Archive for 2019
January 2, 2019
MARK PULLIAM: RBG’s Hubris Is a Gift for Donald Trump. “The prospect of Trump selecting Ginsburg’s replacement as his third Supreme Court pick has caused some of Ginsburg’s previously-fawning admirers to turn against her, as their hatred for Trump overwhelms their loyalty to her. As Mother Jones acidly noted, after her most recent fall but before her latest cancer surgery, ‘The situation today is one many liberal lawyers feared years ago and worked hard to avert. But the feisty justice rebuffed them all, a decision that makes all the hero worship hard for some of us to stomach.'”
THAT WILL SHOW THEM: Tiffany Haddish Vows To Wear Fur Every Day Until ‘Police Stop Killing Black People.’
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Georgetown takes ‘A.C.T.I.O.N.’ against ‘microaggressions in medicine.’ Medical mistakes kill far more people than guns, but sure, go after micro aggressions.
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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Gov’t Still Shutdown, Tear Gas Deployed and Much, Much More. “Pelosi took a break from listening to Don Ho and eating poi to offer a spending plan to open the government that does not include border wall funding. The WH is not interested. Good.”
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: The country that has lost three million people. “An estimated 5,000 people pack up their lives and leave every day, eager to flee the economic collapse and humanitarian crisis which has beset the oil-rich nation.”
CHANGE: Trump issues fewest regulations ever, ‘Unconstitutionality Index’ reaches record low.
President Trump has made good and then some on his pledge to slash costly federal regulations, issuing the fewest new rules in recorded history in his first two years, according to a new analysis.
In fact, the efforts by the White House, Office of Management and Budget, and several agencies to cut and reduce the flow of regulations this year have only ever been topped once: by the same Trump team last year.
“At year-end 2018, how is President Donald Trump’s regulatory reform project going? Better than Obama, Bush II, and Clinton in terms of fewer regulations; but not as good as Trump’s own first year,” said the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
CEI regulations guru Clyde Wayne Crews Jr. said in a year-end report provided in advance to Secrets that Trump ended the year with 3,367 new regulations. That is the lowest since records were first kept in the 1970s.
But Crews noted that Trump’s number of new regulations is lower. The reason: the government requires a “regulation” to kill a regulation, and Trump is continuing on his promise to kill two regulations for every new one he proposes. . . .
In what Crews has dubbed the “Unconstitutionality Index,” Trump has has also slashed the percentage of new rules to new laws passed by Congress and signed by Trump, he wrote in a second report issued Monday.
Admittedly it’s a low bar, but Trump is without a doubt the most conservative and most libertarian present of my lifetime, notwithstanding that he’s not really a conservative or a libertarian by instinct.
ROBERT KAPLAN: Time to Get Out of Afghanistan. “The United States is spending beyond its means on a mission that might only be helping its strategic rivals.”
No other country in the world symbolizes the decline of the American empire as much as Afghanistan. There is virtually no possibility of a military victory over the Taliban and little chance of leaving behind a self-sustaining democracy — facts that Washington’s policy community has mostly been unable to accept.
While many American troops stay behind steel-reinforced concrete walls to protect themselves from the very population they are supposed to help, it is striking how little discussion Afghanistan has generated in government and media circles in Washington. When it comes to Afghanistan, Washington has been a city hiding behind its own walls of shame and frustration.
While the Chinese, Pakistanis, Indians and Iranians are all developing competing energy and mining projects in and next door to Afghanistan, the United States appears to have little commercial future in the country, even though it spends about $45 billion there annually.
Read the whole thing.
REVIEW: There’s No Such Thing as a Free Speech.
As 2018 gutters out, sputtering down to its dim end, it might be worth looking back at one of the few genuinely new lights of the past year—the Columbia University law professor Philip Hamburger’s underappreciated Liberal Suppression: Section 501(c)(3) and the Taxation of Speech.
Perhaps the book received less attention than it deserved because of its subtitle, there being a general rule in the publishing world that books with parenthesed paragraph numbers of IRS code in their name aren’t destined for wide notice. Call a book Trojan Horses, and you might do all right. Add the subtitle 26 CFR 20.7520-3 and the Taxation of Gifts, and you’re headed for the remainder bin.
