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.

A couple of weeks ago we suffered another intrusion by Orange Kitty, the neighborhood bully, who took advantage of the moment to molest a faux-piscine member of the family:

Yep, that’s a catnip fish clutched in his avaricious paws.

Paws can be avaricious, right?

Earlier this week the NFL announced that players who would be kneeling during the national anthem should instead stay in their locker rooms until the anthem is finished. President Trump chose to reject this approach, as if he had any say in the matter:

The Philadelphia Eagles Football Team was invited to the White House. Unfortunately, only a small number of players decided to come, and we canceled the event. Staying in the Locker Room for the playing of our National Anthem is as disrespectful to our country as kneeling. Sorry!

The NFL was responding to pressure from both its fans and President Trump, and while of course this entertainment segment is dependent on its fans, it also has to have some sort of backbone or it risks becoming a sheet to the wind, to borrow from the old saying, and any sailor knows that an unsecured sail can swiftly become worthless.

This is the risk the NFL is taking as it meddles with this policy.

The NFL needs to find a way to climb out of this hole it’s dug for itself, and I suggest it show a little leadership. First, it should revert the above policy and assert the right of the players to show their dissatisfaction with the status of racial equality by kneeling during the anthem. This public activity may annoy those fans unconscious of the flawed state of affairs, but perhaps it’ll wake a few of them up.

Second, it should find a way to acknowledge the real racial disparity problems which persist in this nation. Sure, the game of football has made a number of African-Americans rich – but it’s also saddled them with brain injuries and other physical problems. The NFL is a rich organization, perhaps they should work on finding ways to help poverty-stricken African-American communities improve themselves, and publicize it.

And if Trump gets whiny about their policy, kick the asshole in the teeth. One of the great story themes of America has been telling the powerful off. The NFL is certainly powerful in its own right, but the President sees himself as some sort of national CEO. Kick him in the teeth, Commissioner Goodel.

I just received in my mail an announcement from the Democrats:

Democrat Lauren Arthur just WON her special election for the Missouri Senate, flipping a Trump-won district from red to blue!

Lauren’s win marks the 42nd time Democrats have flipped a Republican-held seat from red to blue since Trump took office. That’s historic – and it shows yet again that voters everywhere are REJECTING the GOP’s extremism, even in the heart of Trump country.

KMBC News of Missouri confirms:

How significant is this victory? It’s hard to say. In 2016 the Republicans won by about 23 points, and in 2012 by about 5 points. On the other hand, the turnout of 24,591 is less than 1/3 of a normal turnout, so that suggests the results are swayed by general voter enthusiasm. I glanced at losing candidate Corlew’s website and noted not a single mention of President Trump on the front page. My guess is that this election may have partially turned on purely local issues.

Still, a Democratic flip of a seat remains a flip and should continue the energy the Democrats will need in the midterm elections in November.

Remember Representative Martha Roby (R-AL2), who barely made it into Congress in 2016 when she dared to withdraw her support from then-candidate Trump, and then proceeded to vote 100% with his agenda – and still drew criticism and threats of another primary challenge? Well, I fear her allegiance to the extremist conservative cause isn’t as strong as it was, as FiveThirtyEight demonstrates:

Yes, she’s dropped a full 2.5 percentages points from perfection with the extremists, and that’s just not good enough – she’s being assailed by primary opponents. WaPo explains:

“I know that I back up the president, I support the president, and I will continue to do that,” [candidate Rich Hobson said].

As if she hasn’t?

A former Democrat is actually the most serious primary challenger to Roby. Former congressman Bobby Bright is running for the seat that Roby took from him in 2010, this time as a Republican. He’s also cozying up to conservatives to draw a contrast with Roby.

“I am a Republican, my philosophy is Republican, and I want to run this race as a Republican,” Bright told local TV station WTVY.

Alabama candidates who don’t get a majority of the vote must go to a runoff in July with the second-highest vote-getter. Republicans watching the race expect Roby to go to a runoff with Bright. …

Roby may well go on to win a fifth term in Congress despite her very public reprimand of the president back in 2016. But her struggles to clear Tuesday’s primary present two important lessons for Republicans in Congress right now: (1) This is Trump’s party, and (2) Beware of questioning him out loud.

