Opening Up the White House Press Briefings to Local News Reporters

Saw this on Ricochet. A recent White House press briefing was set up for Skype and four local newsfolk* who were not in DC were able to ask questions.

This was great. First, it further breaks the monopoly of the national media on the president. Second, it allowed the news people to ask questions about how national policy might influence their local situations. Third, it brought in points of view not often seen in the national media, such as a pro-coal publisher who framed his question in terms of the damage being done to the Kentucky economy by anti-coal regulations.

Wiley at Ricochet has videos set up so you can watch while the questions are asked and answered.

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*Technically, one was the publisher of a local paper, not a reporter.

Friday Night AMV

Rockets. Rockets, planes, tanks!

That "Netherlands Second" Video

Apparently there are now a bunch more, as European nations jump on the bandwagon.

They are strangely self-critical, these videos. They seem to be mocking their own patriots almost as much as Trump. At some point, the series becomes a mocking of the idea of patriotism itself.

A Bit of John Lee Hooker to Start the Weekend

Knife Rights in Georgia

The Georgia Legislature is in session. Our friends at Knife Rights are seeking support for a Senate Bill that would alter the definition of a "knife" in Georgia. I'm not sure it's a good idea, though I completely support the right to carry knives of any kind.

SB 49 would change the definition of a knife, for the purposes of a carry permit, from "a cutting instrument designed for the purposes of offense and defense consisting of a blade that is greater than five inches" to "a pointed or sharp-edged instrument consisting of a blade that is greater than 12 inches," with both of them specifying that such a blade has to be attached to a handle. (Is a hatchet now a "knife"? Only if its blade is greater than 12 inches, I suppose. Perhaps an axe is.) There are no laws restricting the carrying of a "knife" per se; rather, a further definition is that a "weapon" means a "knife or handgun," and the law restricts the carrying of a "weapon."

Now, read the code section where this definition would apply.

(a) Any person who is not prohibited by law from possessing a handgun or long gun may have or carry on his or her person a weapon or long gun on his or her property or inside his or her home, motor vehicle, or place of business without a valid weapons carry license.

(b) Any person who is not prohibited by law from possessing a handgun or long gun may have or carry on his or her person a long gun without a valid weapons carry license, provided that if the long gun is loaded, it shall only be carried in an open and fully exposed manner.

(c) Any person who is not prohibited by law from possessing a handgun or long gun may have or carry any handgun provided that it is enclosed in a case and unloaded.

(d) Any person who is not prohibited by law from possessing a handgun or long gun who is eligible for a weapons carry license may transport a handgun or long gun in any private passenger motor vehicle; provided, however, that private property owners or persons in legal control of private property through a lease, rental agreement, licensing agreement, contract, or any other agreement to control access to such private property shall have the right to exclude or eject a person who is in possession of a weapon or long gun on their private property in accordance with paragraph (3) of subsection (b) of Code Section 16-7-21, except as provided in Code Section 16-11-135.

(e) Any person licensed to carry a handgun or weapon in any other state whose laws recognize and give effect to a license issued pursuant to this part shall be authorized to carry a weapon in this state, but only while the licensee is not a resident of this state; provided, however, that such licensee shall carry the weapon in compliance with the laws of this state.

(f) Any person with a valid hunting or fishing license on his or her person, or any person not required by law to have a hunting or fishing license, who is engaged in legal hunting, fishing, or sport shooting when the person has the permission of the owner of the land on which the activities are being conducted may have or carry on his or her person a handgun or long gun without a valid weapons carry license while hunting, fishing, or engaging in sport shooting.

(g) Notwithstanding Code Sections 12-3-10, 27-3-1.1, 27-3-6, and 16-12-122 through 16-12-127, any person with a valid weapons carry license may carry a weapon in all parks, historic sites, or recreational areas, as such term is defined in Code Section 12-3-10, including all publicly owned buildings located in such parks, historic sites, and recreational areas, in wildlife management areas, and on public transportation; provided, however, that a person shall not carry a handgun into a place where it is prohibited by federal law.

(h) (1) No person shall carry a weapon without a valid weapons carry license unless he or she meets one of the exceptions to having such license as provided in subsections (a) through (g) of this Code section.

