Yup, The Court Still Sucks

 Today's two major decisions were respectively somewhat surprising and not at all surprising. I was a little surprised that the decision to allow businesses to discriminate against LGBT people was 6-3. The idea that the Court would countenance discrimination would - I thought - peel off one justice, most likely Roberts or Kavanaugh. I was wrong.

The decision to cancel some student debt does not surprise me in the least. This continues both the Right's war on education and the Court's war on economic redistribution. The Times - being the Times - asks how this will impact Biden's political fortunes. Obviously, people will be pissed and obviously, people can be irrational when they are pissed.

However, the Dobbs decision has placed a spotlight on the Court. People - especially younger people - were already pissed about overturning Roe, now they have another reason to be pissed. The decision about student debt is "easily" reversed. By that I mean that a Democratic House, a 52 seat Democratic Senate and the White House could write a new student debt relief law. 

Running against an essentially lawless Court would be a bold move from someone like Biden, who is at heart an institutionalist. However, delegitimizing this Court is not an action that Biden would be taking, it would be a reality that he is pointing out. Quite independent of any political messaging, the Assembly of Religious Experts on the Supreme Court has exceeded their authority by substituting their judgment for the judgment of the Executive and Legislative branches. They have also taken cases - especially these two cases today - that should have been thrown out for lack of standing. They went well out of their way to fuck people over.

Bring this fight.

Affirmative Action

 The Court's decision today to essentially end affirmative action should come as no surprise. While the Court has shown some sympathy towards preserving some vestiges of democracy, it has and will continue to be willing to privilege the position of White, straight people when it can. There is also a plausible if strained reading of the XIVth Amendment that supports their decision.

It is unlikely that colleges will suddenly become all Asian and White, however. Educators and administrators do see their roles as opening doors for young people, so they will find ways to continue to admit historically disadvantaged groups. One preliminary step is the move of colleges to go "test optional" in their admissions process. The main piece of evidence to prove that Asians are being discriminated against is SAT and ACT scores. 

In fact, historically, the emergence of standardized testing first led to the overrepresentation of Jewish students. This led Admissions Departments to go to a "holistic" approach that looked at things like legacy connections and extracurriculars. Of course, there is also athletics to consider.

While standardized testing is a decent predictor of Freshman year success, it's not a measure of much more than that. Moving away from those tests will make Admissions work much harder. Those overworked young people will have to read a lot more applications, and they will be looking for easy "no's" in the pile. Good people will get passed over for certain schools, because of one thing here or there that allows someone who has about 10 minutes to read an entire kid's life story to move them into the rejection pile. It was already brutal, and this decision will likely make it more so.

Affirmative action worked. It helped raise two generations of Black and Brown students to being the first in their families to attend college. And maybe that meant that Chad and Kimberly had to go to Middlebury or Davidson instead of Yale or Duke, but this was a societal "good" that we erased today. I do think many schools will continue to work to find a way to admit minority students, but it's going to be a damned mess.

Yes, The Court Is Still Corrupt

 With a handful of reasonable decisions being handed down by the Supreme Court, Josh Marshall opines that this really doesn't mean that our highest Court of functioning the way it should. I think he's right.

Yes, Roberts is concerned with the institution of the Court itself, and I think to a lesser degree Kavanaugh and Barrett share that concern. Dobbs may have shaken them more than they let on. However, I would expect them to basically end Affirmative Action this week and possibly overturn the Chevron case that allows for regulatory agencies to be flexible in how they apply rules. 

There are enough votes right now to preserve gay marriage and some other fundamental civil and democratic rights, but when it comes to the interests of the wealthy, I would expect this Court to create novel legal theories to further enrich the wealthy.

What The Hell Was THAT?

 I'm trying to make sense of Yevgeniy Prigozhin's Potemkin Coup and mostly failing. He's been beefing with the Russia Ministry of Defense since Day One of Wagner's involvement in Ukraine. So, I get the feud with Shoiyu. However, there seemed and seems to be some non-trivial support for Wagner's move among rank and file Russians. So, while it's overwhelmingly likely that Russian armed forces would eventually defeat Wagner forces, it's not clear that this "armed protest" wouldn't have turned into something bigger.

