Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Rest In Peace and Power, Ms. Faith Ringgold

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.

We begin today with a celebration of the life of noted African American artist Faith Ringgold, who passed away yesterday at her home in Englewood, N.J. at the age of 93.

Margalit Fox/The New York Times

For more than a half-century, Ms. Ringgold explored themes of race, gender, class, family and community through a vast array of media, among them painting, sculpture, mask- and doll-making, textiles and performance art. She was also a longtime advocate of bringing the work of Black people and women into the collections of major American museums.

Ms. Ringgold’s art, which was often rooted in her own experience, has been exhibited at the White House and in museums and galleries around the world. It is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the American Craft Museum in New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and other institutions.

For Ms. Ringgold, as her work and many interviews made plain, art and activism were a seamless, if sometimes quilted, whole. Classically trained as a painter and sculptor, she began producing political paintings in the 1960s and ’70s that explored the highly charged subjects of relations between Black and white people, and between men and women, in America.

Yes, there’s a lot of bad, mad, and sad news and punditry below the fold. I wanted to begin today with a celebration and a smile.

Rex Huppke of USA Today writes that for all of his bluster, the shoe salesman is simply a ‘giant chicken.’

For a guy who fancies himself a tough alpha male – brimming with “I’m right and you’re wrong!” bluster like the cock of the walk – Donald Trump is, in reality, a giant chicken.

Trump's first criminal trial is set to start Monday in New York City. If you struggle to keep track of the man’s multitudinous indictments, this is the one involving Stormy Daniels, the adult-film star he’s accused of paying off in advance of the 2016 presidential election to keep quiet about their alleged affair. [...]

You’d think an abundantly confident macho man like Trump would be champing at the bit to get into a courtroom with his lawyers and prove the “Thugs and Radical Left Monsters” wrong, to pull back the curtain on this unjust persecution/prosecution, to shove the evidence of his angelic innocence right in their smug faces.

You’d think. But Trump has been doing the opposite, trying everything possible to delay the trial. His lawyers filed three futile appeals just this week, all of which were shot down. [...]

At this rate I expect he’ll show up to court Monday in a WHAAAAAAAAmbulance then get carried in on a stretcher, moaning about how the deep state gave him typhoid fever.

Adam Wren of POLITICO went to the shoe salesman’s rally in Schnecksville, PA yesterday and heard Trump roll out all of his “greatest hits.”

Speaking at a rally in Schnecksville, Penn., as sirens sounded in Israel and the Iron Dome defense system intercepted drone attacks, Trump said that both Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and the Iranian aerial attacks on Israel “would not have happened if we were in office” and criticized what he said was President Joe Biden’s “weakness” abroad. [...]

On Saturday, as the crowd broke out into chants of “Genocide Joe,” Trump said, “They’re not wrong.” The phrase had been popularized by protesters of Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war — especially from the left.

A spokesperson from the Biden campaign declined to comment.

Trump’s remarks on Israel were relatively brief, and the balance of his speech hewed closer to home. He assailed Biden — who he called a “stupid person” and a “demented tyrant” — for everything from the price of gas to a “border bloodbath,” with immigrants coming “from prisons, from mental institutions, they’re coming from all over the world.” [...]

“On Monday in New York City, I will be forced to sit fully gagged,” said Trump, the first former U.S. president to face a criminal trial. “I’m not allowed to talk. Can you believe it?”

He called Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg “a Soros-appointed prosecutor.”

Chris Geidner writes for his “LawDork” Substack that that the earliest that Arizona’s 1864 abortion ban will probably take effect is June.

Abortion in Arizona will likely remain legal under the terms of the state’s 15-week abortion ban for at least two months, despite this week’s Arizona Supreme Court decision reviving a near-total abortion ban, due to a 2022 court order in another case.

At the same, the original 1971 challenge to the near-total ban is to return to a trial court for further proceedings over remaining claims that were never resolved back in the 1970s — proceedings that could lead to further court action blocking enforcement of the near-total ban beyond that time.

