Today is the anniversary of a raid you may not know about. If you do, the date likely doesn’t ring a bell. What you almost certainly do know is that members of the Black September faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization took members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and eventually killed all of them. This led to a massive and wide-ranging campaign of retaliation by Israel (Operation Wrath of God) targeting everyone directly involved in the attack as well as those who had ordered it. The initial Munich attack and the campaign of retaliation have subsequently been chronicled in various books and even big-budget Hollywood movies.
One of those attacks came on April 10, 1973, when members of Israel’s elite commando unit — known by an acronym, Sayeret Matkal — led a raid into Beirut. Some details of the raid are set forth in an AP article published today. The head of the unit and head of the raid was Ehud Barak, who would later become the head of the IDF, the first prime minister to drive Benjamin Netanyahu from office in 1999 and finally erstwhile defense minister in later Netanyahu governments.
Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona has walked into a series of fights that he doesn’t necessarily want to have. But now that they’ve come to him, he’s not shying away from the battles that have erupted in the nation’s school system.
Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) officially announced Monday that he will run for reelection to his seat in 2024, an expected but welcome weight-off for Democrats who have to defend a battery of competitive seats this cycle.
Former President Donald Trump’s attorney Jim Trusty said on Sunday he expects the Trump legal team to seek a motion to dismiss the historic New York City indictment over the $130,000 hush money payment made to porn actress Stormy Daniels.
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Swift Injustice
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is vowing to pardon a man convicted Friday of killing a Black Lives Matter protestor …. before the man is even sentenced or has appealed his conviction.
Under pressure from Tucker Carlson and fellow Republicans, Abbott made the announcement on Twitter less than 24 hours after Daniel Perry was found guilty of shooting Garrett Foster at a protest in Austin in the summer of 2020.
“I will work as swiftly as Texas law allows regarding the pardon of Sgt. Perry,” he said.
The highly public move by Abbott while the case is still pending and before the case was reviewed by Abbott or his pardon board was extraordinary:
Abbott lacks authority under state law to issue a pardon without first getting a recommendation from the Board of Pardons and Paroles, whose members he appoints. In his statement, Abbott said he already asked the board to review the verdict to determine if Perry should be granted a pardon.
“I have made that request and instructed the board to expedite its review,” Abbott said. “I look forward to approving the board’s pardon recommendation as soon as it hits my desk.”
The jury’s unanimous guilty verdict came after 17 hours of deliberations over two days following an eight-day trial.
“David Wahlberg, a former Travis County criminal court judge, said he cannot think of another example in the state’s history when a governor sought a pardon before a verdict was formally appealed,” the Austin Statesman reported.
A dual system of justice — one for Republican partisans and another for everyone else — is emerging as another threat to the rule of law in the Trump era.
Do Better
Bill Barr should not be used by TV nets as a political or legal commentator. It’s an egregious abdication of journalistic obligations.
If you want to treat him as witness and bad actor, have at it. There’s plenty to work with there. A sample of how to do it:
ABC's @jonkarl joins the list of journalists who invite Bill Barr on and fail to ask him about the egregiously corrupt things he did to shut down THIS VERY CASE.https://t.co/UikgOGZvnd
To recap this week's news: Donald Trump and Clarence Thomas were both accused of public corruption but it's okay because neither of them used a bullhorn so Tennessee expelled two black guys who want to stop the NRA from murdering children Texas forces people to give birth to.
“GOP embraces a new foreign policy: Bomb Mexico to stop fentanyl”
Harlan Crow And Nazi Memorabilia
The buzziest weekend news was centered two weird fascinations of billionaire GOP donor Harlan Crow, the guy who’s been buddy-buddy for years with Clarence Thomas and giving him free access to his private yacht and jet.
The Dallas Morning News resurfaced some of its own old reporting on Crow, specifically:
“His backyard garden is home to sculptures of fallen Communist icons and dictators, including Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Fidel Castro, Karl Marx and Che Guevara.”
“His Preston Road home hosts a collection of … paintings by Adolf Hitler.”
As Washingtonian points out, his Nazi collection goes well beyond some of Hitler’s paintings.
WSJ: New Details on Intelligence Leak Show It Circulated for Weeks Before Raising Alarm
Fascinating Showdown
TPM’s Kate Riga on the dueling judicial rulings late Friday on abortion pills that set the stage for a major legal fight over access to abortion even in blue states.
Fox News Settles Lesser-Known Defamation Case
In a filing over the weekend, Fox News and former host Lou Dobbs revealed they had settled the defamation case brought by a Venezuelan businessman whom the network linked to voting-system fraud in the 2020 election. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed. Fox News is scheduled to go to trial next week in Dominion Voting Systems’ billion-dollar defamation lawsuit.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) broke his femur during the weekend parade in Hartford celebrating UConn’s national championship in men’s basketball. The 77-year-old underwent surgery and is recovering.
A Tale Of Two Lakes
The Great Salt Lake: The extraordinary amount of snowfall this winter in Utah has brought the Great Salt Lake back from the brink and bought some additional time to implement water policies to preserve it.
Tulare Lake: Similarly, heavy precipitation this winter in California has reformed the historic Tulare Lake in the Central Valley of California, which went dry in the 20th century as water was diverted for agriculture.
The Mother Of All Real Estate Bubbles
A neighborhood east of downtown New Orleans remains flooded August 30, 2005 in New Orleans, Louisiana, after Hurricane Katrina. (Photo by Dave Einsel/Getty Images)
The scientific community is well aware of the risk climate change poses to property values along the coasts and in flood- and storm-prone areas. But there’s little evidence that real estate markets have priced in those risks yet.
It looks to be setting up like a classic bubble-busting scenario, where everyone realizes all at once that their real estate is “under water” and prices plummet accordingly. I’ve been curious what the tipping point will be. Storms like Katrina and Sandy were harbingers of the new climate reality, but by themselves weren’t enough to shift development patterns. Insurers have been pulling out of some especially risky areas for years, another early sign of what’s to come, but not enough of a clarion call to shift markets more broadly.
You can imagine a controlled, intentional policy-based approach to addressing the new catastrophic risks real estate values faces, but there’s nothing happening right now on the scale necessary to deal with the problem.
So it looks like we’re going to run off the cliff like Wile E. Coyote, with our legs spinning helplessly for a moment before we plummet.
This article first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Flush with $80 billion in new funding, the IRS is aiming to ramp up audits of wealthy taxpayers and large corporations, according to a strategic operating plan it released Thursday. The 150-page plan also includes a lengthy list of proposed changes intended to improve customer service, upgrade the agency’s notoriously outdated computer systems, boost hiring and even “explore making it easier” to file tax returns directly with the IRS for free.
Until a spurt of funding during the early pandemic and then the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the IRS had been hobbled by a decade of budget cuts, causing audit and enforcement rates to plummet. As the report notes: “Taxpayers earning $1 million or more were subject to an audit rate of just 0.7% in 2019 — a sharp decline from 7.2% in 2011. We will increase enforcement for high-income and high-wealth individuals to help ensure they are paying the taxes they owe.” It cites employment taxes, excise taxes, and estate and gift taxes as areas of focus. The plan promises to comply with a Treasury Department directive not to increase audit rates for small businesses and people making $400,000 or less.
ProPublica followed its first IRS series with “The Secret IRS Files,” a second multiyear series that has explored how the U.S. tax system favors the rich, including how its focus on income allows people with massive wealth to sidestep taxes on an epic scale — to the point where some of the wealthiest people, such as Jeff Bezos, had years in which they paid no federal tax.
In comments to The Washington Post about the new IRS plan, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said: “One of the things that people talk about when they say that the tax code is unfair is, if you’re low-income, you’re more likely to be audited than if you’re wealthy. … That is not consistent with tax fairness.”
The plan, released by recently confirmed IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel, aligns with the remarks made by President Joe Biden in his most recent State of the Union address: “I think a lot of you at home agree with me that our present tax system is simply unfair,” Biden said. He reiterated his proposal for what he calls his billionaire minimum tax, which would mandate a 20% minimum levy on income, including unrealized capital gains, for people with a net worth of $100 million or more.
