Althouse

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• A bit of red at sunrise....
• "I’ll accept it because the fans vote. When I said that, it was always my belief that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame was for people in rock music."
• "In the past, I would simply have shut down inappropriate discussions, but I’m no longer legally allowed to do so....
• "In The Broken Constitution, Noah Feldman argues that the Confederate states had a constitutional right to secede and that Lincoln violated the Constitution in forcing them back into the Union and freeing the slaves."
• "As Princeton University Professor Sam Wang described, the DeSantis plan will result in ‘one of the most extreme gerrymanders in the country’ — precisely the result Florida voters sought to eradicate in passing the Fair Districts amendment."
• "Twitter executives who created the rules said they had once held views about online speech that were similar to Mr. Musk’s...."
• "It is possible to overstimulate the economy.... Law and order is not just a racist dog whistle.... Don’t politicize everything.... Border security is not just a Republican talking point.... 'People of color' is not a thing.... Deficits do matter.... The New Deal happened once."
• "Likelihood of Trump Indictment in Manhattan Fades as Grand Jury Wraps Up."

A bit of red at sunrise.... Posted: 29 Apr 2022 06:13 PM PDT ... and some deer kept us company...    Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"I’ll accept it because the fans vote. When I said that, it was always my belief that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame was for people in rock music." Posted: 29 Apr 2022 01:47 PM PDT "I have found out lately that it's not necessarily that. But if they can't go there to be recognized, where do they go? And so I felt like I was taking away from someone that maybe deserved it certainly more than me, because I never considered myself a rock artist. But obviously, there's more to it than that."  Said Dolly Parton, quoted at The Vulture. Last month, she had declined to be considered for the honor.

"In the past, I would simply have shut down inappropriate discussions, but I’m no longer legally allowed to do so.... Posted: 29 Apr 2022 01:21 PM PDT "My question, then, is whether it's ethical to continue to teach material I know will expose students to bigoted, racist speech from their classmates, with whom they will then be expected to maintain a collegial working relationship. In a nutshell, if teaching the poet and activist Audre Lorde means forcing Black, queer and female students to endure racist, homophobic, misogynistic comments from their classmates, is it still ethical to teach Audre Lorde?" A question to the NYT "Ethicist," Kwame Anthony Appiah, in "How Can I Teach When I'm Not Allowed to Shut Down Trolls?/The magazine's Ethicist columnist on how to navigate new state laws restricting classroom discussions."

"In The Broken Constitution, Noah Feldman argues that the Confederate states had a constitutional right to secede and that Lincoln violated the Constitution in forcing them back into the Union and freeing the slaves." Posted: 29 Apr 2022 12:56 PM PDT Here's the NYRB review of Feldman's new book "The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America."  From the review, by James Oakes: It is impossible to understand the origins of the Civil War, or of wartime emancipation policy, without grasping the significance of the debate over "property in man." Among slavery's opponents, the fact that slaves were referred to in the Constitution as persons and never as property—even in the fugitive slave clause—had profound implications, which Feldman simply ignores.  He likewise ignores two of the most important constitutional principles regarding slavery, neither of which is explicitly stated anywhere in the document. The first was federalism, which left the regulation of slavery entirely to the states. None of the well-known constitutional clauses dealing with slavery restricted the scope of antislavery politics as effectively as the assumption that slavery was a state institution, beyond the power of the federal government.  The second principle was the war powers, ascribed to the Constitution despite the fact that there is no actual war powers "clause." The war powers removed federalism's restraints on Congress and the president. By this reading of the Constitution, the federal government could emancipate slaves in an effort to defeat an invading army or suppress a rebellion. Proslavery and antislavery readings of the Constitution were already evident during the debates over ratification and persisted through the Civil War. Southerners eventually claimed that the constitutional right to slave property was so absolute that Congress could neither abolish slavery in Washington, D.C., nor ban it from the territories—indeed that it was obliged to protect slavery in the territories. But those arguments were stillborn if the Constitution recognized slaves as persons rather than property. If they were persons, they were entitled to due process rights when they escaped to the free states, for example.  Legal personhood also meant that slaves taken into the free states by their owners could be automatically emancipated, and that slavery was unconstitutional on the high seas and in the territories. None of this appears in Feldman's account of slavery and the Constitution. He claims that "Northerners could not quote the Constitution to oppose slavery, because the Constitution said nothing against the practice."  Instead they were forced to rely on the airy platitudes about fundamental human equality in the Declaration of Independence, "the best—really the only—text they could invoke to claim an official pedigree for their moral stance."  Actually, opponents of slavery not only cited the Constitution's repeated references to slaves as "persons"; they invoked numerous other clauses as well. They quoted the Constitution, chapter and verse, when they claimed that Congress had the power to ban slavery from the territories or abolish slavery in Washington.  They endlessly cited the Fifth Amendment's declaration that no "person" could be deprived of liberty without due process of law. They invoked the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable seizure and regularly quoted the Preamble, with its claim that the purpose of the Constitution was to "secure the blessings of liberty" to everyone.... By obliterating the entire history of antislavery politics and the effect it might have had on wartime antislavery policy, Feldman has, as it were, cleared the decks for his alternative interpretation—Lincoln's successive violations of the Constitution....  Ignoring most of the legal arguments and nearly all the precedents for wartime emancipation, and garbling Lincoln's fairly consistent references to them, Feldman instead declares that emancipating slaves was a patent violation of property rights, that everyone understood this, that the Emancipation Proclamation was Lincoln's most outrageous abuse of the Constitution, and that Lincoln knew all along that it was illegal....