Boy, say one bad thing and the Trump faithful will try to trample you underfoot. This is really an indictment of the GOP base, which has slid rightward as moderate members are ejected through the RINO mechanism or leave in sheer disgust at the membership’s behavior. The requirement and expectation of a personal loyalty, so visibly demonstrated in the Comey firing scandal in which Trump requested a pledge of loyalty from then-FBI Director Comey, is a symptom of a fundamental illness afflicting the GOP, a political immaturity in which one’s views on the challenges facing the nation, which are addressed through the formulation and application of policy views, is less important than the loyalty to the Party Leader.

That loyalty culture will, I think, make for a very brittle Party, and if Trump is ever caught committing an unforgivable act, the GOP will shatter because it’s no longer built around policy or moral positions, but rather a person. If he disappears, the consequent power struggle combined with that loyalty structure will result in a GOP in which various factions will fight for control over the base, and the base will try to pick who to be loyal to, rather than asking who has the best policies. It may shatter the GOP, or make it less effective as loyalty bonds become indestructible by anything less than death.

And I gotta say, that fellow Bright who is considered Roby’s biggest challenger sounds like a real third-rater. Shifting from Democrat to Trump-lover, for that’s what it means to be in the GOP these days, is a long ways to go, even for a conservative Democrat. If I met him, the first thing going through my mind would be “power-addict, watch out!”

My Arts Editor pointed out last night that in order to accept a pardon, someone must be found guilty and accept that they are guilty. Naturally, this leads to the observation that, apropos the hubbub over Trump claiming he can pardon himself, it would be an admission of guilt.

And then think of President Ford’s pre-emptive pardoning of former President Nixon. Applied in the current context, pre-emptive pardoning would be an admission of future guilt for those Trump might pardon.

And then, he might even pre-emptively pardon himself.

Image: From the University of Washington’s production of Julius Caesar

It’s a two-edged sword, isn’t it? Does he immunize himself from all federal criminal prosecutions, daring his base to support him even as a future criminal? Indeed, this would be an admission of future guilt. He would be giving himself effective absolute power (at least until his subordinates refuse to do his bidding), since Congress doesn’t dare to impeach him. Both wings are controlled by blind Trump partisans, if not directly, then indirectly, and so Trump remains safe from that threat. However, his base, while able to give GOP elected officials pause, is not large enough to support him in office without help; he requires the support of independents, and most of them, already rejecting his use of the Presidential office, would be even more repulsed by this naked grab for power and immunity.

It’s madness like this that makes Trump’s claim so ludicrous. I have no idea how SCOTUS might rule if asked, but, to me, hypothetical scenarios like this make the self-pardon claim a bad joke.

From USA Today:

A Kentucky high school student wanted to share some words of wisdom with his graduating class, but there was a twist that no one saw coming.

“This is the part of my speech where I share some inspirational quotes I found on Google,” said Bell County High School valedictorian Ben Bowling in his speech. ” ‘Don’t just get involved. Fight for your seat at the table. Better yet, fight for a seat at the head of the table.’ — Donald J. Trump.”

The crowd burst into applause.

“Just kidding,” Bowling said. “That was Barack Obama.”

The 18-year-old valedictorian said the crowd quickly went silent.

But I had the poor taste to start laughing. Bowling wants to study medicine, but I think he should go into stand-up comedy as well.

The decline mentioned in the previous post on this thread continues, according to WaPo‘s Pat Dvorak:

The American birthrate is sinking: 3.8 million babies were born last year — the lowest number in three decades and down 2 percent from 2016, according to a new report by the National Center for Health Statistics.

It’s a decline that is alarming demographers and social scientists — many of them men who chart womb activity like the consumer price index or manufactured-goods sales.

If this keeps up, they fret, we may become like Japan, where adult diapers outsell baby diapers.

Babymaking dropped in the 2008 recession and kept sliding. That makes sense to the charts-and-graphs people. But by 2016, the economy was roaring, business was booming and experts kept wondering when, exactly, women were going to crank the baby factories back up.

Pat thinks she knows the answer:

Here’s the answer: choices. For the first time in human history, women truly have them. A lot of women don’t feel pressured to have kids they don’t want.

“I think there is far more permission to choose a child-free life than there ever has been,” Davidman said. “There’s so much out there to help child-free women feel good about themselves, to not feel shamed.”

It’s not childless. It’s #ChildFree.

“The child-free movement is very much linked to women having more choices,” said Amy Blackstone, a sociology professor at the University of Maine who staged a decidedly nontraditional shower (It’s a . . . Blog!) when she launched her journal of her child-free life with her husband.

