Is Israel’s sharp turn away from even a flawed democracy leading prominent Israeli intellectuals to question political Zionism itself? That’s the conclusion I drew from reading Yuval Noah Hariri’s column in the Financial Times, entitled “Israeli Democracy Fighting for its Life.”
Continue reading “Israel and the Question of Jewish Supremacy”The Real Hunter Biden Saga Reaches Its Crescendo Today
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
The Crescendo v. The Circus
A federal judge is set to hear Hunter Biden’s guilty plea on misdemeanor tax charges this morning in Delaware. The plea deal, which must be approved by the judge, would result in no jail time for the president’s son.
Meanwhile, the GOP’s semi-adjacent Hunter Biden Circus has entered a weird phase where it’s bumping up against the real world. To-wit:
- The House GOP has taken the unusual and absurd step of trying to file an amicus brief in Hunter Biden’s criminal case urging the judge not to approve the plea deal. It’s hard to imagine a world in which the judge allows the filing of such a friend of the court brief. But wait, there’s more …
- In a bizarre twist, the lawyer for House Republicans is claiming that a staff member at the major law firm representing Hunter Biden called the clerk of the court and pretended to be associated with him in an effort to get the amicus brief pulled from the public court record. The judge has looked into the matter on a preliminary basis and found the claim to be credible enough to order Hunter Biden’s law firm, Latham & Watkins, to show cause for why sanctions should not be issued for misrepresentations to the court. For its part, Latham & Watkins told the court:
The matter under consideration appears to stem from an unfortunate and unintentional miscommunication between a staff member at our firm and employees of the Court. We have no idea how the misunderstanding occurred, but our understanding is there was no misrepresentation.
- U.S. Attorney David Weiss, the Trump-appointed prosecutor in Delaware who was left in place by President Biden so as not to interfere in the investigation of his son, has agreed to testify to the House Judiciary Committee – but not until this fall, after the Hunter Biden case is disposed of. It appears that Weiss will rebut GOP conspiracy theories by reaffirming his prior statements that he retained his independence and authority throughout the case.
For more details on the Hunter Biden developments, former Alabama U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance goes deeper.
Trump Indictment Watch
NYT: Prosecutors Follow Multiple Strands as Jan. 6 Indictment Decision Looms on jan 6 probe
Politico: A big lie, an attack on the Capitol — and soon, another indictment
8 Search Warrants Issued In MAL Case
A total of eight search warrants were obtained by prosecutors in the Mar-a-Lago case, and they want to continue to keep most of them under seal. The search warrant for Mar-a-Lago itself was previously known, and most of the rest have been either hinted at or mentioned in court proceedings. There’s reason to think that the balance of the search warrants are probably for electronic devices, not additional physical locations.
Big Admission From Rudy G
In an overnight filing, Rudy Giuliani has admitted to the disputed underlying facts in the defamation lawsuit against him by Georgia poll workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. It appears to be an effort by Giuliani to sidestep looming sanctions for failure to turn over evidence in an ongoing discovery dispute in the case. Giuliani is now arguing that by admitting to the disputed facts of the case no further discovery is needed. But Giuliani still wants to argue that he’s not liable because it was protected speech, and he did not concede that his remarks damaged the two women.
Public Universities Under GOP Siege
A Texas A&M professor was suspended by the university for allegedly criticizing Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in a lecture on the opioid crisis.
A New Nigerian Prince George Santos Scheme Revealed
Before he was elected to Congress, Rep. George Santos (R-NY) and three other men approached a campaign donor for help unlocking the supposedly frozen funds of a wealthy Polish investor who wanted to buy cryptocurrency, the NYT reports:
The donor was immediately skeptical. He was not told the Polish citizen’s name. The men’s plan — having the donor create a limited liability company to gain access to the funds — made no sense to him.
And while they hadn’t yet asked for money, he was struck by how much their pitch resembled the classic Nigerian prince email scheme, in which a rich, potentially fictitious, foreigner asks an outsider to help free up frozen assets.
