What doesn't kill us

The New York Times is admirably upbeat about how unions will emerge from the destruction of their extortion-and-bribery circular financing system stronger than ever before.  "The more you tighten your grip, Lord Vader . . . ."  According to the Grey Lady,

Still, the more interesting question is whether the unions, whatever the blow to their ranks and finances, will be substantially weaker.

Union leaders insist that they won’t — that the crisis posed by the case, Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, has brought more cohesion and energy to their ranks.

“No one wanted this case,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “But the gestalt around the country has been to turn an existential threat into an opportunity to engage with our members like never before.”

That's the spirit.  It was never about the money!  Now that we can't force you to give us money, can we engage?

Getting Excited About Smaller Government

Democrats everywhere have suddenly gotten the bug! Instead of hearing about what parts of the state they want to expand or deepen, Democrats everywhere are talking about what they want to abolish.

#AbolishSCOTUS
#AbolishDHS
#AbolishICE
#AbolishCBP

They haven't gotten as far as an "Abolish" hashtag yet, but the discussion on #ElectoralCollege is pretty negative too.

The other Loretta Lynch bombshell

I thought the rap against former Attorney General Loretta Lynch was the July 2016 tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton, at which they would like us to think they discussed nail polish and fantasy football rather than how to save the Clinton campaign from the email scandal. Inspector General Horowitz tells us, however, that the Russians ostensibly intercepted a Debbie Wasserman-Schultz email to a Soros operative.  In the email, DWS supposedly quoted Lynch's assurances to the Clinton campaign that the feds would go easy on Hillary Clinton:

What is known, based on press leaks and a letter Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley sent Lynch, is that in March 2016, the FBI received a batch of hacked documents from U.S. intelligence agencies that had access to stolen emails stored on Russian networks. One of the intercepted documents revealed an alleged email from then-DNC Chairwoman Wasserman Schultz to an operative working for billionaire Democratic fundraiser George Soros. It claimed Lynch had assured the Clinton campaign that investigators and prosecutors would go easy on the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee regarding her use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state. Lynch allegedly made the promise directly to Clinton political director Amanda Renteria.

The FBI apparently took the document seriously but never interviewed anyone named in it until Clinton’s case was closed by Comey in July 2016. The next month, the FBI quizzed Lynch informally about the allegations. Comey reportedly also confronted the attorney general with the sensitive document and was told to leave her office after getting a frosty reception. No other parties mentioned in the document have been interviewed by the FBI.

The current theory is that it was this intercepted transmission, rather than the tarmac meeting, that led Comey to go off the reservation and cut Lynch out of the loop in his decision to go public with investigations of Clinton.  He claims to have begun worrying about Lynch in September 2015, when she asked him not to refer publicly to an "investigation" of Clinton but instead to call it a "matter."  Comey presumably didn't know any more than we now know whether the intercepted message was real or a fabricated Russian ruse, but he obviously found it credible enough to support his pre-existing doubts about Lynch.

I don't know quite what to think of Comey.  The man blew his ethical obligations six ways from Sunday, but he does not seem to have been operating as a straightforward Clinton or even Democratic operative.  I wonder if even he knows exactly what he was up to.  My guess is Lynch did, though.

Pelosi's likely successor loses his NY primary

This is a race I haven't followed at all, but the people who have been paying attention seem shocked. Her politics are abhorrent to me, of course, but I always enjoy seeing the outspent candidate come from behind to win, particularly if the incumbent couldn't be bothered to attend two primary debates. And if you're going to be a socialist, just go ahead and be a socialist, enough with the camouflage.

Another Paper on Trygvasson

This site has some entertaining papers.

BREXIT Bill Becomes Law in UK

The UK has recently proven that it has a lot more problems than EU membership, but this is a step forward.

Speaker John Bercow said the EU (Withdrawal) Bill, which repeals the 1972 European Communities Act through which Britain became a member of the bloc, had received royal assent from Queen Elizabeth II.

