…& in the morning [DOT 11/11/22]

…so…before I get into anything I really ought to thank @elliecoo for a few things…mostly for filling in for me the other day…but also it has to be said for making my absence sound like it came as the result of an entirely more rock’n’roll reason than I could probably lay claim to…aside from there being some alcohol involved I suspect I’d struggle to clear the bar for most of the rest of the rock’n’roll checklist…but…we’re none of us as young as we were, I guess?

…anyway…before I get into what might charitably be called the news of the day…a brief aside about the day…or at least the day if you happen to be familiar with the UK in that respect…it may not be a big deal to everyone but certainly when I was growing up(…which, admittedly, begs the question of whether or not that can be said to have happened) there was a pretty serious attempt to instill some solemnity into the traditions surrounding the armistice…at 11 o’clock on “the eleventh day of the eleventh month” there would be a ceremonial two minute silence…even the radio went to dead air (probably not every station but the BBC did)…I think these days it’s possible that doesn’t get observed the way it used to but when I remember even people out shopping all pausing to lower their heads in silence or a school full of rowdy kids all shutting the hell up it was certainly a solemn business…but anyway…that header image comes from a year when they arranged over 800,000 ceramic poppies as flood that poured from a window in the tower of london to fill the dry expanse that was once the moat…the idea being that each poppy represented a british life lost in the first world war…& there’s a thing that gets said

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

…if anyone’s interested that’s actually just the middle verse of a longer poem…but though I can’t honestly deny that the sentiment still lands with some weight to me I also can’t deny that one of the things it always makes me remember is that despite people saying “we shall never forget” the price exacted on those who fell fighting “the war to end all wars” the world went ahead & threw a sequel remarkably swiftly in historical terms…though if you bear in mind the final verse of this one…maybe that ought not to come as surprise…where am I going with this, you ask?

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

…I guess I’m going a couple of places…& time allowing I might even get through them before I take pity on anyone scrolling through this & skip to the part where there’s a tune or two & maybe some comments…one of them being that much of the sentiment involved in the above…right down to the part where it was referred to as rememberance…was about the debt owed by the living to the dead…& the fact that this date should fall where it does the day after kyle rittenhouse took the witness stand in his own defense has made that coverage somehow harder to stomach than I already expected it to be

Kyle Rittenhouse, in an unusual move for a defendant, took the witness stand Wednesday. He cried. His defense team then made a motion for a mistrial with prejudice, which means Rittenhouse couldn’t be retried. But whatever the court rules, he has already won.
[…]
If Rittenhouse is convicted, he will likely stop being a right-wing mascot and become a right-wing martyr. If he isn’t convicted, he will set a precedent for others like him to pick up guns they shouldn’t have and thrust themselves into the middle of unrest they should avoid — confident in knowing that prison won’t be in their future.
[…]
If he is freed, the status quo of America’s flawed criminal justice system, in which white offenders are less likely to be convicted, can remain just a little bit longer, the inevitable merely delayed, if not denied. If he’s imprisoned, those sympathetic to his plight have even more reason to use him as an example of how their way of life could be threatened if they don’t fight, and hard. His supporters have basically guaranteed those outcomes.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/politics-policy/sobbing-kyle-rittenhouse-won-before-ruling

This Kyle Ritterhouse? pic.twitter.com/ZXRhwmieq3

— DrMarySLP (@DrMarySLP) November 10, 2021

the prosecutor just forced Rittenhouse to admit to a lie pic.twitter.com/MIhayWANuN

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 10, 2021

huge boomer energy https://t.co/4A6EYTlz7s

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 10, 2021

The prosecutor points out that Rittenhouse, who claims he was there to provide medical assistance, didn't offer help to any of the people he had just shot — even when one of his victims was yelling for help pic.twitter.com/9LtpEkbvM6

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 10, 2021

…pretty sure I could say a few things about that but I’ll spare you all that

…I would note, though…that the day before the NYT ran this under the headline the war on “wokeness” the very same publication ran a price by brett stephens with the title why wokeness will fail…I wouldn’t advise reading that but it’s kind of a stark example of some bleak editorial irony masquerading as some “both-sides”…well…BS

The ways in which we define people and things can be liberating or trammeling; they can advance the cause of liberty and equality or cause societies to regress.