Ammon Bundy Hit With Multimillion-Dollar Judgment
An Idaho jury has awarded damages against far-right provocateur Ammon Bundy in a defamation suit against him and various other defendants by a local hospital.
Bundy refused to participate in the case and a default judgment was entered against him. The jury was then tasked with awarding damages. The verdict was $26.5 million in compensatory damages and $26 million in punitive damages, of which Bundy personally was found liable for $6.2 million in compensatory damages and $6.15 million in punitive damages.
Gonna Be Ugly
A House Judiciary subcommittee is scheduled to hold an anti-transgender hearing Thursday titled “The Dangers and Due Process Violations of ‘Gender-Affirming Care.”
Just Another Day In The DeSantis Campaign
- The DeSantis presidential campaign laid off one-third of its staff.
- The DeSantis campaign fired the aide who made and circulated a pro-DeSantis video containing a Nazi symbol.
- DeSantis was uninjured in a wreck involving his motrocade in the Chattanooga area.
Israel’s Ongoing Crisis
Josh Marshall takes a look at Israel’s unending constitutional crisis.
Death Knell For Legacy Admissions?
The Biden Education Department has opened a civil rights investigation into Harvard’s admissions policy.
UPS Strike Averted
The Teamsters and UPS have reached an agreement on a new contract ahead of an Aug. 1 threatened strike.
Mick Turns 80
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Where Things Stand: MAGA King Continues His Reign
Donald Trump continues to wield power over the Republican Party in a way that no other 2024er has been able to penetrate quite yet. As the former president out-fundraises his competition and enjoys wide leads in early voting states like South Carolina and Iowa, the man considered to be his most serious challenger, Gov. Ron DeSantis, is running out of money. Politico reported just this afternoon that the Florida governor is letting one-third of his staff go, reportedly amid concerns over campaign coffers.
And his position of dominance over the party extends beyond the campaign circuit and into Congress.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: MAGA King Continues His Reign”The Sad Tale of Dead Bounce Ron
We flagged it down in Livewire. But I just have to mention it. Following last week’s blood letting, Ron DeSantis is now canning more than a third of his campaign staff as his campaign continues to bleed out.
Jeffries Calls Out ‘MAGA Republicans,’ ‘Conspiracy Theories’ As McCarthy Changes Tone On Biden Impeachment Inquiry
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) snapped back at MAGA House Republicans’ “conspiracy theories” on Tuesday afternoon, less than a day after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) publicly claimed the ongoing probes into President Joe Biden and his family are “rising to the level of impeachment inquiry.”
Continue reading “Jeffries Calls Out ‘MAGA Republicans,’ ‘Conspiracy Theories’ As McCarthy Changes Tone On Biden Impeachment Inquiry”Freedom Caucus Members Who Are Delaying Appropriations Process Downplay Effect Of Shutdowns
House Freedom Caucus loyalist Rep. Bob Good (R-VA) downplayed the seriousness of a possible government shutdown on Tuesday as the House’s far-right flank drags out the appropriations process, threatening to cripple hundreds of thousands of government employees and Americans who receive services from them.
Continue reading “Freedom Caucus Members Who Are Delaying Appropriations Process Downplay Effect Of Shutdowns”Decades Of Public Messages About Recycling In The US Have Crowded Out More Sustainable Ways To Manage Waste
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
You’ve just finished a cup of coffee at your favorite cafe. Now you’re facing a trash bin, a recycling bin and a compost bin. What’s the most planet-friendly thing to do with your cup?
Many of us would opt for the recycling bin – but that’s often the wrong choice. In order to hold liquids, most paper coffee cups are made with a thin plastic lining, which makes separating these materials and recycling them difficult.
In fact, the most sustainable option isn’t available at the trash bin. It happens earlier, before you’re handed a disposable cup in the first place.
