It's The Guns

 Jesus Christ. Meanwhile, a friend of mine's son was wounded by what appears to be just another angry, random shooting. 

It's the guns, it's the guns, it's the guns. Their ubiquity and the psychology that gives you the power of death in your hands. That this psychopath was shooting off a weapon of war in his yard should be enough. That he then went into the house and executed the people there no longer surprises.

We aren't a sicker society because these people exist. They exist everywhere. We are a sicker society because we don't do a damned thing about it.

The Normal Guy

 Inside this post is a Tweet by Kilgore Trout that I think captures something essential about Biden's electability. While I think Biden would've beaten Trump in 2016, I really think he beats him in 2024, because he's boring and normal. After four years of Trump racist uncle who ruined Thanksgiving, Biden is just a goofy granddad who likes goofy granddad things. 

The unspoken subtext of the Biden (and Trump years in some ways) is that the president himself is not essential to the day-to-day running of the government. Probably the most "hands on" presidents in recent memory were Nixon and Carter. Maybe Clinton and Johnson. Being a micromanager is probably not the best way to be president. Trump and Biden both demonstrate that in important ways the key to a presidency is character and Congress. If you have working majorities, you can accomplish tangible results, but otherwise, it's your character that matters.

Trump is a criminal, a sexist, a racist, a narcissist and an moron. Biden is not a brilliant guy like Obama and Clinton, but he's not a criminal, a sexist, a racist or a narcissist. 

Most people are more than OK with that.

Race To The Bottom

 The anti-abortion victories in America's reddest states are having predictably awful results. If this trend continues - and why wouldn't it - then women in America's reddest and poorest states are going to start dying in childbirth, as are their kids. This was entirely predictable. Abortions are health care in many if not most cases. If OBGYNs face legal punishment for practicing medicine, they will simply move. Unlike other jobs, being a doctor likely provides you with decent mobility. 

We saw extreme GOP governance recently lead to some actual electoral backlash in places like Kansas and Louisiana, and the potential purpling of states like Georgia and (hopefully) North Carolina. However, much of this backlash is muted by the gerrymandering of state legislatures. The thing about gerrymanders, though, is that they are vulnerable to massive wave elections. 

If we start to get a body count of women and newborns as the fallout from Dobbs, then maybe, just maybe, we can force some of these states back into the 20th century (I have no illusions about the 21st).

We Could Use A Leak Right Now

 We need to see what is in the redacted portion of Tucker Carlson's texts. I'm curious to know what is too racist and sexist for Fox News.

Trump, The Sexual Predator

 E. Jean Carroll's case against Trump is going to trial. As Paul Campos notes, this is a civil trial, not a criminal trial, which means a preponderance of the evidence and not "beyond a reasonable doubt."

Unlike with the Dominion case against Fox, Carroll is not looking for a huge payout. She's looking for vindication, so I don't see her settling. Trump should certainly be found guilty based on the preponderance of the evidence, which is basically a backdoor way of establishing - in court - that he is a sexual predator.

Once again, and I will say this clearly for those invested in abstract and obsolete ideas about the American Body Politic: It will not matter to his primary campaign. Donald Trump being de facto found guilty of sexual assault will not disqualify him in anyway from becoming the GOP nominee again. There is no shame he can endure that will make him drop out, and there is no evidence that can be revealed that will cause Cult 45 to abandon him.

Stop it. Stop thinking your rules apply to him or that normal political behavior is part of the modern GOP electorate.

Buh-Bye

 Jon Chait does a nice job summarizing the unique - though not unprecedented - evil that Tucker Carlson represents. I remember when Carlson came to our campus when his kids were looking to enroll here. It was clear that he was simply playing a part of the angry populist, as he yukked it up with our resident British Labour Party Christian Socialist.

However, a few years later, conservative students - rightly - complained about the lack of ideological diversity among our outside speakers and we tried to get Carlson to speak on campus as a "reasonable conservative." This was prior to 2016, but the decision never came together. Before it could, Carlson degenerated into the racist swamp thing that Trump enabled to crawl out into the light.

Carlson is - in so many - a perfect avatar of the modern GOP. He's a wealthy scion, a prep schooled bow-tied nebbish pretending to be a Populist. But the line between fake racist and real racist is effectively non existent.

Fuck that guy.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall thinks 92 year old Rupert Murdoch might be losing his shit.

Learned Helplessness

 There's a line in this report on Sudan that stuck with me.

“You put us in this mess and now you’re swooping in to take your kinfolk (the ones that matter) and leaving us behind to these two murdering psychopaths,” Dallia Mohamed Abdelmoniem, a Sudanese former journalist and commentator, said on Twitter.

Now, we've all said dumb shit on Twitter, but this is a revealing quote. Yes, absolutely, the Global North has created conditions that have hurt the Global South. However, the idea that the US/EU has created the conditions in Sudan is ridiculous. There are problems endemic to Africa that are not actually anyone's fault. Desertification of the Sahel preceded climate change, for instance. The tropics make for poor agriculture. African countries are unusually deprived of deep water ports. And on and on.

And, I fully admit that post-imperial and neo-imperial policies have been bad for Africa, as long as we understand that the Global North has poured billions into aid for Africa. PEPFAR alone will spend almost $7B this year in Africa. 

The Sudan? That's a problem created by the Sudanese. Did the rest of the world make it worse at the margins? Sure, that could be true. But ultimately this is a creation of the Sudanese - especially the two individual warlords.

But as long as the attitude is that America "put us in this mess" then the Sudanese will never be able to solve their own problems.

What Elon Musk Tells Us About Men

 How'd you like to be Elon Musk right now? I mean, the Scrooge McDuck swimming around in all your money must be fun, I guess, but what a year he's had.

Musk's reputation was built on batteries specifically and Tesla more generally. Somehow the idea was created that Musk was an engineering genius over there, building next generation lithium batteries. All this guy ever was was a dork with money who made more money. The dork part is important because he represents this generation's "tech bro uber tech bro". While not actual a tech guy that anyone can tell, he used his first position with Tesla - a company he did not start - to seize the imagination of those who see electrification and batteries as the future.

However, I have some real doubts about Tesla's profitability - which is claimed to be around $6bill. 

The idea that Musk can be the richest man in the world seems odd to me. There just aren't THAT many Teslas on the road and SpaceX isn't exactly raking in good headlines either. Finally, we have his absolutely disastrous takeover of Twitter.

I still poke around on Twitter a bit, but the whole "fun" of Twitter - like TikTok for that matter - are the people there creating interesting posts. There is no nothing special about Twitter itself - in fact its ability to produce trolls always made it pretty terrible even when it was good. Musk never seemed to understand that and proceeded to alienate much of the customer base.

Except for a certain cadre of young men.

When SpaceX announced an "unscheduled vehicle disassembly" most of us rolled our eyes and this description of a rocket blowing up. But man, those Musky Boys just couldn't accept that their chosen avatar of success saw failure. Sure, they can learn from the failure, but it was still a failure. 

I've argued before that motivated reasoning is one of the most powerful forces in the universe, and it's interesting to see people lock themselves into personalities then bend time and space to protect those personas from criticism or condemnation. Trump, Musk...it's the same dynamic.

I like Joe Biden. I don't love him. I think he's actually a pretty sound politician with a penchant for saying dumb stuff off the cuff. I'm not invested in Joe Biden or Dark Brandon or whatever. He's a politician I helped hire to run the country. My identity isn't tied to his. 

For so many young men, it sure seems like they desperately need someone to invest their own hopes and dreams into. Like the kids who want to be Darth Vader for Halloween, because Vader is powerful - never mind that he's the bad guy. He's powerful! Most kids - even most boys - outgrow this stage. 

Some don't. Fragile themselves, they attach themselves to the reputations of charlatans who make them feel big vicariously.

It's a damned shame.

Temporary Reprieve

 The Assembly of Religious Experts blocked Matthew Kacsmaryk's gonzo ruling that banned the distribution of mifepristone in most cases. Kacsmaryk's ruling was the clearest case of legislating from the bench I can think of. This zealot basically overruled two decades of FDA approval and medical practice because, well, he's a religious zealot and a thinks women should be vessels for men's sperm, I guess.

I'm not sure why they waited until Friday, but I wonder if Alito's dissent gives us a clue. He railed against the "shadow docket" (which is ironic given how the conservatives have used it in the past). I wonder if there isn't a majority who was willing to throw the whole thing out on standing. 

The standing argument is a good one. The people who brought this suit have no reasonable claim that they were harmed by the FDA's ruling 20 years ago. They should not have been allowed to even bring the suit in the first place and overturning Kacsmaryk's ruling on those grounds would've allowed them to dodge the "moral" implications of allowing the drug to remain on the market.

Perhaps Roberts was trying to get a majority to throw it out using the shadow docket but he needed an extra day to convince Comey Barrett, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. Instead, we got the narrower ruling.

Needless to say Clarence Thomas ruled against preserving access to the drug and didn't even deign to explain why. If it wasn't for Donald Trump, I think Thomas has a strong argument to be among the worst people this country has coughed up.