(2) A person commits the offense of carrying a weapon without a license when he or she violates the provisions of paragraph (1) of this subsection.

It sounds to me as if the Senate Bill in question narrows the protections of the weapons carry license rather than expands them. As the law stands, with my weapons carry license I can carry a Kabar (8" blade) and it's covered. Under the proposed revision, a Kabar wouldn't be considered a knife. While that is (a) absurd in itself, (b) that means my carry license no longer explicitly licenses me to carry it.

I think the argument is that this would simply eliminate any standard by which knives shorter than 12 inches are barred from being carried. However, it seems to me it would also remove the clarity that the knife I am carrying is specifically authorized by our laws.

I do hope so

I read somewhere last week that Scott Walker was meeting with President Trump to discuss union-busting. Mike Gecan opines in the New York Daily News that the President's opponents are making the same mistakes that Walker's did:

The Trump team is following the Walker playbook, with some variations. Like Walker, it is running aggressive plays right from the start. It doesn’t have to feel out the opponents’ soft spots and tendencies. It knows them.

The difference is that it isn’t just running one play. It’s running a series of them, one right after the other, to keep the defense confused and on its heels.

Second, it’s counting on the opposition to fall into the same trap that the Wisconsin opposition did — to rely on massive demonstrations and to ignore the need to do hard, local, person-by-person organizing back in the local towns, villages and counties.

Trump doesn't seem like a guy who loses sight of the difference between showy and effective actions. If he's showy, it's because he expects to achievable an effect. I supported Walker in the primaries because he'd mastered tactics to achieve his goals, and I was so tired of D.C. Republicans who couldn't seem to navigate their way out of a closet, if indeed they genuinely cared about the goals they claimed to be pursuing. Trump turns out to share a lot of my goals, to my enormous surprise, and I look forward to his implementing them systematically, while his opponents mistake squawking and violence for persuasion and the pursuit of concrete influence.

Fake News

NYT:

President Trump, after promising a radical break with the foreign policy of Barack Obama, is embracing some key pillars of the former administration’s strategy, including warning Israel to curb construction of settlements, demanding that Russia withdraw from Crimea and threatening Iran with sanctions for ballistic missile tests.

I'm sorry, was I supposed to believe that new sanctions on Iran was a "pillar" of the Obama administration's foreign policy? I would have described them as 'something they did their very best to fend off, but finally recognized was going to happen whether they liked it or not.' The Obama administration opposed new sanctions on Iran throughout its second term as it sought its so-called 'deal' with Iran. Iran engaged in multiple ballistic missile tests after the so-called deal, which even the UN viewed as violating the terms of the arrangement.

Nor was this the only way in which Iran violated the so-called 'deal.'

I'm not sure the whole Obama administration had a "pillar" among them. This certainly wasn't one.

The Ship May Have Sailed on That, Sarah

I'm guessing a certain NSW unit is getting chewed today, not that they will probably care all that much.

Rethinking the Probabilities on Harley-Davidson

President Trump meets with Harley-Davidson officials at White House
So, in light of today's very public meeting, I'd have to say the probability of the CNN story being true has declined substantially. It's not impossible that the visit to Harley's factory or museum was in some planning stage and then dropped because of fear of protests. However, this is a very public visit that took some trouble to visually associate their products with the President.

The man had something to say about bikers, by the way.

He greeted the five bikers warmly, saying, “Made in America, Harley-Davidson.”

Mr. Trump added that during the campaign, bikers “were with me all the way.”

But he did not hop on for a ride. Pres. Trump joked to the journalists gathered to watch the welcome: “Boy, would you like to see me fall off one of these!”

Apparently there remains a background issue in that Harley-Davidson has recently outsourced some of its IT work. President Trump didn't make a big deal of it in the photo-op, but there is some reason to think they might have discussed it inside.

About 125 positions were eliminated at Harley-Davidson in the process — and workers who lost their job are now suing, claiming they were discriminated against in favor of South Asian employees.

According to the complaint, most of the workers Infosys brought on had H-1B visas, which are intended for highly skilled fields in which there are a shortage of American workers. But the suit argues that there were plenty of qualified workers available: the ones who just lost their jobs at Harley-Davidson.

