Outside, I'm masquerading

Little Cove Noosa (2022) Painting by Helen Mitra, from a feature on contemporary Australian art.

So, the Supremes struck down Affirmative Acton and Student Debt Relief and I can't even respond yet.

"The truth about our homelessness crisis: As Californians age, they are priced out: Public policy and common perception have long tied the road to homelessness with mental illness and drug addiction. But a new study out Tuesday — the largest and most comprehensive investigation of California's homeless population in decades — found another cause is propelling much of the crisis on our streets: the precarious poverty of the working poor, especially Black and brown seniors. 'These are old people losing housing,' Dr. Margot Kushel told me. She's the lead investigator on the study from UCSF's Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, done at the request of state health officials. 'They basically were ticking along very poor, and sometime after the age of 50 something happened,' Kushel said. That something — divorce, a loved one dying, an illness, even a cutback in hours on the job — sparked a downward spiral and their lives 'just blew up,' as Kushel puts it. Kushel and her team found that nearly half of single adults living on our streets are over the age of 50. And 7% of all homeless adults, single or in families, are over 65. And 41% of those older, single Californians had never been homeless — not one day in their lives — before the age of 50.

Stoller, "Lina Khan Fires a Crooked CEO: The FTC blocked a genomics technology merger, leading to the firing of a CEO. The deal involved Bill Gates, Barack Obama, China and Jeff Bezos. And corporate America is in shock. [...] More than any other possible penalty, the prospect for CEOs that they could lose their job is going to change corporate behavior. Here's the front page story in the Wall Street Journal on deSouza, noting that behavior across corporate America is changing. [...] And this brings me to Microsoft, which is pursuing a somewhat irrational acquisition of game giant Activision, a bank shot attempt to monopolize gaming. The merger is on the rocks, because Great Britain ruled that it's illegal, and the combination is also being challenged by the FTC. And yet Microsoft won't relent. A few weeks ago, in an essay called Corporate Temper Tantrums, I noted that there's an open question about whether large corporations or democratic governments set the rules for our societies. Microsoft is the key example. Its threat to combine operations with Activision, despite the British government calling the transaction illegal, looks completely crazy, akin to civil disobedience by a Fortune 500 firm. There's no reason for it, since the firm has a great path ahead embedding AI in its products. Gaming is a sideshow. Why would the firm destroy its political reputation with this scorched earth campaign?"

At Thread Ap from Radley Balko, "DOJ just released the report from its two-year investigation of the Minneapolis police department. [...] 'Sit on the ground. I'm gonna mace ya.' [...] Casually pepper spraying some folks who were concerned about a suicidal friend. [...] Pulling a black teen out of a car and threatening to taser him for . . . not wearing a seatbelt. [...] Can't argue with this logic. A supervisor found that some MPD cops' use of force must have been reasonable because if it wasn't reasonable force, they wouldn't have used it. [...] Read the incident, and then how the complaint was handled. The investigator was the same supervisor on the scene who failed to find any wrongdoing at the time. He then didn't bother interviewing witnesses or the complainant before clearing the cops. [...] Flashbanging a group of protesters -- just for fun. [...] Casually pepper spraying journalists for no reason at all. [...] You know you have a problem when a federal court won't even grant officers qualified immunity, but your official investigation finds no violation of policy." The details just leave you gaping. How do you reform that?

The interesting thing wasn't the unsurprising news that Alito is just as corrupt as the rest of them so much as the odd (and unconvincing) response to the article he hadn't even read. "Samuel Alito Is the Latest Supreme Justice Exposed for Living Like an Oil Sheikh: I know a lifetime gig is a license for a permanent big-money Mardi Gras, but, really, a private jet to Alaska? A Little before midnight last night, the good people at ProPublica called in an air strike on Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and the rubble is still bouncing. (Interestingly, the Justice wrote a pre-emptive rebuttal on Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal, which is something all innocent people do.)"

"Populist? RFK Jr Doesn't Even Support Medicare for All. Many commentators see the eccentric Robert F. Kennedy Jr as an 'antiestablishment' alternative to Biden. But he doesn't even support single-payer health care, the brightest line dividing the centrist Democratic Party from its base. [...] All of this creates an opening for a primary challenger. Ted Kennedy's nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, has stepped in to fill that niche. He's not the only Democrat running against Biden — Marianne Williamson is too — but in most polls I've seen, Kennedy is well ahead of her. And it's not hard to see why he might emerge as Biden's most prominent challenger. On the one hand, he comes from a lineage of Democratic Party royalty. On the other hand, he's an edgy antiestablishment 'populist.' Or at least that's how he's been widely portrayed — both by commentators who are repulsed by Kennedy's proclivity for anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and by those who find his criticisms of the Biden administration compelling. But the populism label is false advertising. On key issues from Israel/Palestine to Medicare for All, RFK Jr's politics are a thousand miles away from his branding."

"For Black drivers, a police officer's first 45 words are a portent of what's to come: When a police officer stops a Black driver, the first 45 words said by that officer hold important clues about how their encounter is likely to go. Car stops that result in a search, handcuffing, or arrest are nearly three times more likely to begin with the police officer issuing a command, such as 'Keep your hands on the wheel' or 'Turn the car off.'"

"Texas's 'Death Star Bill' Is an Attack on Workers and Democracy: The newly passed HB 2127 is yet another attempt by the GOP-controlled state legislature to impose minority rule over the state of Texas. It's the working class that will pay the price — and the working class that must organize to fight back. [...] HB 2127, labeled the 'Death Star Bill' by the Texas AFL-CIO, will go into effect on September 1. The bill will block cities and local governments from passing regulations on issues like labor protections, housing, and health care. Effectively, it will bar local governments in Texas from governing, hampering democracy in the state."

"The FBI Is Hunting A New Domestic Terror Threat: Abortion Rights Activists: After GOP pressure, FBI abortion 'terrorism' investigations increased tenfold, government data shows. [...] The FBI's abortion-related terrorism investigations jumped from three cases in the fiscal year 2021 to 28 in 2022, a higher increase than any other category listed, according to an audit published by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General on June 6. The number of abortion-related cases in 2022 far exceeds that of all previous years included in the audit, going back to 2017. In the same time frame, FBI investigations into 'racially or ethnically motivated extremists' decreased from 215 to 169; investigations into 'anti-government / anti-authority' declined even more sharply, from 812 to 240. In fact, the only other category to see an increase in cases was 'animal rights / environmental,' which underwent a modest increase from seven to nine cases. [...] 'There is a long history of deadly anti-abortion violence in this country,' German said. 'The FBI should not devote counterterrorism resources to vandalism cases that don't threaten human life out of some flawed notion of parity."

"Twitter Halts Promotion Of Campaign Video Due To 'Abortion Advocacy': 'The mention of abortion advocacy is the issue here,' a Twitter employee told North Carolina candidate Rachel Hunt, according to emails HuffPost reviewed. Twitter blocked a Democrat's campaign video from being promoted on its platform because it expressed support for abortion rights, according to email conversations obtained by HuffPost. The video, created by North Carolina state Sen. Rachel Hunt (D) for her campaign for lieutenant governor, centers on abortion rights in North Carolina and the fall of Roe v. Wade. Hunt says in the video that she's running for lieutenant governor to combat anti-choice Republicans who recently passed a 12-week abortion ban in the state. [...] 'Ah yes, the mention of abortion advocacy is the issue here,' a Twitter employee told Hunt's campaign Wednesday in an email reviewed by HuffPost. The employee said the company may have 'some good news to share on that front' in the next week or so, seemingly suggesting it may change its standards and practices on content discussing abortion rights. 'For now, though, you still won't be able to message around that topic,' the employee added."

"Assault charge dropped against Dan Price, former Gravity Payments CEO " — I haven't known how to react to this whole story but if the claims made about Price are no better than what came up in this case, I have to wonder if any of this is more than smears.

REST IN POWER: Debi Sundahl, former stripper, original publisher of the iconic On Our Backs, sex educator, and founder of Vitale video, of cancer, at 69. Susie Bright's announcement and tribute is now at her blog, "In memory: Debi Sundahl". There are some nice photos and stories.