Although the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling only kept enforcement of the state’s near-total abortion ban blocked for 14 days from the “filing date of this opinion,” the state — in an October 2022 order in a different case brought by the Arizona Medical Association — agreed not to enforce the ban “in any manner against any person“ for 45 days “after issuance of the final mandate” in the case decided at the Arizona Supreme Court this week.

[...]

The long-term injunction against enforcement of the near-total ban had followed Roe v. Wade and only addressed how that ruling controlled the outcome. As such, and as the Arizona Supreme Court made clear this week, the Planned Parenthood lawsuit had other claims that had never been definitively resolved.

As of this month, more than 100 rioters have been convicted and sentenced...for obstructing or impeding an official proceeding — in this case the joint session of Congress that convened on Jan. 6 to formally certify Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments about whether prosecutors improperly stretched the law by charging people with that violation in the first place.

The high court’s ruling, likely to land in late June, has the potential to undo the convictions and sentences of those who have already gone to trial or pleaded guilty, and upend the charges still pending for many more. Three Jan. 6 defendants have already had their sentences reduced ahead of a decision by the Supreme Court.

The court’s decision could have political implications for this year’s election, since Donald Trump — the likely Republican nominee — has made accusations of prosecutorial overreach a core part of his appeal to voters. The case could also directly impact Trump’s own trial for allegedly trying to remain in power after his 2020 defeat; two of the four charges he faces are based on the obstruction statute, and he could move to have those charges dismissed if the Supreme Court rules for the rioters.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr. takes time out from his busy schedule to write for The New York Times advocating for more investment in mental health care.

In September 1958, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was stabbed with a seven-inch steel letter opener. He had been autographing copies of his first book in Blumstein’s department store in Harlem. The woman who stabbed him was named Izola Ware Curry.

When Dr. King found out she was schizophrenic, he harbored no ill will toward her, saying instead, “I know that we want her to receive the necessary treatment so that she may become a constructive citizen in an integrated society where a disorganized personality need not become a menace to any man.” [...]

Lawmakers in Albany right now are in the final stages of negotiating our state budget. Gov. Kathy Hochul and the leaders of the Senate and Assembly must make good on their earlier support for significant investments in mental health care — especially for New Yorkers who have been struggling, posing potential dangers to themselves and others. Doing so now can reduce assaults in our city by people experiencing mental health crises. They can also ensure that when those people do commit crimes, they are held accountable in a manner that reduces recidivism. [...]

And it’s not only New York. According to the Vera Institute of Justice, in the United States, people with serious mental illness are more likely to encounter law enforcement than they are to receive treatment. Since the 1950s, around the time King barely dodged death, the number of state hospital psychiatric beds has decreased by around 94 percent. In many cases, jails and prisons filled the void. While large-scale psychiatric institutionalization was far from perfect — to say the very least — meaningful community-based alternatives never materialized.

Beth Mole of Ars Technica reports that drug shortages in the United States are at all-time highs.

Drug shortages in the US have reached an all-time high, with 323 active and ongoing shortages already tallied this year, according to data collected by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP).

The current drug shortage total surpasses the previous record of 320, set in 2014, and is the highest recorded since ASHP began tracking shortages in 2001. [...]

There are myriad reasons for the hundreds of drug shortages now facing doctors and patients, many of which remain unclear. But, as Ars has reported before, the root cause of shortages of low-cost, off-patent generic drugs is well established. These drugs have razor-thin to non-existent profit margins, driven by middle managers who have, in recent years, pushed down wholesale prices to rock-bottom levels. In some cases, generic manufacturers lose money on the drugs, disincentivizing other players in the pharmaceutical industry from stepping in to bolster fragile supply chains. Several generic manufacturers have filed for bankruptcy recently.