"Made in America" is not just about manufacturing jobs. I wonder if it came up. Likely we will know soon.

Up Helly Aa

The Shetlands held a Viking festival. The pictures are amazing.

Quasi-markets in education

I thought Thomas might appreciate this article about the difference between regulating a market and regulating a monopoly.  One of his arguments is that we can use some market tools even in a heavily regulated area, and that the likelihood of a tool's usefulness will alter depending on who exercises the choices and with what degree of freedom.  He makes the interesting suggestion, for instance, that most ventures fail, and that it makes more sense to employ a strict standard on the back-end, in deciding what failed ventures to withdraw public support from, than to regulate strictly what sorts of ventures can be started in the first place.

What kind of conservative is Gorsuch?

AEI is on fire today.  Here is a careful analysis of where Gorsuch is and is not in line with traditional conservative judicial trends.  The bottom line:  "If Gorsuch is confirmed, he is likely to be a vote for deference to state governments and to Congress but not to government agencies." He may be skeptical of the "dormant Commerce Clause" doctrine, as Scalia was; in other words, he may be inclined to support federal control over arguably interstate commerce only where Congress has explicitly occupied the field, not in every area where Congress might conceivably opt to occupy the field someday. Also like Scalia, he is skeptical of government agencies' attempts to usurp the legislative function and might be inclined not to grant them the usual deference when they do so. In these areas he is in line with the most recent developments in conservative judicial theory.

He may be a bit of an outlier, however, in his principled refusal to override state or federal legislative authority in any other areas. That may make him a bit like Justice Roberts: not inclined to rescue voters from the bad effects of their decisions where there is any doubt at all about the Constitutional issue implicated.

Nuts and bolts of deregulation

Here is a fine, detailed article about how federal regulations are made and how they can be unmade.  Not everything achieved by the stroke of a Presidential pen can be instantly undone the same way.  Nevertheless, there are well-understood pathways for clearing out bad regulations, and there are signs that Congress and the White House are well started on their task.

The right way to dissent

Paul Wolfowitz opined in the New York Times (but this link is to AEI) on the delicate problem of disagreeing with your boss in federal service.  He's talking about the State Department, not the DOJ, but it's still interesting.  I wasn't aware of any of his examples of private and public dissent.

Significantly, when a draft of the dissent channel cable objecting to President Obama’s Syria policy leaked to The New York Times last summer, William Harrop, a distinguished career ambassador who strongly believes in the dissent channel, condemned the leak, saying that the Foreign Service officers’ “oath of office is to protect and defend the Constitution, but they are not free to debate publicly with their president.” He added, “If they wanted to go public they should have resigned.”

Another diplomat, Chas Freeman, said at the time that “the channel can only work if it is ‘internal use only,’ i.e., it does not become part of the political diatribe or embarrass the administration.”

Diplomats confronted with an immigration policy that they believe is harmful to national interests should not abuse their government positions to undermine or sabotage the policy, no matter how strongly they feel about it. They do have three courses they can follow in good conscience:

They can seek reassignment to a position that is not affected by the policy, as John Negroponte did in leaving the White House and accepting reassignment to Ecuador after objecting to what he considered a betrayal of South Vietnam; they can continue working to mitigate the effects of a policy they object to, as Ryan Crocker did with extraordinary effectiveness in Iraq; or they can resign and go public with their objections as the Bosnia dissenters did and as Ann Wright did over Iraq and Ambassador Robert Ford did over Syria.

Whether they also have a First Amendment right to go public with their opposition while still serving in official positions is a question that lawyers can no doubt debate for a very long time.

Of Course He Did

Headline: "Trump's Supreme Court pick founded and led club called 'Fascism Forever' at his elite all-boys Washington prep school."

Well, I guess we can stop worrying about that Anthony Kennedy drift.

What Does Reuters Imagine the President Does?

What to make of this silliness?

U.S. military officials told Reuters that Trump approved his first covert counterterrorism operation without sufficient intelligence, ground support or adequate backup preparations.

As a result, three officials said, the attacking SEAL team found itself dropping onto a reinforced al Qaeda base defended by landmines, snipers, and a larger than expected contingent of heavily armed Islamist extremists.

