Mark Byron

RBG, RIP

Who had the Notorious RBG dying on their 2020 Bingo card? It does throw an interesting twist to the political dynamics of the fall.

First of all, it's worth noting that a person of value died before we venture into the politics of her passing. As a lawyer in the 70s, she helped litigate a number of key woman's rights cases for the ACLU's woman's rights division. This was back when woman's rights were about getting access to jobs and education rather than abortion. Those wins would seem like no-brainers today and not controversial except to militant complementarians, but giving women equal access to careers and education was a novel and counter-cultural position fifty years ago. 

She had to fight through the condescending sexism of the 60s to start her legal career and achieved quite a bit against the odds. Even the president stepped out of character to praise her-"She led an amazing life. What else can you say? She was an amazing woman, whether you agreed or not, she was an amazing woman who led an amazing life." The blind squirrel got an acorn on that one.

A number of legal scholars compared her to Thurgood Marshall, as I did when I heard of the news this morning. Marshall headed up the legal wing of the NAACP when they were fighting to end Jim Crow and northern institutional racism as well rather than litigating the boundaries of acceptable affirmative action. Both did needed work as civil libertarians as lawyers and acquired the disdain of conservatives for their work on the bench. A comparison to John Lewis comes to mind; a right-of-center guy of 2020 would appreciate what all three did before getting into office, but be less thrilled with them in office.

She pushed the boundaries of rights for women in the 70s, which was well needed in 20/20 hindsight. She also pushed out the boundaries of rights for sexual minorities and pushed in on the rights of churches and individuals who ran afoul of left-leaning policies. That's where she acquired the ire of the right and the devotion of the left.

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Now, to the politics. Double-standard alert.

Four years ago, the Senate stalled on filling the Scalia vacancy in order to have Trump appoint the replacement, arguing that the winner of the election should get to choose the nominee. Fat chance of that happening this time.

It appears that they'll push forward with picking a replacement. A fairly quick selection of a nominee is in the works, and hearings on the nominee would be likely in October.

The Republicans have 53 seats and can afford to lose three. A competent conservative jurist can expect to get to 50. Senators Collins and Murkowski may well vote no on pro-choice grounds, but that needs two more defections. Mitt Romney is mentioned along with the RINO Sisters as a possible no vote, but his breaking ranks on impeachment is a on a different plane as this pick; Trump's amoral behavior rubbed Mitt the wrong way, but a solid conservative nominee along the lines of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh wouldn't be a problem for Romney.

The Democrats will be doing all that they can to derail this nomination, as they did with the Kavanaugh pick. Unless the nominee has some sort of toxic revelation, it's hard to see much that they can do other than try to blockade the Capital to prevent a vote.

They'll have a lot of reasons to do so. The Ginsberg pick will swap out the most liberal member of the court for a conservative, giving the right a 6-3 edge and thus a one-vote cushion to overcome a small-c conservative justice opting not to buck precedent like we've seen Roberts do in an abortion case recently.

If this pick goes through, the chances of a liberal court anytime soon severely diminish. Clarence Thomas is the oldest conservative at 72, so he'll likely outlast a Biden term. Stephen Breyer is 82 and would likely retire and let Biden get his replacement, but there's little chance of making a dent in a 6-3 breakdown until the late 20s...

At least if we stick with a nine-judge format. The number of Supreme Court justices aren't set in the Constitution, so Congress could increase the number to flip the alignment. Adding four new sets and appointing left-friendly justices to them would give the left a 7-6 edge, or they could add 6 to give them a 9-6 edge and a vote cushion.

That would be nuclear hardball.

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I'd expect the president to pick a woman. That woman will be treated as a traitor to her gender by the left, but it would take an attack point away from the Democrats. It wouldn't hurt to pick someone who's a Protestant, since there are none on the court; an evangelical-leaning nominee would juice that wing of the Trump block and give the left something to over-react to.

This will be a Kavanaugh-level brawl, with the double-standard and the added stakes for left-right swap rather than center-right in replacing Anthony Kennedy replacing the sexual assault accusation. Expect a lot of street theater, where BLM protests could be a template for last-ditch "resistance."

FEMA Meets Rube Goldberg

The $400/week unemployment insurance plan the president proposed yesterday just might work. Give the White House some credit for creative finance, as they shoe-horned it into a FEMA emergency relief fund for folks who are out of work due to an emergency but fall through the normal unemployment cracks. 

I would think that would be designed for folks displaced from their job due to a flood or a hurricane; I'm picturing a business in downtown Sanford just NW of Midland that got wiped out this spring when the Sanford Lake dam collapsed. COVID doesn't quite fit the design of such a regional tragedy, but it isn't much of a stretch to treat the current unpleasantness as a disaster. Thus, it might just pass legal muster.

Two caveats are mentioned in the CNBC piece. One is that the money is a 75%-25% federal-state match, so states would have to pony up $100/week for each covered worker. That might be hard to conjure up in a state that is spending more due to COVID and bringing in less tax revenue. Doubly so when any federal help to cover those state budget deficits is not forthcoming; the Republicans are not thrilled "bailing out" more-generous Democratic state governments who were the hardest hit during the first batch of cases this spring. State governments will be torn between helping their needy and balancing their budgets.

Also, some Democratic governors might be leery of taking part if it is seen as selling congressional Democrats up the river and partnering with Trump on a financial Rube Goldberg end-run of the legislative process. I'd expect some push-back from quarters on the left on states going along with this, just as many Republican states were less than thrilled with being a part of Obamacare.

The other bug in this FEMA plan is that the normal unemployment insurance system can't be used to deliver it. The initial system set up this spring piggy-backed on existing unemployment infrastructure. Folks can't be on both normal unemployment and this FEMA 400 (sounds like a new NASCAR race heavy on crashes). Thus, we'd need to see states have to quickly (or not so quickly) craft a institutional and software system to administer this new FEMA moolah; easier said than done.

For Trump, any slowness can be blamed on lousy state governments, not FEMA. Any Democratic opt-outs of the plan can be spun as lefties caring more about politics than the needy. If neither takes place, I'll eat my words, but the odds are good on both happening.

"Rule by da Cree? It's time the Natives were in charge."

The sausage making is being put on hold. Failing to get a deal on a "stimulus" package, the president's team is proposing that Trump unilateral extend eviction from government-owned housing, unemployment benefits and give a payroll tax cut.

One out of three might work, which is the first one. If Obama can unilaterally keep the "dreamers" from being deported, Trump can keep folks behind on their rent from being evicted. Who would have standing to challenge it? 

The other two seem bogus constitutionally. A president can't spend money that isn't appropriated, nuking extending bonus unemployment on his own. Trump has managed to divert some money from Defense department items to help fund his border wall, but he'd be hard pressed to divert Labor department money for the purpose.

The president has the power to suspend tax payments in an emergency, but the tax-payers still own the money once the emergency ends. Thus, as this piece points out, employers would likely stash the tax money in question in savings rather than pay it out to employees, since they still own Uncle Sam the money.

The eviction moratoriums might stick, but there would likely be an injunction filed first thing Monday morning on the other two.

Sorry. Rule by decree has its limitations, as much as The Donald would like it otherwise.

Give Me Liberty, Give Others Death

I'm rather taken aback by the large number of people not wearing masks after being instructed months ago to do so. They aren't budget-busters (disposable ones costs about a buck in bulk and washable cloth ones can be had under $10) and don't obstruct oxygen flow enough to worry about. The only negative side effects are that they look dorky and that they can fog up your glasses a bit.

However, the negative side effect of not wearing them in this COVID era is passing along a disease that kills a non-trivial percentage of the folks getting it. We've had 67,683 confirmed cases in Michigan and 6,024 deaths. That's about a 9% kill rate. Granted, there were likely a lot of asymptomatic folks who never got tested, thus skewing the death rate up a bit, but that's still rather bracing.

