Bayes’ Theorem: Deceptively Simple

Bayes' Theorem, in classic form

Good ol’ Bayes’ Theorem. Have you even wondered where it comes from, though? If you don’t know probability, there doesn’t seem to be any obvious logic to it. Once you’ve had it explained to you, though, it seems blindingly obvious and almost tautological. I know of a couple of good explainers, such as E.T. Jaynes’ Probability Theory, but just for fun I challenged myself to re-derive the Theorem from scratch. Took me about twenty minutes; if you’d like to try, stop reading here and try working it out yourself.

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Women’s Work

[I know, I’m a good three months late on this. It’s too good for the trash bin, though, and knowing CompSci it’ll be relevant again within the next year.]

This swells my heart.

LAURIE SEGALL: Computer science, it hasn’t always been dominated by men. It wasn’t until 1984 that the number of women studying computer science started falling. So how does that fit into your argument as to why there aren’t more women in tech?

JAMES DAMORE: So there are several reasons for why it was like that. Partly, women weren’t allowed to work other jobs so there was less freedom for people; and, also… it was simply different kinds of work. It was more like accounting rather than modern-day computer programming. And it wasn’t as lucrative, so part of the reason so many men give go into tech is because it’s high paying. I know of many people at Google that- they weren’t necessarily passionate about it, but it was what would provide for their family, and so they still worked there.

SEGALL: You say those jobs are more like accounting. I mean, look at Grace Hopper who pioneered computer programming; Margaret Hamilton, who created the first ever software which was responsible for landing humans on the moon; Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughan, they were responsible for John Glenn accurately making his trajectory to the moon. Those aren’t accounting-type jobs?

DAMORE: Yeah, so, there were select positions that weren’t, and women are definitely capable of being confident programmers.

SEGALL: Do you believe those women were outliers?

DAMORE: … No, I’m just saying that there are confident women programmers. There are many at Google, and the women at Google aren’t any worse than the men at Google.

Segall deserves kudos for getting Damore to reverse himself. Even he admits there’s no evidence women are worse coders than men, in line with the current scientific evidence. I’m also fond of the people who make solid logical arguments against Damore’s views. We even have good research on why computing went from being dominated by women to dominated by men, and how occupations flip between male- and female-dominated as their social standing changes.

But there’s something lacking in Segall’s presentation of the history of women in computing. She isn’t alone, I’ve been reading a tonne of stories about the history of women in computing, and all of them suffer from the same omission: why did women dominate computing, at first? We think of math and logic as being “a guy thing,” so this is terribly strange. [Read more…]

Citizens of the United States: You’ve been Hoodwinked

Remember that giant fight to preserve the Affordable Care Act from earlier this year? Where comedians weighed in with emotional appeals, mass protests led to mass arrests, politicians who voted against it were cheered by their constituents?

President Donald Trump on Wednesday claimed the Republican tax overhaul has “essentially repealed Obamacare” but said officials “didn’t want to bring it up” until the legislation had already passed.

“The individual mandate is being repealed. When the individual mandate is being repealed, that means Obamacare is being repealed because they get their money from the individual mandate,” Trump said at the start of a cabinet meeting.

He said the tax bill has “essentially repealed Obamacare,” though the legislation has eliminated a key provision of the health care law but not repealed it entirely, and claimed Republicans will come up with something that will be much better, whether it’s block grants or whether it’s taking what we have and doing something terrific.”

“We didn’t want to bring it up. I told people specifically, ‘Be quiet with the fake news media because I don’t want them talking too much about it,’” Trump said. “Because I didn’t know how people would — but now that it’s approved I can say the individual mandate on health care, where you had to pay not to have insurance, okay, think of that one, you pay not to have insurance. The individual mandate has been repealed.”

Emphasis mine. Taken at face value, Trump is claiming he deliberately hid his latest attempt to take away your health care away in a tax bill that primarily benefits wealthy donors to the Republican party, and with the help of Republicans managed to pull it off. That’s remarkably cruel.

It’s also untrue, as is usual for Trump.