"Ginni and Clarence: A Love Story How they saved one another, raged against their enemies, and brought the American experiment to the brink." A lot of people are curious about that marriage. And since he's been in the headlines a lot recently, Chapo Traphouse did an interview with Corey Robin about what he learned when writing his book The Enigma of Clarence Thomas.

"The Right accuses their critics of the conspiracy they themselves engage in" — Like, for example, the nefarious billionaire story.

"The Obamanauts Are Rebranding as Evil: It's not just Jay Carney, the former Obama spokesman who now leads capital's side of the class war at Amazon. A whole cohort of Obamanauts — those bright, young idealists who wanted to change the world — have positioned themselves in roles in the private sector where they can most effectively be part of the problem. [...] When it comes to Obama administration alumni taking lucrative gigs in Wall Street and Silicon Valley, this list is by no means exhaustive (this is to say nothing of Obama himself, who's made an absolute killing giving speeches to corporate clients). Even for hardened cynics of the political class, the shift from 2008's rousing message of 'Change we can believe in' to cashing in at corporate America has been so nakedly unsubtle it's sometimes defied belief. When that message failed to actualize itself between 2008 and 2016, a common refrain from some Democrats held that some combination of events and political constraints had doused the progressive ambition burning in the Obama administration's fiery liberal soul. Since departing the White House, countless alumni have had more freedom than most to take up professional opportunities of their own choosing — and the choices many of them made strongly suggest otherwise." Pretty sure that "fiery liberal soul" was never there to begin with.

Zach Carter in The New Yorker, "What if We're Thinking About Inflation All Wrong? Isabella Weber's heterodox ideas about government price controls are transforming policy in the United States and across Europe. [...] Instead, without warning, her career began to implode. Just before New Year's Eve, while Weber was on the bunny slopes, a short article on inflation that she'd written for the Guardian inexplicably went viral. A business-school professor called it 'the worst' take of the year. Random Bitcoin guys called her 'stupid.' The Nobel laureate Paul Krugman called her 'truly stupid.' Conservatives at Fox News, Commentary, and National Review piled on, declaring Weber's idea 'perverse,' 'fundamentally unsound,' and 'certainly wrong.'" What had she done that was so "stupid"? She'd proposed the same restraint on inflation that had worked in World War II: Price controls. Via Atrios, who had more to say about that.

"Public Schools Have Been Made to Answer for Capitalism's Crimes: Unwilling to disrupt the economic system that created mass inequality, liberals invested schools with magical powers to fix a broken society. When public schools failed to clean up capitalism's mess, they ended up on the chopping block."

If you needed a reason for millions of people to hate "liberals", always remember that Thomas Friedman was represented to people as a "liberal" media voice. And, as David C. Korten's review of Friedman's 1999 book The Lexis and the Olive Tree makes clear, Friedman was a monster. "We Are the Capitalists. You Will Be Assimilated. Resistance Is Futile. [...] If the author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree were not Thomas L. Friedman, the book could, with cause, be dismissed as simply another elitist corporate puff piece extolling the virtues of deregulation and the elimination of economic borders in the idolatrous pursuit of money. Friedman, however, has often been on the side of progressives, especially in his writing on Israel. His current book has its use, not because it offers any new insights into globalization -- it does not -- but rather because it reveals so much of the mindset of those self-proclaimed liberals and "new" Democrats who, like Friedman, have uncritically embraced economic rule by currency speculators and mega-corporations as the inevitable and beneficial future of humankind."

And, just by coincidence (and not a result of me cleverly digging up an old article on Friedman's monstrous book), Cory Doctorow recently wrote that "There Is Always An Alternative."

"Why thousands of board games are buried beneath Mankato: The Anti-Monopoly alternative to America's most successful board game took off in the 1970s. But a gaming giant with Minnesota ties sought its destruction. Somewhere beneath southern Minnesota lie the remnants of about 40,000 board games once created and sold as an antiestablishment alternative to mega-selling Monopoly. Manufactured in Mankato, the game Anti-Monopoly found success in the mid-1970s amid America's rampant inflation and institutional distrust. Then, much like in Monopoly, the ownership class quashed the competition."

Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, "Tracks of My Tears"

And one thin dime won't even shine your shoes

"Amazonie 2 (2020)" by Magali Angot (Mangot) is from a surprisingly fun collection on parrots.

"The Supreme Court Has a New Bold Lone Dissenter: This is a case about the federal right to organize your workplace through a union, which is protected by the National Labor Relations Act, or NLRA. This law was a cornerstone of the New Deal; before that point in history, unions were basically treated as illicit conspiracies out to undermine law-abiding businesses. The NLRA said: We're going start treating unions like lawful enterprises that protect workers' vested rights. One way it does that is by preempting state-level suits against a union for helping to organize a workplace. That's really important because otherwise, employers could destroy a union by slapping it with ruinous civil suits for negligence and trespassing and whatever, even though it's engaging in federally protected activity. The fundamental principle in this case is that the Supreme Court has said the NLRA kicks in, and state law is ousted, whenever unions engage in collective action that is arguably protected. The key word is 'arguably'—it doesn't have to be certain. And that's an important buffer because the National Labor Relations Board, which enforces the NLRA, has to step in and investigate whenever charges are filed, then decide whether fines and penalties are necessary." And that's where the Supremes stuck their nose in.

"Atlanta Police Arrest Organizers Of Bail Fund For Cop City Protesters: Part of a brutal crackdown on dissent against the police training facility, the SWAT raid and charges against the protest bail fund are unprecedented. ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, a heavily armed Atlanta Police Department SWAT team raided a house in Atlanta and arrested three of its residents. Their crime? Organizing legal support and bail funds for protesters and activists who have faced indiscriminate arrest and overreaching charges in the struggle to stop the construction of a vast police training facility — dubbed Cop City — atop a forest in Atlanta. In a joint operation with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, or GBI, Atlanta cops charged Marlon Scott Kautz, Adele Maclean, and Savannah Patterson — all board members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund — with 'money laundering' and 'charity fraud.' The arrests are an unprecedented attack on bail funds and legal support organizations, a long-standing facet of social justice movements, according to Lauren Regan, executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center. 'This is the first bail fund to be attacked in this way,' Regan, whose organization has worked to ensure legal support for people resisting Cop City, told me. 'And there is absolutely not a scintilla of fact or evidence that anything illegal has ever transpired with regard to Atlanta fundraising for bail support.' [...] A more detailed arrest warrant for Patterson notes that the alleged 'money laundering' charge relates to reimbursements made from the nonprofit to Patterson's personal PayPal account for minor expenses including 'gasoline, forest clean-up, totes, covid rapid tests, media, yard signs and other miscellaneous expenses.' Targeting the organizers with a militarized SWAT raid based on such expenditures only clarifies the desperation of law enforcement agencies in going after the movement."

"A New Prison Policy Blocks Incarcerated Journalists and Artists From Publishing Their Work: New York prisons may have effectively banned journalism behind bars. JOHN J. LENNON HAS built an unlikely career. As a journalist writing from within the prisons he covers, he has spent the last decade offering a rare inside perspective into politics, health, and recreation behind bars. His most recent feature, in The New York Times, illustrated how rising housing prices leave those released from prison with few options to avoid homelessness. He's landed a book deal and a contributing editor position with Esquire. 'Writing has changed my life,' he told New York Focus in a phone call from Sullivan Correctional Facility. 'I've been able to grapple on the page with a lot of things.' He also mentors others who've found solace writing while imprisoned. But the agency that runs New York's prisons is set to block Lennon and countless other incarcerated writers, artists, and poets from getting their work outside prison walls. Last month, the agency quietly handed down new rules severely curtailing what incarcerated writers and artists can publish — and forbidding them from getting paid for it."

"High Court Denies Assange Right to Appeal Putting Him Perilously Close to Extradition: A single judge on the High Court of England and Wales has rejected imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange's nearly year-old request to appeal the British decision to extradite him to the United States to stand trial on espionage and computer intrusion charges. Assange's legal team has one last recourse in the U.K. and has five days to request a hearing before the court."

