MICHAEL WALSH: In Germany, the ‘Immigration’ Worm Has Turned. “As Mutti Merkel climbs down, the German desire for Ordnung reasserts itself.”
Archive for 2018
July 9, 2018
AS I WAS SAYING THE OTHER DAY: People returning to labor force in droves — a key step for the economy.
Nine years after the end of the Great Recession, the U.S. economy has achieved an unemployment rate comparable to the boom period of the late 1990s. Some 600,000 people rejoined the labor market last month, actively looking for work, a sign that jobs are indeed out there, and people are motivated to look for them.
The jobs report suggests that the gradual improvement of labor market conditions continues. Labor market recovery did not start yesterday; it has been a sustained trend, building momentum especially in 2015 and 2016 and continuing in 2017 and 2018.
The recovery is broad-based, with employment growing in almost all sectors of the economy. Only retail trade, interestingly, showed notable job losses in June.
The most encouraging aspect of the June report was the increase in the labor force. The substantial drop in the proportion of Americans actually working was a major negative effect of the Great Recession.
When enough people start looking for work again after becoming officially “discouraged” and falling off the unemployment roles, the unemployment rate can actually tick up (as it did last month), even during a period of substantial jobs growth.
It’s weird though that Obama didn’t get his Recovery Summer until after he left office.
MAYBE IT’S NOT “MARRYING DOWN” AT ALL: Smart women need to marry down to become mothers because there aren’t enough smart men to go around, researchers warn.
Intelligent women should consider marrying less clever men if they want to start a family, according to researchers.
There are simply not enough brainy men to go round – so women may need to widen their search, warned the author of a report that found a growing number of professional women were freezing their eggs because they couldn’t find ‘Mr Right’.
‘There are fewer educated men in the world for educated women to partner with,’ said Marcia Inhorn, professor of anthropology at Yale University.
‘So if women want to find a partner with whom they can have children, they need a more expansive notion of who is Mr Right.
But with so many women accumulating so much student debt for low-return degrees, will the men see them as catches?
Related: This guy went to college, but it doesn’t make him husband material. “The sooner society lets go of the college degree as some sort of marker of success, the better the situation for women seeking their mate will become. The numbers won’t seem so jarring and the sad tales of women unable to find their equal will dissipate. Love shouldn’t have prerequisites. And a four-year college degree — one that often comes saddled with a side of serious relationship-poisoning debt — shouldn’t be the mark of a suitable suitor.”
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: It’s Stephen King’s Turn to Get Eaten by the Left.
Stephen King, one of the more obnoxiously lefty celebs whose writing skills had deserted him years ago, tried to suggest a ceasefire for the Fourth.
“Progressives, go find a Trump supporting friend–the one you haven’t spoken to since November of 2016–and give him or her a hug. Trumpies, find a “liberal snowflake” friend and do the same. Just for today, let’s all be Americans.”
It’s a nice enough sentiment. It wouldn’t have been all that extraordinary a generation ago. But this time around it unleashed a howling mob of lefties lecturing King about his “privilege” and putting out the usual twaddle about how Trump’s very existence is endangering their lives. Or the lives of all the oppressed people they know.
Read the whole thing.
SULTANS GOTTA SULTANATE: Turkey to Be Transformed as Erdogan Sworn in With Vastly Expanded Powers.
IN CASE YOU MISSED THIS FREE SPEECH VICTORY: McAdams defeats Marquette in WI Supreme Court.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: SCOTUS MADNESS Week Kicks-Off and Much, Much More. “Get your popcorn ready for tonight. I’ll be up watching– the twitter-mania following the announcement will be lit.”
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SHOULD CONDUCT A “DISPARATE IMPACT INVENTORY”: In Ricci v. DeStefano (2009), a Title VII case that concerned the tension between liability for intentional discrimination and liability for disparate impact liability, Justice Scalia began his concurrence this way:
I join in the Court’s opinion in full, but write separately to observe that its resolution of this dispute merely postpones the evil day on which the Court will have to confront the question: Whether, or to what extent, are the disparate-impact provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 consistent with the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection?
I gave a talk at the Federalist Society’s Executive Branch Review a couple of months ago entitled It’s Time for the Executive Branch to Conduct a “Disparate Impact Inventory” (The link is to a written version of the talk w/ a few footnotes added). Essentially, I said that Scalia’s doubts about the constitutionality of disparate impact liability need to be taken seriously. The Trump Administration should begin evaluating the issue for each of the anti-discrimination laws and policies that use disparate impact liability. Does that use violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection or not? (More here.)
