If Trump were merely competent...

... he would be a lot more dangerous. And a bunch of DACA recipients would probably be preparing for deportation today.

SCOTUS today overturned Trump's decision to end DACA because he didn't follow procedures required by the Administrative Procedure Act, which guides executive branch rule-making. If Trump and his lackeys had simply crossed their Ts and dotted their Is, it's a good bet they would've won today.

This is the pattern: 

I'm not sure that it's possible to elected a version of Trump that is more competent and less given to shortcuts -- Trumpism, to a large degree, is a set of impulses more than an ideology -- but just imagine if that actually happened. If somebody with Trump's inclinations and a bit of self-discipline took the White House (say, somebody like Tom Cotton or Tucker Carlson) they would probably be much more successful at turning their inclinations into actual public policy. We're not dodging Trumpian bullets because he's wrong, but because he's so bad at the actual business of governing. That's too close a call.

The pure narcissism of Donald Trump

I know we know this, but still...

...it is remarkable the degree to which this president thinks everything is about him. I don't wear a mask when I go out because I don't like Trump. I do it to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in my community. And the Supreme Court didn't rule against Trump on DACA because of Trump, but because his administration bypassed the legal process for overturning DACA. To the extent that the latter ruling came about because Donald Trump doesn't like to bother doing things the right way, I suppose it is about him. But only indirectly. He could still be Donald Trump, and the court would've ruled in his favor if his administration just had its shit together. He's too narcissistic to understand that.

America is sinning against Indigenous women. Again.

Lot of news going on lately, but I want to make sure this sinks in. ProPublica:

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A prominent women’s hospital here has separated some Native American women from their newly born babies, the result of a practice designed to stop the spread of COVID-19 that clinicians and health care ethicists described as racial profiling.

Lovelace Women’s Hospital in Albuquerque implemented a secretive policy in recent months to conduct special coronavirus screenings for pregnant women, based on whether they appeared to be Native American, even if they had no symptoms or were otherwise at low risk for the disease, according to clinicians.

Such separations deprive infants of close, immediate contact with their mothers that doctors recommend.

“I believe this policy is racial profiling,” one clinician said. “We seem to be applying a standard to Native Americans that isn’t applied to everybody else. We seem to be specifically picking out patients from Native communities as at-risk whether or not there are outbreaks at their specific pueblo or reservation.”

America has a long - and relatively recent - history of mistreating native women and their offspring. I only became aware of this during the last year.

A study by the U.S. General Accounting Office finds that 4 of the 12 Indian Health Service regions sterilized 3,406 American Indian women without their permission between 1973 and 1976. The GAO finds that 36 women under age 21 were sterilized during this period despite a court-ordered moratorium on sterilizations of women younger than 21.

Two years earlier, an independent study by Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri, Choctaw/Cherokee, found that one in four American Indian women had been sterilized without her consent. PInkerton-Uri’s research indicated that the Indian Health Service had “singled out full-blooded Indian women for sterilization procedures.”

This kind of stuff is rightly regarded as genocide: Only one of the five means defined in the Genocide Convention is mass murder. The others are "causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group," "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part," "imposing measures intended to prevent births with the group," and "forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

America's treatment of native peoples has included pretty much all of the above. Forced sterilizations certainly fit the bill. Separating native mothers from their children based on nothing more than their apparent ethnicity does too. This is a grave injustice. Unfortunately, for Native Americans, it's just more of the same.

Atlanta police decide they don't have to 'protect and serve' if they don't want to

WaPo:

Hours after the Fulton County district attorney announced felony murder and other charges against the former Atlanta police officer who fatally shot Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old black man, in the back, a number of Atlanta police officers called in sick just before a shift change Wednesday evening.

“This is not an organized thing, it’s not a blue flu, it’s not a strike, it’s nothing like that,” Vince Champion, a spokesman for the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, told NBC News. “What it actually is is officers protesting that they’ve had enough and they don’t want to deal with it any longer.”