Contrary to a statement that President Trump made Wednesday, nixing Obamacare’s individual mandate does not mean that Obamacare has been repealed in the GOP tax bill. The individual mandate, which requires most Americans (other than those who qualify for a hardship exemption) to carry a minimum level of health coverage, is actually still in effect for 2018—meaning that you may have to pay a steep tax fine if you don’t have health insurance, for one thing. And even after the individual mandate repeal goes into effect the following year, Obamacare’s individual insurance markets, federal subsidies to help Americans pay monthly insurance premiums, and Medicaid expansion in the dozens of states that implemented it will all still be in effect barring further Congressional action. […]

Ultimately, repealing Obamacare’s individual mandate would cause 13 million fewer Americans to be insured in 2027 compared with current law, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Healthier and wealthier people may choose to forgo coverage, and even poorer, medically needy people may not sign up for insurance because they don’t know which options are available and there may not be the same sense of urgency to enroll without the mandate. The CBO also predicts that premiums in the markets would spike 10% without Obamacare’s individual mandate as the exchanges are left with a sicker consumer pool. However, for most Obamacare enrollees (those making between 100% and 400% of the Federal Poverty Level), an accompanying increase in federal subsidies will make up for higher premiums. Those making above that income level (about $48,000 for an individual or $98,000 for a family of four) will have to face the brunt of premium increases, though.

So in reality, repealing the individual mandate will either raise your health insurance or increase government spending. The latter might get solved with a tax hike or legislation which passes the cost back to you. All this was done so Republicans could lick Trump’s boots as they celebrate a windfall for millionaires, break promises to shore up health care, and pretend the hasty process hasn’t created a future shitstorm.

I hope to hell you aren’t gonna take that lying down, no matter what side of the political aisle you’re on.

Words Still Have Meanings

It’s a bit amusing to sit down to write something, only to realize you’ve said it better before.

But, rolling back to the start….

Sen. Susan Collins on Tuesday blasted coverage of her support for the GOP tax bill as “extremely discouraging” and “unbelievably sexist.” […]

“I believe that the coverage has been unbelievably sexist, and I cannot believe that the press would have treated another senator with 20 years of experience as they have treated me,” she told reporters in the Capitol. “They’ve ignored everything that I’ve gotten and written story after story about how I’m duped. How am I duped when all your amendments get accepted?”

Having dug into the details, there might be a faint glimmer of truth in there.

Collins also singled out a report that she said included a line about how she “didn’t cry” during a recent meeting with protesters, many of whom suffer from grave medical conditions. That line was later removed after Collins complained, but not before the story posted online.

And sure enough, if you read an archived copy of that New York Times article:

As a group of progressive activists and constituents prepared for a 15-minute meeting on Wednesday with Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, they sat in the lobby of her office and developed a last-ditch strategy to persuade her to vote against the $1.5 trillion tax bill barreling through Congress: tears.

“If Senator Collins actually saw you as a human, saw me as a human, then she wouldn’t pass any of this,” said Ady Barkan, a member of the Center for Popular Democracy, who recently learned he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., and uses a wheelchair. […]

After her meeting at her office, it did not appear that Ms. Collins was ready to change her vote, or that she had been brought to tears.

This fits into a common sexist stereotype.

One of the most persistent ideas about the differences between men and women is that women are more emotional than men. Research on stereotypes has shown emotionality to be one of the general dimensions of sex stereotypes: women are said to be more expressive, excitable, and easily hurt than men. They are also supposed to be more sensitive to the emotions of others […]. Not surprisingly then, when we think of an emotional person, a woman most quickly comes to our minds […].

The large and uncontested consensus about women’s greater emotionality not only characterizes common sense. The assumption that men and women fundamentally differ in their emotional lives can be found through the history of Western academic thought: whereas maleness stands for reason, femaleness is characterized by another mood of understanding, in which taste, sensibility, practical sense and feeling are more important […]. From the 19th century onwards, rationality and emotionality have largely become associated with the supposedly different natures of men and women, the former fitted for productive labor and the latter for household and emotional labor.

