Harry Litman/The Los Angeles Times:
Why Trump’s outlandish legal maneuvers are backfiring with the federal judge in the Jan. 6 case
It certainly doesn’t help [Donald] Trump that [Judge Tanya] Chutkan has made clear that his lawyer, John Lauro, is already in a fairly deep hole with the judge. Lauro, presumably at Trump’s insistence, had responded to the Justice Department’s suggestion to start the trial in January 2024 with a preposterous proposal of April 2026.
Since Chutkan said that she will give no consideration to Trump’s personal political agenda, Lauro had to support the silly suggestion with specious arguments about volume of discovery and average length of other cases. She was matter-of-fact when she informed Lauro that she wasn’t buying what he was trying to sell: “You and I have a very, very different estimate of … the time that’s needed to prepare for this case.”
Among the many legal stories today is the sentencing of some Proud Boys:
Jennifer Rubin/The Washington Post:
Eastman’s defense is shattered in state bar proceeding
At a critical hearing last week in the California bar proceedings, designated legal expert Matthew A. Seligman submitted a 91-page report, which I have obtained from the state bar, that strips away any “colorable,” or legally plausible, defense that [John] Eastman was acting in good faith in rendering advice to the now four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump.
This report has serious ramifications for Eastman’s professional licensure and his defense in Georgia. Moreover, his co-defendant and co-counsel in the alleged legal scheme, Kenneth Chesebro, who has employed many of the same excuses as Eastman, might be in serious jeopardy in his Oct. 23 trial. (Another lawyer, Sidney Powell, also requested a speedy trial.)
Kyle Kondik/POLITICO:
No, Ohio Is Not in Play
The talk about its reemergence as a key presidential battleground is misplaced.
Before the 2016 election, I wrote a book called The Bellwether: Why Ohio Picks the President, which tracked Ohio’s long-standing history of almost always voting for the presidential winner and consistently voting similarly to the nation.
Several months later, Ohio once again voted for the presidential winner — Donald Trump. But its vote did not reflect the nation’s, and four years after that, Ohio continued in the same rightward direction. It voted for the loser — Trump — with a vote that was even less reflective of the nation.
Miami Herald:
Florida reviewers of AP African American Studies sought ‘opposing viewpoints’ of slavery
When Florida rejected a new Advanced Placement course on African American Studies, state officials said they objected to the study of several concepts — like reparations, the Black Lives Matter movement and “queer theory.” But the state did not say that in many instances, its reviewers also made objections in the state’s attempt to sanitize aspects of slavery and the plight of African Americans throughout history, according to a Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times review of internal state comments. For example, a lesson in the Advanced Placement course focused on how Europeans benefited from trading enslaved people and the materials enslaved laborers produced. The state objected to the content, saying the instructional approach “may lead to a viewpoint of an ‘oppressor vs. oppressed’ based solely on race or ethnicity.”
Ryan Burge/”Graphs About Religion” Substack:
Liberals Have Won the Culture War
Opinion on sex, drugs, and abortion have all moved left over time.
[Pat] Buchanan and his supporters wanted, at a minimum, to stop the leftward drift that they believed was happening in the United States on social issues. If not push the country in a more conservative direction. Well, I’ve looked at the data from the General Social Survey and it’s clear to me that Christian conservatives failed miserably in this endeavor. On every single social issue, the average American is more liberal today than they were just two decades ago.
I took five social issues that the General Social Survey has been asking about for decades and analyzed their trajectory over time. Here are the five positions:
The Associated Press:
Pope says some ‘backward’ conservatives in US Catholic Church have replaced faith with ideology
Pope Francis has blasted the “backwardness” of some conservatives in the U.S. Catholic Church, saying they have replaced faith with ideology and that a correct understanding of Catholic doctrine allows for change over time.
Francis’ comments were an acknowledgment of the divisions in the U.S. Catholic Church, which has been split between progressives and conservatives who long found support in the doctrinaire papacies of St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI, particularly on issues of abortion and same-sex marriage.
Many conservatives have blasted Francis’ emphasis instead on social justice issues such as the environment and the poor, while also branding as heretical his opening to letting divorced and civilly remarried Catholics receive the sacraments.
Catherine Rampell/The Washington Post:
Republicans and Democrats are falling for the false allure of autarky
Desperate political leaders of all stripes — Republican, Democratic, communist — have found a common enemy: free trade.
The GOP has turned its back on the party’s long-term commitment to liberalizing trade, it seems, because key party leaders have decided foreigners are bad and scary. Not only the “usual” scary foreigners, either (i.e., the non-White ones). President Donald Trump levied tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of goods from China, his most frequent punching bag, but he also launched trade wars against our allies in the European Union, Britain, Canada and elsewhere.
It was a sloppy, aimless attempt to show strength, and it backfired. Study after study found that the costs of Trump’s various trade wars were either mostly or entirely borne by American consumers and businesses, and that the tariffs likely reduced U.S. employment on net.
From Cliff Schecter:
