If You Can't Think of Anything Nice to Say, Ask Me

Unisex cotton tee from lookhuman.com, $19.99.

Josh Marshall wrote something I thought was extremely important yesterday, in his Backchannel blog for subscribers. I'm not going to work through the whole thing, but read it if you get a chance; this link ought to get you behind the paywall.

It was about Joe Biden's age, and the basic message was that Democrats should stop worrying about it—not because it doesn't matter, maybe it does and maybe it doesn't, but because there's nothing anybody can do about it other than learn to live with it. It was baked into the 2024 campaign during the 2020 campaign four years ago, and because he was far and away the best candidate then, he's the only candidate now; he's the incumbent, he's very popular inside the party (consistently around 80% in the Reuters-Ipsos tracking poll), and it's just structurally how it works with an incumbent willing to seek a second term. They virtually always get the nomination. Truman in 1952 and Johnson in 1968 volunteered not to run, for different reasons, and it was terrible for their parties.

And it's not just about Biden, but the whole party:

No one runs to be a one-term president. And no one runs for president and succeeds without an overweening level of ambition. So what the incumbent president wants is never going to be in doubt. That’s a given. What matters is that a whole apparatus of patronage, expected appointments, intra-party compromises and incumbent advantage for the political party as a whole is layered over that individual president’s overwhelming ambition. All of that gets tossed aside if the president just decides out of the blue he’s cool with a single term. Countless people are heavily invested in that reelection effort. And while others who aren’t as clearly sold on or allied with the incumbent are less invested, they don’t matter as much since their guy isn’t in power.

There's not going to be a way of getting rid of him, if you did want to. Even a Ted Kennedy couldn't dislodge a relatively unpopular Jimmy Carter—all he was able to do was get Reagan elected. You don't want to do that. 

So you need to deal with it. And look, it's not an accident. Biden is an extraordinarily skilled politician and he's been an exceptionally good president. He's got the whole Democratic coalition, the labor unions, the organized minority groups, the intellectuals, and a whole bunch of those soccer moms, behind him. He ought to have the literal left behind him too, given the amount of work he's put into making a reality of the Elizabeth Warren agenda, but I realize you can't have everything. Nevertheless, he's the best positioned to beat Trump and has done it already once.

And the fruits of Bidenomics are starting to become really evident, as the inflation finally goes down and the stock exchanges go up. So do the charging stations for EVs, all over the place, and the other infrastructure projects in the congressional districts, and the number of jobs and the prevailing wage. 

Sure he's old. He's also incredibly fit for 80, exercises and is good at making sure he gets his down time, and you can see by what he's been doing with the legislature and the regulatory work and on the foreign policy circuit and in the campaigning, and the occasional flashes of Dark Brandon, that he's not in any kind of cognitive decline, regardless of what some Republicans want you to believe (they also want you to believe that he's a brilliant and ruthless fiend, personally throwing all his enemies in jail the way Trump tried and utterly failed to do with his). Somebody who's made it to that age in that condition is more likely than not to continue the same to 85 and 86. Nothing is certain, he could have a catastrophic health issue at any moment, chas veShalom, but it's going to be something unpredictable, and then we'll have to deal with that.

My first mother-in-law, a woman of great generosity and indefatigable cheer (at least compared to her daughter, heh-heh) was down on worrying. "Worrying never fixed anything," she'd say, and she was right. You can try to be prepared for likely problems, but the unlikely ones are the ones you can't prepare for, and you just have to deal with them as they come.

The most likely catastrophe on the horizon is, duh, the re-election of Donald Trump, the unkillable Grigory Rasputin of American politics. I don't really think that's ineluctably likely either, but there's no denying it's a serous danger. That, too, has already happened once. 

I think what Democrats need to be doing right now is defending our country against that, and one of the ways they could be doing it would be if they could learn how to say Biden is worth voting for, instead of moaning in every forum about how unsatisfactory he is, and predicting his imminent physical collapse. And as far as that goes, showing some love to vice president Kamala Harris, too. Criticize Biden by all means, for cause, on the specific ways he's let you down (I've had trouble with the places where he's failed to turn around from Trump-era policy especially on immigration and trade, though I think for those we need a better Congress more than a better president), but don't panic in public over the idea that he's the wrong nominee.

