On Gender Pronouns, and Blowing Your Nose

From Fencing Bear at Prayer

On Gender Pronouns, and Blowing Your Nose

For those unfamiliar with the etiquette history of blowing your nose.

Fencing Bear at Prayer

Former US Attorney Andrew McCarthy

The Antithesis of Obstruction

Trump did not obstruct a valid FBI investigation; he demanded the exposure of a false one. 

The “collusion” narrative was a fraud, plain and simple. We know that now. Hopefully, it won’t take another six months to grasp a second plain and simple truth: Collusion’s successor, the “obstruction” narrative, is a perversion. 

The Left loves narrative. The ever-expanding story manipulates time, space, and detail to fit a thematic framework. Political narrative has some surface appeal, but it is deeply flawed. It obscures plain and simple truth. 

So let’s stick with the plain and simple: The essence of obstruction is to frustrate the search for truth. Its antithesis is to demand the exposure of fraud. 

Donald Trump’s political enemies are trying to build an obstruction case on the antithesis of obstruction: the president’s insistence that the collusion fraud be exposed. 

 National Review

MEXICO 2ND DEADLIEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD BEHIND ONLY SYRIA

It was the second deadliest conflict in the world last year, but it hardly registered in the international headlines. 

As Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan dominated the news agenda, Mexico's drug wars claimed 23,000 lives during 2016 -- second only to Syria, where 50,000 people died as a result of the civil war.

"This is all the more surprising, considering that the conflict deaths [in Mexico] are nearly all attributable to small arms," said John Chipman, chief executive and director-general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), which issued its annual survey of armed conflict on Tuesday.

"The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan claimed 17,000 and 16,000 lives respectively in 2016, although in lethality they were surpassed by conflicts in Mexico and Central America, which have received much less attention from the media and the international community," said Anastasia Voronkova, the editor of the survey.

Article

DILBERT: WHY THE NEW HEALTHCARE BILL WILL BE A LOSER

... I expect the next version of the Republican healthcare bill to be a complete failure. That’s because Republicans seem deeply committed to a losing path, thanks to what might be called the Contrast Problem.

Contrast is the driving principle behind all decisions. You have to know how your options differ, and by how much, or else you have no basis for a decision. President Obama solved for the contrast problem by designing Obamacare to cover more people than before. The rest of the details – especially the costs – were hard to predict, so our brains flushed that noise and focused on the greater number of people covered.

Everyone knew Obamacare would need future tuning to get it right. That gave us mental permission to focus on the good parts we understood – the greater coverage – and hope the other details would get worked out later. President Obama nailed the Contrast Problem like the Master Persuader he is.
That was then.
Now, President Trump and the Republicans have the “going second” problem. The public will compare their proposed bill with Obamacare and conclude that the one metric they understand – the number of people covered – does not compare favorably with Obamacare. The contrast is fatal.
We know Paul Ryan will do his wonkish best to tell us about all the amazing advantages of this new bill. And we know the public won’t understand any of it. But they sure will know it doesn’t cover as many people. Done. Bury it.
During the campaign, candidate Trump made some references to taking care of everyone. It sounded like universal coverage, but no one thought he meant it.

He did mean it.

He meant it because he understands the contrast problem. Any Obamacare replacement needs to cover more people than Obamacare, or else it is dead on arrival. Any skilled persuader would see that.

Paul Ryan doesn’t see the Contrast Problem as important, evidently.

I think most trained persuaders would agree that the one-and-only path to a successful replacement of Obamacare should include AT A MINIMUM a plan to reach greater coverage. And the only way to get there is by goosing innovation in the healthcare field. We can’t tax our way to full healthcare coverage. We need to lower the costs. And President Trump also needs to solve the Contrast Problem.

Scott Adams Blog

My favorite, liberal, wacko, lesbian, Bernie voter

Camille Paglia: "It’s obscene... It’s outrageous, OK? the Democrats are nothing now but words and fantasy and hallucination and Hollywood."
Courtesy of Ann Althouse:

"There’s no journalism left. What’s happened to The New York Times? What’s happened to the major networks? It’s an outrage. I’m a professor of media studies, in addition to a professor of humanities, OK? And I think it’s absolutely grotesque the way my party has destroyed journalism. Right now, it is going to take decades to recover from this atrocity that’s going on where the news media have turned themselves over to the most childish fraternity kind of buffoonish behavior."

