As you know there are key elections today across the country. The ones we’re following most closely are the constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion rights in Ohio and the legislative elections in Virginia, in which abortion is also a major issue.
One big thing to remember is that in something like the Virginia legislative races, the battle for control of the state Assembly and Senate will likely come down to a pretty small number of votes, perhaps just one or two races. A win is a win. That’s our system. But the electoral significance of a win for the future is much less clear. Given the frenzied panic among many Democrats right now, if Republicans take control of the Virginia House and Senate, it’s likely to send Democrats into full apoplexy and the national news media into a full Biden death watch. But the difference between that outcome and a Democratic win, which would led many to think that Times/Sienna poll wasn’t such a big deal after all, is likely to be a pretty small number of votes. Just keep this in mind as we go into the evening regardless of the result.
As with my post yesterday, this is a notebook of observations about various issues tied to the Israel-Hamas war.
Invisible War
As I noted yesterday, what amazes me is how little we know about what is happening on the ground in the battle between Israel and Hamas. The US press is filled with reporting on the domestic repercussions of the conflict; there’s lots of reporting on the civilian death toll in Gaza. Those issues deserve lots of attention. But Israel’s core goal is to physically eliminate Hamas’s de facto army, usually estimated to number around 30,000 militants; its arsenal of weaponry; and its complex of tunnels. It is very hard to find much solid information, from either side, on how much success they are having accomplishing that.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court debated a question so blindingly obvious to a reasonable person that it reveals how extreme its Second Amendment jurisprudence has become: Can the government take guns away from domestic abusers?
Look, Donald Trump wouldn’t resort to the name-calling, the prickly attacks on judges and prosecutors, the self-defeating effort to appeal to his base even when it hurts him in court if – and I can’t emphasize this enough – he weren’t losing.
It’s a losing man’s bet to gamble that instead of winning in court you’re going to win at the polls on Election Day and make this all go away.
It’s a loser’s play to chide, ridicule, and threaten the judge who is hearing the big fraud case against you.
It’s a desperate man’s Hail Mary to ignore the overwhelming evidence against you and play to the cameras and friendly audiences.
You step back and look at the Trump arc since 2017 and I’m only being partly glib when I offer this summation of the Trump message to the base: “I’m a loser just like you.”
The losses keep piling up: election defeats in midterms and in 2020, multiple indictments, his foundation dissolved, and his business empire facing massive fraud findings. Other than a couple of Senate impeachment acquittals, it’s a loser’s string of defeats.
It all played out in open court yesterday in the civil fraud trial in New York. And yet … the media fascination with Trump’s bombast, with the pissing matches he sets up and then participates in, and with his transgressive behavior sidesteps what a loser he is. It’s similar to the hackneyed tendency to ascribe to Trump 3D chess skills and brilliant maneuvering that mere mortals simply can’t fathom.
I often wonder what it will take. Trump in a prison uniform and fulminating behind bars? I somehow doubt even that will break the spell.
But the defendant stands alone in American history for his alleged crimes. No other president has engaged in conspiracy and obstruction to overturn valid election results and illegitimately retain power.
Jack Smith Tries To Keep Jan. 6 Trial On Track
Special Counsel Jack Smith on Monday filed a flurry of responses to various Trump bid’s to derail the case, but the most important strategic move was to urge U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to decide quickly on Trump’s immunity and double jeopardy claims so that the appeals can begin promptly and not derail the March 2024 trial date.
John Eastman On 60 Minutes
Just keep on talking, buddy:
NEW: Society for Rule of Law
A group of anti-Trump conservative lawyers is launching a new project called the Society for Rule of Law.
Election Day
A relatively quiet off-year Election Day. What to watch:
Virginia: Control of the state legislature is at stake, with abortion rights a central issue
Kentucky: Gov. Andy Beshear (D) tries to fend off state Attorney General Daniel Cameron, the first Black person to hold that office.
2024 Ephemera
POTUS: The NYT poll over the weekend showing President Biden trailing Donald Trump in key battleground stories has unleashed a fresh round of “Democrats worry” stories.
MI-Sen: Former Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI), who voted to impeach President Trump over Jan. 6, threw his hat into the crowded GOP primary ring for the open seat held by Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI). The Senate GOP’s campaign arm immediately crapped all over his campaign.
SCOTUS Hears Important Gun Case
The court will consider whether a federal law that bans people under domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms runs afoul of the Second Amendment, offering the conservative supermajority a chance to demarcate more clearly what the limits of gun regulation are under the Constitution.
House Republicans finally get a shot to grill a sought after antagonist in their impeachment pursuit of Joe Biden: the special counsel in charge of prosecuting the president’s son, Hunter Biden.
Imagine trying to explain this to a visitor from elsewhere.
“So the president’s son is being prosecuted?” Yes.
