Robert Reich makes the case that Trump will continue to obey-ish court rulings:

Which leads to a further question: Why has Trump decided not to defy the courts, when the MAGA faithful want him to?

The answer, I think, is that although Trump doesn't pay attention to opinion pieces in The New York Times or The Washington Post (and certainly not this Substack), he does pay attention to opinion pieces in the Rupert Murdoch-owned press -- specifically in the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal.

Their opinions have been uniformly against Trump defying the courts.

In other words, Murdoch is sending Trump a clear warning: If you take on the judiciary, you're on your own.

I don't know, man, but I don't have anything better.

It's either this or marvel how the word anti-semitism has become contorted to justify slashing university funding. (In fact, I tried to write a post on that, but got bogged down thinking that we needed ground rules to keep it from deteriorating into a referendum on Palestine and actual anti-semitism.)

This feeling of despair-blogging is so eerily familiar from Trump1: it's literally so repetitive and kind of boring, but what the hell else do you talk about when the Titanic is sinking? "Oh look, yup, still sinking."

NickS writes: he internet has trained me to expect mediocre listicles, but this surprised me -- clearly deeply considered, researched, and informative.

Heebie's take: I'm surprised at how few of them I recognized. Maybe 25%?

I am very freaked out by the idea that Trump is now entertaining the idea of ignoring court orders, and that the rhetoric against judges has amped up, and Trump going after specific law firms that have defended anyone who ever remotely hurt his feelings. (Lashing out against specific people isn't new, of course.)

The court system moderately provided guard rails during T1, and totally abdicated its responsibility towards reining in Trump during the intermission, and now may be neutered altogether.

I'm so angry about the failures to deal with him between 2020-2024, both legally and by the media, and whoever else might have had any power to shape this path. Talk about an accountability sink.

(I don't want to live in a fascist regime, I'm just a girl, and the collapsing process is extremely stressful.)

LW writes: Ezra Klein has a long detailed conversation with a careful pollster, David Shor.

Some real surprises for me-- 20 year olds net Trump.
Increased turnout nationally would have helped Trump.

Not surprising: Inflation was the main issue for low-information voters, who decided the election. Preserving institutions did not matter to these folks.

Thoughtful questions (starting with polling bias), good empirical answers.

" So people want an angry moderate.

I think that's exactly right."

Heebie's take: I've definitely noticed that there hasn't been anywhere near the retrospective psychoanalyzing that we saw in 2016. We were able to say with surgical precision then that Comey ratfucked Clinton, and we were scrutinizing every last detail all over the place, and this time it's fallen into the Valley of Demoralization.

I like the format, of a transcribed conversation with slides to anchor it. I don't quite understand how the slides would have worked in the actual podcast, but they're good for keeping conversation moving forward

Haven't skimmed it all yet, though.

Ace is in speech therapy, and they've finally gotten to their Rs. (It was a whole thing - not making progress, discovering anatomical problems, getting expanders, etc etc. Then finally back to a new attempt at speech.)

First Ace worked on g's and k's, fine. But the Rs are much more interesting. (Disclaimer: this is my understanding, filtered up through an 11 year old.)

So: apparently some people make their r's in the front of their palate, and some people make them in the back. Ace was given a choice of what kind of person they want to be. They chose to be a back-of-palate r person. (I am a front-of-palate person! So my experience of how to say all these words differs now from Ace's.)

That makes me think that there must be so many motor and kinesthetic things with a diversity of normal ways to do them! I don't know why this never occurred to me, but now it seems obvious. Probably most motions have many right ways (and many wrong ways!) to do them, but journalists and morning talk shows tend to boil things down into The One Right Way to do whatever.

Next: The easiest Rs to master are the ones at the beginning of a word. Ace has gotten those. Now they're working on open Rs and closed Rs. Open Rs are things like "oar" and "scar" and closed Rs are things like "ear" and "bird".

Ace can do these with concentration, in isolation, and the hard part of course is incorporating them into regular speech. And the spelling of a word can be a red herring. You're trying to anticipate the word coming up, but is it "sword" or "worm"? It requires so much cognitive load!

Anyway, it's a work in progress, but overall going very well and I find it fascinating.

Heebie's note: PF submitted this Friday and I missed it, but I think it still stands as a jumping off point for Monday morning quarterbacking. Or Sunday morning. (I figured it was time-sensitive-ish.)

politicalfootball writes: I have a spicy contrarian take for all you leftists. I think the Democrats are basically taking the correct approach to the continuing resolution. This has been my intuition all along, but since all the smart folks think otherwise, I've been prepared to change my view.

I finally got around to reading Josh Marshall on this to find out why I'm wrong. Marshall's piece is a thorough, good faith effort to address the sort of arguments I would make, and it's weak. I don't think I'm being unfair to characterize it as the Yes, Minister argument: "Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it."

More specifically, Marshall's argument is "Democrats must oppose Republicans, this opposes Republicans, therefore ..." He discusses how much people will come to hate Trump's chainsaw approach to government, but never quite articulates how putting a meat axe in Democratic hands hinders Trump's program. Trump has acted to limit the federal government to "essential" functions. Why should Democrats try to own that?

Marshall himself has been smart on this topic. He explained that in Trump's February 11 Workforce Optimization Initiative, Trump established a goal of doing the exact thing that Marshall now asks Democrats to do. Quoting Marhsall on the Republican objective:

What will it be like after they're done? It will be like a permanent shutdown. That's not hyperbole or a metaphor. It's literally what they say in the executive order. I would think Democrats should be familiarizing themselves with all the particulars of the OMB "essential" plan and basically be campaigning on it.

Democrats are hobbled by the Superman Problem. The Bad Guys can invariably distract Superman by threatening civilians. Liberals understandably want to see Democrats reclaim some sense of agency, but Marshall proposes shoot the hostage logic. The problem is, the Democrats like the hostages, and want them to prosper, and the Republicans aren't taking hostages -- they are identifying victims.

You can see Marshall's misunderstanding here:

Republicans almost always get blamed for a shutdown and not Democrats. And that's for a simple reason: nobody buys the idea that the Democrats want to shut down the government.

Well no, Republican get blamed for government shutdowns because they keep seeking to shut down the government. Democrats have threatened to do so on occasion, but nobody takes them seriously because Democrats won't shoot the hostage, and people know it. The Democrats want to be Superman; the Republicans are Zod.

And what happens if Superman loses interest in the well-being of hostages? That puts him on the same side as Zod. And because hypocrisy isn't a problem for Zod, he gets to campaign on his sympathy for the little people. The predictable result of a shutdown triggered by the Democrats is that the Republicans call the bluff and refuse to budge, and the Democrats cave. Democrats are weak that way, like Superman.

We're in desperate times, and maybe we have to start thinking about which hostages need to be shot. Gavin Newsom is getting out in front on the hostage-shooting issue with his take on trans athletes.

Me, I still think we need to save as many hostages as we can. Let Trump shut down the government. Don't do it for him.

Heebie's take: I feel like both options were really bad.