Monthly Archives: June 2018

Plus ça change:

A short form (specifically, an anapodoton) of French plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (“the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing”). [Wiktionary]

Noted in “There’s a new kind of superfood – and it’s not what you think,” Michael Le Page, NewScientist (26 May 2018, paywall):

The arrival of a generation of GM crops with clear benefits for consumers should be big news. But far from helping to win over hearts and minds, it seems few people will even realise what they are eating. Plus ça change.

Allegations continue that the Brexit debacle may have been the result of unfair manipulations, as I noted in the beginning post of this thread, allegedly by the Russians. Charlie Stross on Antipope has a round-up of some follow-on information:

As is the goodness of many things. I was reading about the controversy of GM (Genetically Modified, and, by implication, artificially genetically modified) foods as depicted in Michael Le Page’s “There’s a new kind of superfood – and it’s not what you think.” Seeing as it’s in NewScientist (26 May 2018, paywall), it’s not surprising that there’s a negative strain to it when they discuss opposition to GM foods. I ran across this bit …

Take the efforts to enrich rice to prevent vitamin A deficiency, which causes blindness and even death. Golden Rice, as the vitamin-enriched GM version is called, promises to improve the lives of millions of children, yet anti-GM organisations have fervently opposed it.

There are two facets to GM foods. First, there’s the matter of nutrition, as exemplified by the comparison of natural rice and Golden Rice – the latter is far more nutritious in terms of Vitamin A.

The second facet is implicit in Le Page’s next paragraph:

The stakes are high. GM crops could help us produce better foods in a more environmentally friendly way, which will be ever more important as the population grows and the planet warms. For instance, Napier is developing crops rich in beneficial omega-3 oils. As these oils typically come from wild fish caught to feed farmed fish, this could make fish farming more sustainable as well as having health benefits.

By being more environmental and more nutritious, this permits the support of more people.

In a ridiculously overcrowded world.

Being the Let’s have a dig at the assumptions type, I decided to wonder if the anti-GM forces might be right in action, if not in reason (which tend toward the metaphysical). Now, there’s a common argument often made that by using techniques which result in more nutritious food being grown, both in content and in volume, we preserving the environment more so than if we didn’t.

But this is an improper argument.

Researchers often talk of independent and dependent variables. In the former, changing one parameter of an experiment is a safe thing to do because the value of that parameter is not thought to influence the behavior of other parameters.

Dependent variables, on the other hand, are influenced by the values of other parameters, sometimes in unpredictable ways, making the modification of a parameter more of an adventure. Without a good understanding one parameter’s influence on others, changing that value and the result of the experiment may be difficult to understand, or, contrariwise, the change may illuminate the nature of the influence.

My contention here is that there’s an assumption of parameter independence which is not true. My precise (ok, that’s a lie, but let’s get on with it) suggestion is that such factors as availability, price, and nutrition values of food are signals to the entire species of the viability of large, small, or non-existent (beyond the adult pairing). Naturally, there are other factors, such as infant mortality and that sort of thing, but my point is this:

If we adjust the food signals to suggest to the human organism that food is nutritious and easy to come by, then any reduction in agricultural land use gained through the use of GM foods will be erased by the additional land used by those offspring “validated” by the signals generated by the GM foods. After all, agricultural land isn’t the only land used by humans; there’s housing, transportation, recreation, and some of it requires far more land per capita than others.

If this whole “signaling” seems ludicrous to you, consider this post, referencing serious scientific research into the landscape of fear, wherein deer are inhibited from feeding in certain zones because they know predators hunt in that area. While these are grosser signals than what I’m proposing, they fall into the same class.

In the end, a non-partisan analysis of these factors may find that the anti-GM forces have a point, if inadvertently, in the context of the overpopulation of this planet, and – crucially – finding a non-violent manner to reduce the overall population. Feeding more people more efficiently ignores the other uses of land those people will engender, and thus endanger the supporting environments even moreso than is already true.

The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) has released its latest tracking poll of the public’s view of the ACA. It’s a nice display which lets you lay out how long to show and breaks out the respondents in various demographics. For example, since the inception of the ACA, here’s the results for all adults as to whether their opinion of the ACA is favorable, unfavorable, or no opinion. The no opinions are dropping and the favorables appear to have a clear lead.

This one shows results for high-income folks.

Kevin Drum on Mother Jones sees this as close to victory for the pro-ACA forces:

In 2015, with Obamacare favorability languishing around 35-40 percent, repealing it wouldn’t have been too hard if President Obama himself hadn’t stood in the way. Today, Obama is gone but ACA’s favorability is 50-55 percent and rising. Even the rich favor keeping it around. There’s just not much appetite for destroying Obamacare anymore except among the tea party-ish base of the Republican Party.

I don’t know how far Donald Trump can go toward sabotaging Obamacare out of existence. Polls mean nothing to him in the face of getting revenge of Obama, and there’s obviously a lot of damage he can do. But can he do enough damage to wreck it for good before Democrats take over Congress or toss him out of the White House?