Not only does a mask help you avoid the bug, but it also helps you giving the bug to someone else if you have it and don't know it. Thus, I struggle to see a downside of wearing one.

Folks weaned on the idea of rugged American individualism might beg to differ. Americans have a tendency to hate being told what to do, especially if it is someone from the other party telling you it.

I didn't vote for Gretchen Whitmer two years ago. Despite being ticked at Bill Schuette for being an ardent Trumpite, I held my nose and voted Republican.

I'm glad I got outvoted, for we'd have many more dead Michiganders had he won, assuming he erred on the side of keeping things open until things got much worse. I'm not planning on becoming a Democrat, but the Republican leadership in both Washington and Lansing has had a tin ear towards public health, erring on the side of wanting to keep businesses open and to play to that rugged individualism streak that ignores the idea of looking out after one's fellow man.

Last I checked, being considerate of others is a virtue. "Love your neighbor as yourself", I think the phrase goes. Some odd dude named Jesus said it a couple of millennia ago.

The folks who ignore mask requirements and feel that social distancing is for wimps have helped give us a resurgence of COVID cases.

Trying to make mask-wearing voluntary didn't work. The news of the afternoon is that Gov. Whitmer is making it mandatory, fining folks $500 for not wearing them and shutting stores down that don't make people mask up before going in.

The problem I've seen of not doing it that way is that businesses don't want to play the bad cop. A security guard at a Family Dollar in Flint got killed for doing that a couple of months back. Even if that level of reaction is a rarity, having someone make a stink and storm out isn't great for business.

I'll give Midland's Big Boys some credit for doing this voluntarily. The waitress manning the front door noted that they were just following CDC guidelines. No one else has been doing that in Midland. I've been in five other sit-down restaurants since things opened back up last month, and none are calling BS on maskless wonders.

Until now, that is.

Slow Ride...Away From Political Anger

I'm not much of a Trump fan, to put it mildly. I got more than my share of teasing as a kid and I have low tolerance for verbal bullies and teasing of any type. That extends to mistreatment of minorities, especially when ethnocentrism and/or racism morphs into bullying of its own.

Unfortunately, that's the president's stock in trade.

I blogged a bit ago on the Lincoln Project, a group of old-school Republicans who've refused to join Cult 45. I'm not comfortable with the trolling they do to the president, since two wrongs don't make a right. However, this Michigan member of the LP, Jeff Timmer, struck a cord.

They range from the direct to the deeply sarcastic. On Thursday, when Trump tweeted "PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT" in response to the Supreme Court's ruling he doesn't have absolute immunity from a subpoena for his tax records, Timmer responded, "I see someone woke up on the gibbering barking madness side of the bed today."

When in late June, it became apparent that several cases of coronavirus were linked to a bar in East Lansing, he tweeted, "Wow. A virus immune to both people's stupidity, boredom, and political ideology. If only there were medical science to guide us. Alas." When Trump attracted a far smaller crowd than expected for a rally in Tulsa last month, Timmer said he'd seen [Foghat] tribute bands get bigger audiences.

Foghat's biggest hit was Slow Ride. The refrain "Slow ride......take it eeee-zee" is worth taking to heart.

One of Trump's tricks is to get his critics mad at him, phrasing things in ways that will get a boo-yah from his fanboys and a big boo from his critics. He wants an exchange of urinary products between the two.

However, we don't want to waste the urea on him. It's not worth ruining your anniversary, as some of his pro-Jim Crow tweets of Monday started to do to me. Best to take Foghat's advice and to not take the bait and join the barking madness.

Catholic and BLM: A Matter of Cases

A common refrain among evangelicals is that catholic (with a small C), meaning universal, is a good thing for the Church: many of our classic creeds profess a catholic church. They'll balk at the capital-C version of Catholic for it's extra-biblical traditions and (in their view) problematic theology.

I think a similar approach is at play with Black Lives Matter. The idea isn't offensive, since society at large often washes its hands of the social pathologies afflicting the Black community. Not caring much about one more shooting in Flint or Saginaw is a reflex action designed to blow off any costly efforts to tackle those pathologies.

Thus, giving a darn about poverty and stereotypes that lead to bad policing should be on our mental plate. Trotting out "all lives matter" as a egalitarian counter is often designed to blow off the idea of needing to work on those problems

However, the Black Lives Matter organization is a secular, left-wing outfit hostile towards traditional morality (or pro-trans if you want  a more charitable spin) and a market economy that the BLM crew sees as not serving the Black community well. One can be in favor of the "Black lives matter" idea but be leery of BLM as a organization.

It's also easy to be against the BLM idea and the group, lumping the two. A sports news item of the morning revolves around the WNBA's partnership with BLM the group.

Senator Kelly Loeffler is a minority owner of her hometown Atlanta Dream; she's also had to be more-Trumpy-than-thou since being appointed to the post to fend off her right flank from Trumpite Doug Collins in November's jungle primary.  She's on the bubble of not coming in the top two. Jimmy Carter had to tack right to win a gubernatorial primary, noting that he got out-[N bombed] in 1966 (I don't want to dignify the phrase by Googling for a quote) and Loeffler is trying not to get out-Trumped.

She gave both barrels to BLM as a "political movement", which will play well with the Fox News crowd but comes across as tone-deaf in dealing with her Black employees with the Dream. She's been part of the Atlanta establishment (her husband's firm owns the New York Stock Exchange) and owning a woman's basketball team fit the MO of a businesswoman who's part of Atlanta's co-ed and multi-racial old boy network.

She's having to act less elitist as a modern politico, and it's coming back to bite her with the Dream, which I would assume is named with MLK in mind. The result isn't pretty.

Open Invitation

Last night, while I was reading an article on the upcoming college football season and whether it will take place, I saw an ad from a Trump super-PAC, featuring the Donald superimposed on a Big Sky-ish valley scene with mountains on the right, with the caption "Opening Up America Again", if I recall correctly. VP Pence was plugging the “keep opening up America” meme in this CNBC article.

Minor problem. When you're opening up businesses, you're increasing the number of interactions with people and increasing the chances of our old friend COVID-19 being exchanged along with cash and credit cards. Given that we have a record number of daily cases nationwide, centered on some of our more free-market-friendly southern states, opening up has its downside.

The irony of the Opening Up America ad on the college football article is that it seems that the very opening up of the economy in the South and elsewhere is helping give COVID a second wind and imperiling the sports seasons folks in "them thar parts" especially like. I'm one of them: me loves me some football...or basketball...or baseball.. or about any sport right now.

It's a tough dilemma. Going into lock-down mode does a real number on the economy but cuts down on the disease spread. Coming out of lock-down, especially when folks feel that masks and social distancing are something that fearful wimps and liberals do, puts a Space-X rocket on the R₀ figure. Michigan (as I predicted Monday) just closed its bars after opening them back up a couple of weeks ago, following Texas, Florida and California's lead. Finding that new-normal mix that lets us do more things while keeping COVID under control (and if R is 1.25, it ain't under control for long) is very tricky.

Poking the Frog

I don't like teasing. Even if the subject of the abuse "has it coming."

Thus, this Politico piece hits a major schadenfreude chord. A "never Trump" outfit called the Lincoln Project has been doing a doctoral thesis in trolling The Donald, running attack ads... on Fox News...in Washington.... during the evening when Trump's been known to watch. Trump gets PO, tweets unkind things about the LP crew, including a special dose of venom to LP co-founder George Conway, husband of Trump's media advisor Kellyanne (that's going to make for some interesting pillow talk).

