Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Some are gospel, others mere suggestions

It helps that the Second Amendment has a powerful manufacturing lobby behind it. It helps that the press, churches, and the ACLU stand behind the First. Case after case has reached the U.S. Supreme Court about those. The problem, of course, is that other, better-funded conservative advocacy groups exist to make application of the Constitution’s provisions as selective as possible as Frank Wilhoit so adroitly observed, if only by implication.

Poor little 14th Amendment. It’s long as amendments go (the longest). Maybe that’s why its application has been so contested and/or ignored. Too long to read? Or perhaps too radical to enforce.

Sherrilyn Ifill writes in the Washington Post:

I use the word “radical” deliberately. The 14th Amendment was conceived of and pushed by the “Radical Republicans” in Congress after the Civil War. They were so named because of their commitment to eradicating slavery and its vestiges from American political life. A number had been abolitionists, and all had seen the threat that white supremacist ideology and the spirit of insurrection posed to the survival of the United States as a republic. Although the South had been soundly defeated on the battlefield, the belief among most Southerners that insurrection was a worthy and noble cause, and that Black people — even if no longer enslaved — were meant to be subjugated to the demands of Whites, was still firmly held.

The 14th Amendment was meant to protect Black people against that belief, and the nation against insurrection, which was understood to constitute an ongoing threat to the future of our country. Frederick Douglass, the formerly enslaved abolitionist who rose to become one of the most prominent voices of the Reconstruction period, had no illusions about the persistence of the “malignant spirit” of the “traitors.” He predicted that it would be passed “from sire to son.” It “will not die out in a year,” he foretold, “it will not die out in an age.”

Depends on your definition of age.

States of the former Confederacy and others saw fit not to apply Section 1 for nearly 100 years after its passage. And the Supreme Court let them, Ifill wants us to remember. It’s still contested nearly 60 years after passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.

Section 1
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 3 is even more an orphan. No lobbying groups, powerful or otherwise, to fight for it. And that provision in Section 2 about reducing states’ representation for disenfranchising its citizens? It may as well not be there.

Section 3
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Ifill reflects on the reluctance of courts to enforce the 14th Amerndment even now in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, and after a Colorado judge found that Donald J. Trump incited an insurrection, BUT:

The 14th Amendment is treated as a suggestion but rarely imposed in full measure when the status quo will be upended. This was perhaps most famously on display in 1955, in the case of Brown II, when the Supreme Court undercut its majestic decision of a year earlier in Brown v. Board of Education,by hedging on the immediate end to segregated schools and counseling instead that local officials should move with “all deliberate speed.”

The Colorado court’s approach to Section 3 continues this tradition. To find that a president incited a violent insurrection against the United States but hold that such a president can still run for public office — indeed to return to the presidency itself — could not stand in starker opposition to the words and spirit of Section 3.

The 14th Amendment has once again proved too bold for the judges empowered to interpret it. Political forces are at play again, this time fearful of a backlash if Trump is removed from the ballot. As this case makes its way through the appellate process and, most likely, to the Supreme Court, it should be understood in the context of how the timidity and unwillingness of judges to acquiesce to the judgment of the 14th Amendment’s framers effectively derailed our democracy’s promise after Reconstruction and until the mid-20th century. We must ensure that it does not do the same in the 21st.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that Americans are better at spouting phrases from their founding and governing documents than they are at living by them.

Remember when conservatives accused liberals of moral relativism? Yeah.

“White” Rhino baby!

The Virginia Zoo is thrilled to announce the birth of a female southern white rhinoceros on November 9, 2023 at 5:40 a.m., bringing their crash up to five. The calf is the second rhinoceros ever born at the Virginia Zoo and the second offspring to 17-year-old father Sibindi and 10-year-old mother Zina, who birthed the Zoo’s first rhino calf, Mosi, in 2021.

Zina and Sibindi are a recommended breeding pair by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ (AZA) White Rhino Species Survival Plan® (SSP), which helps to ensure genetic diversity and the continued growth of the southern white rhino population in AZA accredited facilities. The new calf, who will be named by her keepers at a later date, and Mosi’s genetics are considered especially valuable due to their parents’ origin. Zina was born at the Singapore Zoo in 2013 and Sibindi was born in South Africa in 2006. The birth of these offspring marks the first time their genetics have been represented in an American zoo.

