hudebnik

After work yesterday, I walked to the pharmacy to pick up some prescription refills and Covid tests, then stopped at the library (open 8 AM-8 PM) to vote. It was fairly busy, as "early in-person voting" goes: I had to wait in line a minute to get my ballot, then wait in another line for a minute or two for a shielded booth where I could fill it out. Still, in and out in under ten minutes; no complaints.

But it was depressing to see that they had erected 7-foot-tall, 2-foot-thick concrete barriers around the "voting" side of the library; I've voted at this location for years and never seen that before.

I spent three hours last night phone-banking for the Harris/Walz campaign, calling voters in Pennsylvania. Actually the first hour was a rather long-winded and repetitive training on how to use the calling software and the script (which you're allowed to put into your own words, but they really want you to follow the prescribed order of questions and topics), I took a 15-minute break in the middle to eat dessert with my wife, and the last 15 minutes were "debriefing", so about an hour and a half. If I do it again in the next few days, I can probably skip the training part and go straight to calling.

The calling software works best if you have a computer or tablet screen and a cell phone: the script and links are on the screen, you call one number with your cell phone, and the software forwards your call to each successive potential voter (so they don't see your personal phone number).

Perhaps half of the calls were met with either voicemail or unsolicited-call-blocking, which is reasonable: I bet if I lived in Pennsylvania right now, I'd want to block unsolicited calls too. A bunch of people hung up as soon as I identified myself as calling from "Pennsylvania Democrats", ditto. One person said "Oh, no, I'm not voting for KaMAla," while several others said "yes, I'm voting straight Democratic ticket" and two or three said "Yes, I'm voting, but I won't tell you which way." Four or five said "I've moved out of Pennsylvania; can you stop calling me?", so I clicked the "moved" button in the GUI.

I don't think I found anybody in the "undecided" category, so I never got to use the "persuasion" part of the script.

The theme for the day was "early voting": they want to encourage sympathetic voters to vote early (whether by mail or in person), against the possibility of illness, family emergency, weather emergency, etc. on Election Day. Most of the people who said they were planning to vote were unaware of the early-voting-in-person option, so I described it to them, told them the deadlines, and gave them a Web site to look up the location and hours.

I diverged from the script slightly by telling two people about the early-voting option even though they hadn't said which way they were voting. There are occasional conflicts between being a capital-D Democrat and being a small-d democrat.

At the end of the three-hour session, there was a debriefing in which people described the most interesting calls they'd had. One caller whose fiancee is Ukrainian talked with a Ukrainian who had lost family members to Putin's invasion. One voter wasn't certain whether to vote, but agreed that "a rutabaga would commit fewer crimes in office than Trump."

For years, we've been hearing both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders described as "populists". As Wikipedia points out, the word "populist" is extraordinarily ill-defined, more often used as an accusation than as a self-identification, but its various meanings all line up with "favoring the interests of the virtuous ordinary people against the evil elite", where "elite" is defined as whatever the politician in question opposes. There's also a connotation that "populist" politicians will promise, and perhaps even give, the people whatever they ask for, without regard to whether it's achievable or a good idea in the long run. That definition certainly applies to Donald Trump, whose policies seem dictated by what lines drew the most applause at a rally.

Most recently, Vice Presidential nominee J. D. Vance is described as a right-wing populist, but not in the same way: Vance adds an actual ideology to Trump's genetic-algorithm approach. Both have said some things I (and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and AOC and...) agree with, such as that "the system is rigged against ordinary people", although they differ on who's doing the rigging: in Trump's case it's "Democrats" and anybody who's ever dissed him, while for Vance it includes billionaires and large corporations. (Although considering that one is a billionaire, and both have gotten a lot of support from billionaires, I don't expect any policies from either that hurt the best interests of billionaires.)