"Texas sheriff files criminal case over DeSantis flights to Martha's Vineyard: A Texas sheriff's office has recommended criminal charges over flights that the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, arranged to deport 49 South American migrants from San Antonio to Martha's Vineyard, in Massachusetts, last year. In a statement on Monday, the Bexar county sheriff's office said it had filed a criminal case with the local district attorney over the flight. The Bexar county sheriff, Javier Salazar, has previously said the migrants were 'lured under false pretenses' into traveling to Martha's Vineyard, a wealthy liberal town. The recommendation comes after the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, threatened DeSantis with kidnapping charges on Monday, after Florida flew a group of people seeking asylum to Sacramento. It was the second time in four days Florida had used taxpayer money to fly asylum seekers to California. 'The charge filed is unlawful restraint and several accounts were filed, both misdemeanor and felony,' the Bexar county sheriff's office said in a statement provided to KSAT News."

My favorite thing about the story of the tsouris that got stirred up when the Dodgers invited the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to be their guests is that actual Catholic nuns stood up for them because they visit the sick, clothe the naked, and feed the poor, which is just what nuns are supposed to do. "Dodgers apologize and invite Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to Pride Night: Less than a week after removing the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence from their lineup, the Dodgers on Monday re-invited the organization to Pride Night amid backlash from LGBTQ+ and civil rights groups as well as local politicians and even Dodgers employees."

Impeached Republican "Texas AG Says Trump Would've 'Lost' State If It Hadn't Blocked Mail-in Ballots Applications Being Sent Out: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, said former President Donald Trump would have lost in Texas in the 2020 election if his office had not successfully blocked counties from mailing out applications for mail-in ballots to all registered voters. Harris County, home to the city of Houston, wanted to mail out applications for mail-in ballots to its approximately 2.4 million registered voters due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the conservative Texas Supreme Court blocked the county from doing so after it faced litigation from Paxton's office."

I always wondered when these people would finally notice the contradiction here. "Texas House Overwhelmingly Approves Restrictions on No-Knock Warrants: Conservatives who support the bill recognize the conflict between unannounced home invasions and the Second Amendment. The Texas House of Representatives last week overwhelmingly approved a bill that would sharply restrict the use of no-knock search warrants, which the state Senate is now considering. Both chambers are controlled by Republicans, and the bipartisan support for the bill suggests that many conservatives recognize the potentially lethal hazards of routinely allowing police to enter people's homes without warning. That practice pits law enforcement priorities against the right to armed self-defense in the home, which the Supreme Court has recognized as the "core" of the Second Amendment. [...] "No-knock warrants are really dangerous," Wu told Houston Public Media. "They're just a bad policy. There's no reason that you can't announce that it's the police coming into your door in the middle of the night." He said Texas conservatives "understand that you don't really have a right to defend your home if you don't know who is coming in."" All the more so when the warrants themselves are frequently of questionable provenance and the teams that execute them do so recklessly.

"Video Showed an Officer Trying to Stop His Partner From Killing a Man. Now We Know Police Investigators Never Even Asked About the Footage. We obtained the NYPD's full investigation into the killing of Kawaski Trawick, including documents and audio of interviews with the officers. The records provide a rare window into how exactly a police department examines its own after a shooting." Let's just say there was a little discrepancy between what the video showed and what the police said happened, and the "investigation" didn't even investigate it.

YouGov poll less interesting than it could have been: "American women describe their experiences with menstrual periods"

REST IN PEACE: "Cynthia Weil, Storied Songwriter With Decades of Hits, Dead at 82: Cynthia Weil, the celebrated songwriter who helped craft timeless hits like the Righteous Brothers' 'You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin',' the Animals' 'We Gotta Get Out of This Place,' and Chaka Khan's 'Through the Fire,' died Thursday, June 1. She was 82." Wrote some Gene Pitney and Motown hits I loved, as well, and my old favorite from Wild in the Streets, too, "The Shape of Things to Come".

REST IN PEACE: "John Romita Sr, Spider-Man artist and co-creator of Wolverine, dead at 93 [...] Romita died of natural causes in his sleep. His son, John Romita Jr, also a successful graphic novelist, confirmed the death in a Twitter post on Tuesday night."

REST IN POWER: "Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower, dies aged 92 [...] In March, Ellsberg announced that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer. Saying he had been given three to six months to live, he said he had chosen not to undergo chemotherapy and had been assured of hospice care. 'I am not in any physical pain,' he wrote, adding: 'My cardiologist has given me license to abandon my salt-free diet of the last six years. This has improved my life dramatically: the pleasure of eating my favourite foods!' On Friday, the family said Ellsberg 'was not in pain' when he died. He spent his final months eating 'hot chocolate, croissants, cake, poppyseed bagels and lox' and enjoying 'several viewings of his all-time favourite [movie], Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid', the family statement added." I like knowing that. Right up to the end he was speaking up for whistleblowers who have been treated like criminals by our modern "leaders". He was a real hero. Also, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is my favorite porn film.

REST IN POWER: "Glenda Jackson, fearless actor and politician, dies aged 87 [...] Jackson bestrode the narrow worlds of stage and screen like a colossus over six decades. Though such a Shakespearean tribute would undoubtedly have had the famously curmudgeonly actor reaching for her familiar catchphrase: 'Oh, come on. Good God, no,' nothing less will do for a star who emerged from a 23-year career break to play King Lear at the age of 82. Not only did she win an Evening Standard theatre award for that performance, but she brought the audience to its feet by playing up to her ferocious reputation with an attack on the awards' sponsor. For decades, the newspaper had scorned her as an actor, opposed her as an MP, she said, 'so I'm left thinking what did I do wrong?'"

ROT IN PERDITION: "Left Out of Pat Robertson's Obits: His Crazy, Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory: The right-wing Christian broadcaster was a bigoted loon—and the GOP embraced him. On Thursday, Pat Robertson, the television preacher and founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, died at the age of 93. The obituaries duly noted that he transformed Christian fundamentalism into a potent political force with the Christian Coalition that he founded in 1990 and that became an influential component of the Republican Party. They also included an array of outrageous and absurd remarks he had made over the years. He blamed natural disasters on feminists and LGBTQ people. He called Black Lives Matter activists anti-Christian. He said a devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti occurred because Haitians had made a 'pact with the devil' to win their freedom from France. He prayed for the deaths of liberal Supreme Court justices. He insisted the 9/11 attacks happened because liberals, feminists, and gay rights advocates had angered God. He claimed Kenyans could get AIDS via towels. He insisted Christians were more patriotic than non-Christians. He purported to have prayed away a hurricane from striking Virginia Beach. (The storm hit elsewhere.) Yet left out of the accounts of Robertson's life was a basic fact: He was an antisemitic conspiracy theory nutter."

ROT IN PERDITION: "A farewell to James G. Watt, environmental vandal and proto-Trumpian: Last week was so chock full o' news, what with the Trump indictment and the deaths of religious right-winger Pat Robertson and the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, that I'm concerned that another significant passing has received far less attention than it deserved. That's the death of James G. Watt at 85, which occurred on May 27 but was announced by his family last Thursday. Most leading newspapers granted Watt an obituary, proper for someone who was Ronald Reagan's Interior secretary for just under three years. The New York Times called him 'polarizing,' the Washington Post 'combative,' this newspaper 'sharp-tongued and pro-development.' Did those adjectives do justice to Watt, however? I think not. They focused on his actions while in office from 1981 to 1983. What they missed, however, is his legacy as a Republican ideologue on environmental policy." We were all horrified when he was appointed, but my sister-in-law worked at Interior and they were all crying.

