty guy gets bad legal news the stronger he becomes. And Sumner calls BS.

The idea that [CEO of the Harris Poll, Mark] Penn and [Los Angeles Times writer Scott] Jennings are selling is that narrative that Republicans, and Trump, want everyone to believe: It’s the “every time he gets knocked down again, he gets up stronger” thesis. And it is, what’s that word again? Bulls---. Every time Trump is held accountable, every MAGA account on X seems to spew “Democrats just elected Trump!” Because, somehow, they seem to be convinced that everyone else is just as angry about a slight to Trump as the folks in their Let’s Go Brandon support group. We’re not.

Fans of the nasty guy said the same thing before the 2020 election. And, after impeachment, he lost. Sumner also had a look at what the nasty guy wants in a VP candidate. + Surrogacy: How quick are they to defend the nasty guy, praise him, and attribute every bit of good news to him? + Subservience: How well can they be a blank, extremely white screen onto which any nasty guy thought can be projected – without a thought for legality or morality. + Sacrifice: Someone who will take the bullet and slow down the chase. Sumner then rates who appear to be the top four candidates according to those criteria. These candidates are: Doug Burgum, Marco Rubio, Tim Scott, and JD Vance. Beyond that I really don’t care how well each fits the criteria. Kos of Kos wrote about the conservative movement being one long grift. He shows a list of products one can buy to avoid buying a similar product that is too “woke.” One can get anti-woke water, razor blades, beer, sneakers (the gold ones that give the nasty guy a cut), pets, coffee, and even a bank. That they cost more than the corresponding “woke” product is an easy guess – a case of Ultra Right Beer goes for $57.84 ($18.65 of that for shipping) while a case of Bud Light is $21. But it keeps you from getting woke cooties. I’ve collected a bunch of pundit roundups. I’ll just go through them (with a diversion or two) even with the jumble of topics. A pundit roundup for Kos from two weeks ago by Chitown Kev quoted Thor Benson of Wired on how the nasty guy’s return to the Oval Office could create a surveillance state and do it quickly.

If he so desired, Trump could create his own version of this [Nixon era] program, but he’d be working with much more advanced technology—and it’d be in a time when there are countless data points available on every American. Hoover could have only dreamed of a world where everyone was walking around with tracking devices. ... The administration may not even need to come up with a justification for surveilling Americans without a warrant, because it could simply purchase scores of people's personal data. The federal government has been known to purchase data from private brokers in the past, and doing so doesn’t require a warrant. “We are just awash in data, and data brokers can just collect and sell these data,” Vagle says. “Law enforcement or quasi-law enforcement can collect that information.”

A momentary break from roundups to visit a Book Post by Admiral Naismith on Kos that includes a look at the book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, by Jaron Lanier. The book, of course, goes into these in a whole lot more detail to explain what is happening to your brain, politics, and more. Reader reviews of the book are here. Naismith just lists the reasons and I’ll mentioned some of them:

1. You are losing your free will. 2. Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the inanity of our times. 3. Social media is making you into an asshole. 4. Social media is undermining truth. ... 9. Social media is making politics impossible.

Naismith boils the ten down to two:

(1) social media is run by fascists like Zuckerberg, who use insidious propaganda techniques to make Republicans into dangerously unhinged terrorist fanatics and Democrats discouraged from voting out of sheer despair. (2) the "influencers"--not the kids on reddit with a million followers, but the REAL behind-the-scenes godzillionaires--pay billions to mine your data and f--- you over with targeted propaganda. And yet---I have a friend network via social media. I have in fact PRACTICED, not lost, empathy by interacting with them. I get to have friends in Colorado and Ohio and Florida and England, who I would never interact with at all, but for social media.

A roundup from ten days ago, Kev quoted Greg Sargent of The New Republic talking about the nasty guy saying he’ll get revenge.

In the media, this story tends to be framed as follows: Will Trump seek “revenge” for his legal travails, or won’t he? But that framing unwittingly lets Trump set the terms of this debate. It implies that he is vowing to do to Democrats what was done to him. But that’s not what Trump is actually threatening. Whereas Trump is being prosecuted on the basis of evidence that law enforcement gathered before asking grand juries to indict him, he is expressly declaring that he will prosecute President Biden and Democrats solely because this is what he endured, meaning explicitly that evidence will not be the initiating impulse.