The Trump tweetstorms then generate national publicity for the LP attack ads, giving them earned media for the cost of a targeted ad buy in Washington (or Palm Beach or Bedminster if he's weekending there).

The first, fleshly reaction is "Cool. He has it coming. That's clever...cruel, but clever."

However, two wrongs don't make a right. It's cruel. Full stop. Put down the skunky schadenfreude and slowly back away.

We're supposed to love our enemies. Even ones who don't deserve nice treatment. Lord knows Trump shows no mercy on his foes; however, we're not supposed to return serve.

The Horse is Out of the Barn-It's Already Bolton

Interesting ruling on John Bolton's kiss-and-tell; a federal judge accepted the government's word that it had classified material, but since reporters galore had review copies and that the books are at stores waiting for a Tuesday launch, any secrets within aren't secret anymore.

The question to be seen by the book proper is how many real national security secrets there are and how many merely embarrassing-to-the-president revelations there are within. It reminds me of an old Soviet era joke about Sergei getting twenty years in the gulag for calling the general an idiot. Was that harsh? No, since he wasn't charge with insulting a superior officer but for revealing a state secret.

Our Mister Brooks

<Update 6/17 8PM -The news of today paints a much less flattering picture of the officers. Officer Rolfe (no word if Officer Earl knew him) is up on felony murder charges and could get the death penalty. Kicking Brooks after he was unconscious shows quite a bit of malice. Manslaughter might be the starting point of deliberations rather than the end as I wrote earlier.>

 

I've been on a blog hiatus for a bit, so I haven't had a chance to wade into the George Floyd death. In that case, the manslaughter/murder charge seems valid given the story and multiple non-police witnesses. That was flat out evil.

I've been surprised by the depth of anger on this case, but it's legit outrage, probably magnified by COVID, which ravaged the black (I'm warming to the idea of upper-casing Black, but I'm lower-case for now) community. COVID has left all of us a bit edgy after having been in lockdown mode for a couple of month; that frustration likely amped up the outrage. There are a lot of things that need to be done to get cops a bit less trigger happy, more humane treatment of folks in custody, to avoid Driving While Black pullovers and (the hardest of all) to get out of the habit of assuming black youths are trouble on the half-shell. 

Some of those can be done on a policy basis, instructing police officers what to do and what not to do and enforcing it, but others will be harder to do, especially when Trump's base will reflexively back police and even more reflexively look down their noses at black activists.

The case of Rayshard Brooks will put that reflexivity to the test. Mr. Brooks was passed out in a Wendys drive-through, blew a positive breathalizer test, grabbed a cop's Taser and pointed it at him, and was killed by said cop. Cop was white, Brooks was black.

Is a guy with a Taser armed? It's not a lethal weapon (although it can induce a heart attack at times) but it would be enough to give a police officer pause? What's the normal protocol for dealing with an adversary with a Taser? My untrained mind would think that the cop could picture getting paralyzed by the Taser, then having the gun nabbed by your adversary and getting it used on yourself.

That's going to mean that charges against the officer are going to be hard to make stick. It looks close enough to self-defense such that a DA might not opt to press charges, like in the Ferguson case. Reasonable doubt out the wazoo, it seems.

HUD secretary Ben Carson chimed in this morning-

"I think this is a situation that is not clear-cut, like the callous murder that occurred in Minnesota, and it really requires some heads of people who actually know what should be done under these circumstances to make judgments," Carson said on "Fox News Sunday," referring to the death of George Floyd at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis.

This could get ugly. In London, we've seen some pro-racism protesters confront anti-racism counterparts, something that we've not see in the US that much. However, we have quite a few folks on the right that are pro-police but not racist per se.

Somehow I missed seeing the Thin Blue Line flag previously. It sends a message "I support the police." In this current climate, supporting the police can have the undertone of not supporting the Floyd and Brooks protesters. While few folks looked to defend the Floyd killer, Brooks' antagonist might get quite a bit of support, especially from Fox Nation folks.

That could lead to some unsavory street theater, if not street combat, if pro-police right-wing goons look to lock horns with some of their BLM counterparts.

 

 

The Gig is Up

California is looking to go to bat for college basketball and football players and gig-economy "contractors" in two interesting bills working their way through their legislature. Whether it helps them remains to be seen.

The one that's gotten more national attention is a move to make more free-lancers like Uber and Lyft drivers officially employees and subject to issues like minimum wage law, sick leave and other legally-mandated benefits. The side effects could include lower wages for drivers, higher prices for customers and less service in outlying areas (if demand is spotty in less congested areas, it might not justify a fixed wage per hour). 

Lots of folks are uneasy about work shifting away from conventional jobs with set hours and set pay to free-lance jobs with no guarantees. Cab drivers are the first casualty, but restaurant delivery drivers might be on the way out as well, as it might be more cost-effective for an in-house driver to be substituted for calls to Uber Eats or Doordash.

I worked delivering pizzas in my youth, but I could easily have seen myself doing "side hustles" (as one Uber ad actually referred to it) were that tech available in the 80s. Both variants leave the worker in the "precariat" as sociologists have christened the near-minimum-wage niche of the labor market with a precarious economic situation. The gig style gives more flexibility but less legal security.

If you lean libertarian, you're pro-gig, feeling the adults are adults and can make contracts as they see fit. If you're concerned about the least-of-these precariat, you're skeptical, as billion-dollar companies that can plow near-nine-figures into a ballot proposal to overturn the proposed law have an distinct ("unfair" if you're not charitable) advantage over Da Liddle Guy.

If you're both of those, you're having one of those angel-and-devil-on-shoulder conversations in your head; feel free to choose which is which at home.

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Meanwhile, another bill that would alter the face of big-time college sports is weaving its way through Sacramento-

California's state senate is expected to vote on its Fair Pay to Play Act this week, which would then put it in Newsom's hands to decide whether he will sign it into law.

The proposed legislation, which would not go into effect until 2023, would make it illegal for California schools to take away an athlete's scholarship or eligibility as punishment for accepting endorsement money. The California State Assembly approved the bill with a 73-0 vote earlier this week.

If that passes, California colleges would be force to be kicked out of the NCAA, for they'd be unable to comply with NCAA rules on players making money on ads or other endorsements. The PAC 12 would be back to the PAC 8 until they decided to snag up some Mountain West schools...

...or the NCAA would be forced to allow endorsement deals nationwide. The scandals involving Adidas and Nike playing basketball players or their parents under the table would make such deals kosher (and hopefully above-board) on the college level. It would dry up some of the endorsement money schools are making, as players could have a side-hustle on with the sneaker-mongers.

Amateur status seems overrated and very prone to hypocrisy and under-the-table money. When Olympic sports are professional and big-time college sports make schools money, the California law might make the sports cleaner.

Playing by the (Golden) Rules

Enlightenment liberalism is a hard sell these days. We see right-populists gumming up the works in Italy (where a nativist Lega party is leading in the polls), Germany (where their AfD nativist force "grand coalitions" of establishment parties to keep them at bay) and the UK (where Brexit animates a more populist Johnson government to the dismay of the Tory elites) as well as the US.

Thus, we have have a lot of hand-wringing in elite circles. This Politico EU piece wonders if they've hit peak populism and this piece on the Politico mothership worries that they haven't... because the peasants are too dense to appreciate it-

As much as President Donald Trump’s liberal critics might want to lay America’s ills at his door, [psychologist Shaun] Rosenberg says the president is not the cause of democracy’s fall—even if Trump’s successful anti-immigrant populist campaign may have been a symptom of democracy’s decline.

We’re to blame, said Rosenberg. As in “we the people.”

