SCOTUS and Chevron The James Fallows tweet Digby cited about SCOTUS overturning the 40-year-old Chevron doctrine was an eye-opener. The SCOTUS decision hands highly technical decisions about regulations to courts. Fallows was so succinct and instructive that I’m reposting him here: A salesperson asked me on Tuesday what I did before retirement. I told him I reviewed the material stresses and reaction forces in high-temperature, high-pressure piping systems, pressure vessels, and rotating equipment for compliance with ASME codes (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) using finite element analysis. Which is why my cocktail party answer more often was, “I design factories.” In a more ironic mood, I’d reply, “Clients pay a lot of money to ignore what I tell them.” Do my job poorly and expensive equipment gets damaged and millions of dollars in production are lost. Do the job badly and people might die. Regulation decisions SCOTUS just put in the hands of judges are often conservative. Especially those regarding safety, like OSHA regulations. They are conservative for a reason, as Fallows points out.
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The government-funded research project’s mysterious removal of Azov’s profile was followed by a State Department decision to allow the controversial right-wing unit to receive U.S. military aid. Editor’s note: the following article was originally published by Sam Carlen and Iain Carlos for the Noir newsletter. Stanford University’s Mapping Militants Project (MMP), a U.S. government-funded initiative that conducts research on “violent militant or extremist organizations,” quietly removed their profile on the Azov Battalion early last month. The Azov Battalion (now known as […]
The post Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion profile quietly removed from Stanford extremist group list first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion profile quietly removed from Stanford extremist group list appeared first on The Grayzone.
Post debate visit One of us here is a delegate to the Chicago DNC convention in August. Turns out that privilege comes with demands on your time. That includes, coincidentally, being present when the party’s candidate shows up in your state to campaign. About the time this posts, I’ll be on the way from my end of the state to one such event four hours away. (N.C. is nine hours from east to west.) I can only imagine what it’s like to be the youngest state chair in the country, Anderson Clayton, now 26. She’s been barnstorming North Carolina’s 100 counties since her 2023 election and attracting national press along the way. And fitting presidential visits into that schedule. Here she is at 24 (June 2022) taking a selfie with a local blogger who avoids selfies. Gen Z gonna Gen Z. I’ll try to share what I can through the August convention. These things tend to be tightly controlled and hyper busy. It was less demanding to attend the Charlotte convention in 2012 on a press pass. Your patience appreciated. Digby will be along presently with some presidential debate coverage/fallout. And there will be fallout.
Helluva cognitive wizard The moment last night when Donald Trump brought up “acing” his cognititve test (actually a screen for early dementia, including Alzheimer’s), Joe Biden should have pounced. He didn’t. “This guy over here boasts about passing a dementia screen. Boasts! Anyway, how good was it? Donald Trump is obsessed with sharks and showerheads, with windmills and electric boats,” Biden might have responded. “Can he even draw the clock? Next thing you know, he’ll be accusing relatives of stealing his steak knives.” (A former landlady of mine with dementia complained about that.) “Trump thinks having an uncle who taught at MIT makes him a genius,” for goodness sake, Biden didn’t say. Last week Trump got wrong the name of the physician who gave him the test. But Biden didn’t pounce. Missed opportunity. The choice the debate presented was “Hell no” vs. “Oh, no,” as MSNBC’s post-debate panel put it. Joe Biden is an accomplished legislator and a surprisingly successful president. But he’s not a communicator on par with Barack Obama. That’s okay.
But it wasn’t just Biden. Trump was awful too There’s no sugar coating it. The best you can say about that debate last night is that it was a missed opportunity for Joe Biden to put to rest the questions about his age and focus on Donald Trump’s extremist agenda and his criminality. The worst is that he gave a disastrous performance that should lead to his resignation and an open convention in August to choose a successor. There are plenty of Democrats pushing for that right now and it’s always possible they’ll succeed in getting Biden to drop out and turn the Chicago gathering into a shitshow not seen since 1968. Maybe that’s the kind of spectacle that will finally bring the Democratic party down to the level of the Trump Show. And maybe that’s what the American people really want. I don’t know what was wrong with Biden. It’s hard to imagine that they ever would have asked for a debate if this was the way he is normally. We’ve seen him recently in Europe holding press conferences and giving speeches and he seemed to be fine.
The high court overruled the Chevron precedent. It’s not entirely unexpected but like Dobbs it’s going to have huge ramifications. Kate Riga at TPM: The Supreme Court overruled a key pillar of federal agency authority Friday, appropriating a massive amount of executive branch power to itself. In overruling Chevron, the Court decided that federal agencies no longer get to fill in the gaps of Congress’ laws with their experts’ own reasonable interpretation of how to carry them out; that authority now resides in the judiciary. It’s a power grab that the right-wing legal world has been marching towards for years — and they finally got a Court activist enough to do it. Chief Justice John Roberts, often the tip of the spear for this movement, wrote the majority. Justice Elena Kagan, probably the Court’s best pro-agency voice, wrote the dissent, joined by her two liberal colleagues. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas wrote solo concurrences. Roberts completed the takeover with very little humility.
Not Kamala, David Frum: A word to everybody writing, “The Democrats have nobody to blame but themselves” takes … The fundamental reason we’re in this crisis this morning is that the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Reagan is about to nominate for president a dictator-loving criminal against the Constitution. That disgrace and shame is theirs. If President Biden had posted an equally poor performance against presumptive GOP nominee Nikki Haley, then in that case yes, the Democrats would have nobody to blame but themselves – too bad for them, but the Constitution would not be in danger. The Republicans could have nominated somebody else. They chose Trump over many alternatives. They did it because their core voters like and enjoy Trump. Tell me again, who has nobody to blame but themselves? Last night, operating in the truest spirit of “good people on both sides,” a CNN moderator asked President Biden whether he thought that Trump’s voters were voting against democracy.
That was Biden at a rally in North Carolina today. He was the guy we usually see. I don’t know who that guy last night was. CNN has a snap poll about the debate. Make of it what you will: Registered voters who watched CNN’s presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump largely think Trump outperformed Biden, according to a CNN poll of debate watchers conducted by SSRS, with most saying they have no real confidence in Biden’s ability to lead the country. At the same time, a majority who tuned in say it had little or no effect on their choice for president. okay… Debate watchers say, 67% to 33%, that Trump turned in a better performance Thursday. Prior to the debate, the same voters said, 55% to 45%, that they expected Trump to turn in a better performance than Biden. And in 2020, Biden was seen by debate watchers as outperforming Trump in both of their presidential debates. Republicans who watched the first 2024 debate expressed broad confidence in Trump’s performance, the poll finds, with Democrats less sanguine about their party’s presumptive nominee.
Let’s take a look at the two candidates on the day after the debate: Blah,blah, blah. He’s just as offensive and nuts as ever. And this says it all: Meanwhile, here’s Biden. (I posted this earlier but it needs to go viral so here it is again.) Then he went to NY to dedicate the new Stonewall LGBTQ Monument visitor’s center. If you start this speech at about 10 minutes in you’ll hear him tell a story I’ve never heard before about how he first saw two men kissing when he was 16 years old and he turned to his dad for an explanation and he told him, “they just love each other.” I’ll admit it brought a tear to my eye. Nobody does that better than him. I know we’re all traumatized by what we saw last night. Despite the hand wringing by the pundits and anonymous Democrats, today is a reset. And today Biden is better than Trump. By the way, the Biden campaign raised 14 million yesterday. Trump raised 8. Just saying.
I think we all need a soother potpourri. And a stiff drink.