The Supreme Court finally puts some limits on Trump’s excesses

In a long awaited ruling, the court affirmed by a 6-3 margin the constitutional right of birthright citizenship, that anyone born in the US is a citizen irrespective of the status of the parents. (There are small exceptions such as the children of foreign diplomats.)

The US supreme court has upheld birthright citizenship, which provides nearly all people born in the country with citizenship, ruling against a central piece of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.

“Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause,” the ruling says.
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The supreme court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857 had ruled Black people were not US citizens, but “a separate class of persons”. But the 14th amendment which reversed the Dred Scott decision, was adopted in 1868 during the reconstruction era after the US civil war, to codify the rights of Black Americans – and confer citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof”.
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Are hot and cold streaks illusions?

Following his team’s loss to Turkey in the final game of their group stage, the US soccer team’s manager Mauricio Pochettino complained about the use of the word ‘momentum’ in sports.

“[Momentum] is a topic that I don’t understand,” Pochettino said when asked about how the loss would affect his team’s prospects. “What is momentum? To play with the same team that we played against Australia? And to take the risk to receive a yellow card and not to play the next game? Did Germany lose the momentum too [in their 2-1 loss to Ecuador]? I don’t know. [There are] too many topics in soccer that I don’t understand. The objective was to finish first, and we are first, and now is the next stage, and it’s going to be a final, and we are ready.”

Pochettino has a point. There is no doubt that a team is happy when they win and sad or disappointed when they lose. But ‘momentum’ is one of those words that have a scientific sheen and used to give weight to the idea that there are ‘hot streaks’ and ‘cold streaks’ in sports, that a win will likely increase the chances of a win next time and a loss will lead to more losses. But one result is not a trend, though the word ‘momentum’ seems to suggest that it can be.
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Why euphemisms keep changing

People who are sensitive to avoid giving offense tend to be cautious in how they refer to groups of people because the polite (or at least inoffensive) ways of doing so keep changing. In the US we are perhaps most familiar with how the terms for Black people have changed over time, with ‘Negro’ and ‘colored’ falling out of favor, though African American is still acceptable. The change from ‘black’ to ‘Black’ is quite recent. This evolution can lead to mockery by right-wingers, especially white cis males, to make fun of this as political correctness run amok. Some even argue that they have the right to use whatever label they want to use, even if it seen as offensive by the targeted group, and that they should just suck it up.

Linguist John McWhorter explains why euphemisms keep changing, using many examples from all areas of life.

What the cognitive psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker has artfully termed ‘the euphemism treadmill’ is not a tic or a stunt. It is an inevitable and, more to the point, healthy process, necessary in view of the eternal gulf between language and opinion. We think of euphemisms as one-time events, where one prissily coins a way of saying something that detracts from something unpleasant about it. That serves perfectly well as a definition of what euphemism is, but misses the point that euphemism tends to require regular renewal. This is because thought changes more slowly than we can change the words for it, and has a way of catching up with our new coinages. Since that is likely eternal, we must accept that we’ll change our terms just like we change our underwear, as a part of linguistic life in a civilised society.
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The Lincoln Pool and Gandhi’s salt march

Trump really has egg on his face due to the mess he has made of the Lincoln Pool. He seems so acutely embarrassed by this fiasco that he has set his attack dogs in the weaponized (in)justice department to arrest people whom he alleges have vandalized the pool and caused the coating to peel off and algae to proliferate. He has made extraordinarily detailed claims that they cut through the paint layer with sharp items.

“The 350 foot gash, made by a very sharp knife or razors, is actually numerous slashes over a very long 350 foot length. It was purposefully and criminally done, and somebody had to work very hard, probably in the dark of night, to create such a condition. Likewise, the small area at the bottom of the Pool was cut and powerfully lifted off the surface leaving very jagged, uneven edges.”

No evidence has been produced in support of this claim of vandalism even though the pool is in a very public space and monitored 24/7/365 by security cameras so if anybody did try to ‘vandalize’ it, or even just dip their hands in the water, the evidence would be easy to produce. The fact that we have not seen any is a sign that the vandalism charge may have been cooked up to take attention away from the mess that Trump himself has created.

[UPDATE: For the first time, a named top official at the National Park Service has made the charge in court, although his “statement does not say when exactly the damage occurred or whether it was a suspected case of vandalism and does not identify anyone who might have been involved.”]
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Good riddance to Starmer

Owen Jones has no patience with those who are praising resigning UK prime minister Keir Starmer as a principled person of integrity who was unlucky and undone by circumstances.

No. This was not a decent man defeated by circumstance, a man of duty and integrity who was simply in the wrong job, a principled leader undone by events. This was an unprincipled politician who abandoned promises with as much enthusiasm as he trousered freebies from rich donors.
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Starmer was a frontman for a Labour-right operation whose purpose was clear: persuade a leftwing membership to hand the party back to those who despised everything it had just stood for. 
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To win over the membership, Starmer’s campaign promised tax hikes for the top 5%, public ownership of utilities, abolition of tuition fees, “an immigration system based on compassion and dignity”, human rights “at the heart of foreign policy”, and the abolition of the House of Lords. In power, Starmer has either failed to deliver on these promises or done the opposite.

