Rebellion in the Senate

Sen. Booker, a man well-known for his melodrama, has decided to openly defy the rules in order to put out what he plainly views as explosive emails from the SCOTUS nominee. Having read them, though, I'd think these emails would be reassuring to Democrats about the quality of the man they are considering for the post.

For example, here he is defending the independence of the law-enforcement arms of the Executive from the politics of the elected President. As I understand it, that is exactly the position of Democrats vis a vis Donald Trump and the FBI or DOJ. The nominee was on their side way back in the Bush administration.

And here is the nominee asserting that he is on the side of a "race neutral" airport security policy in the wake of 9/11, when profiling (more on religion than race) was being put forward by many as an obvious security procedure. Again, for Democrats, this should put him on the side of the angels.

Booker says he's prepared to be expelled from the Senate in order to get these documents in front of the American people. Well, OK, thanks I guess. What does he see in these documents that is so alarming?

UPDATE: Booker was just grandstanding, it looks like -- the documents were cleared for release last night, at the request of his staff.

A Confession

The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

I would know. I am one of them....

This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.

You can read his (or her) defense of this approach to electoral government at the link.

That's Not Going to Cut It, Francis

The Pope says that our response to the current scandals in the Church should be "silence and prayer."

What's Fonzie Like?

UPDATE: Original text deleted. This looks to be a death hoax, which is a strange form of internet behavior I’ll never understand. The article claims he had no children, but he has 3 according to Wikipedia. People should cut this sort of thing out.

I Guess There's Some Football Going On

...and thank God for normal America.



I guess we aren't quite done yet.

Kyl Back to Senate

McCain's term will be finished by his old colleague John Kyl, another 'grand bargain on immigration' guy. Even in 2007, when that article was written, his voters were incensed about the issue. I don't get the sense that the Republican electorate has grown more accepting in the ensuing decade.

Conversational Old Norse

Phrases you can use with friends and family, from our favorite cowboy scholar.

Senescence Affects Ideas

The WSJ has an article today describing our left's ideas as 'exhausted.'

This liberalism evolved within a society shamed by its past. But that shame has weakened now. Our new conservative president rolls his eyes when he is called a racist, and we all—liberal and conservative alike—know that he isn’t one. The jig is up. Bigotry exists, but it is far down on the list of problems that minorities now face. I grew up black in segregated America, where it was hard to find an open door. It’s harder now for young blacks to find a closed one....

Today’s liberalism is an anachronism. It has no understanding, really, of what poverty is and how it has to be overcome. It has no grip whatever on what American exceptionalism is and what it means at home and especially abroad. Instead it remains defined by an America of 1965—an America newly opening itself to its sins, an America of genuine goodwill, yet lacking in self-knowledge.

Spengler writes that last week's funeral for John McCain was really a funeral held by members of his elite class for the world they thought they lived in. That world, above all, they mourn.

Both items h/t Wretchard.

Responses to Tyranny from America's Geniuses of Vienna

Three of the great minds of the last century, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Popper, and Friedrich Hayek, all wrote pieces on how to respond to tyranny if it ever came to the West. The Economist has a helpful survey of their ideas.

Hayek and Popper were friends but not close to Schumpeter. The men did not co-operate. Nonetheless a division of labour emerged. Popper sought to blow up the intellectual foundations of totalitarianism and explain how to think freely. Hayek set out to demonstrate that, to be safe, economic and political power must be diffuse. Schumpeter provided a new metaphor for describing the energy of a market economy: creative destruction.

These are ideas that are well worth considering at length.

Politics as Usual

The funeral of Senator John McCain was a festival of anti-Trump rhetoric, in spite of the fact that some Trump family members were in attendance. Well, that's doubtless just what McCain would have wanted. However, there is a footnote to this story that is worth knowing.

NPR: School Shootings Overestimated by at least 2/3rds

An unexpected but appreciated attempt at real journalism.

This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, "nearly 240 schools ... reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting." The number is far higher than most other estimates.