The IRS plan also includes an initiative to “study the feasibility” of allowing taxpayers to file directly with the agency. That study will likely face opposition from companies such as Intuit, the maker of the widely used TurboTax software. In another series, “The TurboTax Trap,” ProPublica documented in exhaustive detail multiyear efforts taken by tax prep companies to undercut free tax-filing.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., chair of the Senate Finance Committee, applauded the IRS plan. “The bulk of this funding,” he noted in a statement, “will go toward building up the IRS’s capacity to root out cheating by sophisticated, wealthy individuals and companies with highly complex structures.” (The Inflation Reduction Act legislation directed an additional $45.6 billion to IRS enforcement, through September 2031, on top of its previously allotted budget.)
There are few better examples of the right-wing corruption of the federal judiciary than what happened yesterday down in Amarillo, Texas, when federal trial court “stayed” FDA approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. The ruling applies nationwide and on its face will ban the drug when it goes into effect in seven days.
I put “stayed” in scare quotes because the ordinary meaning of a stay is to put an action on hold, to prevent it while its validity or legality is evaluated. It’s to prevent some irreversible harm. But mifepristone was approved for use in the U.S. 20 years ago. There’s no serious or substantial question whether mifepristone is safe and effective for the purpose of inducing an abortion. And that is what the FDA evaluates. It’s something federal judges don’t normally evaluate and really aren’t in any position to.
This is simply yet another backdoor way to ban another legal method to abort a pregnancy in red states and blue.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
Home runs are exhilarating — those lofting moments when everyone looks skyward, baseball players and fans alike, anxiously awaiting the outcome: run or out, win or loss, elation or despair.
Over the past several Major League Baseball seasons, home run numbers have climbed dramatically, including Aaron Judge’s record-breaking 62 homers for the New York Yankees in 2022.
Our new study, published April 7, 2023, offers solid evidence for another cause — rising global temperatures.
What we learned from 100,000 baseball games
The physics tell a simple and compelling story: Warm air is less dense than cool air. As air heats up and molecules move faster, the air expands, leaving more space between molecules. As a result, a batted ball should fly farther on a warmer day than it would on a cooler day owing to less air resistance.
This simple physical link has prompted speculation from the media about the connection between climate change and home runs.
But while scientists like Alan Nathan have shown that balls go farther in higher temperatures, no formal scientific investigation had been performed to prove that global warming is helping fuel baseball’s home run spree — until now.
Inourstudy, published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in collaboration with anthropologists (and baseball fans) Nathaniel J. Dominy and Jeremy M. DeSilva, we used data from over 100,000 Major League Baseball games and 200,000 individual batted balls, alongside observed game day temperatures, to show that warming temperatures have, in fact, increased the number of home runs.
So, what about everything else that drives home runs?
We can’t run a controlled experiment where we replay each pitch cast since the 1960s and vary only the temperature to assess its effect on home runs. But we can use the trove of data on home runs and temperature to statistically estimate its effect. Whether a game is hotter or cooler than average is not likely to be related to other factors driving home runs, like ball construction, steroid abuse, game analytics or elevation differences among ballparks. This fact allows us to statistically isolate the role of temperature.
To verify our game-level model, we use data from high-speed cameras that ballparks have had since 2015. The cameras provide the launch angle and launch velocity of each hit — 200,000 of them were included in our study. This means we can compare a ball coming off a bat at the same angle and velocity on a warm day and a cool day — near-perfect experimental conditions.
The high-speed camera model nearly exactly replicated the effect of temperature on home runs that we estimated with the game-level data. With this observed relationship between game day temperatures and home runs in hand, we were able to use experiments from climate models to estimate how many home runs have occurred because of climate change so far.
We found that more than 500 home runs since 2010 could be directly linked to reduced air densities driven by human-caused global warming.
More homers in a warming future
We can use the same approach to make estimates about home runs in the future.
For example, if the world continues to pump out greenhouse gas emissions at a high rate, the temperature will continue to climb, and that could soon yield several hundred additional home runs per year. It could add up to several thousand home runs cumulatively over the 21st century.
Increase in average number of home runs per year for each U.S. major league ballpark with every 1-degree Celsius (1.8 F) increase in global average temperature. Domed parks control the temperature on the field, so warming is less of a factor. Christopher W. Callahan, CC BY
Teams have ways to counter the heat. They can shift day games to be played at night, for example, or build domes over ballparks. In Denver, where the air is less dense because of its higher elevation, the Rockies started storing game balls in a humidor in 2002 to make them “mushier,” increasing their weight and giving pitchers more of a sporting chance.