Another thread in some flavors of populism is the notion that "the people" are not only virtuous but homogeneous -- politically, religiously, ethnically. The Communist Soviet Union and Communist China both leaned into this, paying particular worship to the traditions of their predominant ethnicities, while pretending that other ethnicities didn't exist. And both were/are renowned for cracking down on political dissent from the party line. (Both also created their own "elites" of Party officials who, despite egalitarian pronouncements, somehow always ended up with all the material goods.) Right-wing (but not left-wing) populism in the US does the same thing, cozying up to neo-Nazis, Christian fundamentalists, and overt white-supremacists. Both left-wing and right-wing populism sometimes "cancel" people for expressing politically incorrect views, but only the right-wing side seeks racial and religious homogeneity.

Another difference has to do with proposed remedies. (Parts of) both left-wing and right-wing populism agree that billionaires and multinational corporations represent an "elite" that has too much power, and both propose counterbalancing that power with the power of government, but they differ on the specifics. For FDR and perhaps Teddy Roosevelt, this required the rule of law exercised by a strong man not hemmed in by too many procedural quibbles. More recently, this strategy has split in two: the left emphasizes the Rule Of Law, while the right has emphasized the Strong Manly Man who can cut through red tape and Do What Needs To Be Done without regard to niceties like the law, individual rights, or anybody else's opinion. The left wants to strengthen government to build a nation of laws, not of men, while the right wants to strengthen government to build a nation of men, not of laws.

Both of these approaches have practical problems. On the right, as the saying goes, "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." The more power you concentrate in one individual, insulated from accountability, the more likely that individual is to become (first) self-justifying, and then utterly self-serving and corrupt. Since Donald Trump was already utterly self-serving and corrupt, giving him the power of the Presidency was like pouring kerosene on a campfire.

On the left there's a different problem: legislative capture. The more power the law has, the more incentive billionaires and multi-national corporations have to buy it to serve their own ends rather than the people's ends. And any individual billionaire or corporation has a much stronger interest in controlling the law than "the people" do. (If a cheetah loses a predator-prey contest, it misses lunch; if a gazelle loses the same contest, it misses the rest of its life. So selection pressures are much stronger on the gazelle, with the result that gazelles and other "prey" usually win.) "The people"'s interest balances that of a billionaire or corporation if lots of "the people" each do a little bit, which runs into "tragedy of the commons" free-rider problems. Alternatively, you need a relatively small number of officials whose job is to protect "the people"'s interest, and these officials have to be accountable to the people in order to avoid falling into the "corrupt power" trap.

My fellow Americans,

248 years ago today, representatives of thirteen colonies met in Philadelphia and decided they didn't want to be ruled by a King any more. Over the next few years, they created a new nation whose leaders, even the highest, were elected by consent of the governed, and whose leaders, even the highest, were subject to the law.

As of three days ago, we no longer have that nation. According to the Supreme Court, a President exercising his Constitutional powers is above the law, absolutely immune from criminal charges no matter how illegal, corrupt, or self-serving his actions may be.

I don't want that privilege. I didn't ask for that privilege. Donald Trump asked for that privilege, and the Supreme Court gave it to him (and me, and every future President).

Now if I want to take bribes, sell pardons, vetoes, or appointments for millions of dollars each, I can do it. I may be impeached, perhaps even convicted and removed from office, but I'll never be charged with a crime. And the same goes for every future President.

Now if I want to order the US military to kidnap Donald Trump and the six Supreme Court justices who voted for this decision, or even kill them, I can do that too. I may be impeached, perhaps even convicted and removed from office, but I'll never be charged with a crime. And the same goes for every future President.

Of course, I won't do those things, because they are against the law, and I don't believe in Presidents being above the law. But the next President, or the one after that, might not have those scruples. Our nation cannot take that risk.

So I'm calling for a Constitutional Amendment to correct the Supreme Court's gross misunderstanding of our system of government. Presidents are not above the law, even -- or especially -- when they use the unique powers we've bestowed on them.

Good night, happy Independence Day, God bless you, and may God save America.

Richard Nixon is reported to have said "If the President does it, it's not illegal." I would read that in the contrapositive: "if it's illegal, then the President didn't do it; the private citizen who happens to be President at the moment did it, and should therefore be prosecuted like any other private citizen." The DC Circuit Court, in denying Trump's claim of immunity, basically agreed: "the fact that Trump's actions 'allegedly violated generally applicable criminal laws' meant that those actions 'were not properly within the scope of his lawful discretion.'"