Atrios provides a guest link to a surprisingly good opinion piece by Perry Bacon, Jr. in the WaPo in the wake of Chris Licht stepping down at CNN. "After the firestorm created by the Atlantic article, Licht is now stepping down from his post. But all of the harsh criticism is a bit unfair to Licht. In particular, his skepticism of left-wing causes, and his view that people who don't agree with the left are constantly attacked and shamed, isn't some outlier stance. These ideas are regularly expressed in many of the nation's most prominent news outlets. If you spend a lot of time talking to White men in Democratic politics, as I do, you have to nod along as comments like Licht's are made, even if you don't agree with them, to signal that you are a reasonable person worth talking to. Licht's comments embody an anti-woke centrism that is increasingly prominent in American media and politics today, particularly among powerful White men who live on the coasts and don't identify as Republicans or conservatives. It's deeply flawed, and it's pushing some important U.S. institutions to make bad decisions. [...] 'Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned,' the New York Times declared in the first sentence of a March 2022 editorial. In reality, there has never been a right to voice your opinion without the possibility of being shamed or shunned (terms without precise meanings) — and there shouldn't be. Shaming and shunning people are free expression, too. What I suspect this editorial was actually calling for is for self-described Democrats and liberals to be able to express more conservative views (such as skepticism about transgender rights) but without being attacked in the way that conservatives often are for such views (being called bigots)."

"This L.A. Bus Shelter Managed to Offend Literally Everyone." This is what happens when hurting the homeless becomes more of a priority than creating things that serve the purposes they were supposed to be created for. Those nice benches that were meant for people — tired people, or old people — to be able to rest while visiting a park, shopping, or waiting for the bus, have been made so uncomfortable that no one can actually rest on them anymore. And now they've found a way to eliminate any protection from rain or sun. A work of genius.

"How Reading The Economist Helped Me to Stop Worrying About White Supremacy: A recent viral sensation identifies the migration of poor whites as the cause of the problem—letting the rest of us off the hook! [...] If an Economist article that went viral recently is any indication, neither revelation made a dent in the conventional wisdom about who's behind white supremacy in America. The article, by Elliott Morris, citing a research paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, claims that you can use math to prove that 21st-century reactionary politics come from poor whites who left the South looking for jobs a century ago. It's not hard to see why this piece got traction. It absolves lots of white people of any responsibility for white supremacy. It's just truthy enough to become the kind of 'everyone knows' canonical narrative that informs political strategies for a generation. But the math proving that racism comes from one specific class of people turns out to be fatally flawed! And it gets worse. By obscuring how white supremacy actually works, and perpetuating mistaken ideas of why it persists and spreads, this study can make it harder to fight. That leaves us all worse off. It's the political equivalent of junk food."

"The First Name of a Supreme Court Justice Is Not Justice [...] Over roughly the past 15 years, the justices have seized for themselves more and more of the national governing agenda, overriding other decision makers with startling frequency. And they have done so in language that drips with contempt for other governing institutions and in a way that elevates the judicial role above all others. The result has been a judicial power grab. [...] Recognizing the justices' ideological project also points to the beginning of the solution. We ought to begin talking about the justices the way we talk about other political actors — recognizing that their first name is not Justice and that they, like other politicians, should be identified by their party. We should stop talking about another branch's potential defiance of a judicial opinion as an attack on 'the rule of law' and instead understand it as an attack on rule by judges, one that may (or may not) be a justified response to some act of judicial governance. And those other branches should be more willing — as they have at other moments in American history — to use the tools at their disposal, including cutting the judiciary's funding, to put the courts in their place. In recent years, the judiciary has shown little but contempt for other governing institutions. It has earned a little contempt in return."

So, it turns out that instead of threatening people, you can get people to show up in court by communicating with them: "Criminal justice policy in the United States focuses on increasing negative consequences to deter undesired behavior. However, defendants often appear relatively insensitive to these changes in the severity of consequences. Fishbane et al. considered a different policy lever: improving the communication of information necessary to adhere to desired behavior (see the Perspective by Kohler-Hausmann). They found that redesigning a criminal summons form to highlight critical information and providing text message reminders increased the likelihood that defendants would show up to their appointed court date, thus eliminating a substantial percentage of arrest warrants for failing to appear in court. In follow-up experiments, the authors found that laypeople, but not experts, believe that such failures to appear are relatively intentional, and this belief reduces their support for interventions aimed at increasing awareness rather than punishment. These findings have implications for policies aimed at improving criminal justice outcomes."

"Pluralistic: The long lineage of private equity's looting: Fans of the Sopranos will remember the 'bust out' as a mob tactic in which a business is taken over, loaded up with debt, and driven into the ground, wrecking the lives of the business's workers, customers and suppliers. When the mafia does this, we call it a bust out; when Wall Street does it, we call it 'private equity.'" Cory Doctorow explains how vulture capitalists are destroying everything people need.

And here's Robert Kuttner's 2018 story, "It Was Vulture Capitalism that Killed Sears: Don't blame Amazon or the internet. The culprit was a predatory hedge fund. If you've been following the impending bankruptcy of America's iconic retailer, as covered by print, broadcast, and digital media, you've probably encountered lots of nostalgia, and sad clucking about how dinosaurs like Sears can't compete in the age of Amazon and specialty retail. But most of the coverage has failed to stress the deeper story. Namely, Sears is a prime example of how hedge funds and private-equity companies take over retailers, encumber them with debt in order to pay themselves massive windfall profits, and then leave the retailer without adequate operating capital to compete."

"Black People Care About Crime, But We Don't Need Police Propaganda: With Mass Shootings And Gun Violence Permeating The News, It's Clear We Need Public Safety Solutions. But More Cops Aren't The Answer. Everyone wants to live in a society free from crime, Black people included. We're just not usually able to comfortably express that without America treating it as an endorsement of our own criminalization and mass incarceration. When mention is made of the Black community's collective concern about crime, it is rarely to address our material needs or alleviate the causes of crime, but instead offered to dismiss calls for progressive reform in lieu of continuing to invest in 'tough on crime' initiatives."

"What is a 'Riot'? For weeks, I was puzzled by the radical disconnect between what was being reflected back to us by the national media -- and even our friends and relatives in distant parts of the country -- and what Portland residents like me, who live downtown, knew to be the truth. The national media were repeatedly saying Portlanders were 'rioting,' that the downtown was overrun by 'antifa and Marxist terrorists,' filled with burning buildings and looting . . . but we saw nothing of that, especially those of us who live closest to the epicenter. Nervous friends from out of town repeated that police are saying the activity in the streets are 'riots.' Nobody's rioting, we responded, and we're not afraid to go downtown. It finally dawned on me that the Portland Police Bureau's use of the term 'riot' was a technical matter -- a legal one -- which had very little to do with the phenomenon American citizens have been accustomed to seeing reported on the national news as riots."

In 2014, the late Robert Parry wrote about the coup in Ukraine and the bizarre way the media was covering it. He was no stranger to the way the press corp can twist the narrative, but he felt that something new and even more sinister had been added, an ingredient we have become used to seeing today. "Ukraine, Through the US Looking Glass [...] But the U.S. press has played down his role because his neo-Nazism conflicts with Official Washington's narrative that the neo-Nazis played little or no role in the 'revolution.' References to neo-Nazis in the 'interim government' are dismissed as 'Russian propaganda.'"

For the record, almost everyone takes one look at me and thinks I'm Jewish. Sometimes this is really obvious (like that guy who went out of his way to show me the swastika tats on his knuckles), and sometimes it's a more subtle reservedness that only goes away when the listener somehow learns that my ethnicity is something else, but by and large, people just assume I'm Jewish. So I would tend to notice if there was a lot of antisemitism going on around me, and I will say for the record that on the few occasions I have met Ken Livingstone, or the many occasions on which I have socialized or worked with Ken-supporting Labourites and Corbyn-supporting Labourites, I never experienced any from them. And actual Jews who have spent considerably more time around Labour Party people say much the same: "Bindman has had an equally long history in the Labour Party, as a councillor, deputy leader of Camden council and chair of the Society of Labour Lawyers. He has acted for a number of leading figures in the party, although not Corbyn. 'I have had close involvement with the Labour Party for many years, and I can say that I've never really experienced antisemitism among fellow Labour Party members or in Labour meetings.' He is not alone in this judgement. The idea of any Jew being antisemitic is, in his words, 'pretty hard to swallow'. Bindman does not deny that antisemitism exists in the party, as it does everywhere, but he agrees with Corbyn's assessment in response to the EHCR report that the problem of antisemitism had been exaggerated - an assessment that got the MP expelled from the parliamentary Labour Party. 'He thought the problem had been exaggerated in the Labour Party. He did not say that antisemitism itself was not highly important, but he said there was not as much of it as had been suggested and he is absolutely right about that. 'You can look at all the statistics and studies that have been made. If you look at the facts you can't justify what Keir has said or done unless he's using it as a pretext. A political strategy. That's all I can say.'"