The GOP Is A Failed State

 Josh Marshall has famously said that "the GOP is a failed state and Donald Trump is it's warlord."

However, it extends beyond a pithy punchline about the modern GOP. America has some aspects of state failure. The most obvious is the inability of the state to keep people from being killed. Mass shootings dominate the headlines for obvious reasons, but Americans simply die at higher rates than they should and many of the reasons - especially the lack of access to healthcare - are a direct result of GOP policies.

What is terrifying is that - in the ungodly event of a GOP takeover of the Executive Branch in 2025 - they are prepared to launch America further into state failure. The overwhelming hostility of the current "conservative" movement in America to the basic functions of government is more important that Donald Trump's uniquely odious and criminal person. A Republican victory - ANY Republican victory would create a void in the heart of civil government that could engender the separation of the country into different parts. There is simply no future for parts of the country that value basic governance with the death cult that constitutes the GOP.

Exactly Who You Expect It To Be

 Please imagine what the Tennessee GrOPer who just resigned over sexual harassment claims looks like.

Now realize that this is exactly what he looks like.

Yeah, yeah, book by it's cover and so on, but...c'mon. This guy is Smug Arrogant Bully from central casting.

Depressing, But We Should Be Used To It By Now

 Look, Clarence Thomas is corrupt. He's a generally awful human being. 

He is not going to resign over the first part because of the second part. The fact that Abe Fortas resigned over something more trivial does not inform Thomas' behavior.

The GOP - in their rearguard fight to preserve unpopular theocratic and plutocratic policies - will not ever voluntarily relinquish any power they have anywhere. So stop framing the story as if that's going to happen. 

I'm Going To Hell

 I can't help but find this objectively hilarious. I feel bad for the team of engineers trying to make SpaceX happen, but for the life of me, I can't understand why this isn't NASA's task. Since SpaceX is an example of why Elon Musk is a supergenius, though, I'm chuckled.

At What Point Do They Accept It?

 Ron DeSantis is toast. We are seeing the GOP establishment - the very force that was supposed to neuter Trump and move to a "Trump without the baggage" candidate - abandon DeSantis.

There have been media voices on the Right and Left fluffing this guy's profile because they seem to want to believe that the GOP is not actually a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump Steaks. It is. Again, the invaluable Josh Marshall: "The GOP is a failed state and Trump is its warlord."

When someone like Glenn Youngkin looks at what happened to DeSantis, is he going to see this as an opportunity or a warning? I think the later. 

Trump will be the nominee. The election - if Democrats know what they are doing - will be a referendum on Dobbs and January 6th. If it is, Biden wins.

If you're Youngkin, you have to figure that Trump will be dead or in prison by 2028. Why self-immolate?

Josh Marshall Is Right, Part A Million

 Marshall's takes on the media landscape are usually among the best and that's true about the Fox-Dominion lawsuit.

This is likely the largest actual settlement in history. Dominion is making a ton of money off this. However, if you wanted the case to somehow "takedown" Fox or create some sort of emotional catharsis, you were never going to get that. In fact, you might get justice from the courts, but you are unlikely to get some grand, emotionally rewarding payoff.

Popcorn Time

 Rod DeSantis is not a good politician. He's a good politician for Florida. He is the answer to the question: "What if Trump, but even more repellant?" Watching him flame out before he's even declared that he's running is objectively hilarious. Watching the news media pretend that any Republican has a chance against Donald Trump - as long as Trump is more or less ambulatory and able to speak in complete sentences - is objectively discouraging. It's sad that an entire profession devoted to explaining the world to people, that has spent seven years following every belch and fart from that warped scion of middling wealth, can't figure out what's going on.

The Modern GOP

 So far - even absent Chaos Agent Donald Trump - this is what the modern GOP is offering up:

- A Speaker of the House so weak and ineffectual that he can't even stake out a position on the debt ceiling from whence to negotiate. This effectively brings the US to the edge of default, again, when the GOP controls part of Congress and a Democrat holds the White House. They aren't even arsonists so much as pyromaniacs with matches.

- The guy they thought was going to be their cure for Trump has decided to launch a fatwa against Disney World. Picking a beef with the world's largest entertainment company seems like a good idea for a barn (cross) burning back bencher, but for someone who styled himself as a the "reasonable alternative to Trump" it looks like he's a fool. 

For the umpteenth time, the problem with the GOP is not Donald Trump. The problem is that Donald Trump is exactly sort of cruel buffoon that the Republicans want. No ability to govern, just attack enemies, usually in the most ineffectual and counterproductive way possible.