Justice Roberts, and the 6-member Republican-appointed majority of the Supreme Court, mostly agree with Nixon's formulation. Former Presidents have absolute immunity for actions they took "within their core Presidential powers" (which aren't defined anywhere in the Constitution but evidently include pardons, vetoes, and cabinet and ambassadorial appointments), and presumptive immunity for any other "official actions" they took as President. "Official actions" are interpreted very broadly, "covering actions so long as they are not manifestly or palpably beyond his authority." In deciding whether an action is "official" or not, "courts cannot consider the president’s motives, nor can they designate an act as unofficial simply because it allegedly violates the law," on grounds that even opening such questions to court examination after the fact would impede the President's ability to do the job. Apparently the only way to tell whether an act is "official" is whether it uses a power granted to the President in the Constitution.

So if, hypothetically, a President had a personal interest in a particular criminal case, and one of the star witnesses was facing Federal charges, the President could openly and publicly offer the witness a pardon in exchange for changing or refusing testimony. (For a witness not facing Federal charges, the President could openly offer the witness an ambassadorship or a high-ranking government post instead.) Anyone else who offered a witness something of value in exchange for changing or refusing testimony would be guilty of witness-tampering, but when the President does it, it's not illegal. Indeed, this falls into the "absolute immunity" category above: there isn't even an opening to argue about it. Ironically, if the President were to simply offer the witness money in exchange for changing or refusing testimony, that probably wouldn't be immune because it doesn't involve using a Presidential power.

Likewise, a President could openly and blatantly sell pardons and governmental posts in exchange for money, an act which for anyone else would be bribery. But when a President does it, it's not illegal.

In both of the above cases, Congress could of course impeach the President, but as we've seen, if the President commands the personal loyalty of a third of the Senate, that's a toothless threat.

For less-"core" aspects of Presidential power, the Court says the President is "presumptively immune", in that the prosecutor bears the burden of proof that charging former Presidents for this particular crime wouldn't "threaten the power and functioning of the executive branch". (More precisely, "the President must ... be immune from prosecution for an official act unless the Government can show that applying a criminal prohibition to that act would pose no 'dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.'") If the judge agrees that that high bar has been met, then the prosecutor can at least go ahead and bring the charge.

The majority opinion doesn't give much guidance on how to decide these questions. It lists several powers that are "core" and therefore "absolutely immune", but doesn't rule out other powers falling into that category too. It lists a lot of things that are "official" and therefore "presumptively immune", but doesn't name a single act -- even those acknowledged by Trump's lawyers as "unofficial" -- that's definitely "unofficial" and non-immune. All the guidance is in favor of immunity. (Justice Barrett's concurring opinion is slightly less generous, identifying several specific allegations against Trump as examples of things that don't involve Presidential power and therefore are not immune.)

The majority writes "Presidents cannot be indicted based on conduct for which they are immune from prosecution.... Testimony or private records of the President or his advisers probing such conduct may not be admitted as evidence at trial." So if a particular act is considered immune, prosecutors can't use it as evidence of criminal intent in other, non-immune acts. For example, since most of Trump's communications with the Vice President, the Attorney General, and other high-level advisers are considered immune, they can't be used as evidence that Trump knew there was no evidence of widespread fraud and he had lost the election fair and square, and was trying to change the result by any means necessary to keep himself in office. The majority argues that knowing that such communications might become evidence could prevent a President from conferring frankly with advisors. (Justice Barrett's concurring opinion disagrees on the question of using immune actions as evidence in non-immune actions.)

A large fraction of a President's communications are thus immune, not only from prosecution as crimes in themselves, but from being used as evidence in other crimes. For example, when Trump told the Justice Department to send letters to State election officials with "concerns" about election fraud (for which they actually had no evidence), inviting States to retroactively change their certified slates of electors, the Acting Attorney General resisted this order, and Trump repeatedly threatened to fire him and replace him with someone who would send the letters. Since communicating with, appointing, and firing cabinet officials are core Presidential powers, this entire episode cannot be charged, nor can it be used as evidence supporting other charges.