Fischer, Agneta H. “Sex differences in emotionality: Fact or stereotype?.” Feminism & Psychology 3.3 (1993): 303-318.

By using tears as a theme in that article, it was indirectly reinforcing the stereotype that women are driven more by emotion than logic and reason. That is sexist.

Except that’s not all the article said.

Ms. Collins remained respectful and strained to convince the room of about a dozen skeptics that the promises that had been made to her were ironclad. She defended her decision in the face of the group’s challenges that previous Republican promises for the tax bill had been broken, including a commitment to not add to the deficit and to not benefit the rich, and that written agreements are not law.

“I do not believe that I’ve given up leverage,” Ms. Collins said. “I’ve used my leverage to negotiate agreements that are promises to me.” She added, “I’m sorry that you don’t believe in the agreements.”

The deals that Ms. Collins struck that extend beyond the tax bill have been the subject of much speculation and doubt in Washington, because they would require the backing of House Republicans and some Democrats.

Alan Rappeport’s article primarily presents Collins as a rational, autonomous agent. The Senator claims she has negotiated for bipartisan health legislation and against automatic Medicare cuts. It puts that front and centre, focusing on the debate over how secure those pledges to Collins have been, and leaves the call to emotion as a background theme. At the other end, emotion is a strong tool in the activists’ toolkit. Appeals to emotion are not automatically sexist, they only become that way when generalized across a sex. Rappeport’s article was not directly sexist, as it did not explicitly state women are more driven by emotion; at best, it indirectly contributed to existing sexist stereotypes. That’s not a good thing, but that has to be weighed against the large portions where it indirectly challenges those stereotypes as well.

Note as well that the Senator claimed her coverage was “unbelievably sexist.” Yet when pressed, the best example she could give is the indirect, conflicting example above. It’s a pretty safe bet that Collins is conflating “criticizing women” with “sexism,” possibly in an attempt to defend herself from people critiquing the strength of her concessions. She might also legitimately misunderstand what “sexism” means, a terribly common problem.

I was going to transition to talking about how Status Quo Warriors rely on ignorance of terms to support their views, but I realized past-me already did an excellent job on that subject. So please accept this brief meditation on sexism instead, and follow the link for more interesting reading.

Every. Vote. Counts.

When we last left Virginia politics, Democrats had been elected to many of the key positions like Governor and Attorney General. To the shock of many, they almost grabbed a majority of the legislature too. That state is notoriously gerrymandered in favour of Republicans, so even a nine-point advantage in the popular vote wasn’t expected to earn 50% of all legislative seats. And yet Virginians woke up on November 9th to learn that Democrats held 49 seats and Republicans had been reduced to 51.

Probably. See, at that point five races were incredibly close, demanding recounts and lawsuits to settle them, so those results were likely but not final. As the days ticked by, four three of those five seats were resolved and indeed “likely” became “final.” The fifth fourth?

A Republican seat flipped Democratic in a wild recount Tuesday – with the Democrat winning by a single vote – creating a rare 50-50 tie between the parties in the House of Delegates and refashioning the political landscape in Richmond.

My gut reaction on this was that Democrats had effectively gained a majority, as the Governor could break a tie. But as I read on…

Power sharing in the House of Delegates is an awkward exercise. Committee chairs have to be negotiated as does the person who will serve as Speaker. With the parties split 50-50, there is no mechanism to break ties and any legislation short of 51 votes does not advance. Republicans hold a slight 21-19 edge in the state senate but with a Democratic lieutenant governor to break ties, and a Democratic governor with veto power, Republicans may be forced to advance a more bipartisan agenda.

… it looks like that only covers the state Senate. Ah well, the point remains that Virginia went from being a Republican-controlled state to one where both parties need to cooperate and step across the aisle to get work done. It’s a radical shift, and it was all due to a single person’s ballot.

I hope the 11,608th voter in Virginia’s 94th district is whooping it up tonight. To the larger point, it’s also a dramatic example of why voter suppression must be opposed by all.