It is for that reason that we battle over language, over who gets to control and define it, over whose stories get told and how. It is for that reason that words that gather power are set upon by those who wish to defang them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/opinion/wokeness-racism-politics.html

…& I won’t go into the whole spiel about what that term originally meant back in the 30s when it first seems to have been coined…or how it’s been effectively twisted into a pejorative by people apparently immune to how making willful ignorance a badge of honor reflects on them

‘I think we should throw those books in a fire’: Movement builds on right to target books [WaPo]

…but I will note that in that WaPo piece it mentions that one book people have tried to ban in schools before now is twain’s “adventures of huckleberry finn”…& that, as it happens, I seem to recall that being the plot of something I read in the 80s & assumed at the time to be an exaggeration for dramatic effect…that one was called the day they came to arrest the book & maybe none of those folks ever read that one…but either they never heard of fahrenheit 451 or their inability to grasp irony has somehow blinded them to the part they’re casting themselves to play

American democracy’s most dangerous adversary is white supremacy. Throughout this nation’s history, white supremacy has undermined, twisted and attacked the viability of the United States. What makes white supremacy so lethal, however, is not just its presence but also the refusal to hold its adherents fully accountable for the damage they have done and continue to do to the nation. The insurrection on 6 January and the weak response are only the latest example.
[…]
The same refrain played after the infamous three-fifths clause passed under the southern threat to walk away and, thus, scuttle the constitution and the United States. Massachusetts delegate Rufus King called the nefarious formula to determine representation in Congress one of the constitution’s “greatest blemishes” while lamenting that it “was a necessary sacrifice to the establishment of the Constitution”.

The enslavers’ extortionist threats – white supremacy as the price for the nation to come into being – should have created a massive backlash. But it didn’t. There was no retribution, only compliance and acquiescence. The demonstrated lack of accountability for threatening the viability of the United States served only to embolden the slaveholders, who bullied, harangued and pummeled other congressional leaders, including the brutal 1856 beating of Senator Charles Sumner by southerner Preston Brooks on the Senate floor, to get their way.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/10/white-supremacists-war-on-democracy-unscathed

…& I guess I’m also going to bang that battered-looking drum about there being some unfortunate parallels to be drawn when it comes to the traction achieved by narratives at odds with reality

In May 2020, as the world was convulsed by the coronavirus pandemic and global infections topped 4 million, a strange video began appearing in the feeds of some Facebook users. “Climate alarm is reaching untold levels of exaggeration and hysteria,” said an unseen narrator, over a montage of environmental protests and clips of a tearful Greta Thunberg. “There is no doubt about it, climate change has become a cult,” it continued, to the kind of pounding beat you might hear on the soundtrack of a Hollywood blockbuster. “Carbon dioxide emissions have become the wages of sin.”
[…]
At one stage, users hovering over the logo of that advertiser – a UK organisation called The Global Warming Policy Forum, or GWPF – were informed by Facebook that it was a “Science Site”. The GWPF is not a science website: it is the campaigning arm of a well-funded foundation accused by opponents of being one of Britain’s biggest sources of climate science denial.

The videos being tested by the GWPF in the spring and summer of 2020 were part of a strategic pivot away from explicit climate crisis denialism, and towards something subtler – a move being pursued by similar campaigners across the world. Welcome to a new age of what the atmospheric scientist and environmental author Michael E Mann has labelled climate “inactivism”: an epic struggle to convince you not so much to doubt the reality of climate crisis, but rather to dampen your enthusiasm for any attempts at dealing with it.
[…]
Public debate over the environment once pitted people who believed in the reality of anthropogenic climate change against those who questioned it. At least two of the current cabinet, including Boris Johnson, used to count themselves among the sceptical camp. Today, with a firm majority of every demographic group in the UK in agreement with the fact that humans are warming the planet, and that this poses a serious danger, the battle lines have been redrawn.
[…]
But there is now an even more powerful weapon in the inactivist armoury. It comes in the form of an appeal to social justice: one that casts environmentalists as an aloof, out-of-touch establishment, and the inactivists as insurgents, defending the values and livelihoods of ordinary people. “The biggest single threat to the net zero transition is a culture war-style backlash that heavily politicises this agenda and spooks governments into moving more slowly,” says [James] Murray [editor of the website BusinessGreen and a leading environmental commentator]. “At present, it’s on the periphery. But as the past few years have taught us, ideas that were on the periphery can become very influential, very quickly.”
[…]
It was back in May this year that DeSmog – a journalism platform that aims to expose and eliminate the “PR pollution” around climate breakdown, and one of the project’s partners – first noticed a newly trending Twitter hashtag: #CostOfNetZero. It was being pushed by Steve Baker, the Tory MP for Wycombe and the former chair of the Brexit-supporting European Research Group, as well as a newly appointed GWPF trustee. Using ISD’s tools, researchers were able to map the sources of tweets containing the hashtag, and the relationships between them. “What we found at that stage was that it was basically just Baker and his allies continually retweeting it to create the impression of there being a lot of concern around this issue,” said Mat Hope, a former DeSmog editor. “We were able to show that it was a manufactured controversy, not some authentic insight from somebody with their finger on the country’s pulse.” (Steve Baker did not respond to a request for comment.)