Democracy is hard work. And as society’s “elites”—experts and public figures who help those around them navigate the heavy responsibilities that come with self-rule—have increasingly been sidelined, citizens have proved ill equipped cognitively and emotionally to run a well-functioning democracy. As a consequence, the center has collapsed and millions of frustrated and angst-filled voters have turned in desperation to right-wing populists.

His prediction? “In well-established democracies like the United States, democratic governance will continue its inexorable decline and will eventually fail.”

Secular small-l liberal thought doesn't always sell well, especially if people feel threaten by their anti-conservative-religion and citizen-of-the-world views. If your small-l liberal elites can't explain how their world-view works better for the county than a nativist populist, then there might be a problem with their world-view rather than with the mind of the median voter. However, that requires humility (that you might actually be wrong) and respect for your fellow man, something that runs counter to human nature.

How does open borders and free trade help Joe Sixpack? How does normalizing sexual minorities make life better for folks whose religion or culture sees being heterosexual and cisgendered as optimal versus the alternatives? Those are items that can be hard sells if you're working against racism (immigration) blue-collar self-interest (immigration and free trade) and traditional culture both secular and religous (sexual minorities and immigration).

The Golden Rule seems to the cornerstone of liberalism when done well, but when forgiveness for people who disagree with you is lacking, you get conservatives "deplatformed" by militant leftists and liberals being asked to leave America if they don't buy into a Trumpian world-view. Without forgiveness and respect for others, you'll see autocratic tendencies across the political spectrum.

Small-l liberal democracy will give rights to minorities on Golden Rule grounds, since an unshackled democracy allows 51% to rape and pillage the other 49%. Loving God and loving one's neighbor as oneself were Jesus' two prime directives; it's hard to do the latter without the former, but liberal democracies try to institutionalize the Golden Rule.

The cultural left will want the Golden Rule applied to immigrants and sexual minorities, but neglect to give grace to poor natives and folks with a more traditional sexual morality. Christian traditionalists will often forget to be charitable to immigrants and minorities both ethnic and sexual, forgetting that Imago Dei applies to the targets of Trumpian wrath.

Democracy, to borrow from Mencken, is the idea that the people should get what they want ... good and hard. Even if it isn't good for them. In a democracy, your candidate will occasionally (and sometimes frequently) be beaten by the "bad guy", but if your guy always wins, you're living in a one-party state that you agree with. Sometimes the bad guys win, and your job is to persuade part of the majority to support your guys.

The alternative is either an autocratic state that enforces your world-view, or a bounded democracy where unacceptable candidates aren't allowed. Iran has democratic features, but only within the bounds set by a group of Shia clergy. Germany has a lot more democratic features than Iran, but parties that look too Nazi are persona non grata.

Germany came to mind via this piece, where a city councilman from a Naziesque party got elected mayor by his peers, much to the chagrin of everyone and his uncle.

Stefan Jagsch of the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) was elected unanimously by seven councillors in Waldsiedlung, near Frankfurt am Main.

Mr Jagsch won because no rival stood against him. The small town has about 2,650 residents.

The NPD has survived efforts to ban it, but is seen as "anti-constitutional".

Note that the NPD is a very small party and not the larger nativist AfD; the AfD seems to have absorbed much of the NPD vote on the national level, but Mr. Jagsch seems to have been an exception to the rule.

The NPD does have some troubling tendencies, like wanting to regain the ethnically-German areas in other countries and a rejection of the small-l liberal order. However, the German electoral authorities have opted not to declare it illegal, fearing that deplatforming it will give it more attention than it deserves.

One of liberalism's weak spots is that the Golden Rule mentality will give grace to people who would not give it back in return were they in power, be they white-nationalists or Islamists. Liberalism is playing by the rules in a knife-fight, but playing by the rules is in their DNA. 

You're better off beating such folks at the ballot box rather than banning them, for that merely gives then street cred.

 

The (Somewhat) Big Ten

The Democrats seem to have been able to get the field down to ten for their next debate. That will save them the two-night split-field layout designed to give the back-of-the-pack folks some air time against the big kids.

There are some interesting inclusions. Amy Klobuchar seems to have qualified largely by showing on radar in neighboring Iowa, where there's a market for her Minnesota-nice statesmanship; this piece highlighting freshman Iowa congresswoman Amy Finkenauer, who could almost pass for Klobucahr's niece both in looks and style shows that at least one of Iowa's districts might give her a hearing. Nationally, she's under 1% per Real Clear Politics in 11th, with Tulsi Gabbart getting the short end of the stick at 1.4% but only cracking 2% in two DNC-accredited polls (four was the cut-off).

Julian Castro made the cut, which surprised me. He seems a bit to establishmentarian to sell well in a Democratic primary, although some decriminalization of illegal immigrant status rhetoric might have pushed the needle.

Andrew Yang made the cut as well. He's a fellow nerd with some interesting ideas (universal income of $1000/month as an answer to more and more folks getting automated out of jobs) who wins over some 2016 Trump supporters. The article shows him to be more profane than I'm comfortable with, but that seems to be par for the course for younger candidates, or even older ones, as the current president has a potty mouth as well. He'd have a shot at winning over some blue-collar secular conservatives looking for a better answer than MAGA tariffs which don't make America greater so far. However, that's a bit of a long-shot.

Cory Booker also made the cut. I don't always like his histrionics, but there seems to be a nice, reasonable guy at the core. He's got the middle-ground issue where he's too establishment for the left wing but not moderate enough for what's left of the centrist wing.

Beto O'Rourke got in as well. Had the primary been in December 2018, he'd be in the lead pack, but when he went from being the Great Liberal Hope to oust Ted Cruz in Texas to just another candidate on a national stage, he's suffered, possibly from a lot of his Thoughtful Young Liberal vibe getting stolen by Mayor Pete. The El Paso shootings in his home tuft gave him a platform and may have saved him to resurrect that 2018 vibe.

I'm still a "Never Trumper" as the saying goes but would find it hard to cast a positive vote for any of the Democrats in the field come next November. However, there isn't someone to vote for in the GOP side as of yet (Joe Walsh and Bill Weld don't move the needle for me, either), so I could easily see myself raiding the open Democratic primary and voting for the least objectionable candidate who has a shot.

 

 

Holey Orders

Rule by decree?

He continued, "The vast amounts of money made and stolen by China from the United States, year after year, for decades, will and must STOP. Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA. I will be responding to China’s Tariffs this afternoon. This is a GREAT opportunity for the United States."

It would be interesting to see what law he's basing this on, or whether Trump has started to play Calvinball on a global scale, making up the law as he goes. It's not the Pernicious Poem Zone, since he did the tweet in prose form. However, it sure was pernicious, if you own stocks.

Can we change the channel away from this comedy? It is SO out there, no commissioner could suspend disbelief for that long.

We have a Senator Hawley, all we lack is a Senator Smoot. I've seen this movie before.

 

Inverted Yield Curve, Meet Inverted Trope

For years, a common dig at American Jews was that they supposedly had "dual loyalty" to both the US and Israel. The same dig was made of American Catholics in days of yore; JFK had to suffer through that. I recall the classic quip credited to Harry Truman, who said "It's not the Pope that bothers me, it's the pop" referring to shady-dealing Joe Kennedy.

Nowadays, conservatives like Israel and (at least pre-Francis) the Vatican . They'd prefer a devout Catholic to a lapsed one and a pro-Israel Jew to a BDS-backing one. It helps that the current Israeli government takes a hard line on Iran and jihadi terrorists, making them geopolitical allies. 

These days, that trope is trotted out more on the left, where Israel is often seen as the last European colony abusing the Palestinian natives and trotting out Nazi and apartheid South African comparisons. For them, being pro-Israel makes one as a geopolitical neocon to be shunned.