Dagnabbit, four of those certainly looked settled. But then that leads me to this.

Voters in the Fredericksburg area filed suit [December 6th] to seek a new election in House District 28. The Virginia House Democratic Caucus fully supports the voters in this suit. This is the only remedy available to voters that were given an incorrect ballot on Election Day. This decision comes after the State Board of Elections admitted that 147 voters were miss-assigned into the wrong House District where the margin is only separated by 82 votes.

Despite admitting to the incorrect ballots the Board of Elections still certified the result, hence the illusion of settlement. But between that lawsuit and any subsequent vote, there’s a teensy chance Democrats could flip the seat and earn a majority in the Virginia House.

Someone buy that 11,608th voter a beer.

This is getting comical. Emphasis mine.

A three- judge panel declined to certify the recount of a key House race today, saying that a questionable ballot should be counted in favor of the Republican and tying a race that Democrats had thought they had won by a single vote.

“The court declares there is no winner in this election,” said Newport News Circuit Court Judge Bryant L. Sugg, after the judges deliberated for more than two hours. He said the ballot in question, which was deemed unacceptable during the five-hour recount on Tuesday, contained a mark for Democrat Shelly Simonds as well as a mark for Republican Del. David Yancey but that the mark for Simonds had also been struck out.

Election officials presiding at the recount on Tuesday had not counted that ballot. But Republicans challenged the ballot in court, saying the voter intended to vote for Yancey and the ballot should be counted for the Republican.

I guess I’m both right and wrong? I’ll take that.

Well, that’s Over

Starting out with a lie probably isn’t a good idea, but it’s the best summary I’ve got. I finally have a stretch of free time, and I’ve given myself explicit orders to kick back and relax. That includes poking away at this blog again, as poor ol’ Proof of God has suffered a fair bit of neglect and my list of rant topics is worth a rant in and of itself. But kicking back also means kicking out stuff like this:

Eyes Down. Copyright HJH, 2017.

It’s not my best work, but I’m also coming back into photo processing after a few year’s absence. I’ve never really been happy with my forest scenes (they always feel way too busy and unfocused), so I thought I’d crush the busy bits into blackness and draw your eye to the really cool bits: the texture of the snow. The desaturated high-detail look is practically a cliché nowadays, but I like it here (and I was hip to it before most, dammit!)

On the Latest Clinton “Scandal”

I know, I know, I have other things and more important things I should be working on. But I went to so much trouble typing this up, it seemed fitting to share over here too.

Anyway, yesterday Donna Brazile posted an excerpt from her book on Politico, where she made some damning claims.

The Saturday morning after the convention in July 2015, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.

“What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.” […]

“Wait,” I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?” […]

When I got back from a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.

The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

I was pointed to the story shortly after it was published, but decided to bide my time. It smelt too good to be true, and I was sure other people would start digging into the details. Indeed, it wasn’t long before someone found a draft of the Joint Fundraising Agreement for 2015, because (ironically enough) WikiLeaks posted it as part of their email dump. If you scan over it, you’ll find nothing to support Brazile’s claims.

Then today I spotted a Twitter thread by someone with knowledge of the workings of the Hilary Victory Fund. Long story short: thanks to her high profile, decades of experience, and a Supreme Court decision, Clinton raised a whopping $530 MILLION for herself and the DNC. Alas, Sanders wouldn’t concede the race, and Clinton’s agreement was that she’d share it once she was the official nominee, so she couldn’t fork over the DNC’s share of the cash. This led to Sanders and a few reporters claiming Clinton was greedy, because she was sitting on a giant pile of cash and refusing to share it!

When Sanders finally threw in the towel, Clinton started distributing the funds to the cash-strapped DNC: $158 million for her campaign, $107 million for the federal DNC, and the remaining $264 million for all the state-level DNC parties. How that translates into “less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had amassed” is something only Brazile can answer.

