Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Bedlam

[Brexiter]

We begin today with Charles Pierce of Esquire asserting that there is not and has never been any such thing as "completely free speech" in the entire history of American democracy.

Ever since the beginning of the republic, and even among some of the people who wrote and promulgated the Constitution, nobody ever believed in completely free speech. This is especially true among the rich and the powerful—and more especially true of the rich, powerful, and thin-skinned. Somebody is always going to be insulted, offended, or otherwise agitated by someone else expressing their thoughts. That agitation could be political, personal, social, or a hundred other variations, and that agitation almost inevitably fashions itself into a desire to eliminate its proximal cause, to wit, the expression or ideas, or both, that touched it off in the first place. And if you are rich and powerful, your agitation is particularly well-armed.

Any sensible reading of the history of the First Amendment (hell, of the entire Bill of Rights) is a history of pushing and pulling, one step up and two steps back. But the one thing that the First Amendment should protect absolutely is the right of all of us to argue about the rights that the Constitution guarantees. And the last couple of weeks have been a bonanza for that most basic First Amendment exercise.

The primary battleground recently has been Twitter; or at least it has been since Elon Musk, the living embodiment of Rod Stewart's assessment of having "a lot more money than sense," bought the platform and turned it into the lab rat for every twist and turn of his bizarre version of libertarianism.

Emine Yücel and Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo continue reportage of the TPM investigation into the Mark Meadows text messages, writing about some of the non-governmental players attempting to overthrow the 2020 election.

Davis is a prolific donor to Republican politicians. On Dec. 9, 2020, as a slew of Trump allies around the country were engaged in efforts to overturn the vote, Davis indicated he was pressing various contacts to get himself a White House meeting. As he sought to enlist Trump’s chief of staff in this effort, Davis dangled the possibility he would host Meadows on a “goose hunting trip.”

Davis’ pitch was evidently successful. Seven days later he wrote another message to Meadows describing his sitdown with Trump. Based on that message, Trump had told Davis he wanted to seize voting machines “for evidence.” Davis also seemed to feel Trump was fixated on the thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories involving Dominion, a voting systems company that loomed large in the imaginations of many 2020 election deniers. Countless experts — including multiple Trump administration officials — have testified the claims about Dominion had no merit and even Meadows, in some of his texts, indicated he was dubious of the claims about the company. Ultimately, Dominion filed a series of defamation suits against Trump allies who pushed the theory. While some of those cases are ongoing, Dominion has had some success in initial court decisions. Davis wrote Meadows indicating he was concerned about Trump’s focus on Dominion. He was eager for Trump to get behind other, more run-of-the-mill right-wing conspiracy theories about fraud.

I guess that Marty Davis, too, wanted to "humor" Number 45 but with "more run-of-the-mill" conspiracy theories. Or maybe we were all living in a Bethlem Royal Hospital with the inmates in control. And I mean that in all the varied connotations of the word “bedlam.”

Blake Hounshell of The New York Times lists the reasons that Democrats are feeling pretty good going into 2023.

Democrats are gawking at the lackluster start of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, which so far has earned him very few endorsements from Republican members of Congress. On Thursday, Trump lashed out at the recent run of polls showing Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida outpacing him in hypothetical matchups — including in The Wall Street Journal, an influential newspaper among Republican donors.

Then, several of Trump’s most prominent supporters mocked what he had billed as a “major announcement,” which turned out to be a low-energy infomercial for digital trading cards selling for $99. […]

The average price of a gallon of gasoline has fallen to $3.18 from a height of $5.02 in June. And even though Americans are still feeling pretty sour about the overall state of the economy, the overall rate of inflation rose by 7.1 percent in November — still a lot, but less than expected. Twelve Republican senators voted for the same-sex marriage law that Biden championed, a recognition of just how far public opinion has moved on the issue over the last decade.

If all goes as planned next week, Congress also looks poised to pass an overhaul of the Electoral Count Act, a major bipartisan victory led by Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

A former President of the United States hawing NFT’s? Between Musk and Trump, I’d almost believe that maybe we’re still living in Bedlam. Or a damn good illusion of one.

