James.galbraith

I saw a Cybertruck in real life for the first time a few days ago. That is the ugliest vehicle I’ve ever seen and I can remember when people were buying the PT Cruiser. I can’t imagine a normal, human person seeing that monstrosity and thinking “That’s the truck for me!” What I’m saying is, Cybertruck owners don’t deserve rights. 

 

 

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On Friday, President Joe Biden gave a nearly 20-minute speech to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Construction and Maintenance at its conference in Washington, D.C., touching on the union’s support for his campaign in 2020, his record as a pro-labor president, and the anti-labor records of Donald Trump and the Republican Party. 

"My predecessor and his MAGA allies have a very different view. He promised Infrastructure Week every week for four years and never built a damn thing," he said, adding that Trump wants to “repeal the climate law that would gut all those new jobs and industries created here in America.”

Biden spoke about his intention to let the Republican tax breaks for the rich, which “exploded” our national deficit, expire.

"My opponent learned the best way to get rich is inherit it. I can't argue much of that. But, eh?” Biden joked. ”They learned that paying taxes is for working people, not the super-wealthy. They learned that telling people ‘you're fired’ is something to be laughed about. Not where I come from. Not where I was raised."

As Biden walked off the stage, the audience chanted, "Four more years."

Look, folks, my predecessor and his MAGA allies have a very different view. He promised Infrastructure Week every week for four years and never built a damn thing. Fact.

[...]

Now they want to repeal the climate law that would gut all those new jobs and industries created here in America. My predecessor rolled back protection for American workers. He opposed increases in the federal minimum wage. And he was proud, very—proud—of his $2 trillion tax cut when he was president, that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy and created the biggest corporations and exploded, exploded the federal debt. I cut the federal deficit. He exploded it.

 

By the way, this is no, there's no exaggeration here. It's going to expire. And if I'm reelected is going to stay expired.

Look, let me close with this. The two different ways of looking at our economy. Some folks learned very different lessons growing up than you and I did.

[...]

My opponent learned, the best way to get rich is inherit it. I can't argue much of that. But, eh? They learned that paying taxes is for working people, not the super-wealthy. They learned that telling people "you're fired" is something to be laughed about. Not where I come from. Not where I was raised.

I guess that's how they look at the world from Park Avenue, Mar-A-Lago. But I grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania and Claremont, Delaware—working-class and middle-class towns. But many of you did as well. Nobody handed you anything. You paid your taxes, and being told you were fired wasn't entertainment. It was a devastating nightmare to a family.

Folks, where we come from, it matters. That's why when I look at the economy, I don't see through the eyes of Mar-A-Lago. I literally see through the eyes of Scranton and where I grew up in my Grandpop's kitchen table. I see through the eyes of working people like you. And the basic values said you represent honesty, decency, hard work, faith. It matters. Fairness matters.

And you believe like I do. Everyone in America deserves just an even shot. No guarantee, just a shot. But guaranteed to have a shot. In America we leave nobody behind. Where we come from, folks, that's the America you all are building. That's the America you're recreating. Let me ask you, are you going to keep doing it?

I know we can do this because of you, the American worker. I've never been more optimistic about our future than I am today. Folks, you just have to remember who the hell we are. We're the United States of America, and there's nothing beyond our capacity. Nothing, nothing. Nothing. God bless you all. Thank you. Thank you. On behalf of America. Thank you.

You've really done it. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Zachary Mueller is the senior research director for America’s Voice and America’s Voice Education Fund. He brings his expertise on immigration politics to talk about how much money the GOP is using to promote its racist immigration campaigns.

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U.S. aircraft manufacturer Boeing plans to enter the flying car business in Asia by 2030, looking to tap demand for the fast travel the vehicles could provide in the region's traffic-choked cities. Nikkei: Boeing Chief Technology Officer Todd Citron revealed the plans in an interview with Nikkei. The company is developing electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) craft at subsidiary Wisk Aero. The aircraft will adopt autonomous technology, rare among eVTOL craft. The plan is to first obtain certification in the U.S. before expanding into Asia. Details of the Asia business will be finalized in the future, including whether Boeing will sell the aircraft to companies aiming to provide eVTOL transportation services or operate the services itself. Boeing is currently considering which country in Asia to enter first, including Japan. In Japan, domestic startup SkyDrive and Germany's Volocopter are scheduled to operate air taxi services at the 2025 Osaka World Expo. Boeing opened a research and development base in Nagoya on Thursday. It first established R&D operations in Japan in 2022 but had been renting space from other companies until now.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Republican Party’s attempted impeachment fiasco and beleaguered House Speaker Mike Johnson were the subjects of late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert’s opening monologue Wednesday night. Colbert observed that while the House Republicans targeting Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas “never identified a specific high crime or misdemeanor for the impeachment, which is usually kind of a thing,” the event was still historic.

It's only the second time in America that a Cabinet member has been impeached. The first was Secretary of War William Belknap back in 1876, which Congress accused of “prostituting his high office to his lust for private gain.”

[In Trump voice singing Bette Midler song] Did you ever know that you're my hero …

Colbert then laid it on thick, claiming that his entire show would be dedicated to covering the Senate’s impeachment trial of Mayorkas, before someone off camera told him the Senate immediately voted to dismiss the articles of impeachment. 

“That was quick,” said a stunned Colbert. “So, what do you guys want to talk about?”

Colbert then pivoted to the precarious position GOP Speaker Mike Johnson finds himself in, even though “they just got rid of the last guy six months ago.”

Republican speaker of the House has joined the list of least secure jobs, just below No. 2 leader of ISIS; World's Oldest Man; and Rupert Murdoch fiancée.

After playing a clip of Johnson telling Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo that Trump is "100% with me," Colbert threw to a clip of Trump being asked whether he will support Johnson.

Trump: Well, we'll see what happens with that.

Colbert: That is a dose of classic Trump loyalty. He's got your back ... so he can push you under a bus.

Zachary Mueller is the senior research director for America’s Voice and America’s Voice Education Fund. He brings his expertise on immigration politics to talk about how much money the GOP is using to promote its racist immigration campaigns.

A cartoon by Mike Luckovich.

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Today's News:

Most of the justices seem to want to make it harder to prosecute January 6 rioters.

The Supreme Court spent about an hour and a half on Tuesday morning arguing over whether to make it much harder for the Justice Department to prosecute hundreds of people who joined the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

It appears, after Tuesday’s arguments, that a majority of the justices will side with the insurrectionists — though it is far from clear how those justices will justify such an outcome.

The case, known as Fischer v. United States, involved a federal law which provides that anyone who “obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so” commits a very serious federal felony and can be imprisoned for up to 20 years — although, as Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar pointed out during Tuesday’s argument, actual sentences against January 6 defendants convicted under this statute have been much shorter, normally ranging from a little less than one year to slightly over two years.

According to the Justice Department, more than 1,265 people have been arrested for playing some role in the attack on the Capitol. Approximately 330 of them have been charged under the obstruction statute at issue in Fischer. One of them is Donald Trump.

As a federal appeals court held in its decision in this case, the obstruction statute is pretty darn clear that it applies to an effort to obstruct any congressional proceeding intended to certify the result of a presidential election — like the proceeding that the January 6 rioters attacked. And very few of the justices seemed to agree with Jeffrey Green, the lawyer representing a January 6 defendant, who proposed one way to read the statute more narrowly.

Nevertheless, many of the justices expressed concerns that the law sweeps too broadly and that it must be narrowed to prevent people who engage in relatively benign activity from being prosecuted.