The Democrats must make it clear that, so long as the individual mandate is no longer part of the ACA, it’s no longer correct to call it ObamaCare. That individual mandate is the central mechanism that makes the whole jury-rigged contraption work, because, like any insurance, it’s the money from the the non-injured members which, to the extent possible, makes the injured parties whole again. If that individual mandate is not in place, then it’s

TrumpCare

And the Democrats need to trumpet that. TrumpCare means your healthcare costs go up! That needs to be an anchor around Trump’s neck, because then it can become an anchor around the jowly neck of every GOP candidate that has clasped Trump more tightly to their bosom than their own spouses – and that seems to be the trend these days in the GOP.

In my mind, one of the more pernicious trends of the current mid-term elections is the entire competition to be the most Trump-like and Trump-loyal partisan in the election. This is what leads to absolute corruption at the upper-most levels. There is a difference between sharing policy views, and loyalty to the Party leader (also known as team politics, of which I’ve written too much), and the latter is a poison in our water.

So I hope the Democrats can defeat every GOP candidate who’s frenching President Trump, if only in his dreams, and make it clear that this is not the American Way.

The explosion from the desolate wasteland of Winter to the excesses of Spring, that is. Here’s our backyard from last week.

Verdant.

Professor Pearlstein has written an unsettling article for WaPo on the current financial trends in the corporate world:

Now, 12 years later, it’s happening again. This time, however, it’s not households using cheap debt to take cash out of their overvalued homes. Rather, it is giant corporations using cheap debt — and a one-time tax windfall — to take cash from their balance sheets and send it to shareholders in the form of increased dividends and, in particular, stock buybacks. As before, the cash-outs are helping to drive debt — corporate debt — to record levels. As before, they are adding a short-term sugar high to an already booming economy. And once again, they are diverting capital from productive long-term investment to further inflate a financial bubble — this one in corporate stocks and bonds — that, when it bursts, will send the economy into another recession.

Welcome to the Buyback Economy. Today’s economic boom is driven not by any great burst of innovation or growth in productivity. Rather, it is driven by another round of financial engineering that converts equity into debt. It sacrifices future growth for present consumption. And it redistributes even more of the nation’s wealth to corporate executives, wealthy investors and Wall Street financiers.

Corporate executives and directors are apparently bereft of ideas and the confidence to make long-term investments. Rather than using record profits, and record amounts of borrowed money, to invest in new plants and equipment, develop new products, improve service, lower prices or raise the wages and skills of their employees, they are “returning” that money to shareholders. Corporate America, in effect, has transformed itself into one giant leveraged buyout.

But wait, it gets worse:

As a result of all this corporate borrowing, Daniel Arbess of Xerion Investments calculates that more than a third of the largest global companies now are highly leveraged — that is, they have at least $5 of debt for every $1 in earnings — which makes them vulnerable to any downturn in profits or increase in interest rates. And 1 in 5 companies have debt-service obligations that already exceed cash flow — “zombies,” in the felicitous argot of Wall Street.

“A new cycle of distressed corporate credit looks to be just around the corner,” Arbess warned in February in an article published in Fortune.

Mariarosa Verde, senior credit officer at Moody’s, the rating agency, warned in May that “the record number of highly-leveraged companies has set the stage for a particularly large wave of defaults when the next period of broad economic stress eventually arrives.”

Right out front, I’ll say my expertise in corporate finance is extremely limited. When I invest, I specialize in the story the potential investment is trying to tell me, and I try to evaluate for whether it’s a credible story. Sometimes I’m right, sometimes not. My advisor conducts his own investigation, and then we get together and thrash it out.

When I look at something like this, I try to translate the numerical measures into something more concrete, yet somehow allegorical. In this case, I’m seeing a great deal of what I’ll call innocent greed. It’s the belief that the naked pursuit of money is a good thing, a sort of libertarian trope, true or not. Whether it’s share buybacks to force the price of shares up (a disastrous move when the market chooses – or, to force more responsibility on the companies in question, the company’s results – to force the price of the shares down, leaving the company executing the buyback holding shares worth less than what they paid for them), often financed through debt, or dividends backed not by corporate profits but, again, by debt, the basic story seems to be about pride, prestige, face.

We’ve kept our dividends going for fifty years now, never mind how! Look at that, our stock price climbed another 20%! Isn’t it wonderful?! And we hold ever so many of our own shares!

A few years after the Great Recession that started in 2008, I read an article on the demise of Lehman Brothers. For younger readers and those who don’t recall, Lehman Brothers was more than just an obscure name appearing in Despicable Me (2010), it was one of the monster investment banks of Wall Street. One might write, Lehman Brothers (1850-2008), because it was the distressed institution that was not rescued by either the Bush or Obama Administrations during the Great Recession. The article, which might have been written by Morgan Housel of The Motley Fool, but I cannot recall with certainty, purported to recount one of the last meetings Lehman Brothers exec had with investors, and the theme of the meeting was how Lehman Brothers was dedicated to making profits for those investors.

Sounds harmless, even typical, doesn’t it? Yet, a few days later Lehman Brothers was dead, the victim of its own mad financial machinations, ripped to pieces when those knotted messes were ripped apart by the inertia of a falling market and a world wide recession.

I would contend, as did the author of that article, that it was a primary symptom of a foundational illness that ultimately doomed Lehman Brothers. Look, from a societal point of view, companies do not exist to make money. I know the general wisdom of the private sector would differ with me, but if you think it through, it becomes obviously right. The proper formulation is, Companies provide specific services thought to be useful to their consumers, and the best ones are profitable because they have the right combination of efficiency and service content.

