Quality of medical care

A message from a reader who is a retired  anesthesiologist:

Recently, Dems (especially mini-Bernie) have emphasized the NEED for “better healthcare”.

In my not so humble opinion, as an expert in medical care (largely based on my own experience), is that it can’t get much “better”.

Retired, with Medicare and United Advantage from my former employer, I have had GREAT CARE. In fact, the “county hospitals” (mostly teaching hospitals) have provided better care than any private hospitals I have been in.

In truth, “the poor” get better hospital care than “the rich”.

The argument that “minority women” don’t have good pregnancy outcomes is because of “lack of access to care”. Nonsense; most cities have multiple satellite clinics in “poor neighborhoods).

Much illness is no doubt preventable. For example, untreated high blood pressure can be damaging or fatal; yet this cannot be the fault of doctors. Blood pressure can be measured FOR FREE at many stores. Treatment is cheap ($4/month for most common medications), much less than the price of cigarettes.

And not smoking is not under the control of doctors.

In summary, the “need for better care” is a fantasy for mini-Bernie and his kind.

Via email

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LIBEL: Trump Campaign Sues New York Times Over Article Claiming an 'Overarching Deal' With Russia

President Donald Trump's re-election campaign filed a libel lawsuit against The New York Times on Wednesday, accusing America's newspaper of record of defamation in an article claiming that Trump's 2016 campaign had an "overarching deal" with Russia regardless of the fact that Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of collusion.

"Today the President’s re-election campaign filed suit against the New York Times for falsely stating the Campaign had an 'overarching deal' with 'Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy' to 'help the campaign against Hillary Clinton' in exchange for 'a new pro-Russian foreign policy, starting with relief from ... economic sanctions,'" Jenna Ellis, senior legal aid to the Trump campaign, said in a statement.

"The statements were and are 100 percent false and defamatory. The complaint alleges The Times was aware of the falsity at the time it published them, but did so for the intentional purpose of hurting the campaign, while misleading its own readers in the process," she insisted.

The article in question, "The Real Trump-Russia Quid Pro Quo," an op-ed by Max Frankel (executive editor of The Times from 1986 to 1994), claimed that there was a clear deal between Trump and Russia.

"There was no need for detailed electoral collusion between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy because they had an overarching deal: the quid of help in the campaign against Hillary Clinton for the quo of a new pro-Russian foreign policy, starting with relief from the Obama administration’s burdensome economic sanctions," Frankel wrote. "The Trumpites knew about the quid and held out the prospect of the quo."

The lawsuit explains that this article is entirely false.

"The Defamatory Article does not allege or refer to any proof of its claims of a 'quid pro quo' or 'deal' between the Campaign and Russia. Rather, the Defamatory Article selectively refers to previously-reported contacts between a Russian lawyer and persons connected with the Campaign. The Defamatory Article, however, insinuates that these contacts must have resulted in a quid pro quo or a deal, and the Defamatory Article does not acknowledge that, in fact, there had been extensive reporting, including in The Times, that the meetings and contacts that the Defamatory Article refers to did not result in any quid pro quo or deal between the Campaign and Russia, or anyone connected with either of them," the lawsuit explains.

NYT Columnist Condemns Facebook for ... Adopting NYT's Ad Policy
"The Times’ story is false. The falsity of the story has been confirmed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election released on or about April 18, 2019 (the “Mueller Report”), and many other published sources, that there was no conspiracy between the Campaign and Russia in connection with the 2016 United States Presidential Election, or otherwise," the campaign's lawsuit argues.

The First Amendment defends freedom of speech and freedom of the press, but there are limits to both. Defamation of character is one such exception, although it has been highly limited by the Supreme Court decision New York Times v. Sullivan (1964). In the case of alleged defamation against a public figure like the Trump campaign, the campaign would have to prove malicious intent and a reckless disregard for the truth.

The lawsuit cites evidence of bias against the Trump campaign and claims both maliciousness and that reckless disregard.

"There is extensive evidence that The Times is extremely biased against the Campaign, and against Republicans in general. This evidence includes, among other things, the fact that The Times has endorsed the Democrat in every United States presidential election of the past sixty (60) years. Also, Max Frankel, the author of the Defamatory Article, described himself in an interview as 'a Democrat with a vengeance,'" the filing states.

"The Times obviously had a malicious motive, and also acted with reckless disregard for the truth. Extensive information, including stories in The Times published before the Defamatory Article, had put The Times and the world on notice that there was no conspiracy between the Campaign and the Russian government, and there was no 'quid pro quo' or 'deal' between them," the lawsuit argues. "Moreover, extensive information, including stories in The Times published before the Defamatory Article, established that, at most, there had been isolated contacts between individual Russians and some persons associated with the Campaign, which did not result in any 'deal' or 'quid pro quo.'"

It is important to note that the Trump campaign, not President Donald Trump himself, filed this lawsuit. The organization, not the president himself — in neither his personal nor his official capacity — is bringing this legal action against The Times.

The New York Times is currently facing another defamation lawsuit, albeit a far less high profile one. Immigration hawk and VDARE founder Peter Brimelow sued The Times for defamation after it echoed the Southern Poverty Law Center's claim that he is an "open white nationalist," in contrast to its own journalistic ethics.

SOURCE 

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Claims of Russian Election Meddling Are Still a Scam

If you can’t handle some memes or misleading ads, you probably shouldn’t be voting.

The fearmongering over Russian election “interference” might be the most destructive moral panic in American political life since the Red Scare. Then again, to be fair, those who prosecuted the post-war hunt for Communists had the decency to uncover a handful of infiltrators. We’ve yet to meet a single American who’s been brainwashed or had their vote snatched away by an SVR Twitterbot. Probably because no such person exists.

Nevertheless, millions of Americans believe that a handful of terrible memes — and I mean the most amateurish and puerile efforts imaginable — on social media were enough to overturn a presidential election in the most powerful nation on earth. Or, more likely, most pretend to believe it. As Donald Trump’s fortunes have turned somewhat in recent weeks, and socialist Bernie Sanders looks poised to take the Democratic Party nomination, the Russians are once again coming to snatch your vote.

There were lots of “wows” from journalists on Twitter last week when the New York Times reported that members of the House Intelligence Committee were warned by an aide to Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire that Russia would be meddling in the 2020 campaign in order to get President Trump reelected. When Trump found out, the Times reported, he was furious that briefers had given Adam Schiff ammunition for political attacks.

First off, this isn’t an absurd concern. In his effort to undermine the public’s confidence in the elections for partisan purposes, Schiff has shown an ugly and cynical propensity to exaggerate and lie about Russian attempted meddling. He’s done more harm in undercutting American trust in “democracy” than Putin.

He’s not the only one.

“Putin’s Puppet is at it again, taking Russian help for himself,” Hillary Clinton, still struggling to come to terms with her devastating loss, said Friday. “He knows he can’t win without it. And we can’t let it happen.”

“We are now in a full-blown national security crisis,” tweeted former CIA Director John Brennan, one of the leading culprits perpetrating the Russia fraud. “By trying to prevent the flow of intelligence to Congress, Trump is abetting a Russian covert operation to keep him in office for Moscow’s interests, not America’s.”

As if often the case in Trump era, the initial thinly sourced story and subsequent freakout was quickly tempered by additional reporting. CNN’s Jake Tapper, for instance, reported that there was no intelligence showing that Russians would interfere for Trump, only that they likely had a “preference” for Trump because he was “a dealmaker.”

Here is Bloomberg’s Eli Lake:

In fact, Schiff — who was present at the briefing in question — knows that there is no formal intelligence finding that Russia is meddling on behalf of Trump. Administration and House Republican sources tell me that the intelligence official who was briefing the committee went “off script” when asked about Russia’s preference for Trump in the presidential election. No other representatives from the intelligence community at the briefing backed up her assertion, these sources say, nor did the briefers provide specific intelligence, such as intercepted emails or conversations, to support the claim.