Joan Walsh of The Nation looked at the health care plans in Project 2025. First, align care with the demands of conservative Christianity – no abortion, no transgender care, and more. Then...

Severino would also leave Americans far more vulnerable to crass capitalism when they are seeking healthcare. He wants HHS to promote private-sector Medicare Advantage plans, which—take it from me, I did my homework—may give healthy “young” seniors decent benefits at lower costs, but which get more expensive, and more restrictive, as seniors age and need more care. He recommends making Medicare Advantage the “default option” once a person qualifies for the senior-citizen health program at age 65, which would be a boon to private insurance companies, since it essentially privatizes the wildly popular public program. Severino would also repeal recent legislation allowing Medicare to negotiate better prices for commonly used drugs. And he doesn’t like Medicaid any better: He would weaken the ACA provisions that rely on Medicaid expansion and would impose work requirements on recipients.

In a roundup from eleven days ago, Greg Dworkin quoted a tweet by Steve Benen (which includes a link):

Trump to Mike Johnson: Put unqualified, scandal-plagued loyalists on the Intelligence Committee, giving them access to many of the nation's most sensitive secrets. Johnson to Trump: Sure thing. Everyone else: You've got to be kidding me.

Dworkin quoted an article in The Guardian:

The chair of Colorado’s Republican party is facing calls to resign from members of his own group after the state organization sent out an email criticizing Pride month – and later calling for rainbow-colored Pride flags to be burned. Dave Williams, who is also a representative in Colorado’s legislature, has faced swift backlash from his fellow Republicans in the wake of the controversial email sent. Much of the criticism aimed at Williams by other Republicans focused on the potential for his remarks to hurt the chances for members of their party to be elected.

I notice the criticism is not about the harm to LGBTQ people. It is good to see Republicans admit that oppressing LGBTQ people can turn voters against them. In the comments are a few good cartoons. Rob Rogers posted one of the nasty guy in a landing craft with other troops approaching the coast on D-Day (now 80 years ago). He says, “But Hitler did some good things... Right suckers?” exlrrp posted a meme of the Statue of Liberty taking a golf swing at the head of the nasty guy. And a panel posted by National Now shows Lucy and Charlie Brown and she says, “I think a lot of my anger can be traced to Patriarchy!” In a roundup from nine days ago, Dworkin quoted Dean Baker on X and Threadreader:

I was listening to a focus group sponsored by NPR of people who don't like Biden or Trump. They asked one person who was leaning towards Trump about what she saw happening in a second Trump term. She answered, he would create jobs. Given that we have created jobs at an incredible pace under Biden, this would be like saying that they want to see Trump in because he would nail Osama Bin Laden. What an incredible indictment of the media that people literally have no idea of the basic facts on the economy. And don't tell me this is based on their lived experience. They don't know lots of people who are unemployed. They get this from what they hear, not from what they see.

And in the comments... A cartoon by David Wilson shows the nasty guy speaking at a rally. A guy in a red hat says, “I wonder what his sentence is going to be.” A woman in a blue jacket says, “Me too! I haven’t heard a complete one yet.” A cartoon by Joel Pett shows a car driving past the “Church of our Malignant Christian Nationalism.” The man in the car asks, “Are we obliged to forgive them for knowing not what they do?” In a roundup from a couple days ago by Dworkin he quoted Peter Wehner of The Atlantic talking about political supporters:

But something has changed for me in the Trump era. I struggle more than I once did to wall off a person’s character from their politics when their politics is binding them to an unusually—and I would say undeniably—destructive person. The lies that MAGA world parrots are so manifestly untrue, and the Trump ethic is so manifestly cruel, that they are difficult to set aside. If a person insists, despite the overwhelming evidence, that Trump was the target of an assassination plot hatched by Biden and carried out by the FBI, this is more than an intellectual failure; it is a moral failure, and a serious one at that. It’s only reasonable to conclude that such Trump supporters have not made a good-faith effort to understand what is really and truly happening. They are choosing to live within the lie, to invoke the words of the former Czech dissident and playwright Vaclav Havel. One of the criteria that need to be taken into account in assessing the moral culpability of people is how absurd the lies are that they are espousing; a second is how intentionally they are avoiding evidence that exposes the lies because they are deeply invested in the lie; and a third is is how consequential the lie is.