I wonder, though. How we might measure this in objective terms? Well, we could ask how many women are turning to artificial insemination techniques in order to become pregnant. Actually, the question would have to be more subtle in order to mitigate unrelated factors such as choosing later in life to have childen, but, still, that information would tell us if this is really a result of it being a choice increasingly made in the negative by potential parents, if the artificial insemination approaches are dropping, or if something more biological is happening, if artificial insemination is going up. The latter might indicate the biosphere is becoming less suited to human occupancy, suggesting befoulment by humanity is not conducive to continued existence. Unfortunately, a five minute search yielded little more than this 2014 NPR article which suggested that the number of IVF births is climbing. Hardly a definitive answer.

On our trip to Stockholm, WI, we ran across one of our favorite plants, which we call ‘everted lungs,’ and bought a couple.

In nearby Pepin, where we had an excellent lunch at the Harbor View Cafe (now for sale), we also encountered this interesting … gutter.

This guy needs a facelift, a new agent, and possibly a visit with the proctologist in order to see if that jet pack that must be up his ass is causing hemorrhoids.

It’s a little tempting to try to make something out of the ugly mess of The Monster From The Prehistoric Planet (1967, aka Gappa: The Triphibian Monster), but, in the end, the best thing I can say is that when the two parent monsters are searching for the baby monster stolen by the representatives of the evil tycoon, it really did seem like they were looking.

There, I said something good.

The rest of it was wretched. Possibly the worst of it was the final sentiment expressed by the woman reporter, who said she was giving up her career, staying home, and washing diapers. But the balance of this story, from special effects to dialog to acting to story, was not much better.

Yeccccccccch.

Andrew Sullivan’s first section of his weekly tri-partite column in New York is an unsettling, even frightening, meditation on how the world into which we were born and have learned to operate – that is, liberal democracy – appears to be coming apart at the seams.

Elsewhere, the strongman model is proliferating: Putin in Russia has dropped all pretense of democracy; Xi is now the first president of China for life; Erdogan in Turkey is still not done enlarging his powers; Netanyahu will be Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, governing on the basis of ethno-nationalism, suspicious of his own deep state, including the Mossad, and cementing a Jewish state from the river to the sea.

And in the U.S., of course, the omens are not good right now. Trump himself is resurgent in the polls — his disapproval-approval gap was -20 points last December; it’s -11 points almost six months later. On the generic ballot, the Democrats’ lead has sunk from 13 points to 6 in the last five months. The party is in shambles in Southern California, one of its key regions for regaining control of the House. Sean Trende now believes that continued GOP control of Congress is perfectly possible, even probable. Since, it seems to me, the midterms are our only real shot at checking our own strongman, this is demoralizing.

Maybe the economy’s continued steady growth is part of Trump’s polling revival, especially as it begins to reach the working class (at long last). Or maybe the outreach to North Korea has persuaded enough people that Trump is not always terribly dangerous in world affairs. Maybe it’s the tax cuts, although they have had no effect on growth so far — first quarter GDP growth was just downgraded to 2.2 percent. But the better part, I’d wager, is simply Trump’s continued salesmanship, his relentless media presence, the tribalism now endemic to our politics, and his core anti-Establishment appeal.

It’s a helpful, if somewhat terrifying reminder, that most folks operate on a What have you done for me lately? approach to, well, everything. And that works out reasonably well for car repair shops, grocery stores, and that sort of thing. Screw me over and I’ll move on to the competition, bud, be it tree services or banks.

But government is quite another thing. When the Founding Fathers were shaping the current American Constitution, they had two failed examples in their recent past: first, the English monarchy, which had inflicted taxation without representation on the Colonials, along with various other injustices, and, second, the American Confederacy, that period of time in the 1780s when the United States lacked a strong Federal government. This latter period ended in 1788 with the affirmation of the current Constitution.

They were primarily concerned with constructing a fair and just government through prevention of injustice. But how does one measure success? We are, and have always been, a country of merchants, and I think this colors our evaluative faculties to an untoward extent. At the current time, despite positive economic signs (such as a reduced unemployment rate) there is a lot of economic unhappiness. Unfortunately, there is a tendency to blame government for the tides of economic fortune, which tend to flow as they will and, while they may be influenced by government action, are rarely controllable by government action. But there the blame resides when the tide flows out, leaving communities dry and brittle.

This is where we may find ourselves with an unanswerable conundrum. Let’s take two statements:

1. A government system which does not deliver prosperity to its adherents is a system which should be modified or even discarded.
2. A government system should be judged on its ability to achieve its purposes, which in the American case is to render the would-be dictators impotent.

