"Why Did the Supreme Court Wait So Long to Decide to Set the Trump Criminal Immunity Case for Full Hearing and Argument?"

"It Likely Means No Trial for Trump on Election Subversion Before the Election."

Rick Hasen asks and speculates at Election Law Blog.

Hasen quotes the Supreme Court's order:

The Special Counsel’s request to treat the stay application as a petition for a writ of certiorari is granted, and that petition is granted limited to the following question: Whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office. Without expressing a view on the merits, this Court directs the Court of Appeals to continue withholding issuance of the mandate until the sending down of the judgment of this Court. The application for a stay is dismissed as moot.

The new episode of the Advisory Opinions podcast begins with a discussion of the cert grant, and co-host David French observes that the motion for a stay would have required the Court to opine on the likelihood of success on the merits. The Court avoided that by granting cert. 

The request to treat the stay application as a petition for a writ of certiorari came from Special Counsel and reflects the interest in speeding things up. The Court granted that request, but those who want speed wanted the cert grant denied. Now that cert is granted, the speed demons criticize any taking of time. The Court should be neutral and at least has self-interest in appearing neutral. It shouldn't be for or against speed — rushing or dragging its heels.

IN THE COMMENTS: Kevin surprises me with "Rushing or dragging? That cannot be allowed":

"Biden is also known to swim naked."

Said the commenter Kevin, at my post about President Theodore Roosevelt wading, naked, in winter, in Rock Creek Park, where passersby might look on.

That made me want to look back at my post on the subject — here it is, February 17, 2021 — because I seem to remember thinking — while others evinced outrage — that it's fine and not sexual behavior to swim naked in your own pool, and if you're stuck with Secret Service protection, it's their job to endure it stoically. I'd quoted Biden:

"[L]iving in the White House.... it's a little like a gilded cage.... The vice president's residence is totally different. You're on 80 acres overlooking the rest of the city. And you can walk out. There's a swimming pool. You can walk off the porch in the summer and jump in a pool and go into work...."

I said: 

"Hey, team Biden is Joe and I’m sitting here in Wilmington, Delaware. It’s a scary time. A lot of people out there confused things are changing every day, every hour."

"So I wanted to have this conversation with you now if we could, why am I doing this? Well, first so we can keep talking with each other or we can’t hold rallies anymore, but we’re not gathering in large public spaces.... And a, the second reason is I think this podcast could offer some really helpful information. I’ve seen these kinds of crises before and uh, and I’ve sat in the situation room in the oval office and we’ve grappled three crises from Daniel outbreak to the Iran nuclear deal to the auto industry rescue. And, uh, during that time I’ve been able to work with some pretty accomplished experts, women and men who have steered us through epidemics and demic.... [T]he young people who think they don’t have to worry about social dissonance distancing I should say. You know, do it for older people in your life.... You know, I have overwhelming faith in the American people when the American people have never, ever, ever, ever, ever let their country down when faced with a challenge. Never. And they’re smart. I am so darn proud. It sounds corny to be an American. How, look how we’re pulling together.... And, uh, you know, my heart goes out to all those folks who have lost somebody or have someone in the hospital who’s suffering. It just, it’s an enormous, enormous burden. And, uh, but, uh, we’re thinking about you. I really mean it and I, all Americans are pulling together, so we’re going to get through this... And, uh, in the meantime, everybody stay healthy, stay safe, and, uh, I’ll be talking to you regularly. Thank you so much."

That's Joe Biden, from a transcription of a podcast from the Joe Biden for President Website. I've added ellipses where I've taken things out, but I haven't changed anything else. You can also listen to the audio at that link.

IN THE COMMENTS:

Rick: "What is a Daniel outbreak?"

Women are generally more liberal than men, so why is there a "reverse gender gap" on marijuana legalization?

2 polisci profs — Laurel Elder and Steven Greene — analyze (at WaPo) why only 49% of women support legalization when 59% percent of men do.

One factor that didn’t matter was parenthood... But neither mothers nor fathers were more likely to oppose marijuana legalization than people without children.

One factor that did matter was women’s greater religiosity... Because religious people are more opposed to marijuana legalization, factoring in religiosity narrows but does not eliminate the reverse gender gap.....

A second factor is what’s known as the “risky white men hypothesis.” Researchers have shown that men, and white men in particular, tend to accept risk more than others. This helps explain the gender gap on a number of environmental, health, science, and technology-related issues. For example, white women and men and women of color worry more about the consequences of global warming and nuclear power...Still, taking account of race and gender did not eliminate the reverse gender gap, either.

The risky white men hypothesis!