The Washington Post also reported on Friday that Sanders had been briefed by U.S. officials warning that Russia was trying to help his presidential campaign. Democratic Party operatives took to the Sunday shows to blame Russia for supporting Sanders — all in an effort to get Trump reelected. Never mind that Bernie could easily have won the nomination in 2016. Never mind that Sanders has built an impressive national movement over the years. Never mind that the champions of the Democratic Party establishment are astonishingly weak. Never mind the party’s base has been dramatically moving Left for years. It’s gotta be Putin!

The Washington Post piece is thin on specifics, which should lead us to believe the story is a politically motivated leak meant to slow Sanders’s momentum. (Then again, Bernie was implying that the Russians were responsible for the toxic campaign behavior of his Bro-sheviks, so maybe he deserves it.)

There are few people who detest the candidacy and philosophy of Sanders more than I, yet I’m positive that the KGB can’t give him the Democratic Party nomination any more than they can install Donald Trump in the White House. Only voters can.

It’s likely that Russia, as it did in 2016, will engage in amateurish efforts to foment divisions among some American — as if we needed any help. If they actually “hack” an election — a word incessantly, and erroneously, used by journalists at the height of the Russia scare in 2017 — we’ll know.

But the Russian hysteria plays into a long-standing liberal conviction that feeble-minded conservatives vote against their own interests only because they’ve been hoodwinked. It might be the doing of a foreign power. It might be the plutocrats. It might be “special interests.” It might even be domestic tricksters, like the ones in the much-discussed recent McKay Coppins piece in The Atlantic, “The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President” — a piece that offers over 8,000 chilling words describing traditional political operations as something dark, undemocratic, and new. Be prepared for a flood of similar pieces. Democrats never lose elections. Elections are only stolen from them. Nothing but Trump stepping down and admitting he’s a Putin asset will stop Democrats from questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Of course, if you can’t handle some memes or misleading ads, you probably shouldn’t be voting, anyway. You’re clearly not prepared for the civic responsibilities that come with an open debate, which is often messy and ugly, rather than hermetically sealed in a media-approved bubble.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

MARKET STATE OF HEALTH: Coronavirus fears continue to spook markets; CDC warns of "inevitable" spread in the U.S. (The Washington Post)

"TAKING THE NECESSARY STEPS": San Francisco declares state of emergency over coronavirus (Fox News)

ABANDONING THE PARTY OF SOCIALISM: Eight Mississippi elected officials leave Democrats and independents, join GOP (The Daily Wire)

A WHOLE NEW WORLD: Disney's Bob Iger steps down as CEO, will remain executive chairman through 2021 (Fox News)

CULTURE OF DEATH: The Senate on Tuesday rejected two Republican abortion bills, one that would outlaw abortions after 20 weeks and another that would attempt to raise the standard of care for newborns born alive after botched abortions (National Review)

BLEXIT: Poll from black-led PAC: Blacks getting fed up with Democrat Party (The Daily Wire)

DAMAGE CONTROL: ABC News suspends reporter on eve of Project Veritas exposure (The Daily Caller)

POLICY: When it comes to raw power, few have more of it than central bankers (Mises Institute)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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Canada: A Dead Country Walking

Canada is presently in the throes of social and political disintegration. A left-leaning electorate has once again empowered a socialist government promoting all the lunatic ideological shibboleths of the day: global warming or “climate change,” radical feminism, indigenous sovereignty, expansionary government, environmental strangulation of energy production, and the presumed efficiency of totalitarian legislation. Industry and manufacturing are abandoning the country in droves and heading south.

Canada is now reaping the whirlwind. The Red-Green Axis consisting of social justice warriors, hereditary band chiefs, renewable energy cronies, cultural Marxists, and their political and media enablers have effectively shut down the country. The economy is at a standstill, legislatures and City Halls have been barricaded, blockades dot the landscape, roads and bridges have been sabotaged, trains have been derailed (three crude-by-rail spillages in the last two months), goods are rotting in warehouses, heating supplies remain undelivered, violent protests and demonstrations continue to wreak havoc—and the hapless Prime Minister, who spent a week swanning around Africa as the crisis unfolded, is clearly out of his depth and has no idea how to control the mayhem.

No surprise here. A wock pupper politico in thrall to the Marxist project and corporate financial interests, Justin Trudeau is generally baffed out when it comes to any serious or demanding concerns involving the welfare of the people and the economic vitality of the nation. Little is to be expected of him in the current emergency apart from boilerplate clichés and vague exhalations of roseate sentiment.

Still, Trudeau may have been right about one thing when he told The New York Times that Canada had no core identity—although this is not what a Prime Minister should say in public. Canada was always two “nations,” based on two founding peoples, the French and the English, which novelist Hugh MacLennan famously described as “two solitudes” in his book of that title. But it may be closer to the truth to portray Canada as an imaginary nation which comprises three territories and ten provinces, two of which, Quebec and Newfoundland, cherish a near-majoritarian conception of themselves as independent countries in their own right. Newfoundland narrowly joined Confederation only in 1949 and Quebec held two successive sovereignty referenda that came a hair’s breadth from breaking up the country.

The latest entry in the exit sweepstakes is oil-rich but hard-done-by Alberta, a province which suffered under the National Energy Program introduced in 1980 by the current PM’s father Pierre Trudeau, and is currently struggling under a concerted left-wing campaign, sponsored by Green-progressivist foundations (American consortiums masking via proxies as Canadian coalitions), clueless Nobel laureates at their virtue-signaling best, and a Liberal government ideologically aligned with the NDP (New Democratic Party) and the Greens, to prevent the development of its vast oil reserves. Alberta has always resented the indifference to and domination of the Canadian West by the so-called Laurentian Elite comprising “the political, academic, cultural, media and business elites” of central Canada. There is now a Wexit movement gathering momentum.

It might just as plausibly be argued that Canada is composed of a veritable congeries of competing, self-identified mini-nations—English, French, Islamic, Chinese, Sikh, native tribes with multiple patrimonies and unpronounceable names, and sundry political constituencies affiliated with the global left. Contributing factors like indiscriminate immigration from dysfunctional countries, metastasizing socialist doctrine verging on nascent totalitarianism, a state-funded national broadcaster and a deeply compromised print media subsidized by the Liberal government added to the destabilizing brew. Meanwhile, to quote lawyer and former philosophy professor Grant Brown, “the education system invites Extinction Rebellion kooks into the classroom to terrify the children” (personal communication). An army of little Gretas will carry the country-killing revolution even further.

George Grant’s 1965 Lament for a Nation argued that Canada had ceased to be a nation, having surrendered its identity to the continental thrust of American dynamism and to the historical progress of the “universalist and homogeneous state [as] the pinnacle of political striving.” He goes on to argue that the “impossibility of conservatism in our era is the impossibility of Canada,” especially as the country falls ever more under the sway of “the Canadian establishment and its political instrument, the Liberals.” The book has been extremely controversial and may appear a little dated, shrouded in the mists of nostalgia for “the narrow provincialism and our backwoods culture”—although, no doubt tongue in cheek, suggesting that “Perhaps we should rejoice in the disappearance of Canada.” Lamenting or rejoicing, we are looking at a fait accompli.

It is often noted that America is a nation evenly divided between progressivist and conservative populations, a civil dilemma not easily resolved. But Canada is divided approximately 65-35 by these constituencies, and if one considers that the federal Conservative Party in its present manifestation can fairly be described as Liberal Lite, the breakdown is more like 95-5. This means there is no chance of reconciliation between our political disparities, such as they are, and Canada is doomed to plummet down the esker of every failed socialist experiment that preceded it and, indeed, that is presently on display in various foundering nations around the globe—North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and counting.

Trudeau père invoked the War Measures Act in 1970 to quell the Quebec separatist movement, the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), after a series of bombings and murders. It is obvious that the son has neither the political smarts nor the strength of character to act decisively against those who are busy reducing an already patchwork country into a heap of shards and rubble.

And there we find the proof that, whatever Canada may once have been and whatever the talking heads may incessantly proclaim, Canada is no longer a viable political construct. It is a dead country walking.