Zoha Qamar of FiveThirtyEight notes that while a large majority of Americans think that housing insecurity deserves to be prioritized, few Americans are for prioritizing the problem in their own neighborhood.

Generally, Americans support tackling housing insecurity, with 71 percent saying that it should be at least an important priority for Congress to pass legislation growing the housing supply and improving housing affordability. But research also suggests that while Americans want more kinds of infrastructure to reduce homelessness, far fewer want those resources close to where they themselves live.

Earlier this year, YouGov surveyed Americans about building almost 40 kinds of developments, ranging from country clubs to waste management facilities. Regarding social infrastructure, 85 percent of Americans supported building homeless shelters somewhere in the United States. However, when they were asked about building shelters in their own local area, support was over 20 percentage points lower. Support for low-income housing followed a similar pattern, with broad approval for building it someplace in the country (82 percent) but much less for building it locally (65 percent).

This discrepancy isn’t necessarily new or surprising, however. More recently, we’ve seen it play out in American cities throughout the pandemic. For example, in New York City’s Upper West Side, the city temporarily housed homeless people in unoccupied hotel rooms. But after local homeowners and renters protested, the city relocated many of the people to other neighborhoods.

I did not see anything about the verdict in the Aaron Dean case here at Daily Kos.

William Melhado/Texas Tribune

The Fort Worth ex-police officer who shot and killed Atatiana Jefferson at her mother’s home in 2019 was convicted of manslaughter by a jury that deliberated on Wednesday and Thursday.

The jury rejected the more serious charge of murder, and sentencing will come later. Under the Texas Code, the prison sentence for manslaughter is between two and 20 years.

Aaron Dean, 38, a white police officer, resigned from the Fort Worth Police Department days after fatally shooting Jefferson, a 28-year-old Black woman.

Lincoln Mitchell writes for Washington Monthly that San Francisco is not and has never quite been the liberal bastion that the national media would have you to believe.

While there was almost no national coverage of San Francisco’s elections last month, the results provided more evidence for those who believe the city is moving rightward. Brooke Jenkins, the district attorney appointed by Mayor London Breed after Boudin was recalled, easily won the election in her own right. Jenkins, who has an African American mother and a father from El Salvador, used to run the hate crimes section under Boudin but, like many in the office, disagreed with his progressive approach. Since her appointment in June, she has behaved like a conventional big-city D.A.

In a race for the board of supervisors, San Francisco’s equivalent of the city council, the progressive incumbent Gordon Mar was narrowly defeated by the more conservative Joel Engardio, who supported the Boudin recall and that of three school board members in February. Mar didn’t and paid the price. In another district, Honey Mahogany (her real name), in a bid to become San Francisco’s first trans supervisor, lost to Matt Dorsey, a more conservative incumbent. [...]

So San Francisco can be seen as moving rightward in some respect, but if you view it with a longer lens, you’ll see that this moderate tick to the right is part of the city’s history, which is much more like that of other American cities than is commonly understood. San Francisco has a deserved reputation for being socially tolerant—just read about Susan Sontag’s visits to lesbian bars in the 1950s, the flowers-in-your-hair drug culture of the 60s and 70s, or the city’s place as a beacon of the progressive counterculture during the Reagan era 1980s. But the high-profile social tolerance also belied a conservative business community and a city long on homeowners more concerned about property values than taking George Washington off the name of schools. In many respects, San Francisco has never been all that progressive.

Mel Robbins of CNN decries the labeling of people that commit suicide as "selfish."

I think of death from suicide the same way I think about death from brain cancer. If you have a friend or a loved one – as most of us do – who has died from a struggle with addiction, depression, trauma or toxic stress, that mental health challenge fundamentally changed their mind, the way they think and they way they process the world. Similar to the way that brain cancer deteriorates the brain, mental illness impairs the mind and, for some, mental health challenges can even alter the physical structure of the brain.

With cancer, you see people you love deteriorating on the outside. When someone struggles with mental health issues, you often don’t see it. Unfortunately, people – men in particular – feel a lot of shame when they are struggling mentally.

There are a lot of people battling demons in their heads who put on a smile, share fun videos on social media, play on sports teams and are successful at work – all as they struggle to battle their inner demons. Just because you can’t see it inside someone, doesn’t mean the pain they are experiencing isn’t real or overwhelming.