In our research on waste behavior, sustainability, engineering design and decision making, we examine what U.S. residents understand about the efficacy of different waste management strategies and which of those strategies they prefer. In two nationwide surveys in the U.S. that we conducted in October 2019 and March 2022, we found that people overlook waste reduction and reuse in favor of recycling. We call this tendency recycling bias and reduction neglect.
Our results show that a decadeslong effort to educate the U.S. public about recycling has succeeded in some ways but failed in others. These efforts have made recycling an option that consumers see as important – but to the detriment of more sustainable options. And it has not made people more effective recyclers. https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q_Va-AIliDw?wmode=transparent&start=0 Recycling rules vary widely across the U.S., leaving consumers to figure out what to do.
A global waste crisis
Experts and advocates widely agree that humans are generating waste worldwide at levels that are unmanageable and unsustainable. Microplastics are polluting the Earth’s most remote regions and amassing in the bodies of humans and animals.
Producing and disposing of goods is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and a public health threat, especially for vulnerable communities that receive large quantities of waste. New research suggests that even when plastic does get recycled, it produces staggering amounts of microplastic pollution.
Given the scope and urgency of this problem, in June 2023 the United Nations convened talks with government representatives from around the globe to begin drafting a legally binding pact aimed at stemming harmful plastic waste. Meanwhile, many U.S. cities and states are banning single-use plastic products or restricting their use.
Upstream and downstream solutions
Experts have long recommended tackling the waste problem by prioritizing source reduction strategies that prevent the creation of waste in the first place, rather than seeking to manage and mitigate its impact later. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other prominent environmental organizations like the U.N. Environment Programme use a framework called the waste management hierarchy that ranks strategies from most to least environmentally preferred.
The familiar waste management hierarchy urges people to “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle,” in that order. Creating items that can be recycled is better from a sustainability perspective than burning them in an incinerator or burying them in a landfill, but it still consumes energy and resources. In contrast, reducing waste generation conserves natural resources and avoids other negative environmental impacts throughout a product’s life.
R’s out of place
In our surveys, participants completed a series of questions and tasks that elicited their views of different waste strategies. In response to open-ended questions about the most effective way to reduce landfill waste or solve environmental issues associated with waste, participants overwhelmingly cited recycling and other downstream strategies.
We also asked people to rank the four strategies of the Environmental Protection Agency’s waste management hierarchy from most to least environmentally preferred. In that order, they include source reduction and reuse; recycling and composting; energy recovery, such as burning trash to generate energy; and treatment and disposal, typically in a landfill. More than three out of four participants (78%) ordered the strategies incorrectly.
When they were asked to rank the reduce/reuse/recycle options in the same way, participants fared somewhat better, but nearly half (46%) still misordered the popular phrase.
Finally, we asked participants to choose between just two options – waste prevention and recycling. This time, over 80% of participants understood that preventing waste was much better than recycling.
Recycling badly
While our participants defaulted to recycling as a waste management strategy, they did not execute it very well.
This isn’t surprising, since the current U.S. recycling system puts the onus on consumers to separate recyclable materials and keep contaminants out of the bin. There is a lot of variation in what can be recycled from community to community, and this standard can change frequently as new products are introduced and markets for recycled materials shift.
Our second study asked participants to sort common consumer goods into virtual recycling, compost and trash bins and then say how confident they were in their choices. Many people placed common recycling contaminants, including plastic bags (58%), disposable coffee cups (46%) and light bulbs (26%), erroneously – and often confidently – in the virtual recycling bins.
This is known as wishcycling – placing nonrecyclable items in the recycling stream in the hope or belief that they will be recycled. Wishcycling creates additional costs and problems for recyclers, who have to sort the materials, and sometimes results in otherwise recyclable materials being landfilled or incinerated instead.
Although our participants were strongly biased toward recycling, they weren’t confident that it would work. Participants in our first survey were asked to estimate what fraction of plastic has been recycled since plastic production began. According to a widely cited estimate, the answer is just 9%. Our respondents thought that 25% of plastic had been recycled – more than expert estimates but still a low amount. And they correctly reasoned that a majority of it has ended up in landfills and the environment.
