Francis Scott Key Bridge Disaster

Some interesting tidbits.

There was quite a bit of commentary in Tuesday’s Forum about the awful news that a barge crashed into the Francis Scott Key bridge near Baltimore, taking out some key infrastructure for the foreseeable future. Given how little know about commercial shipping, bridge architecture, and maritime search and rescue, I saw no real need to weigh in. Indeed, it’s not even clear which of the many categories we’ve created over the last two decades-plus that I’d file it under.

Still, side from the tragic loss of life and the massive disruption that this will cause, a few things seem noteworthy.

First and foremost, the sheer readiness of people to spin off wild conspiracy theories and racist nonsense. Axios (“Misinformation runs rampant after Baltimore bridge collapse“):

Why it matters: Rampant misinformation during mass casualty events is not a new phenomenon. But under Elon Musk’s ownership of X, the platform has changed from an essential real-time news source to a breeding ground for conspiracy theories.

Driving the news: Federal and state authorities said Tuesday there’s no evidence that terrorism played a role in the collapse of the 1.6 mile-long bridge, which was struck by a container ship at around 1:30am ET Tuesday.

[…]

What they’re saying: “Everything so far indicates that this was a terrible accident. At this time, we have no other indication, no other reason to believe there’s any intentional act here,” President Biden said in remarks Tuesday afternoon.

Zoom in: Within hours, X accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers were promoting baseless claims that the Dali had been the victim of a cyber-attack or had intentionally rammed into the bridge.

The terrorism speculation was at least understandable given the constant stream of threats from the usual suspects, especially in the wake of US support for Israel in the brutal war in Gaza. The DEI and Israel theories are, at best, nutty and, at worst, pure racist bullshit.

In other political news, President Biden argues that federal taxpayers should be on the hook for cleaup and rebuild. NBC:

President Joe Biden said he wants the federal government to pay to rebuild the Baltimore bridge that collapsed early Tuesday after a large cargo ship sailed straight into one of the bridge’s support pillars.

“We’re going to work with our partners in Congress to make sure the state gets the support it needs. It’s my intention that the federal government will pay for the entire cost of reconstructing that bridge, and I expect the Congress to support my effort,” Biden said in brief remarks from the White House before he left for North Carolina.

Biden said that it will take “some time” to rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which transverses the Patapsco River, but that he told Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, that he’s directing the federal government to “move heaven and earth” to reopen the port and rebuild the bridge “as soon as humanly possible.”

[…]

The Port of Baltimore, one of the largest shipping hubs in the U.S., is the top port in America for both imports and exports of automobiles and light trucks, Biden said, noting that 850,000 vehicles are moved through the port annually.

“We’re going to get it up and running again as soon as possible. … Fifteen thousand jobs depend on that port, and we’re going to do everything we can to protect those jobs and help those workers,” he said.

He also said that the bridge is “critical for travel,” not just for Baltimore but for the Northeast Corridor, saying more than 30,000 vehicles cross it daily.

I think this is the right instinct, although with some significant caveats. Right in that the Federal government has the ability to marshall resources quickly and that repair is vital from a national, not merely a local perspective.

On the other hand, the bridge is a Maryland state highway, and one that collects tolls, no less. It seems reasonable that they should pay part of the cost of this revenue producer. That’s especially true if a private contractor maintains the roads in exchange for a cut of the fees. (I haven’t the foggiest whether they are; it is true for many of the toll roads in Northern Virginia.)

Moreover, this calamity was caused by a private company. While the captain is rightly being lauded for quickly informing authorities, allowing traffic to be stopped and thus likely saving countless lives, if the investigation shows that there was negligence on the part of the company, then they (and, by extension, their insurance company) certainly ought to be held liable to the extent possible. Notably, this is not the first time this particular vessel has had an accident. USA Today:

This was not the Dali’s first harsh encounter with a pier, and that time its leadership was determined to be at fault. It’s too early to know what caused Tuesday’s accident.

The cargo ship that struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge collided with a shipping dock in Belgium in 2016. That incident occurred as the Dali was leaving port in Antwerp and hit a loading pier made of stone, causing damage to the ship’s stern, according to the VesselFinder.com website, which tracks ships across the world. An investigation determined a mistake made by the ship’s master and pilot was to blame.

My purely amateur speculation at this point is that the captain the Key Bridge incident did an exemplary job under the circumstances but that the ship was not maintained to standard. A Reuters report provides some evidence for that:

An inspection in 2023 carried out in Chile found “propulsion and auxiliary machinery” deficiencies, according to data on the Equasis public website, which provides information on ships.
But Singapore’s Maritime and Port Authority said in a statement that the vessel passed two separate foreign-port inspections in June and September 2023. It said a faulty fuel pressure gauge was rectified before the vessel departed the port following its June 2023 inspection.

If so, the US taxpayers shouldn’t be on the hook for all the damages.

Also interesting. According to an AP report, at least four of the six workers killed from the bridge collapse are from Latin America:

The six missing people were part of a construction crew filling potholes on the bridge, said Paul Wiedefeld, the state’s transportation secretary.

Guatemala’s consulate in Maryland said in a statement that two of the missing were citizens of the Central American nation. It did not provide their names but said consular officials were in contact with authorities and assisting the families.

Honduras’ Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Antonio García told The Associated Press that a Honduran citizen, Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandoval, was missing. He said he had been in contact with Suazo’s family.

And the Washington Consulate of Mexico said via the social media platform X that citizens of that nation were also among the missing. It did not say how many.

Since I haven’t seen this shouted from the rooftops, I presume they were all here legally. Still, it would give the impression that the crew was mostly, if not entirely, foreign born.

Finally, this incident should renew focus on our failing infrastructure. We’ve spent decades talking about the state of our bridges but really haven’t invested much money into fixing the problem. Presumably, this particular bridge was in good shape. But, while it’s apparently nearly impossible to design one that can withstand a full-on collision from a massive vessel, there are mitigation measures (“dolphins” and other barriers) that could have been in place that weren’t.

Relatedly, as at least one commenter noted in the Open Forum discussions, it’s dangerous to have a whole region of the country so dependent on a single bridge. We really need to build in more redundancy.

FILED UNDER: US Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Ronna McDaniel Likely to Sue NBC

There will be lawyers.

POLITICO Playbook (“Ronna strikes back“):

The ramifications of NBC’s decision yesterday to part ways with contributor RONNA McDANIEL just two days after her paid network debut on “Meet the Press” are just starting to shake out. But they could be expensive.

McDaniel expects to be fully paid out for her contract, two years at $300,000 annually, since she did not breach its terms, we’re told — meaning that her single, not-quite-20-minute interview Sunday could cost the Peacock more than $30,000 per minute, or $500 per second.

That’s just one tidbit we’ve picked up from McDaniel’s side of things following yesterday’s announcement from NBCUniversal News Group Chair CESAR CONDE, and it might be just the beginning of the fallout. McDaniel spoke yesterday with BRYAN FREEDMAN, renowned lawyer to the estranged cable-news stars, to discuss legal options even beyond recouping the dollar value of her original contract.

While no arrangement is final, a person close to McDaniel tells us, Freedman would be an obvious choice: He represented MEGYN KELLY in her own acrimonious parting with NBC, as well as ousted anchors CHRIS CUOMO, DON LEMON and TUCKER CARLSON in disputes with their respective former networks.

McDaniel, we’re told, is exploring potential defamation and hostile work environment torts after MSNBC’s top talent — momentarily her colleagues — took turns Monday blasting her on air. (NBC declined to comment about the $600,000 figure or her potential claims.)

McDaniel was silent yesterday as the fallout from the internal network revolt mounted, and her perspective and role in the deal was largely lost as it unraveled in real time. She and her allies are, unsurprisingly, furious about how everything went down, believing she was misled about how much she’d be welcomed into the fold by executives who had aggressively recruited her. They blame the same NBC brass for botching the situation by not having her meet with top network talent ahead of the rollout, then caving to internal pressure from liberal-leaning hosts.

Most of all, they’re furious that the network did little to push back on a multi-day campaign against their new hire on their own airwaves. Host after host cast McDaniel as an enemy of democracy for, among other things, participating in a November 2020 phone call where then-President DONALD TRUMP sought to convince Michigan GOP elections officials not to certify election results.

“The part that pisses me off most about this is not necessarily that they folded; it’s [that] they allowed their talent to drag Ronna through the mud and make it seem like they were innocent bystanders,” the person close to McDaniel said.

I’m not privy to the terms of McDaniel’s contract and have little expertise in employment law in any case. While there are ongoing efforts to change it, New York (where I presume the contract is based) is an at-will state, meaning employment can usually be terminated for any reason that doesn’t defy public policy. But, since she wasn’t fired for cause, NBC would presumably owe her the contracted amount.

The main example I’m familiar with on these matters is that of athletic coaches, both at the college and pro levels. Most of those contracts require fired coaches to be paid either the full amount due or some specified lower amount. Most also require them to mitigate by finding suitable employment in the field with some sort of offset. I would guess that something like this is in McDaniel’s contract.

NBC absolutely should have anticipated the reaction to her hiring. I find it astounding that they allowed their talent—particularly non-commentators—to go on their air and trash the hire. It’s just a bad look for the network all around.

That said, I don’t know on what basis McDaniel would have a case for additional damages. She is a known liar, repeatedly claiming that the 2020 election was stolen despite no evidence for that and dozens of court findings and other evidence to the contrary. That various NBC and MSNBC hosts found it outrageous that she was hired on the grounds that it diminished their journalistic reputation is certainly defensible and, indeed, would seem to be protected speech.

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James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Wednesday’s Forum

FILED UNDER: Open Forum
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

Trump’s Massive Truth Social Windfall

He's suddenly a billionaire after all.

· · 28 comments

Yesterday, I stumbled on a Bloomberg report headlined “Trump’s Net Worth Hits $6.5 Billion, Making Him One of World’s 500 Richest People.” It’s paywalled but its teasers were:

Today, other papers are providing more insights.

WSJ (“Truth Social Stock Price Surges on First Day of Trading, Increasing Trump’s Fortune“):

Shares of Donald Trump’s social-media company surged 40% on their first day of trading, boosting the presidential candidate’s fortune. The question is, how soon can he tap his roughly $5.5 billion stake in Truth Social?

That is up to the board of Truth Social’s parent company. The group includes his son, three former members of his administration and the former congressman who took a leading role in defending the former president in his first impeachment trial.

So, pretty quickly, then?

Truth Social’s parent company began trading Tuesday under the ticker DJT, Trump’s initials. Its shares soared after the opening bell, giving it a market value of roughly $9.5 billion. The gobsmacking stock price makes Trump’s approximately 60% stake worth approximately $5.5 billion. Those values will continue swinging with the stock price.

Trading was so intense that Nasdaq temporarily halted trading.

Why people would pay so much for something with no ostensible investment value would be an interesting question were in not for the identity of the chief stakeholder.

The timing couldn’t be better for Trump. On Monday, a judge ruled that Trump can pay $175 million to put his $454 million civil-fraud judgment on hold during his appeal. Trump hadn’t been able to get a bond to cover the whole judgment.

The $175 million is a fraction of Trump’s newfound wealth, but his shares are just out of reach. Typically, people involved in the type of deals that brought Truth Social to the stock market aren’t allowed to sell or borrow against their shares for six months.

The seven-member board would need to grant Trump a waiver if he wished to make such moves before then. That isn’t unheard of, but boards typically wait a month or more before letting a big owner sell. They risk setting off a flood of selling that could cause big losses for independent investors.

But boards tend to be rather more independent than this one.

If the board grants Trump a waiver, company rules will limit how much he can sell. Based on the trading volume of the company taking Truth Social public, Trump could still be allowed to sell at least several hundred million dollars worth of stock over a three-month period.

The seven-member group includes Donald Trump Jr. and three former members of the Trump administration: former U.S. Trade Rep. Robert Lighthizer; Kash Patel, a former White House and Pentagon aide whom Trump late in his term considered naming to top positions at the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and Linda McMahon, former head of the Small Business Administration and co-founder of World Wrestling Entertainment with her husband, Vince.

Devin Nunes, the chief executive of Truth Social and a former congressman who defended Trump on the House Intelligence Committee, is also a director. The head of the shell company taking Trump’s firm public, Eric Swider, and a longtime lawyer named W. Kyle Green round out the group. Swider and Green’s ties to Trump aren’t immediately clear.

Several hundred million dollars could come in handy. And, again, I’d be shocked if this group of toadies stood in the way. And, again, this isn’t exactly an ordinary investment vehicle:

Granting Trump a waiver to sell could be risky for the board because he is by far the largest shareholder and the main reason individual investors have been buying the stock. Any signal that he is selling or likely to sell could dent the share price and fuel concerns about Truth Social’s future.

But this is the world of Donald Trump, where things can be upside down. Trump is getting this huge windfall because his supporters have banded together on social media to push up the stock. Shares of the SPAC that became Truth Social rose 35% on Monday and had surged in advance of the deal closing.

These investors want to help Trump. So rather than dump the stock, they could cheer his sales. By keeping the share price high, they could help Trump even more. The former president could receive tens of millions of additional shares if the stock stays above certain levels in the coming weeks.

Indeed.

Many professional investors say the stock is disconnected from the reality of Truth Social’s business, which posted about $5 million in sales and tens of millions in losses from its 2021 launch to September 2023. That could fuel extreme volatility in the share price in the coming months.

“Anything Trump does tends to get an extremely high level of scrutiny,” Marvin said. “This will be no different.”

You don’t say.

MSNBC’s Ja’han Jones (“Jeff Yass just bought Trump. Here’s what he stands to gain.“) contends it’s more than just a bunch of Trump enthusiasts.

Billionaire investor Jeff Yass is playing his Trump card.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported Friday that the right-wing megadonor and major TikTok investor is a part owner of the company that merged with Donald Trump’s media company, which owns Truth Social, the former president’s struggling social media platform. The head-scratching deal stands to add billions of dollars to Trump’s net worth.

Yass’ name recently started popping up in news reports after Trump denounced legislation in Congress that could ban TikTok unless the social media outlet is sold from its China-based parent company. This was a major reversal of Trump’s previous opposition to TikTok and came after Yass met with Trump in Florida, with the backdrop of the former president’s mounting legal fees only adding to suspicion that Yass essentially could be purchasing a presidential candidate.

Trump claimed afterward that he hadn’t spoken with Yass about TikTok, and Yass is a major backer of efforts to promote school privatization, so I guess it’s possible that the right-wing billionaire didn’t say a thing about one of his most prominent investments. (Yass recently declined a request for comment from NBC News.)

But it certainly looks like Trump is under Yass’ thumb now.

It also looks like TikTok — or at minimum, one of its key investors — has just tried to one-up other social media companies in Big Tech’s ongoing battles over influence in Washington. Two years ago, The Washington Post revealed that Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, had waged a behind-the-scenes pressure campaign that involved trying to get media outlets and lawmakers to scrutinize TikTok more heavily. And although Meta can’t take total credit, that effort does seem to have helped get us to the present-day scenario, with a possible TikTok ban under consideration at the federal level and several other bans enacted at the state level.

With Trump, Yass appears to be employing the oligarchic approach to protecting an investment: transfer heaps of cash to a desperate presidential candidate and hope they do your bidding.

I must admit to have paid little attention to Yass and having been unaware of his role in Truth Social. Here’s what a NYT report (“Big Republican Donor Jeff Yass Owned Shares in Trump Media Merger Partner“) said about it in yesterday’s paper (Section B, Page 4, incidentally):

Jeff Yass, the billionaire Wall Street financier and Republican megadonor who is a major investor in the parent company of TikTok, was also the biggest institutional shareholder of the shell company that recently merged with former President Donald J. Trump’s social media company.

A December regulatory filing showed that Mr. Yass’s trading firm, Susquehanna International Group, owned about 2 percent of Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which merged with Trump Media & Technology Group on Friday. That stake, of about 605,000 shares, was worth about $22 million based on Digital World’s last closing share price.

It’s unclear if Susquehanna still owns those shares, because big investors disclose their holdings to regulators only periodically. But if it did retain its stake, Mr. Yass’s firm would become one of Trump Media’s larger institutional shareholders when it begins trading this week after the merger.

Shares of Digital World have surged about 140 percent this year as the merger with the parent company of Truth Social, Mr. Trump’s social media platform, drew closer and Mr. Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee for president.

So, a company in which Yass has an unspecified stake holds 2% in another company that just merged with Truth Social. That makes Yate’s role much murkier.

Still, the fact remains that Trump is getting a massive influx of cash at a particularly opportune time. Presumably, there are some strings attached.

FILED UNDER: 2024 Election, Economics and Business, US Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Third Parties and Ballot Access for 2024

And back to thoughts on section 3.

· · 6 comments

Via ABC News: Will RFK Jr. and third-party contenders even make the ballot in November?

So far, the Libertarian Party looks likely to appear on at least 37 state ballots…the Greens look to have access in about 21 states…No Labels…in 18 states…. Meanwhile, the conservative Constitution Party has also made 12 state ballots.

[…]

Beyond these party or quasi-party organizations, Kennedy’s campaign has officially made the ballot in one state — Utah — and claims to have qualified in three others, while an allied super PAC claims to have sufficient signatures for Kennedy to make the ballot in four more. For his part, West claims to have made the ballot in four states so far.

The deadlines are largely this summer so they all still have time to qualify.

I would note that while we can certainly continue to debate section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, all of this rather clearly underscores a point I made earlier: states can absolutely keep candidates off the ballot based on state-level procedures. All of the talk by SCOTUS about the national nature of that process was well off the mark in my view.

some states could prove especially difficult to qualify in, whether they’re competitive or not. Perhaps the hardest could be New York, which has increased the electoral support threshold for parties to maintain ballot access from 50,000 votes to 130,000 votes in the last gubernatorial election. Last fall, the Supreme Court refused to hear a legal challenge to the 2020 state law that raised the threshold. As a result, unrecognized parties in New York — like the Libertarians and Greens — will need to meet the same requirements as independent candidates: collect at least 45,000 valid signatures by May 28, with at least 500 from each of half of the state’s congressional districts.

Recognizing the dramatic nature of section 3 and the topic of insurrection (and acknowledging that the decision was 9-0–although with caveats and conflicting dissents), the facts above were in my head when I noted the following from the transcript of oral arguments:

JUSTICE KAGAN: But maybe put most boldly,
25 I think that the question that you have to confront

1 is why a single state should decide who gets to be
2 president of the United States. In other words, you
3 know, this question of whether a former president is
4 disqualified for insurrection to be president again
5 is, you know, just say it, it sounds awfully national
6 to me. So whatever means there are to enforce it
7 would suggest that they have to be federal, national
8 means.
9 Why does — you know, if you weren’t from
10 Colorado and you were from Wisconsin or you were from
11 Michigan and it really — you know, what the Michigan
12 secretary of state did is going to make the
13 difference between, you know, whether Candidate A is
14 elected or Candidate B is elected, I mean, that seems
15 quite extraordinary, doesn’t it?

Well, every election there are candidates denied the right to be on a given ballot, so it just throws Kagan’s logic out the door and is why of the arguments that might be proffered for not allowing Colorado to rule as it did, the notion that “it sounds awfully national to me” flies in the face of pre-existing reality.

Moreover, different states are currently making (and will make) decisions about Candidate A and Candidate B. Or, maybe, more accurately, Candidate E and Candidate F–which is really the issue insofar as we are collectively comfortable with third-party types being second-class candidates, but less so about Rs and Ds whom we see as deserving their privileged positions. Quite frankly, if Colorado had been trying to deny some third-party candidate from being on the ballot based on section 3, I think SCOTUS would have allowed it (and yes, I acknowledge that is rank speculation). But since it would have opened a massive can of worms around the two major parties, they punted.

The fact that elections are administered by the state, and the fact the US Constitution gives the power to regulate the selection of Electors specifically, makes SCOTUS’ logic strained, in my view.

Likewise, I definitely do not think that originalism saves them from their decision. For example, from contemporaneous debate (emphases mine):

Sen. John Henderson (R-Mo.) made clear that this wasn’t just about ex-Confederates, saying, “The language of this section is so framed as to disfranchise from office the leaders of the past rebellion as well as the leaders of any rebellion hereafter to come. It strikes at those who have heretofore held high official position.”

Section 3’s framers and critics in the Senate agreed that it disqualified insurrectionists from office whether they had been convicted of a crime or not.

“The guilt or innocence of the party was not the matter at issue,” Willey said. “We were not trying them for their crimes, but we were providing security for the future peace of the country.”

Henderson concurred: “It is said that these leaders ought not to be condemned unheard, that they should not even be disqualified for official position until their guilt is established in a court of justice. … But when it is only proposed to fix a qualification for office and deny them future distinctions, which would rather make their treason honorable than odious, I do not hesitate to act.”

I will conclude, however by noting that I remain unsurprised by the decision and, moreover (and despite my protestations) I understand the decision to keep Trump on the ballot because of the firestorm that keeping him off would have created and the Court didn’t want to be responsible for that. I just think that the logic they used to reject the claim was rationalization needed to reach the conclusion they wanted, rather than the result of Principled Legal Wisdom.

Although by the same token the reason I still intellectually support the application of section 3 to Trump is because I think he did, in fact, support insurrection and that he is a real danger to the republic should he be elected. Further, I think that section 3 is there is try and project us against such a person regaining power.

I do hope that enough voters have to wisdom to reject him and agree that it is likely better for the nation that he lose (again) at the ballot box than it would be for him to be disqualified. I am just not pleased with the gamble inherent in that pathway (especially given the Electoral College).

FILED UNDER: 2024 Election, Democracy, US Politics, , , , , , , , ,
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

US-Japan Unifying Command Structure

A long overdue strengthening of a key alliance.

· · 8 comments

Reuters (“US eyes change to military command in Japan as China threat looms, sources say“):

U.S. President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will agree next month to tighter military cooperation, including talks on the biggest potential change to Washington’s East Asia command structure in decades, two sources said.

Washington will consider appointing a four-star commander to oversee its forces in Japan as a counterpart to the head of a proposed Japanese Self Defense Forces (SDF) headquarters overseeing all of the country’s military operations, said the sources, who have direct knowledge of the plan.

Biden and Kishida will unveil their plans when they meet on April 10 in Washington, the Financial Times reported.

“We are in discussion about how our planned joint command can strengthen cooperation with the U.S. and South Korea,” Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi said on Monday at a regular media briefing when asked about the reports.

The agenda for the Biden-Kishida summit has not yet been decided, he added.

Kishida wants to establish the joint command headquarters before the end of March 2025. Tokyo has said it has “serious concern” over China’s growing military power and the threat it poses Taiwan, just over 100 km (62 miles) from Japanese territory.

Unlike in neighbouring South Korea, where U.S. and South Korean troops can operate under a unified command under a four-star general, U.S. air, land and sea forces in Japan have a three-star commander and do not have any authority over Japanese troops.

A four-star commander – the highest peacetime rank in any of the U.S. service branches – would match the rank of the Japanese counterpart in the new headquarters. A U.S. officer of that rank might lay the groundwork for a future unified Japanese-U.S. command, experts say.

Some U.S. officials, however, want any new U.S. commander there to be responsible only for joint exercises, training and information sharing with the new SDF headquarters, said one of the sources, both of whom asked not to be identified because they are not authorised to speak to the media.

Japan Times (“U.S. eyes revamped military command in Japan, reports say“) leads with:

Washington and Tokyo are planning to announce an agreement to restructure the U.S. military’s command in Japan when Prime Minister Fumio Kishida visits the White House next month, media reports said Monday, in what would be the biggest upgrade to the security alliance in decades.

The deal would help strengthen operational planning and exercises between the countries, the Financial Times and local media reported Monday, as the allies look to build up their joint response capabilities to what they say is the growing threat from China — especially in the event of a crisis over Taiwan.

and adds:

One model Washington is reportedly considering involves creating a new U.S. military joint task force that would be attached to the U.S. Pacific Fleet, one of the component commands at the Hawaii-based Indo-Pacific Command, the FT reported. Under this scenario, the fleet’s four-star commander would look to spend more time in Japan, and would have a bolstered support structure in the country. Eventually, the task force, which would be composed of different parts of the U.S. military, would shift to Japan.

Tokyo has long asked for a four-star commander to be based in the country, and a simple upgrade of U.S. Forces Japan could also be in the cards.

