Understanding what’s going on with Netanyahu requires a knowledge of Israel’s parliamentary procedures I do not possess. But Juan Cole says that last night Netanyahu missed a deadline for forming a new government. And that means the coalition trying to get him out gets a shot at forming a new government. I wish them luck.

The end of Netanyahu is not a sure thing. The opposition coalition claims to have exactly the number of votes, and no more, to take a new majority and establish a new prime minister. Netanyahu is working to get just one of those votes to switch to his side. So it’s not over.

This just in — The Times of Israel reports,

The eight-party coalition that aims to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is appearing increasingly likely to secure the necessary majority support in the Knesset, Israel’s two main news stations reported Friday night.

The assessment among all members of the “change bloc,” led by Prime Minister-designate Naftali Bennett and Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid, is that the coalition will indeed be sworn in, Channel 12 said, with a wafer-thin 61-59 majority.

Getting rid of Netanyahu won’t mean getting rid of right-wing pro-settlement leadership, as some of the anti-Netanyahu coalition are hard righties, including the guy likely to be the next PM. But it won’t be Netanyahu.

See also Jennifer Rubin, This is what putting country over party looks like.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu listens as Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks during a joint statement after their meeting at the Prime Minister’s office, Tuesday, May 25, 2021, in Jerusalem, Israel. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, Pool)

There are multiple reports today that Trump sincerely believes he will be “reinstated” as POTUS in August.

Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August (no that isn’t how it works but simply sharing the information). https://t.co/kaXSXKnpF0

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) June 1, 2021

Charles Cooke of National Review — not one of my usual sources — corroborates what Maggie Haberman says.

I can attest, from speaking to an array of different sources, that Donald Trump does indeed believe quite genuinely that he — along with former senators David Perdue and Martha McSally — will be “reinstated” to office this summer after “audits” of the 2020 elections in Arizona, Georgia, and a handful of other states have been completed. I can attest, too, that Trump is trying hard to recruit journalists, politicians, and other influential figures to promulgate this belief — not as a fundraising tool or an infantile bit of trolling or a trial balloon, but as a fact.

Cooke continues,

The scale of Trump’s delusion is quite startling. This is not merely an eccentric interpretation of the facts or an interesting foible, nor is it an irrelevant example of anguished post-presidency chatter. It is a rejection of reality, a rejection of law, and, ultimately, a rejection of the entire system of American government.

This is startling? His entire administration was a rejection of the entire system of American government. He never appeared to understand what the entire system of American government is, never mind his particular role in it.

Chis Cillizza at CNN writes that Trump has gotten worse. I don’t see worse. His head was never screwed on all the way. IMO he’s more stupid than crazy, but of course I’m not a psychologist. It’s true he’s not well connected to reality, but I think that’s because reality doesn’t interest him. He sees no profit or pleasure in reality. Bullshit, on the other hand, is gold.

Paul Campos:

Trump is reportedly more obsessed than ever with the idea that the election was stolen from him. Asking whether he really believes that is a category mistake: Donald Trump doesn’t have “beliefs” about those sorts of things in anything like the normal sense of the word. He just says whatever he wants to say with literally no regard for truth, evidence, plausibility, or anything else. As many people have pointed out he’s not so much a liar as a bullshitter in Harry Frankfurt’s classic formulation (TL;DR version: a liar has to care about the truth in order to lie about it; a bullshitter is not even interested in the truth to the limited logically necessary sense that a liar must be).

Maggie Haberman’s tweet was in reponse to something about QAnon and Myanmar, or “MIN-a-mar” as one Trump cultie pronounced it. Apparently the Q-culties have had a thing about Myanmar for a while. See How Q And Trump Deadenders Became Obsessed With Myanmar by Josh Kovensky at TPM. The culties sincerely believe that Trump gave orders to the military before he left office to stage a coup, and this will happen sometime this summer.

I believe I’ve mentioned recently that Myanmar is seriously bleeped up. Nobody wants to be like Myanmar, including Myanmar.

Also — If you missed the Chris Hayes segment on Rand Paul’s obsession with quails on cocaine, here it is. It’s a hoot.

The 2012 Veiled Prophet “maids” and their fathers, Ladue News photo.