Why is this important? It brings back into focus that a company is not an instrument for the implementation of greed, for the collection of more and more proxies of wealth, which can fluctuate in their value to a dismaying degree, by which I mean dollars (or whatever might be your local currency). The private sector wisdom leads to a corporate function which contributes nothing to the advancement of society. Stock buybacks as a form of returning profits to shareholders, dividends as expression of pride, the drive to use tax loopholes, none of these are reflective of the purpose of companies as seen from a societal viewpoint, and they are all the spawn of the prevailing wisdom of the purpose of the private company.

By contrast, a company which concentrates on providing those services of value, whether it be your local supermarket working to satisfy the local appetite for apples or for being localvores, or Apple, Inc, providing advances in communication technology which arguably does advance society, and then collects the profit … well, I’m sure it sounds very unsophisticated, even Puritan-like, to the advanced private sector investment banker who is deep into ETFs, and maybe advocated credit default swaps just prior to the Great Recession.

But I think getting back to the roots of the motivation for companies in the societal view is an instructive exercise in evaluating just what the hell is going on in Pearlstein’s article. I recommend reading it in full, whether or not you’re an investor, and thinking about what it may mean for your future. The Trump Recession may be far worse than the Great Recession. It may become the Trump Depression, and it’ll be caused by the nakedly greedy pursuit of wealth, rather than the wise pursuit of stability and justice.

Americans have always been distracted by the tangibles, haven’t they?

Senator Gardner (R-CO) accomplished his goal, I think, as Ilya Somin reports on The Volokh Conspiracy:

For reasons I outlined in a previous post on Senator Gardner’s efforts on this issue, the passage of the STATES Act would be an important victory for both marijuana legalization and federalism. Nine states and the District of Columbia have already legalized recreational marijuana, and twenty-nine states and DC have legalized medical marijuana. Both figures are highly likely to increase. In all of those jurisdictions, the STATES Act would largely eliminate the federal ban on marijuana possession and distribution. Gardner and [Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)] deserve credit for reaching across partisan lines to make progress here. …

The introduction of this legislation is the result of a deal Senator Gardner struck with President Donald Trump in April. In January, Attorney General Jeff Sessions ended an Obama-era policy that limited federal prosecution of marijuana user and distributors in states that had legalized pot under their own state laws. In retaliation, Gardner, who represents the first state that legalized recreational marijuana, held up Trump Administration nominees for Justice Department posts in order to pressure Sessions into reversing his decision. Under the deal, Gardner lifted his blockade on the Justice Department nominees and Trump apparently agreed to support the passage of legislation similar to that which Gardner and Warren have now introduced.

And, later, Trump public announced his support – for what it’s worth. I suppose this will guarantee Gardner’s reelection in 2020, especially if it passes the House as well.

But I remain sad that the judicial confirmation process was held hostage by Gardner, and is not respected on its terms for what it is, the manner in which the third leg of the stool of government is populated. Gardner has basically said he’ll return to being a rubber stamp for Trump’s nominees, rather than demanding the best and brightest.

All the pot in the world won’t make that nightmare go away.

Fissiparous:

1. Reproducing by biological fission.
2. Tending to break up into parts or break away from a main body; factious. [The Free Dictionary]
   

Noted in “‘Riyadhology’ and Muhammad bin Salman’s Telltale Succession,” Chibli Mallat, Lawfare:

Put all this together and the information shows a large substratum of dissent in Saudi Arabia and a sizable group of significant Saudi personalities living in exile. The history of dissent in Saudi Arabia is getting better known. The opposition is large but remains fissiparous and disorganized. With little support in the West outside prominent human rights organizations, the focus will remain on the domestic opposition. The most significant elements of that opposition lie within the royal family and among the business elite.

NewScientist (26 May 2018) reports on the latest synaesthesia:

A WOMAN can’t help laughing uproariously when she sees other people being tickled.

She has mirror-touch synaesthesia, a condition that makes people feel sensations on their own body when they watch other people touching things.

To see how this relates to tickling, Vilayanur Ramachandran and Claudia Sellers at the University of California, San Diego, recorded how much the woman laughed in different cases, such as when she was spontaneously tickled or when viewing funny situations.

They found that, in general, she didn’t laugh any more than a non-synaesthete. However, when watching someone else being tickled under an armpit, she burst out laughing and tried to make it stop by placing her hand under her own armpit – which seemed to help (Neurocase, doi.org/cpsb).

The spectrum of connections the human brain can experiment with can be a bit dizzying. You can call it mistakes or you can call it evolutionary dead-ends, but in the end the deviance from the neurotypical can be quite unsettling.

Here’s Deb’s new begonia after a bit of rain. I think this came out quite well for this cheapie camera.

The flash didn’t improve the picture, though.

Noting a fine point of which I was not aware, and importantly, Avi Berman remarks in Mother Jones on the real purpose of the addition to the census form asking questions about citizenship:

In March, the Trump administration added a question about US citizenship to the 2020 census for the first time since 1950, leading critics to charge that the question was a deliberate effort to reduce the response rate among immigrants and the political power of the cities and states where they live. But at a congressional hearing on Friday, another potential motive for the controversial census question was on full display: using the data to allocate political representation on the basis of the number of citizens in a district or state rather than the total population.