However, Prigozhin's preemptive cancelation asks the question of what he hoped to accomplish? Did Putin labeling him a traitor surprise him? They hadn't met significant resistance yet and he caves? To Lukashenko? How did he get involved? 

There are plenty of historical episodes of armed mutinies that were simply a mass of grievances and actually led to some policy changes or reform. It simply hasn't been common recently (as in the last century). 

How do the Wagner troops feel about this? Prigozhin's in exile, they will likely be turned over to the Russian armed forces - whom they hate. How do we reconcile that Russian citizens seemed pretty OK with the Wagner demi-coup. 

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian counteroffensive has been mostly fits and starts and probing attacks. Is there anyway they can turn this chaos to their advantage?

What an absolute mess.

American Airlines Is The Worst

 Last Saturday, I did my duty and showed up early to the airport for my flight to San Francisco. I was at the gate and ready to go! I got on for the first leg of the flight to Charlotte. As soon as I'm settled and turning on the Champions' League Final, the pilot announces a needed check on the airplane. As I am on American, I know this means an engine has fallen off, and soon enough we all deplane and four stricken looking gate agents try and re-book an entire flight.

My agent eventually realizes the only way to get me to San Francisco is on United. I ask if they should send my luggage out for me to rebook on United. She assures me that it will be sent with me without having to re-check it.

Four days later, I still don't have it.

United did their best. The flight from Hartford to Dulles was behind schedule, so the pilot flew like Maverick from Top Gun and - my favorite part - slammed on the brakes when we landed so we could make the first taxi way to the gate. I managed to run through the concourses in my Travel Crocs and made the connecting flight to San Francisco that got in at 1:30 in the morning. 

My bags went to Dallas.

Why Dallas, one might say. But one would not understand that American Airlines exists to make me miserable. It's in their corporate bylaws. For three days, the bag sat in Dallas until some woman there called me and asked me about my bag. She simply read the number on the tag and wanted to know what she should do with the bag. It was on the next plane to SF. All the fucking about with corporate Twitter accounts and calling a customer service rep who never answered his phone and some West Indian woman (I'm guessing from the accent) calls me up and puts it on a plane.

Then, it sits there in SFO. I'm travelling all over the place with my wife. I finally work my way through three different phone trees and I'm talking to another woman in some room inside the new airport and she promises to put the bag on a plane for Medford Oregon tomorrow morning. If that happens, I will finally get my luggage.

I suppose as a politics blog, there should be a broader point. 

Because my actual body flew on United, they were supposed to handle the bag once it got to SFO. Since American wouldn't send it to SFO, there was nothing they could do. However, the numerous agents I spoke to in India were all super helpful. Meanwhile, no one at American would answer the phone. I tried calling American at SFO directly. They said I needed to call baggage control, and when I asked for that number they hung up!

People - generally speaking - are nice and want to be helpful, especially if that is part of their job. Organizations, however, can make that impossible. American is such an organization, but it strikes me that this particular situation - two different airlines waiting for the other to act - suggests the need for a specialized, non-airline organization that specifically receives any late bags and reunites them with their owners.

Meanwhile I was stressed and miserable in Sonoma wine country and several national parks. 

My poor son is supposed to fly on American in July and I'm terrified of what will happen to him.

Light Posting For The Rest of the Month

 Hitting the road, Jack.

The Reviews Are In

 The other night, my boys and I went to see the new Spiderman movie. It is, hands down, one the best Marvel movies and animated movies of all time. My old assed ears couldn't make out a third of the dialogue, but even so it was funny, moving and visionary. In case you don't know anything about Across the Spiderverse, it posits that there are multiple universes - each with their own Spiderman. This is a theme being used in other Marvel movies, as they pivot away from the Avengers/Thanos plot. Anyway, the lead Spiderman in these two animated films is Miles Morales, a Puerto Rican Spiderman.