But Philip Hamburger has always gone his own way, and in Liberal Suppression he intends what his subtitle asserts: The constitutional idea of free speech has weakened over the past century, and one of the most powerful devices diminishing freedom of speech is the treatment of nonprofit organizations in the tax code.
Phil is doing great work. I also recommend his The Administrative Threat, about runaway administrative agencies.
HMM: Iran drought turns political as lawmakers fight over water share.
Eighteen lawmakers representing constituencies from the central Iranian province of Esfahan, where water scarcity has reached an alarming state, have resigned collectively in a symbolic move against what they believe is an unfair distribution of water resources. In response, their counterparts from three other provinces, which share the same water supplies, hit back. They demanded in a public letter that the heads of the three branches of the Iranian state — president, parliament speaker and judiciary chief — as well as the country’s powerful Supreme National Security Council intervene to bridge the widening divide over who should have more water.
The latest confrontation has not been without a precedent. Last August, Iran’s interior minister reported at least 20 water-related clashes, some of them deadly, in a period of less than 140 days.
Local tensions over water resources in Iran are not a novelty either. In recent years, the crisis has not only worsened but has also witnessed new implications. Provinces that were traditionally considered water-rich areas — such as west Azerbaijan, east Azerbaijan, Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad, Chahar Mahal and Bakhtiari, Khuzestan, Mazandaran, Gilan and Golestan — are already battling it out to win the bigger share, bringing the fight to political levels in the open.
Plus: “To overcome the crisis, the Iranian government has launched at least 10 water transfer megaprojects in the target areas. The projects, however, remain incomplete and have only complicated the situation by sparking protests in areas from which water is meant to be transferred to drought-hit regions.”
This is an underreported story with potentially huge consequences. More details at the link.
KAROL MARKOWICZ: How the Trump presidency made me a better American.
Nearly two years after his inauguration, I have concluded that President Trump has made me a better person.
For starters, I’m more compassionate. After the election, I was as dazed and confused as anyone in the political-media bubble. To understand what happened, I devoured reporting about Trump voters and sought to understand them.
I wasn’t some liberal, mind you. I had worked for years in Republican politics. Yet I hadn’t known any Trump primary voters. I didn’t know his fans, his base.
Reading their concerns was eye-opening. They weren’t stupid, and they weren’t hateful. Mainstream politicians had ignored them for so long that they took a wild chance on the reality-TV star from Queens.
At the same time, because I wasn’t a Trump voter, I understood the pain of people frightened by his win. Caring about his voters didn’t preclude caring about his opponents, I found.
I talked down friends who thought America was over because of his presidency. I exulted in our institutions and checks and balances, and I defended them when they were attacked by Trump — or his adversaries.
Read the whole thing.
TAMING THE BEAST: Trump Administration Issues Fewest New Regulations in History. “The Competitive Enterprise Institute has some good news for beleaguered U.S. businesses.“
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Louis CK’s Politically Incorrect Comedy Didn’t Change. You Did. The #MeToo-ed comedian jokes about Parkland kids and transgender pronouns in leaked footage of his new routines.
Since “comedians” have been the chief propagandists for the left, it’s very much in the interest of the right to see them devouring each other and becoming steadily more oppressive and unfunny.
January 1, 2019
ELLEN BARKIN hopes Louis C.K. is raped.
BOY HEROES STILL EXIST: 11-year-old boy uses all his strength to pull man from bottom of pool, saving his life.
WELL, IF “POLITICALLY RESPONSIBLE” MEANS LEFTIST-SUPPORTING: Corporations are finding their politically responsible side.
I would favor a return to the old days, when spending shareholder money on things other than profit-maximizing was treated as a breach of fiduciary duty. “Activists” worked hard at undermining that a century ago, with predictable results.
You could accomplish a lot of this via tax laws and regulations, I suspect. You know, if there were anyone in the Trump Administration who wanted to.
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OPEN THREAD: Happy New Year!
GLOBAL WARMING IS IMPACTING PEOPLE FROM HEAD TO TOE AND EVERYWHERE IN BETWEEN. JUST ASK NBC!
—Headline and subhead, NBC News, Christmas Eve.
● Chaser: NBC Blasted For ‘Worst New Year’s Show Ever’; Included ‘Vaginal Steaming’ Comment.
—The Daily Wire, today.
THIS IS MORE LIKE THE 21st CENTURY I WAS PROMISED: The world’s first jetpack racing league is poised to take off in 2019.