Lea Page of the New York Times spent six months knocking on the doors of over 8,000 voters from across the political spectrum:

There’s an immediate intimacy in having a conversation on someone’s doorstep. It is, after all, a threshold between public and private, but who would have thought that political canvassing would be so conducive to such unvarnished honesty? Perhaps because of the fracturing of our communities, we encountered an almost universal need to be witnessed and validated, to trust. … It never felt like a loss. We had stood together on porches and broken steps, among pots of petunias and cans of sodden cigarette butts, and we listened. People told stories full of pride and full of pain. Do you see me? they seemed to ask in a hundred different ways. Do you see my beauty? Do you see my struggle? They were asking so little of us. It was easy to say yes.

Last weekend the nasty guy went to a black church in Detroit to convince people he wold be better for black people than Biden. In the comments Rambler797 included a tweet by John Rock:

“Photo shared by Detroit reporter Russ McNamara of the crowd during Trump’s visit to a Black church in the city yesterday. McNamara reported, ‘Of the 8 Black Trump voters I talked to, just one was from Detroit and zero were congregants.’” In no way surprised by this.

That photo is of the people sitting the pews. All the faces that can be seen are white. A cartoon by Barry Deutsch posted on Kos shows a man and a woman saying, “Why can’t trans people just accept their bodies as they are? ‘Gender Affirmation’ is woke crap! Normal people don’t do that!” Around them are words to show what body modifications each has had done. Some for her: shaved legs, liposuction, boob job, makeup, nose job, botox, hair dye, and pierced ears. Some for him: tattoos, chin job, hair transplant, shaved face, and tummy tuck.

Must prove not their worth but their worthlessness

Yeah, I’m still writing about him. I hope I’m writing about him for only four more months. Dartagnan of the Daily Kos community wrote that over those four months we don’t have to listen to the nasty guy’s campaign attacks and lies or the consider the felony convictions or puzzle over the campaign promises (or their lack). We don’t need to consider what he did during the Capitol attack in the final days of his first occupation of the Oval Office. We have enough information about his fitness for office by what he didn’t do during the attack. Because what he didn’t do was call off the attack. And he didn’t do it for more than three hours. Even though there were aides and his children insisting he needed to.

Trump has the distinction of having demonstrated to every single American—over an interminable, three-hour stretch on Jan. 6, 2021—just how unfit he is to lead this nation.

It is time to remind voters of that. Mark Sumner of Kos reported on Flag Day:

The New York Times is ready to hand the flag over to Donald Trump to fondle as much as he wants. In a nauseating article that can’t stop gushing about how Trump is the “51st star,” the paper is just so overwhelmed by Trump hugging and kissing the flag and the patriotism of his big red tie that they declare the flag the property of just one party. President Joe Biden doesn’t agree. In a new ad, the Biden-Harris campaign unabashedly celebrates the history and meaning of the American flag— a flag that belongs to everyone. “The stars and stripes were created to unite us,” the narrator says in the ad. “It is a powerful symbol that Americans stand together.”

Sumner then mentioned some of the ways Republicans are calling America a nation in decline and a “cesspool.” To that Sumner wrote, “Hugging the flag while slamming the nation is not patriotism.” I’ve written about cryptocurrency data mining that uses so much power that coal-fired electricity plants are not being shut down, but are being sold to data mining sites to generate more dirty power. Sumner reported that AI is following that same path. Back to crypto for a moment. In 2023, Arkansas passed the “right to mine” bill to protect Bitcoin miners from regulations and taxes. The state Republicans want Arkansas to be the “crypto hub.” A year later, leaders hear that people don’t like living next to sheds with screeching computers. Also, for all that noise and energy use crypto data mining is for a fake currency. On to AI. Nvidia, the company that designs AI chips, has topped Apple as the company with the largest capitalization (stock price times number of shares). That value is way above $1 trillion. And now Chris Taglo, editor of the Heartland Institute, is squawking that AI is so important (and so hungry for electricity) that we as a country just gotta abandon all our plans for stopping climate change. We gotta keep those coal fired power plants humming. They’re saying this as the Midwest and Northeast are experiencing a heat dome and while every month in 2023 set heat records every month so far in 2024 has been hotter. Yup, in the choice between a livable planet and AI, they’re going for AI. Now AI might have an advantage over crypto in that AI might be useful and might produce some highly needed something. Might. But even Taglo is merely hopeful that what we’ll get out of AI will be beneficial. And not a second existential threat. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev had a couple interesting quotes. First, from Timothy Snyder, in his “Thinking About” Substack, talked about what the nasty guy is looking for in a vice president, emphasis on “vice.” Normally, the top guy looks for complementary virtues. That won’t work for the nasty guy.

