by liberal japonicus
This NYT article wasn’t behind a paywall and I’ll leave it to all of you to glean whatever kernals of grain and post in the comment. The article had me thinking about the movie The Madness of King George, which is from an Alan Bennett play and tells the story of the Regency Crisis of 1788 where George III suffered a bout of mental illness. From the wikipedia summary
Lady Pembroke recommends Dr. Francis Willis, who cured her mother-in-law. Willis uses novel procedures. At his farm in Lincolnshire, patients work to gain “a better opinion of themselves.” He observes to an equerry “To be curbed, thwarted, stood up to, exercises the character.” When the King insults him, foully, he is strapped into a chair and gagged. He will be restrained whenever he “swears and indulges in meaningless discourse” and “does not strive every day and always towards his own recovery”.
Who do you nominate to be our Dr. Willis? In my version, she’s black.
I couldn’t figure out how to work this in the post, but this article, about a 14 year old hacker, quotes him saying this:
“It was disgusting, it was greedy, it was rooted in my own insecurities, it was wrong in every aspect,” he said in the interview, two days before reporting to prison.
Why can’t we have a president with the emotional intelligence of a 14 year old hacker?
A 14 yo going to prison? He’s 20 now. He also seems to be genuinely self-aware and fully takes responsibility.
Not only is Trump incapable of that, but I don’t think anyone in his family, his Cabinet, or any supporter in Congress is capable of it.
House Democrats File Bill to Form 25th Amendment Commission to Assess Trump’s Mental Fitness
Is the article a news article or an opinion column? It comes across as an opinion column.
It’s too long to be a news article and it includes a wider array of arguments and perspectives than would normally be found in an op-ed. I’d call this a long form journalistic essay.
The NYT has always had longer pieces that are more news analysis than reportage. I’m not precisely sure of the relationship, but I think many of them were often found in the NYT Magazine. The Guardian adopted this with their ‘long reads’, but the NYT Times, never short on humility, calls them ‘Great Reads’.
Unlikely that a “25th Amendment commission” goes anywhere, and even if it did, I’d fully expect that the current totally-corrupt Supremely Deplorable Court to ignore the plain text of the Amendment and toss the law, with some crisp legal reasoning, such as “yur doon it rong”.
A book viewing the Supreme Court from a different angle than partisan politics.
“Most people get the Supreme Court all wrong. A smattering of high-profile decisions has popularized a simplistic idea of the Court and its justices. Yes, six of them were appointed by Republicans, and only three by Democrats. So, how does that 6-3 conservative majority explain why, in the 2024-25 term, conservative Brett Kavanaugh was more likely to agree with liberal Elena Kagan than conservative Neil Gorsuch? Or why did the court throw shade on Florida’s attempt to ban drag shows?
To truly understand the Court, Sarah Isgur argues, you have to look beyond partisan politics—the “X-Axis.” The wisest court watchers apply another measuring stick, the “Y-Axis,” where the nine justices span from order-loving institutionalists to true chaos agents. Once you appreciate these overlapping and even competing impulses, the Court begins to look a lot more like a 3-3-3 split than 6-3.”
Last Branch Standing: A Potentially Surprising, Occasionally Witty Journey Inside Today’s Supreme Court
Unlikely that a “25th Amendment commission” goes anywhere, and even if it did, I’d fully expect that the current totally-corrupt Supremely Deplorable Court to ignore the plain text of the Amendment and toss the law, with some crisp legal reasoning, such as “yur doon it rong”
I think Snarki is right. However, I don’t think the point is to actually get him removed. I think the point is to shut up all the snipers and gripers who keep screaming on social media that the Dems aren’t doing anything, to keep stories about his dementia in the msm, to put Republicans on record, and to make his dementia an issue in the midterms.
From an interview with Last Branch Standing‘s author, Sarah Isgur. Lightly edited for clarity.
“Here’s the problem. If we could all have a checklist at the beginning of the term with all the cases that the court is going to hear, and then everyone in the media checks which are the big cases of the term. I’d be great with that, but that’s not what we do. Instead, we wait until we have the decisions. If they’re 6-3 along ideological lines, they’re big cases. And then we declare that the Court is divided 6-3 along ideological lines.
“If the case is conservatively coded, we had three cases last term. One was on gun manufacturer liability, one was on religious liberty for tax-exempt purposes in Wisconsin, and one was on reverse discrimination, if you’re straight and think your gay boss fired you because you were straight. All conservative coded.
“Everyone thought they were going to be 6-3. Everyone thought they were big cases before the term. They all came out the same day last June. All three were unanimous. All three were written by a different liberal justice. And we never talked about them again. They were mind-wiped because they didn’t fit the 6-3 narrative. So, that’s the problem.
“We define the big cases by which ones are 6-3, and then the 6-3 ones are the big cases, and then the court is ideological, and they’re divisive. Last term, 15% of the cases were with all of the liberal justices in dissent, right?