But the most convincing argument arrived late this afternoon when MSNBC posted the memo which is supposed to be the “smoking gun” for Brazile. There is a section in there where they talk about hiring a Clinton-approved communications director, but that’s undercut by some language which appears near the end:

Nothing in this agreement shall be construed to violate the DNC’s obligation of impartiality and neutrality through the Nominating process. All activities performed under this agreement will be focused exclusively on preparations for the General Election and not the Democratic Primary. Further we understand you may enter into similar agreements with other candidates.

Fun fact: the DNC pursued and signed a similar Joint Fundraising Agreement with Bernie Sanders. He had very different fund-raising tactics, though.

Nowhere in the piece does Brazile mention that Politico reported the fundraising agreement between the DNC and Hillary when it happened, nor does she mention that the Sanders campaign also signed a joint fundraising agreement with the DNC. Bernie could have raised more money through that agreement, which would have helped the DNC financially and also arguably helped down-ballot Democrats, but he chose to raise money through small donations.

Now, maybe there are some amazing revelations hidden within Brazile’s book which upend everything I’ve mentioned. Alas, it isn’t available for sale; everything you’ve read has been an excerpt, and the full book won’t be available for weeks. That’s a bit of a problem, as in four days there’s a critical election in Virginia. The Democrat, Ralph Northam, is roughly tied with the Republican, a very Trump-ian Ed Gillespie. The DNC has actually done well after the 2016 election, roughly 10-15 points better than expected, but due to rotten luck and gerrymandering that hasn’t been enough to flip many seats to their side. They’re desperate for a high-profile victory, and up until recently this Virginia election looked like their best shot.

Except by choosing to publish sensational excerpts with explosive allegations against Clinton and the DNC days before the election, with the full context only to be revealed after the election, Brazile and/or her publisher may have handed the Virginia race to the Republican on a platter. This not only hurts the DNC, but the reformers trying to improve the DNC, and makes the latter look like sensationalist conspiracy theorists who are willing to sabotage the party if it’ll line their own pockets.

Overall, I have to side with Josh Marshall’s latest Twitter rant on this.

I think a fair read is that they wanted control over things for the general, which is fair and normal. But they also wanted control over the building of what they expected to inherit for the general. That’s not unreasonable in itself but also meant having a lot of veto power over things that were happening during the primaries, hiring of key staff. So while it says these things apply exclusively to the general, they were also getting veto rights over organizational decisions *during* the primaries even if they weren’t abt the primaries. There are also some lines in their abt rights to review emails etc that are a little unclear to me and might create more control.

The upshot is that this is significantly different from what [Donna Brazile] claimed. But it also includes levels of control pre-general election that wld have come as a surprise to many. As I said in my post this morning, there’s nothing remotely here that qualifies as “rigging” the election. That’s inflammatory, frankly a smear. Indeed, it makes no sense if you have any real understanding of what the dnc even does it can do. The schedules are set up way in advance, long before people at the DNC had any idea Sanders would run such a strong campaign. The DNC doesn’t administer the primaries, the states do. Basically the DNC cldnt rig the process even if it wanted to.

This agreement isn’t nothing. No candidate shld have this kind of say during the primaries even if it’s abt things for the general. But it’s very different from what Brazile describes and it doesn’t remotely mean anything [was] “rigged”. That’s a smear intended for political effect.

Donna Brazile’s descent into fantasy continues.

Brazile describes in wrenching detail Clinton’s bout with pneumonia. On Sept. 9, she saw the nominee backstage at a Manhattan gala and she seemed “wobbly on her feet” and had a “rattled cough.” Brazile recommended Clinton see an acupuncturist. Two days later, Clinton collapsed as she left a Sept. 11 memorial service at Ground Zero in New York. Brazile blasts the campaign’s initial efforts to shroud details of her health as “shameful.”

Whenever Brazile got frustrated with Clinton’s aides, she writes, she would remind them that the DNC charter empowered her to replace the nominee. If a nominee became disabled, she explains, the party chair would oversee the process of filling the vacancy.

Josh Marshall spotted this and did his homework.