Southern white rhinos are native to South Africa, where they are found almost exclusively, and have been introduced to Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Eswatini. They have been classified as Near Threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), with poaching for their horns being the largest threat to them in the wild. This threat has already resulted in extinction and near-extinction of other rhino species.

“This baby is invaluable to the long-term survival of the species.” Greg Bockheim, Executive

Director of the Virginia Zoo, said. “And like her older brother, she could not be more adorable.”

In the wild, southern white rhinos’ median life expectancy is about 36 years, but they may live to be older than 40 in human care. The gestation period averages around 16 months, the second longest in the animal kingdom behind elephants.

White rhinos are not actually white in color. Their name comes from the Afrikaans word wyd, meaning “wide”, which references the animals’ mouth shape but was misinterpreted by early English settlers as “white.”

.@JohnLeguizamo stops by to call bulls**t on Univision's softball Trump interview pic.twitter.com/3p45N0ZChm

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) November 23, 2023

Let’s hope people listen … and that the Democrats put some serious money and effort into counteracting what these greed heads are doing.

Do they not realize that Trump thinks they all come from shithole countries?

Will they be able to overcome their differences to keep the government open?

The Republicans have managed to pass some of the appropriations bills from the floor (although most of them are going to meet heavy resistance in the conference) so they aren’t starting from scratch after the first of the year. But there are a few that they just can’t seem to come to terms on. Here are some of the reasons:

Agriculture 

House GOP leadership has struggled for months to pass the party’s annual agriculture and rural development funding bill amid divides over spending and measures aimed at restricting abortion access. 

The bill was one of the first the party sought to bring to the floor in the summer. But leadership scrapped plans for a vote in July as hard-line conservatives pressed for steeper cuts to overall funding levels while moderates came out against the bill over language that sought to limit access to an abortion pill known as mifepristone. 

The bill — which funds the Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and other related agencies — ultimately failed when it came up for a vote in September over the same issues.

And while some are hopeful the party will eventually be able to get it across the finish line, others are doubtful.

Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), chair of the subcommittee that crafted the funding bill, said earlier this month the House should “go to conference with the Senate with what we have” instead of opting for another floor vote. 

“There are members who have said, look, they can’t vote for that bill with the mifepristone language in and there are a whole lot more members who said they can’t vote for that bill with the mifepristone language out,” Harris told The Hill then. “There is no solution to it.”  

“So, that means, let’s go to conference with what we have and bring a conferenced product back to the floor,” he said. 

If it’s about abortion, the Senate Democrats aren’t going to budge. But who knows what Joe Manchin will do? (Sinema is firmly pro-choice, at least.) Still, Biden would veto it, obviously. And the Dems will be happy to take that to the voters in November.

Financial Services and General Government 

Reproductive rights also played a role in House Republicans canceling a vote on their annual financial services and general government funding bill earlier this month, as did funding for an FBI headquarters.   

Some moderate Republicans said they opposed the bill over language seeking to prohibit Washington, D.C., from carrying out a law that aims to protect people from employer discrimination based on their reproductive health decisions. 

The bill also faced pushback from some in the right flank amid scrutiny of the FBI. Conservatives have accused the agency of political weaponization and pushed for the measure to include language barring funding for a new FBI headquarters.  

Some also said the measure didn’t go far enough to cut spending, despite a proposal to claw back billions of dollars in IRS funding passed in the previous Democratic-led Congress in hopes of offsetting spending in the bill.  

Among the offices the bill covers funding for includes the Treasury Department, the executive office of the president and the General Services Administration, which constructs and manages federal buildings. 

Ditto.

Transportation, Housing and Urban Development 

House Republicans punted plans to bring up their annual transportation and housing funding bill twice this month, as some moderates took issue with proposed cuts to Amtrak. 

“Some people want to cut more, other people are worried that we cut too much, or they’ve got particular concerns, Amtrak concerns,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), who heads the spending subcommittee that crafted the bill, told The Hill earlier this month. 

Moderates, especially those from New York, voiced concerns about a drop in Amtrak funding of more than $1 billion below fiscal 2023 levels. 