Which statement is false? Neither, so far as I can see for the average citizen – me included. The problem may lie with the eternal problem of incomplete information. After all, farmer or office worker, we are most familiar with our own situation. But if our entire community has become an economic casualty, such as Detroit, say, then one must look around for a fix – or something to blame. They are frequently related items, to be honest.

Flag of the Wiemar Republic
Source: Wikipedia

Now – not wanting to mention Nazis^[1], but I fear I shall – one of my favorite examples of this problem I’m talking about is the Wiemar Republic. Following the fall of the Kaiser after World War I, the Wiemar Republic replaced the traditional German monarchy. Like any nascent Republic, it had many problems, the greatest of which was the Treaty of Versailles, which imposed ruinous reparation requirements upon Germany after their surrender in the Great War. This led to the massive inflation which ruined the German economy and inflicted a sense of helplessness and fear on the German citizens.

The election of Adolph Hitler and the subsequent throttling of the Republic is often viewed as an almost incomprehensible event in the liberal democracies. In my mind, part of the problem has been the failure to personally experience the entire period of Germany, from the proud times just prior to World War I, to the economic ruin and subsequent humiliation imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, to the election and general adulation of the man that would be called Der Fuhrer, and the total disaster that befell Germany in his megalomaniacal wake.

Given the disastrous times of the Wiemar Republic, it’s more fit to ask, Why should the Germans have retained the Republic? What had it brought them? Misery, humiliation, and economic disaster. They tried to print enough money to make it through, and inflation ate them up. Today’s generous pay check was tomorrow’s pittance – literally. Economically, the Republic was a disaster – or, at least, it happened to exist at the same time as the economic disaster.

Hell, this reasoning even applied to the moral systems of the day, and just like that, the Holocaust was enabled. That, however, is a path I’m not walking today.

Returning to the economics of the situation, in reality the Treaty of Versailles was the engine that destroyed the Republic, and subsequently enabled Hitler’s rise to power and, ultimately, World War II. The French obsession with revenge, as understandable as it was, doomed a generation of Germans, French, Russian, and British men to destruction and death. And, partly, the inevitable ignorance of the average citizen, government minister, and even frightened clergymen welded the coffin of the Republic shut. It wasn’t reasonable to expect them to understand the economic tides, and they didn’t.

One of the most important functions of government is to give us a sense of how the rest of the nation is going through the collection and distribution of information. Until the last few decades, this has been a reasonably successful function, probably getting better with technology, but as I remarked, the last few decades have seen a dedicated assault upon the perceived dependability of government. Some of this is earned, as we see the occasional government scandal, such as Watergate, FBI Director Hoover, Senator McCarthy, and other men of dubious character clamber into government positions and then abuse them. Other discredit, however, is showered upon our government for less than honorable reasons. Long time readers have seen my occasional dissection of email relayed through conservative friends, full of blatant lies, half-lies, false inferences, and rotten rumors, and these are deliberately intended to discredit and destabilize the government.

This leads the average citizen to fail to give full faith and credit to those agencies that they actually pay to function in their names. Believing only in one’s own experience and opinions will lead to inevitable fallacy in a country this large. I, for example, may think the world is going swimmingly because the Twin Cities area, despite some poverty in spots, is generally doing OK. But, as I understand from reports, many urban and rural areas across the nation are struggling, or even dazed and destitute.

And so, prisoners of our own sensibilities, those communities adversely impacted by the economic tides and lacking in the experience of governments other than limited-power liberal democracies, begin to fall away from the liberal democracy model. Our imaginations are limited, despite the efforts of story-tellers; experience is far more immediate, and if the high school graduate suddenly cannot get the expected factory job that lets him own a home and have a family, well, what the hell good is a liberal democracy then? If that guy on the stage is promising to make coal King again, if he’s promising to resurrect the steel industry, hey, isn’t that an improvement?

Who says morality is worth a shit when your savings are gone and economic failure is in your nostrils? Why should I trust the good reports of “the media” when I’m already living paycheck to paycheck and the factory just closed?

In reality, standard politicians do the best they can. But fighting the economic tide is a tough chore, and it’s made doubly hard because Americans hate change imposed on them. It’s great to start a new business, but when an entire economic sector changes because of someone else, inside or outside of the nation, then we’re not so happy. Think of coal miners, steel workers, and all those other industries where jobs have “gone overseas” or just disappeared.