Kyodo News (“U.S. military to strengthen functions of Japan command headquarters“) leads with:

The U.S. military plans to strengthen the functions of its command headquarters in Japan, as it aims for smoother cooperation with the Asian nation’s Self-Defense Forces in tackling security threats posed by China and North Korea, diplomatic sources said Sunday.

and adds:

Japan is set to establish a joint headquarters to command its ground, maritime and air forces by the end of March 2025. Kishida’s government is aiming to deepen cooperation between the U.S. military and the joint headquarters.

Currently, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, responsible for Japan, has its headquarters in Hawaii and the different time zone and physical distance hampers the efficient interaction of Japanese forces and the U.S. military.

There is concern that if the U.S. military in Japan reinforces its functions along with the SDF, it would be difficult to separate its jurisdiction and authority from that of the Indo-Pacific Command, some analysts said.

Taipei Times (“US eyes change to military command in Japan“) leads with:

The US is contemplating plans to strengthen the functions of the US Forces Japan Headquarters to promote cooperation between the US military and the Japan Self-Defense Forces due to concerns about a potential Taiwan contingency, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported yesterday.

and adds:

As China is stepping up its military coercion in East Asia and there are concerns about the possibility of a Taiwan contingency, some are worried that it would be difficult to make timely responses under the current system, which requires coordination between Tokyo and Hawaii due to the time difference, it said.

The adjustment under discussion aims to expand the authority of the US Forces Japan Headquarters without taking away the command authority of the US Indo-Pacific Commander, it said.

There is a proposal to give the Tokyo headquarters authority to plan joint Japan-US exercises and training, as well as to work with the joint headquarters that is to be launched next year on coordination, information sharing and distribution of materials, it said.

Another possible arrangement is to establish a permanent joint team in Japan to ensure closer coordination between the Japan Self-Defense Forces and US forces in Japan, it said.

This move is long overdue. We’ve had unified commands for Europe and Korea for generations now and it only makes sense to bring the most capable American ally in the region into a similar arrangement.

Granting that I’m relying on English-language sources, the move is welcome in both Japan and Taiwan. While the former has long had an uneasy relationship with US forces stationed there—particularly the large Marine contingent in Okinawa—the assignment of a four-star US commander there signals a stronger alliance and US commitment to their defense.

FILED UNDER: Asia, Military Affairs, National Security, World Politics, , , , , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Tuesday’s Forum

· · 61 comments

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FILED UNDER: Open Forum
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

UN Security Council Demands Immediate Gaza Ceasefire

The United States abstained but did not exercise its veto power.

· · 24 comments

BBC (“UN Security Council passes resolution calling for Gaza ceasefire“):

The UN Security Council has called for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza, after the US did not veto the measure in a shift from its previous position.

It also demanded the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.

It is the first time the council has called for a ceasefire since the war began in October after several failed attempts.

The move by the US signals growing divergence between it and its ally Israel over Israel’s offensive in Gaza.

In an unusually strong rebuke, a statement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the US had “retreated” from its original position which had clearly linked a ceasefire to a hostage release.

It said this harmed efforts to release hostages by giving Hamas hope it could use international pressure on Israel to achieve a ceasefire without freeing the captives.

It also said Mr Netanyahu had decided to cancel meetings between an Israeli delegation and US officials in Washington that were scheduled for this week.

Israel’s defence minister said Israel would not stop the war in Gaza while hostages were still being held there.

Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group which governs Gaza and which triggered the war with an unprecedented attack on Israel on 7 October, welcomed the resolution. It said it was ready “to engage in an immediate prisoner exchange process that leads to the release of prisoners on both sides”.

The group has made any hostage release conditional on the release by Israel of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

I must admit to being baffled by this. The United States has a veto power, yet neither exercised it nor voted in the affirmative. So, we’ve simultaneously allowed the measure to go through and provided no leadership.

So: Now What?

UN Secretary-General António Guterres rightly observed that, having passed, the resolution must be implemented and that failure to do so “would be unforgivable.” But who the hell is going to make Israel comply? It’s damned sure not going to be the United States military. Not only is that politically inconceivable, we surely wouldn’t have taken the feckless step of abstaining if we were.

The other four Permanent Members voted in the affirmative and are issuing various statements. But I guarantee you that they’re not going to do anything if we don’t.

So, again: Now What?

FILED UNDER: United Nations, World Politics, , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

NY Appeals Court Hands Trump Lifeline

An unexpected 11th hour reprieve.

· · 10 comments

NYT (“Trump Can Post Smaller Bond in Civil Fraud Case, Court Rules“):

With Donald J. Trump on the clock to secure a nearly half-billion-dollar bond in his civil fraud case, a New York appeals court appears to have handed the former president a lifeline on Monday, saying it would accept a far smaller bond of $175 million.

The ruling by a five-judge panel of appellate court judges was a crucial and unexpected victory for the former president, potentially staving off a looming financial disaster. Had the court denied his request — and had he failed to obtain the full bond — Mr. Trump risked of losing control over his bank accounts and, eventually, even some of his marquee properties.

For now, those dire outcomes might be on hold. If Mr. Trump obtains the smaller bond, it would prevent the New York attorney general’s office, which brought the case accusing him of fraudulently inflating his net worth, from collecting while Mr. Trump appeals the $454 million judgment imposed by a trial judge. The appeal could take months or longer to resolve.

Mr. Trump has 10 days to secure the bond, and two people with knowledge of his finances said he should be able to do so by then.

In a statement, Mr. Trump said he would “abide by the decision” and post either a bond from an outside company or put up the money himself. He added that the appellate court’s decision to reduce the bond “shows how ridiculous and outrageous” the $454 million judgment is.

[…]

The trial judge, Arthur F. Engoron, found Mr. Trump liable for conspiring to inflate his net worth to reap favorable loans from banks and other financial benefits. The $454 million reflected the interest payments Mr. Trump saved by misleading his lenders, as well as profits from the recent sale of two properties.

Justice Engoron did not stop there. He also imposed several restrictions on Mr. Trump and his family business. For three years, Mr. Trump cannot run any New York company, including portions of his own, nor can he obtain a loan from a New York bank. The same restrictions apply to his adult sons for two years. And he extended the appointment of an independent monitor, a watchful outsider to keep an eye on the family business.

In a surprise move, the appeals court on Monday also paused most of those new restrictions, save for the monitor.

The substantive portion of the ruling in its entirety:

It is ordered that the motion is granted to the extent of staying enforcement of those portions of the Judgment (1) ordering disgorgement to the Attorney General of $464,576,230.62, conditioned on defendants-appellants posting, within ten (10) days of the date of this order, an undertaking in the amount of $175 million dollars; (2) permanently barring defendants Weisselberg and McConney from serving in the financial control function of any New York corporation or similar business entity; (3) barring defendants Donald J. Trump, Weisselberg and McConney from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation for three years; (4) barring defendant Donald J. Trump and the corporate defendants from applying for loans from New York financial institutions for three years; and (5) barring defendants Donald Trump, Jr. and Eric Trump from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation in New York for two years. The aforesaid stay is conditioned on defendants-appellants perfecting the appeals for the September 2024 Term of this Court. The motion is otherwise denied, including to the extent it seeks a stay of enforcement of portions of the judgment (1) extending and enhancing the role of the Monitor and (2) directing the installation of an Independent Director of Compliance.

I have yet or to see a reported explanation for this rather sizable concession. I’ll update when I have.

UPDATE (13:46): Common DreamsJulia Conley provides this:

Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman, now a senior legal affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Timessaid the “pro-business” appellate court’s decision was not surprising and was “reasonable,” considering that “a bond is designed to secure eventual payment, not to financially wreck the defendant.”

“In a sense the decision reducing Trump’s bond and giving him more time is consistent with the ‘treat Trump like any other litigant’ credo,” said Litman, “but they sure let him twist in the wind until the last moment.”

An updated version of WaPo‘s report contains this:

Although the appeals court gave no reasoning for its decision, Adam Pollock, an attorney who formerly served as assistant attorney general in New York, said the decision could indicate that it might consider permanently reducing the judgment against Trump on appeal.

“It’s extraordinary because the law is clear that you have to post a bond in the full amount, and it additionally suggests that there may be concern that the underlying judgment is itself excessive,” said Pollock.

FILED UNDER: Law and the Courts, , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Supreme Court to Hear Abortion Pill Case Tomorrow

The ruling could be more impactful than Dobbs. Or render Dobbs less impactful.

· · 18 comments

USA Today (“Abortion pill challenge gives Supreme Court chance to move toward national abortion ban“):

Two years after the Supreme Court erased the constitutional right to an abortion, creating a patchwork of access across the country, the justices could now pave the way toward a national ban.

In a case they will consider Tuesday about access to the abortion drug mifepristone, the court could give legitimacy to a nineteenth century obscenity law that some abortion opponents are promoting as a de facto federal abortion ban that just needs enforcing.

Even if the court decides the case without addressing the 1873 Comstock Act − which it could easily do − the justices could restrict access to mifepristone in a way that would make it more difficult for millions of women to end a pregnancy in states where abortion is legal.

The result would be an end run around the court’s stated purpose, when it overturned Roe v. Wade, of leaving the question of abortion to Congress and the state legislatures, according to abortion rights advocates.

Keeping in place a lower court’s decision restricting access to mifepristone, more than 640 state lawmakers wrote in a brief to the court, would “wrest the power to decide abortion access issues back out of the hands of state legislators.”

Abortion opponents say it’s the Food and Drug Administration that is doing the end run around the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision by enabling women to circumvent state abortion bans by allowing unreasonably easy access to mifepristone.

The FDA’s actions “rob from the people important decisions on this vital issue,” the attorneys general of 22 states told the court.

More than six in 10 abortions in the United States last year were completed with pills, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.

The Supreme Court is deciding whether the FDA improperly relaxed requirements on mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in medication abortions for early pregnancies. The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the FDA should not have allowed mifepristone to be dispensed through the mail, along with other changes.

WSJ (“Abortion-Pill Case Puts Supreme Court Back in the Hot Seat“):

The Supreme Court on Tuesday will consider whether to roll back the availability of the abortion pill known as mifepristone as women increasingly rely on medication to end unwanted pregnancies.

The case has quickly forced the court back into the abortion thicket after its decision two years ago in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization eliminated federal protections for the procedure. Since then, roughly one-third of states have banned many or most abortions, but mifepristone is more readily available than ever, especially by mail, and overall abortions haven’t declined.

This has bedeviled Republican politicians and disappointed antiabortion groups who hoped the demise of Roe v. Wade would substantially reduce the number of pregnancy terminations. Medication abortions now make up nearly two-thirds of abortions. There were some 150,000 more of them in 2023 than there were before the decision, in 2020, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.  

“That model really poses a threat to the antiabortion movement because once pills are in the mail it’s pretty hard to track where they go and where they end up,” said Rachel Rebouché, the dean of Temple University’s law school.

At issue in Tuesday’s case is whether the Food and Drug Administration acted reasonably in adopting rules that have made it easier to obtain mifepristone since 2016. As a legal matter, that is fundamentally different from the Dobbs case, which discarded the 1973 court’s view in Roe that a woman’s control over pregnancy before fetal viability could be inferred from broad constitutional guarantees protecting individual liberty. By withdrawing the right to an abortion, the court left states to restrict the procedure or not as they see fit.

[…]

Elizabeth Sepper, a law professor at the University of Texas, said Tuesday’s case could show how far the court’s conservative majority, already critical of regulatory agencies, is willing to let litigation rather than rule making shape policy decisions.

When it comes to expertise, “the Food and Drug Administration is really the gold standard,” Sepper said, and the agency has been central to the success of the American pharmaceutical industry. Drugmakers are backing the regulators. “They are very, very worried about the idea that the FDA could be second-guessed in the courts based on the say-so of any E.R. doctor anywhere,” she said. 

The high court’s ruling, expected by July, will land in the middle of the election season and has the potential to shake up races that are up and down the ballot, at a time when abortion has proved to be a key political issue post-Dobbs. 

In some ways, the abortion-pill case has the potential to affect a greater number of women than Dobbs. Even without the constitutional protections Roe provided, more than half the states have legal access to abortion. But if pill access is restricted, abortions will be more difficult to obtain across the nation.

“States like California and New York are going to be just as affected by any roll back,” said Nancy Northup, president and chief executive of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which represented an abortion clinic in the Dobbs case. 

The current suit, filed by Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian conservative advocacy group, on behalf of antiabortion doctors and medical associations, alleges the FDA flouted legal obligations to ensure patient safety when it relaxed restrictions on access to the drug. Erin Hawley, an ADF attorney and wife of Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.), will argue Tuesday for the challengers. 

This case could be a double whammy. The right-most Justices have been signaling for years that they want to overturn a decades-old precedent that the courts should grant extreme deference to federal regulatory agencies in their rule-making. That they have the ability to do so in a case that would make abortion radically more difficult even in the bluest states would likely make them giddy.

On the broader question, I’m somewhat sympathetic to Thomas and company ideologically but think it would be a disaster practically. Congress has delegated huge chunks of its express powers to Executive branch agencies, exercising its Constitutional authority in the breach via the oversight function. This rather stands the Constitution on its head. But there’s really no practical alternative. Congress lacks both the bandwidth and expertise to legislate these areas on a detailed basis. Even absent the longstanding partisan gridlock in that body, there’s simply no way to govern a modern society in the manner envisioned by the Framers way back in 1787.

Whether the FDA overstepped its bounds in making mifepristone easily available by mail is well outside my expertise. But, considering that they ruled it safe for early-term abortions a quarter-century ago, it certainly seems reasonable to make it more readily available.

This, of course, creates a standoff. Dobbs returned the power to decide whether abortion is legal to the several states. Yet, since drug regulation is a federal responsibility, that power is all but circumscribed by the easy availability of this drug by mail.

So, even aside from the legal issues, SCOTUS is in a tough position. It put its legitimacy on the line by overturning a half-century-old Constitutional right that it had created. Now, it either has to render Dobbs all but meaningless or it has to double down on destroying precedents. Either way, it’s legitimacy is further weakened.

FILED UNDER: Law and the Courts, Supreme Court, , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Biden Wargaming Stolen Election Contingencies

He may be fighting the last war.

· · 18 comments

Rolling Stone (“Biden Is Building a ‘Superstructure’ to Stop Trump From Stealing the Election“):

For years, Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear that if he doesn’t win the 2024 presidential election, he is willing to cheat and steal it. Since President Joe Biden’s inaugural address, according to sources with intimate knowledge of the situation, Biden and his inner circle have been drawing up meticulous plans and creating a large legal network focused on wargaming a close election finish, in which the former president and Republican Party launch a scorched-earth, Big Lie–fueled crusade.

[…]

Over the past year, Team Biden has been conducting war games, crafting complex legal strategies, and devoting extensive resources to prepare for, as one former senior Biden administration official puts it, “all-hell-breaks-loose” scenarios. The preparations include planning for a contingency in which Biden’s margin of victory is so razor-thin that Trump and the GOP launch a tidal wave of legal challenges and political maneuvers to rerun his 2020 election strategy: declare victory anyways, and try to will it into existence.

“President Biden has been worried, for a while now, that Donald Trump is going to try to steal the election, if it’s very close on Election Day,” says a source familiar with Biden’s thinking. “If that ends up being the case, we are… also expecting the Republican Party to go into overdrive to help him steal it. We are continuing to build out the infrastructure to ensure that doesn’t happen — again — if President Biden wins and Trump and MAGA Republicans try to confuse [everyone] and sow chaos.”

[…]

Top officials in both the Trump and Biden camps are expecting an uncomfortably tight election outcome in November, sources in both campaigns have told Rolling Stone on numerous occasions over the past year. Advisers to both candidates say they expect the race will turn on a margin of just tens of thousands of votes in a handful of key battleground states, if not a single state. One Trump adviser says that they had privately told the ex-president and presumptive 2024 GOP nominee to anticipate an electoral “knife fight to the death” on, and likely in the wake of, Election Day.

Team Biden’s in-house counsels and network of outside lawyers are currently preparing legal strategies for scenarios involving recounts that would make, in the words of one Biden official, “make Florida in 2000 look like child’s play.”

[…]

Any attempt by Trump to try and undermine the 2024 election would likely look different than 2020, if only because he lacks the legal authority and access to federal resources he enjoyed as president.

Still, Team Biden has been planning for years sketching out what Trump could do as the leader of the GOP, and has partnered with the Democratic National Committee and a vast network of liberal attorneys and legal groups to conduct similar doomsday-style wargaming.

One swing-state Democratic election official involved with these efforts refers to it as a “superstructure” of various legal teams and liberal operatives who “are going to fight [Team Trump and election deniers] on all fronts and let them have it from all sides, if MAGA wants to tear down our democracy.”

According to two Biden campaign officials and two other sources with knowledge of the operation, draft pleadings and legal motions, for all kinds of possible Trump-related emergencies, are already written and at the ready. In critical swing states such as Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, Team Biden is regularly in contact with an array of outside counsels and local law firms that have been retained to actively monitor what is happening on the ground, including with regards to the activism of election-denying Trump allies. 

Bidenworld’s closely-held list of nightmare scenarios — in which Democratic legal teams would have to battle it out tooth and nail with Republican counterparts before, during, or after Election Day 2024 — has grown “comically long,” says one source with direct knowledge of the matter. Biden campaign officials and other Democrats familiar with the topic tell Rolling Stone that a key concern, for which step-by-step gameplanning has already begun, is how to robustly respond if Trump and other leading Republicans try to engineer another Jan. 6-style power grab.

In these internal wargames among Bidenworld and Democratic attorneys in key states, this kind of Jan. 6 sequel has included scripts in which House Republicans or state officials refuse to certify a Biden victory — an act that prominent GOP politicians, including on Capitol Hill, have publicly dangled as an option.

A spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee tells Rolling Stone that the national party is also setting aside “tens of millions of dollars in a robust voter protection program to safeguard the rights of voters to make their voices heard against relentless attacks from Donald Trump and the GOP.”

“Meanwhile, the Trump campaign and the RNC have invested in an army of conspiratorial, election-denying legal staff to undermine our elections and make it harder for Americans’ ballots to be counted,” says the DNC spokesperson. “We won’t let Republicans get away with these baseless attacks on our democracy, and we will continue to use every tool at our disposal to strengthen our democracy as MAGA extremists attempt to tear it down.”

First off: good. Trump, after all, went to great lengths in an attempt to steal the last election and has made it abundantly clear that he will not accept a loss this go-around as legitimate. It only makes sense to be prepared for that eventuality and plan for any possible scenario.

But, frankly, I’m not all that worried about Trump stealing the election through any systemic means. As noted in the piece, he’s not President anymore and lacks any institutional power. Not only does Biden control the levers of power this time, he’s much more adept at using them because he’s actually a professional politician with decades of experience, surrounded by a professional team whose expertise he actually has the good sense to listen to.

Moreover, Trump has intentionally destroyed the Republican National Committee, draining it of both expertise and resources. The notion that “the Trump campaign and the RNC have invested in an army of conspiratorial, election-denying legal staff” is laughable. Neither have any money at this point. The Democratic National Committee, by contrast, is teeming with money and is a more or less professionally run outfit.

To reiterate: I applaud Team Biden’s prudence in being prepared for a repeat of 2020. But Trump and the RNC aren’t even paper tigers anymore on the legal-institutional front.

Honestly, my real fear is that January 6, 2021 was a dress rehearsal for something much bigger and more sinister. While Trump has shown time and time again that he’s a joke in the courtroom, I do not doubt at all that he can still incite violence. The question is only at what scale.

FILED UNDER: 2024 Election, US Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Ugliness in International Soccer

A long tradition continues unabated.

· · 3 comments

AP (“CONCACAF Nations League final twice stopped because of homophobic chants in pro-Mexican crowd“):

The U.S.-Mexico CONCACAF Nations League final match was suspended in the late stages for the second straight year because of homophobic chants by pro-Mexican fans.

Canadian referee Drew Fischer stopped play in the 88th minute of the United States’ 2-0 victory in Sunday night’s final, played before a crowd of 59,471 at AT&T Stadium.

Play resumed after a 4 1/2-minute wait, and Fischer halted it again six minutes into stoppage time. Play restarted 1 1/2 minutes later and the match was played until conclusion in the ninth minute of added time.

“CONCACAF condemns the discriminatory chanting,” the regional governing body of North and Central America and the Caribbean said in a statement. “Security staff in the stadium identified and ejected a significant number of fans, and the referee and match officials activated the FIFA protocol. … It is extremely disappointing that this matter continues to be an issue at some matches.”

U.S. coach Gregg Berhalter and players were hit by debris while celebrating Gio Reyna’s goal that built a two-goal lead.

“That was unfortunate because we want a really competitive game, we want a great atmosphere but we don’t want to get things thrown at us,” Berhalter said. “It’s unsafe and someone can get hurt.”

Last year’s semifinal at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas was stopped by Salvadoran referee Iván Barton in the eighth minute of a scheduled 12 minutes of stoppage time with the U.S. ahead 3-0.

CONCACAF issued a statement the next day that it “strongly condemns the discriminatory chanting by some fans,” which it said “has no place in our sport.” The regional governing body did not appear to announce any disciplinary action.

The Mexican Football Federation last month challenged financial penalties totaling 100,000 Swiss francs ($114,000) imposed by FIFA for incidents at two games at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. FIFA imposed a 50,000 Swiss francs fine with an additional 50,000 francs to be spent on a campaign educating fans.

FIFA has repeatedly held the Mexican soccer federation responsible, handing out fines and closing stadiums for games after incidents in qualifying matches for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups and for Olympic qualifying.

A bit confused by the vagueness of the reporting, I did some quick searching and found Simon Borg‘s Sporting News report “Explaining the homophobic chant that has Mexico’s soccer federation in hot water with FIFA.”

In a practice believed to have started among fans in the early 2000s — one outlet highlights a 2004 Olympic qualifier between the USA and Mexico — Mexican national team fans join in unison to shout a Spanish-language homophobic slur (“p***,” which roughly translates to “gay prostitute”) when an opposing goalkeeper puts the ball into play on a goal kick. The chant is supposedly meant to intimidate the ‘keeper and the opposing team.

The argument for years was that the word has multiple cultural meanings in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries and that it is not intended as a homophobic slur when used by fans in a stadium.

But there’s no getting around the fact that it’s a derogatory term that’s demeaning to the gay community. FIFA and anti-discrimination groups have made that much clear, and the Mexican soccer federation (FMF) has also recognized it and is taking action.

“It’s not the intention with which you shout or with which you chant. It’s how the other [people] receive it,” then Mexican federation president Yon de Luisa told media in 2021. “If anybody feels it’s a discriminatory act, then it is not something that we should include in a conversation. That is no longer a debate. If it is discriminatory, we should avoid it.”

In conjunction with soccer authorities and match organizers, the FMF is working to eradicate the chant from its matches with the knowledge that failure to do so could result in escalating punishment from world governing body FIFA.

So, it’s not aimed at any particular player on the US or any other team; it’s just a vulgar chant apparently intended to intimidate opponents.

And it’s not just the Mexican fans acting abhorrently despite routine warnings and multiple sanctions.

AP (“Vinícius still a target for racial abuse ahead of Spain’s ‘One Skin’ game against Brazil“):

Vinícius Júnior clenched his right fist and raised it high above his head after scoring at Mestalla Stadium, posing for a moment to make sure everyone noticed.

The symbolic gesture in early March came nearly a year after the Real Madrid forward was on that same field with tears in his eyes after being racially abused by some Valencia fans.

That incident sparked an outpouring of support for the Brazil forward, who is Black, and set off widespread calls for action by Spanish authorities and society in general.

At the time, many saw it as a turning point in the fight against racism in Spanish soccer.

But some 10 months later, Vinícius has continued to be subjected to racist abuse in Spain despite the initial uproar that accompanied the incident at Mestalla.

That lack of progress will be noted when Spain hosts Brazil at the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium on Tuesday. The international friendly was originally set up under the theme “One Skin” following the racial abuse aimed at Vinícius last year.

“We haven’t fully advanced,” said Esteban Ibarra, president of the Movement Against Intolerance, Racism and Xenophobia in Spain. “There was some response, but it wasn’t a significant step forward. In the end, if there still is a dominant feeling of impunity, the fans will keep acting the same way as before.”