“I think that many of us are comfortable reining in federal spending, but not disproportionately impacting our region,” Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-N.Y.) told reporters this month, adding that proposed cuts in the bill “are just too significant.” 

But there had also been criticism in the right flank among members pressing for lower funding in the bill, which covers funding for offices like the Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development, that the bill didn’t go far enough to lower funding.  

I think the wingnuts will cave on this one. They will want to protect their New York delegation.

Commerce, Justice and Science 

A group of mostly hard-line conservatives recently tanked consideration of the party’s bill to fund the Department of Justice for most of next year, as some opposed the bill’s proposals for the FBI among other issues. 

“The bill itself didn’t go far enough to defund some of the policies and practices going on with [the] Department of Justice and FBI, weaponization of the government,” Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), who was among the GOP members that opposed the bill, said at the time. 

“It also increases spending instead of cutting spending of all departments, that’s not the one we should be doing that for,” he said of the sweeping bill, which also provides funding for the Department of Commerce, NASA, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Office on Violence Against Women and other operations. 

Several moderates also helped block consideration of the bill on the procedural vote, raising concerns about how certain proposals would impact public safety. 

“There was specific grant funding that trickles down to the Suffolk County Police Department and other Long Island police departments that, if this bill was ultimately approved, would have made public safety a worse issue on Long Island,” Rep. Nick LaLota (N.Y.), another “no” vote, argued. “It would have made affordability a worse issue on Long Island.” 

“Defund the police” is an excellent policy. It works wonders. They should put that one front and center.

Labor, Health and Human Services 

Another bill Republicans hoped to pass before leaving Washington on Wednesday would have funded the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services (HHS), and Education for most of next year. 

However, that bill also proposed steep cuts that faced staunch resistance from some moderates. 

The bill sought to prohibit Planned Parenthood-affiliated clinics from receiving funding, slash funding for Title I grants for states with schools where “children from low-income families make up at least 40 percent of enrollment” and laid out double-digit percentage cuts to discretionary funds for Labor, HHS and Education, according to a legislative summary. 

Republicans say the bill would cut funding for programs under its purview by more than $60 billion compared to enacted levels in fiscal 2023, drawing backing from some hard-line conservatives pressing for more aggressive action to tackle the nation’s growing debt.  

Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said there’s “not a lot of cuts that were missed and they cut $60 billion out.” 

“That means there’s some significant cuts,” Simpson said, adding that bothers “a lot of people.” 

Ya think?

Good luck to America with all this. It’s possible that they will find a way to pass these with promises of a good conference outcome. And they may even be able to keep the government from shutting down in the process. But Mike Johnson is in big trouble if those moderates win on any of it. And since he’s a hard-core, far right anti abortion extremists it’s hard to imagine he’ll go that way.

Say it ain’t so!

Oh look:

Three Ukrainians who aided the Donald Trump campaign’s efforts to discredit the Biden family have been charged with treason.

The 2019 drive was led by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was Mr Trump’s personal lawyer at the time.

It centred on unproven allegations that Joe Biden had corrupt dealings with Ukraine as vice-president.

Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) said the three men charged were paid by Russian military intelligence (GRU).

It added that they had used a “tense political situation” to harm Ukraine’s reputation abroad.

The three men charged are understood to be current MP Oleksandr Dubinsky, former lawmaker Andriy Derkach and ex-prosecutor Kostyantyn Kulyk.

Mr Dubinsky has denied the charges.

All three are said to be members of an agent network led by Russian Gen Vladimir Alekseyev, the deputy head of the GRU.

The charges allege they pursued “information subversive activities” related to the 2020 US election and were paid $10m (£8m).

The men are accused of helping to spread the falsehood that Ukraine, rather than Russia, interfered in the recent US elections.

The allegations against Mr Biden involved the business dealings of his son Hunter, who was a director of Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma.

Mr Trump and his allies suggested that Mr Biden, as Barack Obama’s vice-president, encouraged the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, because he had been investigating Burisma.

Hunter Biden has since filed a lawsuit against Mr Giuliani for “the total annihilation” of his privacy via the former New York mayor’s search for damaging information related to the Biden family.

Ukrainian authorities did not explicitly identify Mr Dubinsky, instead using his alleged Russian intelligence call sign “Burtino”.

