The Conversation -- December 3, 2023
** David French of the New York Times: "[The Insurrection Act] is a land mine embedded in the United States Code, one that Donald Trump, if re-elected president, could use to destroy our republic. But it's not too late for Congress to defuse the mine now and protect America.... Some version of the Insurrection Act is probably necessary.... [The act has] been used rarely, and when it has been used, it's been used for legitimate purposes.... That historical restraint has been dependent on a factor that is utterly absent from Trump: a basic commitment to the Constitution and democracy.... It will be difficult if not impossible for any reform bill to pass Congress. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the Republican-led House of Representatives, was a central player in Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election. Many of Trump's congressional allies share his thirst for vengeance. But it's past time ... to strip unilateral authority from the president." ~~~
~~~ Marie: Once again, the reason Congress won't curb the raw presidential power encoded in the Insurrection Act is that one of the two major political parties is opposed to democracy and the rule of law. I don't suggest that all of our political ills are the fault of Republicans, but I'd say about 90% of them are. A democratic republic cannot function when one party believes in nothing but power and nutty conspiracy theories.
Jon Gambrell of the AP: "Commercial ships came under attack Sunday by drones and missiles in the Red Sea and a U.S. warship there opened fire in self-defense as part of an hourslong assault claimed by Yemen's Houthi rebels, officials said. The attack potentially marked a major escalation in a series of maritime attacks in the Mideast linked to the Israel-Hamas war as multiple vessels found themselves in the crosshairs of a single Houthi assault for the first time in the conflict."
Damian Carrington & Ben Stockton of the Guardian: "The president of Cop28, Sultan Al Jaber, has claimed there is 'no science' indicating that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global heating to 1.5C, the Guardian and the Centre for Climate Reporting can reveal. Al Jaber also said a phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development 'unless you want to take the world back into caves'. The comments were 'incredibly concerning' and 'verging on climate denial', scientists said, and they were at odds with the position of the UN secretary general, António Guterres. Al Jaber made the comments in ill-tempered responses to questions from Mary Robinson, the chair of the Elders group and a former UN special envoy for climate change, during a live online event on 21 November." Thanks to RAS for the link. ~~~
~~~ Valerie Volcovici of Reuters: "Climate advocate and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore on Sunday slammed the UAE - host of the COP28 climate summit.... The comments, made to Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of the conference in Dubai, reflected skepticism among some delegates that COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber, head of the UAE's national oil company ADNOC, can be an honest broker of a climate deal. 'They are abusing the public's trust by naming the CEO of one of the largest and least responsible oil companies in the world as head of the COP,' Gore said. At a presentation at the COP's main plenary hall before the interview, Gore unveiled data showing that the UAE's greenhouse gas emissions rose by 7.5% in 2022 from the previous year, compared to a 1.5% percent rise in the entire world."
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Joe Versus the Stinkers. Ben Lefebvre, et al., of Politico: "The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled sweeping new regulations targeting methane emissions from the oil and gas sector on Saturday, a significant milestone for President Joe Biden's strategy for curbing the pollution driving up the Earth's temperatures. The rule's 3 a.m. rollout was timed to coincide with the ongoing U.N. climate talks in Dubai, where the U.S. has sought to play a leading role in global efforts to reduce emissions of the powerful planet-heating gas. But its biggest test will be in the legal arena at home, where conservatives on the Supreme Court have slapped down regulations the justices viewed as White House overreach." ~~~
~~~ Jim Tankersley & Lisa Friedman of the New York Times: "Vice President Kamala Harris pledged at a United Nations climate summit on Saturday that the United States would spend billions more to help developing nations fight and adapt to climate change, telling world leaders that 'we must do more' to limit global temperature rise. Her remarks followed an announcement by U.S. officials at the summit the same day that the federal government would, for the first time, require oil and gas producers to detect and fix leaks of methane. It was the most ambitious move to reduce fossil fuel emissions that President Biden's administration was expected to unveil at the summit...."