SOURCE 

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Britain's NHS Tribalizes Healthcare

A warning: It's adding protections to make sure the "wrong" ideas aren't communicated by patients

The leading presidential contenders in the Democrat Party all favor eliminating private healthcare insurance by different means, and the machinations they use to get there are about what Democrats are always about: The acquisition and maintenance of power by any means necessary. Equally contemptible? Democrats have long made it clear that anyone who disagrees with any part of their agenda is unworthy of consideration. Those wondering what such a combination would yield in terms of healthcare need wonder no more: Beginning in April, Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) will be able to refuse nonemergency care for “sexist” and “racist” patients.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who believes “no act of violence or abuse is minor,” wrote to all NHS staffers, “Being assaulted or abused is not part of the job. Far too often I hear stories that the people you are trying to help lash out. I’ve seen it for myself in A&Es, on night shifts, and on ambulances.”

To implement his new program, Hancock has reached a joint agreement with police and the Crown Prosecution Service. It will grant the police greater powers to investigate and prosecute cases where NHS staffers are presumably victims of a crime. “All assault and hate crimes against NHS staff must be investigated with care, compassion, diligence and commitment,” he declared.

No sane person would argue that healthcare providers must endure people who threaten them with violence or are actually physically abusive. In fact, staff can currently refuse to treat such people. Yet the additional measures are pure pablum aimed at assuaging progressive sensibilities. As Sky News puts it, the new protections will “extend to any harassment, bullying or discrimination, including homophobic, sexist or racist remarks.”

Defined by whom? Some hypersensitive snowflake indoctrinated to believe “white privilege,” gender “fluidity,” “social justice,” or any other manifestation of the “woke agenda” should be part of the criteria for determining who gets treated and who doesn’t?

Apparently so. While a 2019 survey of 569,000 NHS employees revealed that 15% have experienced physical assault, rising to 34% among ambulance staffers, more than one in four stated they had experienced harassment, bullying, or abuse over the past year. “Racism was the most common form of discrimination, but 2019 also saw the highest levels of reported sexism and intolerance of religion and sexuality,” the Daily Mail reports.

“All colleagues in the NHS deserve to work in a safe, caring and compassionate environment,” Hancock insists. “You deserve a working environment that supports your physical and mental health, and helps you be the very best you can be.”

Again, with a large exception for safety, this is utter nonsense. There is no perfect world where patients, already injured, impaired, and/or stressed enough to seek care, will comport themselves solely in a manner that uplifts the entire consumer-provider relationship and helps the provider to be “the very best you can be.”

As for a compassionate and caring environment, who’s kidding whom? In 2008, British medical ethics expert Baroness Warnock asserted that people suffering from dementia are a burden on the NHS and should be allowed to opt for euthanasia, even if they are not in pain.

Four years later, Professor Patrick Pullicino, a consultant neurologist for East Kent Hospitals and professor of clinical neurosciences at the University of Kent, asserted that the “Liverpool Care Pathway,” which provided palliative care for terminally ill patients, was killing off 130,00 people per year, because they were difficult to manage — or to free up beds for other patients.

In 2017, the NHS decided to single out obese people and smokers. Those with a body mass index over 40 were denied nonemergency surgery unless they lost weight. Smokers had to quit for at least eight weeks and then had to be tested to detect the levels of carbon monoxide in their blood to make sure. Also in 2017, the NHS took away the parental rights of Chris Gard and Connie Yates so their gravely ill son, Charlie, could “die with dignity” rather than receive experimental treatment in America.

Thus, while the latest agreement precipitated by Hancock refers to the possibility that NHS staffers may be abused by people in crisis or with neurological conditions who will ostensibly be handled appropriately, the track record of antipathy toward “certain” types of patients — as in those insufficiently attuned to progressive sensibilities — is impossible to ignore.

The group most likely to offend? “Elderly people make up most of the patients in any health care system,” explains columnist Andrea Widburg. “They are also the people least likely to be ‘woke.’ Without malice, they may use old-fashioned phrases that are now considered offensive when referring to women, homosexuality, or race. They probably don’t even have a vocabulary for ‘non-binary’ people.”

Even more to the point, conditions like early onset dementia and Alzheimer’s engender serious changes in behavior, often manifested as hostility. How will those patients be “appropriately handled”? Columnist Paul Joseph Watson illuminates the arc from the present to a highly dystopian future — one that isn’t solely about lack of treatment for the elderly. “First it was deplatforming people from social media websites, then it was deplatforming people from bank accounts and mortgages.” he writes. “Now it’s deplatforming people from hospital treatment. Literally eliminating people’s right to basic health care because of their political or social opinions.”

Right now, when Americans go to a hospital for nonemergency care, they are usually asked to present proof of insurance and/or another from of identification, such as a driver’s license. Will those politicians who champion a system similar or identical to the NHS ultimately require patients to submit access to their social-media accounts as well?

As columnist Laura Hollis explains, “The new NHS rule is intended to protect health care workers from insults and slurs. But it is easy to see how something similar in the United States could be twisted for political advantage, particularly given the widespread tendency in some quarters to treat every political, policy or cultural disagreement as an expression of hate: racism, sexism, homophobia or other bigotry.”

That would be progressive quarters where “microaggressions,” “triggering,” and “implicit bias” are seen as reasonable ways to determine “improper” behavior.

Yet even Hollis somewhat misses the point. In certain professions, putting up with annoying or tough customers is part of the job, and the notion that anyone could err to the side of hypersensitivity with regard to refusing someone healthcare is absurd. Moreover, unlike Britain, we have a First Amendment that allows for free speech, even if — or especially if — it is offensive.

In reality, the NHS is embracing an exclusionary political agenda sold as compassion. That’s not healthcare. It’s tribalism.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

GLOBAL RESPECT: President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi got a raucous welcome when they held a rally at the world's largest cricket stadium (Daily Mail)

PRO-LIFE WIN: Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rules Trump admin stripping funding from abortion clinics is constitutional (The Daily Caller)

PIVOTAL DECISION: Supreme Court to hear case on gay "rights" and foster care (The New York Times)

DOUBLING DOWN: Sanders garrisons Castro comments by defending communist China (The Daily Caller)

JEWISH IN NAME ONLY: AIPAC blasts Sanders after 2020 frontrunner says he'll skip conference (Fox News)

HERE WE GO AGAIN: U.S. Women's National Soccer Team files $66 million "gender discrimination" lawsuit against U.S. Soccer Federation (MRCTV)

POLICY: Will the U.S. and India play the long game on trade? (Hudson Institute)

POLICY: Weinstein and the complicated legacy of #MeToo (The Federalist)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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Study Insists Journalists Aren't Swayed by Leftist Bias

A recent research paper published by the University of Virginia dubiously concludes, “There is No Liberal Media Bias in the News Political Journalists Choose to Cover.” While the researchers did find that the vast majority of mainstream journalists lean hard to the left — to the left of even socialist Bernie Sanders — they still maintained that this reality doesn’t skew their reporting.

Of course, if this were genuinely the case, the political leanings of mainstream-media journalists would be a mystery to us — at least insofar as their reporting is concerned.

“The funny thing about this study is that it purports to show that even though journalists are overwhelmingly liberal, their political bias doesn’t affect the stories they choose to cover or not cover,” observes Power Line’s John Hinderaker. “Which is why the press paid a hundred times as much attention to the biggest political scandal in US history, the coordinated effort by the CIA, the FBI and the Department of Justice to swing the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton, or, failing that, to disable the Trump presidency, as to the entirely fabricated, implausible and politically paid-for fantasy that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians. Right?”

The fact of the matter is, an individual’s political bias is both inescapable and influential — and journalists aren’t somehow magically exempt from human nature. This bias can only be mitigated if it is recognized, acknowledged, and balanced with competing ideological perspectives. If mainstream-media journalists continue to maintain the fiction that their reporting is impervious to their personal bias, they’ll continue to earn the enmity and deep distrust of the American people. And rightly so.

SOURCE 

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Time to End the Tyranny of District Court Judges’ Nationwide Injunctions

"The real problem here is the increasingly common practice of trial courts ordering relief that transcends the concurring cases before them," wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch, pictured in 2017, recently. "Whether framed as injunctions of 'nationwide,' 'universal,' or 'cosmic' scope, these orders share the same basic flaw—they direct how the defendant must act toward persons who are not parties to the case."