(Almost as a side note, the majority's opinion appears to grant carte blanche to Presidential communication with the Justice Department, including interfering in individual cases. Indeed, the President could fabricate false evidence against a political rival, or order the Justice Department to do so, and he couldn't be prosecuted for it.)

The Court's opinion is careful to look like it's "taking a middle ground" (e.g. rejecting Trump's ludicrous claim that since the impeachment clause says a President can be criminally prosecuted after being impeached, convicted, and removed, that means a former President can't be criminally prosecuted without first being impeached, convicted, and removed), while actually giving Trump 90% of what he wants. (Trump had claimed he could be prosecuted criminally only if first impeached and convicted by the Senate; the majority took that away with one hand, but gave back with the other, saying even if he were impeached and convicted, he'd still be immune from prosecution for official acts.)

One of the things Trump most wants is delay, and he's certainly got it. The case has already been delayed by at least six months to decide the question of immunity, and the Court, on the last day of this year's session, has sent things back with minimal guidance to the District Court to decide, for each individual charge, and each individual source of evidence, whether it enjoys absolute immunity, presumptive immunity (in which case it must decide whether allowing it would "intrude on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch"), or no immunity. Each of these individual decisions will likely be appealed by one side or the other to the Circuit Court, and then to the Supreme Court, so even if Trump loses the election, it could easily be a year or more before the charges themselves can be addressed... and weeks or months more before a verdict. And, of course, if he wins the election, the Federal cases will both be dropped, leaving only the Georgia case limping along under the constraints of prosecuting a sitting President who promises "retribution" against anyone who displeases him.

BTW, the Court didn't say anything about whether its immunity and inadmissibility rulings apply to state courts, or only Federal courts. If they apply to state courts, the Georgia case too is reduced to almost nothing, even for the 18 defendants who aren't named Trump, because much of the evidence has become inadmissible.

The majority dismisses, quite insultingly, the dissent's "fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals about a future where the President 'feels empowered to violate federal criminal law,'" expressing more concern about "an Executive Branch that cannibalizes itself, with each successive President free to prosecute his predecessors, yet unable to boldly and fearlessly carry out his duties for fear that he may be next." Indeed, it's amazing that we've gotten through 240 years of Constitutional government without each successive President prosecuting his predecessors; could it be because most of them didn't commit blatantly self-serving crimes using their official powers?"

One must also wonder how much comfort it gives a former President to face not prosecution, but merely assassination, by the current President.

Justice Thomas's concurring opinion, unsurprisingly, holds that the majority didn't go far enough; he thinks the whole notion of a Special Counsel is un-Constitutional, in which case Jack Smith has no legal authority to bring any charges against anyone. The Constitutionality of the Special Counsel's office must be decided before the Court should have considered, or even heard arguments on, the question of Presidential immunity.

The dissent by Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson points to a long history, ranging from the Federalist Papers and Constitutional Convention, to the Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton administrations, to Trump's own defense counsel, of assuming and reassuring people that former Presidents are subject to criminal prosecution if they commit actual crimes, even in their official capacity. (Trump's impeachment counsel said “If my colleagues on this side of the Chamber actually think that President Trump committed a criminal offense... [a]fter he is out of office, you go and arrest him.")

Both sides cite Fitzgerald, a case in which former-President Nixon was ruled immune from civil suit by someone who had lost his Federal job in a reorganization ordered by the President. The dissenters in this case point out that the Fitzgerald court disagreed on many things, but were unanimous that immunity was more warranted in such a civil case than in a criminal case: "a contention that the President is immune from criminal prosecution in the courts, if ever made, would not be credible." That incredible contention has now been made by SCOTUS itself.

"I am deeply troubled by the idea, inherent in the majority's opinion, that our Nation loses something valuable when the President is forced to operate within the confines of federal criminal law."