“By a prosecutor appointed by Trump?” You got it.
“And the president’s opponents are mad about that?” Oh, yes.
“But didn’t the president’s opponents want his son prosecuted?” Quite so.
“So they’re mad because … ?” Exactly.
Israel-Gaza Watch
Netanyahu: Israel will be responsible for overall security in Gaza for “indefinite period.”
United Nations says 89 of its employees have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7
Jewish man dies after altercation during dueling protests in California.
Confused anti-Semitic American plows her car into what she thought was an “Israel school” in Indiana but was actually occupied by an anti-Semitic hate group.
UMass student arrested for punching Jewish student at Hillel vigil.
Be Careful With This One
I’ve been intrigued by how property insurance companies have started responding to the risk of climate change. My concern is that the risk is very real, but that insurance companies – which are so easy to demonize – will end up becoming the pariah here at the expense of dealing with the actual policy issues the growing risk implicates. Hating on insurance companies offers an easy political out rather than actually contending with the gargantuan risk the real estate market faces. At this point, we seem to be in the data-gathering phase, which is fine as far as it goes.
13B-Year-Old Supermassive Black Hole Found
A composite picture shows the galaxy cluster Abell 2744 in X-rays from Chandra and infrared light from Webb, as well as close-ups of the black hole host galaxy UHZ1. (X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/Ákos Bogdán; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare & K. Arcand)
Two NASA space telescopes teamed up to scrutinize a distant galaxy and discovered something mind-boggling: a gargantuan black hole inside a galaxy that’s more than 13 billion years old. The “supermassive” object — hailed as the oldest black hole yet confirmed — has roughly the same mass as all the stars in that galaxy combined.
A Jewish man in his late 60s (reports about age vary), Paul Kessler, has died after being struck by a pro-Palestinian protestor in Westlake Village (a city in Los Angeles County) yesterday afternoon.
Reports are still sketchy. But there were apparently dueling demonstrations at an intersection in Westlake Village. There was some sort of interaction between one or more pro-Palestinian demonstrators and Kessler, a pro-Israel demonstrator. The pro-Palestinian demonstrator apparently hit Kessler on the head with a megaphone. Kessler then fell back and hit his head on the concrete. Looking at all the reports together, it seems like hitting his head on the concrete may have been the injury that eventually killed Kessler. Not all reports include the hit with the megaphone. Some simply report a scuffle which led to Kessler’s fall.
It appears Michigan and national Republicans are trying to avoid the repeat of a situation that plagued the party in the 2022 midterms as the GOP gears up for a crowded Republican Senate primary race in the state. A Republican has not captured a Michigan Senate seat since 1994.
Republican alarms went off quickly after former Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI) — of the grocery store chain, for my fellow midwesterners — announced Monday that he would join the handful of other Republicans running in the primary for Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s (D-MI) seat, up in 2024.
Special Counsel Jack Smith hit back at Donald Trump’s attempt to have the Jan. 6 case against him dismissed in a stark Monday reply, characterizing the former president as committing crimes without parallel in American history.
As many of you have likely seen, over the weekend The New York Times and Siena released a poll showing that President Biden is running behind Donald Trump in all the big swing states with the exception of Wisconsin. Meanwhile a “generic Democrat” is polling ahead of Trump basically everywhere. Not surprisingly this has again released flurries of questions about whether Biden should be running at all or whether he should be replaced with another candidate younger and with less baggage. TPM Reader LD wrote in to ask, “Is TPM’s position still that we need to sit down and shut up if we have doubts about Biden’s appeal to the coalition necessary to win?”
Let me first respond to LD’s grievancy gripe. The dynamics of the online world make us all reflexively assume the posture of fed up little guy in a battle with the elites. But the truth is that I never said any such thing. (By the way, LD and I talked it over and now I think we’re back to being best pals.) What I said is that I don’t think anyone but Joe Biden will be the nominee and I don’t think we have any realistic way to change that. (Just why I think that you can see in the earlier posts.) So I’m focused on getting this guy reelected rather than imagining some alternative, usually fantastical scenario. As I told LD in my initial, slightly volcanic response, by all means go out and advocate for Biden to step aside. I’ll be here in what I take to be the real world trying to get him reelected. I don’t control people. I certainly don’t control Biden. This is just my interpretation of the situation before us.
I wanted to share some thoughts on a miscellany of topics that have come up over the weekend in Israel/Palestine. Most aren’t the ‘big picture.’ Partly I’ve run out of things to say about the big picture and, to an extent, the emotional energy to say it.
These are just observations on topics just beneath the headlines.
This article was originally published at ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments this week in a pivotal firearms case that could have profound implications for how police and courts deal with domestic violence.
The question: Should people who are placed under domestic violence protection orders also lose access to their guns?