“That’s your ideological narrative. The exact same number of cases. I just love this when it turned out this way. I mean, thank you, court, for doing the work for me. The exact same number of cases had all the liberals in the majority and only conservatives in the dissent, 6-3 or 5-4, but we just don’t talk about those cases, and we pretend that that’s not happening.”
It’s almost as if you LIKE every one of the nine Supreme Court justices
A majority of SCOTUS decisions are 9-0 or 8-1 every term. That’s because a majority of the cases are asking for a narrow ruling on some detail of federal law or court procedures. Big cases are the ones where the plaintiff is asking the Court to make changes: in the balance of power between two branches, in the balance of rights between two groups, in how far (or not) the government can intrude into your private life. The Trump tariff case is a big case, even though most analysts think it will be 8-1 because the Court is going to hold that Congress has not ceded a broad tariff authority to the President, nor that the President has some implicit foreign policy authority to levy tariffs.
“High-institutionalist justices (Chief Justice John Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett) land in the majority far more often (Kavanaugh at ~93% historically, Roberts and Barrett in the 90s %). The low-institutionalist conservatives (Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch) form a more independent “freaks-and-geeks” bloc, while the liberals vary (Kagan, higher-institutionalist/strategic; Sotomayor and Jackson more strident/individual).”
Sarah Isgur’s Two-Axis Supreme Court Map
There’s lots of ways to look at the Justices. When Gorsuch was nominated during Trump’s first term, pretty much everyone acknowledged that he was selected because he strongly opposed the regulatory state and would be a consistent vote to overturn Chevron and support the major questions doctrine. Which he has been. His other quirks — eg, strong support for Native American tribal authority — when he sometimes sides with the liberal minority were immaterial.
The description of George III’s treatment at the hands of Dr Willis makes me grateful that psychiatric medicine has (mostly) advanced in the years since then. I’m not sure how being bound and gagged would result in him gaining a “better opinion” of himself.
My guess about Trump’s future is that he’s gonna end up like his father, with minions bringing him meaningless things to sign so he thinks he’s still the boss, while they run things in his stead. Who knows, he might basically be there now.
The exact same number of cases had all the liberals in the majority and only conservatives in the dissent…
High-institutionalist justices…land in the majority far more often
These points don’t imply what Isgur wants them to, as would be obvious to her if she weren’t so pleased to have the court on the side of her politics.
Whatever the composition of the court, some Justices would be roughly at its ideological centre, and so would come out as “high-institutionalist” in Isgur’s analysis. (Not that I would expect her to see things the same way if a centrist like Kagan were the swing vote.)
The extreme right is in the minority quite often because the court is hearing cases, to oblige Trump and his allies, where a reasonable court would quickly vote 9-0 (but with a reasonable court these cases would probably not be brought and heard).
There are (at least) two major problems with the current court. First, it’s a powerful political body whose median member is far right, and therefore far to the right of the median voter. Second, two thirds of it have effectively abandoned any attempt at intellectual respectability. Now they simply decide what they want, the reasoning, such as it is, comes second.
Looking at the Isgur blurbs, it looks like she doesn’t take into account the shadow docket at all.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/supreme-court-shadow-docket-tracker-challenges-trump-administration
The US administration is in La-la land
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/2026/04/16/did-pete-hegseths-prayer-sound-like-pulp-fiction-quote-heres-why/89639322007/
https://www.9news.com.au/world/pete-hegseth-pulp-fiction-bible-verse-pentagon-sermon-usa-politics-news/1ffd64d4-628f-49ec-be6f-51e32c83bfea
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/us/politics/trump-iran-war.html?unlocked_article_code=1.bVA.3XNv.QAXeVHQk7JMe&smid=url-share
novakant: that Hegseth thing is good, but it’s not as good as J D Vance saying the Pope should be very careful when discussing theology!
Color me unsurprised that Vance’s Hahvahd education would set him up to convert to Catholicism in 2019 and 7 years later, have him lecturing the Pope on the fine points of [Catholic] doctrine. To be honest, I’m surprised that Vance hasn’t issued his own encyclicals yet.
Ezekiel 25:17
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2WK_eWihdU
https://www.thedailybeast.com/scotus-justice-clarence-thomas-77-goes-on-unhinged-rant-about-intellectuals/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/02/trump-indecency-jan-6-pardons/685324/
By the way, it’s way past time to be “appalled”. If you are still at the appalled stage, you’re already offloading from the boxcar and trying to pet the Commandant’s rottweiler.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/how-the-internet-fringe-infiltrated-republican-politics
They are telling us, and have been telling for us decades that they will murder everyone of us. Their vermin God has ordered them to kill us.
The genocide of all of the enemies … worldwide and on every street in America … of the poisonous, vermin conservative Christian Nazi movement is upon us.
I now believe in preventative genocide against THEM to defend myself and my loved ones.