The dissenters also point out that allowing former Presidents immunity, while forbidding current Presidents to prosecute them, does not actually "respect the independence of the Presidency", instead preventing the President from "taking Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" and "exalting the occupants of the office over the office itself".

The dissenters see no significant difference between the majority's "absolute immunity" and "presumptive immunity", except that the former don't include any of the charges against Trump; a majority that prides itself on making no rulings where it doesn't have to has invented a whole broad category of absolutely-immune Presidential acts that don't come up in this case. Perhaps the majority created this category in order to have a three-point spectrum, so lower-court decisions will put most things into the middle category (well-known psychology), which is enough to immunize the President in most cases.

"The official-versus-unofficial act distinction... seems both arbitrary and irrational, for it suggests that the unofficial criminal acts of a President are the only ones worthy of prosecution. Quite to the contrary, it is when the President commits crimes using his unparalleled official powers that the risks of abuse and autocracy will be most dire."

"Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority's message today."

The Founding Fathers are spinning in their graves tonight.


As usual, the three women appointed by Democratic Presidents constitute the minority. Even within the Republican-appointed majority bloc, the one Justice who sees Presidents as slightly more subject to the rule of law, the one willing to identify a few actions as definitely non-immune, is the one woman. Every male on the court ruled that a President needs the untrammeled freedom to do whatever he wants in office, even if it blatantly violates the law. It's the whole "cowboy" thing, or perhaps "Dirty Harry": alpha-males are their own law, and you can't expect them to submit to following the same rules as we lesser mortals. I guess in the choice between "a nation of laws" and "a nation of men", we know where these guys stand.

I have my phone set to read me the news headlines from several major news organizations as I do my morning ablutions, and one of them (by default) is Fox News. And it's always interesting to hear how Fox's take on the news differs from everybody else's: for example, last year when Fox News was hit with an $800 million lawsuit verdict for lying about Dominion voting machines being rigged to shift votes in the 2020 Presidential election from Trump to Biden, it was a headline on every news agency except Deutsche Welt and Fox, which didn't mention that there had been a verdict at all.

This morning there was an offhand mention that "Republicans in the US House rejected an aid bill to Ukraine and Israel because it didn't contain border security measures." That's not how it was described on any other mainstream news source (Reuters, NYT, WaPo, NPR, AP...): the usual story is that Republicans in the US House, after months of bipartisan negotiations, rejected an aid bill to Ukraine and Israel that contained almost every border security measure they had ever asked for, because Trump didn't want a border security bill to pass before the November election so he could run on Biden's inability to do border security. And then the US Senate, with almost all Democrats and about half of Republicans, passed the same bill without the border security stuff, but the Republican Speaker of the US House refused to even call a vote on it.

If you saw your toddler playing with a sharp knife, would you run and grab it away? Probably not: the toddler would instinctively tighten its grip on the knife, probably cutting itself. Instead, you would offer it something better.

I've seen a lot of posts saying, roughly, that the people of Gaza deserve what they're getting because they overwhelmingly support Hamas, which committed such barbarisms on Oct. 7. To which I respond "Of course they support Hamas -- it's the only game in town. When is the last time they were offered something better?"

Which raises the obvious question: what does Hamas offer the people of Gaza? For that matter, what does Fatah offer the people of the West Bank?

If you were a Palestinian living in Gaza before October 7, you could expect to live your life treated as a criminal, subjected to long, random searches and road-blocks every day on your commute to work, which you might not get to at all if the searches took too long. Eventually, the next time the simmering war heated up, you might die at random, for no reason, when an Israeli bomb fell on your home. You would live and die ignominiously as a victim. Hamas offered you the hope of living and dying with dignity, as an actor: if Israel was going to kill you anyway, it might as well at least be for a reason of your own choosing.