I bet you can guess what half of the reviews panning the film focus on.

Was it wokeness and DEI? Silly rabbit, of course it was. (My favorite are the one star reviews calling it one of the best films ever, because the reviewer doesn't know how the star system works.) The fact that Miles is NOT Peter Parker is a really important plot point, not tokenism. However, you can't shake the absolute belief that Hollywood is out to make your kids gay and white people hate themselves. No amount of contrary evidence can shake that belief.

Which brings me to the Trump indictment. Now, I must allow that I'm reading sources who are center and left, and they are pretty unanimous that the details in the indictment are incredibly, incredibly damning. Given that the evidence is in the indictment of Trump admitting the documents were still classified, directing people to hide them from the government and storing them in appalling loose circumstances...how is he not guilty?

However, the Right has its lens through which nothing but the Pure And White-Sorry-Right Belief may shine. Trump is a guy who has largely escaped legal accountability his whole life by bullying people he has defrauded and paying fines to lesser charges. Now - under the klieg lights of being president - all of his petty criminality is on display. For people objectively looking at this indictment, it is baffling why he is not already behind bars.

Honest to God, they executed the Rosenbergs for less.

However, for tens of millions of Americans - bunkered from reality behind the non-stop bullshit of Fox and Fiends - Trump is somehow a victim. All of the evidence, all of the documentation, all of his own words...nothing will shake this a priori conviction. 

In an ideal world, all those who ran out to defend Trump at all the various stages of this moment of legal accountability would sit there ashamed and abashed. They would plead mea culpa. Hell, even most of the people running against him in the Republican primary won't call him out. 

We are likely due more indictments in Georgia and in DC for trying to overturn the election. There will be audio recordings of Trump doing crimes and it will not matter. 

The Republican Party needs to be razed to ground and the ashes scattered. 

How Do You Even Engage?

 Fundamental to politics is the idea that there should be a free and vigorous debate between opposing parties. When it comes to Donald Trump, however, it is largely impossible to have that debate because the other side is simply spouting gibberish. This is become true again with the GOP response to Trump's (latest) indictment. 

The basic talking point from the GOP is that this is a political prosecution and therefore we have abandoned the "rule of law." Mike Pence tried and failed to make this case, although he's pretty dumb so maybe others will make it better. However, the basic premise to this criticism is that ANY prosecution of Trump is based on politics rather than on his manifest lawbreaking. 

The facts are pretty clear and pretty damning. Trump had classified documents, which does apparently happen. He then lied, obstructed and refused to hand them back to the proper authorities. Trump is not President of the United States. He has zero right to have those documents, yet he repeatedly refused to turn them over. These are simply facts and are at the heart of the indictment.

Of course, with the Right "every accusation is a confession." We have already seen Ron DeSantis and Trump try and leverage the state to punish political enemies. That the Justice Department for a Democratic administration has indicted Trump is exactly something they would do without merit to laws being broken. This is why they can't admit that Trump is different.

However, Trump's B-side campaign slogan was "Lock her up." How many investigations into Benghazi or Hunter Biden's laptop have we had without indictments?  As Trump crack(ed up) legal team discovered in 2020, you actually have to have receipts in federal court. All the spurious accusations about Hillary Clinton or Hunter Biden's criminality have not warranted an indictment, which is issued by Grand Juries, not the whim of the prosecutor. It is true that prosecutors have some discretion about whom to bring charges against and they don't present exculpatory evidence, but that's what the trial is for. Clinton and Biden haven't even cleared the minimal bar for indictment.

Trump has been on a decades long crime spree that wealth and fancy lawyers have managed to cover up. Now, he's paying the price. 

The - definitionally - is the rule of law.

Socrates In The Discourse

 I'm trying to clean out some old office stuff in anticipation of our sabbatical and my need to write. I came across a notebook from years ago where I wrote on Plato's Meno. In this dialogue, Socrates argues that learning is simply the soul's recollection of what it already knows. OK, that's maybe true of wisdom, but then again...Sorry, Socrates, you're full of shit there.

