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.
Indeed. That is the real issue. For two hundred years courts enforced a common sense interpretation consistent with the principle that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. Then Scalia, joined by three GOP accomplices and Kennedy (WTF?), declared he knew better.
The results are before us, a society with four or five hundred million guns, where we take care to ensure every loon and criminal is well armed. Conservatives I read are very concerned about shootings in homes, streets, schools, malls, synagogues, attempts on the president, and of CEOs. (Really one CEO, but they make it out to be a plague.) They even spare an occasional thought for shot up mosques. They propose every solution one could think of, except the obvious one.
Karl Popper spoke of open and closed societies. “Originalism” defines a closed society, one with fixed beliefs. It cannot learn and evolve. Not only the Constitution, but other laws, opinions , and attitudes of a racist, oligarchic, 18th century society must rule us now. Except it’s even worse, “Originalism” is really a tool for clever and corrupt justices to twist the law to their preferred outcomes.
The Constitution was racist through seventy years of slavery. It was racist through a hundred years of Jim Crow. But try to carve out a majority Black congressional district in a state with a large Black population and suddenly the Constitution has always been color blind.
Fretting over Jill Biden just seems overwrought, in my view. It is as if people haven’t been paying attention to the way the news cycle works under Trump. The whole Biden stuff, which is backward-looking anyway, will hardly be on anyone’s mind in a week or so.
In some ways, it could even be the Dems’ benefit, in small measure to be sure, as it highlights the age of the current president and raises the question in the minds of some as to what we aren’t being told about his health.
Regardless, like with the whole autopsy kerfuffle, this stuff is hardly going to stay in the news bloodstream for long.
@gVOR10: And to top it all off, I have never found Scalia’s interpretation to hew to “originalism” in any event (save in the sense that originalism really has nothing to do with original meaning).
Perhaps people should start carrying around hand grenades, machineguns (real ones, not AR-15s; like a .50 cal tripod mounted machinegun), rocket propelled grenades, stinger missiles, etc., as arms the constitution allows them to bear. Also maybe ask to buy enriched uranium or plutonium and the necessary isotopes for initiators, to use in small kiloton arms.
For self defense, naturally. How else are you going to hold off against a tyrannical government? With revolvers and shotguns?
Scalia loved playing with guns, but we must pretend he was calling balls and strikes because as a legal argument that’s unseemly and juvenile.
Who, and who are they leading?
The Democrats I know think the Bidens and Harris-Emhoffs can do whatever the hell they wanna do, and are sick of weak Beltway media bootlickers whitewashing MAGA fascism and kleptocracy. When’s Politico gonna cover that?