I am setting aside our impending implosion into darkness and tyranny to write about a stupid controversy involving an actress I’m not sure I ever heard of who starred in television shows I don’t remember watching. This also involves a bit of St. Louis cultural bric-à-brac that I hadn’t thought about in years. But I take it parts of the Internet are blowing up over this. I feel a need to clarify some stuff.

The actress, Ellie Kemper, was the 1999 Fair St. Louis Queen of Love and Beauty, a fact that shouldn’t be of any real importance to anybody but maybe the Kemper family. Fair St. Louis is an annual event hosted by the Veiled Prophet Organization, which hereafter I will call the VPO.

The VPO, which was once known as the  Mystic Order of the Veiled Prophet of the Enchanted Realm, is a profoundly weird cultural thing run by moneyed St. Louis families. The VPO was established in 1878, which is about the only fact regarding its establishment everyone agrees on. The primary stated purpose of the original VPO was old-fashioned civic boosterism. It was modeled after the New Orleans Mardi Gras; the “Mystic Order” was and is something like a Mardi Gras “krewe,” a social organization that puts on a parade or ball at Mardi Gras time, except in St. Louis there was and is only one krewe and you had to have yacht-fulls of money to buy your way into it. Unlike Mardi Gras, the VPO was never associated with any observance of the church year, I don’t believe. Over the years the dates for the VP festivities — primarily a parade and a fancy debutante ball — have moved all over the calendar.

Preciding over all public VPO festivities is a character called the Veiled Prophet, who wears elaborate robes and a veil that conceals his identity. The Prophet is supposed to be from a mystical kingdom called Khorassan. All that’s known is that the guy behind the veil is one of the VPO members. There are rumors the honor goes to the guy who paid the most money for it that year, but I don’t know if that’s true.

A robed Veiled Prophet and a Queen of Love and Beauty at the debutante ball, undated photo.

Beneath the civic boosterism, there are hints that the original VPO had some less noble purposes. This Atlantic article — which, I warn you, is partly fact and partly bullshit — associates the founding of the VPO with anti-unionism. The organization was also largely about promoting the leadership and privilege of the city’s old, elite moneyed families, which obviously it was. However, the attempt in the article to tie the VPO to the KKK is going too far, and I will explain this in a bit.

The VPO was all white until 1979, when it finally agreed to accept Black members. The Black members still had to have yacht-fulls of money to qualify for membership, so there aren’t a lot of them, but there are a few. Kemper is being slammed for associating with an institution with a “racist past.” As there are few institutions in the U.S. that don’t have a racist past, not to mention a racist present, this seems a bit unfair. I am also seeing claims that the VPO excluded Jews, but I can’t find any corroboration for that. I believe there were Jewish members long before there were Black members, anyway.

Regarding the alleged tie to the KKK — the author of The Atlantic article, Scott Beauchamp, found an old image of one of the early costumes of the Veiled Prophet and noted that it resembled a Klan robe. However, according to several sources the Klan itself didn’t take to wearing their signature robes until some time after 1878. (See, for example, How the Klan Got Its Hood from The New Republic, January 2016.) Also, several sources say both the Veiled Prophet robes and Klan robes are modeled after what were common Mardi Gras costumes of the time, which in turn were modeled after old Catholic penitent robes still worn in Europe here and there. The photo above shows what the Prophet’s robe has looked like for a long time, or at least as long as I can remember, which is not very Klannish.

The VPO isn’t what it used to be, frankly. Back in the 1950s the Veiled Prophet Ball was on local television every year. I remember watching it on our little black and white teevee. In the St. Louis area it was a thing one always watched, like the Miss America pageant and the annual broadcast of Peter Pan with Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard. Anyway, what I remember about it is that the debutantes, or “maids,” wore these poufy princess ball gowns and tiaras with a single feather sticking up on top. And they carried enormous bouquets of flowers. As they were brought forward to be presented to the Veiled Prophet, they had to execute a deep bow that was almost a full prostration, all the while holding the bouquets with both hands, not letting their feathered headdresses fall off, and without tripping over the countless yards of fabric in those gowns. And I assume they were wearing heels.

I was always impressed. They had to have thighs of steel to pull that off.