Said Camille Paglia, talking to Sean Hannity on his radio show yesterday.

Althouse Blog w/ Link to Audio Interview

On this day in 1964

MISSISSIPPI BURNING

THREE "FREEDOM SUMMER" CIVIL RIGHTS WORKERS MURDERED

On this day in 1964, three young Freedom Summer civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman (a former Honors Program student at the University of Wisconsin), Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney, were murdered in Neshoba County near Philadelphia, Mississippi.

The three had traveled to Longdale, MS, to meet with members of a black congregation whose church had been burned by the KKK.  As they left the church, they were arrested allegedly for speeding and thrown in jail for a few hours.  When they were allowed to leave, they were followed by the local police and others, including members of the KKK.  The police pulled them over again as they were about to leave the county and, with the mob, took the three to another location, tortured Chaney, and shot all of them at close range.  Their bodies were buried deep in a nearby earthen dam.  Their burnt-out car was found three days later near a swamp and their bodies were found two months later thanks to a then-anonymous tip to the FBI from a member of the local police force.

On the day he was murdered, Goodman wrote his last postcard to his parents:

Dear Mom and Dad,

I have arrived safely in Meridian.  This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine.  I wish you were here.  The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good.

All my love.

Andy 

The murder of the young Freedom Summer workers enraged the nation and helped guarantee passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

When the State of Mississippi refused to prosecute, the federal government took over and successfully prosecuted several individuals with civil rights violations but failed to find all those involved.  Forty-one years later, Edgar Ray Killen, was charged and convicted of three counts of manslaughter.  Killen is currently serving a 60 year prison sentence.

In 1980, in what many believe is a black mark on his career, Ronald Reagan opened his campaign for president by giving a speech at the Neshoba County Fair Grounds near Philadelphia, expressing his support for states’ rights.

Background Article I

Wikipedia Article

Milton Friedman, 1991: Making Drugs Illegal is Immoral 

Paige: Let us deal first with the issue of legalization of drugs. How do you see America changing for the better under that system? 

Friedman: I see America with half the number of prisons, half the number of prisoners, ten thousand fewer homicides a year, inner cities in which there’s a chance for these poor people to live without being afraid for their lives, citizens who might be respectable who are now addicts not being subject to becoming criminals in order to get their drug, being able to get drugs for which they’re sure of the quality. You know, the same thing happened under prohibition of alcohol as is happening now. 

Under prohibition of alcohol, deaths from alcohol poisoning, from poisoning by things that were mixed in with the bootleg alcohol, went up sharply. Similarly, under drug prohibition, deaths from overdose, from adulterations, from adulterated substances have gone up. . .

The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating. We all know that overeating causes more deaths than drugs do. If it’s in principle OK for the government to say you must not consume drugs because they’ll do you harm, why isn’t it all right to say you must not eat too much because you’ll do harm? Why isn’t it all right to say you must not try to go in for skydiving because you’re likely to die? Why isn’t it all right to say, “Oh, skiing, that’s no good, that’s a very dangerous sport, you’ll hurt yourself”? Where do you draw the line?. . .

Friedman: I’m an economist, but the economics problem is strictly tertiary. It’s a moral problem. It’s a problem of the harm which the government is doing.

I have estimated statistically that the prohibition of drugs produces, on the average, ten thousand homicides a year.

 It’s a moral problem that the government is going around killing ten thousand people. It’s a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don’t approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else. Most of the arrests for drugs are for possession by casual users. 

Now here’s somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he’s caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it’s absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That’s the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons. 

Of course, we’re wasting money on it. Ten, twenty, thirty billion dollars a year, but that’s trivial. We’re wasting that much money in many other ways, such as buying crops that ought never to be produced.