Such a move would mean a fundamental shift in the way representation is determined, dating back to the country’s founding, when the framers of the Constitution decided the balance of representation would take into account populations that didn’t have the full rights of citizenship, such as slaves and women. It would also significantly diminish representation for areas with large numbers of immigrants and shift political power to whiter and more Republican areas.

It is an interesting question to me; perhaps everyone else is aware of it, though. Disentangling the third-rate GOPers‘ influence from it is a bit sticky, of course, but it helps to pretend this is actually a proposal of, say, General George Washington. If such a personage would present such a proposal, how would you react to it?

My first impulse is to agree: representation is for citizens, now isn’t it? It seems commonsensical. Yet, the Founding Fathers might not agree. One of the compromises reached among them was the counting of slaves for purposes of the Census, fixed at counting each as three fifths of a free person:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

A slave is not a citizen, for a citizen is a free person, absent imprisonment for criminal activities. Yet, they were to be represented regardless.

Despite the Constitution’s apparent provision for the non-citizen, we might soberly consider reasons for or against. Occurring to me:

1. Proper assessment of the needs of a given region cannot be achieved without knowing the number of real persons consuming any Federally-provided resources. In cases of emergency, asking for proof of citizenship is both impractical and ungenerous.
2. Failing to give proper representation to those non-citizens may lead to sentiments of discontent, and while the pro side of the argument for representation for citizens only may view this as a discouragement to potential illegal immigrants, discontent in situ may result in violence perpetrated on citizens.
3. Discouraging illegal immigrants has the potential to turn away those ambitious enough to leave their home countries for the strange, new world of the United States. There is something to the idea that those willing to emigrate have qualities desirable to the United States; this xenophobic hostility does little good for natives in the long run.
4. Discouraging illegal immigrants shuts out crime. This is indisputable, but measuring this good is difficult. Is there an identification of the number of such immigrants in ratio to the total illegal immigrants? What is an acceptable percentage vs the indisputable desirable immigrants of point 3?
5. It is remarkably difficult to find reasons for the pro side of this argument beyond the problematic point 4 and the hypothetical Representation is for citizens!; indeed, I begin to suspect that the argument is little more than an empty slogan. One might argue that a naturalized citizen, through investment of the time and energy to gain citizenship, is naturally loyal to the state, but that hardly addressed the first three points.

So has SCOTUS weighed in on this debate? Avi provides an answer to that question:

Ceasing to count noncitizens, documented or undocumented, toward redistricting and reapportionment would mark a dramatic departure from longstanding democratic norms and recent Supreme Court precedent. In the 2016 case Evenwel v. Abbott, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that states should draw legislative maps based on total population, not the number of citizens in a district. “It remains beyond doubt that the principle of representational equality figured prominently in the decision to count people, whether or not they qualify as voters,” wrote Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a unanimous 8-0 opinion.

Unanimous, no less. It makes me wonder if the Republicans are just spinning their xenophobic wheels on this one.

Don’t fart so loud, dammit!

The power of a story depends, to a large extent, on how much the audience buys into the story. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, through verisimilitude, magnetic characters, and sensory overload. The movie A Quiet Place (2018), however, inverts that last method to accomplish its goals. Set in roughly contemporary times, humanity is being hunted by creatures that primarily use the sense of sound for detection of their prey. This is the story of one farming family, surviving by their adherence of to their code of silence, a code that, on abuse, results in the sudden and violent death of the apostate.

This results in a movie with nearly as little dialogue as The Artist (2011), where the silence has a reason both integral to the story and as a mechanism for focusing the audience’s attention. Similarly, in this movie, the silence with which the characters must live focuses our attention on how the noise we generate that we ordinarily don’t even notice signals our location to anything that cares to listen: other humans, cats, dogs … predators. Their care to minimize their sonic signals acts to emphasize those powerful moments when a misstep puts them in mortal danger.

Or, worse, when the emergence of new life, engendering the cries of pain for us thin-hipped evolutionary trade-offs, brings on the worst.

The storytellers are wise, for the very manner in which mankind is being hunted is also used to fight back, and that cleverness, even if accidental, makes the story that much more interesting. Hearkening back to my preferred theory of story, that stories remain central to the human experience because they teach lessons of survival and success through depictions of the consequences of choices in specific situations, this story is a reminder that not all curses are unalloyed, that the sharpest spear may be turned against its wielder.

I said that stories succeed on how well they engage their audiences, and part of that engagement acts as a barrier to hide the holes that develop in most stories. A Quiet Place has one or two holes. For example, the hunters appear to have specialized completely in sonics, being completely blind, and apparently insensitive to odors. Does this make sense? Would a predator the size of a human, more or less, really be completely incapable of sensing odor or light? While not impossible, it seems highly unlikely.

My Arts Editor pointed out that another approach to the problem of sonic-oriented predators might be to go the opposite way: magnify the general sonic landscape. A wind-chime in every tree, perhaps.

But I think these are minor quibbles. If you violently hate horror movies, you won’t like this.

Otherwise, Recommended.