Empowering consumers to cut waste
Post-consumer waste is the result of a long supply chain with environmental impacts at every stage. However, U.S. policy and corporate discourse focuses on consumers as the main source of waste, as implied by the term “post-consumer waste.”
Other approaches put more responsibility on producers by requiring them to take back their products for disposal, cover recycling costs and design and produce goods that are easy to recycle effectively. These approaches are used in some sectors in the U.S., including lead-acid car batteries and consumer electronics, but they are largely voluntary or mandated at the state and local level.
When we asked participants in our second study where change could have the most impact and where they felt they could have the most impact as individuals, they correctly focused on upstream interventions. But they felt they could only affect the system through what they chose to purchase and how they subsequently disposed of it – in other words, acting as consumers, not as citizens.
As waste-related pollution accumulates worldwide, corporations continue to shame and blame consumers rather than reducing the amount of disposable products they create. In our view, recycling is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for overproducing and consuming goods, and it is time that the U.S. stopped treating it as such.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Taking a Look at Israel’s Unending Constitutional Crisis
A couple days ago I got this email from TPM Reader PT. I was sort of delaying responding because it’s a really complex question. So I’ve decided to post the question and reply here. I preface by noting I’m not an expert on Israeli politics. I don’t live there. But I have followed it closely for many years. So I put it forward on that basis.
From PT …
Continue reading “Taking a Look at Israel’s Unending Constitutional Crisis”It feels like this whole year I’ve been trying to understand the situation in Israel — specifically the fact that the governing coalition wants to make a fundamental change to the country’s political organization and is facing furious pushback from the citizenry. My first thought was that it had a certain “Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party” energy to it: Netanyahu’s overriding priority is to ensure that he isn’t prosecuted for corruption, which means that his overriding priority is to destroy the court system in Israel; hence if you elect a governing coalition that includes him and makes him PM, destruction of the court system is a given. So how do we arrive in a place where everyone knows that Netanyahu’s goal is to destroy the court system, the electorate elects a government that will make him PM, and then the electorate protests when he does what everyone knows he’s going to do.
After thinking about it some more, I have a somewhat different take:
How Early Did Trump’s 2020 Election Overturn Conspiracy Start?
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Jack Smith Reaches All The Way Back To February 2020
An intriguing new report yesterday found that Special Counsel Jack Smith has been inquiring about a February 2020 White House meeting as part of his investigation of Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.
That is far earlier than we generally understood Smith to be looking. It’s even earlier than when we at TPM have generally regarded as the starting point for conspiracy. We’ve pegged it as April 2020, when the COVID pandemic prompted a nationwide wave of changes to voting practices in the interest of public health. Trump saw expanded voting as a threat to his re-election and began the drumbeat of claims about massive election fraud.
To be clear, the CNN report suggests not so much that the conspiracy started in February 2020, but that as late as February 2020 Trump was generally positive and upbeat about the prospects for a safe and secure election:
In the meeting with senior US officials and White House staff, Trump touted his administration’s work to expand the use of paper ballots and support security audits of vote tallies. Trump was so encouraged by federal efforts to protect election systems that he suggested the FBI and Department of Homeland Security hold a press conference to take credit for the work, four people familiar with the meeting told CNN.
Those details offer a stark contrast to the voter-fraud conspiracy theories Trump began spreading publicly just weeks later and continued to use to question the 2020 election results.
At that point, we didn’t fully realize that COVID was already rapidly spreading in the United States; Trump was preparing to tout the steps he’d taken to protect the election; and he hadn’t yet started making his wild and unfounded election fraud claims. It’s as if Smith has reached all the way back in time to find the last pristine, pre-bamboozlement moment so that he can contrast Trump’s actions and mindset from before and after the switch flipped to election fraud inanity.