Even today, jobless coal miners, when faced with a chance to further their education, often choose education in the coal industry. Change, for them, is bad. Someone – or something – is to blame. Right?

And that blame is placed squarely, not just on government, but our government system. It seems like a lot of people don’t understand the blessings that a limited, liberal democracy brings to the table. And I think that’s due to our lack of experience with autocracies, monarchies, and totalitarian regimes that burden their citizens with ‘disappearances,’ assassinations, pogroms, genocide, religious wars, and all that damn rot that makes mothers quiver in their boots and curse their foolish husbands for looking for the biggest bully to lead them.

But that’s how it rolls. And it’s not entirely wrong in the naive view, because someone’s in trouble, and something has to change. And by gum maybe it’s the government’s fault, not mine, because sometimes that’s even true. If liberal democracy is not producing economic success for its citizens, then those citizens may in fact discard it.

And then take their lumps as they may.

¹For to do so would invalidate my entire post under the rules of the Web, no?

Poking into my email bag again, another fine kettle of rancid fish emerges.

It seems if you have info about the potential of crimes of the Clintons your life expectancy is in jeopardy.

WOW!

https://yournewswire.com/fbi-clinton-fast-furious-dead/

FBI Official, Who Exposed Clinton’s ‘Fast & Furious’ Cover Up, Found Dead

FBI Special Agent David Raynor, who was expected to expose the extent of Obama and Clinton corruption and malpractice in the Operation Fast and Furious cover up before a US Federal Grand Jury, has been found murdered with his own gun. He was 52.

Special Agent Raynor was “stabbed multiple times” and “shot twice with his own weapon” just one day before he was due to testify before a US Federal Grand Jury where he was widely expected to testify that Hillary Clinton acted illegally while covering up the Fast and Furious scandal to protect Obama administration crimes.

Raynor’s wife, Donna Fisher, was also found dead at the scene. An autopsy will be completed to determine the exact cause of death, according to police.

According to the Baltimore Sun:

Authorities, who are offering a $215,000 reward for tips in Suiter’s killing, have struggled to understand what happened. The detective was shot with his own gun, which was found at the scene. Two other shots were fired from the gun, and Davis said there were signs of a brief struggle.

Special Agent Raynor’s suspicious death is the latest in a sequence of disturbing deaths in Baltimore connected to the Clinton/Obama cover up of Operation Fast and Furious.

When President Trump took power, the US Justice Department opened another investigation into Operation Fast and Furious as it pertained to the Baltimore Police Department and impaneled a US Federal Grand Jury.

One of the main witnesses was Detective Sean Suiter, an 18-year veteran of the FBI, however Detective Suiter was gunned down in November, in eerily similar circumstances to Special Agent Raynor, also one day before he could testify.

Special Agent Raynor was leading US Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s and FBI Director Christopher Wray’s investigation into the murder of Detective Sean Suiter, who he believed was silenced before he could testify that the Obama administration was criminally complicit in allowing guns to flow into the hands of criminals on the Mexican border.

These guns were involved in the murder of a US Federal Officer, among others, and is seen by investigators as the “Achilles heel of the Obama regime”, because the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry is one of but a very few Obama administration crimes that has no statute of limitations as it involved the killing of a US Federal Officer.

Leaked Wikileaks emails also prove Hillary Clinton was fully knowledgeable about the crime—thus making her liable to criminal charges.

This is the sort of email that makes a lot of assertions, and it can be hard to prove they’re false. But it’s worth taking a look at them:

1. I looked through more than a dozen respectable reports on Agent Raynor, and it appears this was a tragic murder-suicide. The couple was separated, and while this was the first incident of violence, the two had been arguing over his extensive weapons collection for years. The only mention of any connection to the Fast & Furious scandal is on websites of dubious reputation, such as this one, which has the gall to actually quote a Russian source.
2. Given the general hostility of WikiLeaks to the Democratic Party, and possibly the United States, not to mention the difficulty in the common citizen in documenting the authenticity of anything released by Wikileaks, I and, I hope, anyone who has a reasonably suspicious mind will disregard any information which comes, or allegedly comes, from Wikileaks.
3. The confusing mention of Baltimore PD officer Sean Suiter indicates this is actually a mutation, as I ran across at least one article claiming Suiter, who was also murdered, was about to give testimony to the same grand jury. Same wording, same dubious websites. He was, in fact, about to give testimony, but in a police corruption trial, or so says the Baltimore Sun. Federal grand jury, yes, Fast & Furious, no.
4. The mention of Clinton, which I will return to presently, is irrational since she was Secretary of State, not the Attorney General, and, of course, Fast & Furious was a Justice Department activity. AG Eric Holder is the logical person I’d expect mentioned – IF THIS MAIL HAD ANY CONNECTION TO THE TRUTH.
5. I found no mentions of a currently active grand jury investigating the Fast & Furious scandal. Maybe I missed it.