"Children's enjoyment of writing has fallen to 'crisis point', research finds: Only one in three UK children now enjoy writing in their free time – including text messages – with those on free school meals most likely to do so. [...] 'Every year since 2010, the National Literacy Trust has consistently found that children on free school meals are more likely to engage with writing in their free time than their better-off peers,' said the report. 'This trend has remained steady in the face of a global pandemic and an unprecedented cost-of-living crisis that has forced up the price of consumer goods and services at the fastest rate in four decades. This highlights the potential for writing for pleasure to play a vital role in the lives of disadvantaged children and young people.'"

"Idle rich baffled by poor people's distaste for dangerous, low-paying jobs: People who don't have to work have complained for centuries that other people don't like doing poorly paid, dangerous, dull work, the kind that makes the lives of the affluent comfortable and convenient. This collection of quotes, dating back to 1894, all say the same thing — "Nobody wants to work anymore" — as if there was a time when people relished shoveling shit for the upper class."

"So What Is a British Biscuit Really? And why does it need to 'snap'?" The origins of the British "biscuit" from a French term for what Americans call "hard-tack" seem almost mysterious, and help explain why they are equally mystified by what we call "cookies", "crackers", and "biscuits".

"Colin's Barn: Colin Stokes 'got a bit carried away' and built a castle that looks like something out of Tolkien. [...] The Hobbit House, also known as Colin's Barn, in Chedglow, England, has been abandoned since Stokes moved away in 2000 to avoid the noise of a forest marble quarry opening up nearby. He never finished his project, which he had started 1989 using rocks and stones from around his property, and concrete to hold them together." There are a few neat photos.

The Drifters, "On Broadway" (Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil)

But only now my love has grown

Claude Monet's gardens in Giverny, France

Reminder: One day Richard Nixon decided he didn't want to pay for programs Congress passed that he didn't like. So Congress passed The Impoundment Control Act 1974. This law mandates that the president must pay for anything Congress has authorized. And that means that Biden has to ignore the so-called "debt limit".

"Samuel Alito's Assault on Wetlands Is So Indefensible That He Lost Brett Kavanaugh: On Thursday, the Supreme Court dealt a devastating blow to the nation's wetlands by rewriting a statute the court does not like to mean something it does not mean. The court's decision in Sackett v. EPA is one of the its most egregious betrayals of textualism in memory. Put simply: The Clean Water Act protects wetlands that are 'adjacent' to larger bodies of water. Five justices, however, do not think the federal government should be able to stop landowners from destroying wetlands on their property. To close this gap between what the majority wants and what the statute says, the majority crossed through the word 'adjacent' and replaced it with a new test that's designed to give landowners maximum latitude to fill in, build upon, or otherwise obliterate some of the most valuable ecosystems on earth. [...] If you want to feel really cynical about the Supreme Court—if you want to see how a majority has an infinite number of tools at its disposal to override the words that Congress wrote and instead enshrine a conservative agenda into law—read Alito's opinion in Sackett. Honestly, it's like he's barely even trying. Alito's response to Kavanaugh and Kagan consists of one short paragraph that boils down to four words: Their opinions 'cannot be taken seriously.' Alito relied almost entirely on policy arguments, peppering them with legalese to create the impression of an actual legal opinion. It doesn't work, but who cares? The court has anointed itself the final arbiter of every controversy in the land, and if it thinks the Clean Water Act goes too far, then, well, it's the court's sacred duty to rewrite it. As Kagan put it ruefully: 'That is not how I think our government should work,' because 'it is not how the Constitution thinks our government should work.' Sadly, this is how our Supreme Court now works."

"What the Supreme Court Does Matters More Than What It Says: It's impossible to tell the story of the Supreme Court's voting rights cases without mentioning that John Roberts is opposed to voting rights. [...] This is the basic, quick-and-dirty outline you're likely to read in any coverage of Milligan. But to tell the full story, I think, you have to go back in time—to the early days of the Reagan administration, when a rising conservative legal movement star by the name of John Roberts took a job in the new president's Department of Justice. One especially important part of Roberts's portfolio was advocating for narrow interpretations of the Voting Rights Act: Violations of Section 2 of that law, he wrote, should not be 'too easy to prove, since they provide a basis for the most intrusive interference imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes.' Colleagues remembered him as a 'zealot' who harbored 'fundamental suspicions' about the VRA's utility."

Slowly, slowly, they're starting to admit that what drove the price-inflation was greed. "These companies cynically used global crises to juice profits — and brought us inflation: Throughout all the debate in the last year over what has caused higher prices and how to remedy them, one term hasn't received the attention it deserves, given how well it explains the trend: 'Greedflation.' The term defines as what happens when businesses raise prices higher and faster than is needed to cover increases in their costs. We've reported before that soaring corporate profits have contributed more to inflation than the Federal Reserve Board's preferred targets, wages and consumer demand. Two recent papers, however, measure their impact and identify some of the leading culprits by name."

"Bombshell Report Exposes Key Argument Against Student Debt Relief as 'Categorically False' [...] With debt relief for tens of millions of people hanging in the balance, the GOP state officials who brought the case told Supreme Court justices in late February that they have legal standing to challenge the Biden administration's student debt cancellation plan because if it took effect, it would "cut MOHELA's operating revenue by 40%." MOHELA is Missouri's state-created higher education loan authority, and the supposed financial harms it would suffer under the student debt cancellation plan are critical to the right-wing officials' case. If the Republican plaintiffs can't prove that MOHELA—which is not itself a plaintiff in Biden v. Nebraska—would suffer concrete harm from student debt cancellation, their case falls apart. According to the new report by the Roosevelt Institute and the Debt Collective, not only would MOHELA not be harmed by the Biden administration's student debt relief plan—it would actually see its direct loan revenue rise if the plan is enacted."

Even the conservative Brookings Institute has been saying for over a year that Congress should abolish the debt limit:
"I would like to make three points today.
1. The debt ceiling does not serve any useful purpose. It has not imposed any fiscal discipline on Congress.
2. We don't know what would happen to interest rates and the standing of the U.S. if Congress someday failed to raise the debt ceiling, but we do know the effects would be negative. This is not a risk we should take.
3. Our country faces a lot of long-term economic challenges— high levels of inequality and limited economic mobility, slow productivity growth, climate change, high health care costs, and an unsustainable trajectory for the federal debt. We should address those directly. Bickering over the debt ceiling is a waste of time and energy, creates unnecessary uncertainty, threatens the benefits of issuing the world's safest asset and undermines public confidence in our political institutions."

A note, for comparison: The only other country in the world that has a debt ceiling is Denmark, a nation of six million people with a national debt in 2022 of around 323 billion Danish Kroner. Their debt ceiling is DKK 2 trillion, so reaching the debt ceiling is extremely unlikely any time soon. Unlike America, they have not set a debt ceiling they might — and will — bump up against within the fiscal year. The rest of the countries don't even bother having a debt ceiling because why on earth would you do that?

The trouble with minting the coin is not that it's a "gimmick", but that it would work. "Why Minting the Coin Is A Threat To The Established Order [...] Minting platinum coins with a face value of $1 trillion and depositing them with the Federal Reserve is Constitutional and solves the problem. But it brings up questions that shake the foundations of neoliberalism. If we can 'mint coins' to pay bondholders, why can't we mint coins to do things that people want and need? Instead of just relying on private capital (the rich) to make investment decisions and get things done in our economy? So Biden can do the right thing and just … pay our bills. But then the neoliberal order breaks down. If We (through Congress) can decide to … you name it, then why are we depending on 'the investor class' (capital) and 'market solutions' etc to decide where to invest, allocate resources, do the planning and everything else?"