But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened.... We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents[.]

It's as if the government bureaucracies can't be trusted to tell citizens the truth.

I Have Returned

The trip to the Swamp was eventful, but I am still thankful to return to the mountain. Yesterday I crossed three great rivers as well as three states, the long Shenandoah valley, and several high mountain passes to get here. It is good to be back.

BB: Feelings Acceptable as Answers on Math Tests

“Any emotion, feeling, statement, or catchphrase is an acceptable answer to most of the problems in the new mathematics standards,” a Common Core representative told reporters. “As long as students are being sincere, genuine, authentic, and true to themselves at the time they are answering the question, that’s all we can ask as educators.”

The Righteous Punishment of the Sun

I am enduring it, having left my mountain fastness for another trip to the Swamp. I’ll be back when I return to places where it is cool enough to think. That will probably be this weekend.

Colloquialisms and Racism

Cross-posted from my blog.

Ron DeSantis, Republican candidate for Governor of Florida, suggested in an interview shortly after his nomination, that his just-nominated Progressive-Democrat opponent, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, would, if elected, monkey up the Florida economy.

Oh, the hue and cry from the Progressive-Democrats, the NLMSM, and Gillum.  A colloquialism that plainly means to mess with things, or to mess things up, suddenly is a racist bull horn—much more than a dog whistle according to Gillum.

How can this be?  One candidate says another candidate will mess things up, and this is racist!?

Oh, wait—Gillum is black.

Notice that.  Gillum isn't a political candidate who happens to be a black man; he's a black man who happens to be a political candidate.

Americans for generations have worked hard to make race irrelevant.  All men are created equal, equal employment, Martin Luther King's dream, and on and on.

But not anymore.  The Progressive-Democrat, his Party, and the Left in general insist that what's important here is the man's race, not his policies.  It's his race that gives meaning to the colloquialism, not his policies.

This emphasis by the Progressive-Democrat, his Party, and the Left in general on race is rank racist bigotry.  That it's wholly artificial, done by politicians solely for personal political gain and by pseudo-journalists solely for click bait makes their racism even worse.

Gillum's cynically artificial racism should disqualify him from public office.

Eric Hines

Update: I have no sense of time. I wrote this for my blog and scheduled it for tomorrow's posting there. Yet, here it is today in the Hall....

Just a Harmless Folk Custom

The Maldives hosts an Eid celebration with, ah, 'September' oriented themes.

Bravo Sierra

This discussion of "b******* jobs" is very interesting, even though the move to support UBI as an answer is less so. I have definitely noticed this phenomenon, and it does seem to violate the logic of capitalism. Yet it seems to be growing, not shrinking.

FEMA insanity

The Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece today on one of my favorite subjects, the barking madness that is our federal emergency management jurisprudence:

Hurricane Harvey shows what can go wrong. It lumbered through Texas, unloading 5 feet of rain, one year ago. Yet 8% of survivors have not returned to their homes, as per a recent Kaiser Family Foundation study. Some low-income families had their aid requests denied by FEMA because of “insufficient damage” to their homes. But FEMA also denied aid to homes with roofs blown off or mold creeping up the walls.

A plausible explanation for at least part of the discrepancy is that FEMA’s comparatively strict aid policies are in conflict with Texas’ minimal housing regulations. FEMA aims to restore property to “safe and sanitary” condition while being careful not to make “improvements or additions to the pre-disaster condition.” At the same time, Texas allows families to build their homes to a lower standard than what FEMA considers “safe and sanitary.” In other words, a house can be good enough for Texas but not for FEMA. Consequently, the only way FEMA can rebuild it to the “safe and sanitary” standard is by contradicting the “no improvements” rule.

Pro-regulatory do-gooders will respond by suggesting that benighted Texas should ramp up its housing standards. Here's what I would prefer: amend the FEMA rules so that federal emergency aid is available to return houses to FEMA's standard of "safe and sanitary," or the local code-mandated standard of "safe and sanitary," or the home's pre-existing condition, whichever is least. Even a bureaucracy need not tie itself up in this kind of Catch 22 unless it's plain bloody-minded.