Emily Steel & Sydney Ember of the New York Times: "Air traffic controllers, who spend hours a day glued to monitors or scanning the skies with the lives of thousands of passengers at stake, are a last line of defense against crashes. The job comes with high stakes and intense pressure, even in the best of conditions. Yet the conditions for many controllers are far from ideal. A nationwide staffing shortage -- caused by years of employee turnover and tight budgets, among other factors -- has forced many controllers to work six-day weeks and 10-hour days.... In the past two years, air traffic controllers and others have submitted hundreds of complaints to a Federal Aviation Administration hotline describing issues like dangerous staffing shortages, mental health problems and deteriorating buildings, some infested by bugs and black mold. There were at least seven reports of controllers sleeping when they were on duty and five about employees working while under the influence of alcohol or drugs."
Wherein George Santos announces he will be "filling" ethics complaints against some House members who led the charge to oust him. Thanks to Ken W. for the link.
Marie: So I figured Trump's many last-minute pardons of slimeballs were a cash-in-your-chips project the Little Prince of Corruption Jared managed. But it turns out Trump had another use for many of said slimeballs: ~~~
~~~ Beth Reinhard, et al., of the Washington Post: "Experts say [Donald] Trump's abuse of the pardon power while in office was unprecedented in modern times.... Never before had a president used his constitutional clemency powers to free or forgive so many people who could be useful to his future political efforts.... Trump's clemency record offers critical insights into how he might wield one of the presidency's most unfettered powers if he is elected to a second term -- potentially to undo the work of a Justice Department he scorns, to eliminate the threat of criminal prosecution against him and his allies, and to continue to build an army of indebted supporters he can call on as needed to back him.... Many of the campaign donors, Republican operatives and media pundits who made his clemency list were well-positioned to return the favor.... [Clemency expert Jeffrey Crouch said,] '... Put simply, Trump regularly abused clemency for his own personal reasons.'"
Maureen Dowd of the New York Times: "When I interviewed them at their makeshift San Francisco headquarters back in 2016, the OpenAI founders -- Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman -- presented themselves as our Praetorian guard against the future threat of runaway, evil A.I.... But ... Musk is gone, and Altman is no longer casting himself as humanity's watchdog. He's running a for-profit outfit, creating an A.I. cookbook. He's less interested in peril than investors, less concerned about existential danger than finding A.I.'s capabilities.... The government has nibbled the edges of regulation, but the quicksilver A.I. has already leaped ahead of the snaillike lawmakers and bureaucrats. Nobody, even in Silicon Valley, has any clue how to control it.... We are totally at the mercy of Silicon Valley boys with their toys, egos crashing, temperaments colliding, ambition and greed soaring." Dowd sort of explains all the hoohah over the ousting and restoration of Altman in the top job at OpenAI.
Presidential Race 2024. The Orwellian Candidate. Michael Gold of the New York Times: "... Donald J. Trump ... repeatedly claimed to supporters in Iowa on Saturday that it was President Biden who posed a severe threat to American democracy. While Mr. Trump shattered democratic norms throughout his presidency..., the former president in his speech repeatedly accused Mr. Biden of corrupting politics and waging a repressive 'all-out war' on America.... 'Joe Biden is the destroyer of American democracy,' [he said]. Mr. Trump has made similar attacks on Mr. Biden a staple of his speeches in Iowa and elsewhere.... Mr. Trump has a history of accusing his opponents of behavior that he himself is guilty of, the political equivalent of a 'No, you are' playground retort.... Even as he was insisting that Mr. Biden threatens democracy, Mr. Trump underscored his most antidemocratic campaign themes....
"At an earlier event on Saturday, where he sought to undermine confidence in election integrity well before the 2024 election, he urged supporters in Ankeny, a predominantly white suburb of Des Moines, to take a closer look at election results next year in Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta, three cities with large Black populations in swing states that he lost in 2020.... 'We're like a third-world nation,' he [said]." The AP's report is here.