However, Socrates goes on to say that ignorance is better than false knowledge, because ignorance can be filled, whereas false knowledge must first removed before it can be filled with truth (including, presumably those things the soul already knows). 

The idea of virtue however, does fall perhaps into something the soul knows but must be reminded of. If virtue is clouded with false knowledge, then this could explain... well so much of what we see among the right, especially the evangelical right. Socrates argues that no passive student can learn virtue or wisdom, they must actively seek it. Yet, much of evangelical Christianity is based on the passive acceptance that the Bible is literally true. Questioning Biblical Infallibility is to question God, and we can't allow THAT. 

Anyway, Pat Robertson died, so that's cool. One less bigot.

Holy Shit

 The SCOTUS upheld the basic idea of the Voting Rights Act by ruling an Alabama racially gerrymandered map illegal. Roberts and Kavanaugh joined with the liberal judges to preserve the idea that laws actually mean what they say.

Cause and Effect

 I was treated to a round of golf with my sons (OK, I paid. Whatever.) on Tuesday. I was worried it was about to rain because of the darkening skies. Nope. It was smoke from Canadian wildfires. For the past two days and into today, the air has been thick with a hazy smoke that has left us dry-eyed and occasionally coughing.

Were these particular wildfires caused by climate change? Scientists struggle to make definitive statements, since any individual event could be caused by any number of individual variables. Still, they have made predictions that extreme events like this will be more common and...here we are.

The irony is that the Global North - broadly speaking - is making really good progress with decarbonizing its energy sector. It's not perfect and I sort of understand those who say it's not fast enough, but it's real. The issue, I fear, in the next two decades will be using the wealth of the Global North to electrify large parts of the Global South with carbon neutral power. 

Large parts of India, for instance, have no consistent electricity. Can they electrify with solar? How would that work during monsoon season? Who bears the cost? Few countries are likely to experience more extreme heat events than India, but it is a country very eager to develop its economy and Modi's entire political career is based around developing India's rural economy.

There is legitimately good news in certain areas of fighting climate change, but events like the 2023 Smoke Out are a signal that it's not moving fast enough.

The Law And Order Party

 Marshall lays out how the GOP MAGAts are thinking about defunding the FBI and other law enforcement agencies because they are holding Trump accountable to the rule of law.

What's interesting about this is what it says about how certain political identities can nullify actual acts. What I mean is that the GOP has always been the "law and order" party. The Democrats' self-inflicted wound of "Defund the Police" - even though no major Democratic politicians endorsed it - was because it reinforced existing public ideas about the Democrats. People already suspected the Democrats tended to favor restricting the police - especially when it came to racial profiling and the like.

What's so interesting about the GOP's identity as the Law and Order party is that the first candidate to frame himself as that was Nixon. Who was - you may recall - a criminal. There's a chart about indicted and convicted Cabinet members from Democratic and Republican administrations and it's not a very balanced list. I think Henry Cisneros was the only Democrat who was indicted and he was acquitted. 

Why this is interesting is that when the GOP refers to itself as the Party of Law and Order, they are not talking about ALL the laws so much as a certain type of order. Tax evasion? That's fine. Shoplifting? Send'em to jail. Insider trading and embezzling? That's just private behavior. The increase in car thefts? That's the break down into anarchy. The myriad crimes that Trump has committed? Don't politicize the justice system.  Unless it's Hunter Biden's laptop or Hillary email server.

When Republicans talk about Law and Order they are talking about subjugating certain groups of people. Historically, this has meant Black and Brown people, but now it can include anyone who's a Democrat. 

Or to put it another way: Law and Order is about authoritarian control of certain ethnic and political groups. It's about the fascism. 

They're Doing It Again

 Donald Trump will be the GOP nominee. There are only two possible ways that he is not. The first and most likely is that he dies or suffers a debilitating health event. The second is that the entire institutional GOP rallies around a "Not Trump." In 2016, Bernie was the Not Hillary, but the GOP field was so fractured that Trump could march to the nomination without actually winning a majority of primary votes.