Atrios wonders why the media talks like DeSantis is the most important governor in America when we have many more impressive governors - and states. He links to Ryan Cooper's article about Tim Walz and Minnesota, who do things like this: "Probably the most significant law passed during the session was a giant expansion of labor rights. As Max Nesterak explains at Minnesota Reformer, the measure mandates paid sick days for nearly all workers, which will accrue at the rate of one hour per 30 hours worked up to a maximum of 48 hours; forbids noncompete agreements in labor contracts; establishes a sectoral bargaining system for nursing homes; allows teachers to negotiate class sizes; and bans 'captive audience' meetings where employers force their workers to listen to anti-union propaganda. It also sets up new protections for meatpackers, construction workers, and Amazon employees. And a separate bill passed on Sunday guarantees a minimum wage for Uber and Lyft drivers." (Oh, but wait, he bottled on one of them: "Minnesota governor vetos gig worker bill following warning from Uber.")

When a Minneapolis county took a little old lady's home to pay off a $2,300 tax bill she couldn't pay, they sold the place but did not return the profit to her. So she went to the Supreme Court, and she won. That's good, but I'm bringing it up because the same people who defend "states rights" have been using the seizure of her condo and theft of the full value of it to "government", by which they mean federal government. They've been treating it as indistinguishable from federal income taxes and any other federal "overreach". They are also the same people who say they want to decentralize power because the federal government is so corrupt and local governments are more answerable (they are not, they are more like local fiefdoms). But here we have a classic example of a local government acting dishonorably and an arm of the federal government being able to undo the injustice.

Ryan Grim alerts us that The criminal case against Henry Kissinger just managed to get stronger somehow, with the arrival of Nick Turse's "Blood On His Hands: Survivors of Kissinger's Secret War in Cambodia Reveal Unreported Mass Killings [...] The U.S. carpet bombing of Cambodia between 1969 and 1973 has been well documented, but its architect, former national security adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who will turn 100 on Saturday, bears responsibility for more violence than has been previously reported. An investigation by The Intercept provides evidence of previously unreported attacks that killed or wounded hundreds of Cambodian civilians during Kissinger's tenure in the White House. When questioned about his culpability for these deaths, Kissinger responded with sarcasm and refused to provide answers."

If you want to know what's happening with Ken Paxton, thank Christopher Hooks for coming closer than I've seen in a long time to the Molly Ivins treatment. "The Texas Legislature Finally Comes for Ken Paxton: The Texas attorney general has spent nearly eight years—and won two elections—under indictment. So why a vote to impeach now? At the start of this week, the Texas Legislature was sliding toward the conclusion of yet another underwhelming, but basically normal, session. Lawmakers had wasted a lot of time and effort, and soon they would go home. But the calm was illusory. By the end of the week, everything was in flames: blood was sloshing down the Capitol's marble halls like the building was the Overlook Hotel. Attorney General Ken Paxton called House Speaker Dade Phelan a drunk, urging him to resign and 'get the help he needs'; later that afternoon, a House committee announced it had been investigating Paxton for months. The Texas House met Saturday, and after about four hours of debate, voted to impeach Paxton. To paraphrase Mao: everything under the dome is in chaos; the situation is excellent. There's been a lot of news coverage of the events of the last week. But this being Texas, it's all underlaid by decades of lore, animosities, and seemingly unaccountable behavior. So if you're trying to get in on the fun, here's a primer."

"American Capitalism Has Produced Its Most Remarkable Innovation Yet: Breadlines: Soviet Russia's food shortages were frequently held up as proof of the Communist system's failure to provide for its citizens. But here in hyper-capitalist America, tens of millions of people are going hungry. [...] The breadline has long been a potent symbol, but it's also one that, for mainstream media and political institutions, can only manifest beyond America's borders. When they happen in other countries, food shortages are framed as evidence of precapitalist backwardness. The American system, by contrast, is one of such relentless dynamism and efficiency that, while individual people might experience problems or hardships — hunger, poverty, unemployment — they are precluded from being an indictment of the model itself."

RIP: "Tina Turner: legendary rock'n'roll singer dies aged 83: Tina Turner, the pioneering rock'n'roll star who became a pop behemoth in the 1980s, has died aged age of 83 after a long illness. She had suffered ill health in recent years, being diagnosed with intestinal cancer in 2016 and having a kidney transplant in 2017. Turner affirmed and amplified Black women's formative stake in rock'n'roll, defining that era of music to the extent that Mick Jagger admitted to taking inspiration from her high-kicking, energetic live performances for his stage persona. " Turner's biggest UK hit didn't get much play in the US, with the result that Phil Spector took out a full-page ad in Billboard thanking the UK for buying "River Deep, Mountain High", which he considered his masterwork. Nevertheless, Turner's light shone in the US as well, and she became the first female performer and the first black performer to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Dahlia Lithwick, "Imagine if the Press Covered the Supreme Court Like Congress: You can't, can you? You can write that the Supreme Court is delegitimizing itself only so many times before you've made yourself ridiculous. If the high court is not in fact behaving in a fashion that makes its decisions respected, the real question is: Why are we all zealously watching and reporting on its decisions as though they are immutable legal truths? Why are we scientifically analyzing every case that comes down as if it holds value? The obvious answer is that these decisions have real consequences—something the past year has shown us far too graphically. But if the Supreme Court is no longer functioning as a real 'court,' why are we mostly still treating its output as if it were simply the 'law'? In some sense, the answer is that the Supreme Court's power and prominence is mediated by the journalists that report on the institution, and we as journalists rely on the court for legitimacy and prominence in return. Someone has to translate legalese to the public. But the way journalists report on the institution—mostly by explaining the 'law'—has set incredibly circumscribed boundaries around how the court's political activities are viewed. The Supreme Court press corps has been largely institutionalized to treat anything the court produces as the law, and to push everything else—matters of judicial conduct, how justices are chosen and seated, ethical lapses—off to be handled by the political press. That ephemera is commentary; the cases remain the real story. [...] It was, at the time, a stinging rebuke to read Margolick conclude that 'no other reporters are as passive as Supreme Court reporters.' Whether the problem was passivity or just a very narrow definition of the job is one thing. But he was emphatically correct to suggest that the long-standing tradition of covering the cases rather than the justices meant that, with few exceptions, there have not been a lot of folks in the SCOTUS press corps on the Clarence/Ginni Thomas beat; almost nobody on the Dobbs-leak beat; and, aside from routinely reporting the fact of plummeting polling numbers, few court insiders on the 'legitimacy' beat. With the notable exception of Politico's Josh Gerstein, who co-reported the Dobbs leak last year, virtually all the scoops about Clarence Thomas' ethical breaches, Leonard Leo's golden spigot, the 'rich donor to Supreme Court Historical Society' pipeline, Ginni Thomas' election disruption efforts, and the catastrophic leak investigation all came from enterprising investigative reporters, political reporters, and 'outsiders' at Politico, ProPublica, and the New York Times. The court's shadow-docket beat was largely invented by legal academics. It speaks volumes about the way the court has been covered that only in the past year have some legacy news outlets hung out 'Help Wanted' ads seeking reporters to cover the court as though it's an actual branch of government and not the oracle at Delphi."

"Economists Hate Rent Control. Here's Why They're Wrong: Half of Americans, namely homeowners, already have rent control. It's time to expand it to everyone. [...] There's just one problem: This neoliberal conventional wisdom is wrong. As recent empirical work has shown, the neoclassical account's core assumptions—one, that rent control restricts the supply of new housing; and two, that it misallocates existing housing, thereby causing an irrecoverable collective loss—fail to hold when it comes to the real world."

"US to give away free lighthouses as GPS makes them unnecessary: Program aims to preserve the properties, most of which are more than a century old, to anyone willing to preserve them."

The Conspiracy Chart —I had no idea there was a theory that Stevie Wonder is not blind.

A few cool pix of Sun halos, arcs and upside-down rainbows seen across England

The Ike & Tina Turner Revue, "River Deep Mountain High", 1969

You can't jump a jet plane like you can a freight train

This photo of the aurora in Suomi, Finland is from Juuso Hamalainen. (There are some other pretty auroras and other things in his gallery.)

Just making a note that no one is more responsible for the disaster we have now than these people, none of whom were baby-boomers: Lewis Powell b.1907, Ronald Reagan b.1911, Milton Friedman b.1912, Margaret Thatcher b.1925, Paul Ryan b.1970, and a passel of Gen Xers.