The vice-presidential candidate cannot be seen to complement Donald Trump, since as a Leader he cannot be seen to have any shortcomings or flaws. His is a specific kind of fascism, though, without any plan beyond retribution. Trump's backers at home and abroad understand that the rage will provide cover to dismantle the operations of the American government -- so that oligarchs need not pay taxes, for example, or so that Russians can commit atrocities in Ukraine. And so those who wish to join the Republican ticket as the vice-presidential nominee must prove not their worth but their worthlessness. They must demonstrate that they do not challenge Trump in any way, and that they would not, should they become president, provide any resistance to those who would like to see American government fail. They must engage, in other words, in a politics of impotence, a determined effort to show that they lack determination.

Kev also quoted Thomas Friedman of the NYT about the tight spot Israel is in due to Iran’s proxies threatening a three-front war from Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank.

But Israel is led by a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has to stay in power to avoid potentially being sent to prison on corruption charges. To do so, he sold his soul to form a government with far-right Jewish extremists who insist that Israel must fight in Gaza until it has killed every last Hamasnik — “total victory” — and who reject any partnership with the Palestinian Authority (which has accepted the Oslo peace accords) in governing a post-Hamas Gaza, because they want Israeli control over all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, including Gaza. ... No friend of Israel should participate in this circus. Israel needs a pragmatic centrist government that can lead it out of this multifaceted crisis — and seize the offer of normalization with Saudi Arabia that Biden has been able to engineer. This can come about only by removing Netanyahu through a new election — as the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, bravely called for in March. Israel does not need a U.S.-sponsored booze party for its drunken driver.

That’s another voice saying that while Israel does not have a policy of genocide against Gaza, some members of Netanyahu’s governing coalition do. Way down in the comments are three good cartoons. One by Garthtoons shows a teacher explaining to her class, “And so we created a federal holiday for Juneteenth to remember the end of slavery in the U.S., though I’m legally forbidden to teach you why that affects anyone’s lives still today.” Adam Zyglis posted a cartoon titled “America’s Parade...” It shows a parade of caskets with the occupants saying such things as “Saw a concert.” “Went to school.” “Prayed in a synagogue.” Watching it is Uncle Sam, thinking, “It’s semi-automatic.” Drew Sheneman posted a cartoon showing a man putting a second olive into his martini, saying, “I’m sick of all this whining about groceries. Do you have any idea what inflation has done to the price of Supreme Court justices?” One of the musicals nominated for a Tony Award, the show I watched on Sunday, was Suffs. It’s about the Suffragette movement leading up to women getting the right to vote in 1919. The song from that show that was featured was “Keep Marching.” I thought the words are wonderful and went looking for them. Here’s some of those words:

I won’t live to see the future that I fight for Maybe no one gets to reach that perfect day If the work is never over Then how do you keep marching anyway? Do you carry your banner as far as you can? Rewriting the world with your imperfect pen? Til the next stubborn girl picks it up in A picket line over and over again? And you join in the chorus of centuries chanting to her The path will be twisted and risky and slow But keep marching, keep marching Will you fail or prevail, well, you may never know But keep marching, keep marching ‘Cause your ancestors are all the proof you need That progress is possible, not guaranteed It will only be made if we keep marching, Keep marching on

Guns kill people. But so do judges who serve the NRA.