The Laboratories of Mediocrity

 It has been noted in many fora that the GOP has no popular governing agenda beyond tax cuts. OK, that's been true for a while now.

What's so fascinating is that the GOP seems to want to embrace actively bad governing measures. They routinely shoot themselves and their constituents in the face, Cheney style, in order to prove their fealty to the insipid cruelty of the GOP agenda. Dobbs and the electoral fallout from it should have been a warning, but I suppose they look at how they often refused to expand Medicaid under the ACA and really didn't pay an electoral price for it. Even if the Medicaid expansion would subsequently pass in statewide referenda, at no point did voters notice that the GOP is making their lives measurably worse.

The states in the Progressive Era were labeled the "laboratories of democracy," but the GOP have made them exemplars of the sort of piss-poor governance that is the GOP brand these days.  In a sane world, they shouldn't get 30% of the vote.

Exactly

 As Paul Campos points out: a large part of our police violence problem is the fact that we have way too many guns. If we had highly restrictive gun laws regarding handguns and rapid fire long guns, the police would (over time) become less violent.

It's the fucking guns.

This Is Just Weird

 Job Chait makes the case that he hopes Ron DeSantis beats Donald Trump in the primary by analyzing three metrics.

First, he thinks DeSantis would be easier to beat than Trump. I think this is arguable, because I think Trump is so incredibly radioactive to independents and moderates that it's likely that Biden gets close to 60% of the popular vote. Seriously. It's a post-January 6th landscape. Also, Biden's biggest vulnerability is his age. Running against Trump negates that liability. Also, Democrats will move heaven and earth to defeat Trump again. They will only move heaven OR earth to defeat DeSantis.

Second, he thinks Trump MIGHT be more dangerous as president. Maybe. I think at this point either Trump or DeSantis could lead to disunion.

His final metric is whether it is better to beat DeSantis or Trump. He argues that if Trump loses it will be another January 6th. You know what? Bring it. Because this time, Biden will be Commander and Chief. Fucking. Bring. It.

His final point might be valid: If you beat Trump, that just goes to show that Trump is toxic - which I think is true at this point. If you beat DeSantis, you prove that Trumpist politics as a whole is toxic. DeSantis is just Dollar General Trump at this point, also, he's not really a very adept politician. We've seen the first "elite" Republican pull away from Puddin Boots, but Ron DeSantis is the Scott Walker of Rudy Giulianis.

Maybe Biden wipes the floor with DeSantis, too, because Dobbs is only going to continue to roil American politics. I'm not terribly concerned with Biden's meh approval numbers, because we are very polarized and most liberal and leftists hate actual liberal and leftist politicians until you have to choose between them and Trump or DeSantis.

But I do worry about the age issue and Trump looks like he's about to die, too, so...I'd rather neutralize that issue.

But! The ideal situation - which I don't see happening right now - is the Trump beats the crap out of DeSantis in the primaries and Biden wins easily in November.

Two birds. One stone.

Hoo Boy

 Josh Marshall points out how the press is really missing the main story with the Jack Teixeira story. They have tried to make sense of the "contradictions" of how a "patriotic" American who volunteered for the military could betray America's secrets. First of all, define "patriotic"? He owned an American Blue Lives Matter flag? This nugget from the WSJ begins to get the main point. Teixeira is part of a very online, very male, very angry cohort that hates "what America has become", which means tolerant and multicultural. Of course he loved Putin, that's a feature, not a bug.

Putin represents exactly what these power worshipping young miscreants want to be: "powerful", in charge, anti-woke whatever that means. Putin doesn't care about your pronouns, he's part and parcel of what I wrote about the other day: the sort of person who wants to cozy up to those who look powerful. There was actually a great example of this in 2020 when the GOP actually - and I am not making this up - shared a meme of Trump as Thanos in Endgame saying "I am inevitable." Did they not see what happened next? Plus...THANOS?  You think you're THANOS?!! That's what you want people to associate with you? (I mean, if you want to do an Endgame meme, do it properly.)

This is the psychology of the modern anti-democratic Right around the world. It's a shallow form of masculinity pimping and parading itself around as "tough" while whinging and wetting their pants over a rainbow on a Bud Light can.

Fundamentally, this is a movement without ideas beyond a will to power and a desire to hurt their "enemies." And it was always there in the shadows. Timothy McVeigh and others dragged it in front of us on occasions, but Trump put klieg lights on it and made it run 24/7 on Fox.

Until we disenthrall the Right from this toxic and truly anti-American fetish for power over people different from themselves, the Republican Party shouldn't be put in charge of a one car parade.

