Who Says Trump Wants a New FBI Director?

Democrats in Congress may be outsmarting themselves.

So, Democrats are hinting to President Donald Trump, want a new FBI director? Then agree to an independent investigation of your campaign’s possible ties to Russia.

Democrats control only 48 Senate seats, meaning they need to pull three Republicans over to their side. The bipartisan angst over the abrupt firing of James Comey on Tuesday could give them the leverage they badly need.

They want a special prosecutor, or perhaps a special panel, to investigate allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Republican leaders oppose an independent probe, but some GOP senators are sympathetic.

Say that one of Trump's goals is making the Russia probe go away. What's more effective in attaining that goal: agreeing to a semi-permanent institution like a special prosecutor, or allowing your opponents to make sure the FBI remains headless?

If you really think there's something to all this, as Democratic leaders claim to do (although even Chairman Grassley concedes that the President is right to say that he isn't personally under investigation), why would you offer this deal? If Trump turns it down, he can charge you with being the ones who are 'obstructing justice' by playing politics with a major police agency. You, by contrast, will be in the difficult position of claiming that (a) 'serious crimes have been committed!' but also that (b) 'Therefore, we must refuse to appoint a new head of the bureau that would investigate such crimes.'

All this chaos is good for somebody, but I'm not sure that somebody is any of us.

PR Grandmaster

Scott Adams argues that the average guy's main takeaway from President Trump's letter firing Comey is the odd sentence thanking him for informing him that he was not under investigation.  Adams credits Trump with getting his opponents in the media to intone "not under investigation" non-stop for several days, thus laying out one simple and comprehensible concept while thoroughly confusing the public on nearly other aspect of the firing.

Death to Trump(-supporting TV Show)

We don't do TV here at Grim's Hall, so I've never seen the show in question, but it apparently enjoyed high ratings. That's not a reason to avoid canceling it, in today's America; it's the reason to cancel it.

Every week, the half-hour comedy, one of the very few aimed to appeal to America's heartland, won its time-slot in the all-important demo, including 6.4 million overall same-day viewers. Deadline further adds that "[w]hile most returning shows were down year-to-year 20-30%, LMS was virtually flat, off just by 5% in total viewers and adults 18-49[.]"

Those are very impressive numbers for a show that has been around for six full seasons.

But that is not all!

Last Man Standing was ABC's Friday anchor, meaning a show that could not only be counted on to win the night but one that kept viewers tuned in to whatever shows came after. Anchors are also crucially important when it comes to launching new shows.

But that is not all!

The real money in the sitcom business comes from syndication rights, selling the reruns on a per episode basis to other networks. Last Man Standing is not only a syndication smash, a virtual cash cow, per Deadline it is the "rare off-network ratings success story these days."

When a show does this well in syndication, every episode becomes a bar of gold, a likely source of rolling revenue for years and years to come.

Doesn't matter. What's important is making sure there is absolutely no cultural affirmation for "America's heartland."

#2 AG Meeting with Senate Intel Committee

Given Sessions' recusal, this guy can approve a special prosecutor on his own -- and no one can stop him if he decides to do so, not the President and not the Senate. I wonder if he's decided to pull the trigger.

Sally Yates is from Georgia?

Apparently she is -- native born, even, and educated at the University of Georgia -- and some are pushing her to be our next governor.

Unconservative

Yuval Levin warns that the voters who won the 2016 election don't see much worth conserving:

I think of alienation as a sense of detachment from one’s own society. It’s looking out at the society you live in and thinking, “That’s not mine” and feeling no connection, no links—seeing it as distant, as hostile, even seeing it as boring. We should never underestimate the power of boredom in social life. That kind of alienation was very much on display in the last election and in some people’s—especially early on in the Republican primaries, in the most devoted Trump supporters—there was a sense that “This society isn’t ours. We have got to blow this up and try again.” I think that’s dangerous in general, but it’s particularly dangerous to conservatism because conservatism in a sense is a sense of attachment and ownership and defensiveness of one’s own society. It certainly can see problems and is inclined to be rather depressed about things most of the time. But that follows from a sense of loss, not from a sense of alienation. It can lead, therefore, in its most constructive forms to a determination to revive, revitalize, recapture institutions, rather than to this sense that “it’s all over” or “the only option we have left is a Hail Mary pass.”

