Enter the Fray

Opponents on Monday protest an extraordinary session bill submitted by Wisconsin Republican legislators.

(John Hart/ Wisconsin State Journal via Associated Press)

Talk about lame lame ducks.

Republicans lost control of gubernatorial and other statewide seats in Michigan and Wisconsin. But instead of graciously accepting the will of voters and handing over the keys to the new guys and gals, they decided to use their remaining days to plunder the prizes won by the rival party. Boo on them.

In Wisconsin, where Republican Gov. Scott Walker lost the top leadership job to Democrat Tony Evers on Nov. 6, the Republican-controlled Legislature is voting on last-minute legislation in a special session that would, among many, many other things, strip Evers of all sorts of authority his predecessor enjoyed.

Wisconsin legislators are also seeking limits on the power of the incoming Democratic attorney general, including by giving themselves the right to hire an outside attorney in certain cases such as those regarding redistricting. (The state’s gerrymandered districts that favor Republicans have been under legal attack). Walker, who is governor for a few more weeks, said he’s inclined to support the legislation.

The Michigan Legislature is on a similar track, rushing through laws to limit the power of the state’s incoming Democratic governor, attorney general and secretary of state. According to the Detroit News, it’s the first time Democrats have held all these seats since 1990.

(That’s not all the last-minute self-serving legislation apparently being rammed through the Michigan Legislature this month.)

If this seems like a familiar a story line it could be because North Carolina’s Republicans took similar action in 2016 before they had to hand the governor seat over to Democrat Roy Cooper.

As my colleague Michael McGough pointed out at the time, one of the last-minute changes — state Senate approval of cabinet members — is actually sensible. But even good ideas smell like sour grapes when they come as part of a figurative middle finger to an incoming, elected leader.

These are power grabs, pure and simple. And though this sore loser legislation is apparently legal, citizens of those states should make note of the legislators who vote for it — and hold them accountable.

A bit of this sore loser-ness has been focused on California as well. Republicans lost spectacularly in the Golden State on Nov. 6, seeing their already small contingent of congressional and state legislative seats diminished to historic lows. That’s got to hurt, but it doesn’t excuse Republican leaders such as outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan for trying to sully the reputation of California’s voting system by suggesting there was something amiss in the counting. What happened is no mystery; the state made it easier to register and to cast ballots, which benefited traditionally disenfranchised voters who tend to be more left leaning.

Look, losing sucks for everyone. But when the losing team pushes over the prize table on the way off the field, they ought not be invited back for the next season.

Shoppers browse the aisles during a Black Friday sale at a Target store in Newport, Ky.

(John Minchillo / Associated Press)

First there was Black Friday, the post-Thanksgiving shopping extravaganza that has become synonymous with huge deals, long lines and the occasional brawl.

Then there was Cyber Monday, because online retailers wanted in on the buying bonanza.

Then came Giving Tuesday, because nonprofits need money too. (It’s today, if you have somehow managed to avoid having your email inbox filled with appeals.)

Before marketers get their hands on Wednesday and cook up another campaign designed to part people from their cash, I’d like to claim it to highlight a byproduct of all this spending: trash.

Let us call this day Waste Wednesday. No one has to spend money to celebrate. Simply gather together all packaging material that came with stuff bought over the past few days, pile it up and contemplate its immensity and its future.

Each new television, blender or toy (and even the swag from your donation to public radio) comes swaddled in a considerable amount of disposable material — boxes, bags and every type of plastic you can imagine.

Most of this material is promptly discarded and sent on its way to landfills, though perhaps a bit might be diverted into recycling bins and come back to life as part of something put on sale next Black Friday. But some of it will probably end up in the environment, as trash has a nasty way of doing, released on purpose or by accident into gutters, storm drains, by the sides of the freeway and, increasingly, into the world’s oceans.

After gathering all of the single-use packaging material you received, you should commemorate the moment by posting a photo of the pile on social media with the hashtag #WasteWednesday. That’s it.

If this catches on, it might give retailers incentive to cut down on all the disposable packaging that gets bundled with their products in time for next year.

Instead of threatening to punish GM for closing factories, President Trump should seek more subsidies for electric vehicles.

(Toby Talbot / Associated Press)

General Motors’ announcement that it is shutting down auto plants and laying off blue- and white-collar workers put President Trump in a predictable froth, which my colleague Jon Healey wrote about.

But if the president was really interested in helping GM, he’d be looking at supportive policies, not punitive (and likely illegal) threats to withhold subsidies. In fact, the president should be increasing subsidies for some of the lines GM plans to end: the Chevrolet Cruze and Volt lines.

GM’s announcement overlapped with a sprinkling of dire reports (which I wrote about) that the U.S. and the world are botching our chance to more directly confront greenhouse gas emissions.

One crucial step would be to reduce the number of gas-powered vehicles. But electric cars and hybrids are more expensive than their gas-powered counterparts, in part due to a lack of economies of scale. So instead of threatening to withhold EV subsidies to GM, Trump ought to look at increasing them across the industry, and finding other ways to make EVs more affordable for consumers (and no, EVs aren’t the complete fix, but they would help).

As the government’s own study on Friday pointed out, the U.S. faces a severe hit to its economy from climate change. So his drill-and-burn policies will just end up costing the nation more down the road, not to mention helping make the world less habitable for humans.

If the president would pull his head out of the oil well, he would see there is huge economic opportunity to be had by leading the global turn to renewable energy, and the U.S. could seize the pole position if the government did more to help build the market for electric vehicles.