In the months that followed, however, disquiet over the net zero transition began ramping up in sections of the UK press – initially in outlets such as Spiked Online and GB News, but eventually creeping into the pages of major newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph and the Sun, too. In August, the Spectator magazine printed an image of banknotes tumbling into a void on its cover, with the headline “The cost of net zero”; by September, right-leaning media commentators were homing in on the government’s aim of gradually phasing out gas boilers as part of the decarbonisation plan, and replacing them with air- or ground-source heat pumps instead. The far greater economic costs of inaction on climate crisis were rarely mentioned in these reports, but again and again, efforts to reduce our collective carbon emissions were framed as an elitist power-grab. “People want a cleaner, greener planet,” wrote Andrew Neil for the Daily Mail in October. “But they will not tolerate a green strategy that involves posh folk telling plain folk what they must do. Especially when the posh folk are doing very nicely out of greenery and the plain folk are picking up the tab.”

By the autumn – as a growing cost-of-living crisis began to dominate the news agenda – the GWPF had rebranded itself as Net Zero Watch, a new parliamentary grouping called the Net Zero Scrutiny Group led by Craig Mackinlay had been formed, and Westminster insiders were reporting on widening splits within the Conservative party over the entire net zero transition. “The fact is you don’t need a majority of the population behind you to create a myth-making frenzy like this; you can do it with a very small minority and a set of media outriders,” said James Murray. Members of the Net Zero Scrutiny group reject the suggestion that they are espousing a new form of climate science denial. “What I want this group to be is a clearing house, a balanced academic facility where we get all sides of the argument,” Mackinlay has claimed previously.

The idea that decarbonisation is inherently elitist is a myth, peddled largely by political figures who have shown little concern for deprived communities in any other context, and who ignore the fact that without a net zero transition it is the very poorest – globally and domestically – who will suffer most severely. But like all effective myths, it is founded on a kernel of truth: namely that under successive governments, political decision-making has felt remote and unaccountable, the rich have got richer, and life for a great many of the rest of us has grown harder.[…]

The GWPF may have been working behind the scenes to encourage that change, but as Peiser implies, they are able to do so in part because people are experiencing very real anxieties. “When people like Mackinlay and Baker start talking about whether the costs and benefits of net zero are going to be distributed equitably, and you consider austerity and the impact of the pandemic, there’s something there that a lot of people might find plausible,” observed Adam Corner, an independent researcher who has helped lead studies of public attitudes on climate change. “They’re inviting people to ask themselves: can the same government that made the poorest pay for the banking crisis really be trusted to design a fair climate policy?”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/11/inactivists-tangling-up-the-climate-crisis-in-culture-wars-manston-airport-kent

…that one’s kind of a long read & largely revolves around the UK but I think the general point about shifting goalposts is pretty widely applicable

The U.S. and China pledged Wednesday to work closely together on climate change this decade in a rare and unexpected joint statement that brought fresh energy to the final days of the U.N. climate summit in Scotland.

The world’s two biggest economies declared their intention “to work individually, jointly, and with other countries during this decisive decade, in accordance with different national circumstances, to strengthen and accelerate climate action and cooperation,” the statement read.
[…]
The joint statement, which was otherwise light on details, mostly affirmed earlier goals, such as ending overseas coal financing and preserving the 2015 Paris agreement’s target of limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/surprise-move-u-s-china-vow-work-together-climate-change

…which superficially sounds better than the nothing china previously seemed inclined to offer…but…well

Many countries undercount their greenhouse gas emissions in reports to the U.N., a Washington Post investigation of 196 country reports found.