However, the lawmaker identified himself in a Telegram post, saying that a court in Kyiv had ordered his detention for 60 days on the basis of the charges.

Mr Dubinsky denied all wrongdoing in a series of posts on Telegram and alleged that he faced political persecution directed at him by President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office.

He faces 15 years in prison and the forfeiture of his assets if convicted.

Mr Derkach and Mr Kulyk fled Ukraine after Russia’s invasion in 2022, the SBU said.

Mr Dubinsky, Mr Derkach and Mr Kulyk were previously sanctioned by the US government in the final days of Mr Trump’s administration for their alleged efforts to undermine the 2020 election in the US.

The Treasury Department identified Mr Derkach as a Russian agent. He is named in the nearly 1,000-page report produced by the US Senate Intelligence Committee on Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election.

Mr Derkach publicly met Mr Giuliani in Ukraine in 2019 as part of their effort to link Hunter Biden to corruption in Ukraine.

He also appeared with Mr Giuliani in right-wing US media ahead of the 2020 election, where they shared details of their alleged investigation.

Separately, while serving as a Ukrainian deputy prosecutor general, Mr Kulyk wrote a 2019 memo that pushed for Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board.

It included unsupported claims that he had evidence President Joe Biden unlawfully enriched himself, which reportedly sparked Mr Giuliani’s search for incriminating information in Ukraine.

Well, ok then.

“It looks like they hate immigrants. Well I am an immigrant, and I did what I could to try and save that little girl ”— Hero Brazilian delivery driver Caio Benicio

Right wingers rioted in Dublin last night, angry because an immigrant stabbed 5 people. It turns out that it was an immigrant who stepped in and stopped the assailant. Imagine that.

 Brazilian food delivery driver in Dublin heroically stopped the knifeman who attacked a group of young children outside their school yesterday.

The attack, which hospitalized three children under the age of 7 and a 30 year old teacher who was trying to protect them, triggered the worst riots in living memory in the Irish capital after a far right mob, described as a “lunatic, hooligan faction” by the police was whipped up by reports on social and mainstream media that the knifeman was an immigrant. The ringleaders were then joined by opportunistic rioters who looted stores, and torched buses and police vehicles.

The identity of the attacker has not been revealed but it has now emerged that the attack might have been much, much worse had it not been for the astonishing bravery and quick thinking of an immigrant who was working in Dublin; Brazilian Deliveroo rider Caio Benicio, 43.

Benicio was on a job when he saw the attack taking place. He jumped off his motorcycle, took off his helmet, and hit the attacker with it until the attacker collapsed.

“I didn’t even make a decision, it was pure instinct, and it was all over in seconds. He fell to the ground, I didn’t see where knife went, and other people stepped in,” he told Irish news website The Journal.

Benicio said that as a father of two children, he “had to do something” and realized he could use his helmet as a weapon to disable the attacker.

We are living through such an ugly era. But people like that man give me a glimmer of hope.

They’re there for him in his time of need. And they’re prepared to use the power of the state to shut down his critics.

Here’s how the free speech warriors of the right defend the first Amendment:

Elon Musk’s new lawsuit against Media Matters, which X Corp. filed late Monday, has been dismissed by legal experts as a frivolous effort to bully a prominent critic into silence. But some Republicans apparently see this as a feature, not a bug: They are allying themselves with Musk’s effort for precisely this purpose.

Musk’s suit charges that Media Matters deliberately and deceptively harmed X (formerly Twitter) with a widely-publicized investigation showing that posts containing pro-Nazi content appeared on X alongside advertisements from leading companies. That, along with a surge in antisemitic content, has advertisers fleeing the site, sparking a slide in ad revenue.

Republicans are eagerly rushing to Musk’s rescue — and not just rhetorically. Two GOP state attorneys general — Ken Paxton in Texas and Andrew Bailey in Missouri — have responded by announcing vaguely defined investigations into Media Matters.

Meanwhile, Trump adviser Stephen Miller is urging Republican law enforcement officials to probe Media Matters for “criminal” activity. And Mike Davis, who is touting himself as Donald Trump’s next attorney general, has declared that Media Matters staff members should be jailed.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Texas, doesn’t deny that the juxtapositions between ads and pro-Nazi postings are real. Rather, it accuses Media Matters of creating an account following only fringe content and endlessly refreshing it until it finally generated the juxtapositions. Those are “extraordinarily rare,” the suit says, but were deliberately engineered to disparage X, harm its revenue stream and interfere with its contracts with advertisers.