I think that the sort of alienation that was evident in some of Trump’s supporters is very dangerous for the American right because it tends to make the right less conservative. And to make the right hostile to its own society. First of all, I think America doesn’t deserve that. We have a lot of problems, our institutions are in real trouble, but things are not nearly as bad as the way in which Trump described them. Just think about the convention speech and, in some respects, even the inaugural. This describes an America that is much darker than reality and when you do that, it doesn’t leave room for thinking about solutions. It doesn’t leave room for thinking about how to come back.

I didn't see the inaugural address that way. Despite my skepticism about Trump, I heard the message that we're tired of being told we're locked into policies that demonstrably don't work, just because someone has decided that the alternatives are unthinkable to the progressive chattering class. I certainly acknowledge a "burn it down, plow it under, salt the ground it stood on" vein in my politics, but not because I'm willing to replace the status quo with just anything. I want either to replace it with policies with a proven track record or, if necessary, to replace it with something new and experimental, but only if we're committed to observing its results and changing it if it doesn't work, either. I'm tired of the magical thinking, from climate science to free lunches.

Ruby Soho

It's a ska take on what I guess is now a punk rock classic, though I am old enough to think of it as a late comer.

Call it an Irish Pub

"I'll up & burst yer filthy mug,
If you draw one more shamrock in me beer!"

Nothing Says "Discrete" Like MOLLE Webbing

It's probably a great product, but I am deeply amused by the marketing.

Set up your discreet mobile field office with the Tactical Shit Snowden Computer Bag that is designed to hold a 17" laptop. The pack unzips to become a portable field desk with multiple pockets for all your gear, documents, pens, power cord, etc. The padded perimeter rim will not only protect your computer, it will also keep the sun off the screen during daylight operations.

What's the MOLLE for anyway? Rigging a holster and an ammo pouch to the outside of your computer bag?

German Police Do Not Appreciate Car Culture

Stars & Stripes has an article on how much the German police do not look kindly on American servicemembers' muscle cars. Near one military base, the police are establishing a special unit to crack down on American custom cars.

It's a basic clash of civilizations. It's the clash between this:

...and this:

Well, This Will Be Fun

Trump firing Comey is going to produce a political fireball, I'll wager.

Warpiper

Havok Journal has a piece by one such.

The first time I played a set of highland bagpipes, the feeling was immense and indescribable. The ability to command such a powerful instrument and convey a mood of elation or utter sorrow was incredible. The first time I fired a M2 .50 caliber machinegun, my brain was equally unprepared to wholly understand what my hands were wielding and what they were then capable of.

Not everyone likes the bagpipes, but then again not everybody loves Ma Deuce either!

Refugees and Terror

We've seen anecdotal evidence that the vetting refugees receive doesn't stop them from turning terrorist. We've also seen arguments that we shouldn't expect it to given the paucity of information actually available to vet people coming from failed states, war zones, or enemy states like Iran.

Now we have something like a statistic from James Comey, head of the FBI: refugees make up 15% of their active terrorism cases.

What we don't get from Comey is a sense of whether these refugee terrorists are motivated by, say, attachment to a drug cartel or to, say, some religious doctrine. The United States admitted 85,000 refugees in 2016 alone, meaning that the 300 cases Comey cites would remain a tiny fraction of the refugee population. Even if it were 85,000 total rather than 85,000 annually, that's just 0.0035%; in fact, it would be orders of magnitude lower when you consider the whole population.

Still, refugees as a whole are a tiny fraction of the American population, so it remains surprising to see them so prominently figuring in terrorism cases. Those refugees from 2016 represent 0.00024% of the American population, and treating the population as a whole would only move the decimal at most a few places: we're still going to be talking way less than one full percentage point, not 15 percent.