Much more here: transcript & videos 

Frank Luntz Focus Group of Trump Voters Still Strongly Supports Trump

With Analysis by Rush

Climategate Scientist Admits Pause in Global Warming is Real

The ‘Pause’ in global warming is real and the computer models predicting dramatically increased temperatures have failed.

This is the shocking admission of a paper published this week in Nature Geoscience. It’s shocking because the paper’s lead author is none other than Ben Santer – one of the more vociferous and energetic alarmists exposed in the Climategate emails.

Delingpole via Breitbart

WTH?!

NYT's David Brooks Defends Trump

But Althouse Accuses Brooks of Weasel Words

I was the op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal at the peak of the Whitewater scandal. We ran a series of investigative pieces “raising serious questions” (as we say in the scandal business) about the nefarious things the Clintons were thought to have done back in Arkansas. 

Now I confess I couldn’t follow all the actual allegations made in those essays. They were six jungles deep in the weeds. But I do remember the intense atmosphere that the scandal created. A series of bombshell revelations came out in the media, which seemed monumental at the time. A special prosecutor was appointed and indictments were expected. Speculation became the national sport. 

In retrospect Whitewater seems overblown. And yet it has to be confessed that, at least so far, the Whitewater scandal was far more substantive than the Russia-collusion scandal now gripping Washington.

 Ann Althouse noted:

"Political victories are won when you destroy your political opponents by catching them in some wrongdoing. You get seduced by the delightful possibility that your opponent will be eliminated. Politics is simply about moral superiority and personal destruction."

Writes David Brooks in "Let’s Not Get Carried Away," which is about "the Russia-collusion scandal now gripping Washington." Brooks ends by quoting a Trump tweet... 

“They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story.” 

... and adding:

Unless there is some new revelation, that may turn out to be pretty accurate commentary.

Why say "may turn out to be" and not "is"? "Unless there is some new revelation" already locates you in the present, looking at the sum total of the evidence we have now. Trump said it amounted to "zero." Either you agree with that or you don't. I understand weasel words, but why double up on weasel words? What are you afraid of?

NYT Brooks
Althouse Blog

On this day in 1863

WEST VIRGINIA ADMITTED AS 35TH STATE

On this day in 1863, West Virginia was admitted into the Union as the 35th state following its secession from secessionist Virginia.   

After Virginia seceded to join the seven southern states that had originally seceded to form the Confederacy, western Virginians, who were mostly non-slave-owning farmers and laborers, felt increasingly alienated from and controlled by the eastern oligarchical planter-slaveholders.  This sentiment had existed from the days of the American Revolution when area residents had unsuccessfully petitioned the Continental Congress to form the state of Westsylvania.   

On June 11, 1861, western Virginia delegates voted to secede and wanted to name the state “Kanawha”.   Western Virginia was immediately invaded by Confederate forces who took over the region claiming, ironically, that the westerners had no right to secede.  

Notwithstanding the presence of Confederate troops, western Virginians voted in a public referendum for secession from Virginia and drew up a state constitution. 

 Although it took two years from the initial delegate vote, President Abraham Lincoln, who had his own reservations about West Virginia’s legal right to secede from Virginia, admitted West Virginia into statehood on this date two years later.

Background Article
Background Article II

Law Prof Althouse Rips NYT Analysis of WI Redistricting Case Before SCOTUS: "Insane"

"Inkblot" is the wrong meme for the gerrymandering problem in the case the Supreme Court is looking at.

The NYT has the headline "Gerrymandering Case Echoes in Inkblot-Like Districts Across the U.S." and the writer — Michael Cooper — gets very far along presenting the problem in terms of the seemingly apparent wrongness of having a sprawling, weirdly shaped legislative district. . .

But the Wisconsin case is just about the opposite problem, as Cooper lets us see in the closing paragraphs of the article. . . 

The problem in Wisconsin is that Democratic voters are concentrated in these compact — not inkblot-like — districts, so that there are "wasted" votes, and Democrats win by wide margins in those places instead of getting their voters spread into some other districts that could become competitive, instead of safe for Republicans. That is, the Democrats are fighting for something more like the Maryland Sixth District. In the new Supreme Court case, the plaintiffs want to "yoke" more Democratic voters in urban areas to Republican voters in more suburban/rural places.