Yas's Corollary

Libertarians are conservatives focused on the "laws that protect but do not bind" the ingroup.

Authoritarians are conservatives focused on the "laws that bind but do not protect" the outgroups.

They don't really have any conflicts.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) July 27, 2023

Sue me, sue me, what can you do me?

Faith Prince and Nathan Lane. If you don't know the show, what makes it sublime is that he really does have to go to a prayer meeting, not because he's got religion but because he's lost a bet.

All right, explain this to me like I'm a five-year-old. I mean with a fairly big vocabulary for a five-year-old, but some innocence:

Rudy Giuliani, who served as a lawyer for former president Donald Trump, is no longer contesting as a legal matter that he made false and defamatory statements about two former Georgia election workers — but argues in a new court filing that what amounted to false claims about vote-rigging in the 2020 presidential election was constitutionally protected speech and did not damage the workers.

"So I made a bunch of false and defamatory statements about you, that's some kind of reason for taking me to court?"

Yes, Rudolf, that's supposedly how it works. He was sued by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the mother and daughter working on the Fulton County ballot count who were seen on video doing something Giuliani described as pulling fake ballots out of suitcases, like drug dealers "passing out dope", and "crooks" who "obviously" stuffed ballots, an accusation subsequently taken up by then-president Donald Trump, with the result that the two women's lives were completely upended, as they told the House January 6 committee a little over a year later: 

But Tell Us About That Terrible Leftist Cancel Culture

 

Protesters in Austin, 2013, against back-door creationism in public schools. Photo by Patrick Michels/Texas Observer.

This was some headline, in the Texas Tribune, which is a treasure of an online newspaper:

Texas A&M suspended professor accused of criticizing Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in lecture

Like an "accusation" of such a crime is enough to get you in trouble with the administration.

The professor, Joy Alonzo, an expert in opioids, wasn't even at her own institution; she was giving a guest lecture at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, to a class of first-year medical students including the daughter of Dawn Buckingham, Texas Land Commissioner, a former state senator from the time when Dan Patrick was a state senator too, and a friend of Texas A&M chancellor John Sharp. Shortly after the lecture ended around noon and she was driving home, Buckingham was on the phone with Patrick, and also to the system's vice chancellor for government relations; Sharp opened an investigation, sending Patrick a text a couple of hours later:

“Joy Alonzo has been placed on administrative leave pending investigation re firing her. shud [sic] be finished by end of week.”

At 4:22, the course coordinator in Galveston had sent an email to the class with a "STATEMENT OF FORMAL CENSURE":

Javi and Chita

 

You know how I've been screaming at the political punditry for a few years now over their theory of the Latin voting bloc becoming more Republican over time as the community's inherent conservatism asserts itself, because

1. It's not a bloc, and
2. that's hiding what's happening

—and hiding from it, of course—it's about race. As with Allan Sherman's upwardly mobile young Jews in the early 1960s who

Traded their used MG
for a new XKE
switched to the GOP
that's the way things go

it's about the social construction of whiteness.

But I didn't really have any data for it, or know how to find it or whether it could possibly exist, until I saw this message from Jonathan Chait: 

Literary Corner: Memorandum Opinion

 

Juan Gris, Still Life With a Guitar, 1913. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Memorandum Opinion Denying Defendant's Rule 59 Motion

by Judge Lewis A. Kaplan

The jury in this case did not
reach "a seriously erroneous result."

Its verdict is not
"a miscarriage of justice."

Mr. Trump's motion for for a new trial
on damages or remittitur (Dkt 204)
is denied. SO ORDERED.

Left, Right, and Enter

 

You guys have seen the map before. I've written it up longer, and I hope more coherent, with new material, and corrected French history (which now looks very poorly done in the old post, especially the art history), so there's a lot to read that you haven't read. It was also a lot of work, which is a reason I haven't been here much, so I hope you'll all read it.