It’s not all high-fives
More home runs might sound exciting, but that boost in homers is also a visible sign of the much larger problems facing sports and people worldwide as the planet warms.
This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Thomas’ brief statement acknowledges joining Crow and his wife, who he described as among his “dearest friends,” on “a number of family trips” over the years. He also defended his failure to disclose them.
“Early in my tenure at the Court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable,” Thomas said in the statement. “I have endeavored to follow that counsel throughout my tenure, and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines.”
But seven legal ethics experts consulted by ProPublica, including former ethics lawyers for Congress and the White House, said the law clearly requires that gifts of transportation, including private jet flights, be disclosed. If Thomas is arguing otherwise, the experts said, he is incorrect.
A Supreme Court spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions for Thomas about the specifics of the advice he was given or who he consulted.
ProPublica’s story Thursday revealed that Thomas had taken international cruises on Crow’s superyacht, flown on Crow’s private jet and regularly vacationed at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks. In one instance, Thomas flew on Crow’s jet from Washington Dulles airport to New Haven, Connecticut, then flew back three hours later.
Thomas did not respond to detailed questions for that story. His statement Friday did not dispute ProPublica’s reporting about his trips. It also did not address broader criticisms from ethics experts and other judges that by repeatedly accepting such trips, he broke long-standing ethical norms for judges’ conduct.
In a previous statement to ProPublica, Crow said that Thomas “never asked for any of this hospitality” and that his treatment of the justice was “no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends.”
A law passed in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the Ethics in Government Act, requires Supreme Court justices and many other federal officials to report most gifts to the public. Justices are generally required to report all gifts worth more than $415, defined as “anything of value” that they don’t repay the full cost of. Gifts are disclosed in an annual financial report that is made public.
There are exceptions, and experts parsing the legality of Thomas’ failure to disclose the travel have been focused on a carve-out known as the “personal hospitality” exemption.
ProPublica asked the seven legal ethics experts about the exception and Thomas’ statement. All said that the law’s language clearly requires that gifts of transportation, such as private jet travel or cruises on a yacht, be disclosed and said Thomas appears to have violated the law by failing to report them.
“I don’t think you can make an argument that private jet flights need not be included under the statute,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor emeritus and ethics expert at New York University law school.
”It is absolutely impossible that anyone could reasonably interpret that exception to apply to private jet flights,” said Walter Shaub, former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. “Not in any universe.”
Richard Painter, who served as the chief ethics lawyer for the George W. Bush White House, said Thomas’ explanation of why he didn’t disclose the trips “makes absolutely no sense.” Painter emphasized that the exemption only covers three categories: food, lodging and entertainment. Private jet flights would fall into none of those, he said.
“Justice Thomas likes to focus on the language of authoritative texts, and that’s not what he’s doing in this statement,” said Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics expert at Washington University in St. Louis.
Thomas himself disclosed at least one private jet flight from Crow, in his financial disclosure for 1997. He has not disclosed a trip on Crow’s plane in more than 20 years.
Reviewing other federal judges’ financial disclosure filings, ProPublica found at least six examples of judges disclosing gifts of private jet travel in recent years.
In the Ethics in Government Act, Congress explicitly stated that the law covers Supreme Court justices. But Chief Justice John Roberts has raised questions about Congress’ power to impose rules on the Supreme Court.
“The Court has never addressed whether Congress may impose those requirements on the Supreme Court,” Roberts wrote roughly a decade ago in an annual report on the judiciary. “The Justices nevertheless comply with those provisions.”
Thomas’ statement Friday does not cite the law itself but rather “disclosure guidelines” for the judiciary. The guidelines elaborate on how the law applies to the courts and are issued by the policymaking arm of the judiciary.
Thomas’ statement refers to a March update of the judiciary’s guidelines for financial disclosure. “It is, of course, my intent to follow this guidance in the future,” he said. The new guidelines explicitly say that transportation is not food, lodging or entertainment and so must be disclosed.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Texas stayed the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of abortion drug mifepristone nationwide Friday, including in blue states with robust abortion protections.