I have long known that once nominated, a prez nominee has to resign from the ticket or die to be replaced. But I’d never actually looked up the rules in the DNC charter and bylaws. So I thought I’d take a look. It turns out they’re even more limited than I’d understood. My quick review of the charter suggests that nothing can happen unless there’s a ‘vacancy’ and the decision is in the hands of the full committee. I think by definition that means only resignation or death can lead to replacement. So while I had assumed incapacitation cld lead to replacement that is not actually clear. In practice, if a nominee had a stroke and had not regained consciousness, I suspect the full committee wld meet and rule that the position was vacant through incapacitation. My point in noting this is hat I think Brazile’s claims may be even more baseless than I’d realized.

But while he was doing said homework, something interesting happened to that Washington Post story.

Whenever Brazile got frustrated with Clinton’s aides, she writes, she would remind them that the DNC charter empowered her to initiate the replacement of the nominee. If a nominee became disabled, she explains, the party chair would oversee a complicated process of filling the vacancy that would include a meeting of the full DNC.

There’s no correction notice, as I type this. So who got it wrong, Brazile or the reporter? I have a theory.

geri: Why did U release info now-U may have destroyed DEM chances at VA elections-No hurry to get this out
Stop litigating 2016

Brazile: There are major elections all across America. Get out and help us. Thanks for your service! We must win in Virginia, New Jersey and more.

It’s one thing to pivot when you’re asked a question in person, because the situation demands an answer of some sort. But it’s quite another to volunteer to answer a question, then blatantly fail to do so. Brazile has faced a barrage of people asking her the same question for the last day, and this is the best answer she can come up with. In other words, she knows people are demanding answers from her, but she has no answer she’s willing to say in public. As Josh Marshall put it,

This is all pure fantasy. She’s married a non-existent power with a highly improbable prescience to create a kind of retrospective, fantasy football version of the nomination in which the momentous and weighty decisions all fell to her. It is highly reminiscent of the agonizing call in which she purportedly informed Bernie Sanders that he’d been right all along and the nomination race had been “rigged”.

This and other claims from Brazile’s book which have come out in the last few hours only confirm me in thinking that her claims are at least self-serving, in other cases highly improbable and in some cases literally impossible.

Brazile is not thinking about what’s best for the Democrats, she’s thinking about what’s best for herself. By timing the book excerpts to come out days before the Virginia election, she’s brought far more attention to her book than it would have earned otherwise. This might cost Democrats a governor seat, but Brazile would rather have a Trump-style Republican in charge than help an organization she views as deeply corrupt.

This is a problem when her views have only a loose connection to reality.

THIS IS NOT NORMAL

Sorry, but I’ve gotta rage for a bit, because many people are missing the bigger picture.

Today we mourn the horrifying terrorist attack in New York City, just blocks away from the site of the World Trade Center. A man drove a truck into a pedestrian bike path and murdered eight people, and injured very, very seriously at least 11 more. […]

My administration is coordinating closely between federal and local officials to investigate the attack and to further investigate this animal who did the attacking. And updates will be provided as available. […]

We want a merit-based program where people come into our country based on merit. And we want to get rid of chain migration. This man that came in — or whatever you want to call him — brought in, with him, other people. And he was a point — he was the point of contact — the primary point of contact for — and this is preliminarily — 23 people that came in, or potentially came in with him. And that’s not acceptable. So we want to get rid of chain migration, and we’ve wanted to do that for a long time. And I’ve been wanting to do it for a long time. And we’ll be asking Congress to start working on it immediately. […]

That was a horrible event, and we have to stop it, and we have to stop it cold. We also have to come up with punishment that’s far quicker and far greater than the punishment these animals are getting right now. They’ll go through court for years. And at the end, they’ll be — who knows what happens.

Trump said that a few days ago, sans the bolding. The president of the United States openly dehumanized a murder suspect, probably on the basis of his skin colour and religion, and yet the primary focus of media reports has been on visas, dual standards, hypocrisy, or pretty much anything else. Have we all forgotten about the toxic effects of dehumanization and its tendency to promote hatred and violence? Has two years of this shifted the Overton window so far that “dog megaphones” don’t even register as noteworthy?