Let's be clear what's going on here: Atlanta Police on Wednesday night decided it was more important for them to protect their impunity from accountability than it is to protect the public. That they did so in organized fashion - Champion's denial of such is transparent BS - gives lie to the whole idea of "a few bad apples." Police violence is a cultural problem, aided and abetted even by the "good cops" who stick with their brothers even when they shouldn't.

I have been a critic of the "defund the police" slogan, because I suspect most Americans think the police are necessary and won't sign onto efforts they think will abolish the police. But the arrogance of the Atlanta Police will make the abolitionists' job easier. The cops are acting more like a protection racket - Nice city you have here. A shame if anything happened to it. - than the guardians of law and order.

John Bolton reveals the problem with 'intellectual Trumpism'

Washington Post:

Mr. Trump said so many things that were wrong or false that Mr. Bolton in the book regularly includes phrases like “(the opposite of the truth)” following some quote from the president. And Mr. Trump in this telling has no overarching philosophy of governance or foreign policy but rather a series of gut-driven instincts that sometimes mirrored Mr. Bolton’s but other times were, in his view, dangerous and reckless.

“His thinking was like an archipelago of dots (like individual real estate deals), leaving the rest of us to discern — or create — policy,” Mr. Bolton writes. “That had its pros and cons.”

This has been obvious for some time - Trumpism is Trump - but that hasn't prevented a cottage industry of writers like Henry Olsen and Victor Davis Hanson or pretty much anybody on the roster of the Claremont Institute to offer an intellectual sheen and overarching consistency to the president's lurching from one crisis to the next. Some of this is to give something undeserving of respect a respectability, but I think some of it is also an effort to steer Trumpism for their own desires. The former effort is spin at best, a lie at worst. The latter effort is probably a doomed project - Trump will be Trump, and if he decides its in his interest to dump his putative allies and propagandists to adopt a different agenda, he most certainly will. 

Did progressivism cause the Tulsa Massacre?

Not going to link this. But still worth understanding the Trumpist perspective.

A couple of thoughts:

* AmGreatness is pretty closely associated with the Claremont Institute, a conservative outfit whose primary role these days is to provide an intellectual sheen for Trumpism. There long-term project, though, sees the original sin of America mostly in terms of the rise of progressivism in the early 20th century, along with with the "administrative state" it helped enable. Some of these critiques have merit -- Woodrow Wilson was really a racist asshole! -- but it is also the proverbial man with the hammer who sees the whole world as a nail. The errors of Herbert Croly explain everything bad in the United States, even when they don't, really. Ascribing the Tulsa massacre to progressivism is ridiculous. 

* Why? Because Americans were enslaving and killing African Americans long before progressivism reared its head in the United States. The KKK was not a left-leaning outfit. Americans didn't need ideology to kill black people. It's what we've always done. 

To be fair, AmGreatness acknowledges that, but only in throat-clearing fashion. 

* Anyway, for the AmGreatness crowd, racism doesn't seem to exist, except in that A) it can make the left look bad, or B) when it does happen, it's actually "multiculturalists" criticizing and opposing white conservatives on college campuses. Meanwhile, the AmGreatness crowd is pretty terrified of the influence of minorities in the country's culture. Make of that what you will.

I can honestly say that racism in American life has come from the left, the center, and the right. I don't think Trumpist conservatives are willing to make the same concession. I'll leave it to others to decide whether that position is held in good faith.

A fun thing to do when you're watching a great movie...

...is to look it up on Wikipedia. A lot of times, you find out stuff that enriches your understanding of the film, or gives you new movies to check out.

For example, we're watching TOKYO STORY this week.

Wikipedia:

"Ozu and screenwriter Kōgo Noda wrote the script in 103 days, loosely basing it on the 1937 American film Make Way for Tomorrow, directed by Leo McCarey."

Which got me interested in MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW.

Again, Wikipedia:

"Orson Welles said of Make Way for Tomorrow, "It would make a stone cry,"[2] and rhapsodized about his enthusiasm for the film in his booklength series of interviews with Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles. In Newsweek magazine, famed documentary filmmaker Errol Morris named it his #1 film, stating "The most depressing movie ever made, providing reassurance that everything will definitely end badly."[3]"

MWFT is not available on any streaming service. Which means I have to hunt it down on DVD.