Justice Samuel Alito, for example, expressed uncharacteristic sympathy for hecklers who interrupt a Supreme Court hearing — suggesting that prosecuting them under a statute that can carry a 20-year sentence goes too far. Justice Neil Gorsuch expressed similar concerns about prosecuting someone who peacefully conducts a sit-in to delay a court hearing, or someone who pulls a fire alarm to disrupt an official proceeding.

Indeed, Tuesday’s argument had a bit of a split personality. During Green’s time at the podium, most of the justices took turns criticizing his attempts to read the ban on obstructing an official proceeding narrowly. Even Alito, who is normally the Court’s most reliable vote for any outcome preferred by the Republican Party, got in on the game — telling Green that he “may be biting off more than [he] can chew” by arguing that the statute must be read to benefit his client.

By the time Green sat down, it appeared that he could lose in a 9–0 decision.

But any optimism that the Justice Department might have had early on in the argument must have been shattered almost as soon as Prelogar began her argument. Most of the justices peppered her with skeptical questions, although the justices who seemed to want to limit the obstruction statute struggled to agree on a single legal theory that would allow them to do so.

So the bottom line is that this case is probably going to end well for many January 6 defendants, but it is far from clear how the Court will justify such an outcome.

The obstruction statute’s plain text clearly applies to January 6 defendants, but it’s unlikely that’s going to matter

Before we dig into any of the individual justices’ views on this case, it’s helpful to be familiar with the full text of the statute at issue in Fischer. It provides that:

(c) Whoever corruptly—

(1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or

(2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so,

shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

Green’s primary argument is that subsection (1)’s language referring to records or documents carries through to subsection (2). So even though subsection (2) is written broadly to bar any effort to obstruct, influence, or impede an official proceeding, it should be limited to only apply to obstructions involving documents or other forms of “evidence tampering.”

Needless to say, this is not how the English language typically works. And only two justices — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh — expressed much sympathy for this reading of the law.

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out early in the argument, if there is a sign in a theatre that reads, “You will be kicked out of the theatre if you photograph or record the actors, or otherwise disrupt the performance,” no one would be surprised if an audience member is kicked out if they start yelling. It would be nonsensical to read this sign to only forbid photography or recording.

Yet, while it is hard to read the obstruction law in a way that doesn’t apply to rioters who invaded a government building for the purpose of disrupting the election certification process — forcing the entire Congress to flee for safety — many of the justices were concerned with other, hypothetical cases where this law might be used to target less troubling activity.

As Alito put it at one point, “What happened on January 6 was very, very serious,” but we need to figure out the “outer reaches” of the statute.

And so Prelogar faced a blizzard of hypothetical applications of the obstruction statutes, along with vague allegations that the government was applying the law selectively to pro-Trump rioters. Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, asked her if this law has ever been applied to a violent protest in the past (Prelogar conceded that it has not, but attributed that to the fact that the January 6 attack is unprecedented).

Meanwhile, several justices expressed concerns about people being charged with a felony for what Alito called “minor impediments,” such as if a heckler forced a proceeding to be delayed for a few minutes or if street protesters made it more difficult for members of Congress to drive to the Capitol. The concern appeared to be that people who engage in minimally disruptive political protests could be charged with a very serious felony.

There are several potential ways out of this trap. Prelogar pointed out that the statute prohibits behavior that “obstructs” a proceeding, and a minimal disruption might not rise to that level — though that theory did little to quiet the many skeptical questions she received.

One of the appellate judges who heard this case, Trump-appointed Judge Justin Walker, also suggested another way to limit the law. Walker homed in on the fact that the statute only applies to someone who “corruptly” obstructs a proceeding, and he wrote in an opinion that this word should be read to only apply to defendants who acted “with an intent to procure an unlawful benefit either for himself or for some other person.”

That interpretation, which Sotomayor and Kavanaugh both alluded to during Tuesday’s argument, would allow the January 6 insurrectionists to be prosecuted — because the whole point of that insurrection was to procure an unlawful benefit for Donald Trump: a second presidential term. But it would prevent the obstruction statute from being applied to minor heckling and the like.

Among the Court’s Republican appointees, Justice Amy Coney Barrett seemed the least sympathetic to the insurrectionists. Though she asked Prelogar whether she could “be comfortable with the breadth” of the obstruction statute, she also suggested that overaggressive prosecutions could be culled because the defendants in those cases could raise First Amendment challenges.

Still, even if the Court’s three Democrats hang together, and even if Barrett joins them, it is unclear whether they can find a fifth vote to hold the January 6 insurrectionists accountable under this particular statute.

The Court’s sympathy for political protesters appears to be quite selective

Much of the skepticism Prelogar faced seemed to be rooted in some of the justices’ fears that ordinary political protests may be squelched by an overbroad reading of the obstruction statute. So it is worth noting another decision that the Court handed down just one day before the argument in Fischer.

In Mckesson v. Doe, the right-wing United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit effectively eliminated the right to organize a political protest — holding that protest leaders could face ruinous financial liability if a single protest attendee commits an illegal act. This decision is completely at odds with a long line of the Supreme Court’s First Amendment precedents.

And yet, on Monday, the Court announced that it would not hear the Mckesson case, leaving the Fifth Circuit’s decision in place.

It is still possible that the Supreme Court will correct the Fifth Circuit’s error in Mckesson at some later date. But it’s notable that the Court felt no urgency to do so in that case, while it spent the Fischer argument thinking about how to shut down some hypothetical future case where the government may not show adequate respect for First Amendment rights.

The Mckesson case, moreover, involved a Black Lives Matter protest, while the Fischer case involved a pro-Trump insurrection.

If nothing else, this is a terrible look for the Supreme Court. And it suggests that many of the justices’ concerns about free speech depend on whether they agree with the political views of the speaker.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: In a major clean energy benchmark, wind, solar, and hydro exceeded 100% of demand on California's main grid for 30 of the past 38 days. Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering Mark Z. Jacobson has been tracking California's renewables performance, and he shares his findings on Twitter (X) when the state breaks records. Jacobson notes that supply exceeds demand for "0.25-6 h per day," and that's an important fact. The continuity lies not in renewables running the grid for the entire day but in the fact that it's happening on a consistent daily basis, which has never been achieved before. At the two-week record mark, Ian Magruder at Rewiring America made this great point on LinkedIn: "And what makes it even better is that California has the largest grid-connected battery storage facility in the world (came online in January ...), meaning those batteries were filling up with excess energy from the sun all afternoon today and are now deploying as we speak to offset a good chunk of the methane gas generation that California still uses overnight." On April 2, the California Independent System Operator (ISO) recommended 26 new transmission projects worth $6.1 billion, with a big number being devoted to offshore wind. In response, Jacobson predicted on April 4 that California will entirely be on renewables and battery storage 24/7 by 2035.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Yesterday, ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos conducted a skillful and revealing interview with New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu. Over nine damning minutes, Sununu illustrated how deep into the Republican Party the rot has gone.

The context for the interview is important. Governor Sununu is hardly a MAGA enthusiast. During the 2024 GOP primary, he supported Nikki Haley, and over the past several years, he’s been a harsh critic of Donald Trump. Sununu has referred to him as a “loser,” an “asshole,” and “not a real Republican.” He has said the nation needs to move past the “nonsense and drama” from the former president and that he expects “some kind of guilty verdict” against Trump. “This is serious,” Sununu said last June. “If even half of this stuff is true, he’s in real trouble.”

Most significant, as Stephanopoulos pointed out, five days after January 6, Sununu said, “It is clear that President Trump’s rhetoric and actions contributed to the insurrection at the United States Capitol Building.”