Did the NYT not notice that the article is insane? The problem in the first half is the solution in the second half! You can't have it both ways. Which is kind of why the Supreme Court hasn't figured out what to do with these cases (other than to allow the litigation to proceed, which is some sort of deterrent to the most aggressively partisan gerrymandering).

Althouse Blog

Remember Japanese Internment Camps?

U.S. Supreme Court Sanctions Federal Government’s Imprisonment of Muslims in Post-9/11 Roundup

Muslims held on minor charges but subjected to sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, strip searches, etc.

The Supreme Court on Monday quashed a prison mistreatment case, filed by immigrants rounded up after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, against former Attorney General John Ashcroft and other officials.

“High officers who face personal liability for damages might refrain from taking urgent and lawful actions in a time of crisis” if they fear possible lawsuits, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority.

Federal authorities rounded up hundreds of predominantly Muslim and Arab men following the Sept. 11 attacks and, under a policy to detain them even on minor pretexts while terrorism investigations proceeded, held them for immigration violations.

Six Arab and South Asian men jailed at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City sued, alleging their rights had been violated by their unjustified detention under the strictest conditions permitted by federal regulations, which included sleep deprivation, solitary confinement and frequent strip searches, as well as unauthorized verbal and physical abuse, including broken bones.

If the allegations are true, “what happened to respondents in the days following Sept. 11 was tragic,” Justice Kennedy wrote, joined in whole or in part by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

But while federal law would permit inmate lawsuits against state officials over similar allegations in state prisons, Congress had provided no such remedy for those in federal custody, he wrote.

WSJ Article (if not a subscriber, click the X in the subscription box)

This used to be a good thing

Trump demands face time with favored Cabinet heads

But Politico worries about it.  Like how many scoops of ice cream Trump gets for dinner.

Politico

The Federalist

New Cuba Policy Helps Define An Emerging Trump Doctrine

President Trump does not believe the United States has enemies only because we create them, or that anything good comes from accommodating hostile regimes

By withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, rattling the North Atlantic Treaty Organization by insisting on fair dealing regarding its costs, disrupting business as usual at the United Nations, and strictly scrutinizing the Iran nuclear agreement, President Trump is signaling that U.S. action in the world will be decided first and foremost according to U.S. interests, not some vague notion of an internationally approved consensus.

This approach makes sense. After all, no country on earth is now acting or ever has acted in the world for the good of the world. All nation-states serve their interests first. If they are wise, they try to act in ways that attract allies and provide common benefits, but the chief goal is always their own interests and security. To think countries do otherwise is fantasy. . . 

Speaking of the Obama administration: Trump’s actions are a marked departure from his predecessor’s approach to the world. Steeped in the “anti-colonial” view of the world that saw first British then American leadership as the cause of the world’s ills and a justification for rogue states’ bad actions, Obama intentionally put U.S. interests last or subsumed them into some vague notion of the world’s interests. No matter how hostile, threatening, or insulting a regime was toward the United States, Obama looked for ways to accommodate them. . .

Obama spoke and behaved as though Cuba was poor, dysfunctional, and allied with our enemies because the United States had pressured and bullied Cuba. His view was that if the United States would simply normalize relations (treat Cuba like any other country in the world) and trade with it, the regime would moderate, open its economy to the world, and democratize. From that would flow peace, harmony, and development on the island.

The Obama administration did not deny that the Cuban regime was a dictatorship or was failing its people materially or in terms of freedom. The administration simply did not hold Castro’s regime responsible for all the problems it caused itself and others. Rather, Obama believed the U.S. posture toward the regime had caused the regime’s bad actions. Therefore, if the United States would change its behavior and embrace the regime, then the regime would respond in kind.