Adventures of a Sock Puppet

Glenn Greenwald gets profiled in the New Yorker. This is a great line:

Leading American progressives—speaking off the record, and apologizing for what they describe as cowardice—call Greenwald a bully and a troll.

Dump on the English time

For all you Scots out there, Netflix is going to tackle the Bruce.


And so all you Irish won't feel left out:


Plenty o'mud  and blood for all from looks of them.

Accusing in Church

A thoroughgoing accusation.

Requiescat in Pace, John McCain

Far from perfect, and a man with whom I have regularly had differences on most serious matters, all the same John McCain was a man who spoke his honest mind and had the good of the Republic in his heart. He may have been wrong at times about how to pursue it; perhaps so are we all. I am glad that his suffering is at an end, and wish the best to his family. Honor and respect to a worthy man, whom I will remember for his service especially as a Prisoner of War, but whom I prefer to remember for his good humor.

Wish-fulfillment press conference

Viking Ring Fortress Update

Four years after its discovery, a Viking ring fortress has begun to offer some answers to archaeologists. First, why was it built at all? Originally, they had theorized it was as a show of force, to deter attacks rather than to actually repel them. Now, they think there was an immediate threat in the area -- other Vikings.

And so fortresses were established right across the kingdom. They was a coastal defence: Rather than being Viking fortresses, they were actually “anti-Viking” fortresses.

It was this hypothesis that led us to discover Borgring.

It suggested that Harold Bluetooth must also have had a fortress to protect the east coast of the country, which turned out to be the case.

What we couldn’t explain was, how exactly the fortresses were used as a defence. And this is where the discoveries made at Borgring can shed some new light.

With this in mind, we can propose a new explanation for the fortresses, and a more direct connection between Harold Bluetooth’s fight on the southern borders and his need for coastal defences in the rest of the country.

The excavations at Borgring have revealed a fortress built to the same design as Trelleborg and the other ring fortresses. We also see that the fortifications were well planned and completed swiftly.

The landscape was levelled, and the walls were built in a precise circle, with gently sloping sides inside the fortress. The interior is divided into even sections, with four wooden gates placed at exactly 90 degrees to each other.

But then… nothing.

There’s no sign of repairs or extensions to the walls, there are only feeble traces of wooden constructions, which could have supported a high wall, and unlike Trelleborg, Fyrkat, and Aggersborg, there are no signs of construction in the interior of the fortress.

But there are traces of a damaging fire in numerous places around the fortress, and deep wheel tracks that suggest long-term use by traffic coming in and out.

How can we explain these features? It is possible that the construction was interrupted prematurely, but in this case we might have expected to see more clear traces of the building process, and we wouldn’t expect to see any later activity.

The wheel tracks suggest that Borgring was sufficiently ready for use, even without the construction of actual buildings or dwellings inside.

Looking at the excavation drawings from Trelleborg made in the 1930s, we see that the fortress walls were built up numerous times, with the oldest phase most similar to the walls at Borgring.

And Borgring is not alone: One of the other fortresses, Nonnebakken, does not appear to have any interior buildings either. This suggests, that the primary function of the fortresses was not to house a permanent settlement, but to allow people to flee there for short periods of time.

This function as a place for refugees to seek shelter, points to a new and stronger connection between the fortresses and Harold Bluetooth’s was against Otto II....

Placed on top of a fortified wall, it was possible for a poorly armed and untrained person, man or woman, to fight off a well-trained warrior.

If enough people sought refuge in the fortress, then the attackers were unlikely to take it. They could initiate a siege, but time would be against them.

The fortresses offered protection to locals, in the absence of the warriors who had be called up to protect the south. This allowed locals to withstand Viking attacks, and provided Harold Bluetooth with a mobile army that he could deploy to the German border.