Question: What is the difference between God and a federal judge?

Answer: God knows that He isn’t a federal judge.

On Feb. 6, U.S. District Judge Loretta Biggs of North Carolina issued an injunction barring the Trump administration from implementing a new policy that changes how the government calculates the duration of an illegal immigrant’s unlawful presence in the country.

Although an injunction is the correct legal tool to stop someone from doing something, Biggs had a choice in how broad that injunction should be.

She could use an injunction that prevented the government from using the new calculation on the plaintiffs who sued, or she could use a so-called nationwide injunction that barred the government from using the new calculation against anyone, anywhere.

Biggs chose to issue a nationwide injunction. Actually, that’s a misnomer. These are better called “universal” or even “absent-party” injunctions, because they aren’t limited either by their geographic scope or the parties they cover.

Instead, they stop the government from enforcing a law or policy against anyone, anywhere.

These universal injunctions are controversial. U.S. Attorney General William Barr denounced them in a speech last May. Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen did so in a speech on Feb. 12, and Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have criticized them as well.

So, what exactly are these strange things, and are they legal?

As always, it’s wise to start our analysis with the Constitution. The Constitution defines the judicial branch’s role in our system of government. Judges don’t pass laws or set broad policies, because that’s the job of the other branches.

Instead, according to Article III, judges decide “Cases” and “Controversies,” which are actual legal disputes between specific parties. Whether civil suits between private parties or criminal cases involving the government, these disputes are brought by the parties, and judges settle them for the parties.

It makes sense, therefore, that when a judge issues an injunction in the process of deciding a particular case, that injunction will not cover more than is necessary.

Historically, when a plaintiff successfully challenged a law as unconstitutional, for example, the judge would most often block the government from enforcing the law against the plaintiff, rather than completely wipe that law from the books.

But the judiciary has grown more powerful than America’s Founders intended and, since the 1960s, this has included issuing universal injunctions.

This type of injunction has become increasingly common over the past few decades as political activists try to enlist judges to make the kind of widespread policy changes that the legislative or executive branches are designed to handle.

Like a gavel thrown into a well-oiled machine, these universal injunctions cause a host of problems for our constitutional government—and for the judiciary itself.

First, they empower judges to exercise power over the entire government, rather than just the parties who brought a case before them.

Second, universal injunctions give individual district judges far more power than they ought to have. Even if 1,000 judges have upheld a law, or limited their injunctions only to the parties in specific cases, one granting a universal injunction means that the law cannot be enforced anywhere.

Third, they undermine public confidence in the judiciary by giving activists judges near limitless power to undo the laws and policies of the democratically accountable branches of government.

One infamous activist judge, the now-deceased Stephen Reinhardt, once joked of his lawless decisions that “they [the Supreme Court] can’t catch them all.”

Finally, universal injunctions lead to what Gorsuch calls “rushed, high-stakes, low-information decisions.” Oftentimes, judges issue universal injunctions at the beginning of a case, even before resolving legal and factual issues.

When that happens, the Justice Department often appeals on an emergency basis. That’s not good, because it doesn’t give the higher courts, including the Supreme Court, the time they need to make sure they get the answer right. 

The Supreme Court, in particular, prefers to weigh in on a legal issue only after many lower courts, lawyers, and legal scholars have had time to discuss it. That debate sharpens the arguments and refines the issues. Emergency appeals, however, eliminate that.

The criticism of universal injunctions has reached a boiling point, and now it’s likely that the Supreme Court will step in. On Jan. 17, the Supreme Court accepted the case of Trump v. Pennsylvania.

One of the questions presented there is whether the court of appeals erred when it affirmed a universal injunction striking down regulations that would have allowed employers with sincere religious or moral objections to opt out of providing contraceptive coverage in employers’ insurance plans.

The high court should take this opportunity to end the practice of issuing universal injunctions. It should remind the lower courts that their power is limited to resolving cases and controversies, and that they are not gods sitting in judgment over the rest of the government

SOURCE 

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Bernie's Wrong: We Are Better Off Today Than We Were 45 Years Ago
 
A record-high number of Americans — 90% — say they are satisfied with their personal lives, according to Gallup. And 74% are optimistic that they will continue being financially satisfied moving forward. Needless to say, the United States will never be a utopia, but for the vast majority of its citizens, most things are going in the right direction.

During the Democratic presidential debate last night, Bernie Sanders, lamenting how a once-prosperous society had been hollowed out by capitalism, claimed that we are no better off today than we were many years ago. It’s a shame that not a single debate moderator ever challenges this farcical assertion. In Sanders’ telling, “people … after 45 years of work are not making a nickel more than they did 45 years ago.”

For those who weren’t alive then, the 1970s were largely a crime-ridden decade of stagnant economics, city bankruptcies, crushing energy prices, sky-high interest rates, institutional rot, garbage and retirement-destroying inflation. Though it was a far better place than the Communist hot spots Sanders praised during those years, it certainly was not ideal.

And a big part of the post-‘70s economic boom we’re still experiencing today — the one that certain progressive and some statist right-wingers like to disparage — was propelled by policies that freed Americans from overbearing technocratic oversight, intrusive regulations and stifling taxes that undermined growth.

The alleged “wage stagnation” to which Sanders and others are constantly referring is a myth. For one thing, “wage stagnation” fails to take into account the health care benefits, pensions, vacations, family leave and other perks now embedded in job packages — somewhere around 30% of an employee’s overall benefits. Once those benefits are added, Americans probably have seen about a 45% wage increase since 1964. More important, the amount of time we work to buy things we need is less. What we buy does more, and it’s of higher quality. Does anyone believe that a dollar spent on medical care in 1975 equals a dollar spent today?

Partly because of a worldwide retreat from collectivism, extreme poverty has dramatically decreased. Massive new markets have opened to us. Despite the perception of many, medium household incomes are at an all-time high. The middle class is growing — especially the upper-middle class. In the past 50 years, spending on food and clothing as a share of family income has fallen from 42% to 17%. Your house is probably more expensive than the average house was in 1975, but it’s also more comfortable and safer.

The year Sanders graduated from college, less than 6% of his fellow Americans — the majority of them wealthy, very few of them minorities or women — were enrolled in higher education. In 1975, only around 11% were enrolled in college. According to the Federal Reserve study, millennials are the most educated generation, with 65% of them possessing at least an associate’s degree.

Better education, soaring productivity and technological advances allow an increasing number of Americans to pick vocations that are safer, less monotonous and more rewarding.

In 1970, around 14,000 workers were killed on the job in the United States. That’s somewhere around 10,000 more deaths yearly than the number of those who perished in the entire Iraq War. Although the workforce had more than doubled since then, the number of occupational deaths in the United States has dropped to around 5,100.

There’s a decent chance that Sanders’ heart attack would have killed a 78-year-old man in 1975. If not, it would have required dangerous surgery. Despite a small dip recently, life expectancy has skyrocketed in the United States over the past 45 years — adding more than six years since 1975. The cancer casualty rate has fallen more than 27% in the past 25 years — which adds up to more than 2 million deaths averted during that time. We’ve been able to mitigate the damage of so many diseases and ailments over the past 45 years — allowing millions to lead longer, more active and less painful lives — that it would take a book to lay out the miraculous number of advances properly.

Most of these developments, not incidentally, were brought to us by profit-driven companies.

In 1975, the child mortality rate was 18.8 per 1,000. In 2019, it was 5.7. Fatalities due to weather events have plunged. Deaths due to air pollution — surely near its smoggy height in 1975 — have fallen, as well. We have cleaner water and cleaner streets.

In 1975, Sanders’ hometown of New York City saw 1,645 murders and rampant criminality. In 2017, there were 286 homicides in NYC. Vehicular fatalities per 100 million in 1975 were at 3.35; now they’re near a historic low of 1.13.

Also, you have a supercomputer in your pocket that offers you instant access to all of human knowledge.