[…]

A couple of weeks ago, there were reports of racist chants targeting Vinícius outside the stadiums of Atletico Madrid and Barcelona before Champions League games that didn’t even involve Real Madrid.

Vinícius retweeted a video that showed a few Atletico fans jumping and chanting “Vinícius chimpanzee,” and a day earlier some Barcelona fans allegedly chanted “Die, Vinícius.”

“I hope you have already thought about their punishment,” Vinícius said at the time on X, formerly Twitter, and tagged the Champions League and European soccer governing body UEFA. “It’s a sad reality that happens even in games where I’m not present!”

There were also reported hate chants of “Die, Vinícius” in Madrid’s Spanish league match at Osasuna on March 16. Real Madrid called the game’s referee “negligent” for not including the chants in his match report. The club also reported them — as well as those alleged chants by Atletico and Barcelona fans — to the prosecutor’s office for hate crimes.

“We must continue to fight to eradicate racism and it is a daily struggle to prevent players like Vinícius or any other from experiencing episodes of intolerance,” Spain defender Álex Grimaldo said Sunday.

Some of Vinícius’ opponents contend his aggressive playing style — not uncommon for a forward — and clashes with the opposition have made him a bigger target for fans. Vinícius often gets into verbal altercations and more than once was seen responding to fans’ provocations from the stands.

There was some movement in the cases against fans accused of insulting Vinícius last year, including the four hardcore Atletico fans who allegedly hanged an effigy of the player off a highway bridge in Madrid.

They were taken into custody in the wave of arrests sparked by the incident against Vinícius in Mestalla, and prosecutors have sought four-year prison sentences against them.

Homophobic chants are bad enough. Death threats and throwing of debris simply can’t be tolerated. This is literally criminal conduct, not simple boorishness, that’s going unchecked.

Stopping play in a game that the offending fans’ team is losing is hardly punishment. Indeed, it stops the momentum of the winning team.

Still, controlling the behavior of tens of thousands of people is, to say the least, challenging.

To take a less serious example, it’s a longstanding tradition at my alma mater, the University of Alabama, to play “Dixieland Delight” during a play stoppage in the 4th quarter of football games. The crowd sings along, inserting some amusing commentary. * Alas, at one point, fans (mostly in the student section) yell “F- Auburn!” multiple times.

The University took various measures to stop this, to no avail. Eventually, they stopped playing the song entirely. Which had limited effect because it turns out that yelling “F- Auburn” doesn’t require any particular musical accompaniment. Long story short, they eventually brought the song back and simply play “Beat Auburn!” loudly from the public address system so that the version coming from the student section doesn’t make it on television.

To take a more serious example, the UK has more or less curtailed the scourge of soccer hooliganism for which it had long been infamous. A 2022 report from Sports History Weekly reminds us,

During the 1980s, Great Britain’s Margaret Thatcher identified 3 profound ills that plagued her country: the IRA, striking miners, and football hooligans.

Paradoxically, it was the heyday of English soccer. Clubs from across the channel had won 7 of 8 European Cups between 1977 and 1984, but their glory on the field was at odds with the disgraceful behavior of their fans off the field.

It all came to a head on May 29, 1985 at the European Cup final, which pitted two storied football teams, Liverpool and Italy’s Juventus.

Shortly before kickoff in Brussels’ Heysel Stadium, a mob of drunken Liverpudlians charged their Italian counterparts in the stands, creating a melee that resulted in the death of 39 fans and hundreds injured after a wall collapsed.

It was the worst hooligan disaster on record. Within days, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) moved to ban all English clubs from competing in the continent for the next 5 years.

Thatcher supported the decision, saying: “We have to get the game cleaned up from this hooliganism at home and then perhaps we shall be able to go overseas again.”

The government and the sport’s governing authorities took a number of measures, including redesigning the spectator sections of stadia, restricting alcohol sales, the use of CCTV to track down and punish offenders, and a registration system for ticket sales to make it easier to keep repeat offenders out of matches. There has been a bit of a resurgence of violence of late, apparently due to white nationalist types organizing it, but it’s nothing like it was four decades ago.

FILED UNDER: Gender Issues, Race and Politics, Sports, , , , , , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Monday’s Forum

· · 53 comments

OTB relies on its readers to support it. Please consider helping by becoming a monthly contributor through Patreon or making a one-time contribution via PayPal. Thanks for your consideration.

FILED UNDER: Open Forum
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

A Glimmer of Hope

· · 27 comments

“Confused Democracy” by Steven Taylor is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

One of the more frustrating, if not gut-wrenching, aspects of the possibility that Donald Trump will return to power is that his most likely route to do so is, like his first go at the White House, with minority support. That is: more voters will prefer Biden, but the mechanism of the Electoral College will allow Trump to win anyway.

We know that Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by 2,833,224 votes and in 2020 by 7,052,045. Note that in the Gallup poll, he never hit 50% approval (Last Trump Job Approval 34%; Average Is Record-Low 41%):

And, of course, the broader selection via 538:*

There is little empirical evidence that he can command majority support. The only concern in that regard is that some recent polls do have him at 50%-plus.

As such, the real precarity of this present moment is that a minority of the electorate can return Trump to power. It is, in my view, a profound flaw in our system that the most powerful members of the government can be elected in such a fashion. Nevertheless, that’s how it works. We all know that it is how he came to power in 2016, that that was his route in 2020, and it is his likely pathway in 2024. Thousands of voters in a few states can give him the Electoral Votes he needs, plain and simple.

By the same token that means, however, that if a relatively small number of Republican partisans can be persuaded not to vote for Trump (or not to vote all) then that enhances the chances of his defeat.

This is why I find at least some hope in things like Pence’s unwillingness to endorse Trump or in stories about utterly indefensible things he says. Yes, I agree, that they will have little effect on MAGAites. They will not even persuade the general Republican electorate who prefers a candidate with an R by their name as opposed to a D (for reasons that are not as irrational as readers here may like to think).

As such, I think it important to remind ourselves that while X event, Y utterance, or whatever is not going to change the minds of MAGAs, or even of most Republican voters, that doesn’t have to be the goal. The goal is try and get enough people to understand the problem and threat of Trump so that places like AZ, MI, PA, and WI go for Biden the way I anticipate that the country as a whole will go in November.

So, to be clear, I am not saying that Trump can’t win (see: 2016). I am not even saying that he can’t win the popular vote (but I think it to be highly, highly unlikely). But I am saying that I would advise against dismissing the steady trickle of stories that give some hope that a handful of voters here and a handful there might change their minds (e.g., via CNN: Lisa Murkowski, done with Donald Trump, won’t rule out leaving GOP). Or, that things like Trump Salutes Insurrection ‘Hostages’ won’t matter.

There is also the clear financial troubles Trump is experiencing, the undeniable distractions of his various trials, and his bizarre gutting of the RNC.

All of this only has to matter at the extreme margins in key locations.

Note, I am also not playing the 2016 game that the Never-Trumpers will save us. I am simply saying that he does do and say a lot of things that may be enough to create something closer to 2020 than to 2016 (especially if the third party vote is more like 2020 than 2016).

Note, too, it is only March and while for those of us who pay attention, it feels like this campaign season has been going on since late 2019/early 2020, for the normals out there, it really hasn’t even begun yet.

Just some late Sunday morning thoughts from a decidedly not normal.

Time to go work in the yard.


*And yes, before someone says it, Biden isn’t knocking out of the park, either. But in contrast to Trump, he was able to win the popular vote in 2020, and he has at least demonstrated the ability to surmount 50%, even if his current numbers are terrible.

FILED UNDER: 2024 Election, Democracy, Political Theory, US Politics, , , , , , ,
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

Sunday Tab Clearing

So many intentions to write, so little time.

· · 10 comments

“It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team,” Carrie Budoff Brown, senior vice president of politics at NBC News, said in a memo to staff.

I have to confess, I don’t see the upside of having an election denier on the team. This is just one of the more cancerous manifestations of both-siderism that also helps legitimize misinformation and normalize Trumpism.

“Ballot harvesting is a big term, obviously,” Allen said. “And our opponents always point to us, ‘Show us the prosecutions.’ Well, there was few prosecutions because it was so vague and there was no penalties. So, DAs and the AG, they’re just not going to focus on that particular code section on ballot harvesting.

“But we know it goes on. We receive calls. We know it happens out there. There are instances where there are paid political operatives, paid ballot traffickers, or whatever you want to call them, that go and put influence on the absentee process, going out and gathering up these applications and trying to influence the absentee process.”

I must confess that, “we receive calls” is not exactly compelling evidence of much of anything.

“We took something that worked and now broke it,” Netherland said. “We failed to guard the purity of the election with this hand count. What we just did is evidence that this hand count was not accurate.

[…]

Morrell added that the discrepancies found in Gillespie and in Travis don’t typically occur in elections where voting equipment is used. Even in parts of the process where hand counting is used, such as audits or recounts (where only one or two races are counted rather than the entire ballot), “we find that it’s easy for people to make mistakes,” she said. And that’s especially true when tallying undervotes.

Who could have known?

FILED UNDER: Tab Clearing, , , , , , , , , , , ,
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

Whither Freakonomics?

The book spawned a cottage industry. But did it change the study of economics?

· · 10 comments

The Economist article titled “Why ‘Freakonomics’ failed to transform economics” does very little to answer the titular question.

Freakonomics was a hit. It ranked just below Harry Potter in the bestseller lists. Much like Marvel comics, it spawned an expanded universe: New York Times columns, podcasts and sequels, as well as imitators and critics, determined to tear down its arguments. It was at the apex of a wave of books that promised a quirky—yet rigorous—analysis of things that the conventional wisdom had missed. 

While still a thriving enterprise—the book has been a bestseller through multiple editions now and co-authors Steven Dubner hosts a popular long-running podcast by that name and other co-author Steve Levitt has yet another podcast under the brand’s umbrella—one of the most famous findings in the original book was embarrassingly wrong:

The book’s most controversial chapter argued that America’s nationwide legalisation of abortion in 1973 had led to a fall in crime in the 1990s, because more unwanted babies were aborted before they could grow into delinquent teenagers. It was a classic of the clever-dick genre: an unflinching social scientist using data to come to a counterintuitive conclusion, and not shying away from offence. It was, however, wrong. Later researchers found a coding error and pointed out that Mr Levitt had used the total number of arrests, which depends on the size of a population, and not the arrest rate, which does not. Others pointed out that the fall in homicide started among women. No-fault divorce, rather than legalised abortion, may have played a bigger role.

Many critics of the approach of using social science methodologies to explore “the hidden side of everything” found it trivial or “cute.” The article concludes,

The credibility revolution ate its own children: subsequent papers often overturned results, even if, as in the case of those popularised by Freakonomics, they had an afterlife as cocktail-party anecdotes. The problem has spread to the rest of the profession, too. A recent study by economists at the Federal Reserve found that less than half of the published papers they examined could be replicated, even when given help from the original authors. Mr Levitt’s counterintuitive results have fallen out of fashion and economists in general have become more sceptical.

Yet Mr Heckman’s favoured approaches have problems of their own. Structural models require assumptions that can be as implausible as any quirky quasi-experiment. Sadly, much contemporary research uses vast amounts of data and the techniques of the “credibility revolution” to come to obvious conclusions. The centuries-old questions of economics are as interesting as they always were. The tools to investigate them remain a work in progress. 

None of which really explains why the Freakonomics approach didn’t catch on or, indeed, demonstrates that it didn’t. Certainly, the behavioral economics it helped popularize is having a moment, including spawning some Nobel Prize winners.

The most interesting thing I learned from the article is that Levitt announced his retirement from academia, at the ripe old age of 57, earlier this month. Timothy Taylor offers some tidbits from an interview explaining why. Two caught my attention.

First, on the process that led to the first edition of the book:

Neither of us thought anybody would read a book if we did write it. But we both were kind of, prostitutes in some sense. And so, for the right amount of money, we were willing to write this book. And interestingly, the right amount of money turned out to be similar for both of us. And so much to our surprise, we got offered, I don’t know, three times that amount of money to write the book. And then the only thing that stood in the way of us writing the book is we had to figure out how to divide the profits, the payments. And Dubner, I don’t remember the exact numbers, but Dubner came to me and he said, “Hey, I know it’s uncomfortable to talk about this, but we need to decide to split.” And he said, “I was thinking 60 /40.” And I said, “I was actually thinking 2 /3, 1 /3.” And he said, “Oh, I’m just not willing to write this book for 1 /3.” And I said, “No, no, I was thinking 2 /3 for you and 1 /3 for me.” And he said, I was thinking 60 % for you and 40 % for me. So, it’s the easiest negotiation ever. We settled on 50 /50, we both felt like we got a lot of surplus and we’ve had a great relationship ever since.

I love it when a plan comes together!

Second, on the retirement decision:

I think two different forces at work here. The first one is that maybe between five and 10 years ago, I worked on three or four projects that I was just incredibly excited about that I felt were some of the best research that I’d ever done … [T]hese were four papers that I was really excited about and collectively they had zero impact. They didn’t publish well by and large, nobody cared about them and I remember looking at one point at the citations and seeing that collectively they had six citations. I thought, my god, what am I doing? I just spent the last two years of my life and nobody cares about it. And I really think it’s true that the way I approached economic problems, without a fashion, without a vogue, and for better or worse, probably the profession is better for having a different set of standards than I was used to meeting up with. And that was really discouraging to me. And you combine that with the idea, with the fact that along with Stephen Dubner, we’ve got this media franchise where Dubner’s podcast Freakonomics Radio gets a couple million downloads a month. And if I want to get a message out, I can get millions of people through a different medium. It just didn’t make sense to me to keep on puttering around, doing all this work, spending years to write papers that no one cared about when I had other ways of getting my ideas out. And really my interests were elsewhere. I didn’t get any thrill. … The question I should ask myself is why didn’t I retire a long time ago? It made no sense. I’ve just been, I’ve thought, I’ve known for years, it’s the wrong place for me to be. And it just took me a long time to figure out how to extricate myself from academics. And I’m so glad I’m doing it. It’s good for everyone. It doesn’t make any sense to, it feels to me awful to be in a place where I’m not excited and where I’m not contributing materially. So, for me, it feels like a breath of fresh air to be saying, “Hey, I’m not going to be an academic anymore. I’m going to be doing what I really love to do.

It’s simple economics! One imagines Levitt makes more money from his side hustle than from his day job. So, if he’s not enjoying the latter, it’s a really poor use of his time.

It’s noteworthy that, while Levitt is mostly known for the Freakonomics franchise, he was a superstar in the field first. Indeed, the reason Dubner interviewed him to begin with was because he’d just won the John Bates Clark Medal, the second most prestigious award in economics short of the Nobel itself.

But, for whatever reason, most of his articles from the last few years have a handful of citations, whereas his very-highly-cited works are mostly from 1995 through 2007. Indeed, the only exceptions appear to be foreign translations of Freakonomics.

FILED UNDER: Economics and Business, , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Yay! Information Matters!

You can lead a horse to water, but the trick is the drinking.

· · 5 comments

Via The Upshot: Republicans Who Do Not Regularly Watch Fox Are Less Likely to Back Trump. My initial thought was that this does not surprise me, but I have to wonder if some of it is just correlation rather than causation (i.e., GOP who don’t back Trump are also likely the types to watch less Fox News anyway). Granted, it is also likely a self-reinforcing cycle.

The article notes that the study was a controlled experiment that did demonstrate that changes in news consumption can change views:

In their experiment, they randomly assigned Fox News viewers to watch CNN for a month, comparing their political views after they switched to the network with Fox viewers who did not make the switch. The result? Getting conservative news viewers to watch mainstream news caused many of the participants to shift away from hard-right views on a number of issues like immigration and race relations. And they found changes in how participants evaluated Mr. Trump.

“It was amazing to see that the study participants learned new facts about the world from watching CNN,” Mr. Kalla said. “These are people who don’t trust CNN; they think it’s propaganda and fiction.

“The fact that they find that these people, in particular, learn something new about the world suggests that they’re more open to persuasion and hearing the other side than we might assume.”

Participants did not just move toward moderate views on issues like immigration; they also started to question their trust in Fox News itself. At the end of the study, respondents were less likely to agree with the statement: “If Donald Trump did something bad, Fox News would discuss it.”

On the one hand, this is heartening news, insofar as it demonstrates that human beings are capable of allowing information to change their minds.

On the other, this was a controlled environment.

Experiments like this have little real-world application, but they do reinforce the notion that conservative news viewers see the current political landscape through a different lens.

Further evidence of this phenomenon:

in the recent survey, the gap between the two types of Republicans persists. Republicans who watch mainstream media are over three times as likely to say Mr. Trump acted criminally as those who consume conservative media. And the share of mainstream media Republicans saying this has grown over the last two years, reaching a peak of 43 percent in December. It is now down to 34 percent.

FILED UNDER: 2024 Election, Democracy, Media, US Politics, , , , ,
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

Biden’s Covid Malaise?

A pandemic hangover may be clouding American politics.

· · 8 comments

President Joe Biden takes his mask off to deliver remarks on COVID-19 and the economy, Thursday, July 29, 2021, in the East Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz

Lisa Lerer, Jennifer Medina, and Reid J. Epstein reporting for NYT (“How a Pandemic Malaise Is Shaping American Politics“):

In March 2020, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Donald J. Trump competed for the White House for the first time, American life became almost unrecognizable. A deadly virus and a public health lockdown remade daily routines with startling speed, leaving little time for the country to prepare.

Four years later, the coronavirus pandemic has largely receded from public attention and receives little discussion on the campaign trail. And yet, as the same two men run once again, Covid-19 quietly endures as a social and political force. Though diminished, the pandemic has become the background music of the presidential campaign trail, shaping how voters feel about the nation, the government and their politics.

How can it be that the pandemic has simultaneously “receded from public attention” and yet is “background music”?

Public confidence in institutions — the presidency, public schools, the criminal justice system, the news media, Congress — slumped in surveys in the aftermath of the pandemic and has yet to recover. The pandemic hardened voter distrust in government, a sentiment Mr. Trump and his allies are using to their advantage. Fears of political violence, even civil war, are at record highs, and rankings of the nation’s happiness at record lows. And views of the nation’s economy and confidence in the future remain bleak, even as the country has defied expectations of a recession.

I’m skeptical that all of these things are a result of the pandemic. And the American experience with COVID was so intertwined with Trump’s leadership that disaggregating the two is impossible.

“The pandemic pulled the rug from people — you were never quite as secure as you were,” Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, a Democrat, said in an interview. “We’re starting to get our grounding back. But I think it’s just hard for people to feel good again.”

High rates of office vacancies have crippled urban downtowns, adding to the sense that the country has yet to recover fully. Depression and anxiety rates remain stubbornly high, particularly among young adults. Students remain behind in math and reading, part of the continued fallout from school closures. And even positive news has been met with skepticism: F.B.I. data released this month confirmed that crime declined significantly in 2023, though polling conducted at the end of last year has shown that voters believe otherwise.

Public perceptions of crime seldom track reality, as they’re shaped by news coverage. But the rest makes sense to me. The pandemic permanently shifted the nature of work, at least for white-collar types, and we’re still struggling to figure out the new normal. Routines were upended and many have not settled into new ones. Or, worse, the new ones leave them without daily contact with other humans.

Elected officials, strategists, historians and sociologists say the lasting effects of the pandemic are visible today in the debates over inflation, education, public health, college debt, crime and trust in American democracy itself. The lingering trauma from that time, they said, is contributing to a sense of national malaise that voters express in polling and focus groups — a kind of pandemic hangover that appears to be hurting Mr. Biden and helping Mr. Trump in their presidential rematch.

Mr. Biden’s administration passed a robust package of legislation and issued executive actions that steered the country out of the crisis, but voters give the president limited credit for his accomplishments and remain pessimistic about the economy and the nation’s direction. Mr. Trump oversaw the most acute phase of the pandemic, but he casts himself as having presided over a more prosperous and secure country, and continues to lead Mr. Biden in polls.

This strikes me as plausible. Indeed, even as one who is virulently anti-Trump and who voted for Biden, I don’t blame Trump for the COVID collapse* and give Biden relatively little credit for the recovery. People less tuned in remember low gas prices and cheap credit under Trump and are angry about higher food prices and high interest rates under Biden.

And this is unlikely to work:

Mr. Biden has defended his role in pulling the country out of a moment of profound calamity, using his State of the Union address to cast the pandemic as “the greatest comeback story never told.”

At a recent Dallas fund-raiser, the president blamed his predecessor for everything people remember with horror about the pandemic.

“Covid had come to America, and Trump was president,” Mr. Biden told donors, adding, “There was a ventilator shortage. Mobile morgues were being set up. Over — over a million people died. Our loved ones were dying all alone, and they couldn’t even say goodbye to them.”

Indeed, if his opponent weren’t such an awful excuse for a human being, I would find this line of attack outrageous. Of course, the biggest global pandemic in more than a century was going to be catastrophic. It’s just stupid to blame Trump for its coming to our shores.

Regardless, the narrative is significantly disrupted by this:

Any political discussion of the crisis is complicated by the widely different ways Americans experienced the most globally disruptive event in a generation.

There is no single unifying pandemic narrative. In California, New York and other Democratic-controlled states, schools and businesses maintained restrictions well into 2021. In Florida, Georgia, South Dakota and other Republican-run states, life resumed some semblance of normalcy far more quickly, even as death tolls mounted.

And, more importantly, this:

Since then, memories have been colored by partisan politics. One study published in Nature last year found that people’s recollections of the severity of the pandemic were skewed by the views they later held about vaccines.

“It was the first time in my lifetime that it felt like everything was up for grabs,” said Eric Klinenberg, a professor of sociology at New York University and the author of a new book about the pandemic in New York, “2020: One City, Seven People and the Year Everything Changed.” “Where we’re left today is this emotional experience of feeling like something is off in the country. We’re experiencing long Covid as a social disease.”

Frustrations over Mr. Biden’s handling of the pandemic and the post-pandemic recovery run deep among many Republicans, and even some Democrats.

Kristin Urquiza spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2020 about her experience watching her father die from complications of Covid. She created a political advocacy group, Marked by Covid, and said she supported Mr. Biden in 2020 because she believed he would comfort victims and console families. She feels differently now.

“He broke his promise to care,” Ms. Urquiza said of the president.

Rather than coming out of the pandemic with a renewed sense of hope, the country has become a far less unified place, she said. She has been deeply frustrated that there have been no efforts to create a permanent national memorial for the more than 1.1 million Americans killed by the disease.

“The families I speak to — the ones living with long Covid and those who have lost loved ones — express a profound sense of abandonment,” Ms. Urquiza said.

For many Republican voters, the pandemic also hardened their belief that government does more harm than good.

Michael Jackson, 47, a waiter in Las Vegas who was out of work for nearly a year, was furious that much of the state did not reopen more quickly. “I think most politicians showed they are completely oblivious to what’s currently happening beyond their office,” Mr. Jackson said.

Dr. Mary Elizabeth Christian, a retired breast-cancer surgeon who lives in Baton Rouge, La., and is part of Ms. Urquiza’s Marked by Covid group, stayed isolated throughout the pandemic and still wears a mask in public. She avoids restaurants and some of her favorite pastimes, like attending gymnastics meets at Louisiana State University, for which she was a longtime season-ticket holder.

Her parents, who were vaccinated, broke their isolation for a dinner to celebrate their 62nd wedding anniversary in July 2021. Within three days, they both tested positive. They died within two days of each other that August.

Dr. Christian said she had lost trust in all levels of a government that she believes failed to protect its most vulnerable citizens.

“I have been a pretty stalwart pro-life Republican, and I can say that I was disappointed by the Republican Party,” said Dr. Christian, who added that she planned to vote for a third-party candidate this November. “I was very disappointed that a party that has a platform to defend life didn’t do what it took to defend the lives of people who were being exposed to Covid.”

That this is mostly nonsensical is immaterial. People feel how they feel.

Since taking office, Mr. Biden has won lasting legislative milestones, including a $1 trillion infrastructure package, a  $1.9 trillion Covid relief package, and major investments to combat climate change.