More than a century ago, these newfangled toys for the middle class — automobiles — became integral to American society when the government invested in paved roads for the cars to travel on, and Henry Ford found a way to make those cars affordable to more people.

The government could do more now to build up the infrastructure for EVs, including charging stations, more and better consumer rebates for converting (and scrapping, not reselling, their used gas guzzlers), and other steps to send both a market signal and market support for products that serve a broader purpose than just getting us to work or the grocery store.

President Trump with General Motors CEO Mary Barra in 2017

(Brendan Smialowski / AFP/Getty Images)

For someone who has pushed hard to free U.S. companies from federal interference, President Trump is unusually willing to tell U.S. companies how to run their businesses.

The latest example is General Motors, which announced plans Monday to cut thousands of jobs and potentially shutter a handful of factories in the face of softening car sales. Traditional Republicans might consider this sort of development a painful but necessary part of the business cycle. To Trump, though, it was a needless blow to an important constituency — autoworkers — in Ohio and Michigan, two blue-collar-heavy Midwestern states that were important parts of his winning coalition in 2016. (The company’s updated plans also envision plant shutdowns in Maryland and Canada, plus two unspecified plants outside of North America.)

So Trump hectored and threatened GM’s leadership, both directly and through the media. He raised the stakes Tuesday on Twitter:

You can insert your own thoughts here about the constitutionality of suddenly (and unilaterally) withholding subsidies from one company while providing them to its competitors. Also, note that the subsidy Trump specified is tied to one of the products GM CEO Mary Barra says is crucial to the company’s future.

Republicans may not object to Trump bullying world leaders in pursuit of this country’s priorities. But bullying the leader of a company in a globalized industry for having a global strategy? That should drive conservatives nuts.

Trump’s America First perspective seems to be making it hard for him to see the reality of GM’s situation. Like many multinational corporations, automakers have factories around the world not just to cut labor costs, but to put production closer to the demand its serving. And though sales dipped slightly in the U.S. last year, they continued growing robustly overseas, especially in China and other developing countries.

So while it might make sense to trim production in the United States, particularly of small cars that are making up a shrinking share of the local market, it makes no sense to roll back production in China — or in Mexico, a prime exporting location thanks to its many tariff-cutting trade agreements.

Whether GM’s bet in China pays off depends on a number of factors, including whether China allows GM to succeed. But Trump may be giving the company’s Chinese investments an unintended hand by piling hefty tariffs on Chinese goods imported into the U.S., which in turn have prompted China to slap tariffs on a growing number of U.S. exports. With those extra costs in place, it’s cheaper for a U.S. company to serve the Chinese market by producing goods there with non-U.S. parts than it would be to serve it with goods exported from a plant in, say, Ohio.

In fairness, Trump’s tariff policy aims to change truly bad behavior that the Chinese government has encouraged or even adopted as policy. The administration has the right goal, which is to stop the theft of intellectual property and eliminate the subsidies and trade barriers that violate international agreements. It’s just that the tactics it’s using — unilaterally imposing tariffs that raise prices for U.S. consumers and invite retaliatory tariffs that hurt U.S. exports — could cause a lot of unnecessary collateral damage.

That damage could increase if the president raises tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods on Jan. 1, as threatened, and slaps new tariffs on an additional $267 billion worth of Chinese imports. Tariffs are consumption taxes, and the larger and more unavoidable they become, the greater the downward pressure they place on the U.S. economy.

Just a reminder: U.S. automobile sales, like the overall U.S. economy, are cyclical. Industry analysts started predicting more than a year ago that sales were leveling off and would start to slide, and that’s what Barra is reacting to. In fact, the downturn in both automobile and home sales has some economists worried about a recession.

No one welcomes big layoffs — GM’s planned cuts would sacrifice about 8% of the company’s jobs. But Barra recognizes that consumers, not presidents, ultimately decide what happens to auto sales and each company’s market share. And company leaders, not presidents, have to decide how to compete and thrive over the long run.

Residents watch last year’s Thomas fire, the kind of conflagration that will worsen and become more common with climate change.

(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)

In the future, when the seas have risen along with global temperatures, and droughts, floods and heat waves have collapsed ecosystems and made sections of the Earth uninhabitable for humans, we won’t be able to say we didn’t see it coming.

Even the Trump administration, in a report released (fittingly enough) on Black Friday, now admits that climate change is here. In fact, another report released the same day says nearly one-quarter of U.S. carbon missions can be traced to oil and gas leases on federal land, so the culpability goes beyond inaction and bad policies to, at least minimally, earning revenues from extracting fossil fuels. Phasing out those leases would go a long way toward meeting national emissions goals.

But wait, there’s more: According to the annual United Nations Environment Program’s Emissions Gap Report released Tuesday in Paris, governments that agreed in 2015 to aggressively reduce their carbon emissions so far have achieved little.

In fact, the report says, promises made only three short years ago to hold temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-Industrial Age levels, with a goal of limiting the rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, “are inadequate to bridge the emissions gap in 2030. The U.N. said it was still technically possible to meet the temperature target, but if national “ambitions are not increased before 2030, exceeding the 1.5 degree Celsius goal can no longer be avoided.”

The U.N. report also said that, after three years of relative stability, carbon emissions went up last year despite mitigation efforts and that “global greenhouse gas emissions show no signs of peaking.”

Lovely.

California has famously led the way among what are called sub-national actors, and although such efforts are good, the report notes that they fall far short of the emissions reductions needed globally. It will take fuller national involvement.

Which brings us inevitably to President Trump, who has said, among other things, that he doesn’t believe human activity is affecting climate change. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Trump’s response to his own administration’s reports of dire consequences was to state simply, “I don’t believe it.”

Because if he did believe it, then he’d have to acknowledge that his policies to extract and burn ever more fossil fuel endangers the nation’s welfare. And to paraphrase scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson, the climate doesn’t care whether Trump believes it’s changing. It’s changing anyway. The challenge is whether the American people — and, for that matter, the global population — believe it and are willing to combat it with everything from changing consumer choices to changing recalcitrant governments.

There are a lot of phrases in the English language for what we’re doing. “Fiddling while Rome burns” comes to mind, a la Nero. There’s also “standing idly by” and “whistling past the graveyard.”

But no matter how you phrase it, we’re doing it to ourselves.

For us non-material types (except for books. And music. And cooking utensils — you get the idea) Black Friday is the bleakest day of the year.

On Thanksgiving Thursday, we celebrate comity and family and take stock of our blessings.

On Black Friday, shoppers throng stores at ungodly hours, elbowing their way forward and swiping goods out from beneath each others’ noses just to save a few bucks on things that neither they nor the intended holiday gift recipient really need.

It’s like lemmings with wallets.

So where did this shopping orgy come from?

Blame Philadelphia. And football. And the Army and the Navy — well, at least their academies.

And, of course, marketers.

Researcher and amateur word sleuth Bonnie Taylor-Blake gets the credit for tracking this down a few years ago. As the New Yorker noted, the common explanations — it was the day retailers counted on for making their year profitable — never made sense to her, so she began digging.

It turns out that in the 1950s, thousands of people would descend on downtown Philadelphia for the annual Army-Navy football game on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. On the day before the game, out-of-towners would add to the throngs of locals who went downtown to shop. The crowds became so huge that all police vacations were canceled to make as many officers available as possible for crowd and traffic control.

The ticked-off cops began calling it Black Friday, and the name stuck.

Shop owners at first were displeased — Black Friday sounds closer to the Black Plague or a stock market rout (the original 1869 coinage referred to the collapse of the gold market after robber barons Jay Gould and James “Diamond Jim” Fisk tried to corner it) than it does to “come spend all your money.” So a movement developed to rebrand it as Big Friday.

Yeah, that didn’t last long.

So Black Friday it is. And in three days we’ll have Cyber Monday, another marketing ploy to separate consumers from their cash.

Who knew lemmings could use a mouse?

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. defended the impartiality of federal judges.

(Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press)

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. deserves credit for pushing back — judiciously — against President Trump’s latest attack on the federal judiciary.

Trump had complained that “an Obama judge” in Northern California had ruled against the president’s attempt to restrict asylum applications. He ominously added: “I’ll tell you what, it’s not going to happen like this anymore.”

In a statement released by the Supreme Court, Roberts said: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

It was a point worth making, even though it wasn’t likely to have any influence on Trump. In fact, the president struck back right away on Twitter:

So, good for the chief justice, but his intervention inspires a few thoughts:

* I wonder how many people who will applaud Roberts for this statement think that the Republican Senate in 2016 “stole” a seat from Barack Obama by refusing to consider his nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to replace the late Antonin Scalia. Isn’t that just another way of saying that liberals were denied an “Obama judge”?

* Maybe Roberts should also aim his criticism at journalists, who routinely identify federal judges in terms of the president who appointed them, even when it’s not relevant. I wrote about that reflex here.

* Roberts knows that his assertion that judges aren’t partisan requires a large asterisk. In some politically charged cases, judges appointed by Democratic presidents can be expected to rule differently from judges appointed by Republicans. But that doesn’t make them partisan hacks. Trump needs to be reminded of that, but so do some Democrats.

* If Roberts is in a remonstrating mood, maybe he will quietly discourage his colleagues on the court from acting in ways that reinforce the “Obama judge”/” Trump judge” stereotype — such as attending events of ideologically defined groups such as the Federalist Society and the American Constitution Society.

* Roberts’ defense of a so-called Obama judge is a reminder that, as a senator, Obama voted against Roberts’ confirmation. Obama said he voted “no” because Roberts had “far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak.” The cynical view, of course, is that he didn’t want the political baggage of having voted for a “Bush judge.”

Of course, despite being dissed by Obama, Roberts voted twice to uphold provisions of the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment, against legal challenges. Does that make him an honorary “Obama judge”? Some Republicans think so.

Former state Sen. Roderick Wright testifies during his trial for voter fraud and perjury in 2014.

(Stephen Carr / Associated Press)

With the state Supreme Court having given its blessing, it seems all but certain that Gov. Jerry Brown will pardon former state Sen. Roderick Wright (D-Inglewood), who was convicted of voter fraud and perjury four years ago.

In fact, I would be surprised if he didn’t, and soon. Wright was a popular politician who many believed was unfairly targeted by the district attorney for simply misinterpreting the residency rules for state lawmakers. The law says state legislators must live in the district they seek to represent. But what does “live in” mean?

It’s actually a more complicated answer than you might think. California is a big state, and the job of a full-time legislator means they must spend a considerable amount of time in Sacramento. Many choose to maintain a home in that city, and even enroll their kids in school there. That seems reasonable.

Wright’s case, however, was not about spending time in Sacramento. He rented an apartment in a working-class neighborhood in his South Los Angeles district but was actually doing his real living at a nice home in a nearby community that was outside the district’s boundaries. The D.A. thought that was a violation of the trust of voters; so did the Los Angeles Times editorial board.

As part of his sentence, besides a very brief jail stay,Wright was forbidden from running for public office again. Nevertheless, he has continued to be a force in Sacramento, though now as a lobbyist.

Pardoning Wright will erase those felonies and, I fear, also the imperative for current and future legislators to live in their districts. SB 1250, passed earlier this year, pushes lawmakers in the same unwelcome direction. The bill, authored by the senator who replaced Wright in the South L.A. district, loosened the rules for legislators regarding maintaining homes outside their districts.

As a new class of legislators gets ready to take the oath of office next month, its members should also remember the pledge they made to voters during the campaign — that is, to be a true representative of their district. Not just an occasional visitor.

The Trump administration is considering authorizing U.S. troops at the Mexico border to use their weapons to defend border agents.

(Eric Gay / Associated Press)

President Trump may be about to make a bad decision even worse.

In the run-up to the midterm election, Trump tried to turn the northward flow of a few thousand desperate Central Americans into a crisis of sovereignty, describing the parade of young men, mothers and children as an “assault” on the border, which he threatened to close.

So like any commander in chief who has no idea what he’s doing, Trump ordered active-duty troops to the border to augment the 6,600 federal agents already patrolling there. Under the Posse Comitatus Act, the military cannot be used for domestic law enforcement purposes on U.S. soil. So the Pentagon has deployed up to 7,000 troops, many of them unarmed, to aid in surveillance, build or mend fences, improve fortifications of border crossings, and other such non-military work.

Now it seems the Pentagon is considering changing directives to the troops to allow them to use their weapons to defend border agents from attack. That might thread the needle of the law, but it certainly violates the intent to limit U.S. armed forces’ domestic deployments and preserve them for defending the country from attacks and militarized threats abroad.

It’s hard to see where firing combat weapons at the unarmed and desperate fits in with a military mission. And it’s not like the Border Patrol has trouble defending itself — agents used their firearms 17 times last year, down from 55 incidents five years before.

But allowing active-duty troops to also use their weapons to protect the already armed Border Patrol escalates the risk that frustrated migrants throwing rocks might get shot, an egregiously out-of-balance response. And it’s not that the troops are trigger happy. It’s more a matter of training and purpose.

This reminds me of the end of the war in Kosovo two decades ago, where I watched a mob of ethnic Albanians on the south side of the Ibar River in the city of Mitrovica face off against ethnic Serbs who lived on the north side. French troops occupied the main bridge over the river and kept the two groups apart. But the Albanians kept trying to cross the bridge, a human tide the French troops had trouble countering because, as one officer told me, they were trained to kill in combat, not control unarmed and unruly mobs.

So a squadron of Italian police — who were trained in crowd control — was deployed to serve as a buffer between the crowd and the troops, and the confrontation slowly wound down.

It’s a good lesson to remember. Trump deployed the troops as a bit of political theater, and as playwright Anton Chekhov once observed, a gun introduced in the first act will get used in the third. That would turn the farce at the border into tragedy.

Protesters rally outside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, where journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed Oct. 2.

(Ozan Kose / AFP/Getty Images)

The killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is probably responsible would be a challenge to even the most judicious and thoughtful U.S. president. The U.S.-Saudi relationship is long-standing and important, yet the United States cannot be seen to condone the state-sponsored assassination of a journalist.

Of course, President Trump is far from being that ideal president, as is clear from the embarrassing statement about Khashoggi’s killing he released Tuesday.

Reading more like the transcript of a Twitter thread or a Fox News interview than a considered foreign-policy pronouncement, Trump’s statement opened with his “America First” campaign slogan — followed by an exclamation point — and the likewise exclamation-pointed observation that “The world is a very dangerous place!”

Then came an exercise in relativism, with Trump ticking off the sins of Iran (including responsibility “for a bloody proxy war against Saudi Arabia in Yemen”) and a reference to how much money Saudi Arabia spends and invests in the United States. (His estimates of the value of Saudi investment have been widely questioned.)

In the fifth paragraph, Trump finally got around to saying: “The crime against Jamal Khashoggi was a terrible one, and one that our country does not condone.” He then boasted of the sanctions the U.S. was imposing on 17 Saudis identified as being involved in Khashoggi’s killing in Turkey and the disposal of his body.

But what about the crown prince, the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia, whom the CIA reportedly has blamed as the author of the plot?

Trump said that “it could very well be that the crown prince had knowledge of this tragic event — maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!” (Or maybe the killing was ordered by somebody sitting on his bed who weighs 400 pounds.)

“That being said,” Trump continued, “we may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi.” But he left the impression that it wouldn’t bother him that much if the crown prince was proved to be responsible.

“In any case,” he went on, “our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. They have been a great ally in our very important fight against Iran.” (The notion that Iran is uniquely nefarious isn’t just Trump’s view; it’s the policy of his State Department.)

Toward the end of his statement Trump left the door open to approving additional sanctions pressed by Congress, which he referred to disparagingly as people motivated by “political or other reasons.”

But in its totality, the statement was a tone-deaf invocation of American interests narrowly defined and a cavalier rejection of any role in U.S. foreign policy for morality or human rights.

Again, framing a response to the apparent complicity of the Saudi leadership in Khashoggi’s death isn’t easy.

The Washington Post, for whom Khashoggi wrote opinion columns, suggested in an editorial Monday that the U.S. could “sanction and shun” the crown prince “while still doing business with the regime.”

Squaring that circle would be extraordinarily difficult. On Tuesday, though, Trump made it clear he’s not interested in even making the effort.

Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner at a White House event in March 2017.

(Andrew Harnik / Associated Press)

Supporters of Hillary Clinton in 2016 — and even a few non-supporters — are having a good laugh over the report that first daughter/senior advisor Ivanka Trump used a personal email account to transact official business.

On Twitter, John Dean (yes, that John Dean) opined: “Dems should run this to ground given her father thought a very big deal when it involved Hillary. So it’s got to be [a] big deal for Ivanka!” Newsweek in tweeting out its story used the inevitable teaser: “Lock her up?”

The mirth — and bitterness — are understandable. It’s an article of faith among Clinton supporters that the issue of her emails was overblown (including by the “liberal” media). And it’s hard not to chuckle at the irony of improper email traffic ensnaring the daughter of a president who claimed Hillary’s actions were “worse than Watergate.”

I don’t want to spoil anyone’s fun, but the differences between the Clinton and Ivanka email offenses are as noteworthy as the similarities.

First of all, Clinton was the secretary of State with access to sensitive information; Ivanka Trump has a vastly less important (and more amorphous) portfolio.

More important, the Washington Post, which broke this story, noted that the FBI eventually determined that 110 of Clinton’s emails contained classified information at the time they were sent or received. A spokesman for Ivanka Trump’s lawyer said that none of her emails contained classified information. If that’s true, it’s an important difference.

It’s possible to believe that Clinton was “extremely careless” in her handling of classified information (the quotation is from former FBI Director James B. Comey’s famous news conference) and that she a) shouldn’t have been prosecuted and b) should have been elected president rather than Donald Trump.

As the Los Angeles Times put it in a Nov. 2. 2016, editorial reiterating our endorsement of Clinton:

“There is no comparison between Clinton’s carelessness in corresponding with colleagues and the recklessness that Trump would bring to the conduct of actual foreign policy. And that is only one of a multitude of differences between the two nominees.”

Clinton shouldn’t have been “locked up” for her email infractions, and neither should Ivanka Trump based on what the Post has reported. That doesn’t mean the two situations are interchangeable, or that Democrats should see Ivanka’s indiscretions as somehow justifying Clinton’s carelessness with sensitive information or her penchant for secrecy.

It may not have been a crime — it shouldn’t have cost her the election — but it was a big deal.

A federal judge has temporarily ordered the Trump administration to resume accepting asylum requests from border crossers.

(Rodrigo Abd / Associated Press)

It was clear from the start that President Trump didn’t have the legal authority under the Immigration and Naturalization Act to ban asylum requests at any place other than established ports of entry, but the administration went ahead with the order anyway.

Late Monday night a federal judge told the government to knock it off, at least for now.

“The rule barring asylum for immigrants who enter the country outside a port of entry irreconcilably conflicts with the INA and the expressed intent of Congress,” wrote Judge Jon S. Tigar in San Francisco. “Whatever the scope of the President’s authority, he may not rewrite the immigration laws to impose a condition that Congress has expressly forbidden.”

Hate to say we told him so, but ... actually, we don’t hate to say it at all. The president and the anti-immigration hard-liners among his advisors broke the law in denying asylum requests outside ports of entry. They also seem to be violating at least the spirit of asylum laws by throttling back the number of applications they are accepting at the border crossings each day, creating a growing backlog.

Yes, the law gives the president wide latitude in adopting and enforcing immigration regulations and policies, but it does not give him the power to rewrite or ignore fundamental aspects of the law. And the INA is explicit about how, where and when people may apply for asylum:

“Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters), irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this section or, where applicable, section 235(b). ”

I added the boldface to the text in case the White House counsel’s office reads this, because apparently the letter of the law wasn’t plain to the legal team the first time around.

Or maybe it was and the president just decided to forge ahead anyway and gamble that no one would stop him.

Presidents, of course, have the right to try to work through or even around laws and regulations as they feel necessary. President Obama did it when he crafted the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, granting reprieve to people who have been living here without permission since they arrived, usually with their parents, as children.

Congress repeatedly failed to devise a remedy for those folks, so Obama, while saying he couldn’t change immigration law, found a way to help the so-called Dreamers by invoking prosecutorial discretion. With 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally, the government must prioritize whom it removes, and Obama deemed Dreamers who met certain conditions safe from deportation until a permanent fix could be found.

Immigration hard-liners howled at the perceived abuse of executive power and sued, though courts so far have not found in their favor. But Obama’s move was framed within the latitude the law gives the president. Trump went further: The law does not give the president freedom to contradict Congress’ stated intention (see above) to, in this case, let asylum seekers make their requests once they reached U.S. soil, no matter where it might be.

That part of the law was based on the solid humanitarian idea that people fearing for their lives shouldn’t be turned away because they didn’t enter through a designated port.

Is the asylum system abused? Some people probably try to scam it, or make good-faith claims based on conditions that do not meet the stringent requirements of being likely to face death or persecution for their race, faith, nationality, political beliefs or membership in “a particular social group,” which has been subject to interpretation by the courts.

But we have a legal system for processing asylum requests and sifting out the false claims, and no presidential anti-immigration stance should compromise it.

The conditions at the border — a crush of desperate people seeking safety from dangerous conditions in their home countries — is a humanitarian crisis, not an immigration crisis. And it is heartless of the administration to respond to it with military deployments, blatant violation of asylum law, scapegoating and fear-mongering.

And it is distressing that so many Americans fall for it.

King County, Washington, will require gun sellers to post warnings about the dangers of owning a firearm.

(Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

In California, businesses that sell products containing known carcinogens must post “clear and reasonable” warnings about the danger of exposure consumers face (remember that brouhaha about coffee?). Look at the side of a can of beer and you find a label warning that “drinking distilled spirits, beer, coolers, wine and other alcoholic beverages may increase cancer risk, and, during pregnancy, can cause birth defects.” Ditto for tobacco products.

But in Washington state, the King County Board of Health (think Seattle) has gone one better about a consumer product with a much more immediate risk of death. It recently ordered all gun vendors in the county to post signs warning of the increased risks of danger from possession of a firearm. The signs read: “Warning: The presence of a firearm in the home significantly increases the risk of suicide, homicide, death during domestic violence disputes and unintentional deaths to children, household members and others.”

As I noted recently, gun suicides far outpace gun homicides, and middle-aged white men are most prone to kill themselves with a gun.

Similarly, women in a house where a gun is kept have a significantly increased risk of getting shot to death during a domestic violence incident. (If they read this, I suspect fewer women would want to live in a house where a gun is present.)

The Everytown for Gun Safety group reported last year that a majority of mass shootings — four or more people shot dead, not counting the killer — from 2009-16 involved domestic violence.

Yes, we stand horrified if no longer shocked by the Thousand Oaks massacre, the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, the Santa Fe High School massacre in Texas, the … well, here’s the list. Go revisit all the mass killings you’ve forgotten about.

But as a society, we also tend to ignore the routine carnage of one or two or three or four people shot and killed almost invariably by a father or husband or boyfriend who had easy access to a firearm.

In a dark irony, surveys on gun ownership find that where hunting once was the prime motivator for people buying guns, now it’s fear — a desire to own a gun for self-protection, even though violent crime has been in steady decline for a quarter century. And even though having a gun in the house increases the chances it will be used on a family member or acquaintance, such weapons are rarely used in self-defense.

People ought to know these things as they browse the gun cases, and the idea ought to spread far beyond King County. It’s a sane, if baby-step, approach to making sure that people who buy guns know what they’re getting themselves into.

President Trump points to CNN’s Jim Acosta during a Nov. 7 news conference as a White House intern reaches to take the microphone away.

(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

President Trump has a knack for elevating the people around him. Kind of like LeBron James — except, umm, different.

Take Trump’s ongoing feud with CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta. For the second time this month, the president has turned Acosta into a sympathetic figure, which is remarkable to anyone who has seen Acosta ask a question in front of a live camera.

After a testy exchange during a press conference at the White House on Nov. 7, Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, announced that Acosta’s security pass to the White House was being suspended. Sanders first accused Acosta of manhandling a female White House intern, then after CNN sued, she said Acosta had hogged the microphone in a disruptive way.

On Friday, a federal judge (who was a Trump appointee, no less) issued a temporary restraining order against the White House, saying the summary suspension had most likely violated Acosta’s right to due process. On Monday, however, CNN was asking for U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly’s help again, saying the White House was trying to renew Acosta’s suspension before the parties were scheduled to return to court.

Kelly’s specific instruction — agreed to by attorneys for both CNN and the White House — was for the two sides to review his ruling and return to court Monday to discuss how to move forward, possibly with a mutually agreed upon schedule for the remaining court dates. The White House apparently had other ideas. What it did instead was try a do-over that would formally suspend Acosta’s pass by Monday afternoon, while still acknowledging that Acosta would retain his pass as long as Kelly’s temporary restraining order remained in place.

You can’t blame Sanders and her boss, White House Communications Director Bill Shine, for going through Kelly’s order and trying to correct the deficiencies the judge cited. On Friday they wrote Acosta a letter saying his pass was going to be suspended; the letter gave him a chance to respond and made clear who was deciding the issue (ultimately, Trump).

The problem is that it’s not really due process when you make up a rule and apply it ex post facto. That’s what the White House is doing here, by its own admission.

“We had not previously thought that a set of formal rules for journalists’ behavior at press conferences was necessary,” Sanders and Shine wrote. Instead, they said, there was a “widely shared understanding” that reporters would not hog the microphone. They would ask but a single question when called upon, unless the White House deigned to allow a follow-up or two, and then let someone else have a turn.

That’s a pretty good description of the decorum that is supposed to rule the press room, but it’s violated from time to time by reporters who can’t seem to get the president (whoever it happens to be, not just this one) to answer in the complete and forthcoming fashion they desire. Over the years, the decorum has been (more or less) maintained informally, by pressure from one’s peers and from White House staff.

Suddenly applying far more serious consequences to violating the informal rules of decorum is a sharp shift from past practice. Neither Acosta nor any other White House correspondent was given notice of that change; they all may be on notice now, but they certainly weren’t on Nov. 7.

That’s why what Sanders and Shine (and Trump) are doing to Acosta is fundamentally unfair. Here’s hoping that it will be seen as legally deficient as well.

Update, 1:21 p.m.: Apparently, even the White House recognized the inequity of cracking down on Acosta for violating rules that had not yet been written. The administration announced Monday afternoon that it was dropping its effort to lift Acosta’s press pass. Instead, it said, it was putting all correspondents on notice of the new rules it had sought to apply retroactively to the CNN reporter — reporters cannot ask more than one question (unless the White House chooses to permit follow-ups) and must “physically surrendering the microphone to White House staff” immediately thereafter, or risk losing their press pass — with “a more elaborate and comprehensive set of rules” threatened if reporters “unprofessional” conduct spreads to encounters outside formal press conferences.

