Friday, March 08, 2024

I have now written this post 20 times

In the 20+(!!!!!) years that I have run this taco stand, I have not been very consistent about anything. Remember when I never used capital letters? Or when I had this weird February 15th Turkish Star Trek tradition? When I used to plug other people's blogs? Or when other people had blogs? Almost all the old shit I did has been replaced by new shit, or no shit at all, or new shit that isn't replacing anything.

My point is that the only constant in life is change, except that I will always, every year, put up a whiny post about how much I hate the State of the Union Address. I really have done it every freaking year since this place launched in mid-2003. I even complained about the SOTU from Kazakhstan. That's how important this issue is to me.

Sometimes my SOTU post will be half assed and sometimes it will be full assed. But the anti-SOTUism is my one constant, even when everyone is saying that Biden did a really good job last night. My beef is not about any particular SOTU performance, it is that the SOTU is nothing more than a performance. That is terrible even when the performance is good.

The Whine Cellar: 200420052006, 20072008200920102011201220132014201520162017201820192020 20212022, 2023.

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

Another shitty Supreme Court decision

Before the Supreme Court ruling yesterday that forced Colorado to put Trump back on its primary ballot, I thought two things about the case:

  1. If you look at the language of the Fourteenth Amendment, there was a strong case that Trump is not eligible to run for president.
  2. There was virtually no chance that the Supreme Court would find Trump to be ineligible to run for President.
I still think that #1 is true, and like plenty of others have mentioned, the per curiam decision the Court issued yesterday really doesn't make any sense. The opinion said that the exclusion clause only applies if Congress passes a law giving teeth to the exclusion, but the language of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment already states explicitly what role Congress has in deciding ineligibility, and it is not what the Court just ruled. The text of that section says that if someone is excluded "Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability." If the drafters of the Amendment intended Congressional action to be necessary to exclude someone in the first place, they would have said so, just as they explained how the "disability" can be removed.

But I do think if the Supreme Court went the other way, there would be huge potential for abuse. If Trump was excluded from Colorado and a handful of other state ballots because he engaged in insurrection, red states would immediately exclude Biden on some bullshit theory that he committed "treason" because (mumble) (mumble) border, or something. The Texas Lt. Governor has already said as much. Let's face it, a lot of state leaders suck and giving the carte blanche to knock anyone they want off the ballot by just declaring them an insurrectionist is ripe for abuse.

If the Court gave a shit about the actual Constitution they could have issued a much more narrow ruling. Like, for example, they could have ruled that you can't be excluded for "insurrection" unless you have been convicted of the crime of insurrection. That would at least be consistent with what the Constitution says. It would also mean that Trump would remain eligible to run for President. But that's more because Merrick Gartland didn't immediately bring charges or appoint a special prosecutor at the beginning of the Biden Presidency. It wouldn't be because the Supreme Court is terrible. The ruling we actually got is because the Supreme Court is terrible. There's almost no opinion these days that isn't a scream for Court reform.


Thursday, February 29, 2024

The "uncommitted" protest vote in Michigan was a failure

If I was a Michigan voter, I might have voted "uncommitted" yesterday to send a message to Biden about his Gaza policy. I still would vote for Biden over Trump in the general, of course. But why not use an otherwise meaningless mostly uncontested primary as an opportunity to express my disappointment.

But to send a message, it would need a lot of support. Just a small statistical blip is not enough to send a clear message to Biden about his policies. Despite all the hype for the uncommitted protest, "uncommitted" got just 13.2% of the vote in the Democratic primary. Maybe that sounds significant, until you realize that there always is an uncommitted vote when an incumbent democrat is running uncontested in a primary in the reelection year. In 2012, there was a 10.7% "uncommitted" vote in the Michigan Democratic primary. That was not the sign that Barack Obama was in any real danger of losing Michigan or reelection later that year. In fact he won both. I don't think the difference between 13.2% and 10.7% is enough to represent a large groundswell of Biden backlash this year, As much as I would like it if Biden changed his policy towards Israel and the conflict in Gaza the uncommitted vote in Michigan wasn't loud enough to deliver a clear protest message.


Just another day of our highly politicized corrupt Supreme Court

It's worth remembering that "presidential immunity", the concept, is completely made up. There is nothing about presidential immunity in the Constitution. Congressional immunity exists, it's in Article I. So the founders knew how to do immunity if they wanted to create legal immunity. But presidential immunity was not a thing for 200 years until it was invented by the Supreme Court in 1982 to protect Richard Nixon when someone he illegally fired sued him. And it was only made up to be immunity from civil lawsuits, not criminal prosecution. So Trump's presidential immunity claims in his criminal cases are pretty frivolous and based on nothing but an attempt to extend an immunity doctrine that was created out of thin air (the very kind of creation that conservative "original intent" jurists claim to hate... except when it comes to creating new immunities for public officials and police officers, and whenever it results in something that conservatives like) and extending it by judicial fiat into a brand new area without any real basis in the law. Or at least in the law before our judicial overlords tell us it is the law now.

Still, I think there is a fair chance that even the current arch-conservative Court will reject Trump's presidential immunity argument. Not because it is frivolous (it is) but because a Democrat is currently in the White House. The joke is the day after the Courts rule that Presidents are absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for anything they do while President, Biden orders the murder of Trump. I don't think that will literally happen, but the current arch-conservative majority is going to be aware of the dangers of telling the current sitting president, who they don't like, can do anything he wants without fear of consequences.