If you're a Palestinian living in the West Bank, you can expect to live your life treated as a criminal, subjected to long, random searches and road-blocks every time you try to leave the West Bank, or even go from one part of the West Bank to another when there's an Israeli settlement in between. Eventually, a bunch of Israeli settlers will damage your home, intentionally, and the law won't punish them, but if you try to repair it to livability, you're the one breaking the law. Or they'll force you out of your home at gunpoint, and anything you do in self-defense will get you killed; if you come back to your home the next week, you'll find Israeli settlers living in it, having declared it theirs because you abandoned it. Or they'll just kill you outright and tell the police it was in self-defense. In any case, you'll live and die ignominiously as a victim. Fatah, or Hamas for that matter, offers you the hope of living and dying with dignity, as an actor.

Some time in the past two months I saw an excerpt from a speech by one of Netanyahu's cabinet laying out the theory that what sustains Palestinian terrorists is the hope of destroying Israel and having their own country, and that hope must be destroyed: they have to understand that they will never succeed, that they have no hope. Which is perhaps correct for the people whose primary motivation is revenge, but for most ordinary Palestinians, like most ordinary Israelis, the primary motivation is living through the next day, year, even decade, perhaps giving their children a better life than their own. And the lack of hope is exactly what turns people into terrorists: people who have no hope, nothing to lose, do things you wouldn't think any human would stoop to (like October 7).

So what could one offer the people of Gaza and the West Bank that would be better than what Hamas offers them? In the abstract, hope: the hope of living a normal life, with equal rights under the law, not treated automatically as a criminal, not killed or forced from your home at random, seeing your children and grandchildren grow up and thrive. Making that more concrete is tricky, though.

I'm not convinced that a two-state solution will ever work. The British in India tried a religiously-based partition of the land, only months before the British in Palestine tried a religiously-based partition of the land, and the result in both cases was years of unspeakable bloodshed. Even eighty years later, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are still openly hostile to one another, and there's official oppression of religious minorities within each country. It didn't work in Yugoslavia, and it didn't work in Ireland (at least for many decades). Wherever you draw the lines between Israel and Palestine, many Palestinians will see it as not enough ("they forced me/my parents/my grandparents out of our homes at gunpoint, and they're being rewarded for it by gaining legal title to our homes, while we get pushed into the least-desirable pockets of land"), while many Israelis also see it as not enough ("this has been our land for thousands of years, why should they get any of it at all?"). The bloodshed may slow down somewhat, or it may not.

Of course, having grown up in the US, what's obvious to me is a one-state solution, with equal rights for all regardless of race or religion. What can you offer the people of Gaza and the West Bank? Citizenship, full stop. (And some kind of recompense for property illegally taken from them, at least recently.)

Which would mean the only officially Jewish nation in the world would no longer have a Jewish majority population, and (if all its people really do have equal rights regardless of religion) would no longer be a Jewish nation. Which is no big deal to me -- why should a nation have a religion? -- but thousands of years of Jews living as somewhat-unwanted guests in other people's nations have dreamt of having a nation of their own, and I don't know what that feels like so I'm not in a position to discount it.

I've been carefully avoiding public statements about what's going on in and near Gaza, but I do Have Thoughts.

On October 7, Hamas slaughtered 1400 Israelis, including babies and senior citizens, almost all of whom were individually innocent of doing anything to harm the Palestinian people, and kidnapped another 200 or so. For the crime of being Israeli, for living in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was an act of barbarism that cannot be allowed to stand, no matter what justification Hamas might have claimed. One could reasonably respond "For this crime, Hamas must be wiped off the face of the Earth, whatever the cost."

In the three and a half weeks since then, the Israeli military has slaughtered 5 to 10 thousand (depending on whom you believe) Palestinians, including babies and senior citizens, almost all of whom were individually innocent of doing anything to harm the Israeli people. And probably killed thousands more indirectly by cutting off electricity, fuel, food, and water. For the crime of being Palestinian, for living in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was an act of barbarism that cannot be allowed to stand, no matter what justification the Israeli government might have claimed. One could reasonably respond "For this crime, Israel must be wiped off the face of the Earth, whatever the cost."

Of course, neither of those things is actually going to happen -- certainly not through military action. On one side, Hamas and Hezbollah obviously don't have nearly enough military power to actually destroy Israel, only to make it suffer. The other side is more interesting.