That’s why tWitch’s death doesn’t make sense to so many people.

In public, his struggle was invisible. In the privacy of his mind, it may have been a living hell. That’s why the language we choose when discussing suicide is so important.

I agree with Ms. Robbins 100%,

Jelani Cobb of The New Yorker looks at the complicated nature of race as it pertains to foreign relations and, specifically, the Brittney Griner-Viktor Bout prisoner swap.

The Goodman case highlights both the potential of citizen diplomacy and the complications that race can impose on foreign relations. The latter issue came to the fore again on December 8th, when Brittney Griner, an American basketball player and two-time Olympic gold medallist, who had been held in Russian custody for nearly ten months, on drug-possession charges, walked across an airport tarmac in Abu Dhabi, as part of an exchange that also freed Viktor Bout, a notorious Russian arms dealer serving a twenty-five-year prison sentence in the United States. As with Goodman’s case, some activists had feared that, in the midst of a foreign conflict, Griner’s identity—she is Black and queer—would make her a low priority for U.S. diplomatic efforts. The circumstances, of course, are very different: many African Americans viewed Reagan with suspicion, whereas support from Black voters was key to Joe Biden’s election. But LaTosha Brown, a founder of Black Voters Matter, a group that has been key to recent Democratic victories in Georgia, echoed Jackson when she told NBC News that, absent efforts to keep Griner’s name in the news, she might “rot in jail.” And, as with the Goodman case, Griner’s release inspired a tide of criticism—from Republicans, at least. [...]

The main theme of the Republican criticism was a supposed weakness in releasing an international war criminal to bring Griner home. Making this argument required a profound tolerance for hypocrisy, given that those huffing about the necessity of keeping an arms dealer in prison belong to a party that has made access to firearms so obscenely sacrosanct that guns have become the leading cause of death for American children. Yet there was an obvious asymmetry in the scene in Abu Dhabi, as the thirty-two-year-old Olympian ambled past the fifty-five-year-old arms trafficker. They had both been convicted of violating laws, but only one of those convictions had a body count attached to it. [...]

So the exchange was a victory for Griner, her family, and her supporters, but also, to a significant degree, for Putin, who, amid his blunders in Ukraine, can placate his nationalist critics by proclaiming that he played hardball with the U.S. During a press conference after Griner’s release, the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, confirmed the Russian intransigence, saying that American negotiators had not been able to secure the release of Whelan because “the choice became to either bring Brittney home or no one.” Putin, having been shaped by a Cold War-era K.G.B. that specialized in manipulating U.S. racial tensions, was almost certainly aware that a perception that Griner might receive insufficient attention could be used to his advantage. The activism that resulted from that perception no doubt helped push the Biden Administration to make a deal rather than to risk repeating the miscalculations of the Reagan Administration.

Finally today, Joe Davidson of The Washington Post reports that progress was made at the U.S./Africa summit, with some differences remaining between the U.S. and the African continent.

Biden, Vice President Harris and other administration speakers repeatedly stressed that any action would be taken with African leaders. They know the big-foot reputation the United States gained during the Cold War and cases where Washington was on the wrong side of history, such as the Reagan administration’s backing of apartheid leaders in South Africa before democracy there was won with Russian support, not to mention President Donald Trump’s profane disdain for African nations with his “shithole countries” remark.

Now, U.S. support for Africa cuts across the government. There are at least 14 federal agencies, not including the intelligence community, actively involved on the continent. One that doesn’t get much notice is NASA.


At the first U.S.-Africa Space Forum on Tuesday, U.S. officials, including NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, celebrated Nigeria and Rwanda as the first African signatories, out of 23 nations, to the Artemis Accords that set guidelines for space exploration cooperation.


Space also has been in the thick of dealmaking between Africa and U.S. companies — a big theme for the summit. Among the deals discussed at the space forum was an agreement between Rwanda and Atlas Space Operations for large satellite antennas, and daily satellite imagery by Planet Labs to help with droughts, forest management, energy issues and high-speed internet. Zipline, an aerial logistics company, expects to use space data to “conduct more than two million instant deliveries across Rwanda by 2029” using drones, according to the White House.

Have a good day, everyone!