Yes, some Americans still suffer, and some of our goods and services are more expensive than they once were (usually due to market intervention). But we are, by nearly every quantifiable measure, collectively better off today than ever before. And what sufferings millennials do experience today often are a result of their making different choices than their parents did. Bernie should understand this better than most. It’s not in every country that a professional revolutionary can afford to buy a dacha on Lake Champlain.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

MEANWHILE... Shelby Pierson "misled" lawmakers about Russia helping Trump win reelection (Townhall)

STATE VISIT: President Donald Trump tours Taj Mahal, draws large crowds in India (CNN)

DAMAGE CONTROL: Michael Bloomberg agrees to release three women from nondisclosure agreements his firm signed over comments he made (The Hill)

MORE FAUXCAHONTAS DOUBLE STANDARDS: In about-face, Elizabeth Warren welcomes super PAC help she once shunned (The Washington Free Beacon)

SNUBBING THE RULE OF LAW: Greyhound bans immigration checks on buses (Hot Air)

POLICY: Why Chinese communism could be the final casualty of the coronavirus (Foundation for Economic Education)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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Democrats And Race: Seems Like Old Times

Wayne Allyn Root

On January 14, 1963, Alabama’s Democratic Governor George Wallace delivered his inaugural address that included the infamous line, “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” As unimaginable as it seems to us now, that was the Democratic Party’s position just 57 years ago. While modern Democrats denounce the bluntness of Wallace’s speech, the sentiment behind it remains the key to their power.

I’m accusing Democrats of being white supremacists, as they were then, but they are still the party of segregation. Gone are the politicians standing in the doorway of a college, blocking entry to minority students, as Wallace did, now they stand there in the name of “diversity,” still separating people by their differences.

If you watched any of the Democratic primary debates (which ratings for most of them suggest you haven’t), you’ve seen all the candidates, at one point or another, declare their plans to “help” people based on immutable characteristics. In other words, to treat people differently based on things about them over which they have no control.

This is the cornerstone of bigotry – that people are different and should be treated differently because of their skin tone, sexuality, etc. Democrats a generation ago found their path to power through preaching the superiority of one group over another. Whether they all believed it or not is a question for history to answer, it was simply a tactic that worked.

When that position became electorally untenable, the party flipped. Or so it seemed.

Segregation was a powerful motivator for voters in the South. Democrats, in the name of power, merged their desire for it with the path of least resistance for obtaining it. It wasn’t a difficult move, the Democratic Party was the party of slavery; when Republicans banished that to the dustbin of history, they created segregation and Jim Crow Laws to keep its sentiments in place. When that fell out of favor, they adapted to what they are today.

Each of these tactics have the same result – dividing people to make it easier to manipulate them.

After the legal destruction of Democrats’ segregation, the United States was on the path to becoming a “melting pot,” where individuals were treated as such; where Americans were Americans, regardless of ancestry. This tended not to favor Democrats.

The popular narrative of the left is this idea that all the Southern racists suddenly, after Civil Rights legislation, switched to the Republican Party. That’s not true. Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” is credited with this conversion. But the South didn’t switch to GOP control until 1994, and only 2 elected Congressional Democrats actually switched parties in the years following the Civil Rights Act. Jimmy Carter won the South, as did Bill Clinton.

It took Democrats some time to reconstitute itself after the Republican Revolution in 1994, after years adrift following the collapse of their segregation tactic, but now they have. And if it seems like old times, that’s because it is. It’s segregation again.

Separate dorms for students based on skin color, sexuality, or national origin. Separate graduation ceremonies, separate admission and hiring standards, etc. “Tolerant” leftists promise and implement targeted government spending and programs based on those same characteristics. The phrase “especially (X group) of color” is uttered with regularity on the campaign trail. We’re being taken from a melting pot to a series of chafing dishes.

People separated – trained to identify with people they don’t know because they look like them – are easier to manipulate. The word “community” has been redefined to apply to immutable characteristics and not geography. Your neighborhood, all manner of people around us, were our community; now the left would have you care more about what happens to someone on the other side of the country because they happen to share your ethnic heritage, than what happens to someone living across the street who doesn’t.

The target of this new “tolerance” is young people; millennials. It’s easier to instill in people the fear and hatred necessary for this tactic to work than it is to change the minds of people who instinctively know it’s garbage. That’s why the protests, the chants, the screaming of victimhood emanate from there. It’s also why fake hate crimes do too.

I wrote in my book about the phenomenon of fake hate crimes and why they are so prevalent. The kids reporting them have been inundated with the idea of this grand conspiracy; an omnipresent hidden hand working to oppress them. They set out to destroy it, but can’t find it because it doesn’t exist. But they’ve been told by people in positions of trust that it does exist. Rather than question what they’ve been told, they create it so they can expose and fight it. Buying a can of spray paint and writing slurs on walls is much easier than accepting you’ve been lied to.

But they have been lied to. America is not a “fundamentally” insert your favorite “ist” or “phobic” word here country. When a college student stands up to announce there are too many white people in the new multicultural student center and it’s making her feel uncomfortable, this is the fruit of that poison tree . That it wasn’t roundly condemned for the racism it was is fertilizer.

Democrats need people divided, groups of people are easier to manipulate than large numbers of individuals. The alternative would be trying to win people over with failed policies that empower elites at the expense of individuals, and that’s still a tougher sell.

In pursuit of power, Democrats have always been willing to do anything. Gone is the dream of Martin Luther King that his children would be judged not on the color of their skin, but the content of their character; replaced with “anything for a vote.”

Democrats have gone from separating people by irrelevant characteristics in the name of hatred to separating people by irrelevant characteristics in the name of tolerance. The tactics have changed, the objective never has. It was racist in the past, and it’s racist now.

SOURCE   

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Obama didn’t build that. Trump will be judged by the present state of the economy in 2020

“Eleven years ago today, near the bottom of the worst recession in generations, I signed the Recovery Act, paving the way for more than a decade of economic growth and the longest streak of job creation in American history.”

That was former President Barack Obama in a Feb. 17 tweet touting and crediting his administration’s policies with enabling the recovery of the U.S. economy from the financial crisis and Great Recession more than a decade ago.

President Donald Trump responded the same day, tweeting, “Did you hear the latest con job? President Obama is now trying to take credit for the Economic Boom taking place under the Trump Administration. He had the WEAKEST recovery since the Great Depression, despite Zero Fed Rate & MASSIVE quantitative easing.”

This naturally led to a news cycle debating whether President Trump could take credit for any of the economic successes being seen right now—sustained growth, the lowest unemployment in 50 years, rising wages, etc.

But why can Obama take credit for his first few years in office but not Trump?

Here’s the truth.

Incumbents are always judged by the present state of the economy. It’s how the American people hold politicians accountable. Just ask Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush if they think the economy had any bearing on their political fortunes. Both had recessions occur during their first terms in office, which turned out to be their last. No amount of blaming their predecessors would have made a difference.

If the economy were to have entered a recession during President Trump’s watch — recall the headlines from last summer when short term interest rates briefly inverted with long term interest rates — you can bet that President Trump would have been blamed for it.

It stands to reason then that with the economy doing so well, and Americans becoming wealthier, that Trump will undoubtedly receive the lion’s share of the credit when the American people go to vote in November. Voters will likely point to the President’s policies on tax cuts, deregulation and America first trade with new fair and reciprocal trade deals with Mexico, Canada, China, South Korea and Japan as playing a key role.

Obama didn’t build that.

At this point in 2012, the U.S. economy had not produced a single job during the former President Barack Obama’s administration from when he took office in Jan. 2009. It was still down 568,000 jobs, and yet Obama would go on to win the 2012 election.

Was it because Americans blamed Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, for the state of the economy and the 8 million jobs that had been lost in the Great Recession?

Possibly, but the fact is, as tepid as the recovery following the Great Recession were, by 2012, the charts were pointed in the right direction. From the low of 138 million Americans employed in Dec. 2009, by Jan. 2012, it was up to 141.5 million Americans with jobs — a jump of 3.5 million.