I'm sorry, but what does Reuters imagine the President does in reviewing a proposal for action? Do they think he reads the CONOP? Do they think he personally reviews the ISR for evidence of landmines?

Brigade commanders don't do that. These guys have no idea how this stuff works.

I Am Not a Doors Fan, But

I'll listen to anything John Lee Hooker sings.

Dig it?

Joe McCarthy as an Object Lesson for Trump

Mona Charen over at Ricochet points out that, although it turned out that Joe McCarthy was correct about communists having infiltrated high levels of the US government, the way he went about trying to fix the problem actually discredited his cause. She then argues that Trump should consider that when it comes to how we handle immigration from the Muslim world.

She has some other things to say as well:

The parallel to our times is the Islamist threat. President Trump is right that we face a threat from Islamists. He is right that careful vetting of immigrants, including refugees, is necessary in light of that danger. The worry is that his ham-fisted approach to a delicate problem may wind up discrediting the effort to vet immigrants, alienate our friends in the Muslim world, and empower the self-righteous left.

...

Alas, instead of stressing that our goal is to separate extremist Muslims from the majority of peaceable Muslims, President Trump’s slapdash executive order showed complete indifference to the distinction. Even green card holders, who have already been vetted and granted the right to live in the United States, were to be stopped at the airport with no notice. Why the rush? Would 48 hours notice have been too much to ask? Translators and military leaders from Iraq and Afghanistan, who had worked with U.S. forces at risk to themselves (and who were badly treated by the Obama administration), were originally offered no dispensation from the blanket order. That’s dishonorable and unwise, as it alienates all Muslims who might be inclined to side with us in a future struggle.

I have to agree with that. I think foreigners who have put their lives on the line for the US deserve to be treated well by us, and I have the sense that they often have not been. In the "no better friend, no worse enemy" formulation, we don't seem to be doing well at either. I hope Trump will correct both sides of the formula.

Solid Point

One problem with hyperbolically calling it a "Muslim ban": you end up with headlines like "Most Americans support Muslim ban."

We had a similar thing happen with the waterboarding and stress-position debate in the Bush administration. Opponents insisted it was "torture." So, that close to 9/11, of course the headlines: "Most Americans support torture."

A Contradiction

A Turkish friend of mine argues, sometimes, that Americans just can't understand that the same Islam we encounter as a persecuted minority in our country is a very different animal in her homeland where it is the majority. For her, and she is far more anti-Islam than any American conservative I know, Ataturk's mistake lay in not finishing the job. The Turkey she grew up in, as a member of the educated and secular elite, has been washed away by the current regime.

This failure of imagination creates a kind of contradiction in the contemporary progressive movement. They have come to see themselves as the heroes of a story about America in which the forces of oppression of minorities have been resisted by a few brave people of good will. As heirs to these few brave people of good will, they inherit a project of moving America away from irrational prejudice against those who are different, and toward a future in which all are treated as genuine equals. This is what they mean when they speak of 'the arc of history,' citing Dr. King, and for many of them it is not a poetic metaphor. It's an article of faith that history really is moving this way, and they are really its heroes.

So, the contradiction my friend is trying to draw: On the one hand, Muslims (here) are a minority exposed to at least sometimes irrational prejudices. On the other hand, Muslims in places like Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and so forth are the major violators of minority rights. To support Islam is, my friend believes, to lay the groundwork for future violations here too as Muslims become stronger and more numerous. Thus, in defending minorities they strengthen the chief enemy of minorities, because it is -- here, for now -- also a minority.

I would like to believe that this is an overstatement, although she has drawn out the contradiction nicely. Certainly I am ready to support any Muslims who are interested in reforming their faith so that this future conflict might be avoided. There are a few different ways in which this might happen, and none of them are at all easy. I'm not under any illusions about how difficult that will be. The theology and history are all against them, as well as what have so far been the best minds of the whole history of their faith. Their task must appear as impossible to us as the task of winning freedom of conscience must have appeared in Christian nations before the 30 Years War. Yet that happened, of course.

In any case, here's another author who makes a very similar argument. She is an atheist, pro-choice, and apparently feminist. She's trying to frame roughly the same point.

It's a good point.