Oh, Look

 Turns out Clarence Thomas broke the law. Who could have possibly predicted...

Exactly This

 Josh Marshall lays out why Diane Feinstein needs to be counseled into retiring today and not at the end of her term. By all accounts, Feinstein is demonstrating signs of dementia. Not the Fox News "Joe Biden has dementia" slur, but she's both absent in DC and not especially helpful when she is there. No one wants to be accused of being "ageist" but she's 89 and has missed over 60 votes. Luckily, she has agreed to step down "temporarily" from the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he absence bottled up judicial confirmations, and it's unlikely that her vote will be needed on actual legislation.

Still, the seat doesn't belong to her. It belongs to the people of California and she is currently not able to do her job and - given her age - this is unlikely to change. 

This Is A Weird Take

 The Times writes a story about Germany expanding economic ties with China, but frames them as being prompted by America seeking to "isolate" China. At no point is there evidence that America is trying to isolate China, it's simply taken as a given that recent efforts by the Biden Administration to strengthen American manufacturing is an effort to "isolate" America leading trade partner.

For me, I keep coming to a phrase that I (rightly or wrongly) attribute to economist Dani Rodrik: naïve globalization. Rodrik's argument is that the Bretton Woods framework of reduced tariffs and an easing of trade restrictions gave way to a naïve belief that if a little globalization was good, then more would be better. This led to GATT being replaced by the WTO, and the basic idea that any form of economic nationalism is bad.

One byproduct of the last eight years has been to question that assumption, and those questions have come both from Trumpist populists and Biden-style old schoolers. The combination of Covid supply chain issues and Russian militarism has made the Biden Administration focus on bringing certain critical industries home. It's fine for China (or Vietnam or India) to make our t-shirts, but it's an economic and military vulnerability for our supply of microchips to be dependent on global trade networks.

For a certain segment of the business community - and I'm guessing the business press by extension - any retreat from full throttle globalism is therefore isolationist? That doesn't make sense. The CHIPs Act is not isolating China, it's strengthening American supply chains and bringing jobs home. Trump's insight about globalization and its impact on American blue collar workers isn't bad, just because Trump had it. If Democrats don't take measures to help blue collar workers, then we will continue to see grievance politics dominate our country and warp our policies.

Great Job, Republicans

 The move to expel the "Tennessee Three/Two" generated more coverage of the GOP's anti-democratic practices, reaffirmed their basic latent racism and further reinforced their message that their solution to gun violence is to kick out people who want to do something about.

And for what? Justin Jones was just returned to his seat, and you have to think Justin Pearson is right behind him.

Deeply Weird People

 Part one of the Clarence Thomas Taking A Bunch Of Gifts story was about how Supreme Court justices have no hard and fast ethics rules and how Thomas is basically a wholly owned subsidiary of Harlan Crow. It was the five hundredth iteration of why Clarence Thomas should never have been a Supreme Court justice, as he is - fundamentally - an immoral person, whether it's his obseiance to great wealth or his sexual harassment of Anita Hill.

Part two of the story...whooo Nelly. Basically, Harlan Crow is one of those weird-ass rich people who does weird-ass shit. He has paintings by Hitler and a signed copy of Mein Kampf and a statue garden of some of the worst dictators of the 20th century. What's striking is how just about every conservative commentator has rushed to Crow's defense, because who doesn't have a bunch of Hitler memorabilia in their home?

The defense, to me, take two forms. The first is pretty straightforward. All these people have taken money and trips and sinecures from Harlan Crow. The Conservative Ecosystem is hermetically sealed and Crow pumps in the atmosphere. This is why conservatives around the country all harp about CRT at the same time. There is no diversity of thought. When the wealthy donor says jump, you say how high.

The second part is that conservativism is - by its very nature - is hierarchical, and wealthy weirdos like Crow sit at the top of those hierarchies. Not as high as the even weirder Donald Trump, but he's been there longer. Odious shitbag Marc Thiessen points out that Crow has a statue of Stalin. Thiessen argues that this proves that Crow doesn't love Hitler, because Stalin is a communist. (This contradicts decades of conservative nonsense about how Hitler is a leftist because it was called the National Socialist Party, but consistency isn't his strong suit.)

OK, so Crow has statues of Hitler, Stalin and Mao, because...he hates them? I know he's got boatloads of money, but why build a garden full of statues of people that you hate? That's just profoundly perverse. 

However, if we go back to the fact that conservatism is basically about hierarchies and deference to power...suddenly Stalin, Hitler and Mao have something in common. 