His Wonders to Perform

Photo via petguide.com.

 

I don't have a Hardcore email account like Edroso's, but I do get some crazy off Twitter, from nuts there who have followed me at one time or another (I always follow back), for reasons I can't generally reconstruct. One of whom goes by "Question Ray Epps". It's also come to me that outside the depths of the Slough of Paranoia most people don't have a very clear idea of why Ray Epps is a thing, whereas, because of my Twitter connection, I've spent some time trying to figure it out, so I probably have a slightly clearer concept than most of you of who Ray Epps is, and the enjoyable Ray Epps news that has surfaced this week, and I thought I should share that.

Epps was an ex-Marine, the owner with his wife of a wedding-venue business in Arizona, and a pretty high-ranking  Oath Keeper, president of the Arizona chapter, who didn't get charged in the January 6 investigations, although he was captured on video during the rally the night before, telling an interviewer and later a crowd that "We've got to go into the Capitol! That's where our problems are!"—"Peacefully! Peacefully!" he added the second time,  leading the crowd to begin chanting, "Fed! Fed! Fed!" And the next afternoon just at the moment of the breach on the Capitol itself, where he's briefly seen whispering to an unidentified person outside the barriers, who then joins the others knocking the barriers down and punching the cops on the other side, while Epps disappears. There's a pretty good mashup of these glimpses in this story at The Independent.

Then, as Ted Cruz was telling the FBI's representative in a Senate hearing on January 11 2022, a mysterious development:

Cruz then noted that Epps initially appeared on a poster issued by the FBI seeking information about people connected to criminal activity on Jan. 6, but was absent from another FBI “seeking information” poster distributed July 1.

“Magically, Mr. Epps disappeared from the public posting,” he said. “According to public records, Mr. Epps has not been charged with anything. No one’s explained why a person videoed​ urging people to go to the Capito​l​,​ a person whose conduct was so suspect the crowd believed he was a ​fed​,​ would magically disappear from the list of people the FBI was looking at.”

I can tell you something about that one: the FBI wasn't looking for him any more, because when the first poster went up and Epps realized they were looking for him, he immediately called them and gave them whatever evidence he had to give (The New York Times checked his phone records and found he'd spoken to them for an hour), so it's really not all that magical.

Joe Did What? Lake NATO

 

Erdogan 🇹🇷 à cours d’arguments, la Suède 🇸🇪 intègre l’OTAN et la Mer Baltique devient le Lac OTAN 👊🏻

Vladimir Poutine, génie militaire👊🏻 pic.twitter.com/6RzxrolXwP

— La Punchline de Yakovleff (@G_Yakovleff) July 10, 2023

Remember all those earnest realists explaining how the Russian Federation was literally forced!—forced, I tell you!—to march into Ukraine because of the increasingly threatening expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization through the states of the former Warsaw Pact from the Balkans to the Baltic, as we kept hearing from Professor Mearsheimer and Messrs. Greenwald and Carlson and most recently Bob-Bob Kennedy. 

I wrote about it with some sympathy myself back at the beginning of February 2022, in the context of the argument I was making back then, that there wasn't going to be any invasion of Ukraine because Vladimir Vladimirovich couldn't possibly be that stupid.

Literary Corner: Vital Caselaw (of Which There Is Much)

 

You're welcome!

A No, No!

by Donald J. Trump. 45th President of the United States of America

Vital caselaw, of which there is much,
further confirms that the Presidential Records Act (PRA)
is the only statute which applies
to Presidents and their records.
These cases build on the Clinton Socks case
in making it clear that Presidents have
complete latitude and authority
when it comes to documents, as well as that
the PRA has no criminal enforcement mechanism.
Deranged Jack Smith knows this, but refuses
to even mention the words "Presidential Records Act'"
in his Scam Indictment of Biden's Political Opponent
(who is leading by a lot) in the middle of a Campaign —
a No, No!