Thus, we have the bizarre turn of the president turning that dual loyalty trope on its head yesterday.

"I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat -- I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty," Trump said. 

So, they're either dumb or double-dealing. Classic name-calling, making your foes either ignorant or evil. If they knew better and were good people, they'd agree with us.

I've seen more than one piece over the last year noting that Trump's minority-bashing hadn't extended to Jews...yet. Your classic right-wing redneck will be anti-non-white and anti-Jewish, but only the hard-core alt-righter will trot out anti-Semitic rhetoric given the conservative bias towards Israel. Trump's Jewish son-in-law and convert daughter seemingly helped prune some of that out of  The Donald if it was there to begin with.

It seems that Trump might have reverted to form on this one, that old traditional antisemitism might have bubbled to the surface;  growing up in NYC, he could well have been exposed to those tropes as the gentiles around him let their inner Archie Bunkers out. Either that, or it might be that bashing liberal Jews as part of his domestic Axis of Evil (Reformed Jews as the  henchmen of The Squad?) was coolly calculated; beating up on liberal Jews is a common parlor game on the right.

The downside is that it gives ammunition to liberals who will look at the philosemitism of the modern right as a smokescreen for the "real" anti-Jewish core, that Israel is only useful for either attacking Muslims or expediting the Second Coming.

 

 

 

First Betsy Ross, then Steven

Back in the good old days, Earl Warren stated that he read the sports page first, since it had news of man's achievements rather than its failures. That's not always the case these days, where you're not sure if you're watching Sport Center or Tort Center.

Miami Dolphins owner Steven Ross is in the cross-hairs for being a Trump supporter (hosting a fund-raiser) yet also funding a foundation supporting racial equality. "Hypocrite" has been flying, and Ross's exercise emporiums are getting boycotted. 

Last I checked, roughly half the country that bothered to vote voted for Trump last go-round. Yes, he didn't get a plurality of the vote, but it was still in the 40%+ range. Not everyone in that bucket is a deplorable bigot, even if the guy they voted for acts like one far too frequently.

We have two main political parties in the country. One of them is headed up by a guy who likes to pick on liberal minority-group members (and just about anyone else he doesn't like) on a regular basis. Quite a few folks who honestly strive to treat everyone fairly saw him as a better bet than his Democratic foe. I was almost one of them.

I don't know much of anything about Steven Ross and whether his foundation is merely window dressing to placate an NFL that has a large black workforce. However, he could very easily be honestly unracist, even if his response to the anthem-kneeling protests last year shows a bit of a tin ear towards racial issues.

By the way, while we're on the topic, there will be quite a few Christian folks who would normally be Republican voters who might see Joe Biden as the lesser of two evils come November 2020. Questioning those folks' faith might be about as valid as questioning Ross' color-blindness without any more evidence than who they voted for (or hosted fundraisers for).

 

Shanghaied Markets

The current "trade war" with the Chinese showcases a lot of President Trump's quirks. Beijing gives him an easy target to pick on, given their disdain for free speech and freedoms in general, their abuse of the Uighur and geopolitical bullying in the South China Sea; it's hard to have too many people who will come to China's defense.

Trump's default style is to bully, to assume that no one dare mess with him or the US. A show of strength will get everyone to cower in respect to the Big Man. China's big enough where they can afford to call Trump's bluff.

They're also not a democracy. US soybean farmers whose pocketbooks have been lightened due to China passing on their normal imports have the option of lobbying their members of Congress to have them short-circuit the trade war as well as voting for a less belligerent and short-sighted leader next year. The Shanghai shopper whose tofu just shot up in price doesn't have that option. Beijing feels that they can manage an economic war of attrition better than the US can, and they're most likely correct.

In the meantime, the reduced exports and higher-priced imports (and higher priced domestic alternatives) will tend to lead to downward pressure on both economies. That has spill-over effects in a number of areas.

One is the drop in the Fed Funds rate last week. Trump has been agitating for lower rates for a while. As a real estate tycoon, Trump likes low interest rates and easy money so that he can get mortgages on his properties cheaper. As a populist, he'll cater to the folks who need or want to borrow over the lending class who's looking to conserve wealth rather than create it. The Fed has to balance fighting inflation with promoting economic growth, and the have nots (or want-to-have-mores like Trump) will want it to err on the growth side; loose money has always been a populist tool all the way back to William Jennings Bryant and free silver.

The Fed isn't moving as much due to that pressure but to the economic slowdown that the trade war will help create. They're trying to clean up Trump's mess rather than to enable it.

One of the other side effects is a drop in value in the Chinese yuan. China's often erred on the side of keeping the yuan low in order to encourage exports. However, if the trade war results in fewer Chinese exports, there will be less demand for the yuan and the value will go down naturally. In that case, China doesn't have to work at devaluing things artificially if the market will do it for them; you don't need to have the sprinklers on in the rain.

That's the take of this Lowy Institute piece, noting that the US might be more of a "currency manipulator" than the Chinese. Lowering interest rates, as the Fed has done, makes the dollar less attractive, as folks looking at US short-term deposits as an investment will get a lower return and look elsewhere. Raising interest rates is a classic way of getting the value of the currency up amidst a value downturn, and lowering rates will tend to devalue the currency.

 

 

Streets of El Paso...and Dayton

A few points to bring in on the signature events of the weekend.

• We've got the availability of guns baked into the US Constitution. Until there is a national consensus to amend the constitution, we're stuck with them.
• Eileen's working at the Sugnet building this summer, which hosts a karate class. Their ad sign leads with "Don't be a victim." The desire for self-defense is that gave us the Second Amendment. That's hard to crack; the Mennonites have tried to preach peace for 500 years and it hasn't worked to date, as pacifism has a niche market.
• The Dayton shooter had a history of thinking about violence, both murder and rape. 20-20 hindsight says that folks should have worked harder to get that streak out of his system. Taking that into policy would mean both doing more to punish lesser violence in youth (running counter to anti-punishment streaks on the left) and spending more money on psych help for kids with violence streaks (running counter to both the limited-government streak and anti-psychology streak of the right).
• One takeaway from Parkland was that such prevention was needed, but that's neither sexy nor simple. Maybe we'll work on it this time if we don't let the gun-control and racism angles be the only talking points.
• Trump called Dayton Toledo by mistake. I get Dayton and Akron cross-wired all the time, and I lived in metro Akron (Kent State) for six years in grad school. That's well down the list of things to rag on Trump for.
• On top of that loooooong list is the immigrant-bashing and minority-bashing that has become Trump's stock in trade. The El Paso victims aren't in good position to sue him over it, but Trump's rhetoric has given aid and comfort to bigots the world over.
• That is not to excuse the El Paso shooter. It's one thing to call immigrants crime-prone [hell]-hole refugees, it's another to go to the lives-unworthy-of-life level of Nazi lore. Trump likely helped that radicalization process along a bit, but he didn't pull the trigger.
• It was a ten-hour drive from the shooter's metro Dallas home turf to El Paso. Premeditated as all get-out and sneaky-effective in getting Mexico proper riled up; a lot of the Whites First crowd are hope for a race war and hope to spark it. I'm not a fan of the death penalty, but its use here wouldn't shed too many tears.
• There's nothing special about having northern European ancestry. "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."  I didn't see Paul add "but White and Wetback, that's another thing." Saying otherwise has the Holy Spirit wanting to kick the cat, but He'd have mercy on the cat.
• Back to Dayton. One policy prescription is "red flag laws" that can take guns away from folks with a violent streak. Sounds good at first blush, but it can easily lead down a path were gun ownership stops being a right and turns into a privilege that only a select few get; in heavy gun-control cities, only elites have the money and connections to get permits. Medieval law limited commoners ability to own weapons lest the nobility lose their monopoly on effective violence; that's what the Second Amendment wanted to prevent in part. 
• That being said, red flag laws are still worth looking into. That's on the table in Ohio.