If the numbers had kept on sinking throughout Obama’s first term, it might have easily only been a one-term proposition. But things were getting better, albeit slowly, and Obama was reelected fairly easily.

Comparatively, since Jan. 2017 when President Trump took office, the economy has produced 6.5 million jobs in the household survey compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and unemployment remains at a 50-year low of 3.5 percent.

The biggest gains have been made by working age adults, [LNS11300060]with labor participation for prime working age 25-54-year-olds jumping from 81.5 percent when Trump took office to 83.1 percent today, representing an additional 2 million prime working age Americans in the economy than would have been had participation remained the same. That same participation rate for 25-to-54-year-olds had dropped every single year during the Obama administration until it finally bottomed at 80.7 percent in 2015. There was some recovery in 2016, and then most of the gains occurred starting in 2017 to present.

But somehow, like contortionists, the American people are supposed to discount the gains made during the early Trump years because those were really Obama’s accomplishment, even as Obama takes credit — and took credit on the campaign trail in 2012 — for the jobs created since the Dec. 2009 low, attributing it to the legislation he signed into law.

The fact is the American people will be judging President Trump on the present state of the economy when they go to the polls in November, not former President Obama.

The only question that matters is as Ronald Reagan once put it: Are you better off than you were four years ago?

And Trump has a good story to tell in 2020 about the economy. Is that really surprising to anyone who follows politics? When things are bad, the incumbents get blamed. When they’re good, they get credit.

Which is exactly what’s happening now. The latest Real Clear Politics average of recent polls has President Trump’s job approval on the economy above 55 percent. And that’s even before all of the early primaries for the Democratic nomination have even been completed. That leaves Trump in commanding position in the presidential race as the blue-collar economic boom taking place continues. Stay tuned.

SOURCE   

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IN BRIEF

COUNTERATTACK: President Donald Trump slams Michael Bloomberg at Phoenix rally, pushing MAGA message during Democrat debate (Fox News)

ECONOMIST/YOUGOV SURVEY: Trump takes 2020 lead, 52%-48%; all Democrats "probably lose" (Washington Examiner)

REMINDER: Denmark tells Bernie Sanders it's had enough of his "socialist" slurs (Investor's Business Daily)

PURGE CONTINUES: John Rood, top Defense Department official who contradicted Trump on Ukraine, latest to be ousted after impeachment saga (The New York Times)

DEFAMATION: A group of Covington Catholic High School students are suing nine media personalities over tweets and commentary about the incident at the Lincoln Memorial last year (Cincinnati Enquirer)

SCOTUS BOUND? A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday it was unconstitutional to force Florida felons to first pay off their financial obligations before registering to vote, siding against state Republican lawmakers who imposed the restriction last year (Tampa Bay Times)

SOME 200 VICTIMS: Pennsylvania diocese, facing more abuse claims, files for bankruptcy (The New York Times)

POLICY: Reconciliation with Turkey should only come with a price (Washington Examiner)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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ICE Throws Down the Gauntlet, Arresting Two Illegal Aliens in a California Courthouse

ICE agents arrested two illegal aliens in a courthouse in Northern California, defying a state law that says they needed a warrant from a judge to do so.

ICE flouted a new state law that requires the warrant before arresting an illegal on courthouse grounds. After the predictable outcry from courthouse officials and others, ICE calmly gave their rationale.

Los Angeles Times:

ICE said in a statement that California’s law doesn’t supersede federal law and “will not govern the conduct of federal officers acting pursuant to duly enacted laws passed by Congress that provide the authority to make administrative arrests of removable aliens inside the United States.”

“Our officers will not have their hands tied by sanctuary rules when enforcing immigration laws to remove criminal aliens from our communities,” David Jennings, ICE’s field office director in San Francisco, said in the statement.

In other words, ICE is telling critics to go climb a tree.

ICE's actions follow the deployment of Customs and Border Patrol agents to sanctuary cities and states. The state government of California bitterly criticized that move, but find themselves unable to do anything to prevent it. The Department of Homeland Security, the agency under which ICE and CBP operate, can send its personnel anywhere they see fit to send them.

Critics of the arrests dragged out the usual excuse: illegals will now hesitate before helping the police or participating in the legal system.

Sonoma County Dist. Atty. Jill Ravitch, Public Defender Kathleen Pozzi and San Francisco Dist. Atty. Chesa Boudin condemned the arrests for undermining public safety. Sonoma County Counsel Bruce Goldstein called ICE’s actions lawless because the agents had no warrants.

“It’s now going to put total fear in the community,” Pozzi said in an interview with the Press Democrat. “People aren’t going to come to court. Victims will refuse to show up. Witnesses will refuse to show up … cases will have to get dismissed.”

ICE said both men had been arrested by immigration officers numerous times from 2004 to 2010 and returned to Mexico several times.

The illegals don't respect the judicial system anyway. If they did, they wouldn't be illegal in the first place.

There is a real constitutional issue involved here. The Supremacy Clause (Article VI) makes state law that conflicts with federal law inoperative. There are no strictures ever passed by Congress on where immigration arrests can be made. And while the feds usually give way as a courtesy to states, they are under absolutely no obligation to do so in this case.

California is likely to find a friendly judge who will slap an injunction on ICE until the courts resolve the issue. But unless the United States Congress acts to restrict ICE from arresting illegals in a specific place, like a courthouse, the state is bound to lose.

SOURCE 

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Can Liberals Be Reached in 2020?

A story of convincing a woman that the Democrat Party doesn't do what she believes in.

Willie Richardson   

We have all been in that situation at church, work, a community event, the barber shop, a doctor’s office, or sitting at the table at Thanksgiving dinner. That moment when awkward silence looms large and the room seems like the air has been sucked dry. That moment when someone says something negative about a political candidate/party you support, not knowing they are targeting you.

Last week, I encountered two similar situations. Assuming I was the typical “black Democrat,” one woman spoke negatively about President Donald Trump while performing my routine physical, and the other was offended by a meme that depicted liberals as being, um, liberals. The latter woman was a retired high-school teacher who came up to me after I spoke at a local high school for Black History Month about Frederick Douglass. She wanted to understand the difference between “liberals and conservatives.” I obliged, smiled, and said, “Let’s talk.”

She immediately said, “Look at this! I’m offended by this. That’s not me!” As I read over the meme, it was a depiction of general conservative versus liberal ideology. I had to disappoint her because the meme was a rather accurate generalization. I said with a smile, “Well, um, this is actually pretty accurate if you ask me.” She was flabbergasted.

The meme read:

If you ever wondered what side of the fence you sit on, this is a great test!

If a conservative doesn’t like guns, he doesn’t buy one. If a liberal doesn’t like guns, he wants all guns outlawed.

If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn’t eat meat. If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone.

If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation. A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him.

If a conservative doesn’t like a talk-show host, he switches channels. Liberals demand that those they don’t like be shut down.

If a conservative is a nonbeliever, he doesn’t go to church. A liberal nonbeliever wants any mention of God and Jesus silenced.

If a conservative decides he needs healthcare, he shops for it or chooses a job that provides it. A liberal demands that the rest of us pay for his.

If a conservative reads this, he’ll forward it so his friends can have a good laugh. A liberal will delete it because he’s “offended.”

Just from knowing this woman, I would never figure she was a liberal. She believes in personal responsibility, limited government, the right to life, and fiscal accountability. “Growing up, we were poor,” she shared. “My mom received assistance and that’s why I vote Democrat. I believe they are for the poor.”

I understood her allegiance to the Democrat Party was a heartstring that had been pulled as a young daughter. Although assistance was helpful, she grew up believing in creating the life she wanted instead of waiting on the government to do it for her. I shared the values of the Democrat Party and she said, “I’m a Christian and don’t believe in this platform!” I looked at her and said, “But you vote for it.”

She became sober-minded and realized her decision to vote for liberal policies went against everything we both knew she stood against. “You’ve really helped me understand some things,” she told me. “I thought my conservative friends were just crazy, but when I think about it I believe the same things.”