[Mark Leibovich: The validation brigade salutes Trump]

During the interview, Sununu didn’t distance himself from any of his previous comments; in fact, he doubled down on them. He reaffirmed that Trump “absolutely contributed” to the insurrection. “I hate the election denialism of 2020,” Sununu said. And he admitted that he’d be very uncomfortable supporting Trump if he were convicted of a felony. But no matter, Sununu reiterated to Stephanopoulos that he’ll vote for Trump anyway.

“Look, nobody should be shocked that the Republican governor is supporting the Republican president,” Sununu said.

It’s worth examining the reasons Sununu cited to justify his support for Trump. The main one, according to the New Hampshire governor, is “how bad Biden has become as president.” Sununu cited two issues specifically: inflation, which is “crushing people,” and the chaos at the southern border.

Let’s take those issues in reverse order. Any fair-minded assessment would conclude that Joe Biden has been a failure on border security—crossings at the southern border are higher than ever—and that the president is rightfully paying a political price for it. His record in this respect is worse than Trump’s.

But Trump’s record is hardly impressive. He never got close to building the wall he promised, and fewer people who were illegally in America were deported during the Trump presidency than during the Obama presidency. Illegal border crossings, as measured by apprehensions at the southwest border, were nearly 15 percent higher in Trump’s final year in office than in the last full year of Barack Obama’s term—when Trump called the border “broken.” Illegal immigration has bedeviled every modern American president.

More incriminating is that earlier this year, Republicans, at the urging of Trump, sabotaged what would arguably have been the strongest border-security bill ever, legislation supported by Biden. So why did Republicans, who have lacerated Biden for his lax enforcement policies, oppose a bill that included so much of what they demanded? Because they wanted chaos to continue at the southern border, in order to increase Trump’s chances of winning the election. That tells you what the Republican priority is.

As for inflation: During the Biden presidency, it soared to more than 9 percent—inflation was a global crisis, not specific to the United States—but has cooled to about 3.5 percent. (When Trump left office, inflation was less than 2 percent.) America’s inflation rate is now among the lowest in the world. More important, wages are rising faster than prices for ordinary workers, and low-wage workers have experienced dramatic real-wage growth over the past four years and for the first time in decades.

More broadly, the American economy is the best in the world. The United States recovered from the coronavirus pandemic better than any other nation. Interest rates are the highest in decades, but America’s GDP significantly outpaced those of other developed countries in 2023. The economy grew by more than 3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2023, which is higher than the average for the five years preceding the pandemic. Monthly job growth under Biden, even if you exclude “catch up” growth figures in the aftermath of the pandemic, has been record-setting. Trump’s record, pre-pandemic, isn’t close.

In 2023, we saw the highest share of working-age Americans employed in more than two decades, while the Biden administration has overseen more than two years of unemployment below 4 percent, the longest such streak since the late 1960s. At the end of last year, retailers experienced a record-setting holiday season. The stock market recently posted an all-time high; so did domestic oil production. The number of Americans without health insurance has fallen to record lows under Biden. Trump claims that crime “is rampant and out of control like never, ever before.” In fact, violent crime—after surging in the last year of the Trump presidency (largely because of the pandemic)—is declining dramatically. As for abortions, during the Trump presidency, they increased by 8 percent after 30 years of near-constant decline.

Even if Republicans want to insist that Biden’s policies had nothing to do with any of this, even if these positive trends are happening in spite of Biden rather than because of him, America during the Biden presidency is hardly the hellscape that MAGA world says it is and at times seems to be rooting for it to be. On Biden’s watch, for whatever constellation of reasons, a good deal has gone right. And deep down, Trump supporters must know it, even as they wrestle with reality in order to deny it.

So the underlying premise that Sununu and MAGA world rely on to justify their support for Donald Trump—that if Biden wins, “our country is going to be destroyed,” as Trump said during a rally on Saturday—is false. Which raises the question: What is the reason Sununu has rallied to Trump?

It’s impossible to fully know the motivations of others, but it’s reasonable to assume that Sununu wants to maintain his political viability within the Republican Party. He’s undoubtedly aware that to break with Trump would derail his political ambitions. But for Sununu, like so many other Republicans, that partisan loyalty comes at the cost of his integrity.

Chris Sununu is not a true believer, like some in MAGA world. He’s not psychologically unwell, like others. He knows who Trump is, and what the right thing to do is—to declare, as Liz Cheney has done, that she will not vote for Donald Trump under any circumstances.

“I certainly have policy differences with the Biden administration,” she has said. “I know the nation can survive bad policy. We can’t survive a president who is willing to torch the Constitution.”

Donald Trump has shown he’s willing to do that and more. Sununu is pledging fealty to a man who, among other things, attempted to overturn an election, summoned and assembled a violent mob and directed it to march on the Capitol, and encouraged the mob to hang his vice president. He sexually assaulted and defamed a woman, paid hush money to a porn star, and allegedly falsified records to cover up the affair. Trump controlled two entities that were found guilty of 17 counts of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records. He invited a hostile foreign power (Russia) to interfere in one American election and attempted to extort an allied nation (Ukraine) to interfere in another four years later. He has threatened prosecutors, judges, and the families of judges. And he has been indicted in four separate criminal cases, one of which begins today.

​​[David A. Graham: The GOP completes its surrender]

Trump has championed crazed and racist conspiracy theories, dined with avowed anti-Semites, and mocked war heroes, people with handicaps, and the dead. He has swooned over the most brutal dictators in the world, sided with Russian intelligence over American intelligence, abused his pardon power, and said we should terminate the Constitution. He obsessively told his staff to use the FBI and the IRS to go after his critics.

Donald Trump makes Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton look like Boy Scouts.

It’s not all that uncommon for politicians to put party above country, to bend and to break when pressure is applied. Courage is a rare virtue, and tribal loyalties can be extremely powerful. But this is not any other time, and Trump is not any other politician. He is a man of kaleidoscopic corruption. There is virtually nothing he won’t do in order to gain and maintain power. And he telegraphs his intentions at all hours of the day and night.   

Given all Trump has done, and given all we know, the claim that Joe Biden—whatever his failures, whatever his limitations, whatever his age—poses a greater threat to the republic than Donald Trump is delusional.

In his new book Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy, Isaac Arnsdorf reminds us of something that Steve Bannon, who served as a close adviser to Trump and is one of the most influential figures in the MAGA movement, once said: “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

Chris Sununu has now enlisted in that war. What is so discouraging, and so sickening, is how many others in his party have done so as well. They are Trump’s willing accomplices.

The Court mostly reinstates Idaho’s ban on transgender health care for children.

The Supreme Court handed down a strange set of opinions on Monday evening, which accompanied a decision that largely reinstates Idaho’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors. The ban was previously blocked by a lower court.

None of the opinions in Labrador v. Poe spend much time discussing whether such a ban is constitutional — although Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion does contain some language suggesting that he and Justice Amy Coney Barrett will ultimately vote to uphold the ban.

Rather, seven of the nine justices split into three different camps, each of which proposes a different way that the Court should handle cases arising on its “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other matters that the Court decides on an expedited basis — often without full briefing or oral argument. The Labrador case arose on the Court’s shadow docket.

Indeed, Idaho’s lawyers did not even attempt to defend its restrictions on gender-affirming care on the merits. Instead, they argued that the lower court went too far by prohibiting the state from enforcing its ban against any patient or any doctor.