ICE-y BMs

Here's an interesting piece noting how Obama Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson defended the embattled Immigration and Customs Enforcement division.

"During the Vietnam War, millions of Americans demanded an end to the war; no one seriously demanded that we abolish the entire Defense Department," Johnson wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post. "Obviously, that would have completely compromised national security."

Quite a few folks on the left have urged ICE's demise. However, no customs and open borders is likely not the end result most ICE-bashers would want. They might like open borders for people but are often not exactly free traders. No ICE would mean no customs checks, thus open season for importing stuff from overseas. 

What they want is a less harsh immigration policy, with the recent uproar over undocumented kids getting separated from their parents creating the ICE-breaking mood on the left. Their cries were answered on that issue, as many conservatives, especially religious conservatives. joined them in criticizing the policy on pro-family grounds. The Trump team took note, did a 180 and are working at reunification fairly promptly with a bit of administrative foot-dragging.

However, if you abolish ICE, you'll likely have some agency doing the custom checks and immigration checks. The resulting agency will resemble ICE and likely have a large hunk of the same staff, as creating a new agency while black-balling former ICE-people will be reinventing the wheel to a dangerous degree.

I have the same response to conservatives who want to abolish the IRS. We need to have someone collecting taxes, and those folks will typically not be well like. Jesus got ragged on for hanging out with "tax collectors and sinners"; their reputation is somewhat better today, but few people like paying taxes.

The IRS has to play bad cop from time to time, auditing folks at random and calling BS when folks fail to pay up. Likewise, ICE has to play bad cop, stopping contraband and under-documented folks at the border and doing the occasional snatch of folks who overstayed their welcome or who weren't invited into the country in the first place. Those folks aren't well liked, either, especially if you're of an ethnic group getting the white-glove treatment from ICE.

However, as Mike Rowe would say. somebody's gotta do it. How much enforcement to do is a live issue. The fact that some level of enforcement is needed should be a no-brainer.

Judicial Role-Playing

The president seems poised to make his pick to replace Justice Kennedy early next week. The conventional wisdom is that he's got it boiled down to three options, with appeals court judge Brett Kavanaugh the front runner. 

Kavanaugh comes across as a pragmatic conservative, which seems to have rubbed some conservatives the wrong way, making a less-than-strident pro-life argument in a case of a detained immigrant teen looking for an abortion. That factoid seems to be a feature rather than a bug, as a 180-proof pro-lifer might have a hard time getting confirmed with the current Senate.

As a appellate court judge, he had to take into account the lay of the land above him, as there was a five-vote majority on the Supreme Court to maintain the status quo on abortion. Kavanaugh clerked for Kennedy, so he had a good understanding of where Mr. Swing Vote would likely come down on things. 

As a supreme court justice, Kavanaugh would be the swing vote, assuming the other eight justices hold to form. He'd be freer to set precedent in that spot, as there's nothing downstream to worry about. It would likely win over the RINO Sisters and a handful of moderate Democrats and get him within hailing distance of 60 votes; he doesn't need 60 in a filibuster-free Senate these days, but it would give him some bipartisan cache going forward. 

The Fifth Sucka Packs It In

One of the big news items of the week is the announcement that Justice Anthony Kennedy is stepping down; he's been the swing vote on just about every 5-4 case in the last decade, very rarely being in the minority on any contentious case. While Kennedy was a Republican nominee, he's been fairly neutral over the years, setting up a 4-1-4 split for the last decade, with four reliably conservative justices (Thomas, Alito, Roberts and Gorsuch) and four reliably liberal justices (Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan, Sotomayor), with Kennedy as the fulcrum.

The seat now held by Gorsuch threatened to tip the scales when Antonin Scalia died in 2016; Republicans had to stall the naming of a replacement until after that year's presidential election to avoid a left-oriented Obama nominee Merrick Garland making things a 3-1-5 liberal split. Democrats will be in the same spot now, hoping to stall things until they can (in their hopes) beat a few Republican senators come November and gain a Trump-proof majority in the Senate.

However, judicial nominees can't be filibustered anymore; two years ago, Republicans could stop a cloture (shut up and vote) resolution with 41 votes. Now, a simple majority can bust a filibuster, so stall tactics aren't as fruitful for Senate Democrats.

One Republican senator, Mike Lee, made an interesting observation that might calm some liberal fears.

“They have to take into account the doctrine of stare decisis, which is a doctrine that generally puts the Supreme Court on a path of following precedent,” he continued. “So, they can't know for sure how any one of those issues is going to turn out and whether any one of those cases might be overturned.”

The retirement of Kennedy, the swing justice who cast the deciding vote in favor of allowing same-sex marriage and in multiple abortion rights cases, has prompted significant concern among liberals that those precedents and others might be undone with a more conservative, Trump-appointed justice on the bench.

On "Obamacare", Chief Justice Roberts has been willing to bolt from the party line and grant that they had a right to tax the uninsured and to fudge on calling the federal government a "state" in order to have national health care exchanges in states that didn't set their own ones up. It's possible that he, or one of the other conservative justices might go with precedent. Abortion's been legal since a week before my wife was born and someone like Roberts might be loathe to scrap 45 years of precedent.

However, Justice Thomas has the famous (at least in the conservative Blogosphere) quote "Stare decisis is fo' suckas"; a lot of dead blog links make a definitive take on that hard to track down. The idea is that if a decision is wrong, bowing to precedent isn't wise; current judges, especially those on the Supreme Court, have a duty to correct bogus decisions of the past. From that vantage point, Roe v Wade might be destined to join Plessy v Ferguson (OK-ing Jim Crow) in that historical dust bin.

The nomination fight will be nasty, as the 51-seat majority held by the Republicans can only stand 1 defection or abstention if Democrats vote no en masse. A combo of a cancer-weakened McCain having to skip a vote and a balky Collins not willing to risk Roe could sideline a nominee. Taking back the Senate no sure thing for the Democrats, but they'll likely throw everything including the kitchen sink (Incoming!) to derail a conservative nominee in the meantime. 

The current president isn't great at charm offensives, as he reverts to being merely offensive far too often. However, Republicans will be trying to win over both the more RINOey senators (Collins, Murkowski) and some of the winable Democratic votes (Tesler, Manchin, Heitkamp, Donnelly) over to the nominee.

Interesting times.

 

 

On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a dog Russian

There was a popular political cartoon of yore showing two dogs at a computer desk. Caption-"On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog." The link credits it to a New Yorker cartoon of 1993, but I remember it with a laptop from the early blog era of the early-mid 00s.

Nobody knows you're a Russian, either. Well, almost nobody...

The website they set up to track the Russian campaign, called Hamilton 68 after the eloquent warning in the Federalist Papers from Alexander Hamilton to beware of foreign efforts to hijack U.S. elections, has documented in recent days how even an American tragedy like the Florida school shooting has become fodder for the network of 600 Russia-linked social media accounts the group’s software is following. The trolls, Fly said, were pushing inflammatory pro- and anti-gun control messages within hours of the killings, with “Russian accounts that were jumping on both sides, basically egging Americans on, making everyone angrier, trying to divide us rather than bring us together in a moment of crisis.”

It's a very pernicious tactic, for just about anyone can be accused of having their chains being yanked by Russian trolls save centrists and establshmentarians. There's always quite a bit of pro-Second-Amendment trolling after a mass shooting, some of it more sober but others designed to maximize the anti-liberal propaganda effect. I assume that the left has its share of trolling going on as well.

We're already distrustful of others, and this just amps the distrust. Is that over-the-top FB post legit, or Russian trolling? One can't quite tell without detective work.