I mentioned something about TRUTH up there, and that’s really the key. The conservative base has, by now, been conditioned to twitch whenever the Clintons are mentioned, and that’s all this is about, stirring up the base with some senseless charges of murder, pointing at Wikileaks as their best source of proof.

And a reasonable person would just laugh this silly bit of fluff off. If they have something resembling proof, honorable authors would bring it forth. Hey, the GOP is in charge of the government these days, bring it to AG Sessions – he’d love to ingratiate himself to Trump by charging Clinton with a plausible crime.

It hasn’t happened, has it? This is the sort of mail that crumbles upon the first skeptical glance, and I should hope that my readers inflicted the same upon it.

The New York Times has obtained and published a memo from President Trump’s lawyers to Special Counsel Mueller essentially arguing that, well, he’s basically above the law. Among the arguments was this:

“The president’s prime function as the chief executive ought not be hampered by requests for interview,” [Trump’s lawyers] wrote. “Having him testify demeans the office of the president before the world.”

In my opinion, quite the opposite. If we wish to walk down the rather silly path of imputing dignity to offices, then we must first remember that the office and its occupant are two different entities. They are not inseparable.

So when we investigate the occupant on reasonable suspicion of some sort of malfeasance, it improves the dignity of the office to have been willing to make the effort to investigate, and clear the occupant of wrong-doing – or not.

Their objection is nothing more than rhetorical puffery.

Sounds like a song title, doesn’t it?

Or is Giuliani really just that far out in left field? He gave an interview to HuffPo:

Giuliani said impeachment was the initial remedy for a president’s illegal behavior ― even in the extreme hypothetical case of Trump having shot former FBI Director James Comey to end the Russia investigation rather than just firing him.

“If he shot James Comey, he’d be impeached the next day,” Giuliani said. “Impeach him, and then you can do whatever you want to do to him.”

Which is utter rubbish. The Constitution does not lend the President special protections for crimes committed in office, even if some believe that prosecution for some crimes should be deferred until the President leaves office. We are all equal before the law, and that means everyone. (It should even include foreign diplomats, who routinely receive passes for minor offenses.) Trump shoots Comey, he gets led away in handcuffs, no matter how much Giuliani and Trump’s other advisors huff and puff over it, and how much the Trump cult shakes its fists in anger and outrage over it.

And Giuliani knows this – or he should. That leaves me with two possible conclusions.

First, Giuliani’s gone right over the edge. Based on his behavior since being hired as Trump’s lawyer, this is not an unreasonable conclusion. He acts like a man with dementia who refuses to admit to it. He is confused, his reasoning is muddled and fallacious, he is ambivalent in the way of a man who cannot keep two thoughts in his head simultaneously. He lives on his reputation as a Mayor of New York City, not on any accomplishments since then. I think this conclusion is most likely.

Image credit: Ancient History Encyclopedia

But one cannot count out the possibility that Giuliani is deliberately making outrageous statements in hopes of making Trump yet more vulnerable to prosecution. In other words, Giuliani is trying to bring Trump down by suggesting the man desires Caesar-like powers – and, for those not up on their Roman history, I refer you to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar for an illustration of the end of fools desiring absolute power. Whether or not Giuliani is wise in this approach to the abusive behaviors of Trump, it remains a distant possibility that it’s a true conclusion.

Personally, though, I agree with Norm Eisen, as reported in the same article:

Norm Eisen, the White House ethics lawyer under President Barack Obama and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the silliness of Giuliani’s claim illustrates how mistaken Trump’s lawyers are about presidential power.

“A president could not be prosecuted for murder? Really?” he said. “It is one of many absurd positions that follow from their argument. It is self-evidently wrong.”

Eisen and other legal scholars have concluded that the constitution offers no blanket protection for a president from criminal prosecution. “The foundation of America is that no person is above the law,” he said. “A president can under extreme circumstances be indicted, but we’re facing extreme circumstances.”