It’s a weak case, as experts point out. The Media Matters article said it had “found” the juxtapositions, which X calls “false,” insisting they were “manipulated” into existence. But even if you question Media Matters’s presentation of the facts, it still wouldn’t show that it did “all of this to harm X’s market value,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

“If Media Matters doctored the images and couldn’t replicate those results, then maybe there would be a claim here,” Vladeck told me, stressing that it did prove “possible to see those ads” alongside Nazi-related content. He noted that Media Matters plausibly wrote about these juxtapositions not to hurt X, but because they’re “newsworthy.

They did it to prove that the guardrails Musk insisted were there did not exist. And I’m sure that many, if not all, of the big companies that pulled out verified it. Can you imagine the conversation? The head of marketing sees this story or hears about it and of course asks their ad sales people to check and see if it’s happened to any of their ads and voila. It has. Because we know it has. We’ve all seen it.

Now, Musk can show all the antisemitic drivel he wants on his platform. Media Matters has the right to publish the fact that he’s doing it in violation of his own stated policy against allowing such things to happen. It’s a free country. And needless to say, his advertisers have no obligation to support it.

I think what people are missing in all this is that Musk himself commonly posts antisemitic comments like the one above along with many other odious comments which get massive engagement on the platform and in the media at large. This report was obviously just another in a long line of complaints about twitter since he took over and many advertiser had probably just had enough, particularly after all the assurances the company no doubt made that it was technically impossible for their ads to be shown next to this objectionable content.

We can all see what’s happening on that platform and it’s driving people away by the millions. Why would major advertisers see that as a smart place to sell their products?

Where we are headed

That’s about as succinct as it gets.

So do yourselves a favor. Volunteer for a local campaign. Donate to a local campaign (not to a marquee one doomed to fail because you really can’t stand the Republican). Encourage your Democratic family and unaffiliated friends (especially) to vote in the primary and general election next year.

Yes, it really does matter:

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — In the northwest corner of Louisiana, a candidate for parish sheriff demanded a recount Wednesday after losing by a single vote in an election where more than 43,000 people cast ballots.

[…]

“This extraordinarily narrow margin … absolutely requires a hand recount to protect the integrity of our democratic process, and to ensure we respect the will of the people,” John Nickelson, the Republican candidate who trailed by one vote in last week’s election for Caddo Parish Sheriff, posted on social media Wednesday.

Henry Whitehorn, the Democrat who won the sheriff runoff, did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.

You’ve seen plenty of close races, even in unlikely places like this.

That’s a pretty remarkable outcome, one supposes, in a parish that voted for Joe Biden in 2020 with 52.5% of the vote but for Bill Cassidy (R) by 59.3%. In a state with 64 parishes but few ways to contact any of their local committees (I just looked up all of them).

They apparently have a Democratic Committee in Cado (population 230k, parish seat Shreveport, pop. 188k): a chair, vice chair, secretary and treasurer, but no way to contact them online either except via a Facebook message. The state party hasn’t issued a press release all year (by their web site), and has no calendar of events. Although they did have a “war room” the other day.

Democratic Party war room on Election Day. We are better together! pic.twitter.com/43AJXFm7OZ

— Louisiana Democrats (@LaDemos) November 19, 2023

And you wonder why we have John Kennedy and Mike Johnson in Congress.

Trump’s “Stanford” experiment

The MAGA faithful, at long last, have not seen the light. That Road to Talledega moment, that flash of insight when the scales fall from their eyes and their political savior is revealed a bronzer-caked madman bent on the destruction of the red, white and blue nation they hold so dear? Never happened.

What has happened since Donald Trump’s Veterans Day “vermin” speech is that the mainstream press and others have finally stopped giving him the benefit of the doubt.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Donald Trump is a fascist,” late-night host Stephen Colbert told his audience. Former Republican Tom Nichols declared Trump had “crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism.” Even the New York Times this week broached the subject.

