SaturTabs
POLITICO, “‘Why are we talking about this?’: Democrats are furious that the Bidens won’t go away“
Jill Biden’s stunning admission this week that she thought her embattled husband was having a stroke on the debate stage in June 2024 stood in stark contrast to her positive spin and staunch defense in the moment. And it ripped open barely healed wounds from Democrats’ disastrous effort to hold the White House, setting off a fresh round of backward-looking fingerpointing less than a week after the party’s botched autopsy of the 2024 presidential election.
Leading Democrats say it’s an unnecessary distraction as they push to keep their party focused on a critical midterm — and what voters truly care about.
POLITICO (“Donald Trump’s revenge tour might not end in 2026“):
The president has already lashed out at two House Republicans due to perceived slights, with the White House floating a longer list of potential targets over the past year. Trump could also take aim at several GOP senators up for reelection in 2028 — including Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Kentucky’s Rand Paul and Indiana’s Todd Young — as he seeks to make a lasting mark on the Republican Party in the final stretch of his presidency.
[…]
“Look at all of them that are up in 2028 … do they think about retiring?” asked one Republican senator who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about colleagues who have previously broken with the president.
Ian Millhiser, Vox, “Brett Kavanaugh just won a surprising victory for racial justice.”
In Kavanaugh’s majority opinion in Pitchford v. Cain, which was handed down on Thursday, the justice more or less implemented a proposal for how to prevent racism from infecting jury selection that he first proposed in a 1989 piece that he published when he was still a law student.
Wired, “The Pentagon Knew Enemies Could Track Troops’ Phones for Years. Now They Are“
For nearly a decade, the Pentagon was warned—by its own contractors, analysts, and intelligence agencies—that anyone with a credit card could buy a map of where American troops sleep, work, and store nuclear weapons. Now the bill has come due in a war zone.
A newly disclosed letter shows the warnings went unheeded: US Central Command now confirms it has received “multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil US personnel in theater”—the first official acknowledgment that the data-broker economy is being used to hunt American forces in the Middle East.
NYT (“Trans Athlete Could Repeat as State Champion at California Meet“):
AB Hernandez, a senior at Jurupa Valley High School, about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, is considered a strong contender to win three events at the event on Friday and Saturday in Clovis, Calif.: high jump, triple jump and long jump. But even if she finishes far ahead of her competitors, she won’t stand alone on the podium.
Last year, the debate over whether it is fair for trans girls to compete in girls’ events reached the White House, as President Trump threatened to withhold funding from California if it let her compete. Event organizers scrambled to assuage concerns and made a last-minute rule change: Athletes who finished in the spot behind a trans athlete would be elevated to share the trans girl’s placement.
NYT (“Bluesky Says Kremlin Is Hacking Its Platform to Spread Propaganda“):
The compromised Bluesky accounts included those of people who are influential in their fields, though perhaps not famous. They were journalists and professors, a pollster in Texas, an anime artist and a filmmaker in Hollywood, whose account posted a video doctored by artificial intelligence to impersonate a Canadian police official criticizing France’s president, Emmanuel Macron.
The campaign, which the researchers at Clemson linked to the Social Design Agency, a company in Moscow, shows how Russia continues to seek new ways to erode public support for Ukraine, which Russian forces invaded in 2022.
John McWhorter, NYT, “Commas, Common Sense and Justice“
In considering how the history of punctuation can affect history itself, Hazrat touches on the role of commas in the 2008 Supreme Court ruling that the Constitution’s Second Amendment — “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed” — protects the rights of all people, not just militia members, to possess firearms. Hazrat finds the reasoning behind the ruling, District of Columbia v. Heller, is absurd. I agree.
[…]
Rather, we should accept the most plausible interpretation of what the words mean. Until this century there was a broad understanding that the Founders meant that all clauses of the amendment, no matter how many there are, should be read together. As in, people should be able to bear arms to serve in a militia, not just for any reason they want.
I would add that the comma is less the issue than that Scalia’s interpretation is hopelessly forced.