But some of his post-pandemic programs with the biggest influence on people’s daily lives have not endured. Congress failed to renew a child tax credit payment that sent families monthly checks. Tens of millions of dollars in grants to assist child-care facilities expired, forcing the closure of some providers. Millions of borrowers who had their student loans paused during the pandemic now have payments due, after the Supreme Court rejected an administration plan to forgive $430 billion of student debt. The administration is now pursuing a more piecemeal approach to forgiving that debt.

Alida Garcia, a Democratic strategist and mother of twins, said she harbored a “fired-up rage” during the pandemic and felt almost constantly angry “about the lack of support for mothers in particular.”

“Now, I am equally, if not more, exhausted than at that time, and it feels like things are getting harder for women,” she said.

For others, the anger of those pandemic days has metastasized into a deeper lack of faith in politics.

Julie Fry, a public defender in New Jersey, spent months pushing administrators and politicians in her state to reopen shuttered public schools. Three years later, her young daughters are thriving in school.

But she feels angry and resentful — at politicians from both parties — when she recalls those long months of home-schooling and the mental health toll it took on so many children.

“I feel like Trump was a mess and Biden was a coward about doing what was right for kids,” said Ms. Fry, who describes herself as a staunch liberal. “There were no grown-ups willing to speak up for what kids needed.”

That Biden had next to no power over local public schools doesn’t matter, I guess. As I’ve been noting throughout the 21-year history of this site, people ascribe extraordinary power to the President, blaming him for seemingly everything wrong in the world and crediting him when things are going well.

Presumably coincidentally, Cornell psychiatrists George Makari and Richard A. Friedman take to The Atlantic to argue “It’s Not the Economy. It’s the Pandemic.”

America is in a funk, and no one seems to know why. Unemployment rates are lower than they’ve been in half a century and the stock market is sky-high, but poll after poll shows that voters are disgruntled. President Joe Biden’s approval rating has been hovering in the high 30s. Americans’ satisfaction with their personal lives—a measure that usually dips in times of economic uncertainty—is at a near-record low, according to Gallup polling. And nearly half of Americans surveyed in January said they were worse off than three years prior.

Experts have struggled to find a convincing explanation for this era of bad feelings. Maybe it’s the spate of inflation over the past couple of years, the immigration crisis at the border, or the brutal wars in Ukraine and Gaza. But even the people who claim to make sense of the political world acknowledge that these rational factors can’t fully account for America’s national malaise. We believe that’s because they’re overlooking a crucial factor.

Four years ago, the country was brought to its knees by a world-historic disaster. COVID-19 hospitalized nearly 7 million Americans and killed more than a million; it’s still killing hundreds each week. It shut down schools and forced people into social isolation. Almost overnight, most of the country was thrown into a state of high anxiety—then, soon enough, grief and mourning. But the country has not come together to sufficiently acknowledge the tragedy it endured. As clinical psychiatrists, we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when it’s not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and anger—exactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.

Normally, when a spate of stories making a similar argument hit, it’s because an underlying big study came out. But neither article references one.

Regardless, Makari and Friedman aren’t doing political analysis here but highlighting the downsides of repressing trauma.

The pressure to simply move on from the horrors of 2020 is strong. Who wouldn’t love to awaken from that nightmare and pretend it never happened? Besides, humans have a knack for sanitizing our most painful memories. In a 2009 study, participants did a remarkably poor job of remembering how they felt in the days after the 9/11 attacks, likely because those memories were filtered through their current emotional state. Likewise, a study published in Nature last year found that people’s recall of the severity of the 2020 COVID threat was biased by their attitudes toward vaccines months or years later.

When faced with an overwhelming and painful reality like COVID, forgetting can be useful—even, to a degree, healthy. It allows people to temporarily put aside their fear and distress, and focus on the pleasures and demands of everyday life, which restores a sense of control. That way, their losses do not define them, but instead become manageable.

But consigning painful memories to the River Lethe also has clear drawbacks, especially as the months and years go by. Ignoring such experiences robs one of the opportunity to learn from them. In addition, negating painful memories and trying to proceed as if everything is normal contorts one’s emotional life and results in untoward effects. Researchers and clinicians working with combat veterans have shown how avoiding thinking or talking about an overwhelming and painful event can lead to free-floating sadness and anger, all of which can become attached to present circumstances. 

[…]

Traumatic memories are notable for how they alter the ways people recall the past and consider the future. A recent brain-imaging study showed that when people with a history of trauma were prompted to return to those horrific events, a part of the brain was activated that is normally employed when one thinks about oneself in the present. In other words, the study suggests that the traumatic memory, when retrieved, came forth as if it were being relived during the study. Traumatic memory doesn’t feel like a historical event, but returns in an eternal present, disconnected from its origin, leaving its bearer searching for an explanation. And right on cue, everyday life offers plenty of unpleasant things to blame for those feelings—errant friends, the price of groceries, or the leadership of the country.

There’s more but you get the point. And, it turns out, there’s some political analysis after all:

One remedy is for leaders to encourage remembrance while providing accurate and trustworthy information about both the past and the present. In the early days of the pandemic, President Donald Trump mishandled the crisis and peddled misinformation about COVID. But with 2020 a traumatic blur, Trump seems to have become the beneficiary of our collective amnesia, and Biden the repository for lingering emotional discontent. Some of that misattribution could be addressed by returning to the shattering events of the past four years and remembering what Americans went through. This process of recall is emotionally cathartic, and if it’s done right, it can even help to replace distorted memories with more accurate ones.

President Biden invited the nation to grieve together in 2021, when American death counts reached 500,000, and again in 2022, when they surpassed 1 million. In his 2022 State of the Union address, he rightly acknowledged that “we meet tonight in an America that has lived through two of the hardest years this nation has ever faced,” before urging Americans to “move forward safely.” But in the past two years, he, like almost everyone else, has largely tried to proceed as if everyone is back to normal. Meanwhile, American minds and hearts simply aren’t ready—whether we realize it or not.

Perhaps Biden and his advisers fear that reminding voters of such a dark time would create more trouble for his presidency. And yet, our work leads us to believe that the effect would be exactly the opposite. Rituals of mourning and remembrance help people come together and share in their grief so that they can return more clear-eyed to face daily life. By prompting Americans to remember what we endured together, paradoxically, Biden could help free all of us to more fully experience the present.

Good luck with that.


*I, of course, blame him for his politicization of the virus and poor leadership throughout the crisis. But the economy was going to collapse even if he were a perfectly normal President taking expert advice and making the best decisions he could in the interest of the country.

FILED UNDER: 2024 Election, US Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Trump Salutes Insurrection ‘Hostages’

Creeping authoritarianism? Political suicide? Descent into madness?

· · 29 comments

WaPo (“Trump escalates solidarity with Jan. 6 rioters as his own trials close in“):

Shortly after Donald Trump walked onstage at a recent rally, the voice of an announcer instructed the crowd to rise “for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6th hostages.” Trump saluted, and the loudspeakers blasted a rendition of the national anthem performed by people accused or convicted of crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Trump then kicked off the rally with a promise to help the defendants — a group that includes violent offenders he has glorified as “patriots” and “hostages” and pledged to pardon if he returns to power. “We’re going to be working on that the first day we get into office,” Trump said at the rally this month in Dayton, Ohio.

WSJ (“Trump Kicks Off General Election With Dark Rhetoric, Vows to Help Jan. 6 ‘Hostages’“):

Donald Trump spent the first breaths of his first rally as a general election candidate delivering a highly-charged promise: To help the “hostages” detained for their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol “the first day we get into office.”

“They were unbelievable patriots,” he said, after raising his hand in a salute as a recording played of Jan. 6 defendants singing the national anthem from jail.

My first instinct was that this is just weird. Creepy, even. Even by Trump standards.

But it’s also just dumb for someone ostensibly running for re-election.

WSJ:

At this moment, most presidential candidates would pivot to the middle to expand their support. “At its best, politics is about bringing people into your cause, not turning them away,” Nikki Haley, Trump’s last GOP primary foe, said when she quit the race, just before he clinched the nomination. Instead, Trump has used events in recent days to sling polarizing rhetoric and feed red meat to his base. He has mocked President Biden’s stutter, called some migrants “animals” and said Jewish Democrats hate their religion and Israel.

On the campaign trail—particularly at his Ohio rally last weekend—and on social media, Trump has increasingly focused on the fates of Jan. 6 defendants. The former president has dangled the possibility of pardons in recent years, but now is vowing to take immediate steps if elected.

The renewed focus has caused consternation among some of his advisers. But Trump, who is facing a raft of criminal charges related to the events culminating on that day, has sought to minimize his actions by defending those of his supporters. Trump and his allies say the government has overreached in many of the cases.

They have also rallied around the death of Ashli Babbitt, 35, a protester shot by a Capitol police officer as rioters tried to smash through doors of the Speaker’s Lobby. She has been portrayed as a martyr by the far-right and Trump has attacked the officer who shot her as a coward “who wanted to show how tough he was.”

While many Trump voters align with his view of Jan. 6, the prospect of pardons could repel more moderate Republicans and independent voters Trump will need to win. In a Wall Street Journal poll conducted in late February, 55% of respondents overall were opposed to pardoning some of the people convicted of crimes, while 40% supported it. (Nearly twice as many respondents “strongly” opposed pardons than strongly supported them.) Some 88% of Democrats oppose pardons, while just under a quarter of Republicans do. Among independents, 65% oppose pardons, the Journal poll showed.

Trump needs the votes of hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—of people who dislike him but are dissatisfied with the incumbent President. To the extent they’re paying attention—which, granted, is a huge caveat this far out—this can’t be helpful.

But it’s quite possible that staying out of prison is more top of mind for Trump than being reunited with the Resolute desk.

WaPo:

“Every time there is a big event that is ‘negative Trump lawsuit,’ he’ll do something to distract attention from that,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor at Princeton University who studies the rise and fall of constitutional government. “These outbursts with language that’s just unacceptable in U.S. politics happen when he is under pressure.”

While Trump quickly secured the GOP nomination, defeating his rivals by wide margins in early contests and driving them to withdraw from the race, some Republicans are voicing concerns that his misrepresentations of the Jan. 6 attack and the people involved could weaken him with general election voters.

“It’s not the way that I would talk about it. I was there,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), who endorsed Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) in the primary, said of Jan. 6. “We want to broaden our support, we want to broaden, at least that’s the way I would look at it.” Rounds added that Trump is “probably not going to take my advice.”

In December, Trump said he’d govern as a “dictator” on “Day One” to “close the border” and drill for oil — a remark he went on to repeat, later claiming he was making it in jest. In a March social media post, he added to those two promised first acts that he would also “Free the January 6 Hostages.”

In January, Trump warned of “bedlam” if he lost, and declined to rule out violence by his supporters. In March, he threatened a “bloodbath” after he spoke about promising to enact tariffs. (Allies and his campaign argued he was speaking figuratively about the economy.)

On Friday, Trump on social media promoted a flier for the nightly vigil outside the Washington jail supporting Jan. 6 defendants housed there, led by the mother of slain rioter Ashli Babbitt. Babbitt’s mother, Micki Witthoeft, said at Wednesday’s vigil that Trump called her that day about “setting these guys free when he gets in.” She added, in remarks that were live-streamed online: “He said to pass that on to the guys inside that they’re on his mind, and when he gets in they’ll get out.”

But the more obvious explanation is that the man is just nuts.

WaPo:

Trump opened his first 2024 campaign rally in Waco, Texas, last year, while saluting to the song with Jan. 6 defendants titled “Justice for All.” He routinely plays it on the patio at Mar-a-Lago, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about private interactions. Trump played it at Mar-a-Lago the night he was arraigned last spring in New York. He also saluted to the song at a November 2023 rally in Houston.

At a recent rally in Greensboro, N.C., Trump discussed his legal problems in similar terms to how he has described people charged with or convicted of crimes related to Jan. 6. “I stand before you today not only as your past and hopefully future president, but as a proud political dissident and as a public enemy of a rogue regime,” he said.

“The J6 hostages, I call them because they’re hostages,” he added at the same rally. “They’re put in jail for extended periods of time, for very long periods of time. They’re hostages. You heard them singing. You heard the spirit that they have, the spirit is unbelievable. That song became the number one song.”

The last bit, by the way, is actually true! The song topped the Billboard Digital Song Sales chart last week. It is, alas, an incredibly niche list. It sold some 33,000 downloads, compared to just 10,400 for the runner-up. Presumably, because nobody pays to download individual songs anymore because they can stream any song they want.

Regardless, that boy ain’t right.

FILED UNDER: 2024 Election, US Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Sunday’s Forum

· · 19 comments

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FILED UNDER: Open Forum
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

Privacy and Public Figures

No, I don't feel terrible now.

· · 14 comments

In the wake of Kate Middleton’s revelation that she has cancer, The Atlantic published two columns arguing we should be ashamed of ourselves for speculating about her health.

Helen Lewis (“I Hope You All Feel Terrible Now“):

For many years, the most-complained-about cover of the British satirical magazine Private Eye was the one it published in the week after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997. At the time, many people in Britain were loudly revolted by the tabloid newspapers that had hounded Diana after her divorce from Charles, and by the paparazzi whose quest for profitable pictures of the princess ended in an underpass in Paris.

Under the headline “Media to Blame,” the Eye cover carried a photograph of a crowd outside Buckingham Palace, with three speech bubbles. The first was: “The papers are a disgrace.” The next two said: “Yeah, I couldn’t get one anywhere” and “Borrow mine, it’s got a picture of the car.” People were furious. Sacks of angry, defensive mail arrived for days afterward, and several outlets withdrew the magazine from sale. (I am an Eye contributor, and these events have passed into office legend.) But with the benefit of hindsight, the implication was accurate: Intruding on the private lives of the royals is close to a British tradition. We Britons might have the occasional fit of remorse, but that doesn’t stop us. And now, because of the internet, everyone else can join in too.

That cover instantly sprang to mind when, earlier today, the current Princess of Wales announced that she has cancer. In a video recorded on Wednesday in Windsor, the former Kate Middleton outlined her diagnosis in order to put an end to weeks of speculation, largely incubated online but amplified and echoed by mainstream media outlets, about the state of her health and marriage.

Kate has effectively been bullied into this statement, because the alternative—a wildfire of gossip and conspiracy theories—was worse. So please, let’s not immediately switch into maudlin recriminations about how this happened. It happened because people felt they had the right to know Kate’s private medical information. The culprits may include three staff members at the London hospital that treated her, who have been accused of accessing her medical records, perhaps driven by the same curiosity that has lit up my WhatsApp inbox for weeks. Everyone hates the tabloid papers, until they become them.

[…]

This news will surely make many people feel bad. The massive online guessing game about the reasons for Kate’s invisibility seems far less fun now. Stephen Colbert’s “spilling the tea” monologue, which declared open season on the princess’s marriage, should probably be quietly interred somewhere. The sad simplicity of today’s statement, filmed on a bench with Kate in casual jeans and a striped sweater, certainly gave me pause. She mentioned the difficulty of having to “process” the news, as well as explaining her condition to her three young children in terms they could understand. The reference to the importance of “having William by my side” was pointed, given how much of the speculation has gleefully dwelt on the possibility that she was leaving him or vice versa.

Charlie Warzel (“We’re All Just Fodder“):

It was always going to end this way. The truth about Kate Middleton’s absence is far less funny, whimsical, or salacious than the endless memes and conspiracy theories suggested. In a video recorded and broadcast by the BBC, the princess says she has cancer, and that she had retreated from the public eye to deal with her condition while attempting to shield her children from the spotlight. Instead, she had to contend with the internet giggling about whether she’d had a Brazilian butt lift. 

[…]

In my least charitable moments, I see this toxic dynamic as the lasting legacy of social media—a giant, metrics-infused experiment in connectivity that has had a flattening, pernicious effect. In 2021, I interviewed Elle Hunt, a journalist who’d tweeted an innocuous opinion about horror movies one evening and woke up to find she was trending on Twitter, her feeds choked with thousands of furious replies and threats. When I asked her to describe the experience of becoming Twitter’s main character for the day, she summed it up thusly: “You’re repurposed as fodder for content generation in a way that’s just so dehumanizing.” Three years later, these words resonate even stronger. What Hunt described to me then as “a platform failure,” feels to me now like a learned behavior of the internet, where people, famous and not, are repurposed as fodder for content generation.

The cycle repeats itself endlessly. This afternoon, the memes about Middleton shifted—from jokes about her whereabouts to jokes about how awful it was that everyone had been making fun of a cancer patient. Feeling bad about the memes tweets immediately became a meme unto themselves. Despite the tone shift, the reason for these posts is the same: They’re a way to take a person and repurpose their life for entertainment and engagement. If this sounds exhausting and depressing, it’s because it is.

I pay about as little attention to the British royal family as is possible for someone who consumes as much news as I do. So far as I can tell, I have blogged about Middleton precisely once, a June 2012 post titled “Queen Updates Order of Precedence and Who Must Bow to Whom” rolling my eyes at the silliness of it all.

Regardless, while I obviously wish the 42-year-old mother of three all the best in the face of her diagnosis, I would contend that she has no expectation of privacy in such matters. She’s a bright, college-educated woman who willingly and knowingly married a man in line to be the King of England. She chose life in a fishbowl and the health of a future Queen of England is actually the business of the UK taxpayers who fund her lavish lifestyle.

Even so, there should obviously be limits on the conduct of the press. Chasing their limousines around on motorcycles to obtain photographs is obviously way over the line. Ditto enticing hospital staffers to steal private medical records.

Comics and pundits are in a different category, bound mostly by the ever-changing boundaries of good taste. Suggesting without evidence that a couple is on the verge of breaking up strikes me as on the wrong side of that line.

Still, speculation wouldn’t have been necessary had the palace been more forthcoming. Their public relations team is shockingly bad given how long they’ve been in business.

FILED UNDER: Media, Society, , , , , , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Islamic State Attacks Moscow Concert Venue

Putin ignored warnings from US intelligence.

· · 20 comments

WaPo (“Death toll from Moscow concert attack rises to 115 as more bodies found“):

At least 115 people were killed after gunmen armed with automatic weapons opened fire at a popular concert venue on the outskirts of Moscow and set the concert hall alight, Russia’s Investigative Committee reported Saturday, following U.S. government warnings this month about a “planned terrorist attack” in the Russian capital.

The committee said more bodies were found in the concert hall early on Saturday, adding that the death toll was expected to rise, with 16 of the 107 hospitalized victims in a grave condition and 44 in a serious condition.

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) reported to President Vladimir Putin that all four of the gunmen who attacked the Crocus City Hall concert venue had been arrested early on Saturday, and another seven arrests had been made, according to the Kremlin press service.

The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the Friday night attack, already one of the most deadly in modern Russian history, which left about 140,000 square feet of the venue in Krasnogorsk in flames according to Russia’s emergency services. A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information, told The Washington Post that the United States had “no reason to doubt” the claim from the Islamic State.

CNN (“US had warned Russia ISIS was determined to attack“):

The US warned Moscow that ISIS militants were determined to target Russia in the days before assailants stormed the Crocus City Hall in an attack that killed scores of people, but President Vladimir Putin rejected the advice as “provocative.”

[…]

Experts said the scale of the carnage – some of which was captured in video footage obtained by CNN showing crowds of people cowering behind cushioned seats as gunshots echoed in the vast hall – would be deeply embarrassing for the Russian leader, who had championed a message of national security just a week earlier when winning the country’s stage-managed election.

Not only had Russian intelligence services failed to prevent the attack, they said, but Putin had failed to heed warnings from the United States that extremists were plotting to target Moscow.

Earlier this month, the US embassy in Russia had said it was “monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow,” including concerts, and it warned US citizens to avoid such places.

US National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said the US government had “shared this information with Russian authorities in accordance with its longstanding ‘duty to warn’ policy.”

But in a speech Tuesday, Putin had blasted the American warnings as “provocative,” saying “these actions resemble outright blackmail and the intention to intimidate and destabilize our society.”

That stance came despite Russian authorities having reported several ISIS-related incidents within the past month.

The state-run RIA Novosti reported on March 3 that six ISIS members were killed in a counter-terrorist operation in the Ingush Karabulak; on March 7, it said security services had uncovered and “neutralized” a cell of the banned organization Vilayat Khorasan in the Kaluga region, whose members were planning an attack on a synagogue in Moscow; and on March 20, it said the commander of an ISIS combat group had been detained.

Two sources familiar with the American information said that since November there had been a steady stream of intelligence that ISIS-K – an affiliate of ISIS that is active in Afghanistan and the surrounding region – was determined to attack Russia.

Moscow has intervened tellingly in Syria’s civil war, to the support of President Bashar al-Assad and against ISIS.

ISIS-K “sees Russia as being complicit in activities that regularly oppress Muslims,” Michael Kugelman of the Washington-based Wilson Center said, as quoted by Reuters.

NYT (“Russia has been hit by several major attacks in recent decades.”):

For many Russians, the massacre at a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow on Friday night brought to mind shootings and bombings across the country in recent decades, events that the authorities often described as terrorism.

The authorities linked many of those attacks to Russia’s wars against Chechen separatists in the 1990s and 2000s. Those conflicts helped enable the rise of Vladimir V. Putin, who over his two decades in power has sought to project an image of being tough on terrorism.

In the early 2000s, Chechen militants staged several major terrorist attacks, as Russia waged a second war to defeat a separatist movement in Chechnya. In October 2002, dozens of Chechen gunmen seized a crowded Moscow theater, taking more than 750 people hostage.

The siege lasted for days, until Russian special forces filled the theater with a debilitating gas to incapacitate the gunmen. More than a hundred hostages died as a result of the raid, with most of the deaths attributed to the gas. The Russian government later acknowledged that it had pumped in an aerosol version of fentanyl in its attempt to end the standoff.

In September 2004, Chechen militants swept into a school in Beslan, a city in the North Caucasus, taking more than 1,000 people hostage, including 770 children, and rigging the building with explosives.

Three days after the siege began, Russian security forces armed with tanks, rockets, grenade launchers and other weapons stormed the school, which caught fire as they engaged in gun battles with the Chechen fighters.

More than 330 hostages — including 186 children — died in the battle, leading the European Court of Human Rights to decide over a decade later that the Russian authorities had violated European human rights law in their handling of the siege. The Kremlin rejected the conclusion.

Bombers detonated two explosives at landmark subway stations in Moscow in March 2010, killing at least 38 people. The attack, resembling a subway bombing that killed about 40 people in 2004, revived fears that the Chechen insurgency had not been quelled, and a Chechen militant leader claimed to have ordered the attack.

In 2011, a bomber attacked Moscow’s busiest airport, Domodedovo, killing 37 people. The Russian authorities later said that the bomber was a man from the North Caucasus.

A homemade device filled with shrapnel exploded during rush hour, killing at least 14 people. Officials named the bomber as a member of the Uzbek minority in southern Kyrgyzstan, and said they were investigating whether he had any links to Islamist extremists.

About 600 miles east of Moscow, a gunman attacked a school in the city of Izhevsk, killing 15 people, in what the Kremlin called a terrorist attack.

The authorities said the attacker, who had been armed with two pistols, “was wearing a black top with Nazi symbols and a balaclava” and was not carrying any ID.

There’s not really much to say about the horrific nature of these attacks on civilians.

That the United States is sharing intelligence with the Putin regime, which is labeled an “acute threat” in our national strategy documents, highlights the complexity of international politics. Our relationship with Moscow is decidedly more adversarial than it was with Beijing, even though that regime is our “pacing challenge.” But even adversaries need to communicate and we have both a humanitarian interest in preventing attacks on Russian civilians and a shared security interest in thwarting Islamic extremism.

UPDATE: BBC reports Putin gave a televised speech claiming the four terrorists “tried to hide and moved towards Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them from the Ukrainian side to cross the state border.” Ukrainian officials called the claim “absurd” and “Andriy Yusov, a representative of Ukrainian defence intelligence, told the BBC the area is full of Russian military and security services. Any terrorist fleeing the scene of an attack would have to be ‘stupid or suicidal’ – or want to get caught – to head there, says Yusov.”

This is laughably pathetic but raises concerns that Putin will escalate violence in Ukraine to distract attention from his own failures here.

FILED UNDER: Terrorism, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Congress Passes Budget, Averts Government Shutdown

Five months too late, we're back to the Biden-McCarthy deal.