Formalizing the End of an Era

I had an odd emotion when I saw the news of Billy Graham's passing. "Finally..."

It seems like we've been writing Graham's obit for years, as he did a slow fade out of the public eye.  That link is from a 2006 post on a Graham statue that the SBC put up, and closes thusly, 

Graham's not dead yet, just in deteriorating health. Were he dead and Catholic, he'd be on the fast track to sainthood like Mother Teresa or John Paul the Great; people would flock to his grave-site asking for him to intercede with Jesus.

Evangelicals cut out the middleman and pray straight to God; there isn't a market for a evangelical capital-s saint. However, he's a singular figure in 20th Century American Christianity; none of the big televangelists can come close to the impact that Graham has had.

How do you honor that body of work? A nice museum is inevitable; things are likely to err some on the high-tech Disneyesque side given the scope of interest in Graham. However, we'd best honor it by trying to better present the Gospel ourselves, with more humility and less pride, more universality (not universalism, mind you, but the idea that the Gospel transcends nationality and culture) and less parochial thoughts.

It took 11 more years to finish deteriorating. It seems like another era already. Graham was America's Pastor that largely transcended politics (over-coziness with Nixon not withstanding) well into this century. The Obama inaugural had Rick Warren filling that role, but by 2012, even a largely apolitical preacher was too toxic to the left to do a reprisal. Louie Giglio got vetoed by the LBGT lobby even though he was even more apolitical than Warren; merely being an orthodox Christian was enough.

However, it's not the civic religion role that drove Graham, it was a simple drive to tell the world about Jesus. That's more important than who's in the White House or the Supreme Court.

It's also needed even more than it was when I did a VBS presentation on Graham in the early 1990s. I remember closing my presentation with the idea that Graham was getting up their in years and that one of the kids from Kent's Grace Baptist could be his successor.

They're now in their 30s. Time flies.

It feels like the Church is on the back foot these days, fighting a rear-guard action against an advancing hostile culture that makes the idea of Graham somewhat quaint. However, the Common Era has has darker ages. 

If you cheated and read the end of the book, the good guys win. Keep that in mind. Billy did.

The War Against Anger

We're a few days out from yet another school shooting and the gun-rights/gun-control verbiage is flowing more freely than melting snow in Midland. Some students of the Florida school have been prompted to do a great photo op and march on Washington.

On a less grandiose level, we have Second Amendment mavens pointing out that the shooter's weapon of choice (AR-15) is more mundane than it looks. One snarky variant (too snarky to link to) on that theme noted that, in the right hands, a non-auto manual-load rifle can rack up a nice body count, using the 1966 Texas tower shooter as their poster boy.

Of course, the most cliche of the NRA rhetorical kit is "guns don't kill people, people kill people." Well, it's a close fight between that and "if guns our outlawed, only outlaws have guns" for pinning the cliche-meter, but let me run with GDKP,PKP.

What really does the killing is anger. Uncontrolled anger.

While we're in the cliche-trashing realm, let me run the risk of trotting out a Church Nerd special from Ephesians 4.

²⁵ Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body. ²⁶ “In your anger do not sin”^[d]: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, ²⁷ and do not give the devil a foothold.

Good advice even if you don't believe in a literal Devil or the Savior that the writer (Paul) preached about. However, it's easier said than done, especially if that anger has metastasized into a truly nasty cancerous boil.

Our shooter Mr. Cruz seems to have anger by the boatload. The reporting pointed to a stint with a local white-nationalist outfit (Hispanics must have been white enough for them), giving a troubled young man a target for his frustrations in life.

Having a one-pull-one-shot semi-auto AR-15 expedited the killing process, but it was the anger at life and at one's fellow man that got the very ugly ball rolling.

I'm reminded of the "War on Terror"; critics of the phrase will point out that it isn't terror tactics that are at play, but radical Islam that is the issue at hand. Dig deeper, and it is anger that is the true driver, a dislike of some class of people to justify killing them.

For quite a few jihadis, it is a rage against society that seems to be far too akin to Mr. Cruz's, rather than some hard-core Muslim theology. An angry young man finds an Other to rage at, whether it be non-whites for a wannabe Klansman or the infidels for jihadis.

Get rid of the rage and anger, and you're a long way towards getting rid of the violence. Some more prudent Muslims will note that jihad means struggle in Arabic, not war, and that a greater jihad lies in taming our sinful nature, making the violent resistance of infidels a "lesser jihad."

Easier said than done, once again. Without the Holy Spirit's help, it's a very uphill struggle.

Changing the Constitution to ban guns is another uphill struggle. A more achievable struggle is to try and minister to the angry young men (and women...we don't have too many female mass killers, but that could change) in our communities before that anger gets out of control. This Cipher Brief article points out that little can be done to lock up would-be killers before they act out, but trying to change their angry attitudes is still legal.

 

Mitch and Chuck's Charcuterie Plate

I'm recalling a minivan ad of about 20 years ago (a once-over with Google fails to conjure it up) where the various family members are in a conference room, each with a lawyer, hashing out the features they are holding out for. Just when they think they have settled everything, a black lawyer designed to invoke Johnnie Cochran from the OJ trial comes in.

"Aren't we forgetting some-one?"

Pan to four-month-old in a baby-carrier.

Mom- "Timmy?"

Cochran clone-"Yee-eeessss."

Timmy doesn't have a seat at the table in Washington right now. We've just gotten done passing a tax-cut late last year, and the manic hunk of charcuterie that came out of the Senate gives extra cash to both the Pentagon and domestic programs. Everyone seems to have gotten something, except Timmy, standing in as the future taxpayers who will get stuck with the tab for all this largess.

Instead of Cochran, we have a tag team of the Freedom Caucus and various liberals, with the former going to bat for Tiny Taxpayer Tim and the latter going to bat for his "Dreamer" analogue (Timoteito if I try and cram that through), since that corner wants a DACA vote as the price for passage.

Classic "both ends against the middle" dynamic. There isn't much of a middle left, it seems, nor is there much in the way of long-term planning; running deficits is the easy way out, since future taxpayers aren't voting yet.

One old saw has tradition giving the dead a vote. Planning for the future gives kids and the unborn a vote.

Lost Causes Best Not Searched For

We had a social-media fed perfect storm of incivility in Charlottesville this weekend. Start with a high-minded removal of Lee and Stonewall Jackson statues and giving their namesake parks PC names. Add white-nationalist outrage of the move in a town easy road-trip distance for the DC-based press to cover. To that, add locals who want to counterprotest the alt-right invasion and good liberals from elsewhere wanting to do likewise.

To polish off the witch's brew, add a touch of skinhead-style attitude on the part of the more militant of the crimson-necked crowd and a few of their excitable anti-fascist counterparts. Throw in a redneck mimicking the jihadi tactic of pedestrian-smashing as a low art and serve warm.

Good TV. Lousy cultural moment.

The city isn't to blame, other than possibly going overboard and trying to cancel the rally (that gives a heckler's veto that is far too common on campuses these days). Removing the statues, put there to celebrate white supremacy and to mourn the Lost Cause, is a good thing to do on balance.

Lee and Jackson seem to have been honorable guys with bad taste in sides, supporting their state and looking the other way at the "peculiar institution" of slavery in the process. Arlington National Cemetery was built on Lee's estate as payback for his efforts in the war, and Jackson was a prof at VMI before leading a lot of his former students into battle. White the two generals were not-bad guys in a bad cause (Lee and Rommel are in similar boats as great tactical generals on the wrong side of history), the anti-black folks in the Jim Crow era that put a lot of such statues up were far less honorable.