It's an interesting story.

Imran Awan Walks

Somehow I don't feel that this trial fully satisfied our need for answers to all of the questions associated with this case.

UPDATE: Just a strange moment in the intersection of courts and politics all around.

Wise Policy

Americans continue to see government as the top threat to their lives. Since it is, that's a good way to see things.

Agencies, too, can be used as partisan weapons, as we saw under the Obama administration when the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was wielded as a bludgeon against conservative organizations with little consequence. Of course, the IRS has a long history of such abuse. "My father," Elliott Roosevelt said of former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, "may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution." Now that abuse has spread to other areas of government.

But there are consequences to weaponizing law and government. "Now everyone, no matter what their political leanings, will wonder if they too are a political target by an out-of-control agency protected by the Justice Department," Investors Business Daily warned in 2015.

Just three years later, Americans support or vilify a growing number of government agencies depending on their partisan affiliations. Laws have become weapons, and agencies are seen as allies or enemies. That has serious consequences for public perception of the overall government within which those agencies operate. Just 18 percent of Americans "say they trust the federal government to do what is right just about always or most of the time," Pew polling found this year.

That's Different

The UK has hit upon the idea of hiring criminals to be magistrates, because diversity.

It is true that you run into few convicts on the bench.

Diverse means different, but different doesn't always mean useful.

A Proposed Resolution

Not a terrible idea, really.

Live by Inequality, Die by It

When you've spent ten years trumpeting 'growing inequality' as the chief economic measure, well...

Take the economy, which is faring better under Mr. Trump by many measures than it has in a generation or longer. Each week throughout this summer has brought almost nothing but economic sunshine. The pace of factory hiring has more than doubled since last year. A July survey from the National Federation of Independent Business notes that optimism among small-business owners, who employ nearly half the nation’s private-sector workforce, is at levels not seen since 1983. Wages are also increasing, which was reflected in a Commerce Department report last week that showed retail sales—on groceries, restaurants and clothing—far exceeding economic forecasts and surging at double the rate of inflation.

The best feature of this economic growth is its inclusiveness. The simultaneous gains among various demographic groups is something the country hasn’t experienced in a long time, if ever. Older workers, women, minorities, seniors and the less-educated all are faring better in the labor force today than they did under President Obama. The jobless rate for Americans age 16 to 24 hit a 50-year low this summer. In May, the black unemployment rate dipped to 5.9%, the lowest number on record at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. People who had stopped looking for work are sending out resumes. More people are quitting jobs because they are confident that a better one awaits. Employers are increasing perks and benefits in an effort to attract new hires and keep the ones they already have. There were 6.7 million job openings last quarter, a 17-year high.

When the media reports this good news, the stories too often resemble a Democratic National Committee press release.

Fauxcahontas Rides Again

Last week she had a proposal to introduce 'corporate citizenship,' which is a more interesting idea than NRO gave it credit for being. It's not actually dissimilar from Trump's own idea that corporations like Harley Davidson should show special loyalty to America. The details need to be worked out, but it sounds like a point of commonality -- at least potentially.

This week she has a proposed lifetime ban on lobbying by high Federal officials, as well as other reforms. Again, not a terrible idea in principle; details need work, but in principle it's bold but not outrageous. Also, again, similar to Trump: "Drain the Swamp!"

Sadly, there will be no compromises nor useful discussions between these camps. They are intent on running against each other, not working together. But maybe these ideas will get sharpened against each other in the 2020 race, and leave the winner with a mandate to do something on them.

American Fascism

Carry the American flag in public? That's a beating.