Naturally, the GOP has decided to repeat their 2016 strategy of fracturing the Not Trump vote, because they are political geniuses.

Also, too, Fuck Cornell West. He supported Ralph Nader in 2000 and Jill Stein in 2016. This guy is a narcissistic menace to American democracy.

Who Blew Up The Dam?

 A major dam on the Dnipro River has been breached causing flooding in Kherson Oblast. Early indications are that it was Russia and - because busting open dams is usually considered a war crime - that's likely the case. Why - aside from an almost constant sociopathy - would Russia blow the dam? It will have a negative impact on Crimean war supplies, and Crimea is central to Russia's war goals.

My guess is that Russia is hoping that a flooding Dnipro will allow them to transfer units from Kherson further east to counter Ukrainian advances there. Russia troops - man for man - are worse than Ukrainian troops, but they have more of them. Moving troops from Kherson by using the floodwaters as a defensive fortification would suggest that Russian manpower is being tapped out.

But What Then?

 Jon Chait lays out in concise detail how the Republican Party has become authoritarian -  a deep fried Orbanism. The obvious question is what to do about it. How do you completely change the minds of people who wander the earth with ironclad certainty in falsehoods? 

The only thing that can truly save American democracy - aside from a series of compelling wins by Democrats - is a schism within the GOP. I wish I could see that happening, but the Liz Cheney's of the world are few and far between.

Biden

 I agree with pretty much everything Martin Longman says here. From Biden, I wanted competency and an end to the chaos and drama of Trumpistan. We got that. I also agree that it's a shame that Biden has largely done everything we could have hoped from him and maybe more and his approval ratings continue to be so aggressively meh.

I suppose it's the curse of being a work horse and not a show horse, when all the reporters are looking for the show horse.

A Multipolar World

 Fareed Zakaria notes that we are in an emerging new world where "the rise of the rest" has ended a roughly 25 year period of American hegemony. There are - I think - some problems with his interpretation. He notes that more than half the global population does not support the West's condemnation of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. While this is roughly true, the reality is that China and India's population may have a different take than their leadership. Or not. India, in particular, has a tortured history with the "West" which sometimes includes the United States and sometimes doesn't. 

Zakaria is accurate that we have a hypocrisy problem when it comes to the rules-based order we have tried to create since 1945. Once again, our invasion of Iraq and the subsequent human rights abuses during the War on Terra exposed a real gap between our ideals and our actions. And then...Trump. Since 9/11, we have seen a schism within the GOP about America's proper role in the world. The neo-isolationism of Trumpism would be devastating to our ability to create a more peaceful globe. It's unclear that the bellicose nationalism of Dick Cheney and John Bolton would do any better.

The near-miss on the debt ceiling has preserved America's critical role in international finance as the world's reserve currency. I'm reading a biography of John Maynard Keynes, and his efforts to wean the world off the gold standard was perhaps his life's work. We have replaced gold - in some fundamental ways - with the dollar. That will obviously breed resentment in some quarters. Ukraine is demonstrating the weakness of Russia's capacity as a great power. One would think a country like India would re-examine its relationship with Moscow.

One thing Zakaria notes is the rise in a hyper-nationalism among these emerging states. Much of this is framed as opposition to the West. However, it's easy to see how Africa and Asia could repeat the horrible history of 20th century Europe. They may have rejected important hallmarks of Western culture, but they have imbibed nationalism from us. The worst result possible, it would seem.

Happy Pride Month

 Remember, America was founded by heterosexual heroes like...um...Baron von Steuben, Alexander Hamilton and Henry Laurens...Well! At least they were real men's men like...um...Count Casimir Pulaski...?

I hope some godbothering nitwit in Georgia leads a campaign to rename Ft. Pulaski when they find out Pulaski was likely intersex. The shit throwing tantrum will be hilarious coming so close to LGBTQ friendly Savannah.

Also, people are fed up with the godbothering nitwits.