Fifth of July: Antidisestablishmentarians

State of the Stupid, 2023: 

You can build this strawman out of any old resentments and prejudices you have lying around the house or in the garage, without an expensive and time-consuming trip to the Hobby Lobby. 

The genius of Rubio's tweet is in his focusing his hostility on those who see the US as "built on stolen land" as if it wasn't obviously true that Europeans and their descendants had appropriated virtually every bit of North America from its indigenous inhabitants between landfall in Mexico in 1519 and the closing of the frontier in 1890. A gasbag like Ted Cruz would have insisted on adding something about African chattel slavery beginning 1619 to the sentence, but there's not an ounce of fat on Marco's argument: he heads straight for the single most indefensible lie you can tell about the history of the continent and tells you you're "nuts" if you try to argue with it.

As well as possibly "influential" (unlike, say, Senator Rubio), rich (in contrast to Senator Rick Scott), famous (as opposed to infamous like Senator Lindsey Graham), or holding a "fancy degree" (instead of a no-frills plain one like Josh Hawley's Yale J.D., 2006). 

Dream Piece, 2018

An early lucid dream, originally posted on July 4, 2018, re-upped.

Statue of Wilson in Tirana, Albania, via wikimpia.

Upstate, kept waking up before dawn to some extraordinary bird call, and then ended up sleeping until 8:00. Dreamed Trump decided to name Woodrow Wilson to the Supreme Court.

I was on 84th Street, at PS 9, only in the middle of a vast and empty parking lot with a statue of Wilson—you couldn't see anything else, not even the school itself, it was as big as Kansas—waiting for my wife, who was in there applying for a job, which is in itself bizarre, if she were looking for a job it wouldn't be at an elementary school. I had my phone and was looking at Twitter and gradually began to realize it was trending that Trump had picked Wilson.

My first thought was spitefully noting that he'd gone back on his pledge to stick to the Federalist Society list. The man never keeps his promises! Only then did I realize it was much worse than that. "But he's been dead since 1919!"

It may have been making this error or realizing it was an error—his stroke was in 1919 but he stayed alive till 1924—that woke me up. Happy Independence Day.

 

Unsettled Law

Before you begin your thinkpiece, the Supreme Court DID NOT strike down Affirmative Action

Admission preferences for legacies, donors, employee families and special recommendations are still allowed

The Court struck down Affirmative Action For everyone except WHITE PEOPLE

— Michael Harriot (@michaelharriot) June 29, 2023

Thanks for the heads up, Michael.

Pretty weird to be out again wanting to defend an institution when I don't even think it should exist—or maybe I just think it should be nationalized, like Oxford and Cambridge, except for the law school and business school, those have to go. But it's not really about Harvard, anyway. North Carolina is probably a much more important example, because what will happen there is that Black and Latin people will have less chance to go to Chapel Hill and fall into the less prestigious campuses of the state's system, where they will be less likely to graduate, less likely to go on to postgraduate studies, and overall make less money in the course of their careers. While the white and presumable Asian students who replace them in Chapel Hill won't actually do any better there than they would have done at Asheville or Wake Forest or wherever, because this is what my man Zachary Bleemer found when he looked at the corresponding situation at the University of California when they abandoned affirmative action after a state referendum, Prop 209, ordered them to:

For the Record: Long COVID

This is just amazing, from Laura Loomer, the anti-Muslim activist, Project Veritas veteran, and frequent victim of cancel culture

from numerous social media platforms, payment processors, vehicles for hire, and food delivery mobile apps for various reasons, including violating policies on hate speech and spreading misinformation.^{[12][13][14][15]} She has also been banned and removed from events, and had press credentials revoked, for harassment and causing disturbances.^[15][16] After her 2018 ban from Twitter, she handcuffed herself to Twitter's headquarters in New York for two hours before police cut through the handcuffs at her request.^[5][17][18] Loomer was also banned from the March 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) after attempting to heckle reporters and chasing them through the conference.^[19]

Really makes me wonder how many conservatives have no idea they got long covid pic.twitter.com/se4m06tvMQ