Erstwhile:

: in the past : formerly

• cultures, erstwhile unknown to each other —Robert Plank

[Merriam-Webster]

I happened to use it in a comment in some computer code for work today, and suddenly realized my conception of the definition of the word was a trifle foggy.

We didn’t used to have peonies in the backyard. Now we do. And they’re making a rush to invade from their current positions.

Mr. Hosta may not have a chance.

And the very next WaPo article I read has another example of the crumbling of a reputation, this time that of Larry Kudlow:

The U.S. economy has been growing close to 3 percent over the past year — a rate once thought impossible — and is on track to get even growthier in the second quarter. Business is booming as corporate spending on new capital equipment has surged in 2017 and 2018. Hiring and wages are rising, too. Household net worth has soared to an almost unimaginable level of $100 trillion.

Ummmm, no, it was never thought impossible. Here’s a chart from Trading Economics:

Clearly, 3% is good but neither great nor impossible.

Mr. Kudlow, I do hope you’re as rich as Trump likes to surround himself with, because I’m not sure anyone will wish to employ you after this.

Over the last year I’ve run across the occasional report that those who work in the current Presidential Administration have discovered that their services are not in the same demand by the private sector as those who’ve worked in previous Administrations, a puzzling occurrence given the private sector plumbs ordinarily won by those who’ve labored in the White House for previous Administrations.

Equally true is that finding quality people to work in the Administration has also been difficult. Indeed, finding someone to fill the #3 spot at the Justice Department has been impossible, no doubt since, in the event of the current #2 leaving, who would be Rod Rosenstein, the #3 would become the target of President Trump’s ire over the Mueller probe.

Like most folks, I put this down to an extraordinarily incompetent and untruthful Administration. Why take a chance on someone who works there having the same incompetence and amateurishness when there are more qualified people walking the streets? The inability of the Administration to recruit quality people, as evidenced by those put forth for confirmation, makes the fate of those already in the Administration that much more likely.

So reading WaPo’s report concerning the Administration’s claims that its tariff threats lead to the building of a new aluminum plant is more or less the death rattle of Presidential advisor Peter Navarro’s reputation for integrity:

“Just last Friday, we had a plant, a groundbreaking in Ashland, Kentucky, the heart of poverty in America in Appalachia. $1.5 billion aluminum rolling mill because of the president’s tax and tariff policy.”
–White House aide Peter Navarro, interview on Fox News, June 4, 2018

“This is a story that’s truly remarkable and Donald J. Trump has brought in tax cuts, deregulation and trade policies that are working for the American working people. And guess what, on Friday they opened a $1.5 billion groundbreaking aluminum rolling mill in Ashland, Kentucky.”
–Navarro, interview on Fox News, June 3

The Trump administration, led by the president, is quick to claim credit for good news even if its policies may have had little to do with it. So our antenna went up when we saw Navarro, the White House director of trade and industrial policy, repeatedly attribute the building of a rolling aluminum plant in Kentucky to the president’s tariff and tax policies.

But …

But here’s the rub: Before Trump took the oath of office, the company had announced it had purchased 202 acres of industrial park land for the plant.

“As far as the original decision to build the mill, initial investigations began approximately in the last quarter of 2016, with the site and business case evaluation,” said Jaunique Sealey, Braidy’s executive vice president for business development.

Worse yet …

Since this is a rolling aluminum plant, not a smelting plant, the tariffs will actually increase the plant’s costs, as Bouchard acknowledged in a recent CNBC interview. “Our costs for an aluminum rolling mill in Ashland, Kentucky, will go up because expenditure for our prime input, prime aluminum, will go up,” he said. But he indicated the company would pass on the costs to consumers and said that overall the tariffs are a good thing because it will raise the overall price of aluminum.

Gibbs, however, noted that the tariffs will also likely increase the cost of building the plant.

And etc. So Mr. Navarro is complicit in trying to mislead the public concerning. I notice in his Wikipedia biography that he’s a professor emeritus, suggesting he’s retired, and he’s well outside the mainstream of thought in economics, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing for an economist, but those who swim against the current do have to produce.

Lying through your teeth isn’t how you produce, Mr. Navarro.

And it makes his reputation much more fragile. It makes me wonder how intellectually honest he is being with himself as well as the President, although the latter is probably only minimally damaging, as the President apparently hardly ever takes any advice anyways.

The fallout from this Administration will include half a generation of potential leaders, perhaps, if we agree that Administration experience is an important part of the C.V. of a future leader.

CNN is missing any easy bet, I think, although perhaps they believe they shouldn’t be the leader in attaching an epithet to legislation. That would be too bad, because this be accurate. Their headline reads,

Trump moves pushing up Obamacare premiums for 2019

And what it should read is

Trump moves pushing up TrumpCare premiums for 2019

The moment Trump took the decision to disable the individual mandate in the ACA, that made that legislation all about him. Best to rename it to reflect reality.

And the reality is that TrumpCare premiums are going UP, UP, UP!

On Lawfare, Paul Rosenzweig opines that Special Counsel Mueller may be feeling the pressure, as Rosenzweig doesn’t see the witness tampering charge against Manafort as being compelling.

So what is going on here? Why would Mueller’s team, whose actions to date have been premised on overwhelming evidence, take this risk and go out on this evidentiary limb?