I allowed her to draw her own conclusions. If you are ever cornered between a political wall and a hard place, remember these three easy steps to reaching liberals, especially if they are professing Christians:

Listen more than you talk. Liberals like to complain about almost everything. The president, the economy, schools, guns, and tolerance. Let them get it all out and even if you’re tempted, don’t say a word. Let the awkward silence happen a few times. When you keep quiet you actually gain leverage when your voice is heard.

Stay in control of your emotions. Don’t let your feelings affect your messaging. If you begin to attack or defend your position out the gate, you will ruin your chances of having meaningful dialogue. Grin and bear the erroneous emotional rant you hear. Smile and shake your head in affirmation as you listen. It doesn’t mean you agree, it means you’re listening with self control.

Intelligently speak your position. Wait until they say something you both know he/she doesn’t agree with — same-sex marriage, forcing children to attend failing schools, abortion, gun laws, big government, and the destruction of the traditional family.

When you speak, remind them of the facts about the economy. Remind them of the beauty of school choice or Opportunity Zones. Remind them of the points in the State of the Union Address.

You will see how they begin to agree with the facts and all you’ll end up doing is nodding your head in agreement. Tell them, “You certainly don’t sound like a Democrat based on what you believe in. Has anyone told you that before?” A close family member or friend has always said something to them about their liberal political leanings to no avail, until now!

There are levels to reaching a liberal. Do not count them all out because many of them vote based on feelings and not facts. Bring the facts to the conversation and leave it there.

If they trample on Trump, help them to decipher between political personalities versus political policies. This woman told me, “But Barack Obama was so smooth and polished. Trump just comes out with it all.” I told her being smooth allowed our former president to get away with policies that would not be accepted otherwise. She agreed and realized that it is not about the personality of the president but what he actually puts into policy.

This exchange of ideas was productive. I learned how to calmly approach those who have different political ideologies. I believe she learned what she actually believes doesn’t line up to what she votes for. Win-win situation!

SOURCE 

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Political Midgets

Slander, lies, and rumors are now daily staples of political campaigns nationwide.

When I first began to draft this article I was not thinking about Mike Bloomberg, but as my momma used to say, “If the shoe fits, wear it!” But more on little Mike later. In recent years, politics has taken a very critical turn. For the Left it has become all-out warfare! If they lose elections, it’s only because Republicans cheated. It can’t be because of flawed policies.

Slander, lies, and rumors are now daily staples of political campaigns. And it’s not just on the national level, but in local elections as well. Because there is no such thing as truth in advertising anymore, you have to really do your homework to find out who’s lying and who’s telling the truth.

The current campaign for the Democrat nomination has been something to behold, especially for a Baby Boomer like me. The entire field of candidates is proposing policies that will destroy our nation’s economy, civil rights, free speech, and Second Amendment rights. Do you think I’m being paranoid?

We have candidates that want to give free healthcare to illegal immigrants and some want to tear down the border wall, allowing unrestricted immigration. All want abortion right up to birth and several think it would be okay after the baby is born to kill it. Two candidates have publicly said there’s no room in the party for pro-life Democrats. Joe Biden has changed his position on so many things it’s hard to keep up with what he believes today — except he hates Trump!

Bernie Sanders, the communist sympathizer who never met a dictator he didn’t like, wants to undo everything that caused our economy to become a global powerhouse. He hates greedy millionaires — well, billionaires now that he is a multimillionaire himself. Elizabeth Warren is now a millionaire, too, but she doesn’t want you to be one.

Then, there’s the New Green Deal that will destroy our economy, though we’re told that we’ll all die in 12 years if we don’t do something NOW. No one can tell me why our country’s economy needs to be destroyed because the biggest polluters, China and India, are not going to destroy their economies. The Green New Deal won’t change the climate, but we have to take drastic measures now!

Their message: “Raise the minimum wage, even though it will mean cutting jobs. Raise everyone’s taxes and take healthcare away from more than 160 million workers and go to single-payer coverage. And the best part is, it will all be free if you vote for us.”

But suddenly, hope has arisen for us all! Mike Bloomberg has bought his way … I mean, he’s thrown his hat in the ring. We’re saved! An old white gazillionaire has decided to save the country from Donald Trump. The man has spent hundreds of millions to take our guns and, as mayor, told New Yorkers how much soda they could drink, made racially insensitive and misogynist remarks, and is an elitist who thinks anyone who works with his hands is stupid and worthless. But hey, he’s a BILLIONAIRE! The Democrat Party is suddenly changing rules and moving the goalposts so little Mike can play. Is this a great country or what?

Something to think about?

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

LOOKING GOOD: GOP fundraising record: $60.5 million in January; RNC nearly doubles DNC (Washington Examiner)

KEEP AMERICA GREAT: "National satisfaction" reaches 15-year high, "greatly increases" Trump reelection chances (Washington Examiner)

BELIEVE IT WHEN YOU SEE IT: U.S., Taliban agree to landmark ceasefire en route to aspirational peace deal (The Washington Free Beacon)

DESPITE MARQUEE GUN LAWS: Nine killed by "deeply racist" shooter in Germany (BBC)

POLICY: Social Security cannot survive in its present form (Mises Institute)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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The problem isn’t capitalism. It’s capitalists like me

SAM HILL has a point below. He does not have much of an  answer to it but he sees that unevenly distributed economic rewards must cause envy if not anger.  And anger is a powerful motivator that can cause  attacks of various kinds on what causes the anger.  The large number of communist revolutions in the 20th century are powerful evidence of that.

The customary way of preventing too much of that anger was redistribution, invented in 19th century Britain by Disraeli and in 19th century Germany by Bismarck -- both strong and patriotic conservatives.  And all advanced societies to this day do redistribute income extensively.

But is redistribution enough?  The undoubted appeal of the borderline insane Bernie Sanders suggests not. Clearly, a lot of anger and call for change remains.

It helps to understand the Sanders upsurge if we look beyond redistribution to the other influences that have so far reinforced social stability.  And we can see that most clearly in the two large countries which have been most immune to the materialistic temptations of Communism.  Both Britain and the USA have never in their history had economically motivated revolutions or much parliamentary success for extreme-left parties.

So what makes the UK and the USA different?  Two main things: Patriotism and the church.

For a long time in Britain, all respectable people went to church on Sunday.  And the one bit of religious guidance that they undoubtedly received was the famous Ten Commandments.  And one commandment that received attention was "Thou shalt not covet".  Envying the prosperity of others was morally and religiously wrong.  The commandment specifically ruled out communism.  So that was a useful influence in Britain for a long time.

It is still a useful influence in the parts of the USA to this day, despite the general decline of Christian commitment in most of the Western world.  The fact that Christianity has suffered  a big decline is one of the reasons Sanders has so much appeal.  One of the barriers to Sanders' ideas has largely crumbled.

The second traditional barrier to civil war was patriotism.  Consciousness of being a  part of a significant and high-achieving national whole engendered warm feelings in people  that were totally at variance with any desire to rip everything up and start again.

But patriotism has been in the doldrums too.  The Left have done their best to wreck it.  It was however only lying low.  Britain and the USA do have great historic reasons for national pride so when Donald Trump and Boris Johnson reauthorized it, there was an explosion of support for it that propelled both men to power.  So that patriotic core is still strong and will continue to do in the USA and the UK what is needed to keep the destructiveness of socialism at bay.


I am a capitalist because I remember socialism.

I was converted to capitalism by a few years at the University of Chicago and a few decades working internationally and seeing socialism up close and personal. Until recently, I was confident that we need not worry about trying that experiment again because socialism had been tested and had failed. It looks like I was wrong. Socialism is on the rise. Don’t blame Bernie and Elizabeth. Blame ourselves. Here’s why.

The version of capitalism we have implemented is a flawed one. Capitalism is based on the idea that enlightened self-interest and free markets produce the best possible allocation of resources and opportunities. When socialist economies began to fail in the late ‘70s, capitalists figured that if less socialist regulation was good, none at all would be even better. We’ve been working toward that end ever since. According to the Financial Times, 2018 had the lowest enforcement of antitrust regulation in almost a half-century. Even Adam Smith argued that capitalism needs rules. Without them, capitalism quickly dissolves into cronyism and eventually Russian-style kleptocracy.