· · 15 comments

While the attention is rightly on Marjorie Taylor Green’s motion to vacate the Speakership of Mike Johnson, it obscures the fact that Johnson’s crime—like that of Kevin McCarthy before him—was cooperating with Democrats to get a budget passed, keeping the government open. Indeed, as a technical matter, funding expired at midnight but, with a Senate vote looming, President Biden ordered OMB to cease shutdown procedures.

AP (“Senate passes $1.2 trillion funding package in early morning vote, ending threat of partial shutdown“):

The Senate passed a $1.2 trillion package of spending bills in the early morning hours Saturday, a long overdue action nearly six months into the budget year that will push any threats of a government shutdown to the fall. The bill now goes to President Joe Biden to be signed into law.

The vote was 74-24. It came after funding had expired for the agencies at midnight, but the White House sent out a notice shortly after the deadline announcing the Office of Management and Budget had ceased shutdown preparations because there was a high degree of confidence that Congress would pass the legislation and the president would sign it on Saturday.

“Because obligations of federal funds are incurred and tracked on a daily basis, agencies will not shut down and may continue their normal operations,” the White House statement said.

Prospects for a short-term government shutdown had appeared to grow Friday evening after Republicans and Democrats battled over proposed amendments to the bill. Any successful amendments to the bill would have sent the legislation back to the House, which had already left town for a two-week recess.

But shortly before midnight Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced a breakthrough.

“It’s been a very long and difficult day, but we have just reached an agreement to complete the job of funding the government,” Schumer said. “It is good for the country that we have reached this bipartisan deal. It wasn’t easy, but tonight our persistence has been worth it.”

While Congress has already approved money for Veterans Affairs, Interior, Agriculture and other agencies, the bill approved this week is much larger, providing funding for the Defense, Homeland Security and State departments and other aspects of general government.

The House passed the bill Friday morning by a vote of 286-134, narrowly gaining the two-thirds majority needed for approval. More than 70% of the money would go to defense.

The vote tally in the House reflected anger among Republicans over the content of the package and the speed with which it was brought to a vote. House Speaker Mike Johnson brought the measure to the floor even though a majority of Republicans ended up voting against it. He said afterward that the bill “represents the best achievable outcome in a divided government.”

That Congress finally passing a budget—the current fiscal year started last October 1, after all—is considered an achievement rather than a minimal performance standard is a sad reality. But the combination of arcane rules and a fractured Republican Party makes it the new norm.

The vote breakdown showed 101 Republicans voting for the bill and 112 voting against it. Meanwhile, 185 Democrats voted for the bill and 22 against.

Rep. Kay Granger, the Republican chair of the House Appropriations Committee that helped draft the package, stepped down from that role after the vote. She said she would stay on the committee to provide advice and lead as a teacher for colleagues when needed.

Johnson broke up this fiscal year’s spending bills into two parts as House Republicans revolted against what has become an annual practice of asking them to vote for one massive, complex bill called an omnibus with little time to review it or face a shutdown. Johnson viewed that as a breakthrough, saying the two-part process was “an important step in breaking the omnibus muscle memory.”

Still, the latest package was clearly unpopular with most Republicans, who viewed it as containing too few of their policy priorities and as spending too much.

“The bottom line is that this is a complete and utter surrender,” said Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo.

It took lawmakers six months into the current fiscal year to get near the finish line on government funding, the process slowed by conservatives who pushed for more policy mandates and steeper spending cuts than a Democratic-led Senate or White House would consider. The impasse required several short-term, stopgap spending bills to keep agencies funded.

It’s noteworthy that nearly half of House Republicans voted for the bill, as did a majority of Senate Republicans. At this point, the GOP is effectively two, essentially evenly divided, parties.

Roll Call reports, “Twenty-two Republicans voted against the bill, along with Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., who protested the lack of Ukraine aid, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who sought funding for Palestinian aid.” One suspects Bennet and Sanders would have been Yes votes if their protests weren’t merely symbolic.

The obvious political reality is that we have divided government, which by definition demands compromise. Most Congressional Democrats and half of Congressional Republicans seem to understand that.

This, too, is worth highlighting:

“We had to work under very difficult topline numbers and fight off literally hundreds of extreme Republican poison pills from the House, not to mention some unthinkable cuts,” Senate Appropriations Chair Patty Murray, D-Wash., said on the floor ahead of the vote. “But at the end of the day, this is a bill that will keep our country and our families moving forward.”

[…]

Murray touted funding for child care, research for cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, and efforts to combat the opioid crisis included in the bill. She also took aim at House Republicans, who for months resisted the parameters of the deal former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., struck with Biden, eventually ending up with a final result that resembled the original agreement.

“When we do work together, when we put our heads down and focus on solutions, and listen to our constituents, we can find common ground,” Murray said. “But when House Republicans … insisted on partisan poison pills, when they listened to the loudest voices on the far right — who, let’s be real, were never going to vote for any bipartisan funding bill — well, that got us nowhere.”

That’s right, boys and girls: Months of tantrum-throwing and the petulant ouster of the Speaker got the MAGA wing right back to where they would have been last fall. Professional legislators know how to count votes, understanding the limits of what outcomes are possible. Call it the art of the deal.

Amateurs, on the other hand, do this sort of thing:

Still, the legislation faced opposition among some Republicans, critical of the spending levels in the package and wary of its effect on the deficit. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., took the floor ahead of the vote to criticize the measure.

“Congress is poised to do what no American family would ever do. Congress is poised to spend a third more dollars than they receive,” Paul said. “Someone’s going to be asked to pay for it. That’s going to be you. Uncle Sam, Uncle Sucker will be asked to pay for it.”

Paul also took aim at the short turnaround between the bill’s release in the early hours Thursday morning to the final passage vote, saying members lacked adequate time to examine the 1,012-page bill and its more than 1,400 earmarks.

He went after projects like $1 million for Martha’s Vineyard hospital — “in one of the richest ZIP codes in the United States,” Paul said — and $2 million for a kelp and shellfish nursery at the University of Maine.

The notion of holding up a $1.2 trillion package over $3 million (cue Dr. Evil voice) is just laughable. And I guarantee that there is at least that much wasteful spending being funneled to Kentucky. Not to mention that this was primarily a Defense bill, and Fort Knox and Fort Kentucky are in the Bluegrass State.

FILED UNDER: Congress, US Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Saturday’s Forum

· · 15 comments

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FILED UNDER: Open Forum
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

MTG Files Motion To Vacate The Speakership

Its like déjà vu all over again.

· · 25 comments

Less than six months after Republicans forced Kevin McCarthy out as Speaker of The House and elected Mike Johnson as the new Speaker, the Republican party may be about to do the same to Speaker Johnson. Earlier today, frustrated with Johnson’s decision to move forward with a vote on Minibus spending bill, Marjorie Taylor Greene moved forward with a threat to file a motion to again vacate the speakership.

It was not immediately clear how the House would act on her motion, which requires just a majority vote to remove the speaker. Greene, R-Ga., did not file the motion as privileged — which would force a vote within two legislative days — but instead as a regular motion, which could be referred to a committee, where it would likely languish.

Greene told reporters that the motion to vacate was “more of a warning than a pink slip,” saying she does not want to “throw the House into chaos,” like the three and a half weeks that the chamber was without a speaker when McCarthy was ousted.

“I’m not saying that it won’t happen in two weeks or it won’t happen in a month or who knows when. But I am saying the clock has started. It’s time for our conference to choose a new speaker,” she said.

source: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/rep-marjorie-taylor-greene-files-motion-oust-mike-johnson-house-speake-rcna134385

As coverage notes, MTG’s decision to file this as a regular motion just as the House leaves for recess makes the situation a little less urgent for Speaker Johnson. However, as John Bresnahan from Punchbowl news notes, the Speaker is not at all out of the woods:

Speaker Johnson faces a different set of circumstances than John Boehner did in the fall of 2015. As such, it’s unlikely that Johnson would resign. As a reminder, in 2015 it required multiple members to advance a motion to vacate. That changed in 2024 when McCarthy agreed to update the rules so that a single member could make a motion to vacate in return for getting the Speakership. It was that rules change that ultimately undid McCarthy.

So are we about to see a repeat of last fall? Probably not. CBS’s Scott MacFarlane is reporting that whereas McCarthy had alienated Democrats to the degree that they wouldn’t save him from his own caucus, the members of the opposition party are open to keeping Johnson as Speaker:

This puts Speaker Johnson in a challenging position. If he advances any Ukraine or Border package from the Senate, he will definitely face more motions to vacate from the right wing of his party (not to mention from his party’s Presidential candidate). However, if he loses the support of the Democrats, he will lose the Speakership, and we are back to the three weeks of disarray (if not longer) from last fall as the Presidential Election looms large. That inaction could also lead to a government shutdown.

What happens next? Who knows. There’s a lot of time between now and Tuesday, April 9th when the House returns from Easter break.

FILED UNDER: 2024 Election, Congress, US Politics, , , , , , , ,
Matt Bernius
About Matt Bernius
Matt Bernius is a design researcher working to create more equitable government systems and experiences. He's currently a Principal User Researcher on Code for America's "GetCalFresh" program, helping people apply for SNAP food benefits in California. Prior to joining CfA, he worked at Measures for Justice and at Effective, a UX agency. Matt has an MA from the University of Chicago.

DOJ Suing Apple for Monopolistic Practices

Anticompetitive practices in one of the most competitive of markets.

· · 15 comments

AP (“Justice Department sues Apple, alleging it illegally monopolized the smartphone market“):

The Justice Department on Thursday announced a sweeping antitrust lawsuit against Apple, accusing the tech giant of engineering an illegal monopoly in smartphones that boxes out competitors, stifles innovation and keeps prices artificially high.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in New Jersey, alleges that Apple has monopoly power in the smartphone market and leverages control over the iPhone to “engage in a broad, sustained, and illegal course of conduct.”

“Apple has locked its consumers into the iPhone while locking its competitors out of the market,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. Stalling the advancement of the very market it revolutionized, she said, it has “smothered an entire industry.”

Apple called the lawsuit “wrong on the facts and the law” and said it “will vigorously defend against it.”

The suit takes aim at how Apple allegedly molds its technology and business relationships to “extract more money from consumers, developers, content creators, artists, publishers, small businesses, and merchants, among others.”

That includes diminishing the functionality of non-Apple smartwatches, limiting access to contactless payment for third-party digital wallets and refusing to allow its iMessage app to exchange encrypted messaging with competing platforms.

It specifically seeks to stop Apple from undermining technologies that compete with its own apps — in areas including streaming, messaging and digital payments — and prevent it from continuing to craft contracts with developers, accessory makers and consumers that let it “obtain, maintain, extend or entrench a monopoly.”

The lawsuit — filed with 16 state attorneys general — is just the latest example of aggressive antitrust enforcement by an administration that has also taken on Google, Amazon and other tech giants with the stated aim of making the digital universe more fair, innovative and competitive.

“The Department of Justice has an enduring legacy taking on the biggest and toughest monopolies in history,” said Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, head of the antitrust division, at a press conference announcing the lawsuit. “Today we stand here once again to promote competition and innovation for next generation of technology.”

Antitrust researcher Dina Srinavasan, a Yale University fellow, compared the lawsuit’s significance to the government’s action against Microsoft a quarter century ago — picking a “tremendous fight” with what has been the world’s most prosperous company.

[…]

The case seeks to pierce the digital fortress that Apple Inc., based in Cupertino, California, has assiduously built around the iPhone and other popular products such as the iPad, Mac and Apple Watch to create what is often referred to as a “walled garden” so its hardware and software can seamlessly offer user-friendly harmony.

The strategy has helped Apple attain an annual revenue of nearly $400 billion and, until recently, a market value of more than $3 trillion. But Apple’s shares have fallen by 7% this year even as most of the stock market has climbed to new highs, resulting in long-time rival Microsoft seizing the mantle as the world’s most valuable company.

Apple said the lawsuit, if successful, would “hinder our ability to create the kind of technology people expect from Apple — where hardware, software, and services intersect” and would “set a dangerous precedent, empowering government to take a heavy hand in designing people’s technology.”

“At Apple, we innovate every day to make technology people love — designing products that work seamlessly together, protect people’s privacy and security, and create a magical experience for our users,” the company said in a statement. “This lawsuit threatens who we are and the principles that set Apple products apart in fiercely competitive markets.

Apple has defended the walled garden as an indispensable feature prized by consumers who want the best protection available for their personal information. It has described the barrier as a way for the iPhone to distinguish itself from devices running on Google’s Android software, which isn’t as restrictive and is licensed to a wide range of manufacturers.

“Apple claims to be a champion of protecting user data, but its app store fee structure and partnership with Google search erode privacy,” Consumer Reports senior researcher Sumit Sharma said in a statement.

The lawsuit complains that Apple charges as much as $1,599 for an iPhone and that the high margins it earns on each is more than double what others in the industry get. And when users run an internet search, Google gives Apple a “significant cut” of the advertising revenue those searches generate.

The company’s app store also charges developers up to 30 percent of the app’s price for consumers.

Critics of Apple’s alleged anticompetitive practices have long complained that its claim to prioritize user privacy is hypocritical when profits are at stake. While its iMessage services is sheathed from prying eyes by end-to-end encryption, that protection evaporates the moment someone texts a non-Apple device.

But Will Strafach, a mobile security expert, said that while he believes Apple needs reigning in, he’s concerned that the Justice Department’s focus on messaging may be misplaced and could weaken security and privacy.

“I am quite glad that access to SMS messages is restricted,” said Strafach, creator of the Guardian Firewall app.

He notes that a number of apps, ostensibly for weather and news, on iPhones have secretly and persistently sent users’ GPS data to third parties. Strafach said he is concerned weakened Apple security “could open the door to stalkerware/spouseware, which is already more difficult to install on Apple devices compared to Android.”

However, prominent critic Cory Doctorow has complained that while Apple has blocked entities like Facebook from spying on its users it runs its “own surveillance advertising empire” that gathers the same kinds of personal data but for its own use.

“Apple has a history of clandestine deals with surveillance giants like Google, and (CEO) Tim Cook gave Uber a slap on the wrist instead of an app store ban when (the ride-sharing company) built a backdoor to spy on iPhone users who had already deleted Uber’s app,” noted Sean O’Brien, founder of Yale’s Privacy Lab.

On its face, the notion that Apple, whose share of the wildly competitive global smartphone market fluctuates considerably from quarter to quarter, has monopoly power is absurd. Indeed, the past quarter was one of only two in the last eight where it outsold Samsung.

Within the US, though, Apple is indeed the dominant player:

The fact that they charge a premium for their products would seem to give competitors a huge advantage. Even though I’ve been in the Apple ecosystem for fourteen years now—indeed, the whole family is on iPhones—I’d definitely consider switching to a Google or Samsung phone if they were radically cheaper. It turns out, they’re not.

The so-called “walled garden” has long struck me as a feature, not a bug. Various applications working seamlessly between my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook is a huge bonus of being in their ecosystem.

At the same time, it’s clear that Apple engages in some anti-competitive practices.

The Verge‘s Victoria Song (“US v. Apple: everything you need to know“):

The DOJ alleges that Apple blocks “super” apps, suppresses mobile cloud streaming services, blocks cross-platform messaging apps, limits third-party digital wallets, and even limits how well third-party smartwatches work on its platforms.

[…]

The DOJ complaint, which was joined by attorneys general and district attorneys from 16 other states, alleges that “Apple undermines apps, products, and services that would otherwise make users less reliant on the iPhone, promote interoperability, and lower costs for consumers and developers.”

Buried in the 88-page antitrust lawsuit filed by the US Department of Justice against Apple is a reference to everyone’s favorite phone-projection system, CarPlay.

The DOJ says that, like smartphones, vehicle infotainment systems have become a new way in which Apple exhibits anticompetitive behavior to harm consumers as well as its competitors.

It’s no secret that Apple products work best if you stick with an iPhone. It turns out that’s a big reason why Apple landed in hot water today with the US Department of Justice, which alleges that the company went too far in locking down messaging, smartwatches, and digital wallets to intentionally hobble its rivals.

This won’t be a surprise to most consumers. We’ve all known for years about green bubbles and that you can’t bring your Apple Watch to an Android phone. What the DOJ is saying is that, altogether, this series of protective policies makes it extremely difficult for an iPhone user to leave its walled garden, limiting competition so much that it breaks the law.

I’m skeptical of some of these claims. “Lock-in” is a natural feature of many technology products.

For example, I’ve had multiple Fitbit devices over the last dozen or so years. Switching to a different fitness tracker would mean having to start fresh, as I could no longer easily compare today’s activities with those from previous days, months, and years. (And, it’s worth noting that I’ve had iPhones somewhat longer than Fitbits and the latter’s app works perfectly well on the former, even though Apple Watch has been a thing most of that time.)

It’s why, even though people hate what Elon Musk has done to the place, so many people remain on Twitter. I’ve dabbled on Bluesky, which is intentionally a Twitter clone, but it doesn’t have anything like the user base, making it exponentially less useful.

WaPo’s Shira Ovide (“Why is the government suing Apple? Look at your iPhone’s restrictions.“) adds:

The government’s charges against Apple will probably face a high legal bar in court, if the lawsuit makes it that far.

Apple said it would “vigorously” contest the lawsuit. A victory for the plaintiffs “would hinder our ability to create the kind of technology people expect from Apple,” the company said.

If you have an iPhone, you can see for yourself the heart of the government’s allegations.

The Justice Department says Apple limits choices with apps, text messaging, the ability to tap phones to buy lunch and options for seamlessly using a Garmin or Samsung smartwatch with an iPhone.

I assume this to be true but, again, my Fitbits over the years have worked seamlessly with iPhone, both before and after they were bought out by Google.

If you use an iPhone, you’re subject to several limitations pointed out in the government’s lawsuit, including:

You can’t send secure iMessages to someone with an Android phone

If you have an iPhone and text a buddy with an Android phone, each of your phone companies gets a copy of that message — and it’s less secure from hackers.

If you text a video to your Android friend, it probably looks compressed or garbled on their end. You don’t get an indication that your buddy read your text, as you would if he had an iPhone.

If you have a Windows computer, you can’t easily read your iMessage chats on your PC as you can on a Mac.

Honestly, until I bought a Macbook a year and a half ago, it would never even have occurred to me that I could see messages on my PC. So far as I know, I couldn’t do so when I had a BlackBerry, either.

You can’t try some potentially useful apps

Imagine downloading one app that lets you play a bunch of games such as “Candy Crush” and “World of Warcraft.”

Xbox made an iPhone app like that several years ago, but Apple never let you try it. Instead you generally must download and pay for each game app separately.

The Justice Department said that Apple’s decision to block those kinds of apps within apps stops you from trying potentially innovative products. The government lawsuit essentially compared it with Netflix only letting you watch one movie rather than giving you access to a bunch of programming.

Apple said in January that it would start to permit apps within other apps, although it’s not clear yet how that might work in practice.

This is clearly about Apple getting its cut rather than about app functionality. The “innovation” is Microsoft only paying one fee to Apple.

You can’t tap to pay with anything other than Apple Pay

In the United States, Apple restricts access to the technology on your iPhone that lets you hover your phone near a payment register to pay for groceries, a subway fare or a cup of coffee.

That’s partly to keep your phone secure, but it also steers all your tap-to-pay purchases through its own Apple Pay service, letting the company collect a fee every time. Even if you wanted, you can’t pay instead with PayPal, the Cash app, Venmo or other payment services.

In its lawsuit, the Justice Department said that Apple “exerts its smartphone monopoly” to stop financial companies from “developing better payment products and services for iPhone users.”

After the European Union recently passed a law that forces Apple to allow access to its tap-to-pay features, PayPal told its investors that it planned to make its payment service available for tap-to-pay on iPhones.

I honestly don’t have a strong feeling about this one way or the other but I’m not sure why Apple should be required to offer up a competitor’s payment system on its phones or vice-versa.

CNN’s David Goldman (“Green bubbles, Apple Pay and other reasons why America says Apple is breaking the law“) emphasizes what has always struck me as the silliest complaint:

“Buy your mom an iPhone.”

That was Apple CEO Tim Cook’s famous response at Vox’s 2022 Code Conference, when a reporter complained that her mother couldn’t see the videos she texted to her mom’s Android phone because they were grainy and slow.

It’s also a quip that US Attorney General Merrick Garland quoted – and sharply criticized – Thursday at a press conference announcing the Justice Department’s landmark antitrust lawsuit against Apple, in which the Biden administration and 16 states allege Apple is illegally abusing the iPhone’s monopoly power in the smartphone market.

[…]

With iMessage, Apple created an enhanced text messaging service that allows people to seamlessly communicate with one another, sending rich text, high-quality video and audio that uploads almost instantly – as long as it’s sent to another iPhone customer.

When those messages get sent to people with Android phones, they appear grainy, they can be slow to load, and they can miss out on key features like emoji responses, editing functionality and end-to-end encryption. The dreaded “green bubbles” that mark Android users within iMessage – and particularly the lower-quality performance – are illegal, the Justice Department alleges.

“As any iPhone user who has ever seen a green text message, or received a tiny, grainy video can attest — Apple’s anticompetitive conduct also includes making it more difficult for iPhone users to message with users of non-Apple products,” Garland said on Thursday. “As a result, iPhone users perceive rival smartphones as being lower quality because the experience of messaging friends and family who do not own iPhones is worse — even though Apple is the one responsible for breaking cross-platform messaging. And it does so intentionally.”

I routinely text and receive photos and such from non-iPhone users. The easiest way to do that is with a third-party tool like WhatsApp—which I’ve had on my iPhone for years.

LAT’s Wendy Lee (“What the DOJ’s antitrust suit against Apple means for everyone with an iPhone“) adds:

Unlike Google’s Android operating system, which runs on Google phones as well as other devices such as Samsung’s, Apple products operate only through its own software, iOS. The only way that third-party developers can get their app onto Apple’s App Store is by following the iPhone maker’s rules. If they don’t, they risk losing out on millions of customers.

Again, I don’t see why this is a problem. The company’s entire model has been the walled garden approach that curates the user experience. If I wanted to use Android, I would buy one of the many phones that allow me to do that. The iPhone and iOS are synonyous.

“This is signaling that Apple is going to have to bring its prices for other apps down,” [Jamie Court, president of L.A.-based nonprofit Consumer Watchdog] said. “It’s going to have to open its payment systems to other providers and it’s going to have to make sure that people who use other devices have basically a comparable access to convenience and service.”

We shall see, I guess. But, again, it’s not remotely obvious why Apple should be forced to offer competing products on its device. If customers don’t like that, they can buy one of dozens of other products on the market—and tens of millions do just that.

Critics say that Apple abuses its position as a gatekeeper for the App Store, launching similar Apple products that directly compete against rivals and put them at a disadvantage.

For example, Apple released its own streaming music service, Apple Music, which competes directly with Spotify. Apple foes say that the company has a competitive advantage because it not only owns the iPhone but also controls the software system and App Store. Apple also controls which apps are pre-installed on its iPhones.

Even though I once used a music service that eventually became Apple Music, I’ve been using other services (mostly Amazon’s Prime Music and Google’s YouTube Music) on my iPhone for going on a decade now. My wife has long been using Spotify on hers. The five kids use some combination of those apps. None of us are using Apple Music. It’s just not that hard to download an app.

The irony of these suits is that, regardless of how big a Microsoft or an Apple or an Amazon are, they’re ants compared to the power of the United States Government. Having the full weight of the Justice Department against them essentially forces the companies to settle rather than spend years leaking money and having their future clouded by the prospect of a massive judgment.

FILED UNDER: Economics and Business, Law and the Courts, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Seizing Trump Assets Not That Easy

Most of the things with his name on them are not in his name.

· · 89 comments

TNR’s Tori Otten gleefully reports, “Letitia James Is Prepared to Seize One of Trump’s Favorite Assets.”

Donald Trump has just days left to post the nearly half-billion-dollar bond in his New York civil fraud case before the state attorney general can start seizing his assets, and Letitia James seems to know exactly where she wants to start: Westchester.

Trump was fined $354 million in mid-February for committing real estate–related fraud in New York. With interest adding $112,000 per day, and adding the fines his adult sons also face, the total sum has already exceeded $464 million. James formally registered the judgment in Westchester County on March 6, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

James’s filing did not give a reason for the registration, nor did it specify which of Trump’s Westchester assets she intends to seize, but the registration will make it easier for James to secure liens. Westchester is home to two of Trump’s most valuable properties, the Trump National Golf Club Westchester and Seven Springs, a mostly undeveloped 212-acre estate.

CNN’s Kara Scannell goes more straight news with “New York Attorney General takes initial step to prepare to seize Trump assets.”

The New York attorney general’s office has filed judgments in Westchester County, the first indication that the state is preparing to try to seize Donald Trump’s golf course and private estate north of Manhattan, known as Seven Springs.

Alas, trying and succeeding are not the same thing:

Entering a judgment would be the first step a creditor would take to attempt to recover property. Additional steps, such as putting liens on assets or moving to foreclose on properties, or taking other actions in court would follow, if the asset is going to be seized.

[…]

The process to seize assets would not be quick or easy. Trump has structured his business by setting up limited liability companies for nearly every property or asset – over 300 in total – which ultimately are controlled by his trust.

“They are complexly organized and he is not on paper the owner and therefore a judgment against him would not be executable directly against certain properties. Sorting this out is not going to be simple and it’s not going to be quick,” said Nikos Passas, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Northeastern University.

So, James is unlikely to be able to seize anything any time soon. Still:

“In the meantime, she could also obtain bank levies and go after the bank assets. She could put liens on properties. There are all kinds of things that she’s able to do in an effort to collect,” Passas said.

“All this is completely undermining the brand, which he uses for the most part for making any kind of money around the world not just the United States,” Passas said. “In the end I think this could very much mean the end of Trump business in New York and not only – it could spell trouble in other jurisdictions too.”

With any other person, having built one’s reputation as a highly successful businessman only to be proven to be a con man unable even to secure a bond for the appeal would be catastrophic. Trump’s fans constantly seem able to shrug off such details.

FILED UNDER: Law and the Courts, US Politics, , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

A Photo for Friday

"Floating in the Clouds"

· · 5 comments

Floating in the Clouds
“Floating in the Clouds”

March 2, 2024

Pike Road, AL

FILED UNDER: Photo for Friday, Photography
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

Friday’s Forum

· · 50 comments

OTB relies on its readers to support it. Please consider helping by becoming a monthly contributor through Patreon or making a one-time contribution via PayPal. Thanks for your consideration.

FILED UNDER: Open Forum
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

Real Estate Revolution?

A century-old cartel has been broken.

· · 13 comments

The free high-resolution photo of architecture, house, window, roof, building, home, suburb, cottage, facade, property, garage, lights, windows, farmhouse, estate, siding, neighbourhood, real estate, family house, front yard, residential area , taken with an Canon EOS 5D Mark II 03/17 2017 The picture taken with 65.0mm, f/6.3s, 1/13s, ISO 800 The image is released free of copyrights under Creative Commons CC0.
CC0 Public Domain image from PxHere

Yesterday’s episode of The Daily, “The Bombshell Case That Will Transform the Housing Market,” featured an interview with NYT real estate reporter Debra Kamin based in part on a report she filed last with with Rukmini Callimachi headlined “Five Ways Buying and Selling a House Could Change.”

settlement reached this week threatens to strike a blow to an established standard of residential real estate: the 6 percent sales commission. It also will change who pays it. The deal, reached after a yearslong court battle initially brought by a group of home sellers in Missouri, calls for the powerful National Association of Realtors, which has long regulated the way U.S. homes are sold, to amend its rules on how Realtors for sellers and buyers are compensated.

In most real estate transactions in the United States, both the seller and buyer have an agent representing them. For decades, there’s been a standard for paying these agents: a commission of between 5 and 6 percent of the home’s sale price, covered by the seller and split between the two agents.

Commission rates are significantly lower in many other countries. In Britain, they are just above 1 percent, while in Singapore, the Netherlands and Denmark, they hover between 2 and 3 percent, according to a study by the investment firm Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. The homeowners who sued in federal court in Missouri said that N.A.R., through its rules on agent compensation, conspired to artificially inflate the commissions paid to real estate agents.

Now those rules are set to change as early as July, pending court approval of the settlement that includes N.A.R.’s agreement to pay $418 million in damages.

I had, of course, read about the settlement when it came out but, as I’m not likely to buy or sell a house any time soon, hadn’t given it a whole lot more thought.

My longstanding view, both as one who has bought and sold multiple houses and one who has read Freakonomics and other treatments of the issue, is that the real estate market is essentially a criminal enterprise. It’s rather obviously a cartel because of the way the Multiple Listing Service works. Paying a commission on the gross proceeds of a sale—and having no realistic alternative—amounts to extortion.

Most importantly, in my view, is that, while “Realtors” represent themselves as fiduciaries, they’re essentially scam artists whose interests are wildly misaligned with that of their ostensible client. Given that their commission is based on the gross, not the net, they are incentivized to price the house to sell quickly, minimizing their work. An extra $10,000 in their client’s pocket is, after all, only $300 in theirs, since the 6% commission is split both ways. (Indeed, it’s less than that, since they usually have to pay part of their earnings to the firm.) Further, information given to them in confidence will surely be given to the other party since, again, their incentive is to make as many sales as possible with as little time investment as possible. And don’t even get me started on their recommendations for home inspectors and the like.

So, I very much welcome the judgment in Missouri and the broader capitulation by the NAR. Indeed, the $418 million settlement strikes me as a pittance compared to how much their cartel distorted the market.

Kamin argues that not only will commissions to real estate agents go down with open competition but that owing to buyers no longer needing to fork over such a huge chunk of the selling price for their services, they will be able to lower the selling price of homes. She likens this to the end of the travel agent monopoly on vacation planning brought on by the advent of online price-searching tools.

That sort of transformation was already underway even before the settlement. When I bought my previous houses (in 1997, 2003, and 2007), I was totally at the mercy of the real estate agent in looking. In 1997, the only information was newspaper ads and the like and, in 2003 and 2007, Internet searchability was only slightly above the classified ad level. When shopping for the current house in 2019, I had panoramic views and all manner of detailed information via Redfin, Zillow, and the like. The only reason I needed an agent at all was to get access to the houses I identified as possibles.

Still, there are a large number of people who make a pretty decent living as listing and selling agents. Presumably, the only ones willing to take a major haircut are those with no other options.

We used a Redfin agent when buying and selling our previous home. Because our needs were unusual (5 bedrooms plus two additional spaces suitable for home offices; parking for at least 3 and preferably 4 vehicles; good schools at both the elementary and secondary level; etc.) my wife and I looked at a lot of houses over a span of two or three months. Like, in the neighborhood of 50 of them. For the most part, I was able to group these into chunks or 3 to 5 per visit but, still, that’s a lot of visits. That’s an investment well worth making with a payout of 3% of a million-dollar house at the end of the rainbow. If not, are they going to want to be paid per visit? Per hour?

Does the model simply change entirely? If buyer’s and seller’s agents aren’t splitting a commission, the incentives for shady conduct mostly go away. But what will the new system be and what incentives will it create?

FILED UNDER: Economics and Business, , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Trump’s Fundraising Plan

Millions of fools and their money may soon be parted.

· · 38 comments

Two somewhat related reports via Taegan Goddard.

Rolling Stone (“Trump Is Now Fundraising Off His Inability to Pay Fraud Bond“):

ONCE UPON A time, long before he set his sights on the White House, Donald Trump leveraged his massive real estate empire into a braggadocious reality TV show called The Apprentice. The show’s bombastic theme song sang “money, money, money, money,” at viewers over shots of Trump’s New York properties, private planes, and helicopters. Now, two decades after the show first premiered, the former president is begging his followers to fork over cash in order to preserve the assets on which he built his throne.

“KEEP YOUR FILTHY HANDS OFF TRUMP TOWER!” Trump’s campaign screamed in a text message sent out Wednesday morning to potential donors. “Insane radical Democrat AG Letitia James wants to SEIZE my properties in New York. THIS INCLUDES THE ICONIC TRUMP TOWER!” Trump added in a memo linked in the text message.

“Before the day is over, I’m calling on ONE MILLION Pro-Trump patriots to chip in and say: STOP THE WITCH HUNT AGAINST PRESIDENT TRUMP!” the donation page read.

On Monday, the former president’s attorneys revealed that they had been unable to secure a bond backer to guarantee the nearly half a billion dollars he would need to submit an appeal on a massive New York civil fraud ruling against him and his company. Last month, Trump was ordered to pay $355 million in damages to the state of New York and barred “from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation or other legal entity in New York for a period of three years,” after being found liable for defrauding investors and the state through his real estate holdings.

Trump is livid — ot only because he was rejected by 30 different underwriters, but because unless he comes up with the money by Monday, the state could begin seizing his assets to collect payment.

“If he does not have funds to pay off the judgment, then we will seek judgment enforcement mechanisms in court, and we will ask the judge to seize his assets,” New York Attorney General Letitia James told ABC News last month.

WSJ (“Trump Is in Line for a $3.5 Billion Windfall From Stake in Truth Social“):

Donald Trump’s supporters are pushing to hand him a nearly $3.5 billion windfall by driving up the value of his also-ran social-media platform, which is on the cusp of getting approval to list on the stock market.

Trump’s winning lottery ticket would come from Truth Social, the social-media platform he launched in 2021. After a twisted path that included tens of millions of dollars in losses and insider-trading convictions, the shell company taking Truth Social public became the market’s latest meme stock. Trump’s supporters banded together to push up the stock, valuing Truth Social to a staggering $6 billion.

Truth Social could go public as soon as next week, but the deal still needs to be approved by shareholders. Even if that happens, Trump must hold his shares for six months.

Truth Social was created by Trump when he was bounced from the major social-media platforms. Since the presidential candidate was reinstated by Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter, Truth Social has instead become a potential huge paycheck.

Truth Social’s parent is set to go public by combining with a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. Its shareholders, nearly all Trump supporters, are expected to approve the merger Friday morning. Trump’s company could replace the shell company in the stock market as soon as Monday. The new ticker would be DJT, Trump’s initials.

If the deal goes through, Trump’s $3.5 billion windfall could ease his financial pressure and boost his political campaign.

Given that Trump needs to post $454 million in less than a week, I’m skeptical he’ll be able to fundraise it in time. One imagines his enthusiasts are getting tapped out by this point. Indeed, he reportedly only took in $39.3 million in all of February and his campaign only has $74.4 million cash on hand.

A massive windfall from Truth Social would certainly help him out considerably but not in time. Further, I’m skeptical that the fake valuation will come to fruition. Who are these people willing to invest that kind of money to buy a near-worthless social media outfit?

FILED UNDER: US Politics, , , , , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Thursday’s Forum

· · 39 comments

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FILED UNDER: Open Forum
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

Is Trump Even Running for President?

A familiar question is again a reasonable one.

· · 40 comments

Former Obama strategist and current podcaster Dan Pfeiffer asks, “Is Trump Cracking Under the Pressure of the Election?

Donald Trump made it through the Republican primary largely unscathed. He never had to get on a debate stage or adopt a position to outflank a rival. Primaries are usually messy, and the winners often emerge battered, bruised, and broken. Trump floated above the process, and his rivals’ impotence made him look strong by comparison.

The dynamic was interesting. Trump used his MAGA schtick to lock down his base without catching the attention of the broader electorate. He mostly communicated through MAGA-friendly media; so even when he made a mistake, it never traveled outside the MAGA media bubble. There was a sense that Trump had become a better, more disciplined candidate than in his two prior campaigns. Trump did show up to big moments like that CNN town hall better prepared and with a semblance of a strategy. On the campaign trail, he followed the script a little more and didn’t step on his message of the day. In other words, he behaved more like a typical candidate and less like a raving lunatic driven by an underlying urge to sabotage himself.

These small improvements in his performance were worrisome.

However, since the General Election kicked off almost two weeks ago, Trump has returned to his old, chaotic, self-destructive ways. After securing the delegates as the presumptive nominee, Trump has made critical errors daily. He can’t seem to stop saying insane, deeply politically damaging stuff. 

This is followed by a bulleted, hyperlinked laundry list of insane stuff that OTB readers have likely seen and probably isn’t actually all that politically damaging given Trump’s history.

Pfeiffer continues,

Is the old Trump back? Did the ivermectin wear off? Or is he cracking under the pressure and scrutiny of a general election?

Well, Trump didn’t change. He is just as unhinged as ever, but now people are paying more attention. Trump is cracking under the intense scrutiny of the General Election.

Longtime progressive journalist Brian Beutler actually goes further, arguing “Donald Trump Isn’t Running A Presidential Campaign.”

Every now and again it’s fun to hold the unfiltered public comments of normal politicians up against the Donald Trump’s ravings on social media. “Merry Christmas” vs “Haters and Losers” etc.  

If you try that this week, you’ll find Trump completely unmoored from the calendar or any national circumstance. No good tidings for St. Patrick’s Day, no particular interest in federal policy. Trump’s mind has been neatly divided between his hallmark agitprop and unrelenting obsession with evading the nearly half-billion fine he owes the state of New York for serial business fraud. 

When you pan out even further it becomes clear: Trump is scarcely running a presidential campaign. He might become president in spite of this, but his efforts are overwhelmingly fixed on evading justice or mooting judgments he’s already lost by any means necessary. He’d ideally like to prevail in these efforts before the election, but the task will become much easier if he’s able to win or steal the presidency despite the legal peril.  

Granting that there’s some motivated reasoning going on here, they’re not wrong that Trump has seemed erratic and unfocused even by his standards. Then again, he was pretty damned erratic and unfocused in 2016 and managed to win the damn thing. Indeed, he didn’t run anything resembling a normal campaign then, either.

Like it or not—and I decidedly don’t—Trump saying outrageous, nasty, crazy things has long since become part of his brand. Supporters seem to actually like it and goodly number of Republicans who don’t like it have been willing to look past it, seeing Democratic policies as the greater evil.

I would like to see the bubble burst this time. But I’m going to need to see his standing in the polls drop before getting to excited about the prospect.

FILED UNDER: 2024 Election, US Politics, , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Afghanistan Blame Game

Congressional Republicans are reminding voters of a dark hour in the Biden presidency.

· · 44 comments

Tara Copp for AP (“Top former US generals say failures of Biden administration in planning drove chaotic fall of Kabul“):

The top two U.S. generals who oversaw the evacuation of Afghanistan as it fell to the Taliban in August 2021 blamed the Biden administration for the chaotic departure, telling lawmakers Tuesday that it inadequately planned for the evacuation and did not order it in time.

The rare testimony by former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley and U.S. Central Command retired Gen. Frank McKenzie publicly exposed for the first time the strain and differences the military leaders had with the Biden administration in the final days of the war. Two of those key differences included that the military had advised that the U.S. keep at least 2,500 service members in Afghanistan to maintain stability and a concern that the State Department was not moving fast enough to get an evacuation started.

The remarks also contrasted with an internal White House review of the administration’s decisions which found that President Joe Biden’s decisions had been “severely constrained” by previous withdrawal agreements negotiated by former President Donald Trump and blamed the military, saying top commanders said they had enough resources to handle the evacuation.

Thirteen U.S. service members were killed by a suicide bomber at the Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate in the final days of the war, as the Taliban took over Afghanistan.

Thousands of panicked Afghans and U.S. citizens desperately tried to get on U.S. military flights that were airlifting people out. In the end the military was able to rescue more than 130,000 civilians before the final U.S. military aircraft departed.

That chaos was the end result of the State Department failing to call for an evacuation of U.S. personnel until it was too late, Milley and McKenzie told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

“On 14 August the non-combatant evacuation operation decision was made by the Department of State and the U.S. military alerted, marshalled, mobilized and rapidly deployed faster than any military in the world could ever do,” Milley said.

But the State Department’s decision came too late, Milley said.

“The fundamental mistake, the fundamental flaw was the timing of the State Department,” Milley said. “That was too slow and too late.”

In a lengthy statement late Tuesday, the National Security Council took issue with the generals’ remarks, saying that Biden’s hard decision was the right thing to do and part of his commitment to get the U.S. out of America’s longest war.

The president “was not going to send another generation of troops to fight and die in a conflict that had no end in sight,” the NSC said. “We have also demonstrated that we do not need a permanent troop presence on the ground in harm’s way to remain vigilant against terrorism threats.”

Dan Lamothe, Abigail Hauslohner and Leigh Ann Caldwell for WaPo (“Republicans continue to hammer Biden for Afghan exit“):

The top two generals who oversaw the deadly evacuation of Afghanistan faced renewed scrutiny Tuesday as House Republicans escalated their campaign to hold President Biden accountable for the fiasco and Democrats accused Donald Trump of setting the conditions for the Kabul government’s collapse.

Retired Gens. Mark A. Milley and Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, career military officers who served in senior roles under both presidents, testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee as part of its oversight investigation of the United States’ calamitous exit, in August 2021, from a 20-year war.

McKenzie said that although the Pentagon had developed a plan to withdraw all U.S. troops, diplomats, citizens and at-risk Afghan partners months before the Taliban’s return to power, Biden instead decided to leave open the U.S. Embassy and withdraw all but a few hundred military personnel — ultimately leaving tens of thousands in harm’s way.

“I think the fundamental mistake — the fundamental flaw — was the timing of the State Department call” for evacuation, Milley said. “I think that was too slow and too late, and that then caused the series of events that result in the very last couple of days.”

The recurring political spotlight on the conflict’s closing days, marked by scenes of gruesome violence and desperation, has forced Democrats to confront a dark moment during Biden’s tenure as president while he campaigns against his predecessor for a second term as commander in chief.

Many Democratic lawmakers have joined their Republican colleagues in criticizing the administration’s handling of the withdrawal. But with the anticipated election rematch between Trump and Biden months away, they face pressure to defend his position that it was Trump in 2020 who boxed in Biden by accepting a deal with the Taliban that put few conditions on a U.S. departure the following year.

Throughout the hearing, both sides took turns trying to demonstrate their respect for the generals while prodding them to acknowledge the other party’s president as the person ultimately responsible for the evacuation fiasco.

Elsewhere:

My old friend Joshua Foust is angry about the coverage. He was particularly incensed by Lamothe’s framing in the WaPo lede:

A long time defense correspondent describing this as “House Republicans escalate their campaign to hold President Biden accountable for the fiasco” is so dishonest it’s hard to know where to begin. Again, Dan Lamothe knows exactly what he’s doing when he writes this copy and he does not care.

I’ve read Lamothe for years and have never found him biased, but my lens is different. Rather than trying to harm Biden here, I suspect he’s simply reflecting the frustration and outrage so many on his beat felt at what was absolutely a fiasco. Indeed, that was my real-time reaction, as some post headlines from those days show:

I don’t know how you can see the immediate withdrawal otherwise. Or, for that matter, deny that the Biden team rallied rather quickly and salvaged the situation. And, even when the worst was unfolding, it was obvious that there was plenty of blame to go around for the waste of twenty years of failed nation-building.

Nor, incidentally, is this testimony from Milley and McKenzie new. They were saying the same thing in September 2021. And, as I noted at the time,

This deflection strikes me as semantic bullshit. It’s true that NEOs are authorized by State and carried out by DoD. But, as the “senior administration official” implies, had DoD pushed hard for one, State would almost certainly have acquiesced.

My strong sense, therefore, is that DoD leadership had an overly optimistic picture of how long they had to carry out operations before the Ghani government collapsed. From all accounts, nobody at the senior level of the US Government thought that it was going to collapse damn near instantaneously. If, however, State balked at ordering a NEO in the face of DoD demands, it was up to Austin, Milley, or the CENTCOM commander to go to the President and/or the NSC to press their case.

There is, therefore, no plausible scenario where State bears the bulk of the blame. Either all of the key players share equal blame for failing to anticipate the collapse of the Ghani government or President Biden himself overruled DoD in favor of State’s recommendation.

Still, even though he spent a year and a half in country as a Human Terrain Analyst and then devoted years researching and writing about as a blogger and think tanker, Foust is more worried about the consequences of this renewed attention rather than an autopsy of the Afghanistan exit:

It’s hard not to conclude that the DC-based press corps (reporters and pundits alike) simply wants to experience a national collapse because it would be fun to cover, and I don’t like thinking that nor do I know what any of us can do about it.

Biden faced down an openly hostile, warmongering press, defiant CIA stealing evacuation seats for its death squads, and a class of decadent viceroys to do the right thing and end our presence in Afghanistan. Will any future president ever end a war again? Don’t expect it if this is the outcome.

If the election had happened in August of 2021, it may well have cost Biden a second term. But I suspect half of American voters have forgotten we were ever in Afghanistan, much less have a strong opinion on the nature of the exit. American attention spans on foreign policy matters are notoriously short-lived.

And, apparently, it doesn’t sell many papers or generate many clicks, either. As best I can tell, neither the New York Times nor even the Murdock-owned Wall Street Journal covered the hearings at all, and I had to search the WaPo archives to find the above story even though I knew it existed. Of the major outlets I scanned this morning, only the AP featured the story prominently.

Congressional Republicans, not surprisingly, are trying to leverage a dark moment in the Biden presidency for political advantage. In the short term, at least, it’s not working.

FILED UNDER: *FEATURED, 2024 Election, Congress, Military Affairs, National Security, US Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Wednesday’s Forum

· · 55 comments

OTB relies on its readers to support it. Please consider helping by becoming a monthly contributor through Patreon or making a one-time contribution via PayPal. Thanks for your consideration.

FILED UNDER: Open Forum
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

OTB Status Update

· · 5 comments

The response to Sunday’s post on OTB’s Future has been helpful.

First and foremost, my thanks for the kind words about the site. While it sometimes feels like this is a conversation with a relative handful of regulars, it’s clear that far more people regularly read and enjoy the posts and comments. There’s a genuine sense of community here and it’s bigger than is apparent from the daily interaction.

Seven folks, a couple of whom either aren’t regular commenters or whose names I don’t recognize, have signed up for the OTB Patreon membership, and nine current Patrons upped their contribution level. Two others made one-time donations through the PayPal link. My sincere thanks.

We’ll have to get over the squeamishness about reminding readers of these platforms. We’ve been adding reminders to the daily open forum posts and will likely run a more prominent fundraiser on, say, a quarterly basis.

In the longer term, we’ll decide whether retaining the site in its current form is sustainable. As @Andy and a couple of others noted, it’s quite possible that we simply have too many posts, comments, images, and the like for WordPress and the supporting backend (Apache, PHP, etc.) to handle efficiently. A significant redesign and server configuration may be able to make that work while also allowing us to shed the second server for images.

If that proves either technically or financially unfeasible, we’ll explore other options. Most of the regular commenters seem not to care as much about the header images, Related Posts, Popular Posts, and the like as I do. Ditto, for that matter, the site archives. (And, yes, as @Andy also reminds us, we really should do something to preserve the 21 years of content regardless.)

It’ll probably be June before we have time to really dig into all of this but we’ll likely do whatever we’re going to do over the summer. By then, we should also have a better handle on the revenue stream.

FILED UNDER: OTB History, ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Should Sonia Sotomayor Retire?

Of party, duty, age, and political roulette.

· · 38 comments

Josh Barro takes to The Atlantic to argue “Sonia Sotomayor Should Retire Now.” He bases his appeal on counterfactuals:

On Election Day in 2006, Justice Antonin Scalia was 70 years old and had been serving on the Supreme Court for 20 years. That year would have been an opportune time for him to retire—Republicans held the White House and the Senate, and they could have confirmed a young conservative justice who likely would have held the seat for decades to come. Instead, he tried to stay on the Court until the next time a Republican president would have a clear shot to nominate and confirm a conservative successor.

He didn’t make it—he died unexpectedly in February 2016, at the age of 79, while Barack Obama was president. Conservatives nevertheless engineered some good fortune: There was divided control of government, and then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to even hold confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee to the seat. Donald Trump won that fall’s election and named Neil Gorsuch to the seat that McConnell had held open.

But imagine for a moment that Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election, as many expected. By running a few points stronger, she might have taken Democratic candidates across the finish line in close races in Pennsylvania and Missouri, resulting in Democratic control of the Senate. In that scenario, Clinton would have named a liberal successor to Scalia—more liberal than Garland—and conservatives would have lost control of the Court, all because of Scalia’s failure to retire at the opportune moment.

You see where this is going:

Justice Sonia Sotomayor will turn 70 in June. If she retires this year, President Joe Biden will nominate a young and reliably liberal judge to replace her. Republicans do not control the Senate floor and cannot force the seat to be held open like they did when Scalia died. Confirmation of the new justice will be a slam dunk, and liberals will have successfully shored up one of their seats on the Court—playing the kind of defense that is smart and prudent when your only hope of controlling the Court again relies on both the timing of the death or retirement of conservative judges and not losing your grip on the three seats you already hold.