"As Princeton University Professor Sam Wang described, the DeSantis plan will result in ‘one of the most extreme gerrymanders in the country’ — precisely the result Florida voters sought to eradicate in passing the Fair Districts amendment." Posted: 29 Apr 2022 06:44 AM PDT Says the complaint in the case reported in "DeSantis congressional map draws lawsuit as governor quietly signs it into law" (Louisiana Illuminator).  That was published a week ago. I'm noticing it this morning because I was doing a Google News search for "Sam Wang" to find this article I was reading last night: "Princeton University investigating Sam Wang for research misconduct, toxic workplace issues/Head of Princeton Gerrymandering Project faces probe over data manipulation, retaliating against staff" (New Jersey Globe). While working on New Jersey redistricting, Wang was accused of manipulating data to achieve the outcome he wanted, the three individuals confirmed. "He'd fudge the numbers to get his way," said one individual. "He had an agenda. He was good at hiding it when he had to, but it was clear Sam wanted Democrats to win and he was willing to cheat to make that happen."  Princeton Gerrymandering Project staffers raised considerable objections to a report Wang had written on New Jersey's congressional redistricting that they said was biased. A senior legal strategist on Wang's team, a graduate of a top law school who had clerked for two federal judges, worked through the night to rewrite sections that were tilted in favor of the Democratic map in a bid to seek the appearance of greater objectivity.  The congressional redistricting tiebreaker, former New Jersey Supreme Court Justice John E. Wallace, Jr., said that he relied on Wang's "evaluation of partisan fairness of the maps" in his amplification of reasons why he voted for the Democratic map. Wallace said that maps submitted by both parties were constitutional and complied with the federal Voting Rights Act....

"Twitter executives who created the rules said they had once held views about online speech that were similar to Mr. Musk’s...." Posted: 29 Apr 2022 06:34 AM PDT "But Twitter's power as a tool for harassment became clear in 2014 when it became the epicenter of Gamergate, a mass harassment campaign that flooded women in the video game industry with death and rape threats.... In September 2016, a Russian troll farm quietly created 2,700 fake Twitter profiles and used them to sow discord about the upcoming presidential election between Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton.... In 2017... women boycotted Twitter during the #MeToo movement, and Mr. Dorsey... announced a list of content that the company would no longer tolerate: nude images shared without the consent of the person pictured, hate symbols and tweets that glorified violence. In 2018, Twitter banned several accounts linked to the hack-and-leak operation that exposed Mrs. Clinton's campaign emails, and it began suspending right-wing figures like Alex Jones from its service because they repeatedly violated policies.... The next year, Twitter rolled out new policies that were intended to prevent the spread of misinformation in future elections, banning tweets that could dissuade people from voting or mislead them about how to do so.... In preparation for the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Twitter banned manipulated videos known as 'deepfakes' and forbade users to share material obtained through hacking campaigns. That policy was tested when The New York Post published an article containing emails purportedly obtained from the laptop of Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s son Hunter. Fearing that the materials came from a hack-and-leak operation, Twitter blocked the article from being shared on its platform...." A quick history of Twitter's shift away from free speech, excerpted from "Inside Twitter, Fears Musk Will Return Platform to Its Early Troubles/Content moderators warn that Elon Musk doesn't appear to understand the issues that he and the company will face if he drops its guardrails around speech" (NYT). It seems that the earliest motivation was to protect women and to keep them from avoiding the site. But then it turned into assisting the Democratic Party.

"It is possible to overstimulate the economy.... Law and order is not just a racist dog whistle.... Don’t politicize everything.... Border security is not just a Republican talking point.... 'People of color' is not a thing.... Deficits do matter.... The New Deal happened once." Posted: 29 Apr 2022 03:35 AM PDT Those are the "Seven Lessons Democrats Need to Learn — Fast" — according to David Brooks (in the NYT). I think the Democrats do know all these things, they are just too deeply invested in portraying Republics as toxic and can't easily concede that Republican concerns are not bugaboos.

"Likelihood of Trump Indictment in Manhattan Fades as Grand Jury Wraps Up." Posted: 29 Apr 2022 03:26 AM PDT The NYT reports.  At least three of the witnesses once central to the case have either not heard from the district attorney's office in months, or have not been asked to testify, according to people with knowledge of the matter.... And the remaining prosecutors working on the Trump investigation have abandoned the "war room" they used to prepare for their grand jury presentation early this year, the people said, leaving behind an expansive office suite and conference room on the 15th floor of the district attorney's office in Lower Manhattan. The grand jury's expiration at the end of the month does not preclude prosecutors from impaneling another jury.... But impaneling a new grand jury could create challenges for any potential case. Mr. Trump's lawyers could argue — and a judge might agree — that prosecutors were inappropriately hunting for a more favorable group of jurors.

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