For other drugs, the situation is more complicated. The ADHD drug Adderall, for instance, has been in critical shortage since October 2022, causing millions of patients around the country to struggle to fill their prescriptions. It began when a manufacturing delay for one manufacturer kicked off a shortfall. Although that problem has since been resolved, it came amid a significant increase in Adderall prescriptions, which spiked further during the pandemic when telehealth prescribing became more common. Additionally, because Adderall—made of amphetamine-mixed salts—is a controlled substance, the Drug Enforcement Administration sets limits or "quotas" on how much of it manufacturers can make. Such quotas can exacerbate shortages, ASHP said.

Paul Farhi of The Atlantic says that according to data, readership at some of the largest known conservative websites is shrinking.

This past February, readership of the 10 largest conservative websites was down 40 percent compared with the same month in 2020, according to The Righting, a newsletter that uses monthly data from Comscore—essentially the Nielsen ratings of the internet—to track right-wing media. (February is the most recent month with available Comscore data.) Some of the bigger names in the field have been pummeled the hardest: The Daily Caller lost 57 percent of its audience; Drudge Report, the granddaddy of conservative aggregation, was down 81 percent; and The Federalist, founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering 91 percent. (The site’s CEO and co-founder, Sean Davis, called that figure “laughably inaccurate” in an email but offered no further explanation.) FoxNews.com, by far the most popular conservative-news site, has fared better, losing “only” 22 percent of traffic, which translates to 23 million fewer monthly site visitors compared with four years ago. [...]

What’s going on? The obvious culprit is Facebook. For years, Facebook’s mysterious algorithms served up links to news and commentary articles, sending droves of traffic to their publishers. But those days are gone. Amid criticism from elected officials and academics who said the social-media giant was spreading hate speech and harmful misinformation, including Russian propaganda, before the 2016 election, Facebook apparently came to question the value of featuring news on its platform. In early 2018, it began deemphasizing news content, giving greater priority to content posted by friends and family members. In 2021, it tightened the tap a little further. This past February, it announced that it would do the same on Instagram and Threads. All of this monkeying with the internet’s plumbing drastically reduced the referral traffic flowing to news and commentary sites. The changes have affected everyone involved in digital media, including some liberal-leaning sites—such as Slate (which saw a 42 percent traffic drop), the Daily Beast (41 percent), and Vox (62 percent, after losing its two most prominent writers)—but the impact appears to have been the worst, on average, for conservative media. (Referral traffic from Google has also declined over the past few years, but far less sharply.)

Daniel R. DePetris of MSNBC wonders what happens next after Iran’s retaliatory missle and drone strikes against Israel yesterday.

The question was never whether Iran would respond but rather how. Now we know: At the time of writing, over 100 drones and missiles were launched by Iran toward Israel.Further drone or even ballistic missile strikes by the Iranians could follow, although this is hardly assured. Either way, a tense regional situation is becoming even more fraught. The leaders of Israel and the U.S. must now weigh the risks and rewards of an Israeli counterstrike. And if counterstrikes are approved, the leaders of both countries will need to determine how long they will tolerate a dangerous escalatory spiral.

This is not a low-cost scenario for the U.S. There are tens of thousands of U.S. troops stationed in the Middle East, from Syria and Iraq to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. All of these troops are within range of Iranian missile fire or Iranian proxy attacks. U.S. military installations in the region would make for tempting targets in the event of a regional conflagration, and no number of air defense systems would be able to shoot down every projectile fired their way.

[...]

Now Israel has a choice. On Thursday, April 11, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Israeli pilots that Israel was prepared for war if need be: “We set a simple principle: Anyone who hits us, we hit them.” Ditto Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant: “We are prepared to defend ourselves on the ground and in the air, in close cooperation with our partners, and we will know how to respond.”

We’ll end exactly where we began: A celebration and a smile from and for a great American artist, Ms. Faith Ringgold in this 2013 (?) interview for the PBS Documentary “Makers: Women Who Make America.”

Have the best possible day everyone!