What the word “freedom” means to a Christian MAGA conservative libertarian (or, whatever the eff they call themselves and whatever race creed and color they are) in America is that even a Jew such as Stephen Miller can grow up to be a fucking Nazi and cut down all the cherry trees and be proud to tell their truth of it.
The big Holocaust tent.
This recent shitshow of MAGA conservatives now threatening EACH OTHER and using up all of the oxygen in the room arguing which ones of THEM are anti-Semites and which ones are the true Americans and the true conservatives, and the true patriots in nothing more than a practice purge for their common goal, to murder all of their mutual enemies: US.
I find no comfort, as the asinine media does, when I see Marjorie Taylor Jewish Space Laser Greene and Donald Genocidal Trump going after each other or Tucker Motherfucker Carlson and Mark Muslim Pogrom Levin going apeshit on each other, or the the smug, cutely murderous smirking Christian Mike Johnson and any other piece of garbage Republican on the Hill doing a mock cage fight over some genocidal bill before the Congress, or the Nazi, lying white supremacist gay-hating Elon Musk and the gay-loving Nazi Jewish lying white supremacist Sam Altman suing each other over their division of all of the wealth and ownership in the world, or Jew-burner and n*gger-lyncher Nick Fuentes and fellow Jew-burner and n*gger-lyncher Christian Charlie Kirk arguing over their “methods”, or fascist racist Christian Texas and fascist, racist Christian Florida competing for the gold in the Evil sweepstakes.
It’s all just another of the 1934 night of the long knives arguing over who is most genocidal conservative and we still have the Holocaust and nuclear World War III in front of us.
All they are arguing about is their mutual disagreement on the niggling details of how and when they are going to kill me or just fuck me over and then kill me.
And you.
That’s why I keep one round in the chamber and one in reserve because two kill shots are required to survive these subhumans.
have him lecturing the Pope on the fine points of [Catholic] doctrine
And not just any old Catholic doctrine: on Saint Augustine’s theory of a Just War. The Pope is a) the first Pope from The Order of Augustine, and b) wrote his PhD thesis on Augustinian thought. A quotation from the thesis:
“There is no room in Augustine’s concept of authority for one who is self-seeking and in search of power over others,”
I beat you to it, GftNC! Marina Hyde:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/17/pope-leo-jd-vance-donald-trump-catholicism
(The truth is, you hipped me to her, which is why I was quick to read the piece in the first place. You really led me to it.)
hsh: you did beat me to it – I’ve only just got to the papers!
When she’s on top form (which she is here), she’s unbeatable….
I was particularly taken with the Stephen Miller backroom (even harder and weirder) porn reference: it couldn’t be more perfect
This is for wjca.
The first two chapters of conservative Annie Applebaum’s “Twilight of Democracy”, written about her experience living in Poland and becoming, by the right wing’s declaration, the enemy of the Law and Justice (anything but) Party, which was defeated in 2023, for her traditional conservative outlook, now branded commie gay Jew leftist by the fascist right’s radical movement in Poland of the Overton Window to somewhere overlooking Heinrich Himmler’s chicken farm).
It’s remarkable not only for the similarities with Orban’s Hungary but also with Trump here in the “homeland’s blood and soil”.
Just to point out that I know how wj feels and where he stands as a lonely traditional conservative.
https://stroudradicalreading.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/applebaumtwilightofdemocracy.pdf
Rod Dreher did not like the book for obvious reasons, but he’s decamping to Vienna to start Christian populist trouble among the “emasculated” there too.
Thanks, nooneithinkisinnytree. It is, as you say, a lonely position sometimes. But, I think, a battle worth fighting.
“now branded commie gay Jew leftist by the fascist right”
Haven’t gotten branded like that. Yet. Obviously I have some work to do. Sigh — so much to do, so little time.
The first two chapters of conservative Annie Applebaum’s “Twilight of Democracy”,…
If TLDR.
“Overall, the book is a passionate warning from a centrist-liberal perspective but is limited by its subjectivity, selective focus, and tendency to pathologize political opposition rather than engage it as legitimate contestation within democracy. It excels at describing mechanisms of institutional capture and elite complicity but falls short as a comprehensive or balanced diagnosis of democratic challenges.”
Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy Analysis
That’s an AI summary of unattributed comment it’s found on the internet? If so, I can’t see what it adds.
CharlesWT:
I acknowledge your idiosyncratic way of engaging with the world, but don’t GROK my stuff, OK?
Folks can read the whole thing or not, their choice.
All of the reviews of Mein Kampf are apparently not in yet, as Hitler may have had some good points, if we put aside our emotions and biases, right?
Cannibalism. Maybe Jeffrey Dahmer was on to something, but lacked the requisite culinary skills and marketing acumen. RFK is looking into it.
I prefer you unGROKED as well.
You’ve become like that guy in whatever failed TV series it was years ago who decided he wanted to be a crooner, and quit his job and hung around the house in his bathrobe regaling his wife and kids with Sinatra and Bennet standards as they made dinner and tried to get ready for school.
I’ve gone insane too. It’s going around.