So instead I think this is just a delay tactic. The Supreme Court didn't just decide to take the case they declined to expedite it. Oral argument is scheduled for the end of April, two months from now, after first denying the special counsel's request for expedited review in December and then taking weeks to announce whether they would even take the case after Trump submitted his appeal. So a ruling won't come out until the end of June, 6 months after it could have summarily dealt with it (and that's assuming the Court doesn't kick it to the next term, one year from now, which they could, but probably won't, do). By contrast Bush v. Gore was an appeal of a December 8, 2000 ruling of the Florida Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court took the case on December 9, heard arguments on December 11, and issued their ruling on December 12. When the Court wants to expedite something they know how to do it. By not quickly declining to hear the case or expediting the argument and decision, they are deciding to help Trump make sure he is not convicted before he is able to become President and shut the prosecution down. While the Court has not formally ruled on the case yet, that is already a significant decision they have already made.

Maybe Clarence and Ginny will get a shiny new R.V. out of this.


Friday, February 16, 2024

How to get undeserved attention

I want to take this opportunity to announce that I, upyernoz, who never had a serious shot at ever being President, will not run for President of the United States this year.


Sunday, February 11, 2024

Trump's latest on NATO

  1. Trump still has no idea what NATO is. Way back in 2016, before he was elected president, I noted that Trump seemed to think that NATO obligates other NATO countries to pay the U.S. It's one thing when he is a semi-joke of a presidential candidacy based on his history as a reality TV start and with no previous political experience, but once he has actually severed as president, he really should know better. But he still clearly thinks that NATO is some mafia-esque protection racket (where the U.S. requires members to pay them in exchange for protection) as opposed to a mutual defense treaty.
  2. The U.S. news media is remarkably uninterested in stating the obvious, that Trump's claim that NATO members owe the U.S. money has no factual basis at all. That this NYT article, which spins Trump actual's remarks that clearly indicate that Trump believes NATO allies are supposed to pay the U.S. (when he talks about NATO allies being "delinquent" or brags that when he was president "hundreds of billions of dollars came flowing in" from NATO allies), into Trump saying that members were not meeting the alliance's unofficial goal that each member states should spend at least 2% of their GDP on defense.  That's clearly not what he was saying. If a NATO ally spends 2% on defense, that money would go to pay their soldiers or to their domestic arms industry. No money would "come flowing in" to the U.S. They are just distorting what Trump is saying to make it more coherent than it is.
  3. I think this is a much bigger indication of dementia than mixing up the names of a leader. It's not a simple mix up (the kind that everyone does sometimes and older people definitely do more often), it shows real detachment from reality.

Saturday, February 10, 2024

Cheering Israel's self-destructive behavior

Given the reaction of even the pro-peace friends and relatives I have in my life, I'm not surprised at all that J Street has largely supported Israel's war in Gaza. What I don't get is why so many people who both support Israel and really do seem to care about Palestinian lives (even if, in the end, they are valued less than Israeli lives), think it is supporting Israel to cheer them into a war that they will probably lose. And Israel almost certainly will lose. I mean, the goal they set, to "destroy Hamas" cannot be achieved with military force. Even if they kill every Hamas member (which is not a real possibility), Hamas' popularity skyrockets whenever they brutalize civilians and Hamas is the only force fighting back. Almost all of Hamas' leadership is outside of Gaza and this is the best recruitment ploy they could ever dream of.

Israel, like many countries, including the U.S., has over-idealized the military victories in their founding myths. The Israel-against-all-odds-defeated-a-half-dozen-Arab-states (based largely on 1948 and 1967) leaves Israelis with the idea that military force is more effective than it actually is. Plus, Israel in the 40s and 60s is very different than Israel is today. Back then, Israel did not have to care about what the world thought about them. They were a minor economy that was not strongly tied to anyone else. Nowadays the Israeli economy, especially its tech sector, is deeply integrated into the European, American, Canadian, and Australian markets, plus the markets of numerous developing countries, such as India, and the former Soviet Union. It actually matters if the world consensus decides that Israel is committing war crimes, and that is potentially a massive blow to the Israeli economy. I just can't see any scenario where this war plausibly makes Israel more safe or better off in any way. Watching friends and relatives cheer on Israel's self-destructive behavior in the name of being pro-Israel is a truly strange sight.


Monday, February 05, 2024

Immigration

I have no idea what a fair and humane solution to deal with the high number of people showing up at the U.S.-Mexico border might be. But it seems like everything that I ever hear proposed is absolutely terrible. It's a really complicated problem, one that requires careful consideration and thought that, I fear, our political system is completely incapable of providing at the moment. So instead we have leaders trying to one-up each other to be the champion at mistreating foreigners and pushing policies which will almost certainly lead to increases in the number of undocumented people in the U.S., the very thing the people pushing these policies claim to hate.

So no, I don't think this Senate-White House deal is worth it at all. (I'm probably fine with the aid to Taiwan and Ukraine, although I really don't know enough details to say for sure, and I support the increase of immigration judges, giving work authorization to asylees, and increasing the number of skilled immigrants. The rest of it, at least the stuff that made it into Kevin Drum's summary, sucks). So does that mean it is good news that the radical rightwing cabal that controls the House is not going to let this pass because it doesn't require enough brutalization of migrants?

What I'm really afraid of is the administration's desire to get a big aid package to Ukraine and Israel will get Biden and the Democrats to compromise further from here, leaving us with an even worse immigration package that might pass. Luckily a not-insignificant portion of the House GOP will not pass any immigration bill, no matter what it says, as long as Biden is President. It's just odd to pin my hopes on a bunch of frothing racists.