Ultimately, what best explains the gender gap in marijuana attitudes is the gender gap in marijuana use. Men (all men, not just white men) report using marijuana more often than women. Once marijuana use is taken into account, there is no gender gap in attitudes toward gender gap in marijuana legalization.

So it's good old self-interest. But what is it about being male that makes you more likely to use marijuana? I would have connected this to willingness to take risk: Is the male/female gap in marijuana use greater in places where it is illegal? Elder and Greene say:

Research in sociology and psychology has found that men are more likely to engage in deviant and risk-taking behavior, although scholars debate why this is — whether biology, peer influence, different conceptions of morality, or something else.

This might be a reason for women to support legalization. We risk-averse women might avoid using marijuana because we won't commit crimes. That would make legalization more important to us if we also want to use marijuana. Also we may worry about people we care about getting into trouble.

Elder and Green predict that the gender gap will close as marijuana become legal in more states, because when it's legal, it seems "less risky or deviant and also less immoral" and because "as Democratic elites increasingly favor more liberal marijuana policies, this will help push Democrats in the electorate, who are disproportionately women, toward greater support as well." That is, women will follow along once the "Democratic elite" position becomes clear.

I've observed over the years that researchers tend to explain any gender difference in a way that makes whatever is true of women good. This is an interesting example of that. You can see that they're presenting the independence and courage of men as "risk taking," "deviance," and insensitivity to "morality." I'm intrigued by the presentation of women as pushed by the Democratic elite. Is being a follower regarded as a positive quality (when you follow the Democratic elite)?

IN THE COMMENTS: Kevin says:

Women are smart enough to know this isn’t going to put more smart, hard-working, marriage and family-focused men into the dating pool.

"To think, just a few short weeks ago, we were getting lectured about how unfair, sexist, and racist it was to judge a woman for expressing anger during a tennis game."

Wrote Lyssa in the comments to yesterday's post "The intemperance of the law professors' 'judicial temperament' letter."

I had to go back to see what I'd written about Serena Williams back on September 9th:

I felt that Williams was trying — very hard — to intimidate the umpire. She was actively bullying him. Hey! That reminds me of Trump. People say he's lost it and is raging when he's using a style of emotional manipulation.

As I've already written (somewhere in the Kavanaugh posts and comments) that I think Kavanaugh made a decision — after his calm, bland interview on Fox News — to allow his experience of emotion to be visible during the Senate hearing. He's getting criticized and mocked for letting emotion show, but that doesn't mean he'd have been more successful if he had maintained a stoical front.

As I said, above, about Serena Williams and Donald Trump, I think the emotion is displayed as a means to an end. The emotion isn't completely fake, but it's not out of control. There's real emotion, but it is also performed, with an idea of getting something the emoter wants. We need to be careful not to get conned, so we're right to be somewhat skeptical of those who let emotion show. But everyone's trying to get something they want, and people who suppress their emotion aren't inherently trustworthy.

Someone who truly loses control belongs in a different category. But you have to watch out for the accusation that someone has truly lost control. The accusers — like everybody else — are human beings with a will to get something they want. Sometimes their game is so obvious — like the lawprofs' "judicial temperament" gambit — that no one is fooled (though many are fooled into thinking that others will be fooled, because what they want is for those others to be fooled).

IN THE COMMENTS: Noting my statement, “But you have to watch out for the accusation that someone has truly lost control," Kevin writes: "Because those accusations are civility bullshit." Yes. Thanks for reminding me that this is the "civility bullshit" problem I've written about so many times. Calls for civility — don't get angry and emotional, speak only with cool rationality — are always bullshit. In our present-day American political discourse, it's always an effort to get your opponents to unilaterally disarm. When the tables are turned, and expressing emotion is what the people on your side are doing, you'll vaunt their passion and commitment and scorn your opponents for their bloodlessness.

ADDED: Remember when liberals thought this was exactly what was needed:

"I just want to lead with love. I want to be about love.... I love Donald Trump."

Said Kanye West.

IN THE COMMENTS: Kevin said:

Love Trumps Hate

Remember?



What did it mean? Scott Adams wrote in "Win Bigly":

One of the more notable persuasion failures from the Clinton campaign involved the slogan Love Trumps Hate. The first two thirds of the slogan is literally “Love Trump.” Again, human brains put more weight on the first part of a sentence than the end. On a rational level, the sentence makes perfect sense, and it says what Trump’s critics wanted it to say. But in the 3-D world of persuasion, this slogan simply told the world to either love Trump or love the things he hates, such as terrorism and bad trade deals.

Just one more thing Scott Adams got right.

AND: Here's something Ted Rall got wrong:



Turned out we didn't get that 4 to 8 years of stupid — not that particular form of stupid, anyway (the stupid of getting called "sexist" every time you criticized the President).