And yes, the Veiled Prophet maids were all white in those days, but so were the Miss America contestants. However, the VP was more exclusive. Theoretically any pretty girl could be Miss America. But to be a VP maid, your family had to have yacht fulls of money, preferably old money. A little hillbilly girl from a blue collar family, like me, would never have had to execute that bowing maneuver no matter how white she was. For which I was somewhat grateful. It was terrifying just to watch.

In the late 1960s Black activists began to protest the ball and parade. In 1972 a few were able to crash the ball and un-veil the Prophet, who was a Monsanto executive that year. The VPO responded by, eventually, accepting Black members and establishing the Fair St. Louis, a public fair with lots of food and entertainment that anyone can attend. The Veiled Prophet Parade is now called America’s Birthday Parade, and participation is more democratic than it used to be.

The debutante ball is still a debutante ball. It hasn’t been televised for a long time, I don’t think, unless it’s on some funky cable channel I don’t know about.

So that’s the whole story with the Veiled Prophet of St. Louis. Yes, the organization has something of a hinky past, but it’s made some reforms. The current VPO gives a lot of money to charitable causes and is generally harmless, as far as I know.

According to Allegra Frank at Slate, in What It Means That Ellie Kemper Was Queen of the “Racist” Veiled Prophet Ball, on Monday May 31 someone tweeted something about the Veiled Prophet and how weird it is, and then someone else found that Ellie Kemper was once a Queen of Love and Beauty, and then people found the old Atlantic article with its KKK allegations, and before long Kemper was being roasted as the “KKK princess.” And now right-wing sites are screaming that a “liberal mob” is after Kemper and cancel culture and blah blah, but I don’t know of any connection between the Twitter users calling her the KKK princess and liberalism. Anyway, this is all very stupid, and people should just leave Ms. Kemper alone.

President Biden’s Memorial Day address was quite good, I thought. I just want to make note of this part:

What we do now — what we do now, how we honor the memory of the fallen, will determine whether or not democracy will long endure.  We all take it for granted.  We think we learned in school.  You have to — every generation has to fight for it.

But, look, it’s the biggest question: Whether a system that prizes the individual, that bends towards liberty, that gives everybody a chance at prosperity — whether that system can and will prevail against powerful forces that wish it harm.

All that we do in our common life as a nation is part of that struggle.  The struggle for democracy is taking place around the world — democracy and autocracy.  The struggle for decency and dignity — just simple decency.  The struggle for posterity — prosperity and progress.  And, yes, the struggle for the soul of America itself.

More than 100 scholars of political science and related disciplines released an open letter today calling out a serious threat to democracy.

Specifically, we have watched with deep concern as Republican-led state legislatures across the country have in recent months proposed or implemented what we consider radical changes to core electoral procedures in response to unproven and intentionally destructive allegations of a stolen election. Collectively, these initiatives are transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections. Hence, our entire democracy is now at risk. …

… Statutory changes in large key electoral battleground states are dangerously politicizing the process of electoral administration, with Republican-controlled legislatures giving themselves the power to override electoral outcomes on unproven allegations should Democrats win more votes. They are seeking to restrict access to the ballot, the most basic principle underlying the right of all adult American citizens to participate in our democracy. They are also putting in place criminal sentences and fines meant to intimidate and scare away poll workers and nonpartisan administrators. State legislatures have advanced initiatives that curtail voting methods now preferred by Democratic-leaning constituencies, such as early voting and mail voting. Republican lawmakers have openly talked about ensuring the “purity” and “quality” of the vote, echoing arguments widely used across the Jim Crow South as reasons for restricting the Black vote.

You may have heard about the Texas Democrats who stopped passage of partricularly heinous voter suppression bill by walking out of the Texas House and denying the Republicans a quorum. Gov. Greg Abbott is threatening to withhold pay from lawmakers who walked out. There are plans for a special session to take up the bill again.

CNN reports that the Texas Democrats are calling for help from Washington.

Texas state Democratic lawmakers are calling for federal action after they derailed a restrictive voting bill, and President Joe Biden is sending a grim warning about Republican-led state efforts to restrict voting access.

Greg Sargent wrote today,