This requires an incredible amount of ignorance or willful disbelief about how dictatorships—especially Marxist-Leninist ones—think and operate. The Castro regime does not exist for the sake of the Cuban people; it exists for the sake of itself, the party, and the military that run the island. Every single action it takes is to first keep itself in power and then to enrich itself.

Not only do such regimes control political life to stay in power, they also control the economy to stay in power. Obama’s refusal to acknowledge that the regime controlled the economy as a means to holding on to power is key to understanding the fatal flaw of his “opening” policy. . .

The ball is now in Castro’s court to change his policies and actions if he wants to benefit from engagement with the richest country on earth. Moreover, Trump’s new policy requires the regime to hold free and fair elections supervised by international observers and free all political prisoners.

President Trump’s new Cuba policy provides us with the sharpest contrast to date between Trump’s understanding of foreign policy and Obama’s. Trump does not believe the United States is the cause of other countries’ bad behavior. He does not believe that we have enemies only because we create them. And he does not believe anything good comes from accommodating barbaric regimes hostile to the United States.

The Federalist

Andrew McCarthy/NRO

THERE IS NO OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE CASE AGAINST PRESIDENT TRUMP

There is no legal obstruction case against President Trump. As we have repeatedly explained, obstruction requires prosecutors to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a public official acted corruptly in endeavoring to influence or interfere with an investigation. To establish the corrupt mental state, prosecutors must prove that the official knew what he was doing was against the law. 

The president’s actions here, no matter how much one might judge them ham-handed or inappropriate, were not against the law. A president has prosecutorial discretion: He may lawfully shut down an investigation, to say nothing of merely influencing it. And the intelligence services exist to serve the president: He may lawfully terminate any intelligence-collection effort he chooses to. 

In point of fact, Trump did not shut down the investigation of Michael Flynn or the counterintelligence probe of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. Since he had the authority to bring these investigations to a screeching halt, he cannot have acted corruptly by taking lesser lawful action. Period. 

The claim that Trump may be guilty of a prosecutable obstruction crime is premised on a legal error – namely, that the FBI and the Justice Department are a separate branch of government, independent of the executive. In fact, they are subordinate to the president. The power they exercise, as inferior officers, is the president’s power. It does not matter whether an FBI director finds it troubling that a president makes suggestions to him about how a case should be handled. The president gets to do that. If the FBI director finds that intolerable, he can resign. The director’s comfort level is constitutionally irrelevant. 

Prosecutorial discretion is part of a continuum of executive police powers that includes the ultimate interference in law-enforcement: the pardon power. No matter how offended we are when a president pardons (or commutes the sentences of) serious criminals, the matter is unreviewable by the courts. The president may not be prosecuted for obstruction of justice over it, even though it seems like a profound obstruction of justice, because the president has the indisputable authority to take the action. 

Prosecutorial discretion is no different. It is simply the beginning of the process rather than the end – i.e., the decision not to investigate a potential crime, rather than, by pardoning it, to create the constructive legal reality that the crime never happened. The powers of prosecutorial discretion and pardon are two sides of the same coin.

McCarthy NRO Article

What?!

CNN Poll Shows 70% of Americans Believe President Trump Should not be Investigated for Obstruction of Justice

CNN Poll

Does the Swamp always win?

ANDREW MCCARTHY/NRO:

The Justice Department Is Killing Trump

Four key decisions, three of them made after the president was inaugurated and the Justice Department came under his control, at least nominally, have done immense damage to his administration — in conjunction with Trump’s belief that fires are best doused with gasoline. 

To understand why, I will reiterate my two-part working theory for why we have a mess, albeit one that, as a matter of law rather than appearances, falls woefully short of obstruction. First, Trump lobbied for the investigation of Michael Flynn to be dropped — something he could lawfully have ordered to be done — because he (a) was feeling remorse over Flynn’s humiliating removal as national-security adviser and (b) thought further investigation and potential prosecution would be overkill. Second, Trump’s decision to fire Comey — something he was lawfully entitled to do — was not an endeavor to influence the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign; it was the result of exasperation over Comey’s skewed public statements about the investigation, which created the misimpression that Trump was a criminal suspect.

Andrew McCarthy Article