Bishop Robert C. Morlino- Saying What Must Be Said

A letter from the Bishop of the Diocese of Madison, Bishop Robert C. Morlino was published Saturday.  It is repentant, emphatic, serious, and questioning the direction of the church over the last few decades in terms of the church and it's efforts to live within current cultural norms.  It's the most honest, thoughtful, and serious statement I've seen from the episcopate on the crisis of sexual misconduct the Church has been embroiled in.  Perhaps that he was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania means he feels more acutely the pain of the Pennsylvania report.  It's clear he's done holding back:

"It is time to admit that there is a homosexual subculture within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that is wreaking great devastation in the vineyard of the Lord. The Church’s teaching is clear that the homosexual inclination is not in itself sinful, but it is intrinsically disordered in a way that renders any man stably afflicted by it unfit to be a priest. And the decision to act upon this disordered inclination is a sin so grave that it cries out to heaven for vengeance, especially when it involves preying upon the young or the vulnerable. Such wickedness should be hated with a perfect hatred. Christian charity itself demands that we should hate wickedness just as we love goodness. But while hating the sin, we must never hate the sinner, who is called to conversion, penance, and renewed communion with Christ and His Church, through His inexhaustible mercy."

It's a shame that I'm pleasantly stunned to hear this from a Bishop. All of it must be read, and you can read it here.

Of Course: In Germany She's Defenseless

It should be a source of shame to Germans that their refugee policy has made present-day Iraq seem safer to those most victimized by ISIS.

A Yazidi teenager who was kidnapped by ISIS in 2014 and sold as a sex slave fled to Germany after escaping the clutches of an Islamic State jihadist. It was in the Western country where she again encountered her captor who sold her into slavery.

Ashwaq Haji, 19, was so traumatized over seeing the man on two occasions that she returned to Northern Iraq, France 24 reported.... “First, I thought it’s him. Abu Humam. But then I thought that can’t be possible,” she said in an interview, after encountering the man in 2016.

Haji said she saw him a second time earlier this year and he approached her.

“He told me he was Abu Humam. I told him I didn’t know him, and then he started talking to me in Arabic,” Haji said, adding that he asked her if she is Ashwaq. “He told me: ‘Don’t lie, I know very well that you’re Ashwaq.'”

She then said the man told her he knows she lives with her brother and mother and even repeated her address.

She moved back to Iraq with family to avoid seeing her captor again but they live in fear because he has family in Baghdad, Haji said....

She also said German police were not too helpful when she reported the incident.

“The police told me that he is also a refugee, just like me, and that they could not do anything about it,” Haji said.

At least in Iraq she can keep a Kalashnikov to hand. And if the police there get their hands on a former member of ISIS, they aren't too gentle about it.

Privacy as Weapon

Headline: "Meet the Special Counsel Team: So Careful They Won’t Even Disclose Their Shake Shack Orders."

Competing story, same case:

The judge will hold a hearing on a motion by CNN and media organizations to unseal the names and addresses of jurors as well as other parts of the trial that are currently secret.

“A thirsty press is essential in a free country,” the Judge said in announcing the hearing.

Is it usual for the court to consider making the names and addresses of jurors known to the press while the jury is still deliberating? Have I missed this feature of our legal system?

UPDATE: Judge denies motion.

The judge in Paul Manafort’s fraud trial said Friday he has received threats over the case. U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III made the comments as the jury deliberated for the second day, and as he rejected a motion to release information about the jurors. He said he's confident the jurors would be threatened as well if their information was public.

Ellis said that because of the threats against him, he travels with U.S. Marshals.

“The Marshals go where I go,” Ellis said.

Cute

I typically despise governing by budgetary tricks, but at least this one is working in our favor.

Using an obscure budget rule, administration officials are planning to freeze billions of dollars in the State Department’s international assistance budget — just long enough so the funds will expire. The current plan involves about $3 billion, though officials are said to have discussed as much as $5 billion.

The White House plans to submit the package of so-called rescissions in the coming days, which triggers an automatic freeze on those funds for 45 days. The cuts would largely come from the U.S. funding for the United Nations, according to the aide.

With exactly 45 days left in fiscal 2018, the State Department wouldn't be able to use those funds even if Congress rejects the request because those dollars will have expired by Oct. 1.

What a shame it would be if the United Nations received less of our money.