Soon after being elected leader, Starmer suspended his predecessor from the party before finally expelling him in 2023, claiming that he and Corbyn had never been friends and distancing himself from his previous leadership pledges. This was deceit, not pragmatism. When he stood for leader, Starmer told the BBC that nationalisation of utilities was a pledge that would be in the next Labour manifesto. The following year, he denied ever saying this, and told the BBC: “I never made a commitment to nationalisation, I made a commitment to common ownership.”

The party would be a “broad church”, Starmer had promised. Instead, he suspended Labour MPs or prevented candidates from running for making comments critical of the state of Israel, and opposing the two-child benefit cap. His machine blocked leftwingers from standing, such as Faiza Shaheen and Lauren Townsend.
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As for his claim that he took over a Labour party that was “morally bankrupt”, he was the human rights lawyer who said that Israel had a right to cut off power and water to Gaza.
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His government broke promise after promise. Its housebuilding revolution failed to materialise. “No return to austerity” gave way to departmental squeezes. International aid was gutted. Meanwhile, Labour’s internal authoritarianism was exported to the country. Thousands were arrested for holding placards after anti-genocide direct action group Palestine Action were proscribed as terrorists on the same legal footing as Islamic State.
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Starmer believed in little other than his own advancement, a trait hardly uncommon among Labour MPs. The danger is that his dismal, disreputable premiership laid the foundations for the hard-right agenda of Nigel Farage. We will soon discover whether the next occupant of No 10, Andy Burnham, believes the answer is simply to paint a northern, charismatic gloss over a failed agenda. If he fails to offer a decisive break from this useless travesty of a government then he, too, will sink.

Yes.

Meanwhile Burnham’s pick for chief of staff is not good sign and seems to indicate that he will try and continue the Blair-Starmer policies of catering to the right. If that turns out to be the case, Labour is doomed and we can expect Reform to win the next election and Nigel Farage to be the next prime minister.

Good election day for progressives

Primary elections in the US are a test of the relative strength of intra-party factions. On the Republican side, the fight is between Trump and anti-Trump (or at least non-Trump) factions and the Trump side has been clearly dominant. On the Democratic side, the fight is between new and younger progressives on the one hand and the old guard favored by the party establishment led by their senate leader Chuck Schumer and their House leader Hakeem Jeffries on the other.

Yesterday’s primaries were a resounding win for the progressives. In New York, progressive candidates won their races.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani waded into Democratic U.S. House primaries to boost three progressives over establishment-backed candidates. All of them won Tuesday, defeating two incumbents and essentially ensuring that two self-described democratic socialists will be elected to Congress in their deep blue districts.
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Palestine Action protests in the UK

I do not feel any sympathy for the collapse of Keir Starmer’s premiership. Apart from his abandoning his earlier pledges to help ordinary people and instead throwing them under the bus, one of his most despicable acts as prime minister was to declare war on the group Palestine Action. The group says that it is “committed to ending global participation in Israel’s genocidal and apartheid regime” and was protesting Israeli atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank, but Starmer’s government pushed through parliament a law branding it as a terrorist group.

Palestine Action, which was formally proscribed by the UK last July, is a British protest group founded six years ago. It says it uses “disruptive tactics” to target “corporate enablers” and companies involved in the manufacture of weapons for Israel, such as Israeli group Elbit Systems, Italian aerospace company Leonardo, French multinational Thales and Teledyne from the United States. The group has targeted British facilities linked to those companies.
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Will Burnham learn from Starmer’s fall?

As widely expected, Keir Starmer resigned as UK’s prime minister and it is widely expected that newly minted MP Andy Burnham will become party leader and thus prime minister around September when the formal leadership process is completed. Burnham will then have about three years in office to try and turn around Labour’s fortunes before the next general election is due. The question is whether Burnham will take the lesson’s of Starmer’s fall seriously enough to drastically change course.

Starmer’s biggest problem was that he gained the Labour Party leadership in 2020 with his 10 pledges that outlined a progressive agenda and then, after winning the leadership, systematically abandoned them, as this document by disappointed supporters carefully details. This analysis compares his original pledges with his platform for the 2024 election and finds a significant shift towards neoliberalism.
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The Lincoln Pool fiasco

I have to admit that I am throughly enjoying the debacle over the Lincoln Pool. It shows the utter incompetence and grift of the Trump administration and how his grandiose schemes fall apart. I can enjoy this one because unlike his other debacles, this one has not cost lives nor injuries nor harm to ordinary people. True, it is a waste of taxpayer money but on a much smaller scale than his other colossal wastes and (as far as we know) it has not gone into his own pockets like his other grifts, though I would not be surprised to learn that he or his family got a kickback from the contractor, because we know that no amount of money is too small for him to try and get his greedy hands on it. What is best about this fiasco is that it cannot be easily covered up, like the way he had a tarp cover the removal of his name from the Kennedy Center. The pool in all its algae-infested green glory is visible to everyone.

It is not just the algae in the pool turning it green that is causing problems. It appears that the blue paint is peeling off like a layer of plastic. In their attempts to suppress information, they even arrested some random guy who merely tried to touch the peeling paint.
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