Still, Sanders couldn’t resist getting in another dig: “We have created these rules with a degree of regret,” she said in a statement circulated through the press pool. “For years, members of the White House press corps have attended countless press events with the President and other officials without engaging in the behavior Mr. Acosta displayed at the November 7, 2018 press conference. We would have greatly preferred to continue hosting White House press conferences in reliance on a set of understood professional norms, and we believe the overwhelming majority of journalists covering the White House share that preference. But, given the position taken by CNN, we now feel obligated to replace previously shared practices with explicit rules.”

The U.S. government has been after WikiLeaks maestro Julian Assange for eight years, ever since the site published a cache of classified documents it had obtained from U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning. And now we learn, through some sloppy legal paperwork, that Assange has secretly been charged by federal prosecutors.

With what, however, we don’t know. And that’s crucial.

Assange remains ensconced in Ecuador’s embassy in London, so the likelihood of him actually being extradited and prosecuted remain slim for now. But that would change if he wears out his welcome there, as some news outlets have reported he’s doing.

As The Times’ editorial board observed in 2010, the risk is that the government would bring a case against Assange and WikiLeaks that could conceivably be used against newspaper reporters and publishers, to the detriment of press freedoms. Obtaining leaked material and exposing government secrets are key aspects of what the news media do.

“Penalties have been imposed in the past on government employees who have leaked confidential information, but not on the reporters or editors who published it,” we wrote. “Is Assange a journalist? Assuming that he received and published information rather than obtaining it on his own, the answer seems to us to be yes. In principle, we can’t see a difference between WikiLeaks and one of the newspapers that published the information.”

Some Democrats might want to cast Assange’s behavior two years ago in a sharply different light. WikiLeaks bedeviled Hillary Clinton’s campaign by publishing emails stolen from campaign officials and the Democratic Party. (That’s one reason then-candidate Donald Trump repeatedly professed his love for the site.) Assange didn’t disguise his antipathy toward Clinton, which raised questions about whether he knowingly participated in an effort by Russian agents to swing the election toward Trump.

It’s easy to imagine special counsel Robert S. Mueller III pursuing Assange along those lines, given that Mueller has already brought charges against a number of Russian agents for allegedly meddling in the 2016 election. And one might think that such a prosecution would pose little risk of criminalizing journalistic behavior. There’s a clear line between providing an outlet for newsworthy material leaked by government whistleblowers and deliberately acting as a conduit for foreign, state-sponsored hackers, isn’t there?

Maybe not. If material is newsworthy — that is, if the public would be better off with the information out in the open — it may not matter from a journalistic perspective where it’s coming from or what the source’s motives might be. If Russian hackers had obtained emails by Clinton secretly promising to seek to overturn the 2nd Amendment or to reduce Social Security benefits after the election, would a U.S. newspaper be wrong to publish them, even if the editor knew how the emails had been obtained and why they were being offered?

These are tough issues, and it’s admittedly self-serving for folks in my position to suggest that the government tread carefully around them. Regardless, we know now that Assange is facing federal charges. One can only hope that they won’t set a dangerous precedent.

Jim Acosta walks away from the U.S. District Courthouse in Washington.

(Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press)

The Trump administration is putting a positive spin on a federal judge’s order that it restore the press credential of CNN’s Jim Acosta. But make no mistake: The temporary restraining order issued on Friday by U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly (irony alert: a Trump appointee) is a defeat for the administration.

It should accept that defeat gracefully, and permanently restore Acosta’s “hard pass.”

Kelly’s order is a form of emergency relief, pending further action on the merits of CNN’s lawsuit. That’s why White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders emphasized after the ruling that Acosta’s hard pass is being “temporarily” reinstated.

Sanders also made much — too much — of what she said was Kelly’s view that “there is no absolute 1st Amendment right to access to the White House.”

Actually, CNN’s 1st Amendment argument was a more nuanced one: that the decision to blackball Acosta was “a form of content- and viewpoint-based discrimination” and an act of retaliation for protected speech. And while it may not have figured in Kelly’s order, that argument can be addressed in further proceedings.

In issuing his order, Kelly focused on CNN’s other constitutional argument: that the White House violated Acosta’s due process rights under the 5th Amendment by not providing him with advance notice of the revocation or a way to challenge it. Kelly said that the way the White House decided to deprive Acosta of his credential was “so shrouded in mystery that the government could not tell me . . . who made the decision. “

Sanders said that her staff will “further develop rules and processes to ensure fair and orderly press conferences in the future. There must be decorum in the White House.” Trump echoed that call for civility in an exchange with reporters, saying: “You can’t take three questions and four questions. You can’t stand up and not sit down.”

Fair enough. It would be hard to object, for example, to a protocol that reporters surrender the microphone after one or two questions. But the White House can insist on decorum without casting Acosta or other reporters the president finds annoying into the wilderness.

Nine days ago, Rep. Mimi Walters, right, looked headed for reelection. Now Democrat Katie Porter looks to be the winner.

(Chris Carlson / Associated Press)

What a difference (checks calendar) eight days make.

The morning after election day, things looked grim for Orange County Democrats, who had entered the fall election full of hope and enthusiasm. Election night results showed county votes falling largely behind Republicans in the House and statewide races. Although Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of Huntington Beach, the most vulnerable of the Republican House incumbents, looked like he was headed for defeat in the coastal 48th District, Republicans were leading in other county-centric House races, and O.C. votes for statewide candidates were falling on the red side of the ledger even as Democrats were winning in the overall count.

“But wait!” activists said. “They’re still counting votes!”

And so they were, and are. As of the end of the counting day Thursday, the tide had turned.

In the 45th Congressional District, as reliably Republican as Pat Nixon’s cloth coat, incumbent Rep. Mimi Walters (R-Laguna Beach) now trails her Democratic challenger, UC Irvine law professor Katie Porter, and the math doesn’t favor a Walters recovery. The Associated Press projected Porter the victor Thursday afternoon; the official tabulation continues.