There is a giant gap between what nations declare their emissions are versus the greenhouse gases they release. https://t.co/sAKAxpP4kS

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) November 8, 2021

Across the world, many countries underreport their greenhouse gas emissions in their reports to the United Nations, a Washington Post investigation has found. An examination of 196 country reports reveals a giant gap between what nations declare their emissions to be vs. the greenhouse gases they are sending into the atmosphere. The gap ranges from at least 8.5 billion to as high as 13.3 billion tons a year of underreported emissions — big enough to move the needle on how much the Earth will warm.

The plan to save the world from the worst of climate change is built on data. But the data the world is relying on is inaccurate.
[…]
At the low end, the gap is larger than the yearly emissions of the United States. At the high end, it approaches the emissions of China and comprises 23 percent of humanity’s total contribution to the planet’s warming, The Post found.
[…]
The gap comprises vast amounts of missing carbon dioxide and methane emissions as well as smaller volumes of powerful synthetic gases. It is the result of questionably drawn rules, incomplete reporting in some countries and apparently willful mistakes in others — and the fact that in some cases, humanity’s full impacts on the planet are not even required to be reported.

[from the piece linked in the tweet]

It seemed like a straightforward task: Washington Post reporters wanted to measure the gap between what countries acknowledge releasing into the air and the total emissions actually found in the atmosphere.
[…]
But when The Post set out to determine the size of the gap, it found that little about emissions data is straightforward or easy.

To start, many of the country reports to the United Nations were out-of-date, in different measurement units and formats or had numbers buried in hundreds of pages of text. Some types of emissions — notably man-made fluorinated gases and land-use sector gases such as carbon dioxide emissions contained in forest fire smoke — varied wildly from year to year, and countries’ spotty reporting made it difficult to estimate 2019 figures.

Finally, even independent measurements of the total level of emissions vary greatly. Some include certain emission sources that others omit. Different measurement techniques find a wide range of results. Some measurements of certain gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide, are based on a “top-down” approach using atmospheric and satellite-based methods that most countries don’t use in their reporting. Other approaches use a “bottom-up” method, more similar to country techniques, that tallies gases based on power generation, industrial output, agricultural production, transportation and other emissions-producing activities. The Post relied on comprehensive emissions measurements from several different scientific groups.

The result found countries claimed roughly 44.2 billion metric tons of emissions from all sources in 2019, while independent measurements discovered anywhere from 52.7 to 57.4 billion tons of gases in the atmosphere — a gap of at least 16 and up to 23 percent.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/11/07/invisible-methodology-measuring-emissions-gap/

…however you might choose to quibble about the methodology or the message

Cop26 draft text annotated: what it says and what it means [guardian]

…the thing that seems hard to deny is that (as has seemingly been the case as long as I’ve been alive) the problem is worse than we make out

After nine days of grand pronouncements, pledges and plans, scientists delivered a rude awakening to a COP26 summit that has been called “the last, best hope” for climate action: Earth is on track to warm about 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit), eclipsing the world’s shared climate goal by a full degree.
[…]
What countries are planning to do between now and 2030 makes many net zero pledges impossible, the researchers say. And despite a flurry of new commitments to zero out emissions, the projected level of warming by the end of the century is only about 0.1 degrees lower than before COP26 started.

Earth has already warmed at least 1.1 degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. If humanity continues on its current trajectory, global sea levels will rise at least 2 feet, according to research from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Almost half of the world will face regular, life-threatening heat waves. Humanity risks exceeding climate tipping points, triggering ice-sheet loss, permafrost thaw and ecosystem collapse from which there is no return.
[…]
The idea of hitting “net zero” — a point at which humanity’s emissions are completely canceled out by carbon sinks — gained fire in the run-up to this year’s conference. A week before the start of COP26, some four dozen members, including the United States and European Union, had committed to reaching net zero sometime around the middle of the century.

Recent days brought a flurry of new announcements: China aims to zero out emissions by 2060. India by 2070.

If nations can be taken at their word, this looks like progress, if not perfection. Meeting net zero goals would lead to temperature rise of about 2.1 degrees Celsius (3.8 degrees Fahrenheit), according to the emissions gap update. That would bring the world much closer to the Paris agreement goal of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

But researchers say it’s more realistic to look at short-term pledges, which require immediate action and for which political leaders can more easily be held accountable. Here, new plans from China, Australia and Brazil, among other major emitters, don’t do much to alter the world’s trajectory.