A majority of the justices agreed with the state, ruling that the ban cannot be enforced against the actual plaintiffs in this case, two trans children and their parents, but that it can be enforced against anyone who has not yet sought a court order allowing them to receive gender-affirming care.

How the justices divided in this case

While none of the justices discussed at much length whether they think the Constitution permits Idaho to ban transgender health care, every justice but Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan joined one of three opinions laying out how they think the Court should respond to parties asking them to provide relief on the Court’s shadow docket.

Ordinarily, the Supreme Court waits until a case has been fully litigated in the lower courts before weighing in on a case in any way. Under its normal process, the Court also typically receives hundreds of pages’ worth of briefing on a case, hears oral argument, and spends months deliberating on how to decide it.

Cases on the shadow docket, by contrast, ask the justices to bypass this ordinary process, typically to block a lower court order before the case has been fully resolved by a lower appellate court. The justices used to grant shadow docket relief very rarely — most often in death penalty cases where the inmate would be executed if the Court did not intervene swiftly — but it started granting it very often in the Trump administration after Trump’s Justice Department started routinely requesting shadow docket relief.

The justices divided into three camps in the Labrador case, with each camp joining concurring or dissenting opinions laying out how they think shadow docket cases should be resolved moving forward.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, faulted the lower court for issuing a “universal injunction” that prohibits Idaho from applying its anti-trans law to any party. Gorsuch argued that courts should issue more limited orders when a state or federal law is successfully challenged, which only prevent the state or the federal government from enforcing its law against the specific plaintiffs who brought the successful challenge.

Kavanaugh, joined by Barrett, argued that, in shadow docket cases, the Court often “has little choice but to decide the emergency application by assessing likelihood of success on the merits.” That means the Court’s decision to grant shadow docket relief will often turn on whether they think the party seeking such relief should ultimately prevail when the courts reach a final decision in the case.

That’s potentially very bad news for transgender children. Though Kavanaugh's opinion does not discuss whether he thinks Idaho’s law is constitutional, the fact that he voted to reinstate the law (except with respect to the two plaintiff families in this case) suggests that he thinks Idaho has a “likelihood of success on the merits” when the ultimate question of whether trans health care bans are legal reaches the Supreme Court.

Finally, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, argued that the Court should show more “restraint” when it is asked to grant shadow docket relief. She argues that “our respect for lower court judges — no less committed to fulfilling their constitutional duties than we are and much more familiar with the particulars of the case — normally requires an applicant seeking an emergency stay from this Court after two prior denials to carry ‘an especially heavy burden.’”

Although neither Roberts nor Kagan joined any of these opinions, Kagan briefly indicated that she would have denied the request to reinstate Idaho’s law in its entirety.

So who is correct? I have argued in the past in favor of Gorsuch’s approach. The kind of universal injunctions that Gorsuch rails against often allow a single judge to decide an entire state’s, or even the entire nation’s, policy. As more judges have claimed the power to issue such broad injunctions, many parties have sought out judges with particularly extreme views. And these judges often issue broad injunctions imposing a new, nationwide policy that few other judges would tolerate.

Of the three approaches outlined in the Labrador opinions, Gorsuch’s is the most likely to end this practice. Moreover, while liberals may be frustrated by the results in the Labrador case — an anti-trans law will go into effect and likely prevent many teens from receiving health care — the federal courts are dominated by Republican appointees. So a rule against universal injunctions is likely to benefit liberals more than it will benefit conservatives in the long run.

Yet, while a principled rule forbidding both Democratic and Republican judges from issuing universal injunctions is probably the fairest outcome, it’s far from clear that this Supreme Court is capable of such a principled approach. While Gorsuch frequently rails against universal injunctions in his opinions, his concern about them often evaporates once a lower court judge blocks a policy supported by Democrats.

Last year, for example, Gorsuch voted to leave in a place a Republican judge’s order blocking a federal policy prohibiting “ghost guns,” weapons designed to evade certain federal restrictions on gun sales.

Meanwhile, while Thomas and Alito joined Gorsuch’s Labrador opinion, their hypocrisy on the issue of universal injunctions is boundless. Among other things, Thomas and Alito were the only justices who supported several lower court judges’ attempt to block women throughout the country from using the abortion drug mifepristone.

The Labrador case fits this pattern. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch are perfectly willing to rail against universal injunctions when the winners are Republicans who oppose transgender rights. But it remains to be seen whether they will hew to the position they staked out in Labrador the next time the Biden administration asks them to reinstate a federal policy that was blocked by a Republican lower court judge.

Democratic Gov. Janet Mills let a bill become law without her signature that adds Maine's four Electoral College votes to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, under which member states would collectively award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Importantly, the compact would come into force only once states with a majority of electoral votes have joined to ensure the popular vote winner becomes president.

Currently, the winner of the statewide vote in Maine earns electoral votes, while whichever candidate wins in either of the state's two congressional districts gets one additional vote per district. That system will remain in place until the compact is activated, meaning Donald Trump will likely win an electoral vote in the red-leaning 2nd District this year while Joe Biden secures Maine's other three electoral votes, just as in 2020.

Republicans almost unanimously opposed the new legislation, and they could attempt to put a referendum on November's ballot that would suspend the law until the election; if voters agree, the law would be repealed. However, a similar repeal vote in Colorado failed in 2020, which was the only time that voters in any state have voted directly on the proposal.

The compact's 18 current members (which include Washington, D.C.) presently have 209 of the 270 electoral votes needed to activate it. Because Republicans have typically opposed the agreement, its ultimate passage will likely rely on Democrats winning power in several more states. That could happen by 2028, as there's a tough yet real path to victory, as illustrated in the map at the top of this story (click here to enlarge) and in this companion spreadsheet.

The compact moved closer to the 270 mark last year due to Democratic-led drives in Minnesota, which added its 10 electoral votes to the compact, and in Nevada, which took the first step in a multiyear process that could see the state contribute its six electoral votes by 2026.

In Michigan, meanwhile, a state House committee advanced a bill last year to add that state's 15 electoral votes to the alliance. The Senate, however, has yet to take action, and the House has been tied since November after two Democrats were elected to local offices. But if Democrats win special elections for those seats on Tuesday, they could once again press forward.

The Supreme Court is allowing Idaho to enforce its ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth while lawsuits over the law proceed, reversing lower courts.

The justices' order Monday allows the state to put in a place a 2023 law that subjects physicians to up to 10 years in prison if they provide hormones, puberty blockers or other gender-affirming care to people under age 18. Under the court’s order, the two transgender teens who sued to challenge the law still will be able to obtain care.

The court's three liberal justices would have kept the law on hold. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that it would have been better to let the case proceed “unfettered by our intervention.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch of the conservative majority wrote that it is “a welcome development” that the court is reining in an overly broad lower court order.

A federal judge in Idaho had blocked the law in its entirety after determining that it was necessary to do so to protect the teens, who are identified under pseudonyms in court papers.

Lawyers for the teens wrote in court papers that the teens' “gender dysphoria has been dramatically alleviated as a result of puberty blockers and estrogen therapy.”

Opponents of the law have said it will likely increase suicide rates among teens. The law’s backers have said it is necessary to “protect children” from medical or surgical treatments for gender dysphoria, though there’s little indication that gender-affirming surgeries are being performed on transgender youth in Idaho.

Gender-affirming care for youth is supported by every major medical organization, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychiatric Association.

Medical professionals define gender dysphoria as severe psychological distress experienced by those whose gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth.

The action comes as the justices also may soon consider whether to take up bans in Kentucky and Tennessee that an appeals court allowed to be enforced in the midst of legal fights.