"Sam Alito Says Criticism of Supreme Court Is 'Unfair': 'Practically Nobody Is Defending Us': Justice Samuel Alito would like everyone to know that in the wake of the Supreme Court revoking 50 years of abortion rights and then being plagued by corruption scandal after corruption scandal, our criticism of him and his institution is very much hurting his feelings. [...] And as story after story come out about just how corrupt, unethical, and frankly, bought the people are who are deciding things like what we can do with our bodies and who gets voting rights in this country, Alito is complaining that they are the victims in all this, because someone leaked his draft opinion in Dobbs a month early and people protested. [...] Nevermind that Alito himself was reportedly the one who leaked the Hobby Lobby birth control decision to donors in 2014, before calling the leak a 'grave betrayal' and blaming it on some 'angry left-wing law clerk.' The call, sir, appears to be coming from inside the house. And now, amid all this, Alito and Republicans insist that it's 'the Left' that trying to 'de-legitimize' the Supreme Court" He's not just a whiner, he is like OJ Simpson talking about finding the guy who really did it.

"US Supreme Court Puts Chevron Doctrine 'Squarely In the Crosshairs': One legal expert said that overturning the nearly 40-year precedent 'would lead to far more judicial power grabs. The U.S. Supreme Court said Monday it will hear a challenge to a nearly 40-year administrative law precedent under which judges defer to federal agencies' interpretation of ambiguous statutes—a case that legal experts warn could result in judicial power grabs and the gutting of environmental and other regulations. The Supreme Court said it will take up Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo—a case in which fishing companies are seeking to strike down the Chevron doctrine, named after the landmark 1984 Chevron USA v. Natural Resources Defense Council ruling that conservatives have long sought to overturn. The case is one of the most cited precedents in administrative law. The Chevron doctrine involves a two-step process in which a court first determines whether Congress expressed its intent in legislation, and if so, whether or not that intent is ambiguous."

Democrats appear to have been angry that The Lever reported this, so though I was tempted to say, "They're not even hiding it, now," it appears they thought they were hiding it and that no one would catch them. "Pelosi Gets Hospital Lobbyists' Award After Blocking Reforms: The American Hospital Association feted the former House speaker for 'advancing health care' following her years-long effort to obstruct Medicare for All. A top lobbying group for hospitals on Monday gave Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) an award for 'her incredible efforts in advancing health care,' after the former House Speaker spent the past four years fulfilling the industry's top legislative priority: blocking consideration of Medicare for All or any other major reforms to the insurance-based health care system. [...] While The Lever was blocked from attending AHA's awards ceremony, the conference featured several prominent representatives of corporate media."

"Farewell Transmission: Texas' plan to fix its power grid is a disaster. Ever since brutal winter storms blacked out much of Texas and killed hundreds of residents in February 2021, the state's government has constantly talked a big game about bolstering its grid and shielding Texans from future disasters. There is shockingly little to show for it. On April 6, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick announced that the Texas Senate, with 'a strong bipartisan majority,' had passed a 'power grid reform package' of bills purportedly intended to 'make sure that Texans have reliable power under any circumstance.' Featuring nine pieces of legislation and a joint resolution, the package appears impressive at a glance; there are new rules governing energy costs, power-transmission incentives, and protection against grid attacks. State senators from both parties are happy to declare that the new laws—now awaiting final amendment and approval in the Texas House of Representatives—will beef up the state's electricity markets and ensure reliability for consumers, a talking point echoed in media coverage. Yet a keener analysis of the Senate bills reveals that they hardly do anything to keep the grid running—and, in their current form, would actually make Texans' power woes even worse. Should they pass, the result wouldn't just be an ill-equipped Texas grid, but an even weaker electrical system than the one that failed two years ago."

When the union at The New York Times asks for better options, "Dowd's Newsroom Nostalgia Is Management Propaganda: New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd (4/29/23) has painted a picture of the newsroom that time forgot. Her remembrance of a frenetic, vibrant newsroom where sin united professionals, and the cubs learned from the veterans on the beat, matches the great depictions of newsrooms like The Wire's Baltimore Sun or the New York Post in Pete Hamill's A Drinking Life." I worked in that Baltimore Sun newsroom, and it's been gone for a long time. It changed a lot when A.S. Bell sold it to Tribune Newspapers, a very different animal from the old newspapers of yore. For that matter, so has commuting, and I don't blame anyone who wants to avoid it. (Not that it was great back in the day when I had to drive an hour to get to work in evening rush hour and then back again at 1:00 in the morning, but today city traffic is a lot worse than it once was.) Rents inside big cities make it hard to imagine cub reporters finding a place to live close to The New York Times.

Back in the first days of May, The American Prospect was saying, "How to Solve the Debt Ceiling Standoff? Sue Janet Yellen: A bondholder could simply allege that America failing to pay off its debts is unconstitutional. There's a good argument for that." And lo and behold, "The National Association of Government Employees says the debt limit is unconstitutional and that it would furlough federal workers [...] The situation is fundamentally unconstitutional, the lawsuit argues, because it gives the president 'the unchecked discretion to cancel or curtail the operations of government approved by Congress without the approval of Congress.'" But this is all Barack Obama's fault.

"Here's The Real Goal Of Supreme Court Corruption: The prospect of luxury gifts and outside cash is designed to halt the historical trend of GOP appointees becoming more liberal. Amid all the revelations of corruption at the Supreme Court, one glib social-media defense of the conservative justices has been about ideology. As the (ridiculous) argument goes, these scandals aren't actually scandals because the gifts and cash that flowed from right-wing billionaires and conservative activist Leonard Leo's dark money network don't actually influence the justices. Why? Because the justices were already conservative and were always going to vote the way they voted on cases of interest to their paymasters. But that analysis misses how corruption works on a systemic level. As the Founders noted, judges are given lifetime appointments for the explicit purpose of preserving an 'independent spirit' that allows them to change their views without fear of consequences. And in fact, data suggests that in the past, many conservative justices have become more liberal as they age. In light of that, the money and gifts flowing to conservative justices can be seen not merely as cheap influence-peddling schemes to secure specific rulings in individual cases. It can also be seen as a grand plan to deter the ideological freedom that lifetime appointments afford. [...] From Earl Warren to William Brennan to John Paul Stevens to David Souter, the Republican Supreme Court appointees who ended up becoming liberals haunt the psyche of the right's judicial activists. It is this dynamic that conservative puppet masters most want to prevent, because it has not been an anomaly. In 2015, FiveThirtyEight parsed the data and quantified a big trend in its headline: 'Supreme Court Justices Get More Liberal As They Get Older.'" There's even a handy chart. For that matter, it turns out Clarance Thomas even reversed himself on the Chevron doctrine after his wife got some money from promoters of his new "opinion".

"A Strangler in a Strange Land: Daniel Penny killed Jordan Neely with his bare hands on video, but every institution in New York seems to be on Penny's side. Why? [...] My unscientific sense, though, is that a worryingly large part of the general population—not even corrupt or prejudiced officials, but civilians who hold no office or public authority—feels emboldened by the way real, credentialed, powerful authority has begun to ostentatiously defer to murderers. Institutions, both the press and the government, are always more plastic than we think they are; they will bend so that they may countenance every kind of evil so long as they can do so in a way that reinforces their positions. Increasingly, these institutions, from the Times to the Journal to New York City's elected officials, have become comfortable holding up callous, public murder—of leftist protesters, of homeless people, of prisoners of war—as excusable, not just on the basis of unfortunate extenuating circumstances, but in the name of a kind of hateful reverse morality. Personally, I find myself too often tempted to meet this kind of crazed violence with equally passionate resistance; to go out looking for the fight that is constantly being threatened. But that's not what I've been told to do by a figure no less central to my religious practice as a Christian than Christ. The job is not to administer the beatings, it's to tend to the beaten."