But if Sotomayor does not retire this year, we don’t know when she will next be able to retire with a likely liberal replacement. It’s possible that Democrats will retain the presidency and the Senate in this year’s elections, in which case the insurance created by a Sotomayor retirement won’t have been necessary. But if Democrats lose the presidency or the Senate this fall—or both—she’ll need to stay on the bench until the party once again controls them. That could be just a few years, or it could be longer. Democrats have previously had to wait as long as 14 years (1995 to 2009). In other words, if Sotomayor doesn’t retire this year, she’ll be making a bet that she will remain fit to serve until possibly age 78 or even 82 or 84—and she’ll be forcing the whole Democratic Party to make that high-stakes bet with her.

In a theoretical world, of course, Supreme Court Justices are impartial arbiters, not partisan actors. Alas, we do not live in that world. While it’s doubtful that Trump wins and is followed by a Republican successor—Republicans haven’t won back-to-back elections since George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 and have only won the popular vote once since 1988—anything is possible, I guess.

If Democrats lose the bet, the Court’s 6–3 conservative majority will turn into a 7–2 majority at some point within the next decade. If they win the bet, what do they win? They win the opportunity to read dissents written by Sotomayor instead of some other liberal justice. This is obviously an insane trade. Democrats talk a lot about the importance of the Court and the damage that has been done since it has swung in a more conservative direction, most obviously including the end of constitutional protections for abortion rights. So why aren’t Democrats demanding Sotomayor’s retirement?

Well, they are whispering about it. Politico reported in January:

Some Democrats close to the Biden administration and high-profile lawyers with past White House experience spoke to West Wing Playbook on condition of anonymity about their support for Sotomayor’s retirement. But none would go on the record about it. They worried that publicly calling for the first Latina justice to step down would appear gauche or insensitive. Privately, they say Sotomayor has provided an important liberal voice on the court, even as they concede that it would be smart for the party if she stepped down before the 2024 election.

This is incredibly gutless. You’re worried about putting control of the Court completely out of reach for more than a generation, but because she is Latina, you can’t hurry along an official who’s putting your entire policy project at risk? If this is how the Democratic Party operates, it deserves to lose.

Again, in a theoretical world, this is crass and bizarre. Sotomayor is not a Democratic Party operative and has no duty to listen to those who are. In that world, the very suggestion is offensive. But, again, that’s not the world we live in and, indeed, speculation about the retirement of Justices who hit a certain age has become routine.

The cowardice in speaking up about Sotomayor—a diabetic who has in some instances traveled with a medic—is part of a broader insanity in the way that the Democratic Party thinks about diversity and representation. Representation is supposed to be important because the presence of different sorts of people in positions of power helps ensure that the interests and preferences of various communities are taken into account when making policy. But in practice, Democratic Party actions regarding diversity tend to be taken for the benefit of officials rather than demographic groups. What’s more important for ordinary Latina women who support Democrats—that there not be one more vote against abortion rights on the Supreme Court, or that Sotomayor is personally there to write dissenting opinions? The answer is obvious, unless you work in Democratic politics for a living, in which case it apparently becomes a difficult call.

While I am admittedly not party to the conversations deep inside the bowels of the Democratic establishment, I would be shocked if Sotomayor’s status as The First Latina Justice was really that big a factor whether to approach her to urge her to step aside. If anything, it would simply increase the pressure (as was the case when Thurgood Marshall retired) to replace her with another Latina.

I thought Democrats had learned a lesson from the Ruth Bader Ginsburg episode about the importance of playing defense on a Court where you don’t hold the majority. Building a cult of personality around one particular justice served to reinforce the idea that it was reasonable for her to stay on the bench far into old age, and her unfortunate choice to do so ultimately led to Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment and a string of conservative policy victories. All liberals have to show for this stubbornness is a bunch of dissents and kitsch home decor. In 2021, it seemed that liberals had indeed learned their lesson—not only was there a well-organized effort to hound the elderly Stephen Breyer out of office, but the effort was quite rude. (I’m not sure screaming “Retire, bitch” at Stephen Breyer was strictly necessary, but I wasn’t bothered by it either—he was a big boy, and he could take it.) But I guess maybe the lesson was learned only for instances where the justice in question is a white man.

Again, I think Barro overstates the identity politics issue here. While there was certainly a bit of hero worship around The Notorious RBG, there was plenty of talk about her retirement. The earliest indicator I can find in the OTB archives is from February 2011. She was a month shy of 78 at the time— eight years older than Sotomayor is now. There are multiple posts on the idea in the years after that, with an increasing sense of urgency. In July 2014, the late Doug Mataconis lamented that “Liberals Still Think They Can Guilt Trip Ruth Bader Ginsburg Into Retirement.” By November 2018, he was begging Democrats to just “Leave Notorious RBG Alone.”

Regardless, in terms of pure party politics—and the consequences of having a Trump-appointed replacement rather than one appointed by Obama—the critics were certainly right. Most notably, of course, Roe was finally overturned. (Then again, Dobbs was 6-3, so it arguably would have happened regardless.)

Barro concludes,

One obvious response to this argument is that the president is also old—much older, indeed, than Sonia Sotomayor. I am aware, and I consider this to be a serious problem. But Democrats are unlikely to find a way to replace Biden with a younger candidate who enhances their odds of winning the election. The Sotomayor situation is different. Her age problem can be dealt with very simply by her retiring and the president picking a candidate to replace her who is young and broadly acceptable (maybe even exciting) to Democratic Party insiders. And if Democrats want to increase the odds of getting there, they should be saying in public that she should step down. In order to do that, they’ll have to get over their fear of being called racist or sexist or ageist.

Of course, a 69-year-old Justice retiring would actually lead to yet another round of questioning as to why the 81-year-old President doesn’t do the same.

I’m less doctrinaire than my late co-blogger Doug on this matter. While Supreme Court appointments are for life and Sotomayor has every right to stay in what is, after all, a dream job so long as she’s fit to do it, it’s perfectly fair for her co-partisans and others who share her judicial philosophy urge her to step aside for a younger replacement.

I’m roughly 12 years younger than Sotomayor and am unlikely to retire anytime soon. A colleague who turned 80 in December has announced his retirement at the end of this academic year but we wouldn’t have pushed him out had he not done so. But I’m old enough to remember when it was routine—even mandatory—to retire at 65, or even 62. In particular, all three of the Big Three network news anchors retired in rapid succession in the early 1980s.

Of course, college professors and news readers don’t have the final say on the law of the land. Balancing an individual Justice’s desire to fulfill that awesome role with the realities of American politics is a strange and dangerous game of roulette.

FILED UNDER: Law and the Courts, Supreme Court, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Trump’s Financial Troubles

What happens if a corrupt man who owes hundreds of millions is President?

· · 103 comments

NYT (“Trump Spurned by 30 Companies as He Seeks Bond in $454 Million Judgment“):

Donald J. Trump’s lawyers disclosed on Monday that he had failed to secure a roughly half-billion dollar bond in his civil fraud case in New York, raising the prospect that the state could seek to freeze some of his bank accounts and seize some of his marquee properties.

The court filing, coming one week before the bond is due, suggested that the former president might soon face a financial crisis unless an appeals court comes to his rescue.

Mr. Trump has asked the appeals court to pause the $454 million judgment that a New York judge imposed on Mr. Trump in the fraud case last month, or accept a bond of only $100 million. Otherwise, the New York attorney general’s office, which brought the case, might soon move to collect from Mr. Trump.

Putting this dilemma in the larger context of the former President’s other financial difficulties, TNR’s Timothy Noah asks, “Is Donald Trump About to Go Bankrupt?

Debt is becoming a major campaign issue in 2024. I don’t mean the national debt, which today stands at 99 percent of gross domestic product and which, the Congressional Budget Office projects, will total 116 percent of GDP 10 years from now. Nor do I mean student debt, which President Joe Biden has either reduced or eliminated for close to four million people, to the tune of nearly $138 billion. 

No, the debt that haunts campaign 2024 is personal debt—specifically the half-billion in fines that former President Donald Trump owes from two recent legal judgments against him. It’s a campaign issue because, judging from Trump’s past behavior, he will pay off this half-billion-dollar debt just as soon as pigs fly. So it was hardly shocking when The New York Times reported Monday that the former president’s plea for a loan to secure a bond against the largest share of his mounting debt was spurned by some 30 companies, prompting his lawyers to tell a New York State judge that raising the money is a “practical impossibility.”But one firm, Chubb, was willing to offer Trump $91 million to secure his bond in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case. Given the extreme unlikelihood that its generosity will be repaid in the traditional way, it’s an eyebrow-raising arrangement, aswhoever lends Trump money will likely have to seek some other, less savory, compensation.

Let’s first take a tally of the red in Trump’s legal ledger. The first judgment against him is an $83 million penalty for continuing to shoot his mouth off on social media about Carroll. This comes after Carroll won a separate $5 million judgment against Trump for sexually abusing her three decades earlier, and for defaming her after she wrote up the incident in 2019. 

The second judgment against Trump is a $355 million civil fraud penalty for misleading banks and insurers by pretending to be richer than he really was. Interest accrued before the ruling brought the total to about $454 million as of February 16, the day the judgment was handed down. Since then, additional interest has been piling up at a rate of $112,000 a day, adding another $3 million to the tab thus far. 

Between the two court judgments and their attendant penalties, Trump owes $539 million. Even for Trump, that’s a lot of money. Trump is rich but not (as Justice Arthur Engoron, who presided over the second trial, pointed out) anywhere near so rich as he pretends. In April 2023, Trump said in a deposition that he had “substantially more than $400 million in cash,” but Mother Jones’s Julianne McShane says it’s more like $350 million. Forbes puts Trump’s net worth at $2.6 billion; the trajectory over the past decade has been downward. The $539 million Trump owes in penalties represents 20 percent of his fortune. That’s a lot.

Let’s not forget the additional financial liabilities Trump has lately accrued. There’s $392,000 that Trump paid The New York Times a couple of weeks ago for filing a frivolous lawsuit. There’s $938,000 that a judge last year ordered Trump and his attorney to pay Hillary Clinton for filing a frivolous lawsuit. There’s $382,000 that a London judge earlier this month ordered Trump to pay Orbis Business Intelligence, founded by Christopher Steele (of the “Steele dossier”), for filing a frivolous lawsuit. There’s the aforementioned $5 million that Trump paid earlier in the Carroll case. There’s $110,000 in contempt fees that Trump accrued for bad-mouthing New York Attorney General Letitia James during the civil fraud prosecution. 

There’s whatever penalty the IRS may impose when it completes its audit of Trump’s 2015–2019 tax returns. There’s whatever lawsuits Trump’s current lawyers will file when he (or various Trump PACs, or the Republican Party) get tired of paying them. On top of all that, Deutsche Bank’s loans to Trump require him to maintain $50 million in “unencumbered liquidity” and a minimum net worth of $2.5 billion. Trump always thinks he’s bleeding money, but right now Trump really is bleeding money—at a hemorrhagic rate. 

Were we talking about a random real estate conman without the political baggage, my concern here would be about the seeming injustice of his legal plight in the New York case. Leaving aside whether said person would have been sued by the city to begin with, it seems beyond weird to me that interest on the judgment accrued retroactively to well before the judgment was handed down, thus increasing it by more than a third. And the notion that one should have to post a bond for the entire judgment for the privilege of filing an appeal is essentially a denial of the right to appeal.

But, of course, we’re not talking about an ordinary conman but rather a former President who has a not insignificant chance of being re-elected to that office. One who, in his previous stint, violated pretty much every norm—to say nothing of several Federal laws and the Constitution itself–with respect to financial propriety.* There’s simply no doubt in my mind, then, that he’d be willing to sell his office to wipe out these debts.

Yet, here we are, roughly seven months from the election and he’s leading or even with President Biden in most of the national and swing state polling.


*Obviously, his long effort to set the stage for discrediting the results of the 2020 election were he to lose and his attempts to steal it afterward, including inciting a violent attack on the Capitol, made those acts pale in comparison. But the focus here is on his finances, not his other deficiencies.

FILED UNDER: *FEATURED, 2024 Election, Law and the Courts, US Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Tuesday’s Forum

· · 47 comments

OTB relies on its readers to support it. Please consider helping by becoming a monthly contributor through Patreon or making a one-time contribution via PayPal. Thanks for your consideration.

FILED UNDER: Open Forum
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

Clip of the Day

Sit-up at attention edition.

· · 3 comments

Honest question to anyone reading this who plans to vote for Trump: how do you rationalize away his obvious admiration for dictators? How do you defend his obvious affection for Kim Jung Un?

FILED UNDER: 2024 Election, US Politics,
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

Working From Everywhere is Getting Harder

The pandemic ruined everything.

· · 7 comments

CC0 Public Domain image from PxHere

The Economist‘s Bartleby columnist declares, “Every location has got worse for getting actual work done.”

Work would be so much better if you could get work done. It has always been hard to focus amid the staccato rhythms of meetings, the relentless accumulation of messages or the simple distraction of colleagues thundering past. But since the covid-19 pandemic, every single place of work has become less conducive to concentration.

Start with the home office. The promise of hybrid working is that you can now choose your location depending on the task at hand. If you need to focus on work, you can now skip the commute, stay home and get your head down. This tactic would have worked well in 2019, when no one else was ever at home. Now there are likely to be other people there, too, grabbing the best spot for the Wi-Fi, merrily eating your lunch and talking loudly to a bunch of colleagues in their own workplaces. Home has become a co-working space but without any of the common courtesies.

While working out common courtesies with family members isn’t that hard, it’s true that working at home with others in the household is considerably more distracting than doing so alone.

Even if none of your family or flatmates is at home, they now know you might be. That spells disaster. Parcels are delivered with monotonous regularity; large chunks of the day are spent being photographed on your own doorstep holding intriguing packages that are not for you. Children who want food or money know where to track you down.

Delivery in Bartleby’s neighborhood must be considerably more theft-adverse than in mine. I can count the number of times I’ve been asked to sign for a package, much less be photographed holding it, since the pandemic on one hand.

Worst of all, jobs that once required a day off can now be done at no personal cost by booking them in for days when someone else is at home. “Are you going in today?” might sound like an innocuous question. It should put you on high alert. It means that a bunch of people with drills will storm the house just as you settle down to the laptop.

Obviously, partners should be able to coordinate such things for days when there aren’t demanding deadlines and the like. But, yes, my wife and I schedule things—in coordination with one another—for getting household tasks done.

On the one hand, yes, it makes the workday less productive. On the other, it means we can get things done during the workweek, leaving the weekends for other matters. That’s not a terrible tradeoff.

One natural response is to head to the place you were trying to avoid—the office. But its role has changed since the pandemic. It was never a great place for concentrating (the periods of lockdown were glorious exceptions). But it has become even less suitable now that the office is seen as the place where collaboration and culture-building happen.

Before you might have been able to sit in a cubicle, fenced off from other people; now openness is in vogue, which means fewer partitions and greater visibility. Before you might have had a normal chair and a desk; now you will be asked to wobble awkwardly on a tall stool at a champagne bar. Before you were interrupted; now you are being given an opportunity to interact. There is much more emphasis on meetings, brainstorming, drinking, eating, bouncing around on space-hoppers or whatever appalling activity builds team spirit. There is much less emphasis on single-minded attention.

This really hasn’t been my experience but my wife has had a bit of it. For a variety of cultural reasons, my organization—which is in a sense in competition with a non-resident version of ourselves—went back to work quickly after COVID and has emphasized getting back to the old routine. There’s more flexibility in terms of telecommuting and holding meetings virtually now—because the three-month shutdown for COVID proved we could do it—but we still have assigned offices and no more team-building than before.

My wife’s workplace is a weird hybrid, where everyone works from home three days a week but has to slog to the office two days just because. And, with the exception of one day a month where they all pretty much have to be there, there’s no coordination to maximize the team aspect of this in-office presence. Because she’s at the Pentagon, where space is at a premium, though, some people don’t have a desk they can call their own, having to find space where no one is currently sitting.

Juggling all of this is definitely more aggravating than a pure remote model. But it’s still mostly better than a pur at-office model as well.

Home is heaving, the office is off-putting. What about other places, like co-working spaces and coffee shops? These too have got worse since the pandemic, for two reasons. First, there is more competition for spaces. Everyone else who is finding it hard to concentrate has had exactly the same idea of heading to a third location.

Second, online meetings have made it acceptable to reach everyone everywhere. It used to be said that you are never more than six feet away from a rat; now the same is true of a Zoom call. Wherever you are—homes, offices, cafés, libraries, monasteries—someone is within earshot, yapping away about something that manages to be both tedious and impossible to ignore: the plight of local papers in Maine, the risk calculations behind Solvency 2 or why Denise is so impossible to work with.

I’ve never really done the coffee shop thing, aside from the occasional work-from-home day when I needed to escape the cleaning crew or something similar. And it’s been years since I’ve done that, so I don’t have a feel for the change.

There are ways around the concentration problem. One is to become richer: everything is so much easier if you have another wing of the house, or indeed another house. Another is deliberately to swim against the hybrid tide: if Monday is the day when most people work from home in order to focus, the office is going to be a better place to work that day. The most common and least healthy answer is to defer focused work until the evenings and weekends.

Having a larger space is indeed nice. Alas, the trend toward “open” floorplans has somewhat obviated the benefits.

This is not a lament for the pre-pandemic world. Just because each location has got worse as a place to do focused work does not mean that things have got worse overall. Hybrid work allows people to pick the most appropriate locations for specific tasks. The option of occasionally staying at home, even if home is noisier than it was before 2020, is still better for many workers and employers than the pre-covid norm of coming into the office every day. But wherever you are, other people are more likely to be there or to have a greater expectation of interacting with you. The ability to concentrate is sold as a benefit of flexibility. It can be the price you pay for it.

Quite right.

And, further, it’s worse emphasizing that these “problems,” such as they are, are the province of white collar knowledge workers. As the pandemic highlighted, those in the service sector don’t have the luxury of telecommuting. Ditto everyone from coal miners to carpenters to construction workers. All in all, it’s not the worst problem to have.

FILED UNDER: Economics and Business, , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Are Hamas Death Figures Fake?

Damned if I know.

· · 15 comments

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YahooNews points me to a March 16 Telegraph column by Jake Wallis Simons titled “This could be the devastating proof that Hamas is faking its death figures.”

One of the marks of anti-Semitism, George Orwell observed in 1945, is “an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true”. Which brings us smartly to Hamas and how the broadcast media, aid organisations, international bodies and world leaders take its disinformation as gospel. Last week it became clear that this gullibility may have led to a crime against reality.

A new analysis of the group’s casualty statistics indicates that the rag-tag terror army may have pulled off one of the biggest propaganda coups of modern times. The figures, repeated by everyone from the White House to the BBC, are freighted with familiarity: 30,000 dead in Gaza, 70 per cent of whom are women and children. Yet it now seems overwhelmingly likely that these statistics are fabricated.

Professor Abraham Wyner, a data scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has conducted a thorough analysis. He found that Hamas’s official civilian death toll was statistically impossible. “Most likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily,” he wrote in an incendiary essay in Tablet. “We know this because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real. Then they assigned about 70 per cent of the total to be women and children, splitting that amount randomly from day to day. Then they in-filled the number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the data observed.”

The giveaways were many. For example, the reported death toll mounted “with almost metronomical linearity”, Prof Wyner found, showing little daily variation. Obviously, this bore no resemblance to any plausible version of reality. Then there was the fact that, according to Hamas data from 29 October, 26 men came back to life; and the fact that on several days, no men were apparently killed at all, but only women. Were we really supposed to believe any of this?

In February, Hamas admitted to losing 6,000 of its fighters, representing more than 20 per cent of the total casualties reported. Given its claims that 70 per cent of the dead were women and children, there were two possible conclusions: either almost no male civilians had died, or almost all the men in Gaza were fighting for Hamas. Both were obviously absurd.

Therefore, the number of women and children killed was likely grossly exaggerated. If that is the case – if, as Prof Wyner suggests, “the casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters” – where does that leave western outrage? Has the West fallen victim to a monstrous con?

The true ratio of civilian casualties to combatants is likely to be exceptionally low, “at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1”. This, Prof Wyner says, is a “successful effort to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy that protects itself with civilians”.

While I had been naturally skeptical of casualty reports issued by a terrorist group (and, frankly, I tend to be skeptical of any party to a war’s real-time numbers given both the very real propaganda incentives for misrepresentation and the “fog of war” making these assessments fraught even for honest brokers), I had seen enough claims by experts that we should take them seriously that I more-or-less stopped asking.

Looking at Wyner’s bio, CV, and Google Scholar pages, I consider him a highly qualified expert data scientist. He earned his PhD in Statistics from Stanford in 1993, has won multiple awards, and is a prolific and well-cited scholar. Judging from the handful of articles he’s published at Tablet and Forward, he seems to be an ardent Zionist and something of a COVID and climate change skeptic but there aren’t enough red flags to overcome his stature as a top-rate scholar.

Still, that works both ways. He published the above-referenced essay (“How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers“) on March 6. Even granting that he’s a statistician rather than an International Relations or Security Studies scholar, you’d think such devasting findings from someone of his stature would have made it to my attention in the intervening two weeks.

Wyner’s main evidence is in this chart:

About which he observes,

This regularity is almost surely not real. One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%. This is strikingly little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less. Perhaps what is happening is the Gaza ministry is releasing fake daily numbers that vary too little because they do not have a clear understanding of the behavior of naturally occurring numbers. Unfortunately, verified control data is not available to formally test this conclusion, but the details of the daily counts render the numbers suspicious.

I stumbled on Caltech computational biologist Lior Pachter‘s March 8 post (“A note on ‘How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers’“) responding to Wyner’s analysis.

Wyner’s plot shows cumulative reported deaths over a period of 15 days from October 26, 2023 to November 10, 2023. The individual reported deaths per day are plotted below. These numbers have a mean of 270 and a standard deviation of 42.25:

The coefficient of determination for the points in this plot is R2 = 0.233. However, the coefficient of determination for the points shown in Wyner’s plot is R2 = 0.999. Why does the same data look “extremely regular” one way, and much less regular another way?

If we denote the deaths per day by x_1,\ldots,x_{15}, then the plot Wyner shows is of the cumulative deaths y_1=x_1,y_2=x_1+x_2,y_3 = x_1+x_2+x_3,\ldots, y_n=x_1+\cdots+x_n. The coefficient of determination R2, which is the proportion of variation in the dependent variable (reported deaths) predictable from the independent variable (day), is formally defined as R^2 =  1 - \frac{SS_{\mbox{res}}}{SS_{\mbox{tot}}} where SS_{\mbox{res}} is the sum of squares of the residuals and and SS_{\mbox{tot}} is the variance of the dependent variable. Intuitively, R2 is a numerical proxy for what one perceives as “regular increase”.

In the plots above, the SS_{\mbox{res}} are roughly the same, however SS_{\mbox{tot}} is much, much, higher for the yi in comparison to the xi. This is always true when transforming data into cumulative sums, and is such a strong effect, that simulating reported deaths with a mean of 270 but increasing the variance ten-fold to 17,850, still yields an “extremely regular increase”, with R2 = 0.99:

Sadly, I must confess that my long-ago statistical training has atrophied, and I likely never would have fully understood Pachter’s equations. In response to a commenter, though, he adds this bit of clarity:

There could be many reasons for these correlations. Maybe it’s an artifact of the age threshold for children and the distribution of age in Gaza. Maybe it’s the result of lags in recording deaths. Maybe it’s a happenstance arising from so few datapoints. Maybe the data was indeed faked.

I’ll note that there are all sorts of anomalies one can grasp onto. I noticed, for example, that the average, 270 is an integer. Adding up 15 random numbers and then dividing by 15 is unlikely to yield an integer. But it can happen (7% of the time). When one starts floating tons of hypotheses, especially with little data, evidence for one of them doesn’t carry significance.