At least 23 states have enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, and most of those states face lawsuits. A federal judge struck down Arkansas’ ban as unconstitutional. Montana’s ban also is temporarily on hold.

The states that have enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors are Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.

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Donald Trump believes he shouldn’t be held accountable for any crimes he’s been accused of before, during, or after his presidency. But on Monday, he found himself sitting in a courtroom as the first former U.S. president ever to go on trial for criminal charges. It’s the case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg accusing Trump of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election.  

But while this might be unprecedented in U.S. history, other democracies, including France, South Korea, and Israel have charged, convicted, and even jailed former presidents and prime ministers. So why are we having such a hard time wrapping our head around this as a country?

RELATED STORY: Donald Trump's first criminal trial, Day One

Two previous U.S. presidents were in danger of facing criminal charges. President Warren G. Harding died in office in August 1923 and thus avoided being implicated in the notorious Teapot Dome oil lease bribery scandal and other corruption cases involving top administration officials.

Harding was also a notorious womanizer who had a child born out of wedlock. During the 1920 presidential campaign, the Republican National Committee gave Harding’s long-time mistress a monthly $2,000 stipend as hush money and paid $25,000 to send her on a cruise to Japan and China before the election. 

President Richard Nixon came very close to being indicted for his role in the Watergate scandal that led to his resignation in August 1974. Nixon could have faced charges of bribery, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and obstruction of a criminal investigation, CNN reported. But Nixon’s successor and vice president, Gerald Ford, granted Nixon a full pardon, justifying his decision by claiming that long drawn-out litigation would arouse “ugly passions” and “our people would again be polarized  in their opinions.”

As The Washington Post wrote last week:

In the half-century since Ford announced that pardon, other nations have charted a different path, prosecuting former presidents or prime minsters in France, Brazil, South Korea, Israel and elsewhere for numerous alleged crimes, among them embezzlement, corruption, election interference and bribery.

Some cases have illustrated the virtues of trying to hold the most powerful political officials accountable under the rule of law — as well as the formidable challenges that arise when prosecuting such figures. These former leaders can rely on ample bully pulpits to assail the process, maintain influence, shore up support and, in some cases, reclaim power.

Trump has certainly used his “bully” pulpit to assail the process by attacking judges, prosecutors, and witnesses and claiming that putting him on trial would be ruinous for the country. Here’s what Trump posted on his Truth Social platform on the eve of the start of his trial in which prosecutors claim Trump paid hush money to Daniels to avoid a scandal that could have hurt his 2016 campaign:

Tomorrow morning I’ll be in Criminal Court, before a totally conflicted Judge, a Corrupt Prosecutor, a Legal System in CHAOS, a State being overrun by violent crime and corruption, and Crooked Joe Biden’s henchmen “Rigging the System” against his Political Opponent, ME! I will be fighting for myself but, much more importantly, I will be fighting for our Country. Election Interference like this has never happened in the USA before and, hopefully, will never happen again. We are now a Nation in serious Decline, a Failing Nation, but we will soon be a Great Nation Again. November 5th will be the most important day in the History of the United States. MAGA2024! SEE YOU TOMORROW.

Republicans seem to be in a certain state of denial regarding the upcoming trial. The Daily Beast conducted interviews with more than 20 Republican lawmakers over the past week. They made clear that they were supporting Trump even if he is a convicted felon.

“I don’t think that it matters to the American people, because they don’t believe it to be a fair trial,” North Carolina Sen. Ted Budd, a strong MAGA acolyte, told the Daily Beast. “They believe that all these trials are completely unfair against him to drain him of his resources and it’s completely done the opposite thing, it’s rallied the American people behind him.”

And Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a more establishment Republican who recently became chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said he will continue to support Trump even if he’s convicted.

“First of all, I don't think that’s going to happen,” Cole said. “But second, I think some of these prosecutions are simply ridiculous on their face, and some of them are clearly harassment.”

Trump is also trying to rebrand himself as the victim of political persecution, even having the temerity to compare himself to former South African President Nelson Mandela. Trump somehow connected the anti-apartheid icon’s 27 years spent in prison to the possibility that he could be jailed by Judge Juan Merchan for violating a gag order in the hush money case.

“If this Partisan Hack wants to put me in the ‘clink’ for speaking the open and obvious TRUTH, I will gladly become a Modern Day Nelson Mandela—It will be my GREAT HONOR,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Mandela’s grandson told the Times of London that Trump is “definitely delusional.”

Trump probably wishes that he could be like Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2020, Putin signed legislation that grants former presidents immunity from prosecution for any crimes committed during their lifetime. Trump has argued for presidential immunity repeatedly without success.

RELATED STORY: Make America like Russia: Trump wants same presidential immunity as Putin

Trump also shares much in common with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has used a similar strategy of “delay, deny, deflect” after he was charged in 2019 with fraud, breach of trust, and bribery while still in office. Netanyahu has also accused prosecutors of waging a “witch hunt” against him.

Netanyahu left office in 2021 after losing a vote of confidence in the parliament, but returned to power in December 2022 as the head of the most right-wing government in Israel’s history. Netanyahu and his allies then tried to overhaul the judicial system to give ruling parties more power to override Supreme Court decisions and select judges. Under the proposed legislation, courts would no longer have been allowed to bar politicians convicted of crimes from holding top government posts. These proposals triggered mass protests, and may have helped distract the government from warning signs about Hamas’s plans for a major attack.

But two other Israeli leaders ended up serving prison sentences. Former President Moshe Katsav was sentenced in 2011 after being convicted of rape and other sexual offenses against subordinates, and former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was convicted in 2015 of fraud, breach of trust, and tax evasion.

In France, two former presidents were convicted of criminal charges. Jacques Chirac was convicted in 2011 of influence peddling, breach of trust, and embezzlement during his time as the mayor of Paris and received a two-year suspended jail sentence. In 2021, former President Nicolas Sarkozy was convicted of corruption and influence peddling. An appeals court spared him from serving any time in prison. In a separate case, Sarkozy is to go on trial in 2025 on charges or corruption and illegal financing related to alleged Libyan funding of his successful 2007 presidential campaign.

South Korea remains one of Asia’s most vibrant democracies even though four ex-presidents have  been jailed for corruption since the 1980s. Another ex-president committed suicide in 2009 while under investigation. Most recently, President Park Geun-hye was impeached in 2017, and convicted of abuse of power, bribery, and coercion the following year. She was sentenced to 22 years in prison, but received a presidential pardon in 2021 due to poor health.

South Koreans ousted a military dictatorship in the 1980s. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index 2023, South Korea is a top-tier democracy, ranked 22nd in the world—seven spots ahead of the United States, which was labeled a “flawed democracy.”

Trump has been charged with 88 criminal offenses in four criminal cases. But former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who died last year, also had quite the rap sheet. Berlusconi faced 35 criminal court cases since entering politics in 1994, but only one of his trials resulted in a conviction, Reuters reported. Berlusconi was convicted in 2013 for tax fraud, false accounting, and embezzlement related to his media empire, but what was originally a four-year prison sentence ended up being reduced to a year of community service.

And that brings us to former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing populist known as the “Trump of the Tropics.” Bolsonaro cast doubts over the results of the 2022 presidential election which he narrowly lost to left-wing former leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, claiming without evidence that the country’s electronic voting machines were prone to fraud.

Then on Jan. 8, 2023, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters stormed the Congress and other government buildings in the capital Brasilia in a scene mirroring that of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Security forces regained control and arrested several hundred people.