And many pledges from developing nations are conditional upon support from wealthier countries. Considering only the “unconditional” plans submitted to the U.N., projected warming remains stubbornly at 2.7 degrees Celsius (4.9 degrees Fahrenheit).
[…]
The result highlights a weakness in net zero commitments, experts say. It is harder to hold politicians accountable for meeting targets that will come long after they are out of office.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/11/09/cop26-un-emissions-gap/

…& even if we measure up to what we say we’re going to do about it we still wind up in this sort of territory

A billion people will be affected by extreme heat stress if the climate crisis raises the global temperature by just 2C, according to research released by the UK Met Office at the Cop26 climate summit. The scientists said that would be a 15-fold increase on the numbers exposed today.
[…]
The deadliest place on the planet for extreme future heatwaves will be the north China plain, one of the most densely populated regions in the world and the most important food-producing area in the huge nation, according to 2018 research.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/09/1bn-people-will-suffer-extreme-heat-at-just-2c-heating-say-scientists

…not to mention that we arguably need to be paying attention to more than just that one element…we may be carbon-based life…but we need other things, too

A global water crisis is being ignored at Cop26 to the detriment of billions of people’s lives, according to the charity WaterAid.
[…]
A 2016 study found two-thirds of the global population, four billion people, faced water shortages, and many were at increased risk of floods and droughts brought on by the climate crisis.

“The climate crisis is a water crisis at its core,” [Tim Wainwright, chief executive of WaterAid] said. Rainfall patterns have changed in many parts of the world; “more intense and more frequent floods pollute water sources and destroy crops or homes, while longer and more frequent droughts dry up the springs many people need to survive.”

Wainwright said very little action was being taken to help affected communities. A WaterAid analysis in 2020 found that water received less than 3% of climate finance overall.

Rising sea levels were introducing salt into water sources in places, and drought was pushing water deep underground in others, he said, forcing people, mostly women, to spend longer and walk further in search of water.
[…]
He pointed out that it was the poorest people in countries that had contributed the least to the climate crisis who were suffering the most and said investment in managing water supply should be focused in these areas.

The overwhelming focus of talks on addressing the climate crisis had been on trying to slow it down, he said, at the expense of highlighting the current impact on some of the most climate-stressed parts of the world.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/nov/10/global-water-crisis-ignored-cop26-climate-talks-wateraid

…& although I’m all for the prospect of slowing down the rate at which we pitch ourselves into the incident pit of climate change…I find myself forcibly reminded that an approach geared around a great deal of largely empty rhetoric designed specifically to slow down a process has often proved to be an effective means for some to avoid the consequences of their actions

Historically, Trump has relied on lawsuits as a delaying tactic to benefit his business interests, or to claim executive privilege or immunity to stymie congressional, state and other investigations when he was president, according to legal analysts.
[…]
DoJ lawyers and experts say that Trump’s legal fortunes now look grimmer, and that his current battle royale to block the House inquiry into the Capitol riot by his allies seems quite weak, though it may delay the inquiry for months.
[…]
Other DoJ veterans agree that Trump’s legal case looks flimsy, but say it could stall the House inquiry.

“The executive privilege claim against the National Archives is extremely weak,” said former federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig. “The question is whether he can game the system to run out the clock and make the requests moot.”

That may well be the point. Trump’s regular use of litigation to delay federal and state inquiries echo his modus operandi when he was president and in the business world, say experts.

“Likelihood of success on Trump’s legal claims is not always or often the primary goal,” said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University. “The primary goal, at least for the farfetched claims, is delay. If there’s also a partial victory, so much the better.”
[…]
Trump’s legal tactics fit his old playbook. “He is behaving now as he long behaved as a real estate investor and builder in the high stakes and often vicious world of New York commercial real estate,” Gillers said. “When the same tactics are employed in national politics, the victims are democracy and the nation.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/09/trump-capitol-attack-inquiry-legal-setbacks

Donald Trump and his team were never dissuaded by the Hatch Act. Numerous officials were cited for violating its rules during his presidency, but since punishment came down to Trump, they skated. The effectiveness of the Hatch Act depends on people recognizing that there is a rule in place and why it is in place, and it depends on people holding one another accountable for following that rule. Trump and his staff paid no heed to either.