Beware Skotland

A Norse travel guide has been recovered recently, written on 800 year old sheets of vellum.

THE very rough guide to Scotland offered the would-be traveller the following warning. Be very careful there, it says – the natives are dangerous, the language incomprehensible and the weather is awful....

The chronicles have been interpreted by Gisli Sigurdsson, a historian at Reykjavik University... Sigurdsson said the sagas were a warning to travellers that they would encounter a general foggy area, dangerous landings, hostile natives and language problems. They wrote that the people would probably attack you immediately.

That sounds about right.

Fixing Health Care

So I'm trying to figure out what to say to my Senators. Here's one idea.

Suns Out, Guns Out

Georgia's governor, Nathan Deal, signed this year's campus carry bill into law. I'm surprised that he did so, after vetoing it last year, but the effect is to have produced a much more complicated law.

In related news, the NRA is trying to recruit a more diverse membership.

John Lewis on AHCA

Rep. John Lewis of the Great State of Georgia is not a fan, not at all.

Today we are facing a crossroads in the history of this nation. One day our children and our children’s children may turn to us and ask, 'Which side were you on?' In the aftermath of this vote, members of the House will have to look their constituents, their friends, their family and even their children in the eyes and tell them the painful truth.

The House Republican bill, H.R. 1628, does not rescue health care. It is an attack on the poor, the sick, the elderly and the disabled. It punishes hard-working women and men, and it uses their resources collected in the federal Treasury as a pipeline to line the pockets of big business and the wealthiest people in the world.

Never ever in my years in the U.S. House of Representatives have I seen such a betrayal of the public trust. Never have I seen legislative action that reveals such clear disdain for the human dignity of the most vulnerable among us. Never have I ever seen such a willingness to disregard what is right in favor of what is so wrong.

People from all around the country begged their elected representatives to vote against this despicable bill. Instead, my colleagues chose to serve themselves and their rich friends and leave the rest of us to fend for ourselves. H.R. 1628 proves this White House ushered in a government of the rich, by the rich, for big business, and people will pay with their lives for it.

If this bill becomes law, at least 24 million Americans who can see their doctors today will be turned away tomorrow. Those who are sick will suffer, and some of them will die. People with pre-existing conditions will have premiums so high most will not be able to afford care, and any state can deny healthcare to their citizens at any time.

This is a shame and a disgrace. May God have mercy on us all.

This is a good example of the problem I was discussing below, where politics is more aggressive than ethics at dividing people. Lewis, whose skull was broken at Selma, is a man devoted to a particular politics in which the proper role of the Federal government is to do good things for people -- especially poor people and, as a remedy for historical unfairness, minority groups. He reads this bill as an attack on the poor and the sick.

It is possible to untangle opposition to this model of the proper role of the Federal government from opposition to the poor living good lives, or opposing respect for the poor and the sick in general. But there isn't any political advantage to making that leap; in fact it derails several very useful rhetorical tools. And it's emotionally attractive, too, to view your opponents as wicked and evil rather than as simply having different views.

Can we have a debate about the various ways in which Federal money chasing health care services actually raises the cost for everyone, just as increased demand always raises costs given a steady supply? Theoretically, sure. But practically, once you've equated morality with using government to provide goods, opponents to the provision of goods are immoral. Of course it's proper to treat the immoral with disdain. Isn't it?

AHCA Take II

I've spent part of the evening reading through the bill. It is not, in fact, either a repeal or a replacement of the ACA; its relative brevity depends on the fact that it is mostly a modification of that law. A true repeal could have been much briefer; a true replacement would have had to have been much longer.

There are some good things about it, although some of them are trivial. It is clear that the Congress has been listening to the states and taking advice on what works and what doesn't, which is good. Some of that advice has been silly, like the insistence on a provision allowing states to strip Medicaid from high-dollar lottery winners. That's one of those problems that may look bad in the papers, but it can't possibly come up often enough to really merit anyone's attention. Still, trivialities aside, clearly Congress consulted with the states about the problems they'd faced implementing the ACA, and incorporated those thoughts into the bill.

