We begin today with Mark Leibovich’s clickbait-y essay for The Atlantic about former President Barack Obama.
Trump has begun his second term with a continuous spree of democracy-shaking, economy-quaking, norm-obliterating action. And Obama, true to form, has remained carefully above it all. He picks his spots, which seldom involve Trump. In March, he celebrated the anniversary of the Affordable Care Act and posted his annual NCAA basketball brackets. In April, he sent out an Easter message and mourned the death of the pope. In May, he welcomed His Holiness Pope Leo XIV (“a fellow Chicagoan”) and sent prayers to Joe Biden following his prostate-cancer diagnosis. [...]
Obama occasionally dips into politics with brief and unmemorable statements, or sporadic fundraising emails (subject: “Barack Obama wants to meet you. Yes you.”). He praised his law-school alma mater, Harvard, for “rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt” by the White House “to stifle academic freedom.” He criticized a Republican bill that would threaten health care for millions. He touted a liberal judge who was running for a crucial seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. When called upon, he can still deliver a top-notch campaign spiel, donor pitch, convention speech, or eulogy. [...]
In normal times, no one would deny Obama these diversions. He performed the world’s most stressful job for eight years, served his country, made his history, and deserved to kick back and do the usual ex-president things: start a foundation, build a library, make unspeakable amounts of money.
But the inevitable Trump-era counterpoint is that these are not normal times.And Obama’s detachment feels jarringly incongruous with the desperation of his longtime admirers—even more so given Trump’s assaults on what Obama achieved in office. It would be one thing if Obama had disappeared after leaving the White House, maybe taking up painting like George W. Bush. The problem is that Obama still very much has a public profile—one that screams comfort and nonchalance at a time when so many other Americans are terrified.
As Leibovich well knows, the 44th President of the United States cannot run for a third term in office due to the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution limiting a president to two elected terms in office. Given that, President Obama made a very clear suggestion and endorsement as to who should be the 47th President of the United States.
Obama spent much of October 2024 carrying that message to multiple battleground states. Of the seven battleground states, former Vice President Harris did not win any of them, for multiples of reasons (especially the price of eggs!).
To repeat: former President Obama told us multiple times what was necessary to prevent a convicted criminal from ascending to the Oval Office and to prevent the country from descending into chaos. American voters and non voters chose not to heed those warnings.
And here we are.
Don’t put that on the inactions or inadequate actions of President Obama, whether those actions took place before, during, or after the 2024 presidential election. The “American people” are getting exactly what they voted by a slim plurality. Obama has done his work. The former president can do what he da*n well pleases after serving as POTUS for eight years.
Retire when the work is done.
This is the way of heaven.
Tao Te Ching #9
Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times thinks that given the deployment of troops and National Guard members because of largely peaceful protests in Los Angeles and other parts of California, autocracy may already be here, right now.
It’s important to understand that for this administration, protests needn’t be violent to be considered an illegitimate uprising. The presidential memorandum calling out the National Guard refers to both violent acts and any protests that “inhibit” law enforcement. That definition would seem to include peaceful demonstrations around the site of ICE raids. In May, for example, armed federal agents stormed two popular Italian restaurants in San Diego looking for undocumented workers; they handcuffed staff members and took four people into custody. As they did so, an outraged crowd gathered outside, chanting “shame” and for a time blocking the agents from leaving. Under Trump’s order, the military could target these people as insurrectionists.
The administration, after all, has every reason to want to intimidate those who might take part in civil disobedience. Violent protests play into its hands; peaceful ones threaten the absurd narrative it’s trying to bludgeon America into accepting. Just look at the lengths to which it’s going to silence David Huerta, the president of the Service Employees International Union of California. Last week, Huerta was arrested after sitting on a sidewalk and blocking a gate while protesting an immigration raid at a work site in Los Angeles. While he was being detained, he was knocked to the ground, resulting in his hospitalization. On Monday, the Justice Department charged him with “conspiracy to impede an officer,” a felony that carries a maximum prison term of six years.
Trump also, on Monday, called for the arrest of Newsom. If you saw all this in any other country — soldiers sent to crush dissent, union leaders arrested, opposition politicians threatened — it would be clear that autocracy had arrived. The question, now, is whether Americans who hate tyranny can be roused to respond.
Chris Geidner of LawDork outlines the methods of some of Trump’s madness.
In the past five days alone, Trump announced efforts to implement an expansive travel ban — with 12 countries facing a near-blanket ban and another 7 facing significant restrictions — as well as an effort to ban student visas for Harvard and the activationof 2,000 members of the National Guard to “protect” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other personnel carrying out the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operation.
And while a federal judge has already blocked the Harvard effort, the Supreme Court’s conservatives are not particularly interested in playing a similar role when cases get up to them, as we saw just this Friday. [...]
One of Trump’s...favorite methods of addressing a perceived threat is to declare a problem and then over-respond to the problem he has invented, thus expanding the scale of the problem as part of his self-imagined creation.
That, of course, is the reason why Trump is pretending that the National Guard is needed in Los Angeles.
Say there’s a problem, create new rules or restrictions, and justify future escalations based on opposition to the new rules.
Helen Branswell, Chelsea Cirruzzo, and Daniel Payne of STATnews report about the firing of a Centers for Disease Control advisory board on vaccines by HHS head Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Proponents of vaccines have feared Kennedy, who is openly skeptical of vaccines and has long been critical of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, might take such a step. ACIP studies vaccines in the regulatory pipeline and ones that have recently been licensed by the Food and Drug Administration, advising the CDC on who they should be offered to once they have been approved.
Appointing replacement members to the advisory panel would give Kennedy broad latitude to reshape the government’s childhood immunization schedule and other vaccines advice. New members haven’t yet been named, but it would appear they may have been selected, because a statement from Kennedy’s department said that a meeting scheduled for late June will take place. In normal times, ACIP candidates go through a vetting process that can take upwards of a year.
“We have just demonstrated that politics will overrun science in this administration. It scares me to think of what’s ahead,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.
Finally today,Yang Tian of BBC News reports that a Texas man has been charged with murder for slipping an abortion pill into his ex-girlfriend’s drink.
Justin Anthony Banta was arrested on Friday after a months-long investigation into his former girlfriend's accusation that he gave her the Plan C pill (known as an abortion drug) without her knowledge, according to police in the US state.
Mr Banta's ex-partner said when she disclosed her pregnancy last year, he had offered to cover the cost of an abortion, but she expressed her desire to keep the baby.
Police said after meeting with Mr Banta in a coffee shop, she experienced heavy bleeding and visited the emergency room, but lost her baby a few days later.
Mr Banta was also charged with tampering with physical evidence and is awaiting prosecution, according to the Parker County Sheriff's Office.
Interesting…
Everyone have the best possible day that you can in spite of the news!