It was always weird to me how many little kids like Darth Vader or the Hulk. Vader is the bad guy and the Hulk is chaos. However, if you understand their attraction to Vader and the Hulk as an attraction to power, then you can see how that connects to Superman or Captain America (and, yes, it's mostly boys). Power is attractive. Men like Crow and all of his defenders are soaking in it. They love the trappings of power. It's why they can so easily let themselves be captured by the essence of Trumpism.

A six year old loves Darth Vader, because the world is scary and big and Vader is powerful and strong. Harlan Crow loves Hitler and Stalin because they were imminently powerful. Their complete power over life and death is like an intoxicating whisper from the past. Their order was built on fear and death, but it was their order, and that is at the root of conservatism: order that binds others and frees "me".

Is Harlan Crow a Nazi? An anti-Semite? Maybe not, I don't know. 

But it's pretty clear he's enraptured by power in ways that should disturb people living in a democracy. Especially given how he has been able to accrue power without democratic accountability.

Complicated

 This story about El Salvador's anti-crime program illustrates a fundamental problem that I'm not sure most developed world liberals really grok. Civil liberties are being run over in an effort to rescue the population from endemic and pervasive gang violence. And most Salvadorans are cool with that. 

Fundamental to the role of the state - like the absolute bear minimum - is the preservation of public order. That's been degraded in many Latin American states by gang violence. Sure, it's because of American demand for drugs. That's horrible and entirely our fault.

But quite a few Central American states were teetering on state failure. El Salvador is not any more.

The real question is: What will El Salvador look like in a few years? Will they be able to revive their commitment to civil liberties? 

Having cured themselves with bitter medicines, can they stop taking them?

Delusional

 This piece by Frank Luntz is pure lunacy. Luntz is the GOP pollster of record and represents to a certain degree the GOP establishment. So, when he puts forth a "plan" for wresting control of the GOP from Trump, it comes with a certain imprimatur of GOP respectability. Like so many anti-anti-Trump Republicans, Luntz wants to harness whatever the hell Trump harnessed in drawing to an inside straight in 2016 without committing to the spasmodic and criminal impulses of Mango Mussolini himself. 

This is the warmed over bullshit that suggested that Ron DeSantis was the savior of the Republican Party. It was DeSantis that was going to provide Trump's populist appeal without his erratic and self-serving kleptocracy and chaos. Except he won't. DeSantis comically patterned his hand gestures and posture on Trump. He picked fights with Disney (that he's currently losing and will probably lose in the future). 

The thing that Luntz and others miss is that Trump IS the GOP for millions of voters. Unlike Dubya Bush who was term limited into the memory hole or McCain or Romney who were losing losers who lost, Trump is a "winner." Because he's such a shameless narcissist, he can embrace a fanciful version of himself and sell that again and again to the eager boobs who think he somehow represents a religious savior and champion of the little guy. It's...bizarre. Trump is the least religious president in our lifetimes and he could not give a fart in a hurricane about anyone but himself.

Meanwhile, Luntz is over here suggesting a messaging strategy to replace him? Bissh please. 

All you really need to know about today's GOP is this: Trump's current and future indictments make it MORE LIKELY that he will be the party's nominee in 2024. In a normal world that people like Frank Luntz thinks still exists, Trump's manifest guilt and legal jeopardy on multiple fronts would be the end of him. 

Normal rules don't apply to Trump because normal people aren't part of Trump's base.

They are the perpetually aggrieved - a miserable collection of people who are defined by what they hate. These are the people destroying Bud Light because they have a trans spokesperson. Who the f*** does that? I'm not going to buy a MyPillow and destroy it on TikTok, I'm just not going to buy one. There's a takeout place near our house that I won't patronize because they had a Trump sticker near the register. But I'm not going to picket or launch a boycott...I just don't go there.

Trump will continue to defy the normal rules of politics. This will continue to flummox Frank Luntz. For that matter, it will continue to flummox the vast majority of journalists. The whole "Alvin Bragg's case isn't THAT big a deal so we shouldn't indict a former president" presumes that Trump is a normal ex-president. Sure, if Bush had a similar campaign finance violation, I wouldn't suggest an obvious prosecution, because Bush has no political future. Trump ain't that. For everyone saying it's stupid that Al Capone went to jail for tax evasion, they forget that the important thing is that Al Capone went to jail.

Pine away for a Glenn Youngkin or Nikki Haley or even a Ron DeSantis, but the GOP will remain in Trump's febrile little hands until he's dead or in prison. Period.

The Dog That Caught The Car

 The continued disintegration of Republican electoral prospects in the post-Dobbs world continues apace. They can try and claim it's a messaging problem, the way Defund the Police was a messaging problem, but that won't work any better than it worked for the ACAB crowd.

Part of the problem is that the GOP project of thwarting democracy by packing the Courts with lifetime appointments is that you get unhinged lunatics like Matthew Kacsmaryk's deciding to pull the morning after pill off the market in an act of incomprehensible judicial overreach. But why should he care? He will never have to answer to voters. He's simply an arrogant ideologue foisting his Opus Dei shit on the American public.

Luckily - I think - a different judge in Washington state issued an almost immediate contravention of that decision. So, now the FDA has two rulings that are completely contradictory. This will have to go to the Supreme Court. Kacsmaryk's decision is so unhinged that it's not out of the question that even the Assembly of Religious Experts will overrule him. There's no way Roberts goes along with it, as he has to see the damage Dobbs has done. The assumption is that Kavanaugh won't either, by assuming his opinion in Dobbs actually means what it means. 

Kacsmaryk has issued what is quite literally a lawless opinion, in that it is backed by no precedent or case law. It should be laughed out of the Fifth Circuit...but it won't.  It should be laughed out of the Supreme Court...but who knows.

Combined with the expulsion of the Tennessee legislators, this is a banner week for the GOP's utter and complete contempt for American democracy.

UPDATE:  Ooof.  This is...a gut punch.

The Biggest Threat To American Democracy Is the GOP

 Whether in Tennessee or Montana or any other place, the GOP is no longer committed to the idea that the candidate with the most support should represent the people.

UPDATE: Paul Campos has an interesting post on roughly this issue. If we could find a way make it so that minority factions of the GOP can no longer win elections - mostly by vigorous enforcement of voting rights and no gerrymandering - would they actually moderate? The current example of Michigan isn't encouraging, but it usually takes multiple ass whoopings to change behavior.

What's The Worst State In The Union?

 And why is it Tennessee? 

What's so baffling about Tennessee's descent into race-based, Christianist authoritarianism, is that - unlike, say, Arkansas - it has a sizeable Black population, two urban centers known for their cultural impact and Dolly Parton.

Nashville and Memphis are citadels of American music, so I would hope more artists than Jason Isbell will step up and challenge the Christo-fascism in the heart of American music.

I Don't Really Get It

 There have been numerous Left of Center commentators who are coalescing around the idea that the charges against Trump are kind of lame. The argument that Jon Chait puts forward is that these charges would not have been brought against anyone other than Trump. The inevitable comparison is to Al Capone going to jail for tax evasion.

Except Capone DID evade his taxes, mainly because of all the underlying criminality. Tax evasion is a crime. Yes, Capone should've seen jail time for the murders and the bootlegging and so on, but he did evade his taxes.

This is hardly the worst thing Trump has done. He, too, has tax evasion that stretches back decades. The Georgia case is the biggest and seemingly most air tight. The DOJ investigations cover a host of crimes. I get that campaign finance stuff and falsifying business documents isn't January 6th, but Nixon and Watergate were fundamentally about covering up another, different crime. The DC axiom "It's not the crime, it's the cover-up" is traced back to Nixon, who - up until Trump - was the pinnacle of lawlessness in the Oval Office.

Finally, what's the point, precisely, of quibbling with the scope of the charges? What journalistic service is being done here? Is it the deep rooted impulse to bothsides every question? The faux objectivity that poisons so much journalism? 

If Trump is guilty of the crimes, hopefully the jury will hold him accountable. That's it. That's the story. Piss off about the rest.

UPDATE: As Paul Campos points out, Trump will not go to trial in any of the existing or potential criminal cases before the 2024 election. Even if Georgia indicts tomorrow, there will be pretrial hearings and appeals. New York takes forever to go to trial. 

The point, then, is that Trump will be the GOP nominee absent his death or health related incapacity, and he will be running under multiple indictments. Which - one would hope - would make him unelectable.

Really Important Story Yesterday

 No. Not that one. That's barely a "story" at this point. Trump was arraigned. We knew that. He's upset. Dog bites man. It's not a story.

The big story was in Wisconsin. Wisconsin does a dumb thing: it elects its Supreme Court judges. But, that's the rule so that's the rule. The election became a referendum on Dobbs and the overwhelmingly gerrymandered electoral maps in that state. Wisconsin is a true swing state with a large population of old white country folk and Milwaukee and Madison. Trump won it in 2016 and Biden won it in 2020. They have a Democratic governor. 