In the race to succeed Republican Ed Royce in the 39th District, which lies mostly in northern Orange County with some splash over into Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties, former Royce aide Young Kim had been edging Democrat Gil Cisneros. And though Kim still leads the O.C. vote, Cisneros has caught up enough that, combined with the votes in the neighboring counties, he has a slight lead.

Kim, parroting top Republican talking points and without offering evidence, has accused the Cisneros campaign of interfering in the count by “harassing and intimidating vote counters in Orange County. She also said her rival has earned a rebuke from the Los Angeles County registrar of voter for physical ballot tampering.” Except the registrar’s office says it did no such thing.

Walters similarly has impugned the integrity of the vote count, also without evidence. Thanks, President Trump, for injecting conspiracy-theory idiocy into the election process.

Anyway, the vote count has also turned blue for most of the statewide results in Orange County. The morning after election day, Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox led Democrat Gavin Newsom, and other Republicans down the statewide ballot similarly were getting the love: Mark P. Meuser in the secretary of state race, and Konstantinos Roditis in the treasurer’s race.

Not so much any more. And that slight rumbling sound from Yorba Linda is Richard Nixon rolling in his grave.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, shown in May, has been busy this week repairing the company’s image.

(Ludovic Marin / AFP/Getty Images)

A few days after the 2016 election, I attended the Techonomy tech conference in Half Moon Bay where Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg gave a rare interview. Reports were swirling at the time about people plying Facebook with fake news items in an effort to boost Donald Trump’s successful campaign, and Techonomy founder David Kirkpatrick asked whether Zuckerberg thought the social network had influenced the outcome. The youthful billionaire essentially laughed Kirkpatrick off:

We now know just how misguided Zuckerberg was about the uses of his company’s platform. Facebook has spent much of the Trump presidency dealing with revelations not just about fake news, but about foreign meddling in U.S. affairs and the mobilization of hate-fueled mobs around the world.

This week the New York Times triggered another wave of criticism with a lengthy investigation recounting how much effort Facebook put into denying its problems and attacking its critics. Responding to the Times’ tl;dr piece with one of his own, Zuckerberg unleashed a kajillion-word blog post outlining the steps Facebook has been and will be taking to minimize the amount of harmful content its users publish. He also dumped the right-of-center consultants who had defended the company too, umm, aggressively.

The third paragraph of Zuckerberg’s post lays out important questions about how to govern a social network with global reach and deep penetration: “What should be the limits to what people can express? What content should be distributed and what should be blocked? Who should decide these policies and make enforcement decisions? Who should hold those people accountable?”

But as important as those questions are, that paragraph ignores the whole reason Facebook exists, which is to create a compelling way for marketers — of products, services, ideas or anything else an entity with money wants to promote — to reach people who might respond to their messages. Advertisers are Facebook’s sole source of revenue; the company’s stock in trade is learning so much about its users that it can target an advertiser’s messages better than other platforms can. And in order to display more advertisements, the company tweaks the site’s core function — the distribution of users’ posts — to maximize the amount of time users spend on Facebook. The key piece of that equation is elevating content that’s popular within each user’s group of friends, and downplaying posts that are not.

In other words, Facebook is purpose built to funnel messages, particularly commercial ones, to the people most likely to respond to them. So of course it became a useful tool for people eager to manipulate the public for malign purposes. The same features that make Facebook ideal for the peddlers of goods make it ideal for the peddlers of rumors, lies and hate.

That’s why Facebook finds itself shifting uncomfortably into the mode of a content arbiter, not merely a content distributor. Zuckerberg went on at length (but not in much detail) about this effort, the most telling aspect of which was a new initiative to address content that’s objectionable even while complying with the company’s terms of service. This would be what Zuckerberg called “more sensationalist and provocative content,” which he said draws more comments and shares (“engagement”) than less red-meaty fare.

No surprise there — as we say in the newspaper biz, if it bleeds, it leads. In response, Facebook plans to use artificial intelligence to identify and downplay such items. Zuckerberg said the point was to remove the incentive to post such material; another way to look at it is an effort to make Facebook a less efficient pipeline for propagandists. Yet it won’t work unless the AI is exceptionally good at distinguishing the popular stuff that’s welcome from the popular stuff that’s not.

And even then, there remains the question of who should decide what should and shouldn’t be permitted or prioritized by the site. Free-marketers would argue that it’s a private company, so Facebook should govern itself as it wishes. If people don’t like the site’s choices, they don’t have to use it. But Republicans in Congress, who used to be free-marketers, have been suggesting that the government should have a role here because Facebook (and other big Silicon Valley companies) are not making those choices honestly, and instead are discriminating against right-of-center speakers.

Zuckerberg pledged to give users the ability to appeal when content is blocked (or not blocked), with such decisions eventually being handed over to an independent body. That could be a tremendous improvement in fairness and transparency. He also said he’d support some governmental regulations on internet companies, specifically a mandate “to report the prevalence of harmful content on their services and then work to reduce that prevalence.”

That might be helpful, although it could put Congress on a slippery slope toward regulating content online. Still, even the steps Zuckerberg outlined don’t get at the bigger and more important questions swirling around Facebook. Wrote Zuckerberg, “One of the most painful lessons I’ve learned is that when you connect two billion people, you will see all the beauty and the ugliness of humanity.” Facebook’s problem is not that it has surfaced ugliness, it’s that its network has been used to magnify it.