I might have stayed silent, except this isn’t an isolated case. Take this from the same news conference:

We need quick justice and we need strong justice — much quicker and much stronger than we have right now. Because what we have right now is a joke and it’s a laughingstock. And no wonder so much of this stuff takes place. And I think I can speak for plenty of other countries, too, that are in the same situation. […]

Q Mr. President, do you want the assailant from New York sent to Gitmo?

THE PRESIDENT: I would certainly consider that, yes.

Q Are you considering that now, sir?

THE PRESIDENT: I would certainly consider that. Send him to Gitmo — I would certainly consider that, yes.

To be absolutely crystal clear on this, the president of the United States was saying the justice system of his own country is ineffectual, to the point that he is weighing in on matters of justice and basic fundamental rights. This isn’t a one-off, either, let’s take to his Twitter feed:

NYC terrorist was happy as he asked to hang ISIS flag in his hospital room. He killed 8 people, badly injured 12. SHOULD GET DEATH PENALTY!

Would love to send the NYC terrorist to Guantanamo but statistically that process takes much longer than going through the Federal system…

…There is also something appropriate about keeping him in the home of the horrible crime he committed. Should move fast. DEATH PENALTY!

Sorry for sounding like a broken record, but I have to emphasize this: the executive branch of the United States is attempting to dictate what the judicial branch of the US should do. Repeatedly. This violates the right of the accused to a fair trial, which has already had concrete effects.

President Trump’s harsh criticism of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who walked off his Army post in Afghanistan in 2009 and was captured by the Taliban, will weigh in favor of a lighter sentence for the sergeant, a military judge said on Monday. “I will consider the president’s comments as mitigation evidence as I arrive at an appropriate sentence,” the judge, Col. Jeffery R. Nance of the Army, said during a hearing at Fort Bragg. The judge is expected to sentence Sergeant Bergdahl in the next few weeks.

The judge rejected a request that he dismiss the case or cap the length of the sentence on the grounds that the president’s comments had precluded a fair hearing. The judge said he had not been influenced by the remarks and that the public’s confidence in the military justice system had not been undermined.

This has the potential to become a vicious spiral: Trump angrily tweets inflammatory and dehumanizing statements about someone, the judicial system lightens sentences or rules that makes a fair trial impossible, which angers Trump more. These are not the acts of a president, but a dictator.

The President is saying that he would like to interfere in ongoing investigations. He is saying that he would like to order up investigations of his political opponents. He is announcing that he is a corrupt actor who does not believe in the rule of law. He is a man who is capable of firing his FBI Director because he will not aid him in these endeavors and to threaten his [Attorney General] and his [Deputy Attorney General] and the special counsel over the inconveniences they pose him. Even as I type this, he is tweeting about how DOJ should be investigating Clinton. (For example: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/926403023861141504…) In these comments, he is announcing frankly how badly he wants to corrupt the DOJ.

And yet, he is “frustrated.” Why? […] It’s because the norm of independent law enforcement—which he is menacing—is actually strong enough to constrain him—at least right now. It’s strong enough that he can fulminate all he wants about investigating Clinton and still Mueller does his job, and the FBI does its job, and the men and women of the DOJ do their jobs, and none of their jobs, as our democratic polity has determined them, is to fulfill his undemocratic ambitions to loose investigators on people he doesn’t like and to have the Justice Department protect him. It’s a stunning statement of presidential constraint: A president actually saying that he aspires to corrupt interference with law enforcement and can’t pull it off. Let it warm your heart. It sure warms mine.

Alas, Benjamin Wittes, it instead chills mine. Trump has so eroded democratic norms that he can dehumanize people and act like a dictator without facing immediate consequence. Instead, our best hope is that the judicial branch isn’t corrupted too quickly before the 2018 midterms, when the Democrats will hopefully gain a House majority and stay steady in the Senate and thus gain enough leverage to start impeachment proceedings.

That’s a lot of future hope to deal with an immediate problem. This should not be the norm. And yet, it appears to be.