Bolsonaro has been charged by Brazilian authorities with forging a coronavirus vaccine card before he traveled to Florida in late 2022 after his election loss. Authorities are also investigating whether Bolsonaro was involved in plotting a coup to remove Lula from power.

But last July, judges on Brazil’s highest electoral court barred Bolsonaro from running for office again until 2030, making it unlikely that he will ever return to the presidency.

That’s something the U.S. Senate could have done by convicting Trump in his second impeachment trial. At the time, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Trump was “practically and morally responsible for provoking” the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, but it was more appropriate for the former president to be held accountable by the criminal justice system and civil litigation. Maybe some GOP senators thought Trump would just go away, but he’s now their presumptive presidential nominee, and McConnell and most other GOP senators have bent the knee and endorsed Trump.

So now as Trump’s first trial begins, our country is rated a “flawed democracy.” Trump and his MAGA cultists have tried to undermine our justice system, the rule of law, and the public’s faith in democracy. The Washington Post reports:

There is no universe in which I purchase the new Ubisoft Star Wars game for $70 much less $200 now that they just delete games you bought from your library. This is especially frustrating considering I’ve been playing a lot of old games recently, specifically racing ones. Going back and playing these decade old games made me realize how much I dislike the new “festival” design for these sorts of racers. The Crew Motorfest and Horizon both want me to believe that I’m participating in some kind of sanctioned event and compared to games like NFS or even the original Crew it’s just super boring. I’m having a blast with NFS Payback and NFS 2015 right now which sadly is another of these Always Online games meaning that EA could pull the plug on it at anypoint. It’s wild because they still look and play better than many modern racing games. Just because a game is 10 years old doesn’t mean it’s no good anymore especially when you look at the current state of triple A games. 

 

 

Sony is getting ready to release a more powerful PS5 console, possibly by the end of this year. After reports of leaked PS5 Pro specifications surfaced recently, The Verge has obtained a full list of specs for the upcoming console. From the report: Sources familiar with Sony's plans tell me that developers are already being asked to ensure their games are compatible with this upcoming console, with a focus on improving ray tracing. Codenamed Trinity, the PlayStation 5 Pro model will include a more powerful GPU and a slightly faster CPU mode. All of Sony's changes point to a PS5 Pro that will be far more capable of rendering games with ray tracing enabled or hitting higher resolutions and frame rates in certain titles. Sony appears to be encouraging developers to use graphics features like ray tracing more with the PS5 Pro, with games able to use a "Trinity Enhanced" (PS5 Pro Enhanced) label if they "provide significant enhancements." Sony expects GPU rendering on the PS5 Pro to be "about 45 percent faster than standard PlayStation 5," according to documents outlining the upcoming console. The PS5 Pro GPU will be larger and use faster system memory to help improve ray tracing in games. Sony is also using a "more powerful ray tracing architecture" in the PS5 Pro, where the speed here is up to three times better than the regular PS5. "Trinity is a high-end version of PlayStation 5," reads one document, with Sony indicating it will continue to sell the standard PS5 after this new model launches. Sony is expecting game developers to have a single package that will support both the PS5 and PS5 Pro consoles, with existing games able to be patched for higher performance.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It is no longer safe to organize a protest in Louisiana, Mississippi, or Texas.

The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will not hear Mckesson v. Doe. The decision not to hear Mckesson leaves in place a lower court decision that effectively eliminated the right to organize a mass protest in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

Under that lower court decision, a protest organizer faces potentially ruinous financial consequences if a single attendee at a mass protest commits an illegal act.

It is possible that this outcome will be temporary. The Court did not embrace the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s decision attacking the First Amendment right to protest, but it did not reverse it either. That means that, at least for now, the Fifth Circuit’s decision is the law in much of the American South.

For the past several years, the Fifth Circuit has engaged in a crusade against DeRay Mckesson, a prominent figure within the Black Lives Matter movement who organized a protest near a Baton Rouge police station in 2016.

The facts of the Mckesson case are, unfortunately, quite tragic. Mckesson helped organize the Baton Rouge protest following the fatal police shooting of Alton Sterling. During that protest, an unknown individual threw a rock or similar object at a police officer, the plaintiff in the Mckesson case who is identified only as “Officer John Doe.” Sadly, the officer was struck in the face and, according to one court, suffered “injuries to his teeth, jaw, brain, and head.”

Everyone agrees that this rock was not thrown by Mckesson, however. And the Supreme Court held in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware (1982) that protest leaders cannot be held liable for the violent actions of a protest participant, absent unusual circumstances that are not present in the Mckesson case — such as if Mckesson had “authorized, directed, or ratified” the decision to throw the rock.

Indeed, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor points out in a brief opinion accompanying the Court’s decision not to hear Mckesson, the Court recently reaffirmed the strong First Amendment protections enjoyed by people like Mckesson in Counterman v. Colorado (2023). That decision held that the First Amendment “precludes punishment” for inciting violent action “unless the speaker’s words were ‘intended’ (not just likely) to produce imminent disorder.”

The reason Claiborne protects protest organizers should be obvious. No one who organizes a mass event attended by thousands of people can possibly control the actions of all those attendees, regardless of whether the event is a political protest, a music concert, or the Super Bowl. So, if protest organizers can be sanctioned for the illegal action of any protest attendee, no one in their right mind would ever organize a political protest again.

Indeed, as Fifth Circuit Judge Don Willett, who dissented from his court’s Mckesson decision, warned in one of his dissents, his court’s decision would make protest organizers liable for “the unlawful acts of counter-protesters and agitators.” So, under the Fifth Circuit’s rule, a Ku Klux Klansman could sabotage the Black Lives Matter movement simply by showing up at its protests and throwing stones.

The Fifth Circuit’s Mckesson decision is obviously wrong

Like Mckesson, Claiborne involved a racial justice protest that included some violent participants. In the mid-1960s, the NAACP launched a boycott of white merchants in Claiborne County, Mississippi. At least according to the state supreme court, some participants in this boycott “engaged in acts of physical force and violence against the persons and property of certain customers and prospective customers” of these white businesses.

Indeed, one of the organizers of this boycott did far more to encourage violence than Mckesson is accused of in his case. Charles Evers, a local NAACP leader, allegedly said in a speech to boycott supporters that “if we catch any of you going in any of them racist stores, we’re gonna break your damn neck.”

But the Supreme Court held that this “emotionally charged rhetoric ... did not transcend the bounds of protected speech.” It ruled that courts must use “extreme care” before imposing liability on a political figure of any kind. And it held that a protest leader may only be held liable for a protest participant’s actions in very limited circumstances:

There are three separate theories that might justify holding Evers liable for the unlawful conduct of others. First, a finding that he authorized, directed, or ratified specific tortious activity would justify holding him responsible for the consequences of that activity. Second, a finding that his public speeches were likely to incite lawless action could justify holding him liable for unlawful conduct that in fact followed within a reasonable period. Third, the speeches might be taken as evidence that Evers gave other specific instructions to carry out violent acts or threats.

The Fifth Circuit conceded, in a 2019 opinion, that Officer Doe “has not pled facts that would allow a jury to conclude that Mckesson colluded with the unknown assailant to attack Officer Doe, knew of the attack and ratified it, or agreed with other named persons that attacking the police was one of the goals of the demonstration.” So that should have been the end of the case.

Instead, in its most recent opinion in this case, the Fifth Circuit concluded that Claiborne’s “three separate theories that might justify” holding a protest leader liable are a non-exhaustive list, and that the MAGA-infused court is allowed to create new exceptions to the First Amendment. It then ruled that the First Amendment does not apply “where a defendant creates unreasonably dangerous conditions, and where his creation of those conditions causes a plaintiff to sustain injuries.”