The bill transfers decades of European law onto British statute books, and also enshrines Brexit day in British law as March 29, 2019 at 11pm (2300 GMT) -- midnight Brussels time.... Eurosceptics celebrated the passing of the bill through parliament last week as proof that, despite continuing uncertainty in the negotiations with Brussels, Brexit was happening.

"Lest anyone is in any doubt, the chances of Britain not leaving the EU are now zero," International Trade Minister Liam Fox said.

I'm fairly Bayesian about probability theory. I'll accept that the probability is zero when the countervailing probability has risen to one, i.e., when it's happened and not before.

Now on to Scotland's next independence referendum. Smaller government isn't always better government, but that's the way to bet.

Even Sweden Questions the Welfare State

It’s depicted as ‘nationalism,’ and maybe; but it’s not expansionist or aggressive. ’Of course we all want to help people, and we realize we are lucky. But keeping Sweden a good place to live means protecting its wealth and culture.’

Wretchard has lately been employing a shipwreck metaphor. He mixes it a bit, but there are good insights there.

Mitch McConnell: "You're welcome"

The Supreme Court, freshly joined by Neil Gorsuch, rules in favor of President Trump's travel ban 5-4.

Fluid messages

Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

This would be nice

Insulin dependence is no picnic.  We may be on the path to an oral insulin-delivery system that solves at least two huge problems:  the resistance to multiple daily injections and injectable insulin's critically short shelf-life even when refrigeration is available.

Showing up in fly-over country

From a North Dakota Rep.:

Nearly one-third of the Democrats now serving in the U.S. House of Representatives come from just two states, California and New York.

Careful what you ask for

“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.” ...

GEORGE ORWELL

Olav Trygvasson and Violent Conversion

An essay.

Contradictions

The Border Patrol's parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, has stopped referring migrants with children for prosecution. They claim the 'zero tolerance' policy is still in effect, but since they have been ordered not to separate parents and children, and since there is no legal way to hold the children under existing law and jurisprudence for more than 20 days, they simply cannot do everything they've been told to do.

One might think that this is a sort-of mutiny at CBP, but it's really just a basic contradiction in their orders. They're ordered to arrest everyone and hold them for prosecution; they're also ordered not to separate the alleged parents from their children. They can't do both of these things, so they're failing. Failure is what will usually happen when one programs any system to do contradictory things.

I rather liked Dianne Feinstein's bill on this issue, by the way, because it would have built a similar contradiction into nearly all Federal law enforcement. Anywhere within 100 miles of a border or port of entry, such as an international airport, Federal agents would have been barred from separating parents from their children -- "parents," not "illegal immigrant parents" or anything similar. Pretty much all Americans with children would have been liberated from obedience to Federal laws in one fell swoop.

The head of CBP says he's working to 'develop a plan' on this issue, but I'll be surprised if he can come up with one. New orders will need to be written, preferably by the legislature, that redoes this tangle of old laws and court rulings and newer executive orders.

Security vs. Law Enforcement

A surprisingly philosophical account of the distinction, and why the border crises must be solved as a species of the former.

Soccer Editorial Comment

For those of you following the World Cup, this, which my wife ran across:

Interviewer: "Do you think Brazil's 1970 team can beat today's Argentina?"

Pelé: "Yes."

Interviewer: "By how much?"

Pelé: "1-0"

Interviewer: "That's it?"

Pelé: "Well, most of us are over 75 years old now."

https://twitter.com/WorIdCupFC/status/1011019183176536065

Eric Hines
https://twitter.com/WorIdCupFC/status/1011019183176536065
https://twitter.com/WorIdCupFC/status/1011019183176536065

Thinking Things Through

In 2006, I wrote a piece diagnosing what I thought was going wrong with the country. It was called "Time for a Change." It was a very long piece, but it was built around the idea that the Federal institutions were failing and exposing key fault lines in the nation. We got through the rest of the Bush administration and all of Obama's without reaching the point of absolute failure, but the stresses identified mostly kept growing. Now, with even USA Today publishing pieces that openly wonder about civil war, I wonder how much longer before the shear forces tear us apart.