Tom Sullivan, on digby's Hullabaloo, looks down the rabbithole of conspiracy world. MB: My favorite bit: "'If you don't buy into a conspiracy theory, that means you're part of the conspiracy,' one former Twitter user posted Thursday. 'And lack of evidence for the conspiracy is proof that the conspiracy is WORKING,' replied Lindsay Beyerstein." So not only do these people live in make-believe world, they have realized a dandy self-rationalizing proof that fake is real. Thanks to RAS for the link.
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Israel/Palestine. The Washington Post's live updates of developments Sunday in the Israel/Hamas war are here: "Top U.S. officials warned Israel to protect civilian lives as it resumed aerial attacks on Gaza after a week-long pause in fighting, including in the south, where the majority of the Strip's population is now crowded after Israel instructed people in the north to evacuate. 'Too many Palestinian civilians have been killed,' Vice President Harris said Saturday. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he 'personally pushed Israeli leaders to avoid civilian casualties,' saying that a failure to do so would drive Palestinians 'into the arms of the enemy,' undermining its war efforts against Hamas. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the military was determining 'safe areas' for Gazan civilians.: ~~~
~~~ The New York Times' live updates for Sunday are here. CNN's live updates are here.
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Reader Comments (7)
Re the conspiracy theorists, this is still one of our favorites from Doonesbury, and seemingly more relevant now:
https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1985/01/27
Some states already have alternative science.
What's wrong with a little alternative social studies?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/us/republican-governors-civics-education.html
I think it all has something to do with the speed of (en)light(enment.)
It travels much slower in some places.
21 men arrested in a child sex sting in Indiana (and not one drag
queen among them!).
21 photos of some really scary dudes whom you would not care to
meet in a dark alley.
https://www.wane.com/news/prime/21-men-arrested-in-child-sex-
sting-in-greenwood/
@Ken Winkes: @Bobby Lee noted yesterday that Ron DeSantis released his plan to revamp U.S. education when he's president/pigs fly. I didn't bother to read Not-President Ron's plan, but it probably goes something like this:
Ron's Excellent Education Freedom Plan
No reading required. Why should kids be burdened with the onerous task of learning symbols and then combinations of symbols meant to represent words when we have movies and teevee and audio books?
No penmanship required. How can you learn to write if you can't read?
Not much 'rithmetic. Why should kids be forced to learn times tables and even long division, for Pete's sake, when we have calculators? Students will have to learn the Arabic symbols for numbers and standard representations of numbers because everything costs more dollars than the kids have fingers and toes. BTW, subversive "foreign" metric system not allowed.
No "foreign" languages. Everybody in the world should learn English.
Home ec & shop. Girls will learn to make white hoods and boys will learn to make crosses.
Music, art, theater. You must be kidding.
As for social studies, that NYT article you linked has pretty much all you need to know about Ron's plan: lots of patriotism & Christianity, no critical thinking.
P.E. Marching in large formations. Salutes.
Marie,
Related to our discussion of education is what I thought to be a sad little essay than ran in this morning's Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/opinion/education-humanities-college-value.html
Sad because its author couldn't come up with a clear answer to the question she raised. What good are the Humanities? Seemed to me the equivalent of engaging in a war without knowing why...
Seems simple to me. The Humanities, in which I would include history along with the music, art and theater you mention, admittedly do not have immediate practical value, as their critics commonly say, as long as value must always be immediately practical and is always translated directed into money.
But if we always use only the size of a paycheck as our yardstick, we have lost the argument even before it has begun.
While those elements of the Humanities that can improve one's communication skills sometimes have value in the workplace, their real focus and worth is the ways in which they enlarge our sense of what it means to be human and the hints accumulated over the centuries of how to be better at it.
If people are no more than their bank account, the Humanities tell me they don't amount to much.
Guardian
"The president of Cop28, Sultan Al Jaber, has claimed there is “no science” indicating that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global heating to 1.5C, the Guardian and the Centre for Climate Reporting can reveal.
Al Jaber also said a phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development “unless you want to take the world back into caves”."
Now here's a different attack on our system of justice, sourtesy of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, naturally Republican. https://floridapolitics.com/archives/646957-ron-desantis-clemency/