And what, exactly, were the “unreasonably dangerous conditions” created by the Mckesson-led protest in Baton Rouge? The Fifth Circuit faulted Mckesson for organizing “the protest to begin in front of the police station, obstructing access to the building,” for failing to “dissuade” protesters who allegedly stole water bottles from a grocery store, and for leading “the assembled protest onto a public highway, in violation of Louisiana criminal law.”

Needless to say, the idea that the First Amendment recedes the moment a mass protest violates a traffic law is quite novel. And it is impossible to reconcile with pretty much the entire history of mass civil rights protests in the United States.

Morton Broffman/Getty Images

In fairness, the Court’s decision to leave the Fifth Circuit’s attack on the First Amendment in place could be temporary. As Sotomayor writes in her Mckesson opinion, when the Court announces that it will not hear a particular case it “expresses no view about the merits.” The Court could still restore the First Amendment right to protest in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas in a future case.

For the time being, however, the Fifth Circuit’s Mckesson decision remains good law in those three states. And that means that anyone who organizes a political protest within the Fifth Circuit risks catastrophic financial liability.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Los Angeles Times: A network of air monitors installed in Northern California has provided scientists with some of the first measurable evidence quantifying how much electric vehicles are shrinking the carbon footprint of a large urban area. Researchers from UC Berkeley set up dozens of sensors across the Bay Area to monitor planet-warming carbon dioxide, the super-abundant greenhouse gas produced when fossil fuels are burned. Between 2018 and 2022, the region's carbon emissions fell by 1.8% each year, which the Berkeley researchers concluded was almost exclusively owed to drivers switching to electric vehicles, according to a study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. In that time, Californians purchased about 719,500 zero-emission or plug-in hybrid vehicles, more than triple the amount compared to the previous five years, according to the California Department of Energy. The Bay Area also had a higher rate of electric vehicle adoption than the state as a whole. While the findings confirm the state's transition to zero-emission vehicles is substantially lowering carbon emissions, it also reveals these reductions are still not on pace to meet the state's ambitious climate goals. Emissions need to be cut by around 3.7% annually, or nearly twice the rate observed by the monitors, according to Ronald Cohen, UC Berkeley professor of chemistry. Although cars and trucks are the state's largest source of carbon emissions, it underscores the need to deploy zero-emission technology inside homes and for the power grid. "I think what we see right now is evidence of strong success in the transportation sector," Cohen said. "We're going to need equally strong success in home and commercial heating, and in the [industrial] sources. We don't yet see significant movement in those, but policy pushing on those is not as far ahead as policy on electric vehicles." Although cities only cover roughly 3% of global surface area, they produce about 70% of carbon emissions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meanwhile, in Southern California, nonprofit news site Canary Media reports that an old gas combustion plant is being replaced by a "power bank" named Nova. It's expected to store "more electricity than all but one battery plant currently operating in the U.S." The billion-dollar project, with 680 megawatts and 2,720 megawatt-hours, will help California shift its nation-leading solar generation into the critical evening and nighttime hours, bolstering the grid against the heat waves that have pushed it to the brink multiple times in recent years... The town of Menifee gets to move on from the power plant exhaust that used to join the smog flowing from Los Angeles... And the grid gets a bunch more clean capacity that can, ideally, displace fossil fuels... Moreover, [the power bank] represents Calpine's grand arrival in the energy storage market, after years operating one of the biggest independent gas power plant fleets in the country alongside Vistra and NRG... Federal analysts predict 2024 will be the biggest-ever year for grid battery installations across the U.S., and they highlighted Calpine's project as one of the single largest projects. The 620 megawatts the company plans to energize this year represent more than 4% of the industry's total expected new additions. Many of these new grid batteries will be built in California, which needs all the dispatchable power it can get to meet demand when its massive solar fleet stops producing, and to keep pace with the electrification of vehicles and buildings. The Menifee Power Bank, and the other gigawatts worth of storage expected to come online in the state this year, will deliver much-needed reinforcement. The company says it's planning "a portfolio" of 2,000 megawatts of California battery capacity. But even this 680-megawatt project consists of 1,096 total battery containers holding 26,304 battery modules (or a total of 3 million cells), "all manufactured by Chinese battery powerhouse BYD, according to Robert Stuart, an electrical project manager with Calpine. That's enough electricity to supply 680,000 homes for four hours before it runs out." What's remarkable is just how quickly the project came together. Construction began last August, and is expected to hit 510 megawatts of fully operational capacity over the course of this summer, even as installation continues on other parts of the plant. Erecting a conventional gas plant of comparable scale would have taken three or four years of construction labor, due to the complexity of the systems and the many different trades required for it, Stuart told Canary Media... That speed and flexibility makes batteries a crucial solution as utilities across the nation grapple with a spike in expected electricity demand unlike anything seen in the last few decades. The article notes a 2013 Caifornia policy mandating battery storage for its utility companies, which "kicked off a decade-long project to will an energy storage market into existence through methodical policies and regulations, and the knock-on effects of building the nation's foremost solar fleet." Those energy storage policies succeeded in jumpstarting the modern grid battery market: California leads the nation with more than 7 gigawatts of batteries installed as of last year (though Texas is poised to overtake California in battery installations this year, on the back of no particular policy effort but a general openness to building energy projects)... California's interlocking climate regulations effectively rule out new gas construction. The state's energy roadmap instead calls for massive expansion of battery capacity to shift the ample amounts of solar generation into the evening peaks. "These trends, along with the falling price of batteries and maturing business model for storage, nudged Calpine to get into the battery business, too."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"After a year of cracking down with rigid return-to-office mandates, defeated CEOs are now finally accepting that hybrid working is here to stay," reports Fortune: KPMG surveyed U.S. CEOs of companies turning over at least $500 million and found that just one-third expect a full return to the office in the next three years. So it's official: Leaders who believe that office workers will be back at their desks five days a week in the near future are now in the small minority. It's a complete 360 on their stance last year, when 62% of CEOs surveyed predicted that working from home would end by 2026. At the time, 90% of CEOs even admitted that they were so steadfast on summoning staff back to their vertical towers that they were sweetening the pot with salary raises, promotions, and favorable assignments to those who showed face more. But now, bosses are backtracking: Nearly half of CEOs have concluded that the future of work is hybrid — up from 34% last year. What's more, a sizable chunk of CEOs aren't just embracing working from home on Fridays, they're going one step further and ditching the workday altogether. KPMG found that a third of CEOs are exploring the feasibility of a four-day week at their firm... Research has echoed that nearly half of companies with return-to-office mandates witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated, and 29% of companies enforcing office returns are struggling with recruitment. It perhaps explains why, as KPMG's data shows, CEOs are now waking up to the fact that the future of work is probably the happy medium of hybrid... Lewis Maleh, CEO of the global executive recruitment agency Bentley Lewis, has already witnessed a U-turn to more flexible job ads. "I've noticed a definite rise in job postings advertising remote or hybrid work," Maleh tells Fortune. "We haven't worked on any searches that require the candidate to be in the office five days per week in the past six months globally." "The shift demonstrates the cementing of hybrid work models, as CEOs increasingly recognize flexibility as a key factor in attracting and retaining top talent."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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That one guy is actually a robot designed to look like a human, so it's cool.