How it started … how it’s going pic.twitter.com/7AnF9DaX4n

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) November 23, 2023

But the answer to why the faithful have not wavered might be found in Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment and its aftermath. Zimbardo famously set up a mock prison in Stanford University’s psychology department. He recruited students to play the roles of prisoners and prison guards for a study in human dynamics.

The New Yorker recently summarized:

According to the lore that’s grown up around the experiment, the guards, with little to no instruction, began humiliating and psychologically abusing the prisoners within twenty-four hours of the study’s start. The prisoners, in turn, became submissive and depersonalized, taking the abuse and saying little in protest. The behavior of all involved was so extreme that the experiment, which was meant to last two weeks, was terminated after six days.

Less than a decade earlier, the Milgram obedience study had shown that ordinary people, if encouraged by an authority figure, were willing to shock their fellow-citizens with what they believed to be painful and potentially lethal levels of electricity. To many, the Stanford experiment underscored those findings, revealing the ease with which regular people, if given too much power, could transform into ruthless oppressors. Today, more than forty-five years later, many look to the study to make sense of events like the behavior of the guards at Abu Ghraib and America’s epidemic of police brutality. The Stanford Prison Experiment is cited as evidence of the atavistic impulses that lurk within us all; it’s said to show that, with a little nudge, we could all become tyrants.

But not so fast. The study was controversial and drew critics. Among them, Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland. They speculated that perhaps Zimbardo’s recuitment ad influenced who volunteered to participate in “a psychological study of prison life.”

In a 2007 study, the psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland asked whether that wording itself may have stacked the odds. They recreated the original ad, and then ran a separate ad omitting the phrase “prison life.” They found that the people who responded to the two ads scored differently on a set of psychological tests. Those who thought that they would be participating in a prison study had significantly higher levels of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and they scored lower on measures of empathy and altruism.

There was more nuance, of course, but subsequent studies and papers never quite dispelled the urban legends.

One of the few, true talents Trump possesses is for self-promotion. The faux-business genius/reality TV star’s rise to power in this country has been one long advertisement for “aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance.” We see in those who have volunteered to join him a group that seems self-selected for lower scores on empathy and altruism.

What Trump promises to create in his second term is a nationwide experiment in which “regular people” will be invited to play guards at expanded detention camps for undesirables. His plans to centralize more power in the presidency, to bring more federal agencies under direct presidential control, and to prosecute his enemies and rivals is an intentional, months-long advertisement for the type of people Zimbardo’s experiment attracted by accident of wording.

Trump is recruiting Americans predisposed to stare long into the abyss.

Not yet

Kevin Drum has an interesting observation:

How is Joe Biden doing these days? Courtesy of CNN, here are his approval ratings from a variety of national polls over the past few months:

From August through October Biden’s approval dropped about 1.5% per month. Since the Israel-Gaza war broke out a month ago, his approval has improved by about half a percent.

I’d like to generate a chart like this just for young Democrats, but I can’t find the data to do it. My suspicion is that Biden has been hemorrhaging approval from young voters for a long time and the Israel-Gaza war hasn’t really had a big effect. But I don’t know that.

In any case, even if it has had an effect, it’s apparently been counterbalanced by increased approval from older voters. Taken as a whole, the war has rather surprisingly had only a very small effect on Biden’s approval, and probably a positive one.

POSTSCRIPT: The change is even more dramatic if you draw two separate trend lines for the before and after periods:

I think there are probably quite a few people like me who are appalled by what is happening in Gaza but think that Biden is doing the best he can to keep the whole thing from hurtling out of control while trying to rein in Netanyahu, for whom he has no love. US control of the situation is limited to “influence” over Israel which is less powerful than a lot of people think. But the global ramifications of this going sideways regionally are profound.

I do think the protests in the US and Europe have an effect on this however, by showing the Israeli government that there is serious objection to the overkill in Gaza and it gives the US and allies some leverage. Not that I’m sanguine Netanyahu gives a damn. He knows the whole world is worried that this thing is going to explode the region so perversely he’s being even more reckless than usual in order to keep the US and its allies closer than they want to be. It’s a mess.

As for the polling, I don’t know what to make of it. It does appear that Biden is holding on to his pathetic approval rating regardless of what happens in Gaza. That’s about the best we can hope for at this moment. I’m hoping things settle down soon.