— Stop Cop City (@JoshuaPHilll) June 26, 2023

It'a not a fake—I checked:

It's not the fat lady singing, but the Orchestra is on the move

First Kadyrov's fighters already in Rostov pic.twitter.com/FYqbCbR5ye

— Liveuamap (@Liveuamap) June 24, 2023

Six weeks ago or so I wrote, with the strongest sense that what I was writing was completely insane,

I know it's absolutely improbable, but I can't shake the thought that so many irregular forces commanded from outside the Defense Ministry, unable to achieve their assigned objectives in Ukraine, and increasingly at odds with the Kremlin officials whose incompetence is getting them killed, are not a healthy phenomenon back in the motherland. Prigozhin has up till now been pretty careful about attacking Putin himself, but is that certain to last?

I'm really imagining a situation like that of China in the late 1920s, a warlord state, and the potential for real civil war, not necessarily ideological, but rather driven by the presence of too many armies, all struggling to feed themselves off the lands they occupied. Or even Russia during the Troubles at the beginning of the 17th century, torn among armies of the Polish-Lithuanian confederation, Swedish mercenaries backing one new tsar or another (the throne changed hands six times between 1598 and 1613), Crimean Tatars capturing civilians to sell as slaves, and forces loyal to one court faction or another.

Now we seem to have gotten there, with Yevgeny Prigozhin and 25,000 ex-convicts having left Ukraine, and, without a shot fired, apparently occupied the southwestern city of Rostov na Donu, Rostov-on-the-Don, which is the military post from which Russian forces have mostly run and supplied the Ukraine war. After (first) denouncing the defense minister for starting the war on a fake pretext to aggrandize himself

How Trump Won the 2020 Election. In His Brain.

 

Image via.

His grasp on reality is very weak. I think he has a problem with object permanence, and always hopes he can convince the facts to change. He's talking more to himself than to the interviewer.

— Yas You Like It (@Yastreblyansky) June 20, 2023

Object permanence—the understanding that if you're playing peek-a-boo with him and you hide his toy behind your back while his eyes are closed that the toy didn't really cease to exist—isn't really the right concept. Practically everybody gets that by the time they're 18 to 24 months old, and there's no reason to think Trump didn't. What I was after turns out to be something related, in a kind of metaphorical plane, "object constancy", the recognition that a thing remains the same thing under transformations. That a tree seen at a distance is the same as the one you see up close, not a different, smaller tree, in the simplest type of case. 

In the discussion of personality disorders of the kind I think of Trump as suffering from—Borderline Personality Disorder or Narcissistic Personality Disorder—object constancy is generally the recognition that a person remains the same person under what you might call a moral transformation. We've all experienced the feeling in a fight with someone we love that we don't "recognize" them, or they don't "recognize" us ("Honestly, I don't even recognize you!")—that's a metaphor for our or our partner's distress, but for the person with BPD or NPD it can be literally true.

Ukraine: What If They Win?

 

The Battle of Orsha, 1514, when Ukrainian and Lithuanian troops under Prince Kostyantyn Ostrozky stopped the westward advance of the Moscovites, from Serhii Plokhy's Lost Kingdom: The Quest For Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation, 2017.

Isaac Chotiner's New Yorker interview on the Ukraine counter-offensive with the war researcher Marina Miron—not one of his diabolical ones, when he utterly destroys the subject without their knowing it's happening—roused a lot of spite anyway, with her singularly lame-sounding comparison of the Ukrainian forces' situation, in whatever territory they succeed in taking back, to that of the American forces in Iraq around this time 20 years ago:

I’m referring back to Iraqi Freedom, the U.S. operation in 2003. The toppling of Saddam Hussein—the military part—had gone well. But the reconstruction part and governance itself was lacking, and that created a power vacuum. This is something that I think will also be needed in Ukraine once the Ukrainian troops hold those territories. They will need to hold those territories, and they will have to rebuild those territories.