SAN FRANCISCO’S CRISIS LOOKS LIKE NEW YORK’S FUTURE:
Beautiful, hilly San Francisco has become known as the city where 20 pounds of poop were dumped on a sidewalk last week in a clear bag and remained there for hours. As The Post noted, “human waste-related complaints in San Francisco have skyrocketed 400 percent from 2008 to 2018,” and “In 2017 alone, more than 21,000 reports were received.”
What happened in San Francisco is obvious. It stopped prosecuting quality-of-life offenses and, unsurprisingly, the quality of life for the city’s residents and visitors decreased sharply.
In 2015, San Francisco courts stopped enforcing bench warrants for such offenses. Police continued writing up tickets for public drunkenness or sleeping in parks, but when the accused failed to show up to their court appearance a judge simply dismissed the outstanding warrant.
New York started following San Francisco’s lead in 2016 when Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr. announced his office would no longer be prosecuting offenses such as public urination. Both cities have accepted that they’ll continue to have a large number of people living on their streets and inevitably using their sidewalks as a toilet.
Back in the mid-noughts, when I was living in Northern California and regularly flew back to New York to visit family and friends, the difference between the two cities, during an era when Mike Bloomberg continued to enforce most if not all of Rudy Giuliani’s “broken window” crime prevention policies was palpable. But as Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal warned in 2005, hipsters lamented the loss of the gritty Death Wish/Panic in Needle Park-era Manhattan of the 1970s — and thanks to Mayor de Blasio, they’re getting that city back once again. Good and hard, as Mencken would say.
WHAT HATH MERKEL WROUGHT? Germany’s Air Force Is Dying a Slow Death.
The German magazine Spiegel recently revealed that most of the Luftwaffe’s—the modern German air force’s—128 Eurofighter Typhoons are not flightworthy.
In fact, only about ten of the aircraft are ready for operations, Spiegel said. This raises doubts about Germany’s ability to meet its NATO defense commitments.
“The problem is complicated,” according to Spiegel.
Germany, at least, has been playing games with the Typhoon’s operational readiness, according to Spiegel. “The Luftwaffe counts all Eurofighter jets that are allowed to fly as available. But this includes many who do not have a functioning self-protection system. These may be used with dummies on the wings for training flights or maneuvers. Real missions, such as airspace surveillance on the eastern edge of NATO, are excluded with these jets.”
The problem is not “complicated.” Berlin has decided not to devote the resources necessary to keep its air force flying, and so now it barely can fly. The sad fact is that the last time the Luftwaffe was in this sad a shape, it was due to American, British, and Soviet enemy action.
GREAT MOMENTS IN GASLIGHTING: CNN’s Brian Stelter: ‘Never’ Has There Been a ‘Love Story’ Like Trump and Fox News.
Stelter’s only 32. Wait until he discovers the 2008 presidential election.
As Glenn has written, Trump is “a symptom of how rottenly dysfunctional our sorry political class is. Take away Trump and they’re just as awful and destructive. He just brings their awfulness to the fore, where it’s no longer ignorable. Now they’re willing to play with fire, risking the future of the polity over little more than hurt feelings, in a way that would have been unthinkable not long ago.”
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: In beleaguered Venezuela, young women use beauty pageants to escape poverty.
The 16-year-old daughter of a butcher and a teacher is pinning her hopes for a future free of poverty on a single goal: rising through the world of pageants and becoming an international beauty queen.
“These sashes represent a huge accomplishment for me,” says the skinny teen with dark brown eyes as she pushes her long black hair from one side to another. “I accomplished what I set out to achieve.”
While growing concern about sexism and the rise of the #MeToo movement recently led the Miss America contest to drop swimsuit competitions and emphasize personal accomplishment, in Latin America young women continue to flock to competitions where good looks are unabashedly championed above all else.
Now will the Left finally denounce Venezuela’s democratic socialism?
JUST ANOTHER PHONY POLITICIAN: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez changes campaign bio after truth is revealed about where she grew up.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. “The Left Is Ginning Up Violence.”
PERVERSE INCENTIVE: Australian law makes sexual consent explicitly verbal.
If you want to have sex you now have to ask for it loud and clear and get a verbal “yes” back under new reforms announced by the New South Wales government in Australia. NSW is a state on the west coast of Australia and Sydney is its capital.