Additionally, commenter Ken M adds this insight:

If you look at the numbers, it’s very clear that they update fatalities faster than the update #women or #children (and they don’t specify #men, that is just (#fatalities – #women-#children)). On some days fatalities update but there is no change in the #w or #c; on other days the increase in (#w+#c) exceeds the increase in #f. In other words, in the conditions of war, it is hard to get information. The Gazan Ministry of Health (GMH) makes a list of the name and ID # of every identifiable death; Israel maintains the registry of ID #’s so GMH can’t fake that. That’s why their numbers come out accurate. But in real time, they may get a number of fatalities from a hospital and get the names, which allow identification of #w or #c, only later, maybe much later. And if they get the list of names, they have to go through the registry to determine who is a child or an adult, and maybe for ambiguous names who is a woman or a man, and that probably takes time too. So #w and #c get updated with arbitrary lags, sometimes multiple days worth may suddenly get updated at once. So looking at day-by-day movements of these #’s is meaningless.

I’ll add two other things. First, he says there is no correlation between increment in #women and increment in #children, just like Lior showed that there is no correlation between increment in #fatalities and time. But if you look at the cumulative #women vs the cumulative #children, you get perfect correlation, R^2=0.99 (I checked), just like he finds perfect correlation between cumulative #fatalities and time. Second, for his day-by-day anticorrelation between women and men: because they don’t specify men, only #w and #c, and because they may update in bunches, when there is an update of a lot of women, it will look like there’s not many men (i.e. change in fatalities – change in (women + children) is small, or even negative). When there’s an update where they don’t know the identities so it looks like there’s no increase in the #women, it will look like there’s a big increase in men – all the fatalities will appear to be men. So that’s why you get an anticorrelation between #women & #men.

Looking at the numbers as a lapsed data scientist but as a still-engaged Security Studies scholar, my immediate problem with Wyner’s analysis was his assumption that the daily correlation between males and/or Hamas fighters killed and those of women and children ought to be pretty consistent. But there’s no reason that should be the case. The battlefield isn’t a constant, after all. Air strikes are likely to kill a much high percentage of noncombatants than commando raids, for example.

Further, Wyner himself acknowledges the fog of war and says, “The truth can’t yet be known and probably never will be.” Yet, the whole tone of the piece is one of certitude: Hamas is obviously faking the numbers.

All in all, I would be much more comfortable with “Be Cautious About Gaza Ministry of Health Casualty FIgures” than “How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers.”

FILED UNDER: World Politics, , , , , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

“Hostages”

Trump is giving aid and comfort to insurrectionists.

· · 21 comments

Let’s revisit and focus on a specific piece of Trump’s rhetoric that James Joyner noted yesterday, specifically this: describing those who have been tried and convicted of their actions on January 6th, 2021 as “hostages.”

This is not the first or only time he has used the term. Note the following from Truth Social (via The Hill):

“My first acts as your next President will be to Close the Border, DRILL, BABY, DRILL, and Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned!” 

All of which makes me think of the following:

Section 3.
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Trump is currently giving comfort (and promising aid) to insurrectionists.

It is as if allowing such a person access to the highest office in the land is a really bad idea and that the framers of the 14th Amendment tried to codify that fact into the US Constitution.

Side note: I still maintain that the last sentence of the section is the opposite of requiring Congress to act to implement the rule contained in the section, i.e., instead of telling Congress it had to pass a law, the passage states that Congress can overturn the strictures of section 3 via a super-majority.

No time for much more than an observation on this, as it struck me this morning driving in.

Some additional reading via MSNBC: Are these the Jan. 6 ‘hostages’ Trump promises to free?

Also allow me to add the following form Bill Kristol in referencing the first clip above:

But I come back to the salute.

I’ve never served in the military. So I’ve never really saluted or been saluted. But I served in the White House, and traveled with Vice President Quayle, and was near the men and women of the military a fair amount then. And I’ve been around the military a bit in subsequent years.

I’ve seen many salutes. And I’ve always found them oddly moving. They’re gestures of respect and acknowledgments of order. They embody a kind of rule of law, a setting aside of personal feelings. You salute the rank, not the man.

Presidents as civilians probably shouldn’t return salutes (they didn’t, I believe, until pretty recently). But if they do so now, they do so as a gesture of respect. Respect for the military who are serving our nation. And respect for the nation, for the republic, and for the Constitution that upholds it.

And to see Trump saluting the insurrectionists, the Americans he persuaded to violently break the law in the service of undermining the Constitution, was unnerving.

But perhaps also clarifying.

Trump salutes the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol.

Trump supports criminals.

The rest of us support the republic.

It is truly stomach-turning.

FILED UNDER: 2024 Election, Crime, US Politics, , , , , ,
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

Putin Wins Again!

He's on a winning streak not seen since Stalin.

· · 4 comments

Maxim Shemetov/Reuters

NYT (“Behind Putin’s Potemkin Vote, Real Support. But No Other Choices.“):

The Kremlin stage-managed Russia’s presidential vote over the weekend to send a singular message at home and abroad: that President Vladimir V. Putin’s support is overwhelming and unshakable, despite or even because of his war against Ukraine.

From the moment the preliminary results first flashed across state television late Sunday, the authorities left no room for misinterpretation. Mr. Putin, they said, won more than 87 percent of the vote, his closest competitor just 4 percent. It had all the hallmarks of an authoritarian Potemkin plebiscite.

The Kremlin may have felt more comfortable orchestrating such a large margin of victory because Mr. Putin’s approval rating has climbed during the war in independent polls, owing to a rally-around-the flag effect and optimism about the Russian economy. The Levada Center, an independent pollster, reported last month that 86 percent of Russians approved of Mr. Putin, his highest rating in more than seven years.

But while the figures may suggest unabiding support for Mr. Putin and his agenda across Russia, the situation is more complex than the numbers convey. The leader of one opposition research group in Moscow has argued that backing for Mr. Putin is actually far more brittle than simple approval numbers suggest.

“The numbers we get on polls from Russia don’t mean what people think they mean,” said Aleksei Minyailo, a Moscow-based opposition activist and co-founder of a research project called Chronicles, which has been polling Russians in recent months. “Because Russia is not an electoral democracy but a wartime dictatorship.”

The Times’ coverage is representative:

There was a time when the American press credulously treated Russian elections as though they were real. And, no, I’m not talking about the brief period in which Boris Yeltsin was more-or-less the democratic leader of a French-style system. During the fake presidency of Dmitry Medvedev (May 2008-May 2012), when Putin stepped aside because he was term-limited, pretty much everyone pretended that the transition was real and that Putin, who instead was appointed prime minister, was no longer making policy decisions. Even Fox News (“Putin secures 5th term as Russian president in the election with no real opposition, addresses Navalny death“) now acknowledges the obvious.

This makes columns like Ishaan Tharoor’sRussia’s farce election sums up a grim moment in global democracy” something of a head-scratcher.

Three days of voting, staggered across 11 time zones and a vast stretch of the Earth, could only lead to one outcome: An emphatic reelection victory for Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was always clear that the Kremlin would exult in the landslide mandate accorded to Putin, who “contested” the vote against a handful of ciphers allowed to be presidential candidates. By Sunday evening, election officials announced a preliminary tally of that preordained result, reporting that Putin had won more than 87 percent of the vote, with three-fourths of the vote counted. State figures suggested a greater turnout than the previous presidential vote in 2018.

Even then, exiled watchdog groups reported episodes of ballot-stuffing, voter intimidation at some polling stations and other attempts at manipulation, including the alleged busing of Putin supporters to vote multiple times at different locations. In areas of Ukraine occupied and illegally annexed by Russia, observers recounted how local authorities coerced people to participate in the election at “gunpoint.”

Election officials were walking around the occupied town of Novomykolaivka, a local official, who has since fled to other areas of Ukraine, told my colleagues, “in a brigade accompanied by an armed soldier. He was carrying a weapon, so it was a threat, not verbal, but in fact it was a threat of violence.”

Thousands of Russians in big cities attempted to make their displeasure known at both the nature of Putin’s regime and the ongoing war in Ukraine by going to vote at noon Sunday — a symbolic act of solidarity with the late pro-democracy activist Alexei Navalny, who had long called for fairer and freer elections in Russia before dying in captivity. Many spoiled their ballots. Russian authorities clamped down on other forms of dissent and tried to encourage voters to go to the polls ahead of the designated protest time.

That need to cling to hope is profound and meaningful for anybody struggling under an authoritarian regime. And, on a global scale, the need to locate such hope is becoming more necessary. As already outlined in Today’s WorldView, the bumper year of elections worldwide in 2024 comes at a moment of “democratic recession,” with the health of democracies around the world in notable decline.

A new study this month from the V-Dem Institute, a leading center for the analysis of comparative politics at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg, laid out some of the worrying macro-indicators. The institute’s annual Democracy Report measures a democracy using a multidimensional data set based on a number of factors, including the civil liberties and freedoms afforded to all citizens, and their ability to participate in fair elections.

[…]

These findings dovetail with a gloomy Pew survey published last month. In polls put to respondents in a spread of 24 countries, researchers found that enthusiasm for “representative democracy” has slipped since 2017, when the organization conducted a similar survey. It found that a median 59 percent respondents were “dissatisfied with how their democracy is functioning,” and that close to three-quarters of those polled in countries as disparate as Argentina, Germany and Kenya felt that elected officials “don’t care” what they think. More than 40 percent said no political party in their country adequately reflects their views.

The survey found growing interest in alternatives to rule by elected officials, including an embrace of technocracy or even an autocratic strongman. “In 13 countries, a quarter or more of those surveyed think a system in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts is a good form of government,” noted Pew. “In four of the eight middle-income nations in the study, at least half of respondents express this view.”

Democratic backsliding is indeed a very real trend. Indeed, a colleague of mine, who grew up in Turkey, offers an elective on it. But it’s weird to lump Putin’s Russia, which hasn’t been a democracy in any meaningful sense in a long time,* into that camp.

Maybe we can chalk this up to the columnist’s dilemma of having to constantly find something to write about and needing a news hook around which to build it. But doing so in this instance sends the wrong impression to readers.

____________________

*Indeed, there is a debate among specialists as to whether the brief period between Gorbachev and Putin even qualifies. See, for example, Michael McFaul’s “Russia’s Road to Autocracy” and Maria Snegovaya’s “Why Russia’s Democracy Never Began,” both in relatively recent issues of the Journal of Democracy.

FILED UNDER: Democracy, Media, World Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Monday’s Forum

· · 46 comments

OTB relies on its readers to support it. Please consider helping by becoming a monthly contributor through Patreon or making a one-time contribution via PayPal. Thanks for your consideration.

FILED UNDER: Open Forum,
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

Sunday Tab-Clearing

· · 9 comments

FILED UNDER: Tab Clearing, , , , , , , , , , , ,
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

Trump’s Routine Outrages

When being despicable is normal, is it still news?

· · 32 comments

Visitors to the major news sites that I frequent—The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, NPR, YahooNews, and Google News—could easily miss what one might think would be a big story: the presumptive Republican Party nominee for President making some rather outrageous comments in a profanity-laced tirade at a campaign rally. Of those, only NYT and YahooNews highlight the story high enough that I could see them without scrolling.

NYT (“Trump Says Some Migrants Are ‘Not People’ and Predicts a ‘Blood Bath’ if He Loses“):

Former President Donald J. Trump, at an event on Saturday ostensibly meant to boost his preferred candidate in Ohio’s Republican Senate primary race, gave a freewheeling speech in which he used dehumanizing language to describe immigrants, maintained a steady stream of insults and vulgarities and predicted that the United States would never have another election if he did not win in November.

With his general-election matchup against President Biden in clear view, Mr. Trump once more doubled down on the doomsday vision of the country that has animated his third presidential campaign and energized his base during the Republican primary.

The dark view resurfaced throughout his speech. While discussing the U.S. economy and its auto industry, Mr. Trump promised to place tariffs on cars manufactured abroad if he won in November. He added: “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a blood bath for the country.”

For nearly 90 minutes outside the Dayton International Airport in Vandalia, Ohio, Mr. Trump delivered a discursive speech, replete with attacks and caustic rhetoric. He noted several times that he was having difficulty reading the teleprompter.

The former president opened his speech by praising the people serving sentences in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. Mr. Trump, who faces criminal charges tied to his efforts to overturn his election loss, called them “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots,” commended their spirit and vowed to help them if elected in November. He also repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, which have been discredited by a mountain of evidence.

If he did not win this year’s presidential election, Mr. Trump said, “I don’t think you’re going to have another election, or certainly not an election that’s meaningful.”

Mr. Trump also stoked fears about the influx of migrants coming into the United States at the southern border. As he did during his successful campaign in 2016, Mr. Trump used incendiary and dehumanizing language to cast many migrants as threats to American citizens.

He asserted, without evidence, that other countries were emptying their prisons of “young people” and sending them across the border. “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases,” he said. “They’re not people, in my opinion.” He later referred to them as “animals.”

[…]

Mr. Trump issued vulgar and derogatory remarks about a number of Democrats, including ones he often targets, like Mr. Biden and Fani Willis, the Atlanta prosecutor overseeing his criminal case in Georgia, as well as those widely viewed as prospective future presidential candidates, such as Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois.

Mr. Trump called Mr. Biden a “stupid president” several times and at one point referred to him as a “dumb son of a — ” before trailing off. He also compared Ms. Willis’s first name to a vulgarity, called Mr. Newsom “Gavin New-scum” and took jabs at Mr. Pritzker’s physical appearance.

Unlike some regular commenters, I don’t think the lack of prominence to these remarks—all of the sites covered them—is a nefarious plot to boost Trump to keep the race close. Rather, it’s a function of Trump acting outrageously with such regularity that it’s not newsworthy. It’s dog bites man rather than man bites dog.

I’ve long found myself doing the same thing for much the same reason. At some point, flogging the same story day after day gets monotonous. (For that matter, I’ve mostly stopped commenting on mass shootings, as I have nothing new to say about them and can already predict what the comments section will look like. And, while I covered the wars in Ukraine and Gaza on a daily basis at their outset, I now comment on them only sporadically.)

In the early days of Trump’s political ascendency, people constantly warned that his outrageous behavior was being “normalized.” To some degree, that has in fact happened. The press continues to cover it. They even describe it in ways that make clear they think it’s outrageous. But there’s also a certain “water is wet” quality to it.

FILED UNDER: 2024 Election, Media, US Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Ending Judge Shopping

A long-overdue reform is meeting resistance.

· · 8 comments

WaPo (“U.S. courts clarify policy limiting ‘judge shopping’“):

Federal judiciary leaders on Friday released the text of a revised policy directing district courts to assign judges at random in civil cases that have statewide or national implications, making clear that the policy is a recommendation and that they cannot force district courts to follow it.

The Committee on Court Administration and Case Management of the Judicial Conference of the United States, the policymaking body for the federal courts, released the guidance after receiving intense pushback about the change from judges, conservative lawmakers and judicial experts.

On Tuesday, conference officials announced that cases with statewide or national implications that are filed in single-judge divisions should no longer be automatically assigned to the judges who preside there. Such divisions exist in rural parts of the country where courthouses are spaced very far apart.

District courts may continue to assign cases to a single-judge division if those cases don’t seek to bar or mandate state or federal actions through declaratory judgment or injunctive relief, the Judicial Conference said. When random assignments are required, the case should be assigned to a judge within the same judicial district.

The policy does not apply to criminal or bankruptcy cases, according to the memo released Friday. “Case assignment in the bankruptcy context remains under study.”

The memo, shared with district court judges across the country, includes guidance explaining how the judges might follow the updated rule “while recognizing the statutory authority and discretion that district courts have with respect to case assignment.”

Judicial Conference officials said their intent is to address widespread concerns about “judge shopping” — or filing a lawsuit in a courthouse where the lone judge is known or suspected to be sympathetic to a particular cause. The tactic has drawn scrutiny in abortion, immigration and environmental cases, among other hot-button topics, as well as in patent cases, which have been concentrated in a single-judge courthouse in the Waco division of the Western District of Texas.

But the changes proposed to address the concerns have drawn a wave of new objections, with some saying the new policy violates federal statute 28 U.S.C. 137, which says that the chief judges of each district court are responsible for assigning cases.

[…]

Russell Wheeler, a judicial expert at the Brookings Institution, said the guidance “suggests, without saying so directly,” that conference officials are acting on their authority under federal statute 28 U.S.C. 331 to “submit suggestions and recommendations to the various courts to promote uniformity of management procedures and the expeditious conduct of court business.”

“Confusion resolved, and the Guidance on first reading seems eminently sensible,” Wheeler said in an email.

“This guidance was helpful,” Chief Judge Randy Crane of the Southern District of Texas wrote in an email. “It made it clear that the policy adopted by the Committee and the Conference was not a mandate. As such, it does not conflict with each court’s statutory authority to manage its docket. The guidance reflects that it is only an encouragement to the courts.”

As is so often the case, the problem is one that could best be addressed by Congressional action. Alas, that institution has been broken for quite some time, thus leaving the Executive to tinker around the edges.

Amusingly, at least some Members on both sides of the aisle recognize that there is a problem:

Democratic and Republican members of Congress, the Biden administration and organizations such as the American Bar Association have raised concerns about judge shopping in the past, and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. also highlighted the issue in his 2021 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary.

In November 2021, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and then-Democratic senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont criticized the “extreme concentration” of patent cases in U.S. District Judge Alan Albright’s division in Waco. In a letter addressed to Roberts, who oversees the Judicial Conference, the senators asked the chief justice to direct the policymaking body to look into the matter and implement reforms.

“We believe this creates an appearance of impropriety which damages the federal judiciary’s reputation for the fair and equal administration of the law,” they wrote.

Sadly, I’m not sure that reputation is intact these days. But, yes, the ability to all but guarantee the desired outcome of a case by filing with a specific court is beyond outrageous. But the bigger outrage is the existence of so many judges that have essentially pre-judged certain classes of cases.

That said, from my lay standpoint, the guidance seems quite reasonable:

In issuing its guidance, the Court Administration and Case Management Committee noted that “public confidence in the case assignment process requires transparency” and suggested that judicial districts post their rules for case assignments on their websites and “avoid case assignment practices that result in the likelihood that a case will be assigned to a particular judge” unless there is a specific determination that the case should be heard in a particular location.

“The Judicial Conference’s longstanding policies supporting the random assignment of cases and ensuring that district judges remain generalists deter both judge-shopping and the assignment of cases based on the perceived merits or abilities of a particular judge,” the memo reads.

Sadly but not surprisingly, there are some in positions of power who prefer the status quo:

Much of the backlash against the new policy guidance has come from conservative judges and lawmakers, who accused the Judicial Conference and Democrats such as Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) of an attempt to grab power from conservative jurists in isolated jurisdictions.

Two days after the revised policy was announced, before the specifics were made public,Senate Minority Leader MitchMcConnell (R-Ky.) sent letters to about a dozen chief judges across the country advising them to ignore the change, saying it was up to them “to manage the caseload of your court according to the dictates of local circumstances and convention.”

The letter was also signed by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and Tillis — who in 2021 questioned the concentration of patent cases in Waco.A spokesman for Tillis did not respond to a request for comment on the senator’s position Friday or early Saturday.

On Friday, after the text of the new guidance was released, a conservative judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit said he was “glad to see that folks appear to be backing off.”

“Judges should follow the law, and leave the politics to Congress,” U.S. District Judge James Ho said in an email. “The last thing we should do is gerrymander the rules to favor one particular political viewpoint.”

But, of course, the existence of Trump judges (Ho, you will not be shocked to learn, is one of them) and one-judge districts means said gerrymandering is a fact.

Other concerns strike me as valid:

Other judges have expressed concerns about practicality.

Chief Judge Alia Moses of the Western District of Texas said it was hard to imagine how a random-case-assignment policy would work in her far-flung district, where the next courthouse can be a multiday drive away. The desire to avoid targeting a specific lawsuit to a particular judge “is understandable,” Moses said in an email, “but difficult to apply in the real world in a district that is 93,000 square miles in size.”

In announcing the policy on Tuesday, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th District Jeffrey Sutton, chair of the Judicial Conference’s executive committee, told reporters that one option for dealing with geographical distance issues could be holding some court proceedings online.

Wheeler, the judicial expert, questioned whether the conference will be able to persuade all district courts to follow the policy. He said judicial leaders could use the rulemaking process to amend the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which govern civil proceedings in the district courts.

But given the “hostile reaction, especially from those where the judge-shopping practice has flourished,” such a move would be a “tough slog,” he said.

“That leaves Congress. Dream on.”

Indeed.

FILED UNDER: Law and the Courts, , , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Stupid Poll Tricks

Two data points are not a trend.

· · 8 comments

Memeorandum pointed me to a story headlined “GOP Base Has Shriveled Compared to Last Presidential Election” at the husk of the venerable Newsweek. The clickbait headline did its job but, alas, the report was disappointing.

The number of people who describe themselves as Republican has slightly declined since the last presidential election.

The polling firm Gallup, which tracks party affiliation monthly, says that those identifying as Republicans has shrunk by two percentage points since 2020. In February 2020, 30 percent of those Gallup polled said they were Republicans, while 29 percent considered themselves Democrats.

As of February 2024, when the latest data is available, 28 percent say they are Republicans, while 30 percent say they are Democrats, showing Republican’s base declining. Newsweek contacted the Republican National Committee (RNC) by email to comment on this story.

So, we have two snapshot polls, taken four years apart, showing that Republican party ID is down 2% and Democratic party ID is up 1%. Which, of course, is well within sampling error. That’s . . . not particularly interesting.

This does not prevent them from devoting several paragraphs to explaining what may or may not be a trend, including multiple quotations from scholars.

FILED UNDER: Media, Public Opinion Polls, US Politics, , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

OTB’s Future

There's a fork in the road.

· · 68 comments

“Blog Ideas” by Owen W Brown is licensed under CC BY 2.0

As I’ve recounted more than once, this blog started on the free Blogstop service way back in January 2003 but quickly outgrew that, spinning off onto a private domain on a private server, with ever-increasing operation and maintenance costs. Almost exactly two years in, I started running advertisements and declaring OTB as a business on my income taxes. There was a short heyday in which this was a thriving enterprise, spanning a series of spin-off sites. It was, for a time, my full-time job, and for many years, I was even able to pay a few thousand dollars a year to folks who wrote for the site.

The bottom fell out of the ad business years ago, and for more than a decade, expenses have significantly exceeded revenues. After several years of expressing mild concern, my accountant issued a much sterner warning last week that continuing to write off losses year after year could have catastrophic consequences. Suffice it to say, I won’t be doing so in 2024.

When I made the decision to go ad-free five years ago, I observed, “Considering that I make a reasonable living in my day job, I’ve always felt rather sheepish asking people to contribute to the site.” That has remained the case, so I’ve seldom renewed calls for Patreon signups or PayPal contributions. The $1752.32 those avenues brought in last year covers slightly more than a third of what it costs to keep the site going.

The last site refresh was six years ago now and cost on the order of $8000. We’re definitely overdue for another one, as the backend is wonky because the theme isn’t compatible with the latest WordPress version.

Ultimately, then, something’s got to give.

There are times when I wonder if the site hasn’t simply run its course. Blogging is a vestige of another era, and while our logs indicate that we’re still reaching a decent-sized audience (roughly 100,000 pageviews and 20,000 unique visitors monthly), the commentariat comprises fewer than 50 hard-core readers. And, even though I’m not as prolific as I once was here, it still consumes 20 hours or more in an average week.

We could do more to attract patrons, but I’m not really sure what that would entail. We could wall off “Premium” content to those who pay, as is the practice at various Substack blogs and other media outlets. But that has never been the spirit of the site and would have the ironic effect of making it less valuable to paying customers since some of the commenters they enjoy interacting with now would be shut out.

We could move to Substack, a free WordPress site, or a similar alternative and retain a lighter version of the site. Part of the reason OTB is so expensive to run is that it’s so bloody old. There are 58,445 posts, 1,450,482 comments, and 22,891 images being managed by the databases. Indeed, I’ve maintained a separate server just to host images for much of the site’s history to keep it from bogging down. While part of what Steven and I enjoy about the current model is revisiting what we wrote about issues (or the comment section discussions of same) way back when, whether when researching new posts or through the serendipity of the Related Posts feature, that’s likely less of an attraction for most readers. Then again, I’m not sure it’d still be OTB.

I welcome your thoughts on the matter.

FILED UNDER: *FEATURED, OTB History, ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.