Millions of us took that Facebook quiz myPersonality, that scored you on Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism and gave access to our Facebook profiles.

"Suddenly, there was a way of measuring personality traits across the population and correlating scores against Facebook 'likes' across millions of people.'... They had a lot of approaches from the security services,” a member of the [Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre] told me. 'There was one called You Are What You Like and it was demonstrated to the intelligence services. And it showed these odd patterns; that, for example, people who liked "I hate Israel" on Facebook also tended to like Nike shoes and KitKats. There are agencies that fund research on behalf of the intelligence services. And they were all over this research. That one was nicknamed Operation KitKat.' The defence and military establishment were the first to see the potential of the research... But when, in 2013, the first major paper was published, others saw this potential too, including [Christopher] Wylie. He had finished his degree and had started his PhD in fashion forecasting, and was thinking about the [UK] Lib Dems.... 'And I began looking at consumer and demographic data to see what united Lib Dem voters, because apart from bits of Wales and the Shetlands it’s weird, disparate regions. And what I found is there were no strong correlations. There was no signal in the data. And then I came across a paper about how personality traits could be a precursor to political behaviour, and it suddenly made sense. Liberalism is correlated with high openness and low conscientiousness, and when you think of Lib Dems they’re absent-minded professors and hippies. They’re the early adopters… they’re highly open to new ideas. And it just clicked all of a sudden.'"

From "The Cambridge Analytica Files/‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower/For more than a year we’ve been investigating Cambridge Analytica and its links to the Brexit Leave campaign in the UK and Team Trump in the US presidential election. Now, 28-year-old Christopher Wylie goes on the record to discuss his role in hijacking the profiles of millions of Facebook users in order to target the US electorate" (by Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian).

Obviously from that title, there's a lot more to that article that the candy that jumped out at me. I invite you to think about this nefarious predation on the sweet gathering place that is Facebook.

There's also this about Wylie meeting Rebekah Mercer:

“She loved me. She was like, ‘Oh we need more of your type on our side!’”

Your type?

“The gays. She loved the gays. So did Steve [Bannon]. He saw us as early adopters. He figured, if you can get the gays on board, everyone else will follow. It’s why he was so into the whole Milo [Yiannopoulos] thing.”

I'm not sure if I ever took the myPersonality quiz, but I did once take a quiz based on those 5 personality traits that purported to tell you which U.S. President you're most like. Meade took it too. Both of us were most like Barack Obama, even though we had different results on 4 of the 5 qualities. I called bullshit on the test. But maybe things like this really are valuable and politicians could target their communications more squarely at people who would be receptive to them. Is that more frightening that the terribly crude sorting of people by political party? I've been favoring things that break up the old partisan boundaries, perhaps because I'm "above average on openness."

IN THE COMMENTS: Kevin says:

You don't need an accurate result to get people to hand over their data. In fact, the two results most likely for you to repost and ensnare others are probably the one that gives you smug satisfaction and the one you cannot believe could be true.

But only 40% of those who took the myPersonality test gave access to their Facebook profiles, so inspiring trust that this was a serious scholarly endeavor (connected to Cambridge University) was a crucial step in getting to the data. I don't think Facebook opens up the profiles routinely.

"Yeah, I said everything. I said he was a xenophobic, race-baiting, religious bigot. I ran out of adjectives."

"Well, the American people spoke. They rejected my analysis, and he is now my president. I worked with President Obama where I could, with President Bush even though I supported Senator McCain. The bottom line: he is president of the United States. I've gotten to know him better. He asks a lot of good questions. I think he's made good foreign policy choices. He's now arming the Ukraine. Long overdue. He's got the right policy to deny North Korea the ability to hit America with a nuclear-tipped missile. And he is now on the side of the Iranian people....."

Lindsey Graham, on "Face the Nation" yesterday, said something that really resonated with me.

The American people spoke. They rejected my analysis, and he is now my president.... The bottom line: he is president of the United States.

Why don't more people feel like that?

IN THE COMMENTS: Kevin answers my question:

Because Republican. The Democrats would be doing this to any R president, no matter what their policies, no matter what they did with Twitter, no matter what. They have done it to every R president since Eisenhower. It just becomes more shrill and desperate with each round. The goal is to make the bounds of polite policy discussion between center left and far left, and cut out anything else as unacceptable to even think, much less speak of out loud. And it's working pretty well.

The "Breaking News" concept hits a new low.

Right now, at USA Today:



And that's not one of these articles that reports on the existence of a report in another publication. USA Today makes no mention of the Politico article that I blogged first thing this morning, "Is the President Fit? Donald Trump is the least athletic president in generations. Here’s why it matters."