White a lot of folks look at Confederate kitsch (Dukes of Hazard is the classic example) as rebelling against overbearing authority than backing up slavery (the Don't Tread on Me Gadsden Flag is methadone for some stars-and-bars fliers, although I've seen two Old Glory-Confederate-Gadsden trifectas around mid-Michigan as of late), that's not the message that will be sent to those whose ancestors were being enslaved by the bearers of that flag.

I recall a conversation I had with a coworker at Invervarsity Christian Fellowship's Cedar Campus conference center a quarter-century ago. He had a Confederate flag in his cabin not from a love of white-nationalism or the KKK but of that rebel kitsch that appeals to mildly rebellious youth of all ages.

The college-aged young man needed a quick education of the broader meaning of that flag and the unsavory message it will send to black folks and white foes of discrimination. Is an anti-racism unsaved person going to see the young believer's faith as worth-emulating with that flag in the mix? He took it down.

I have little love for the modern alt-right, who mix a toxic ethnocentrism with a bird-flipping attitude. I have a bit less disdain for other "white nationalists" who skip the 'tude but keep the Superfund-site worldview. The PC does get a bit thick at times and the left throws a lot of useful culture out with some unsavory aspects of our nation's past, but this isn't the answer.

In Christ there is no Greek or Jew, slave or free, sayeth Paul. He didn't mention Black or Hispanic, but he would have if they were in the first-century mix, and not to say "but those spear-chuckers and wetbacks, go ahead and dis them to your heart's content." At least that's not in any of the translations I've seen of Colossians 3:11.

Those pro-statue protesters have a right to speak. We've had ideological cousins of theirs for all my life, and the best way to handle them seems to be to let them say their piece without massive counter-protests that give them bigger platforms then they deserve. Had the antifas let this one go on without massive counter-protests, we'd have had no wall-to-wall coverage yesterday. That's blaming the victim in the case of the pedestrian fatality, but the nationalists got a truckload of coverage they wouldn't have had otherwise.

As is, we have the story-line of militant rightists clashing with militant leftists, with the anti-liberal Fox News crowd giving sympathy to the rednecks, at least until the pedestrian demolition derby. That makes more savory conservatives like my mom lean towards reflexively support the rednecks when they don't really deserve the support

Eileen said that if this starts devolving into Civil War 2.0 (buggy as all get out, but 2.1 won't be much better) between the white nationalists and the antifas, she's a conscientious objector. So am I.

Squaring the Circle is a Heller a Thing to Do

Interesting politics on the health-care overhaul. The Democrats are largely sitting back and letting the Republicans hang themselves, so they need 50 of the 52 GOP senators on board to squeak a package through, assuming no Democrats (or Democratic-leaning independents; Angus King might be an very outside shot) break rank and VP Mike Pence breaks the tie in the bill's favor.

Easier said than done. Four economic conservatives, including Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, say the bill doesn't kill Obamacare and incinerate the corpse as needed to make sure it's dead. However, some of the more moderate of the Republican caucus think it goes too far in slashing coverage for low-income folks, most notably Dean Heller of Nevada.

Heller doesn't quite strike me as a RINO, like some of the usual suspects like Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, who are upset with defunding Planned Parenthood. He has a lifetime ACU rating of 82, so he's far from a movement conservative, but not as low as the Mundane Miss M's 60 or Collins' 45. Rob Portman shoots an 81, and he wants more anti-opiod money as his go-to critique.

There are quite a few folks (about 9 or so from a quick scan of the ACU sheet)  roughly as semi-moderate as Portman and Heller, only three of which are needed to scupper (as the Brits would say) the deal. New LA senator Cassidy has some reservation on the Medicaid cuts, if memory serves, and a number of folks who don't exactly have Ayn Rand memorized might also have misgivings.

Interesting times.

Orange Crush

Modern pop music isn't quite up my ally, so I wasn't watching last night's Grammys. One of the "highlights" of the evening per the BBC was Busta Rhymes' takedown of the new president, christening him "Agent Orange." That's an unveiled dig at his skin-tone and his toxicity.

However, the metaphor might be far more apt than Busta implied. If taken in the context of "drain the swamp", Agent Orange is an effective defoliant. It doesn't drain the wetlands, but it does make the swamp critters easier to see and thus to catch; in a more sinister vein, it can also take out the other side's crops and starve them out.

However, it was show to be a strong carcenogen, hurting both the Vietnamese and US soldiers appling it during the Vietnam War.

Both seem to be apt; sending Trump in to reform Obama-era excesses has some rather toxic side effects.

 

 

World Second

I'm looking over newly-sworn in President Trump's speech. Vintage Trump, for better or worse.

"January 20th, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again." Not quite. That assumes that "the people" weren't in charge yesterday, that the people who voted Obama in the last two elections weren't "the people." Trump got a majority of the electoral vote and thus was put in charge today, but he got a minority of the vote back in November.

However, this is the money paragraph for Trumpism-

From this day forward, it's going to be only America first, America first. Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our product, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs.

That leaves out any hope of compassion and sacrifice for a greater good towards the rest of the world.  Making the world a better place doesn't count, just making the US a better place. It creates a small "we" that puts non-Americans outside the circle of consideration.

For instance, taking away the tax-deductability of charitable donations overseas would redirect some of those donations to domestic charities or spent on US goods (no, Trump's not proposing that). It would materially "benefit American workers and American families." However, that doesn't seem to be that godly of a move. 

True, the Obama team has been internationalist to a fault who's do-gooder instincts went badly astray in a number of locales, especially in the Arab Spring era, where only the initial outbreak in Tunisia improved things and generated two messy civil wars in Libya and Syria. However, there are times where being (as the Navy ad went) a force for good in the world is still called for.

Moving away some from  the Obama team's (and Dubya's) Wilsonian do-gooderism is a prudent idea, but self-interest only goes so far.  "Enlightened" self-interest which includes the well-being of others is still a virtue, at least to me.

Headlee Does the Samba

Brazil seems to be taking a page out of teen years, as they've passed a constitutional amendment to cap government spending at current levels.

The project, known in Brazil as PEC 55, freezes expenditure in the executive, judiciary and legislative branches of power, allowing them to grow only by the rate of inflation in the previous year.

Folks on the left, who want the size of government to grow, don't like it; it doesn't help matters that they impeached a leftist president earlier in the year, so the left is in an ornery mood to begin with.

Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets during the Senate session to protest against the austerity plan.

After the vote, many demonstrations descended into violence.

In Brasilia, masked protesters set fire to a bus and marched on the local offices of Globo TV, which they say is biased towards [new president] Mr Temer's government. But the marchers were blocked by riot police.

The teen years part flows from 1978, when Michigan, following the anti-tax mood that most famously gave us California's Proposition 13, passed the Headlee Amendment, which stated that "... the state’s total revenue cannot exceed 9.49 percent of personal income in Michigan." If memory serves, that figure was the current figure in 1978. It also put in rules limiting what would come to be known as unfunded mandates in the early 90s and on mandating local votes on local tax increases.

Michigan has function reasonably well with that in place and has stayed on the books for almost four decades. Liberals have grumbled about it, especially in the early going, but it has settled in to the political rules of the game.

A majority of the voters can rewrite the constitution in Michigan, but Brazil's needs a 60% majority of both houses. That might be hard for the left to undo, but if a crisis that needs a bigger government goes down, such a supermajority could be conjured up to undo it. In the US, 60% (60 votes to be technical, but that's 60% if everyone shows) is the threshold needed to break a filibuster in the Senate, so that's a manageable hurdle to undo this in the future.

It's a bit of a hardball trick for the right, but hard-wiring policy into the constitution is a common trick in many state constitutions; Michigan, for example, makes public worker's pensions untouchable, something that came into play with the Detroit bankruptcy.