Bad things appear to be included as well, although it's hard to say how bad they really are. I'm seeing equally confident exclamations from left-leaning sites that the AHCA's costs cannot be known, because the CBO hasn't scored it and nor has anyone else reputable; and also that the cost of various "pre-existing conditions" will go up by this-or-that very precise figure. Probably the first of these is true, and the figures are all made-up.

That in turn suggests that the Republicans did not learn the most crucial lesson of the ACA, which is that you should never pass a major piece of legislation whose effects you haven't taken the time to fully understand. Bad consequences are almost certain, and any consequences -- or even accidents that can be painted as consequences -- will now belong to the Republicans, or anyway will if they manage to get this through the Senate and signed by President Trump.

On the first pass, I'm not really sure what to think about it. On the one hand, Obamacare has been terrible for rural America. Breaking the seal on making changes to it would be worth doing, even if the changes aren't great. Henceforth Democrats won't oppose any changes because they're trying to 'preserve the Obama legacy'; they can support changes in terms of 'replacing/repairing Trumpcare.' Thus, we would be freer as a nation to think and adjust to the bad aspects of this bill as well as the Obamacare legacy bill.

On the other hand, a lot of this looks like it's unlikely to reduce anybody's health care costs -- though it will cut taxes for some, and raise costs for others (especially the sick and the poor). I think the Feds should get out of the health care game more or less entirely, even turning the VA into quiet grants to veterans to let them pursue private medical services. This is not a step in that direction. It's also not a step in the direction of single-payer, though, and there's a chance it will at least open the game back up to easier future adjustments as necessary.

So I'm not sure what I think right now. What do you think?

Orkney!

In a collection of 12 maps of Scotland, the map of place names in the Orkney Islands is my favorite.

The One Ring

The feminist philosophers I know are of the rising generation, and they are very decent people whom I've not seen engage in poisonous rhetoric of any sort. Watching the destruction of the career of Prof. Rebecca Tuvel, however, I can't doubt that there is a problem of some sort at work in the field.

I wonder if it isn't a more general problem of American political philosophy, though. Typically, it is very human to respect those who live moral lives according to your sense of what "moral" means, and to respect people less if they don't. It's ordinary even to despise people who live lives that are immoral by one's own lights. The problem in political philosophy is that despising your opponents destroys the process of reasoning together. Yet we -- and not just feminists at all, but Americans in general, Democrats and Republicans and others as well -- seem to be locked into a cycle of despising as immoral those with whom we disagree politically.

Oddly enough there isn't a similar problem in ethics, at least not usually. There are several basic roads to ethics that are all thought acceptable even though they diverge. I tend to believe in virtue ethics, for example, and find utilitarianism to be fairly implausible. But I don't despise utilitarians. Nor do they despise virtue ethics, nor does either group despise deontologists. So it's possible to disagree on even the most basic questions of morality without falling into mutual disdain.

Probably it's just the question of power. In ethics, I decide for myself what is right and do that, and mostly that affects me and a few others who have chosen to associate with me (and are free to choose otherwise). In politics, decisions on moral questions are inevitably impositions. It's no longer a question of respecting a difference; it becomes a question of resenting being forced to accept things that you yourself find immoral.

I suspect that any attempt to redress this problem would also give rise to a complaint (again, from all sides) that it is ridiculous to ask them to respect people who want to impose immoral agendas upon them. Which means that their opponents must be driven from politics, somehow, since imposition is inevitable.

For 13 years now, I've been trying to convince people that the right way to resolve this is by finding a way for Americans of different moral views not to exert power over each other. Mostly I have argued for restoring the 10th Amendment and devolving powers from the Federal branches to the states. Then the power concerns fade, as there will be 50 different ways of living available to all.

Sometimes people can be convinced while they are out of power, but I have yet to observe many who remained true to the path should they gain power. It's a quandary: one must have power, and substantial power, to make a change like this. Having gained the power, though, why would you want to break up its very source?