My speculation is simple: This is a sign that they are feeling pressure. Possibly from Trump. Possibly from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Possibly just from their reading of the public tea leaves. Whatever the source of the pressure, they have an increased sense of urgency to move quickly.

And that translates to the want, and need, for Manafort’s cooperation. Not later but now. And the only way to get that cooperation now is to ramp up the pressure. The motion, if successful, would put Manafort in jail sooner rather than later, at the end of what promises to be a lengthy trial. That would concentrate Manafort’s mind quite a bit—and this is the type of pressure tactic that prosecutors use all the time. So that isn’t a surprise.

What is surprising, as I have said, is how thin the factual basis appears to be for these charges. I hope that the Mueller team isn’t rushing its effort. Now is no time to panic.

An interesting insight. Or perhaps they’ve run into a wall and are looking for a way to get the next bit of information. Manafort, as campaign chairman, would certainly be a best bet, outside of going to the source of the matter, but Trump won’t talk to Mueller. Not for all the money in the world.

Comport:

v.tr.
To conduct or behave (oneself) in a particular manner: Comport yourself with dignity.

v.intr.
To agree, correspond, or harmonize: a foreign policy that comports with the principles of democracy. [The Free Dictionary]

Noted in “Voters really, really want a check on Trump. This new poll confirms it,” Greg Sargent, The Plum Line, WaPo:

That 24-point edge among white college graduates is striking, and these numbers comport with the story we had been seeing before the generic ballot numbers tightened: Trump has unleashed a large backlash among college-educated whites and younger and more diverse voters — that is, on the other side of the cultural divide from the aging, blue-collar and rural whites that Trump and Republicans hope will be energized enough to allow them to hold the House. If the backlash to Trump is holding, that suggests the conventional rules may hold as well.

I’m not sure if Steve Benen is serious or not when he’s urging Congressional leaders, clearly dismayed at President Trump’s profligate use of tariffs, to pass legislation retracting the President’s authority to create tariffs:

For now, let’s put aside the oddity of hearing these two GOP leaders insist that Congress should only tackle legislation the White House is inclined to support. They didn’t seem to feel that way in the Obama era – how many dozens of votes did they hold on ACA repeal? – but let’s not dwell on recent history.

Instead, let’s remind Congress’ most powerful Republicans that the legislative branch has a remedy for dealing with a president who vetoes popular bills: lawmakers can override a veto.

Specifically on the issue of Congress, presidents, and tariffs, there’s some precedent to keep in mind: as we discussed the other day, in his final year as president, Jimmy Carter created oil tariffs, which Congress – led by a Democratic majority – quickly overturned.

There’s no reason this couldn’t happen again. It’s a matter of political will, not institutional constraints.

And in this case, the political will is pretty one-sided: Trump’s tariffs have very few proponents on Capitol Hill. Corker’s bill, or one like it, would likely pass with considerable bipartisan support. Enough to override a presidential veto? I think that’s likely, but there’s only one to find out.

So what do you say, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan? If you agree with the Corker bill on the merits, why not give it a try? What’s Trump going to do, tweet at you?

Recall that Representative Roby (R-AL), currently the owner of a 97% Trump Score, has been constantly challenged from within her own party because she withdrew her endorsement of Trump after the release of the Access Hollywood tapes. 97%, yet she’s deemed too disloyal to deserve her seat.

As former House Speaker Boehner himself observes, this is the Party of Trump. It’s no longer the Republicans, a party of principles or policies or positions. It’s all about the personality, and loyalty to same.

The Republican members of Congress are upset because of the tariffs? A whole bunch of them are staring at mid-terms and thinking about how angry the base will get if Congress removes his tariff making powers. Many of them are in unexpectedly fierce battles, and if the base walks away, they will go down to defeat before a re-energized Democratic Party and an appalled Independent and youth movements.

They. Don’t. Dare.

Let’s face it, the Republicans are a bunch of little mice, helpless to do much of anything. They brought this on themselves by letting the extremists run most of the moderates out of the party. Now it’s extremists, racists, and folks who can’t understand the meaning of compromise, howling for Trump to have his way, and if the mice get in the way, well, being tossed out of Congress may be the least of their worries.

Don’t expect the Republicans, especially McConnell, to try to face Trump down. They can’t afford it. Speaker Ryan’s temperamentally unfit to do so.

Yeah, I think Steve was just joshin’. He knows the troubles facing McConnell & Co.

Leon Sigal on 38 North is convinced the American media is misreading Kim Jong un and President Trump:

Shocked that a Trump-Kim summit meeting could soon take place? Worried that it could collapse? No wonder. You’ve been misled by coverage of U.S. diplomacy with North Korea in the news media.

For months that coverage had all but ignored the possibility of negotiation. Never mind that the Trump administration’s stated policy was “maximum pressure and engagement.” Reporters in Washington and abroad focused on any signs of political, economic, and military pressure while all but ignoring diplomatic efforts underway offstage for fifteen months. South Korean and Japanese media followed their lead.

Once the possibility of a summit meeting became obvious, the very idea became the object of withering disparagement in the U.S news media. South Korean reporting was somewhat more optimistic and Japanese reporting more ominous, reflecting the proclivities of their governments.