I'm sure that Israeli air raids and now ground battles have killed a substantial number of Hamas fighters, and even some Hamas leaders, but probably a hundred times as many innocent civilians. And every one of those innocent civilians is survived by at least ten friends and family, who all now hate Israel even more than they did before and are all now prime targets for recruitment to Hamas. If one in ten of those actually joins Hamas, that means for every Hamas fighter you kill, you've created a hundred more. (I made the same point in connection with the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq twenty years ago: for every actual enemy we killed, we also killed enough innocent civilians to generate many more new enemies.) The only way to escape this arithmetic is to actually Kill All the Palestinians, and we have a word for that, starting with "gen". Or perhaps "Hol".

One has to wonder why Hamas carried out its October 7 attacks. The glib answer "they wanted to make Israelis suffer" explains individual motivations, but isn't enough to explain why the entire command structure organized a coordinated series of especially-brutal attacks all on one day. There must have been a strategic purpose. Obviously not to destroy Israel -- Hamas isn't so delusional as to think they could do that. Instead, the strategic purpose was to trigger Israel to retaliate ten times over, to kill many thousands of innocent civilians and create thousands more Hamas fighters, while losing worldwide public sympathy. The Israeli government and military followed, and are still following, that script perfectly.

The current Israeli attacks are not only arguably immoral, they're counterproductive of either Israeli security or (dare I say?) long-term peace. Hamas is firmly opposed to both Israeli security and long-term peace, so destroying it is a worthy goal, but the next question should be "what's the most effective way to accomplish that?" It won't be accomplished with bombs and air-raids, nor with house-to-house ground invasions. You might be able to do it with assassination, but the best way to do it would be to starve Hamas of what little popular support it has, and replace it with a Palestinian organization interested in peace. I won't pretend that that's easy, or that I would know how to do it, only that it's more likely to work than large-scale bombing.

Zack Beauchamp, who knows far more about this stuff than I do, reaches similar conclusions in this excellent Vox article of Oct 20; his Oct 26 conversation with Ezra Klein is here. Among other things, he points out that Israel appears to have no plan for what it would do if it did "destroy Hamas": abandon Gaza for the remaining rebels to rebuild Hamas, install a puppet regime in Gaza to be promptly overthrown by the remaining rebels, or occupy Gaza with thousands of Israeli troops for years or decades to come, those troops being picked off gradually by the remaining rebels?

From the US's perspective, we can't talk about Israel without also talking about Ukraine, where the moral calculus is simpler. Israel and the various Palestinian groups have each tried to capture territory by force, have each attacked one another's civilian infrastructure and civilian population centers over the decades, so there are no "clean hands". Ukraine, while not inhabited or led by angels, has as far as I know never tried to take over Russian territory by force (except those that Russia has recently taken over and promptly declared "Russian"), and never intentionally targeted civilian infrastructure and civilian population centers, while Russia has most certainly done those things to Ukraine, not only in the past year and a half but in previous incursions. Naturally, where there's a clear bad-guy and not-so-bad-guy, the US Republican Party is firmly on the side of the bad-guy: it will happily spend billions of dollars supporting Israel against Hamas (deducting that money from IRS enforcement, naturally, because Tax Cheaters Are Our Friends), but not a penny supporting Ukraine against Russia, because Trump.

The other problem with US support for Ukraine is, as in Gaza, the question of what "victory" would look like. Does it mean a long-term ceasefire on current borders, or the borders of 2021, or 2013? Does it include a promise that Ukraine will never join NATO? A promise that Russia will never invade Ukraine? Why would anyone believe that promise? Accepting the current borders or even the borders of 2021 may be seen as rewarding Russia for its repeated attempts to capture Ukrainian territory, and encouraging more such attempts every few years. On the other hand, it's hard to see Russia being pushed back to its borders of 2021, much less 2013, without direct NATO involvement and a lot more bloodshed by NATO countries, which is politically implausible. Or Putin's downfall, which many people would like to see but nobody wants to be seen as responsible for -- and again, what would come the day after?