Sexual consent is at the core of the state’s first strategy against sexual assault released on Friday, which will focus on raising awareness about consent, as well as protecting victims and preventing sexual harassment in workplaces and universities.
Under the package, a new $1 million advertising campaign will teach people how to “obtain a clear yes.” Young adults, in particular, will be targeted in pubs, bars, clubs and universities and via social media, with messages like “no means no” and “silence is not a yes.”
The perverse incentive is for men to surreptitiously record whatever goes on, to protect themselves from retroactive rape accusations.
WHY SHOULD A SINGLE FEDERAL JUDGE BE ABLE TO MAKE LAW FOR THE WHOLE COUNTRY?: Funny you should ask, since Justice Thomas recently asked that same question.
THANKS, OBAMA: The secret story of how America lost the drug war with the Taliban.
As Afghanistan edged ever closer to becoming a narco-state five years ago, a team of veteran U.S. officials in Kabul presented the Obama administration with a detailed plan to use U.S. courts to prosecute the Taliban commanders and allied drug lords who supplied more than 90 percent of the world’s heroin — including a growing amount fueling the nascent opioid crisis in the United States.
The plan, according to its authors, was both a way of halting the ruinous spread of narcotics around the world and a new — and urgent — approach to confronting ongoing frustrations with the Taliban, whose drug profits were financing the growing insurgency and killing American troops. But the Obama administration’s deputy chief of mission in Kabul, citing political concerns, ordered the plan to be shelved, according to a POLITICO investigation.
Now, its authors — Drug Enforcement Administration agents and Justice Department legal advisers at the time — are expressing anger over the decision, and hope that the Trump administration, which has followed a path similar to former President Barack Obama’s in Afghanistan, will eventually adopt the plan as part of its evolving strategy.
On Twitter, Jerry Dunleavy notes that this would be the second time Obama did such a thing: “Wow. @JoshMeyerDC broke the story on Project Cassandra — how Obama turned a blind eye to Hezbollah’s drug trade to appease the mullahs & get the Iran Deal. Looks like Obama may have done the same w/ the Taliban opium trade — shelving Operation Reciprocity… Whether Hezbollah or the Taliban, it looks like Obama was soft on narco-terrorism.”
AS VENEZUELA CIRCLES THE DRAIN, remember why that is. “Under capitalism, the rich grow powerful. Under socialism, the powerful grow rich — and everyone else grows poor.”
LIVING UP TO THE OLD “THAT’S NOT FUNNY!” JOKE: A Feminist Critique Of Indiana Law School’s Dean Photo.
I suppose we have to add Austin Powers to the list of movies we couldn’t make anymore, because we pay too much attention to the opinions of priggish scolds.
AUTHENTICITY IS KEY. IF YOU CAN FAKE THAT, YOU’VE GOT IT MADE. “Somebody with deep expertise on image creation got ahold of the latest darling of the left and glammed her up for her current role as the standard bearer for the socialist wing of the Democrats.”
UNEXPECTEDLY: Millionaires Flee California After Tax Hike.
Prop. 30 raised the state’s top income tax rate by more than 29%, increasing it three percentage points from 10.3% to 13.3%, which is now the highest state income tax rate in the nation. Prop. 30 also hiked the tax rate on income between $300,000 and $500,000 by two percentage points (a 21.5% rate increase), and raised the rate on income between $500,000 and $1,000,000 by three percentage points (a more than 32% rate hike).
In 2016, California voters extended the Prop. 30 income tax increases, which were originally scheduled to expire in 2019, until 2030. There will be an effort to extend those income tax hikes yet again prior to their expiration in 2030; book it now.
Varner’s new research examined taxpayers who were and were not hit by the Prop. 30 rate hikes. He found that in the two years before the Prop. 30 tax hike was imposed (2011 and 2012), net in-migration for both groups “was positive and roughly constant.” Yet following 2012 and the passage of Prop. 30, net in-migration dropped for households that were facing an effective tax increase of 0.5 percent or more. The reduction was greatest for households facing the highest effective tax hike, according to Varner and his coauthors.
This isn’t surprising for those who are familiar with other attempts to soak the rich with punitive state income tax hikes on high earners.
California already drove out much of its middle class, and now the “regular rich” are heading for the exits. That leaves the super-rich and the poor — a situation fairly described as feudal.