I don’t even think it takes extreme circumstances. We are all equal in the eyes of the Law, after all. Such was the judgment of the Founding Fathers. They saw what happened when that was not true – arbitrary evil inflicted upon the citizenry by the tyrants. There are many historical examples since then, and it’s perhaps an indictment of American sensibilities that we are not intimately familiar with them.

I fear that I failed to follow up on the trial of Officer Yanez in the death of Philando Castile, in which the officer was found not guilty, but he immediately resigned his position, or perhaps was asked to leave. This was just about a year ago.

Today, I see the City of Falcon Heights, the location of Castile’s death, is making a gesture of community spirit. From a City e-mail (I’d give a link if I could find one):

The City Council adopted a resolution on May 16 proclaiming July 6 as Restoration Day and July 7 as Unity Day. The proclamation will become a component of healing, grant respect to Philando Castile’s family, while at the same time serve to improve the quality community engagement within the City by its residents, businesses, and guests.

It set about to shift a day of tragedy and provide a redemptive focus of the two days by which all of us can benefit. The first of the two days, Restoration Day is more about taking personal action and steps to build or restore relationships. This could be in the form of meeting a neighbor, mending a strained friendship or relationship, or even actively pursuing conversation with someone that a person would not naturally interact. Think of how on Earth Day individuals set a side time as a family or neighborhood to actively steward the land.

Here we as a city will be acknowledging the importance of stewarding healthy relationships. The second day has a focus that demonstrates healing has begun, connectedness is taking place, and thus the city as a whole demonstrates a measure of cooperative growth in inclusion and engagement. This could be a day for simple parties on the block, or even citywide gatherings. These two days will be promoted through standard city communication tools that could also provide suggested topics for discussion, and activities.

If you would like to watch the action taken by the Council on the Proclamation, please visit: http://webstreaming.ctv15.org/viewer.php?streamid=3002

It’s good to see it isn’t being brushed under the rug.

It’s not just for animals. From The American Journal of Epidemiology comes a study on coal and oil power plant retirements by Joan A Casey, Deborah Karasek, Elizabeth L Ogburn, Dana E Goin, Kristina Dang, Paula A Braveman, and Rachel Morello-Frosch, and this is from the abstract:

We used California Department of Public Health birth records and Energy Information Administration data from 2001-2011 to evaluate the relationship between 8 coal and oil power plant retirements and nearby preterm births ( < 37 weeks gestational age). We conducted a difference-in-differences analysis using adjusted linear mixed models that included 57,005 births–6.5% of which were preterm–to compare the probability of preterm birth before and after power plant retirement among mothers residing within 0-5 km and 5-10 km of the 8 power plants. We found that power plant retirements were associated with a decrease in the proportion of preterm birth within 5 km (-0.019, 95% CI: -0.031, -0.008) and 5-10 km (-0.015, 95% CI: -0.024, -0.007) controlling for secular trends with mothers living 10-20 km away. For the 0-5 km area, this corresponds to a reduction in preterm birth from 7.0% to 5.1%. Subgroup analyses indicated a potentially larger association among non-Hispanic Black and Asian mothers compared to non-Hispanic White and Hispanic mothers and no differences in educational attainment. Future coal and oil power plant retirements may reduce preterm birth among nearby populations.

An immediate impact on the health of people surrounding these power plants is an important observation, and suggests that those living near these power plants bear a disproportionate share of the burden these power plants inflict on society. Not that, in the past, this was unjustifiable, for one could argue that power brought greater social goods. Today, though, with the development of cleaner power sources, defending oil and coal fired power plants has become inadvisable for those who wish to keep clean intellectual reputations.

In Inside Climate News, Sabrina Shankman comments on further problems:

In a separate article published last week in the American Heart Association’s journal Hypertension, [Noel Mueller, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University] examined what can happen when the pollution source is not eliminated.

In a study that looked at 1,293 mothers and their children in the Boston area, Mueller and his coauthors found that babies who were exposed to higher levels of particulate matter during the third trimester were significantly more likely to have high blood pressure in childhood.

Particulate matter can come from cars and the burning of coal, oil and biomass.

Casey, the author of the California study, said the findings from the two studies are related. “We know that preterm birth isn’t the end of the outcomes for a child that is born early,” she said.

Walter Einenkel of The Daily Kos, from whom I picked up the original pointer to this information, sees studies such as these as indicative of a bigger problem down the road:

The Trump administration’s insistence in attacking all of the clean air policies across our country is not simply craven because of its naked greed, it’s the beginnings of a public health crisis that the Republican Party is not interested in handling on any level. The importance of the study showing these health benefits in California is that Trump’s EPA has targeted the world’s fifth or sixth largest economy as the battleground for so much of its environmental rollbacks.