That's enough for now. I don't really know much about either Israel, Ukraine, or military strategy, and should go back to something I know.

Somebody came to the door yesterday canvassing for a City Council candidate. shalmestere answered the door, and the conversation was over before I even knew anybody was there, but he left a business card.

Which says "Crime Taxes Inflation [parking icon] [school icon] [house icon] ... is 2 damn high! Fix the government! [anger icon]" and then contact information including affiliations with the Republican and Conservative Parties. (New York State law allows cross-endorsement, so multiple parties can nominate the same candidate if they wish; the candidate's name appears multiple times on the ballot, once for each recognized party that nominates the candidate, and you can pick which version of the candidate to vote for).

So as far as I can tell, the candidate's platform, boiled down to a business card, is "there's too much crime, too much taxation, too much inflation, too little (or too expensive) parking, bad schools, something something housing, we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it any more!" Problem is, crime is actually down over the last two years. Taxes are up at the Federal level over the last two years, because the Republican tax cut of 2017 came with a five-year expiration date for ordinary people (although the tax cuts for billionaires and corporations were permanent), and I don't think they've changed appreciably at the state or city level. Inflation is down considerably over the last year, now well below its post-WWII average of 3.7%. (CPI Aug 1945=18.1. CPI Aug 2023=307.026. Ratio=16.96, whose 78th root is 1.037.) So some of these complaints aren't actually true, at least no more so than usual; they're just the standard things people complain about, unmoored to objective reality.

More tellingly, fixing any one of these problems makes the others worse. For example, if you cut taxes, people have more money to spend, which drives up inflation. If you build more parking, that costs the government money so it has to raise taxes, and it takes land that might have been used for housing, so the cost of housing goes up. If you make schools better, that costs the government money so it has to raise taxes, and more people want to live in your neighborhood so the cost of housing goes up. The usual way to reduce inflation is to raise interest rates, slow down the economy, and increase unemployment (which the Federal Reserve decided not to do yesterday, but presumably will at least once later in the year).

And although a City Council member might have some influence over parking, schools, and housing, the same can't be said of the problems that the candidate called out by name (crime, taxes, inflation). So no, I don't take this candidate seriously.

So the indictment from Fulton County, Georgia was released about 11:30 last night, and I stayed up too late reading it. (It's 97 pages, but a quick read because a lot of it is repetitive legal boilerplate.)

It forms an interesting contrast with the Federal indictment for Jan. 6 and related activities. Where Jack Smith went minimalist, Fani Willis went maximalist. Smith's charges are the absolute minimum he could possibly file and respect himself in the morning: he avoids any charge that carries a penalty of disqualification from office, lest he be accused of interfering in the 2024 Presidential election (which he will be anyway), and he avoids any complex charge that's hard to explain or for which Trump might have a reasonable defense. He's looking for a quick, clean kill. Willis's charges are centered on conspiracy and racketeering: she lists 161 distinct acts, many of which aren't crimes in themselves and many of which took place outside her jurisdiction (Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nevada, DC), which form a coherent story of a corrupt organization coordinating to overthrow the legally certified results of an election. And where Smith charges only Donald Trump (while holding a handful of unindicted co-conspirators in his back pocket, of whom presumably some will take plea deals to testify against Trump and others will be prosecuted), Willis charges 19 different people and mentions 30 other unindicted co-conspirators, largely "electors" who signed papers claiming to be the lawfully chosen electors of their various states. In answer to a question at the press conference, yes, she intends to try all 19 defendants together.

Charges include, in addition to the RICO charge against all 19 defendants, 40 other charges against one or more of the defendants: forgery, impersonating public officials, submitting false official documents, unauthorized possession of ballots, computer theft and invasion of privacy (from when several defendants visited a county courthouse on Jan. 7, 2021, scanned all the ballots and imaged all the hard drives), making false statements to public officials (the Georgia legislature and several Georgia election officials), and most obviously soliciting public officials to violate their oaths and commit election fraud.

Now we wait for four different criminal trials, in four different states, to be scheduled and heard.