My Sunday viewing was the Tony Awards, honoring plays and musicals new to Broadway in the last year. I usually watch it, though this year I have more interest because I’ll be in New York next month. Alas, some of those shows have already closed. I suppose I knew the show Illinoise included a gay couple. That it does was made quite obvious when an excerpt was shown and two men danced and kissed. I had to read more about the show and, yes, this show of all dance and no dialogue does include gay characters. Alas, in my limited time I won’t be able to see it. I did know about the show Stereophonic and I am quite interested in it. The topic is a band in the studio making an album. It won best play (and not musical?). If five people in the cast are nominated for best featured performer (three men, two women, one of the men won) are there any lead performers? As I saw that win I realized I may have delayed too long in buying a ticket. And today, seat selection was slim, but successfully purchased. The other show I want to see is Hamilton. Yeah, I haven’t seen it yet. I almost bought a ticket today. Then I saw the fine print saying my ticket will be on my phone. What does the theater do about people without smart phones? In a pundit roundup for Daily Kos Chitown Kev quoted Raja Abdulrahim of the New York Times writing about Gazans speaking out against Hamas, some of whom would only speak once safely out of Gaza.

Some of the Gazans who spoke to The New York Times said that Hamas knew it would be starting a devastating war with Israel that would cause heavy civilian casualties, but that it did not provide any food, water or shelter to help people survive it. Hamas leaders have said they wanted to ignite a permanent state of war with Israel on all fronts as a way to revive the Palestinian cause and knew that the Israeli response would be big.

They knew there would be heavy casualties and destruction, yet didn’t provide food, water, or shelter. That confirms the statement I’ve heard that a big reason Hamas provoked the war was to turn world opinion against Israel. That seems to be working quite well. Hamas is interested only in power and has zero interest in its citizens. The quote matches what my friend and debate partner said a few weeks ago. My friend said that Hamas has as its primary goal to eliminate Israel. In contrast, Israel does not have a goal to eliminate Palestine. However, over the last few weeks I’ve wondered if Netanyahu or his war cabinet (I heard it was disbanded today) or his far right coalition partners have that goal of elimination. I’ve heard accusations (alas, I didn’t save links) that Netanyahu is prolonging the war to keep his far-right governing coalition together to keep him in power and through that avoiding the consequences of a corruption scandal. I’m also troubled by the desperate need by Gazans for food and shelter that is tied up at the border. Mark Sumner of Kos has been posting Ukraine updates only occasionally. The one for this past weekend has good news. Ukraine has been very good at destroying Russian assets in Crimea. The US permission to use our missiles to attack assets in Russian territory has helped that effort.

Crimea has already become too dangerous for Russian ships. Now it may also be too dangerous for Russian planes. And soon, it could be too dangerous for Russians altogether.

Remember when the dam on the Dnipro River was sabotaged, draining a big lake? That lake supplied water to Crimea. It’s looking quite dry in satellite photos. I’ve accumulated several articles on the Supreme Court, or as I’ve heard called recently, the Extreme Court. Last week Sumner reported on Lauren Windsor’s visit to the Supreme Court Historical Society where she presented herself as a conservative Catholic and secretly recorded conversations with Justice Alito, his wife Martha-Ann, and Chief Justice Roberts. Alito’s words got a lot of attention. In the recording Alito came across as a person willing and ready to impose his Christian beliefs on the rest of the country. He said that on some things compromise is not possible and he doesn’t believe the two sides can “live together peacefully.” Alito did not mention law or the Constitution. Roberts came off a bit better. He doubted we live in a Christian nation and it isn’t his (or the Court’s) job to turn the US into one. This is a much better response than Alito gave, but still isn’t a good answer. He didn’t outright declare the US isn’t Christian nation. He only expressed doubt that it is. And through previous rulings he has clearly shown he isn’t a moderate. Aldous Pennyfarthing of Kos wrote that Fox News has finally said something about Supreme Court corruption. But Clarence Thomas and Alito weren’t mentioned. Instead Fox called out Ketanji Brown Jackson. Yes, Jackson accepted four Beyoncé tickets, valued at $3,700. She also reported the gift immediately. There is also the gifts of artwork for her chambers valued at $12,500. And don’t forget the $900K advance on her book to come out in September. Previously there was $6,500 in clothes from a photo shoot and $1,200 flower display from Oprah Winfrey (also properly disclosed). Also yes, Thomas has accepted trips and gifts at least a hundred times more valuable than that and discloses those gifts only when they’re reported publicly. Beyoncé and Winfrey are not likely to have cases before the Court. Harlan Crow, the money man behind the trips Thomas took, has already had cases before the Court. Yeah, Fox News is being Fox News.