Their legislature has an almost super majority of Republicans because of how gerrymandered their maps are. It has been pointless to challenge those maps because the Supreme Court of the US is corrupt and partisan as hell and because the Wisconsin court wouldn't rule in their favor. Now, they can expect a fair hearing and perhaps see those maps overturned. Additionally, challenges to abortion bans will now likely fail.

The critical long term issue is the gerrymandering of those maps, but the proximate cause of Janet Protasiewicz's victory was Dobbs. Dobbs will continue to reshape electoral politics no matter what that recently indicted bloated meat sack does.

The Junkies Get Their Dope

 The cable nets have collapsed onto the rotting couch of the shooting gallery where they have injected pure Trumpiods into their blown out veins. Having seen their ratings collapse with the Chaos Agent's expulsion from the White House, they can now "safely" show his white Ford Bronco moment without being accused of raising his platform.

Trump has been a disaster for the Republic but a godsend for news networks, and the coming shitshow will be like going back on heroin after being clean for years. Trump is guaranteed to turn this trial into a circus. He will likely threaten the life or safety of Alvin Bragg, I mean, you know he will. He could have injunctions and contempt of court rulings against him. He will violate them. It will be the lunatic chaos that Trump excels at.

All which likely guarantees the following:

- Trump will win the GOP nomination running against Alvin Bragg (and Fani Willis and Jack Smith).

- The wall to wall chaos will turn off the voters he needs to return to office.

Gun Sick

 DeathSantis signed a bill allowing concealed carry without permitting or training. We know that - while assault weapons like the AR-15 and its imitators are responsible for the shocking mass killings that punctuate our news - it's handguns that reap the most souls in the Land of the Free.

In the second piece, Yglesias does his usual bullshit about what is and isn't possible, but I would wager that most Americans would be behind rigorous licensing and permitting. Absent that, it's long past time to revoke the exemption that gun makers have from civil suits. As we are seeing in the Dominion suit against Fox News, discovery and the threat of damages can be pretty powerful.

As for DeSantis's red meat/red state posturing, I hope there's a mass shooting at some NASCAR event when a car backfires and everyone draws their shootin' irons and starts blasting away. 

Fuckers.

Trump Decoder

 There have been a number of very insightful analyses written about Trump over the years, but this one - written during the 2020 campaign - is very good.

I think this is a nice bit:

Trump has lived his life inside a curdled and childish belief that he can do and take and keep whatever he wants, without consequence, forever. As a sort of tabloid cartoon of a rich person, an adult Richie Rich that had somehow figured out how to use a smartphone and commit adultery, this delusion has served him decently well; the realities of his wealth and the structural forces that the country has built to protect people of similar fecklessness and similar means conspired to sustain it for decades. The version of this impunity that Trump sells to his audience is a cheaper reproduction, not sold in any store and available exclusively through this limited-time television offer, in which they can feel as invulnerable and unaccountable as him, and be just as lazy and just as cruel, without actually being anywhere near as well-insulated from the consequences of their actions. "I play to people's fantasies," Trump "writes" in the ghostwritten Art Of The Deal. "People may not always think big themselves. but they can get very excited by those who do."

Trump is not a remotely complicated person.

Exhausting

 You would exhaust yourself pretty quickly if you tried to engage every bullshit argument the GOP advanced on pretty much any subject. Some - guns, maybe - are so important you have to, but their political arguments are usually tendentious crap that you should just ignore.

However, I will take a moment to point out that "Only Banana Republics indict their political enemies" is really ridiculous. The Times runs down active political figures who ran for office under indictment. Eugene V. Debs ran for president from a prison cell. As I mentioned yesterday, many countries have indicted former heads of government and heads of state, including France, Britain, Italy and South Korea. 

What the GOP is actually arguing is that if you're a former president - or at least a Republican former president - then you should be exempt from the laws of the United States. Or that if you announce that you are running for President, you should be exempt from prosecution during the campaign. Basically, they are taking Trump's "I could shoot someone in the face in Fifth Avenue and not lose support" line and turning it into a constitutional principle.

They will engage in the usual handwaving about Hunter Biden's laptop...whatever. There is also some dimwitted AG in Idaho or West Virginia who is preparing to indict Biden for not enforcing the southern border. Now, there is a very good reason why the Courts have historically prevented the latter type of case. The presidency would be tied down in endless prosecutions that would render the office powerless. I'm not sure I would want this iteration of the Supreme Court to defend Biden from frivolous prosecution, however.

Tuesday will be interesting - not because of the media circus Trump will create - because we will finally see the sealed indictment. It will be interesting to see what Bragg has. 

It will also be hilarious if Trump has every GOP politician go to the mattresses and then he cuts a plea deal.