As Kevin said in the comments to that earlier post: "Is this what's left to them after the collusion with Russia effort failed? Bullying Trump about his weight?"

Did some memo go out?  This is the talking point — Trump is fat??!!

"MOTH: Sloth? This is Moth./SLOTH: Hello, Moth."

I wasn't going to link to this, because we already talked about the sloth-moth article in the NYT, but in last night's "Retriever Café," roger wondered "when are we going to get back to discussion of sloth shit............" Yeah, those are roger's dots, and I wanted to help.

This blog is about helping people, you know. For example, I also helped the person who said that "Daily Show" embedded video was autoplaying. I edited in a page break so you'd have to click "more" to get to it, even though another commenter (rh) had already given some tech advice about how to prevent autoplay — which is something, I guess, that's built into Safari, because it wasn't autoplaying for me, but I don't want it autoplaying for anybody.

And Kevin asked (about the photo at the Café): "Was that imac back in the corner bad? Is that why you gave it a 'time-out'?" So I'm helping Kevin by answering: That computer is bad, but it took its own time out, and the time out that it chose was forever. If only mild, maternal chastisement would restore its goodness, but it was good for a long time, and I'd love to give it a nice send-off, but it's hellishly hard to rid oneself of an old computer. Even though I have tech people to help me, I have 25 years of expired Macintoshes in corners of my various rooms, all unburied.

Quaestor drops down out of his tree to poop on iMacs:

All iMacs are bad and should be relegated to the darkest corner of the unsold merchandise warehouse. With a lot of swoopy plastic style to wow the yokels, and a lot more instant obsolescence built in (not a bug, but a feature)....

Not a bug, but a moth......... Hey, Quaestor, my last 4 iMacs are metal and they're no more "swoopy" than an iPhone, which wowed people — those whom you call "yokels" — with the simplest possible design, in glass and metal, back when they were used to plastic phones with the kind of linear ridges about which carmakers are sometimes delusional.

Is it wrong to call the man who delivers the President's talking points his "point man"?

This question came up in this morning's post about "Meet the Press," where I'd written that David Gregory introduced Gene Sperling as "President Obama's economic point man," and I quipped "He's the 'point man,' on the show to give the Administration's points."

In the comments, Kevin said:

"I don't even know what 'Cyber Monday' is."

I say, aimlessly deleting about 100 emails that piled up overnight. "Is it the day when you're supposed to shop on line, like Black Friday, but for on-line shopping?" It's such a dumb and boring concept to me that I have to say that out loud in order to remember that I know what Cyber Monday is. Seems to me we're constantly shopping on line, especially when real-world shops are closed, like late at night, early in the morning, and on Sundays. So why Monday? Are we assuming people need to get to some work computer to use Amazon or whatever?

It seems perfectly silly to me, except to the extent that I'd like to remind you — if you like this blog — to do your on-line shopping through The Althouse Amazon Portal (which lets you channel a contribution to this blog without paying any extra for your items). (That link is always up there in the blog banner, and the gesture of appreciation for this blog is definitely noticed.)

IN THE COMMENTS: Kevin said:

Cyber Monday was about using work computers with high speed internet to shop. The idea was you did physical shopping over the weekend, including just noting what you wanted to buy online, and then on Monday you bought it. The concept really doesn't mean anything anymore since dialup went the way of the dodo. Now it's just another excuse for a sale.

So Cyber Monday Christmas-wraps 2 moral failings: 1. Not devoting all your work hours to doing the work you're paid to do, and 2. Treating brick-and-mortar stores as mere showrooms for products you're going to buy elsewhere.

"Perhaps we could design 'love drugs,' pharmaceutical cocktails that could boost affection between partners..."

"... whisking them back to the exquisite set of pleasures that colored their first years together. The ability to do this kind of fine-tuned emotional engineering is beyond the power of current science, but there is a growing field of research devoted to it. Some have even suggested developing 'anti-love drugs' that could dissolve abusive relationships, or reduce someone's attachment to a charismatic cult leader. Others just want a pill to ease the pain of a wrenching breakup."

What's to prevent your abusive-relationship person from committing further abuse by slipping the drug to his/her victim Oberon-style?

What thou seest when thou dost wake,
Do it for thy true-love take,
Love and languish for his sake:
Be it ounce, or cat, or bear,
Pard, or boar with bristled hair,
In thy eye that shall appear
When thou wakest, it is thy dear:
Wake when some vile thing is near.

IN THE COMMENTS: furious_a said:

Artificially aroused men pursuing artificially enhanced women under the influence of artificially induced emotions.

Who says "Romance is dead"?

Kevin said:

I wonder if they watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and are going forward in spite of, or are going forward because of.