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A cartoon by Mike Luckovich.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google says it will start removing links to California news websites in a "short term test for a small percentage of California users." The move is in response to the pending California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), which would require Google to pay a fee for linking Californians to news articles. "If passed, CJPA may result in significant changes to the services we can offer Californians and the traffic we can provide to California publishers," Jaffer Zaidi, Google VP of global news partnerships, wrote in a blog post announcing the decision. "The testing process involves removing links to California news websites, potentially covered by CJPA, to measure the impact of the legislation on our product experience." Zaidi adds that Google will also pause "further investments in the California news ecosystem," referring to initiatives like Google News Showcase, product and licensing programs for news organizations, and the Google News Initiative. A study (PDF) conducted in 2023 estimates that Google would owe U.S. publishers around $10 to 12 billion annually if the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, a national bill, is passed.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dark Brandon strikes again! President Joe Biden is playing Donald Trump like a fiddle on the Affordable Care Act, and Trump just can’t help himself from responding. 

At an event with care providers Tuesday, Biden dangled the bait again for Trump. 

“My predecessor and his MAGA friends want to—I love the phrase, the language they use—they want to ‘terminate’ the Affordable Care Act,” he said.

Trump couldn’t stop himself. He just had to post a video in response. 

“I’m not running to terminate the ACA, as crooked Joe Biden says all over the place,” he said, giving the media another chance to show Trump saying, for the past five years, that’s exactly what he wants to do. Roll the tape!

It’s pretty hard for Trump to argue he doesn’t want to kill it when all the receipts are out there. 

“We’re going to terminate it.” 

“We’re going to win by knocking the hell out of Obamacare, terminating it.” 

“When we terminate it, all we’ll do is say it was a bad experience for the American people.” 

“We are decimating Obamacare.” 

“We want to terminate Obamacare because it’s bad.” Et cetera.

In his angry response to Biden, Trump also said that he will make the ACA “much better, stronger and far less expensive” if he’s elected. Sound familiar? It did to CNN’s Tami Luhby, who pointed out that he had four years to do that and failed.

“Trump is now making many promises to improve the Affordable Care Act,” Luhby writes, “ but once again he has not said much about how he would actually accomplish that goal.”

Responding to Biden was a totally unforced error on Trump’s part. Health care is still a major issue for voters, including Latino voters, with whom Trump needs to make inroads to win. UnidosUS and Mi Familia Vota found late last year that health care is the third most important issue for those voters.

Meanwhile, about 60% of American adults continue to support the ACA, including 30% of Republicans. That’s up from 24% last May. It would definitely help Trump to stop talking about the issue.

But he won’t, and Biden knows that. This is a button he can keep pushing to force Trump to keep the issue alive, and Trump is always going to fall for it.

RELATED STORIES:

Biden's running on Obamacare, and it's breaking Trump's brain

Biden to GOP trying to kill ACA: 'We stopped you 50 times before and we will stop you again'

As Obamacare turns 14, Biden warns us: Trump wants to take our health care

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The dream of legalized cousin marriage ended for one Tennessee state lawmaker on Thursday when his last-ditch bid to block the bill banning the practice went down in defeat. Local news station WSMV reports that a bill making it illegal to marry your first cousin sailed through the Tennessee House of Representatives on Thursday, with just two members, both Republicans, voting to oppose the measure. One of those members was Rep. Gino Bulso, who tried unsuccessfully to tack an amendment onto the bill that would have kept cousin marriage legal so long as the two cousins in question received a thum…

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On Wednesday night’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” the comedian focused his always worthwhile Closer Look segment on Donald Trump's damage control video on abortion. 

"Donald Trump is desperately trying to convince people that he's not an extremist on abortion, after proudly taking credit for overturning Roe v. Wade,” he said, “which has now led to a horrendous ruling in Arizona outlawing almost all abortions in the state based on a Civil War-era law."

Meyers began the segment showing clips of a 2016 Trump boasting about how he was going to get rid of Roe v. Wade, and clips of him in recent months, boasting about how successful he was in doing so. Meyers noted that even former president George W. Bush at least pretended he wasn't going to choose anti-abortion Supreme Court justices if he had the chance. 

TRUMP: Now people, pro-lifers, have the right to negotiate for the first time. [ …]

MEYERS: What do you mean, negotiate? Everything with this guy is real estate. We're talking about health care and bodily autonomy for millions of women. And this guy is treating it like a golf course.

Meyers explained that the intense backlash from voters has clearly put Trump and the GOP in a rough position, even for a serial liar like Donald. 

“Normally, it can be very hard to pin something on Trump because he's so good at wriggling his way out of everything,” Meyers said. “But this is as straightforward as it gets. It's like one of those conspiracy theory boards with one string going from Trump to Roe.” Then he ran a clip of Trump’s Monday video.

TRUMP: Many people have asked me what my position is on abortion and abortion rights.

MEYERS: Oh, people keep asking you what your position is on abortion? You know what that means, my man? You're a shit communicator. You were president for four years. You never shut your mouth, and yet people are still wondering where you stand on one of the biggest issues of our times? And I get that it's confusing, I mean, he says he's pro-life, but he definitely seems like a guy who paid for an abortion—or at the very least once told the woman he would go halfsies. But the reality is, no one is confused. We all know what Trump's personal opinion is on abortion. Whatever will help him today.

Then Meyers ran through some MAGA-surrogates spinning Trump’s brand-new backpedaling position, showing a clip of right-wing radio host Mark Simone on Fox Business with Larry Kudlow. The two men somehow took both positions: that Trump is supporting a 15-week national ban on abortion, and also that he would let states choose. If that doesn’t make you apoplectic, Simone ended by describing Trump as "the pro-choice candidate.”

MEYERS: This brings us to a segment we're calling “Seth Tries Really Hard Not to Lose His S—. Trump is the “pro-choice candidate?” Are you out of your—I'm sorry, I believe you are mistaken. Your statements are misleading and you are failing to provide an accurate, good-faith analysis of the facts. You're inverting the truth for political purposes and gaslighting your viewers by grossly misrepresenting the details of the situation. Let me put it another way. You're @#$(@#Y%(@#%@#%@#&$@((^E!@(#&^$?!!!!!! 

Well, I failed. This has been “Seth Tries Really Hard Not to Lose His Shit.”

But Meyers wasn’t done with Simone, going back to the same interview, where the right-wing radio host attempted to downplay Americans needing to seek health care outside of their home states.

SIMONE: If you had to travel to another state to get an abortion, it's not the worst thing in the world. Hopefully, this is a very rare occurrence in your life. Once in your life maybe it would do it. Buying a bus ticket to go somewhere to get it is not the worst thing in the world.

MEYERS: Then you take the bus, motherfuc!&$#! You take the bus! How about every time someone has to take a bus to get abortion care out of state, we make Mark Simone wait in line for a Greyhound at the Port Authority. Dude would run out that day and buy a T-shirt that says “My body, My choice.”

Meyers finished by talking about the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling that restores an 1864 ban on all abortions, as well as “MAGA-protege” Kari Lake’s quick flip on the law she was championing during her failed gubernatorial campaign last year. He joked that viewers might remember Lake for using “so much soft lighting in her Zoom interviews that she looked like AI." Meyers also pointed to the archaic nature of the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling.

MEYERS: States can enforce laws written before there were even states? Does that mean any state in the Louisiana Purchase is now subject to the laws of 18th-century France? If you steal a loaf of bread in Baton Rouge, you'll be sentenced to 19 years in jail, and they'll write a musical about you? Just to give you an idea of how insane this is.

Enjoy!

Campaign Action

Trump’s lose-lose situation on abortion somehow got worse this week after he released a video attempting to spin a position on the polarizing issue. What does this mean? Bad news for the Republican Party, already in disarray.

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