Don’t Forget The Big Picture
One more point on the CNN report about how far back Jack Smith is looking. I don’t have doubt that the 2020 coup attempt grew out of Trump’s attacks on COVID-era voting workarounds. That’s a neat, clean, logical starting point for the conspiracy.
But big picture, don’t forget that the first impeachment was all about Trump’s re-election, too. His pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to manufacture dirt on Joe Biden peaked with the July 2019 “perfect call.” It’s all of a piece: the lying, scheming, conspiring, and taking affirmative steps to hold on to power no matter what.
And, not incidentally, that is why you can’t separate what House GOP chairs Jim Jordan and James Comer are doing now with the powers of their offices to paint Joe Biden as the godfather of a sprawling crime family. Again, it’s all of a piece.
The Failed Decapitation Of Trump’s Own DOJ
Former Trump DOJ official Richard Donoghue has been interviewed in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 probe.
Interesting …
Rudy G protégé Bernie Kerik coughed up a trove of documents to Special Counsel Jack Smith on Sunday.
McCarthy Warns Of Biden Impeachment
Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who is struggling to hold his conference together enough to pass this year’s appropriations bills, is leaning harder into a Biden impeachment. I don’t think those two things are unrelated.
Border War
The Justice Department has sued Texas over Gov. Greg Abbott’s buoy barrier in the Rio Grande.
Great Read
WaPo: How right-wing news powers the ‘gold IRA’ industry
Telling
Get Ready To Stretch Your Brain
The new Oppenheimer film is a chance to explore the mind-bending scale of of kilotons v. megatons:
Barbie Is Uncompromisingly Subversive
I saw Barbie Sunday evening, but I wanted to wait a day to let my reaction to it settle before writing about it. I walked out of the theater feeling exhilarated that a Hollywood blockbuster (which I rarely go see) had somehow against all odds managed to be uncompromisingly subversive. After two nights of sleep, my feeling hasn’t changed.
What got me to go see it in the first place was Greta Gerwig commenting that she couldn’t believe they let her make this movie. That intrigued me, but I still went in expecting a few broad, inoffensive, waves of the hand toward the well-worn and familiar criticisms of the Barbie doll – before Gerwig’s ambitions would buckle and the movie veer back into the tired cliches of Hollywood storytelling with a heavy dose of commercialism and product placement.
That’s not what Barbie the movie is about at all. It’s bitingly subversive from beginning to end. It started so well that I began to feel tense anticipating when it would go off the rails and turn into schlock. But fairly early on, there’s a lol moment when the Indigo Girl’s “Closer to Fine” begins playing and I realized, with delight, that Gerwig and Noah Baumbach had managed to steer this pink convertible of a film straight and true despite Warners Bros. Discovery, Mattel, and all the commercial pressure that a summer blockbuster brings to bear.
Could you find a more sophisticated critique of the patriarchy? Sure. Could you find one that with an opening weekend haul of $155 million, meaning millions of unsuspecting bubble gum conservatives in red states got an unexpected blast of feminist theory?
I saw it in Bethesda, within the DC liberal bubble. I’m really curious how it plays in more conservative environs. If you had that experience, shoot me an email. Link just below.
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Where Things Stand: The One Tennessee Three-er The GOP Failed To Expel Weighs Blackburn Challenge
The retired school teacher who ultimately survived an expulsion vote brought by her Republican colleagues in the Tennessee state House earlier this year — part of an effort that did ultimately expel two of her younger, Black colleagues — is reportedly planning to challenge Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) for her seat next year.
No Democrat has won a statewide race since 2006, when then-Gov. Phil Bredesen secured his reelection. But a face-off between Blackburn — who has a history of staunch opposition to tightening gun control — and state Rep. Gloria Johnson, (D) whose expulsion vote was predicated on her support for children and parents protesting lax gun laws in the state legislature, could test the energizing power of gun reform in a state recently racked by a deadly school shooting.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: The One Tennessee Three-er The GOP Failed To Expel Weighs Blackburn Challenge”