"With Malice Aforethought [...] But what has been deeply disturbing is the public reaction to Neely's death. What people are essentially saying is 'this man's life was worthless' and, as a result of his criminal record, 'he had it coming.' If this was murder, and I strongly suspect it to be, Neely's past actions and character are immaterial. Penny could not have known of them. Murder is murder. The person does not have to be nice or good or socially useful for it to be murder. The state charges people with murder even when they are not loved, forgotten, dangerous, or hated. The only reason to parade Neely's past in public is justify, excuse, of even celebrate his killing. And plenty of people seem to want to do just that."

"Our Media Is Fueling Vigilantism Against Homeless People: Years of dehumanization and associating the unhoused with criminality help create conditions of violence. [...] In a society with such stark inequality, and so many scrambling to keep their heads above water, dehumanizing those at the very bottom of our social ladder—who couldn't 'make it'—isn't just inevitable, it's necessary. The specter of homelessness and destitution is how the bottom rung of wage labor is disciplined and kept in line. A moral ecosystem emerges to support this necessity, one based on the manifestly goofy idea that we currently live in a plentiful welfare state and everyone who is currently unhoused is so because of a moral failing, or a lack of sufficient arresting and caging, rather than a deficit of social welfare and care. Obviously, they must all want to be poor, or are not well enough to get better and are better left dying on the streets, or being thrown into a cage and given up on. Cruelty is baked into our puritan culture, reinforced daily by our media's love of everything from Perseverance Porn to the aforementioned Welfare Queen tropes. This all creates a media environment where people increasingly see unhoused people having a mental health episode as deserving of a summary death sentence."

"16 Crucial Words That Went Missing From a Landmark Civil Rights Law: The phrase, seemingly deleted in error, undermines the basis for qualified immunity, the legal shield that protects police officers from suits for misconduct. [...] The original version of the law, the one that was enacted in 1871, said state officials who subject 'any person within the jurisdiction of the United States to the deprivation of any rights, privileges or immunities secured by the Constitution of the United States, shall, any such law, statute, ordinance, regulation, custom or usage of the state to the contrary notwithstanding, be liable to the party injured in any action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress.' The words in italics, for reasons lost to history, were omitted from the first compilation of federal laws in 1874, which was prepared by a government official called 'the reviser of the federal statutes.'" The law review article this is based on is "Qualified Immunity's Flawed Foundation."

"Washington Post is furtively sitting on a secret trove of Discord leaks [...] News organizations who find themselves in legal possession of top secrets, as the Post currently has, have the right and the obligation to publish news that has been hidden from the public but is in the public interest, especially when it exposes government misconduct. But when a news organization has exclusive access to secrets that are effectively still secret, they also have an obligation to publish them judiciously and maintain the secrecy of those that deserve it. Several recent articles in the Post have arguably been published simply because they could, rather than out of the public interest, raising journalistic concerns. And some intelligence officials are growing increasingly queasy about the Post's apparent indifference to releasing information that has never been seen in the wild and could very well impact intelligence collection going forward."

"Court Suppresses Breathalyzer Results In 27,000 DUI Cases After Years Of Being Jerked Around By The State Crime Lab: For more than a decade, the Massachusetts State Police crime lab hid information from judges, prosecutors, and criminal defendants. This is nothing unusual for this state and its crime labs. The words 'Massachusetts,' 'crime lab,' and 'scandal' have gone hand-in-hand for years. [Heads up, I will be using 'state' to refer to the Massachusetts government in this post. I'm fully aware it refers to itself as a 'commonwealth,' but come on: the state's name is already too much typing.] Drug labs staffed by technicians willing to either falsify results (rather than actually perform tests) or turn seized drugs into their own personal use stash have resulted in courts tossing nearly 30,000 drug convictions. Losing this many (unearned) wins must have hurt, but apparently state law enforcement has a taste for pain."

The Onion is absolutely arch: "Democrats Demand Recount After Insisting They Lost Race For Mayor Of Jacksonville"

This might be too hard to read. "The short life of Baby Milo: Nobody expected Baby Milo to live for long. He arrived in the world with no kidneys, underdeveloped lungs and a life expectancy of between 20 minutes and a couple of hours. He lived for 99 minutes."

RIP: "Gordon Lightfoot, folk music legend," at 84. "Often considered one of the greatest Canadian songwriters of all time, Lightfoot's contribution to the folk music revolution of the 1960s is reflected by the artists that recorded his songs. Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, and The Replacements have all recorded covers of his music. Best known for the hits 'Carefree Highway,' 'If You Could Read My Mind,' and the no. 1 hit 'Sundown,' Lightfoot continued touring and releasing albums for the next 60 years." None of those are the songs I first learned, but we all had "For Lovin' Me" and a few others in our repertoires. Everybody knew Lightfoot and everybody played Lightfoot. You still hear people doing "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald", but I never played that one.

A must-read that covers a lot of ground succinctly, Cory Doctorow being absolutely clear about how when they stopped doing it our way and started doing it their way, they screwed everything up: "David Roth memorably described the job of neoliberal economists as finding "new ways to say 'actually, your boss is right.'" Not just your boss: for decades, economists have formed a bulwark against seemingly obvious responses to the most painful parts of our daily lives, from wages to education to health to shelter [...] These answers make sense to everyone except neoliberal economists and people in their thrall. Rather than doing the thing we want, neoliberal economists insist we must unleash "markets" to solve the problems, by "creating incentives." That may sound like a recipe for a small state, but in practice, "creating incentives" often involves building huge bureaucracies to "keep the incentives aligned" (that is, to prevent private firms from ripping off public agencies)."

"Tucker Carlson Isn't an Anti-Imperialist — He's a Rabid China Hawk: Tucker Carlson can't be credited for dissenting against US war fever when he spent years on his Fox News show stoking major tensions with China."

Teen Vogue is much more reliable on "criminal justice" than The New York Times. For example, instead of interviewing cops and prosecutors, they interviewed Alex Karakatsanis on Copaganda, Punishment, and Policing in the United States: "This is one thing [authorities do very well. They're really only talking about certain violations of the law that are committed by poor people. What they're not talking about are the many other crimes that are committed every single day, whether it's polluting water, whether it's air pollution, which kills [more than] 100,000 people in the US every single year… When they talk about property crime, they're not talking about wage theft, which costs $50 billion a year. When companies steal money from their workers it's not even dealt with in the criminal system. It's not talked about as a crime, for the most part. They're not talking about tax evasion, which costs [the US] about a trillion dollars a year. These are the crimes that are committed by wealthy people, people with power… And then I think there's an even more basic point, which is that people who have power and influence in our society get to define what a crime is… You can make it a crime to have an abortion. You can make it a crime to have an abortion pill sent to you in the mail… The idea of violent crime is very different from the idea of harm. So, those other types of harm in our society, whether it's sexual harassment at work or racial discrimination in home lending, [are often not actually] criminalized by the law."

"The Government Provided Child Care in World War II. We Need It Again. Women worked then, women work now. It's time for national child care—permanently. [...] Enter one of my heroes: Congresswoman Mary T. Norton of New Jersey, known as 'Battling Mary.' Battling Mary was a trailblazer, a woman of many firsts, who led the way on child care during the war. She was the first woman elected as a Democrat to serve in the House of Representatives. She became the first Democratic woman to chair a House legislative committee when she was elected chairperson of the Committee on the District of Columbia, serving as the city's de facto mayor. By the end of her career, she had chaired four House committees. Norton spent her career fighting on behalf of working families and succeeded in getting major New Deal labor legislation passed. Her efforts as Labor Committee chair helped ensure the passage of 1938's Fair Labor Standards Act, which created the federal minimum wage, the 40-hour workweek, and strict standards for child labor. And during the war, Norton created a national child care system that transformed women's participation in the workplace."

"Vivek Ramaswarmy Wants To Take Away The Vote From Americans Under 25… But He'd Still Let Women Vote: Ramaswampy Is Running For Vice President."

Right-wingers assure me that Portland burned down to the ground in riots and is nothing but a hollowed-out shell full of violence. People who live there say otherwise.

I think I may have posted "Why are British place names so hard to pronounce?" before, but just in case, I'm posting it anyway.

RJ Eskow has been ill, so he learned to make a video in bed. And I love it! "Downtown Boys: I recorded this song in 1977."

Gordon Lightfoot, "The Early Morning Rain"