I can imagine that the Russians who rule those territories have done quite a lot of psychological operations to sway the population, which speaks Russian and which is ethnically closer to Russia, to basically not mind being ruled by Russia, just as in Crimea. 

There was the question of what it means to be "ethnically close", and the question of whether linguistic affiliation is really such a vital issue—do we in the US want to be occupied by British troops? Does Ireland? A lot of people in Taiwan speak Mandarin—should that make it easier for Beijing to take over? Also, ethnic Ukrainians are substantial majorities in both Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts anyhow.

I suggested a Putinian argument for how to construct an analogy that might work:

For the Record: Lab Leak

Philippine pangolin pup curled up with its mom, via Wikipedia. 

Matt Taibbi, pushing a report by his "Twitter Files" coconspirator Michael Shellenberger (best known for his work in the crusade on behalf of the despised plastic straw in his 2020 book Apocalypse Never)

Michael Shellenberger’s Public today released a blockbuster story, “First Person Sickened By COVID-19 Was Chinese Scientist Who Oversaw “Gain Of Function” Research That Created Virus,” which generously credits Racket. The story cites three government officials in naming scientist Ben Hu, who was in charge of “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as the “patient zero” of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This is a major story, contradicting early official explanations pointing to zoonotic cross-species “spillover” at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, colloquially known as the Wuhan wet market. The mystery bat or pangolin suspected of transmitting the disease to humans at that market was never found. The Public story for the first time asserts the source of contamination: a Wuhan Institute scientist fell ill after exposure to a virus engineered at his place of work.

Well, engineered or not engineered, according to the same story, since it also suggests (with pix!) Hu didn't use enough protective gear when he was working with naturally occurring bat and pangolin viruses, so he could just as easily have gotten sick, if he did, from a virus his colleagues brought to the lab from the wild.

FAQ

We've got a question from Kevin in Bakersfield:

Has anyone ever asked the current president why would he have a classified document outside of the SCIF from his Senate days? Has he ever been confronted with that question? pic.twitter.com/kj6UOT2d4D

— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) June 13, 2023

Your friends in the House Intelligence Committee could explain to you that a SCIF, short for Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility, is a place where you're allowed to keep SCI, Sensitive Compartmentalized Information, and the current president, who is former Senator Joe Biden (I guess you knew that), like former Rep. Mike Pence, probably never had any SCI at his house. The overwhelming majority of classified documents are not SCI, so that's the most likely reason.

Unlike former president Trump, who had a SCIF installed at Mar-a-Lago as president, and is known to have sent himself some SCI in the 80 boxes of presidential documents he shipped there on January 19 2021, a few hours before he stopped being president; some that turned up in the 15 boxes he shipped from Mar-a-Lago to the National Archives in January 2022, and some in the 65 boxes he kept there in spite of many polite requests and a subpoena. Including one of the 11 sets of classified documents he tried to hide from the FBI by keeping them in his desk drawer.

Hope that helps.

***

It's the Law

The thing that's making me grumpiest at the moment is when defendant Trump says, "the Presidential Records Act says they belong to me," and all the Republicans chime in, when that's in fact the exact opposite of what the Presidential Records Act says, according to the FAQ at the National Archives website:

Recent media reports have generated a large number of queries about Presidential records and the Presidential Records Act (PRA), 44 U.S.C. 2201-2209. The PRA requires that all records created by Presidents (and Vice-Presidents) be turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) at the end of their administrations. Below is additional information about how NARA carries out its responsibilities under the PRA. Please note that the PRA treats the records of the President and those of the Vice President in almost the same manner such that, in most cases below, President and Vice President can be used interchangeably. 

It's understood that a president or vice president probably has some personal documents that don't belong in the National Archives, though I suppose all of Trump's relationships are so transactional that it's hard to tell the difference

DJT: Hey Malenia can u fit me in for blowie thurs betw 11 11:30?

MKT: Ok daddy car need new transmission pls send deposit also Slov ambassador deep concern Austrian trrop concentration near Ljubljana

But the president is required to sort those out before the new person is inaugurated, and leave the non-personal docs where they are or arrange for their transfer to their new owners, the American people, as represented by the Archive.