Certainly the verbal fireworks have been a distraction. But I wonder if Leon understands all the implications of his concluding paragraph:

Trump and his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, seem aware of the Kims’ desire to end enmity and have taken steps to address it. What better way to start than to sit down at the negotiating table with Kim Jong Un or to say, as the President has, that he is prepared to negotiate an end to the Korean war and to normalize relations – something his predecessors never did. Ultimately, he may have to find a way to forge an alliance with Pyongyang alongside the one with Seoul. How else to assure Kim that he will be secure enough to consider yielding his nuclear arms?

Normalizing relations with North Korea would require accommodation by Trump Evangelical supporters with a regime which has, by most reports, treated its citizens very poorly. That will require some tap-dancing by the Trump Administration, or we’ll discover that we’ve been misled concerning civil liberties in North Korea by successive American administrations, as well as investigative reporters.

Or we’ll discover the Evangelical segment of the United States has really descended into unexplainable moral depravity.

A reader remarks on the declining American birth rate:

Idiots who think we need to keep growing the population to keep growing the economy are just that — idiots. We do not have unlimited space, we do not have unlimited resources. There are real limits to growth and all of the effects as one approaches them are negative. Moreover, it’s not just women now have real choices. The economy was not roaring 2016, and still is not. Capitalists and the 1% are making money hand over fist once again, but the working class has never really recovered, and has really in all truth been taking it in the shorts since roughly the mid-1970s.

The same reader continues:

I meant to mention how inaccurate or distorted the government’s employment statistics are, as well. People are a lot worse off, job-wise, than they indicate.

Which indicates either the wrong data is being collected, or the wrong statistics are being publicized.

The decision on the Masterpiece Cakeshop has come down from SCOTUS, and the decision is 7-2 in favor of the baker who won’t make a cake for a same-sex couple’s marriage celebration. As I suspected, SCOTUS paid no attention to my argument that the baker mistakenly believes a civil wedding is a religious ceremony; their decision appears to have centered on the Colorado Civil Rights Commission’s comments when they had denied Masterpiece’s claim. Or, as several commentators note, including Kevin Drum notes, they punted:

But it’s also incomplete. I think it’s pretty clear that the court simply didn’t want to rule at all on this subject.

Here’s the thing: this is pretty much a no-win situation for the Supreme Court. On the one hand, it involves obvious questions of free speech and freedom of association that are pretty important. They’re so important, in fact, that they apply even in cases of straight-up racism and sexism that have none of the subtleties of Masterpiece. The Augusta National Golf Club—a high-profile meeting place of the rich and famous that’s featured on network TV annually—refused to admit blacks until 1990. 1990! They refused to admit women until 2012. 2012! And that was perfectly legal. …

Kevin believes the Court will just ignore the entire issue until enough of that generation dies off that it doesn’t matter anymore. It’s really an ugly corner case in which a difficult case is made worse because it involves the arbitrary morality of a supernatural creature. That’s a real problem when trying to formulate societal logic that really works.

The ACLU lawyer, David Cole, who lost the case proclaims victory in WaPo:

The court ruled Monday in favor of the baker, but on the exceedingly narrow ground that the state civil rights commission’s consideration was biased by hostility toward religion. Importantly, the court declined to adopt the baker’s principal argument — and the only argument made by the Trump administration — that “expressive” businesses that object to gay and lesbian weddings have a First Amendment right to discriminate. On the contrary, the court reaffirmed our main point: that there is no general First Amendment exception to laws protecting LGBT customers from discrimination. …

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing the majority opinion, could not have been more clear in rejecting the argument that there is a First Amendment right to discriminate. He wrote that “it is a general rule that [religious and philosophical] objections do not allow business owners . . . to deny protected persons equal access to goods and services under a neutral and generally applicable public accommodations law.”

But for some nasty language by the Commission, Masterpiece would have lost.

Andy McCarthy on National Review is disappointed:

Finally, speaking of the First Amendment, this was a straightforward free-expression case, as Justice Thomas (joined by Justice Gorsuch) explained in separate opinion concurring in the judgment. A wedding cake is an implicit expression of approbation, and in Phillips’s specific vocation, a form of artistic expression. As the Court recounted, the Colorado Civil Rights Commission has on at least three occasions protected bakers who — quite understandably, and I think admirably — refused to make cakes that abominated gay couples. That is, the commissioners recognized the palpable free-speech implications. Well, the First Amendment safeguards our right to refrain from expressing not only what the government condemns but what it endorses; indeed, it is the latter that cries out for First Amendment protection.

The freedom of speech clearly embraces Phillips’s right not to be compelled to engage in patently expressive conduct endorsing gay marriage. The state could easily recognize this right without disturbing its anti-discrimination act — even neutral laws of general application must accommodate protected speech.

The Court could have resolved the case that way. But it preferred the consensus appearance of a 7–2 vote to the faithful rendering of a 5–4 decision. With due respect to my editorial colleagues, I believe the justices’ obvious reluctance to defend liberty is a setback. The implication is plain: As long as the next “civil rights commission” is fashionably demure, the next Jack Phillips will lose.

He doesn’t notice the Kennedy comment that ACLU lawyer David Cole quotes. He doesn’t wish to address the damage done to society when someone refuses to provide a service to a protected class. How would Andy feel if a cakeshop run by homosexuals refused to provide cakes to straight couples? Perhaps he’d have the same response: just move along to the next cakeshop. Given the ugliness of this situation, it may not be that awful a suggestion.

