DL Open Thread: Saturday, July 6, 2024

I didn’t watch last week’s debate.  I dreaded it, and just tried to ignore it.  Wasn’t until the next day that I read the virtually 100% consensus that it was a debacle for Biden.  I watched last night’s interview.  I saw a man unfit to be President.   Although some pundits and the D cheerleaders said he performed much better last night.  Yikes.  Our 91-year old mother-in-law lives with us.  I see the same traits in Biden that I see in her.  No, not to the same extent.  His best moments were when he was able to slip into his campaign speech and to list accomplishments.  But he was hoarse, sometimes halting, and often evasive.  Trump is great at evasive, it’s what he’s done his whole life.  Biden is not.  Man, that cognitive test non-answer (his doctor has never ordered one), his repeated avoidance of what a future term would look like.  I hadn’t seen Biden in an interview like this for a long time, had really only seen snippets on TV.  He’s gotten old, really old, and it shows.  Not just old, but frailer.  And seemingly unwell with that chronic hoarseness. And in a total state of denial.  He never should have run for reelection.  I’m all for a graceful exit, perhaps wrapped up in a roll-out as to how the Party will select a replacement.  But exit he must.

Perhaps Not Before He Enacts This (Perfectly-Legal) Agenda:

Good evening, my fellow Americans. With the close of the current session of the Supreme Court, I want to report to you on my compliance with their decisions, especially in the case involving presidential immunity, United States v. Trump.

When I took the oath of office, I swore that I would “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The Supreme Court has now reinterpreted that document. The court, for all intents and purposes, has also reinterpreted the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” to replace the “absolute tyranny” of a king.

Fellow Americans, I have taken the court’s opinion to heart. I am not one to defy the court. I am, as many have remarked, an institutionalist. I believe with all my soul in our institutions. And now, following the letter and the spirit of the court’s ruling, I have acted swiftly, decisively, and enthusiastically to enforce it. I will not, I cannot, shirk my constitutional duty. As Justice Sotomayor states, “In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.”

Now, following my strict construction of the court’s ruling on immunity, I can report to the nation that the threat to national security posed by my former political opponent, my late predecessor, has been eliminated. It was an official act. It was, to quote the court, “presumptive.”

The reasons for his removal do not need to be explained. Under the court’s decision, as an official act, it is more than privileged. I hope you understand that I need not disclose the reasons. I must respect the Supreme Court. I can assure the American people that there will be a thorough report that is currently being written by the intelligence community. It is classified. The substance cannot be disclosed—and never can be.

But I do want to tell you that he did have sex with a porn star. She didn’t like it. And he lied about his golf handicap.

Surprise Election Result In Iran?  Would sure help if this was accompanied by a reduction in regional sabre-rattling:

In an election upset in Iran, the reformist candidate who advocated moderate policies at home and improved relations with the West won the presidential runoff against his hard-line rival, the interior ministry said on Saturday.

The reformist candidate, Masoud Pezeshkian, 69, a cardiac surgeon, got 16.3 million votes to defeat Saeed Jalili, with 13.5 million votes. The result delivered a blow to the conservative faction and was a major victory for the reformist camp, which had been sidelined from politics for the past few years.

While Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wields the most power in government, analysts said the president could set domestic policies and shape foreign policy.

“A reform-minded president, despite all the limitations and failures of the past, is still meaningfully better — in some significant way it would put some constraint on the authoritarianism of the Islamic Republic,” said Nader Hashemi, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at George Washington University.

Endangered Ephemeral Streams.  I didn’t know what one was either.  Now, we both will.  Including why they’re endangered:

Last year, in one of the most significant environmental legal cases in recent history, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority severely limited the federal government’s ability to regulate waterways. By narrowly interpreting the Clean Water Act as only applying to “relatively permanent, standing, or continuously flowing bodies of water” and wetlands with a continuous surface connection to those bodies, the court effectively cut federal protections for more than half of the country’s wetlands. Around 90 million acres of marshy areas are now much more vulnerable to pollution.

Scientists knew immediately the consequences of the case, Sackett v. EPA, would be massive—one plant biologist I spoke to last year who’d devoted her retirement to protecting wild Venus flytraps called it “the worst thing that’s happened in my conservation life.” But determining how the decision would impact the country’s vast network of rivers, lakes, and streams would take time and some scientific digging.

When an ephemeral stream is not flowing with rainwater, lead author and recent Yale postdoc Craig Brinkerhoff explains, it may look something like a dry riverbed. That may not sound like much, but according to researchers, more than half of the water in the United States’ major rivers originates in this type of stream. About 51 percent of water flowing through the Mississippi River in a given year, for instance, traveled through an ephemeral stream first. In the Columbia, it’s 52 percent. And for much of the Rio Grande, it’s more than 90 percent.

If regulators wished to protect rivers from pollution, it might make sense to regulate pollutants in ephemeral streams, too. But since these riverbeds are sometimes dry, they don’t qualify as “permanent, standing, or continuously flowing.” That’s why the Sackett decision is so devastating: With the authority of the Clean Water Act, the federal government can regulate pollution directly entering rivers and lakes. But now it has little jurisdiction over pollution entering the occasionally wet riverbeds upstream from them.

You get the picture.  Some malevolent actors wanted these protections gone, the malevolent Supreme Court justices disappeared them.  But, hey, at least we can take solace in another great Dave Alvin song:

What do you want to talk about?