There is no history, practice, or provision in law for presidents to take official records with them when they leave office to sort through, such as for a two-year period as described in some reports. If a former President or Vice President finds Presidential records among personal materials, he or she is expected to contact NARA in a timely manner to secure the transfer of those Presidential records to NARA. 

But he can't keep the

[TS//SI//NF//FISA] Undated document concerning military capabilities of a foreign country and the United States, with handwritten annotation in black marker

just because he wrote on it with his Sharpie, and he can't keep the doctored hurricane map either.  He couldn't legally have kept the first one if he had succeeded in declassifying it, for that matter. He can't keep any of the 337 documents with classification markings regardless of whether they're still classified. He can't keep most of the 13,000 unclassified documents in the 80 boxes. They all belong to us and NARA.

I can understand why they didn't charge this as a crime. The theft itself occurred in DC, and they decided to file the charges in Florida's Southern District. Moreover, the Presidential Records Act, like so many laws the president is supposed to follow, as we learned to our horror during the Trump administration, suggest any way of enforcing it or penalties for breaking it. (Even though it was Nixon's behavior in trying to sell presidential records that convinced Congress to pass the law in the first place.)

And the indictment rightfully focuses on classified documents among the 31 the prosecutors chose for filing charges, because those are the ones with which Trump really did endanger national security, and/or offer Trump opportunities for cashing in with some of his preferred foreign-government clients (looking at Lawfare's annotated list, I'm guessing typically Saudi Arabia or Turkey, but there are no doubt others).

But I wish they'd managed to say somewhere in there that Trump doesn't have any right whatsoever to any of them, and cited the law that says so, because it's true.

Dream Piece

Not a dream, skydiving over Bogotá, via.

As it happens, I'm getting rid of a cataract in my right eye today, and they've scheduled it for afternoon, adding injury to insult as it were, meaning I have to spend the whole morning maintaining a fast begun last night, not just no breakfast but no lunch until past 3:00, which would be making me crabby enough, but also no liquids, even water, so I'm just altogether on strike, lying on the couch with the radio on, while famous TV lawyer and Brooklyn-Manhattan congressman Daniel Goldman holding forth on the Trump indictment when I fall asleep but Goldman continues to speak, and I'm annoyed in the usual way by that lawyerly way of focusing on the technical aspect of engineering a conviction rather than the narratology of finding out what happened, but I also want to tell him about the possibility of additional indictments in the document theft case, that could be filed in DC, not necessarily more charges against Trump but some of the guilty others I've been thinking about, like Nunes and Meadows.

It's at some kind of party, somewhere on Long Island for some reason, and in the noise I can't make myself heard—as some of you know, I lost my larynx a few years back and speak by forcing air past what's left of my arytenoid cartilage to make it vibrate, while using a finger to stop air from leaking out of the airhole in my trachea, a clumsy process but it works pretty well except if I need to get loud,  and this plays an important plot role in some of my dreams, though not the good ones.

I try people other than Goldman, but they're not listening either, and then I'm in a car with him, and I realize I've got a bigger problem than the details of the Trump charges, because I need to get to Manhattan and the surgery center (this is the first acknowledgment of reality), and my ID is in a backpack I seem to have abandoned in the place we just left. Then the car sort of opens up, revealing a whole social set up behind Goldman, of people sitting on risers, wearing headphones and carrying clipboards and iPads and the like (this seems like the second acknowledgment of reality, when I figure out I'm in a radio program), and I'm able to check my pocket and see I've got my ID (the third acknowledgment), and I start looking for other people I might be able to communicate with, and there's a young Black woman, and I tell myself, "She'll listen to me, Black people always do," and indeed she's listening as I start my explanation, and that's how I wake up.

That's a lucid nightmare where you have agency, and you escape from it by solving the problem as if it were a puzzle, to which the answer is, "Ah, it's only a dream." I've been having them once in a while for a couple of years now, and that's the format.