That was very obvious during last year’s national party convention. Far from avoiding the politicization of the White House, Trump worked hard to leverage it. It wasn’t simply using the White House as a backdrop for campaign events or commercials, either; he tried to frame his residency in the building as being something that Democrats were trying unfairly to take away from him, not as a time-limited rental under the bounds of American law.
[…]
In the news release announcing its findings — findings that extend beyond this one incident to include more than a dozen Trump administration officials — the OSC notes that it is pretty much powerless at this point.

“Though discipline is no longer possible once subjects leave government service,” it reads, “OSC is issuing this report to fully document the violations, highlight the enforcement challenges that OSC confronted in investigating the violations, and to deter similar violations in the future.”
[…]
A prohibition that neither serves to prohibit actions nor to hold to account those who violate it is not a prohibition at all. It’s just a request, one that people like Trump are free to ignore. Now, 15 months later, we can say: Yes, the stunt was a violation of the law. But we then also have to ask: So what?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/11/09/year-later-an-obviously-illegal-campaign-stunt-is-determined-have-been-illegal/

On the surface, a judge’s ruling on Tuesday night that Congress can obtain Trump White House files related to the Jan. 6 riot seemed to echo another high-profile ruling in November 2019. In the earlier matter, a judge said a former White House counsel must testify about then-President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to obstruct the Russia investigation.

In both cases, Democratic-controlled House oversight committees issued subpoenas, Mr. Trump sought to stonewall those efforts by invoking constitutional secrecy powers, and Obama-appointed Federal District Court judges — to liberal cheers — ruled against him. Each ruling even made the same catchy declaration: “presidents are not kings.”

But there was a big difference: The White House counsel case two years ago had chewed up three and a half months by the time Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a 120-page opinion to end its first stage. Just 23 days elapsed between Mr. Trump’s filing of the Jan. 6 papers lawsuit and Judge Tanya Chutkan’s ruling against him.

The case, which raises novel issues about the scope of executive privilege when asserted by a former president, is not over: Mr. Trump is asking an appeals court to overturn Judge Chutkan’s ruling and, in the interim, to block the National Archives from giving Congress the first set of files on Friday. The litigation appears destined to reach the Supreme Court, which Mr. Trump reshaped with three appointments.
[…]
The slow pace of such litigation worked to the clear advantage of Mr. Trump, who vowed to defy “all” congressional oversight subpoenas after Democrats took the House in the 2018 midterm. He frequently lost in court, but only after delays that ran out the clock on any chance that such efforts would uncover information before the 2020 election.
[…]
The chairman of the committee, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, has said he wants to wrap up by “early spring.” In that case, the committee would need access to the files it has subpoenaed by late winter for that information to be part of any report.

Legally, the committee could continue working through the rest of 2022. If Republicans retake the House in the midterm election, the inquiry would very likely end.
[…]
If the D.C. Circuit declines, as Judge Chutkan did, to issue a preliminary injunction, Mr. Trump will presumably immediately appeal to the Supreme Court via its so-called shadow docket, by which the justices can swiftly decide emergency matters without full briefs and arguments.
[…]
Notably, in another Trump-era case, involving access to financial papers held by his accounting firm, Mazars USA, the Federal District Court judge assigned to that matter, Amit Mehta, was sensitive to the timing implications and took less than a month after the case was filed in April 2019 to hand down his opinion that Congress could get the records.

But a D.C. Circuit panel took about five more months before reaching that same result — a nominal win for Congress — in October 2019. Mr. Trump then appealed to the Supreme Court, which waited until July 2020 to send the case back down to Judge Mehta to start the litigation over again using different standards.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/us/politics/swift-ruling-tests-trump-delay-tactic.html

Exactly. Your turn to do what’s right, Mr. Attorney General.

NO EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE EXCUSES FURTHER DELAY. https://t.co/hPpho3JCEm

— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) November 10, 2021

…proxies are a bitch, I’m sure you’ll agree

Poland-Belarus border crisis: what is going on and who is to blame? [Guardian]

…but on the upside…tomorrow’s friday… & ellie saved you from this stuff on tuesday…so there’s at least some small mercies to be grateful for…& once I get that far there’ll even be some tunes underneath all this