These days, after twelve years' more experience, I would name mostly different solutions than the ones that seemed plausible to me then. One area where I still think the solutions look similar is the problem posed by the Federal judiciary, and its penchant for imposing one-sized-fits-all solutions on a divided America. That's where so much of the tension is coming from. If we could fix that, we could live together in peace on most issues.

Consider a point Gringo made in the comments below, on the issue of Lexington, VA. I pointed out that Lexington is a town with a particularly unwelcoming structure for 'woke' politics. He responded:

Lexington city voted ~2:1 for Hillary, while Rockridge County voted ~2:1 for Trump. Which gives me the impression the restaurant won't lose much business.

If that's true, then even in the reddest parts of America many cities are blue. And that seems right, because the same holds for towns like Birmingham, Alabama; or Athens, Georgia.

There are a few issues, like immigration, where ending one-size-fits-all can't solve our problems. Yet there are very many issues where a solution that allowed rural areas to have different laws from urban ones would greatly reduce the tensions facing the nation.

Of course, that requires a change to the Constitution, which requires a supermajority of states to go along with it. It's a hard pull to get there in a nation so divided and whose divisions are so contemptuous of each other.

Rumbles in the Forest

"Is America headed to a civil war" asks... USA Today. Well, it's the Sage of Knoxville writing in the pages of USA Today, but the editors agreed to publish the piece. That this newspaper of all of them would carry a piece warning about a potentially imminent civil war suggests to me that the idea is now completely mainstream.

Who knows? We might catch up to Mexico in political assassinations sooner than anyone thinks.

UPDATE: Calls for more.

Interesting Point

A former lawyer (J.D. cum laude, according to her bio), writes in defense of the 'separation of parents and kids is bad' thesis -- but without exception.

Indeed, studies show that maternal separation is a major stressor even in newborn infants. And fifty years of social science evidence teach us that, on average, children separated from one or both biological parents fare worse, across virtually every measurable indicator, than children who have not been separated from their own married parents.

Given how crucial intact families are to human flourishing, it is appalling that a purportedly pro-life and pro-family Trump administration would use any measure of its discretion to rip families apart. But I would also note that many of those loudly championing children at the border take an incompatible position when children are separated from their parents under other circumstances.

Children’s need for their parents in cases of intentional single-parenthood, divorce, surrogacy, and abortion, is no different than the needs of the children at the U.S. border. In these cases, though, the same needs of children to be raised by those who are most likely to fully invest, care for, and protect them — their biological parents — are ignored.

This is not to say, such as in the case of most adoptive parents, that there are not heroic individuals out there who have stepped up to give non-biological children the best life possible under what would otherwise be extremely difficult circumstances. This is also not to say that divorce is never warranted — although modern attitudes about the purposes of marriage and the no-fault system have overwhelmingly been a bust for children.

The 1970s models of thinking that “children are resilient” in the face of divorce has given way: “The myth of the good divorce has not stood up well in the face of sustained social scientific inquiry – especially when one considers the welfare of children exposed to their parents’ divorces,” observes University of Virginia sociologist Bradford Wilcox.

She goes on to more anecdotal examples, which are not to my thinking as strong. But there's an interesting point there, one that echoes a line of thought that Chesterton advanced. Chesterton is so frequently on the side of the contemporary Right that it is easy to think he isn't going to be very challenging for an intellectual on that side of the fence. Yet he is not always so, and this favoring of the family over capitalism is one of the ways in which he is not:

If it be true that Socialism attacks the Family in theory, it is far more certain that Capitalism attacks it in practice...So the factory is destroying the Family in fact; and need depend on no poor mad theorist who dreams of destroying it in fancy.

This is from a piece called "The Superstition of Divorce," written at a time when widespread divorce was more theoretical than actual. The Right has moved on from that ground, for the most part; this one former attorney being a rare exception.

How Are Things South of the Border?

Headline: "Extraordinary moment Mexico arrests town's ENTIRE police force of 28 officers 'over murder of a mayoral candidate' amid country's bloodiest election campaign."

120 candidates have been murdered since September. This one was a rather extraordinary moment -- the assassin just walked up and shot him in the back of the head, and then walked freely away. But it's only one of three such murders in the last week or so.