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

Justice Alito sold Bud Light stock amidst anti-trans boycott effort
...According to a periodic transaction report posted but now unavailable in the Federal Judicial Financial Disclosure Reports database, Justice Sam Alito sold at least some of his stock in Anheuser-Busch and bought stock in Molson Coors on Monday, August 14, 2023.

Alito did not respond to a request for comment about the sale and purchase or whether it was related to the boycott, the coverage of the purported effects of the boycott on Anheuser-Busch sales, or Raichik’s post. Alito would not even provide confirmation of the accuracy of the previously posted periodic transaction report.

According to Fix the Court’s Gabe Roth, who downloaded the report, it was one of a handful of new reports available this past week in the database and he had "no reason to doubt their veracity.” [...]

Alito’s behavior is similar — both in timing and in substance — to other boycott-related activity and coverage.
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Who Would Benefit From Ebrahim Raisi’s Death?
For Khamenei, what mattered was that Raisi could be counted on to toe the regime’s line. Although competition is tight, Raisi may have more blood on his hands than any other living official of the Islamic Republic. Since the 1980s, the Islamic Republic has executed thousands of Iranian dissidents. The judiciary is the arm of the government that carries out this murderous function, and Raisi has held leading positions within it from the very start; he rose to become the head of the judiciary in 2019.

The same qualities that likely made Raisi seem like a safe regime choice for the presidency also made him a primary contender for succeeding Khamenei as the Supreme Leader. According to the Iranian constitution, only a cleric with serious political experience can become head of state. By now, many clerics who fit that description have died or been politically marginalized (many of them did not share Khamenei’s hard-line politics), leaving the field open to Raisi. In turn, many political observers expected that Raisi would be a weak supreme leader, allowing real power to flow elsewhere—to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), for example, or to other power centers around or ancillary to the regime. Who better for such a position than an unimpressive yes-man?

Raisi belongs to a very particular precinct of Iran’s political elite, and in the past few years, others in the political class had come to worry about the ambition of the circles surrounding him. A native of the holy city of Mashhad, in northeastern Iran, Raisi previously held the custodianship of the holy shrine in the city, which is also an economic empire in its own right. He is married to the daughter of Mashhad’s Friday-prayer leader, an arch social conservative. Raisi’s wife, Jamileh Alamolhoda, has played an unusually public role, leading some conservatives from outside the couple’s regional cadre to worry that after Khamenei’s eventual death, a “Mashhad clique” might come to the top of the regime.
What Does the Dow Hitting 40,000 Tell Us?
By the numbers, the economy looks very good. Unemployment has now been below 4 percent for 27 months, a record last achieved in the late 1960s, ending in February 1970. Inflation is way down from its peak in 2022, although by most measures it’s still somewhat above the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent. U.S. economic growth over the past four years has been much faster than in comparable major wealthy nations. [...] Although I don’t have a way to quantify this, my sense is that conspiracy theories about the economic data have been proliferating as the news gets better. For example, have you heard the one about how the B.L.S. [Bureau of Labor Statistics] is hiding inflation by removing coffeefrom the Consumer Price Index? (It isn’t.)

But how do we know that the B.L.S. isn’t cooking the books in Biden’s favor? The best answer, probably, is to learn something about both the bureau’s methods and its institutional culture; corrupting the data would be very hard. (Although autocrats in other countries have done such things, and there’s no guarantee that it wouldn’t happen if Trump, well known for his mendacity, regains power.)
Clean Energy Is Driving ‘a New Era in American Manufacturing’ Across the Midwest
In August 2022, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides generous tax credits for projects and purchases related to clean energy. Since then, Midwestern states have received about $30 billion dollars in private investments to boost domestic production of electric vehicles, batteries and equipment for solar and wind farms, according to a monthly tally of funding announcements kept by energy think tank E2.

Michigan, Indiana and Ohio have received $11.6 billion, $7.8 billion and $7 billion respectively, the E2 analysis said, placing them among the top 10 states nationwide to receive the most private investments for clean energy projects between August 2022 and April of this year. Michigan and Indiana now outrank Texas for such funding, it said, and Michigan also overtook Georgia as the top state for total number of large-scale clean energy projects. [...]

The growth in clean energy investments has been especially strong for electric vehicles. Despite a recent slow down in sales, EV adoption has been astronomical over the last three years. Americans bought nearly 1.2 million electric vehicles last year, setting a record and making EVs the fastest-growing category for car sales, according to Kelley Blue Book data. EVs comprised 7.6 percent of the total U.S. vehicle market in 2023, up from 5.9 percent in 2022.
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How Trump’s latest comments could violate his gag order again
Following a tense scene to conclude Monday’s proceedings, Trump proceeded to refer to witnesses outside the courtroom — twice. Trump did so despite a gag order barring him from making “public statements about known or reasonably foreseeable witnesses” concerning their testimony.

Trump directly mentioned his legal team’s first witness, Robert Costello, and he offered a more oblique but unmistakable reference to the prosecution’s final witness, Michael Cohen, his former lawyer, who concluded his testimony Monday afternoon. [...]

While not mentioning Cohen by name, Trump apparently read from comments by one of his favorite legal pundits, Andrew McCarthy, about Cohen’s admission in court Monday that he “stole” from the Trump Organization. [...]

Trump cited other commentators who had talked about Cohen, without saying Cohen’s name. He once cited “the witness today” and another time referenced “credibility.” He referred to criticism of prosecutors for allegedly mishandling a courthouse admission and cited “larceny” — all obvious references to Cohen’s testimony.

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