Returning to this long dormant thread on civil asset forfeiture, or as I described it,

… forfeiture is nothing more than judging a suspect to be guilty without trial …

WaPo has a disheartening statistic for me:

In 2017, federal authorities seized more than $2 billion in assets from people, a net loss similar in size to annual losses from residential burglaries in the United States.

Their accompanying chart is even more depressing – $2 billion is a local minima.

There’s not a lot more to add on this thread, outside of the ridiculous numbers involved. The numbers either indicate we’re in the midst of a massive crime wave, despite FBI statistics to the contrary, or those elements of government with access to civil asset forfeiture are abusing it.

One more note from the article, which covers an incident in which a man by the name of Kazazi lost $58,000 to U. S. Customs:

The first thing the Kazazis noticed was that the dollar amount listed was $770 less than the amount that Kazazi said he took with him. The family said that the cash was all in $100 bills, making it impossible for it to add up to $57,330.

[Wesley Hottot, the Kazazi family’s attorney,] said that these types of “errors” are common in forfeiture cases and that it is “always in the same direction” — government receipts coming up a few hundred or a few thousand dollars short of what defendants say they had.

Does the few criminals this helps to convict outweigh the government corruption it encourages? Better yet, these additions to the federal and state treasuries, small as they may seem, are a means to reduce taxes. In an era in which taxation is such a keyword, is it really wise to use such a morally dubious and unprincipled approach to the problem of raising funds for public purposes?

Shouldn’t we simply raise the proper taxes and be honest about paying for that which benefits us?

I do believe I’ll be writing my Senators and Representative.

As I read this morning about how NAFTA re-negotiations may be crashing over a Mike Pence-delivered ultimatum of a five year sunset provision on the agreement, I started mumbling about how this entire Administration is continually pulling shit out of its ass. I have no idea why this ultimatum was presented, and nor does WaPo. This being a few days ago, maybe the Administration just as quickly dropped it when Trudeau refused it.

President Trump wanders about the stage of the Presidency, making vague pronouncements and judgments which, in hind-sight, turn out to be so much bullshit. Ever think about comparing that to President Obama? If President Obama had wanted to renegotiate NAFTA, I think anyone who paid attention would realize that Obama would have been giving speeches which laid out, section & clause, his objections to the treaty and why, and how he’d prefer to fix them in such a way to benefit both the United States and Mexico and Canada. After all, this was public business and deserved a workmanlike approach to the matter.

His specificity was a reassurance.

In comparison, Trump is a bombast, a braggart, a grasping fool. One of the verbal flags of his personality is his dependence on absolutes in his verbs – worst treaty ever I believe he used in describing the JCPOA (Iran nuclear deal). He never deals in specifics, it’s all in vague absolutes, and therefore he’s difficult to evaluate on specific matters – until one steps back and asks whether he’s believable.

No doubt, in his career as a real-estate developer he could be relatively successful using this style because the various groups he dealt with didn’t intercommunicate as a rule – a rule broken during legal proceedings, wherein rumor has it Trump’s inclination towards lies tends to catch up with him.

But in the national spotlight, everyone talks to everyone else. Fact-checking occurs and is broadcast. I tend to see supporters of Trump as the self-deluded, those desperate to return to a time colored rose by their regretful peering into the past. The facts are out there, staring us in the face, but we have to be willing to open our eyes and see them for what they are.

To borrow one of Andrew Sullivan’s favorite quotes:

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
– George Orwell

Aggrandizement:

an increase in power or importance:
He gives a lot of money to charity, but personal aggrandizement/self-aggrandizement is his motive. [Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “John Brennan: I will speak out until integrity returns to the White House,” former CIA Director John Brennan, WaPo:

The esteem with which I held the presidency was dealt a serious blow when Donald Trump took office. Almost immediately, I began to see a startling aberration from the remarkable, though human, presidents I had served. Mr. Trump’s lifelong preoccupation with aggrandizing himself seemed to intensify in office, and he quickly leveraged his 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. address and his Twitter handle to burnish his brand and misrepresent reality.

I was lucky enough to take some pictures of a beautiful butterfly while in Stockholm, WI.

I also put the last two pictures up on iNaturalist, just in case it’s some species someone’s never seen. I know virtually nothing about butterflies.