On Slate, UCLA Law Professor Adam Winkler, on the other hand, rejects the interpretation of a narrow ruling based on some close readings:

Although the justices never explicitly said so, the court seems to have quietly established that business corporations have religious liberty rights under the First Amendment to the Constitution. If that is right, then Masterpiece Cakeshop could be a groundbreaking decision with profound reverberations in American law. …

Often overlooked in the controversy over the wedding cake was that the lawsuit was brought not only by the baker. It was also brought, as the name of the case indicates, by Masterpiece Cakeshop Ltd., a corporation chartered under Colorado law. That corporation was one of the “people” claiming its rights were violated. And the Supreme Court’s decision in favor of the baker is also a victory for the corporation—one that may enable future businesses to assert that they too have been victims of religious discrimination. .

Over and over again, corporations have won rights through Supreme Court decisions that, like Masterpiece Cakeshop, provide little or no justification for why corporations as such should be able to claim those rights. In the 1880s, the Supreme Court held that business corporations have equal protection and due process rights with no explanation; the court simply dropped a sentence in an opinion saying they did. In the 1930s, the court ruled that corporations have First Amendment press freedoms, again without offering any reasons for including corporations.

That’s just bloody unsettling. OTOH, while stare decisis is the generally accepted norm concerning SCOTUS decisions, it’s not unknown to overturn such decisions, in whole or in part. And Professor Winkler writes, perhaps unconscious of the irony,

Justice Neil Gorsuch, an avowed originalist, began his concurring opinion (in which Justice Samuel Alito joined) by calling Smith “controversial in many quarters” and citing two law review articles making forceful originalist arguments against Smith. It was a clear signal to lawyers that at least some of the justices are ready to read the First Amendment to require exemptions for businesses like the bakery here—and presumably many other businesses whose owners have religious objections to things like same-sex marriage and birth control.

I doubt an originalist could possibly make a credible argument that a corporate entity has the same rights as a human being under the Constitution, which makes Gorsuch’s concurrence in this opinion dubious – in my uneducated opinion.

Earlier in this thread, I had noted that the judiciary was nuts if they strayed into questions concerning who’s an artist and who isn’t, and Dahlia Lithwick, also on Slate, helpfully notes this is something SCOTUS appeared to be avoiding:

Consider the extraordinary fact that, as Eugene Volokh notes, a case that was initially brought as a religious-liberty challenge, then briefed and argued almost entirely on free-speech grounds, was decided Monday on religious-liberty grounds. This is likely because the court, after oral arguments, quickly realized that inserting itself into questions about whether bakers, florists, hairdressers, makeup crews, and busboys are all “artists” for First Amendment purposes might be folly. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch seem to be the only justices game to try.

Dahlia believes this is primarily about Justice Kennedy:

To the extent Masterpiece Cakeshop resolved the issue it was granted to take on—whether or not the dignitary interests of religious dissenters can override civil rights and public-accommodations laws—the rule that emerged is simply that we must speak civilly toward one another. …

But constitutionalizing major civil rights disputes based largely on who spoke more rudely to whom feels an awful lot like pandering to the Suffering Olympics discourse that serves only to convey that whoever feels the most dignitary injury will ultimately prevail. The reason the court agreed to hear Masterpiece Cakeshop in the first instance was to resolve that impasse. Rooting a decision in whose words were most hurt-y to Kennedy’s ears adds nothing but confusion.

Ouch.

There’s lots more out there. Professor Winkler leaves me quite unsettled, as loopholes like the one he thinks he sees are fodder for lawyers everywhere. Otherwise, it’s a little hard to see this as much else than kicking the can down the road, hoping time will dissolve the problem for them.

The self-pardoning tweet of President Trump has led to quite a lot of feedback from various commentators, which Jack Goldsmith helpfully collects into one post on Lawfare. Jack’s conclusion after surveying the crowd?

[Alan] Dershowitz is probably right to emphasize that in the unlikely event a president is willing to take on the political costs of self-pardoning, it is unlikely that a court will ever decide whether such a pardon is lawful. First, “a prosecutor would … have to try to prosecute the former president.” Then, “the former president would have to raise the pardon as a defense.” Finally, “the courts would have to decide whether, under our system of separation of powers, the courts have jurisdiction to review a presidential self-pardon.” Dershowitz might have also mentioned that the successor president could, without legal controversy and to alleviate doubt, pardon the self-pardoned former president.

In sum, there is no obvious right answer on the validity of self-pardons, and if Trump becomes the first president to pardon himself, a court will probably not provide an answer.

Far be it from me to disagree, but as a software engineer, this strikes me as one of those ugly corner cases which really needs a resolution, if only to make our future more predictable. Furthermore, I would hope that the judiciary would find against any such right of the President, for reasons I cited here.

The entire self-pardoning power, if permitted to exist, would be a weak ligament in the otherwise strong system of government we currently enjoy. This is not to suggest that these are not troubling times for non-Trumpists, but we’re not on the edge of armed insurrection; the resistance, outside of, perhaps, the antifa, seem dedicated to operating within the parameters of the law.