Why are Democrats forced to ace every test, lest the public think they’re civilization-destroying chaos agents, while Republicans can be literal felons—who face dozens more felony charges—and still be treated as “normal” candidates?

Also last week Joan McCarter of Kos wrote that “Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin is failing at his job of holding the Supreme Court accountable.” About all he can manage is stern letters Alito ignores. Stepping into the void is Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Reps Jamie Raskin and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They are saying a lot about how corrupt the court is and prodding Durban into accomplishing a little bit. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported that the little bit is a bill to require the Court to adopt a set of ethics rules with enforcement. Republicans blocked an attempt to pass the bill through unanimous consent. Majority Leader Schumer is still considering whether to have a regular vote on the bill (but why isn’t the choice obvious?). There’s about two weeks left in the Court’s term (though sometimes they go long) and about a dozen cases still without a ruling. McCarter reported on one case that got a ruling. In a unanimous decision the Court preserved access to abortion pill mifepristone. It was unanimous not because the justices agree on whether it should be banned, but because the people who brought the suit didn’t have standing to do so – they couldn’t prove they would be harmed by the ruling. The oral arguments were a preview of this outcome. Also in the oral arguments Thomas and Alito repeatedly said which argument would be a better attack on medicated abortion that can be won. Plaintiffs could use the 1837 Comstock Act, which banned “indecent” materials, as well as abortion and contraception drugs, from being sent through the mail. So consider this reprieve to be temporary. McCarter also discussed the Court ruling from late last week in which the majority reversed a ban on bump stocks. This is a device that allows a semi-automatic gun to act like a machine gun. Bump stocks were banned after the Las Vegas shooting in 2017 that killed 58 people and injured more than 800. The ruling was written by Thomas. He essentially redefined what Congress meant when it defined machine guns. So much for the “textualist” principle justices have been using as the right way to interpret laws. Justice Sotomayor, in the dissent, called BS. She said the Court should respect the ordinary understanding of words Congress uses. She then provided quotes from all six of the conservatives on their claim of the importance of textualism. McCarter’s conclusion:

“The majority’s reading flies in the face of this Court’s standard tools of statutory interpretation,” [Sotomayor] wrote. “Today, the majority forgets that principle and substitutes its own view of what constitutes a ‘machine gun’ for Congress’.” In doing so, the court just carved out a bump stock loophole from the plain text that will worsen the next mass shootings.

In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin had a few appropriate quotes. From EJ Dionne of the Washington Post:

Conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court have decided that more Americans must die in mass shootings because they have a quibble over the word “function.” In striking down the 2018 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) regulation banning bump stocks, which effectively turn semiautomatic rifles into machine guns, the court’s six conservative justices not only put their ideological preconceptions ahead of rational policymaking. They also privileged an arrogant, misplaced confidence in their own technical expertise over a federal agency’s thoughtful effort to prevent the grotesque slaughter of innocents.

Dworkin included a tweet from David Rothkopf:

We need to be very clear, the right wing on the Supreme Court with their perverse misinterpretation of the 2d Amendment are directly responsible for many of the nearly 50,000 gun deaths that occur in the US each year. Guns kill people. But so do judges who serve the NRA.

From David Firestone of the New York Times:

Skilled shooters using an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle can fire 180 rounds per minute, she wrote, but a bump stock allows them to fire 400 to 800 rounds per minute, which is the ordinary understanding of a fully automatic machine gun. “Today’s decision to reject that ordinary understanding will have deadly consequences,” Sotomayor wrote. “The majority’s artificially narrow definition hamstrings the government’s efforts to keep machine guns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter.” And when the next Las Vegas happens, it will not be enough to blame it on the madness of a single deranged individual. There are so many others.

In the comments are appropriate cartoons. Thanos Kalamidas drew one that asks, “Is SCOTUS arming rednecks and MAGAs for a civil war?” There are two cartoons by Dennis Goris. In one two schoolchildren are walking and one says, “I hope when we get our school shooter, he doesn’t use a bump stock.” In the other three children are at the gate of Heaven and St. Peter says, “They just loved their bump stocks more, that’s all.”