MICHAEL TOTTEN: In Assad’s Syria, the Lesser of Two Evils is Still Evil.
Archive for 2017
April 7, 2017
HILLARY BLAMES THE RUSSIANS FOR HER LOSS: ‘More effective theft even than Watergate’
Notice, please, the smug implication that the White House was somehow hers already and that it was stolen from her by others — others who weren’t the American voters.
BREAKING: GORSUCH CONFIRMED TO SUPREME COURT, 54-45.
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ROGER SIMON: Trump Schools Obama and Democrats with Attack on Assad.
If history is any indication, the spin from the left as this plays out will be astonishing to watch, as these flashbacks from 2013 and the late 1990s illustrate:
(Bumped.)
SWEDEN TERROR: Truck plows into department store, killing at least 2.
More at Hot Mic.
UPDATE: And the almost-inevitable attempt at deflection from Chris Cillizza.
DEREGULATION: FCC Chief Ajit Pai Develops Plans to Roll Back Net Neutrality Rules.
The multistep plan that is emerging appears aimed at eventually shifting oversight for net neutrality to the FTC, which has long overseen most internet-related business, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Under federal law, the FTC lost much of its oversight of broadband providers when the FCC adopted its net neutrality policy, because the FCC rules reclassified broadband providers as common carriers subject to the agency’s oversight.
Mr. Pai’s plans likely would reverse that reclassification eventually, so the FTC again would have jurisdiction over the telecommunications carriers. To preserve the basic tenets of net neutrality, the plans would require broadband providers to pledge to abide by net neutrality principles such as no blocking or paid prioritization of internet traffic. That would allow the FTC to go after violators for deceptive or unfair trade practices.
tl;dr? It’s complicated.
FEWER POLICIES, FEWER SIDE EFFECTS: Perfectly Nice Policies With Less Nice Side Effects.
What happens when you suddenly offer parents generous family leave benefits, paid at the expense of the government? You can probably think of dozens of outcomes. But here’s one you might not have been expecting: people die.
That’s the finding of Benjamin Friedrich and Martin Hackmann, in a new working paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research. The culprit? Nurses, who skew female, provide a lot of vital health care, and made heavy use of Denmark’s new paid family leave benefit when it passed in 1994. Since the supply of nurses was limited, and their skills could not easily be replaced, hospital readmissions went up, and more troublingly, mortality spiked among elderly patients in nursing homes.
Advocates of paid parental leave are no doubt bristling at the implication that their favorite benefit might kill people. But that’s not quite the right implication to take away from this paper. What it really highlights is how difficult it is to know how a given policy will turn out. Had officials understood that in advance, they might have taken steps to mitigate the effects — such as training extra nurses beforehand. The problem, in other words, wasn’t necessarily family leave policy, but the limited visibility policymakers have into the outcomes of their plans.
That’s the knowledge problem. Then there’s the second-order knowledge problem, where policymakers don’t even know what policies they enact.
THE MISFIT PUNK-ROCKER MAKING CONSERVATIVES LISTEN: A smart writeup of Jason Pye’s unlikely rise from punk-band drummer to inside-the-Beltway influencer.
BORN ON THIRD BASE AND THINKS SHE HIT A TRIPLE: Chelsea Clinton Doles Out Advice on Success, Despite Never Having Had Any.
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DEMOCRATS TO WHITE HOUSE: Declassify Susan Rice Intel Reports for Public to See.
Be careful what you wish for…
DO NOT TRUST CONTENT FROM SUSAN RICE: In January, Susan Rice Assured NPR the Obama Admin Removed Chemical Weapons From Syria.
Related: PolitiFact Retracts ‘Mostly True’ Ruling That U.S. Removed ‘100 Percent’ of Syria’s Chemical Weapons. “Subsequent events have proved John Kerry wrong.” Don’t trust content from John Kerry, either . . .
Doug Mataconis adds, “Hours. They’ve likely got someone waiting in the wings to swear him in soon after the Senate votes this morning.”
I’m normally not a fan of fast-moving government, but I’ll make an exception in this case.
I DUNNO, THEY COME TO THE COURT WITH UNCLEAN HANDS: Twitter Invokes “Freedom of Speech” in Effort to Avoid Turning Over Records.
HMM: Liberals largely quiet on Acosta bid for labor secretary.
President Trump’s pick to head the Labor Department, former assistant attorney general for civil rights Alexander Acosta, is heading toward a relatively easy confirmation when he gets a vote in the full Senate this month.
Acosta has solid Republican support, and while few liberal groups are backing his nomination, their response has been muted and nothing like their opposition to Trump’s previous pick for the Cabinet post, fast-food businessman Andrew Puzder.
The vote is expected later this month and “no trouble” is expected, according to a Republican source who requested anonymity. . . .
The success of the anti-Puzder campaign appears to have largely satiated liberal groups’ need to make a stand. Many still make a point of touting Puzder’s defeat even when discussing Acosta’s nomination.
He’s Insta-blogger Elizabeth Price Foley’s law school dean at the moment, and she quite likes him.
RALPH PETERS: Trump shows we finally have a fearless leader back in the White House.
Trump also ignored Russia’s shameless prevarications. We did warn the Russians to evacuate any of their personnel who were on the base — which may also have alerted the Syrians — but the point was made: Slaughter the innocent and there’s one country left in the world that won’t allow it.
Incontestably, our president became . . . presidential. He passed his first pressing foreign-policy test with dispatch and guts.
To know the full results of our attack, we’ll have to wait for imagery, daylight and bomb-damage assessment. No attack goes perfectly. But Trump just sent a vital message — to the butcher Bashar al-Assad, and also to North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and other rogue leaders:
The United States is back. There are, indeed, red lines. And the enemies of humanity cross those lines at their peril.
All of this is true, but it’s also true that the President launched the attack without approval from Congress and no clear and present danger to the United States or our allies.
The precedent for going to war under these conditions was set by the previous Administration, but that doesn’t mean that the current Administration should necessarily follow it.
HILLARY CLINTON: A lot of other people are to blame for my 2016 election loss.
While the media focuses on sexy topics—Russian spy intrigue, botched Muslim bans, White House palace intrigue, emerging foreign policy challenges, and the health care bill’s collapse—Team Trump has been quietly rolling back job-killing regulations and appointing a boring (by design), yet highly competent, Supreme Court Justice who almost certainly will be confirmed on Friday.
Despite evidence to the contrary, President Trump is making changes in his first 100 days that will affect America for decades to come.
One of his key weapons has been the Congressional Review Act (CRA), a 1996 law that allows Congress to repeal recent regulations. Before Trump took office, this law had been used just once. Since taking office, however, President Trump has signed 11 of these CRAs into law, effectively reversing several last-minute Obama-era regulations.
The window for using this tactic is closing; the CRA can only be used within 60 days of Congress being informed of a new regulation. But here’s where things have the potential to get very interesting: Once a regulation is repealed, agencies are also banned from issuing new rules that are “substantially similar” to the one that was just vetoed.
Use of the CRA isn’t news to Instapundit readers (or to Bill Whittle fans), but Lewis omitted one important detail. Whether due to spite or laziness, many Obama-era agencies never bothered to notify Congress of new regulations — so the 60-day clock has yet to start ticking on regs going back years.
PENNSYLVANIA: Rep. Mike Kelly Considering Senate Run Against Casey.