We also rigged the system.

Capitalism is a $30 trillion game of Monopoly, with few winners and many losers. That’s okay. That’s the nature of the game. But we’ve fixed it to make sure the same people win all the time. We’ve created a twotier educational system that stymies upward mobility. We have taxation that lets capitalists pay too little for the public resources that led to their success. We’ve put in laws that protect industries and shield corporations from true competition. And we have played off one disadvantaged group against another. What we have now is a game where some players get extra rolls of the die and their own stack of Get Out of Jail Free cards.

We have been hypocrites about socialism. At its core, socialism is redistribution of wealth by the government. As Karl Marx put it, “to each according to his needs.” The U.S. has gotten the redistribution part down, but in our case we redistribute to each according to his voting clout—that is, we transfer wealth from urban areas to rural ones, to farmers, to older people and to industries with enormous lobbying budgets, like Big Pharma. All the while denying that’s what we’re doing. We’re increasingly being called out by have-nots who want a turn at the trough, like The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson who asks, “Boomers have socialism. Why not millennials?” If capitalists are against socialism, then we need to be against it all the time. If we are not really against it, then we need to stop demonizing people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

We have refused to listen to criticism, especially around income inequality. Technically, everyone in America (and most people in the world) are much better off since the ascendancy of capitalism. But they don’t feel better off. It’s biology. Let’s say tomorrow morning I drive across the street to Randy’s house and drop off a million dollars and then head down to George’s and drop off 10 million. You’d think Randy would be pretty happy. But I doubt it. Instead, he’ll come over and ask why George got more. According to the journal Science, the brain is more responsive to relative wealth than absolute wealth. Rather than trying to understand why people are frustrated, we have, for the most part, dismissed complaints about the wealth gap as sour grapes, or in the case of congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as childish naivete.

And throughout it all, we have been less than gracious. Instead of being modest about our good fortune, we have often been boastful and accused the less fortunate of bringing it on themselves through sloth, profligacy or being unwilling to take risks.

Principled, fair capitalism remains the best and fairest system for everyone. It is far superior to socialism, “democratic” or otherwise, particularly for the poor and disadvantaged. Socialism would reduce inequality in America not by lifting the poorest up, but by forcing everyone toward a miserable mediocrity. (Although probably not billionaires. They’d move to Monte Carlo.) However, principled, fair capitalism isn’t really on the menu. We have created a type of capitalism and a class of capitalists that are very hard to like. If we want to know why socialism is making a comeback, we need only look in the mirror.

SOURCE

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Delivering Truth to Secular Conservatives

Dennis Prager

In the latest edition of “The Rubin Report” podcast, two people I adore, commentators Dave Rubin and Heather Mac Donald, dialogue about some of the great issues facing America. Interestingly, though both are secular, Rubin opened the interview by asking Mac Donald about God and religion.

She began by saying that she is not conservative because of religion but because of her commitment to empirical truth. It is empirical truth that leads her to affirm, for example, “the necessity of the two-parent family” and “most traditional values.”

Mac Donald is right that one cannot be committed to empirical truth and be a leftist (though one can be a conservative or a liberal).

Left-wing assertions that are false include that men give birth; that America was founded in 1619 (when the first enslaved black was brought to the American colonies); that people can be lifted from poverty on a mass scale without capitalism; that there are no innate differences between men and women; that America is a racist nation; that women are paid less than men for the same type and amount of work because they are women; and innumerable others.

But although a secular conservative may be committed to the two-parent family because of empirical truth, marriage and family are not “empirical truths” nearly as much as they are religious values.

Few secular arguments to get married and/or have children are as compelling as religious ones. That’s why religious people are so much more likely to get married and have children.

Mac Donald said: “People who I respect enormously … whether it’s Dennis Prager or Michael Medved … are making the argument that you cannot have a moral society without a foundation of religious belief.”

That is precisely the argument nearly every founder of America made. Not all were Christ-centered Christians, but virtually every one believed that inalienable rights come from the Creator, and only from the Creator. And none (except perhaps Thomas Paine) believed that America could endure if it were to become a godless society.

Mac Donald said:

Part of my resistance to this is simply I don’t find claims of petitionary prayer and the idea of a personal loving God consistent with what I see—what I call the daily massacre of the innocents.

To me it’s a very hard claim to make that I should expect God to pay attention to my well-being when he’s willing to allow horrific things to happen to people far more deserving and innocent than I am.

So, for me, it’s partly just a truth value. I cannot stomach what appears to me to be a patently false claim about a personal, loving God.

I agree with her premises, but not with her conclusion.

I have never believed that God has any reason to pay more attention to me than to any other innocent human being. And I, too, “cannot stomach” the “daily massacre of the innocents”—so much so that I have written how I find the commandment to love God the hardest commandment in the Bible.

But what I also cannot stomach is the thought of a universe in which the horrible suffering of innocents is never compensated by a good and just God: The good and the evil all die; the former receive no reward and the latter no punishment.

The problem of unjust suffering troubles every thinking believer. But the Jewish theologian Milton Steinberg offered a powerful response: “The believer in God has to account for unjust suffering; the atheist has to account for everything else.”

Between the two, I would argue that the atheist’s burden is infinitely greater. And insurmountable.

Mac Donald said: “The idea of what started the universe—we can’t really answer that. I think to say, ‘God’—that’s just a placeholder for ignorance. That doesn’t help.”

Maybe we really can’t answer what started the universe. But as Charles Krauthammer, a great secular conservative, said, “The idea that this universe always existed, that it created itself ex nihilo—I mean, talk about the violation of human rationality. That, to me, is off the charts.”

God, therefore, is not “just a placeholder for ignorance.” Since science can never and will never answer the question “Why is there anything?” attributing the origins of the universe to an intelligent force (which we call “God”) strikes me as the most rational explanation.

Rubin: “I might have to get you in here with Prager.”

Mac Donald: “I’d love to.”

I’d love to, too.

Mac Donald asked: “Where are we all headed? What is the meaning of life? To me, anybody who claims … he doesn’t find meaning in life when there is Mozart and Haydn—to invoke a Dennis Prager favorite—or Beethoven or John Milton or Aeschylus or Anthony Trollope—”

Rubin: “Or just waking up with purpose for whatever you do.”

Mac Donald: “Exactly … trying to do the best you can do. I don’t find life meaningless for one second.”

Joseph Haydn began every manuscript with the Latin words “in nomine Domini”—”in the name of the Lord”—and ended each with the words “Lauds Deo”—”Praise be to God.”

I would ask Mac Donald and other secular conservatives: Do you or don’t you identify the steep deterioration of the arts with the death of God and religion? Is a secular society capable of achieving artistic achievement equal to that which was accomplished in tribute to God?

As for meaning, you—and I—may find meaning every day in trying to do the best we can do, or in great works of art. But, as I know you will agree, that does not mean life has any ultimate meaning. If there is no God, we are nothing more than self-conscious stellar dust. And stellar dust has no meaning.

We really need to continue this dialogue. In the meantime, for what it’s worth, I want to say to both Dave Rubin and Heather Mac Donald, who do so much for our country: God bless you.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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South Bend Residents Have a Message for America: Don't Elect Pete Buttigieg

South Bend, Ind., is a grimy industrial city of 100,000 people located on the St. Joseph River. It's known for being the "home" of  Notre Dame University -- which isn't really true since Notre Dame is technically located in Notre Dame, Indiana.

But South Bend, whose second claim to fame is the Studebaker National Museum downtown, is the home of Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. The highly ambitious Buttigieg is seeking the presidency despite serving two terms as mayor of a small city.

A job that most would see as entry-level employment in politics as a stepping stone to the presidency? That's sort of like a burger flipper applying for the CEO position at McDonald's.

There are many South Bend residents who wonder about that too.

New York Post:

When residents of this city’s impoverished West Side reflect on Pete Buttigieg’s two terms as mayor, a few things come to mind:
A spike in violent crime, development that largely ignored the African American community and how their only well-lit street is the one that leads to Notre Dame University.

So how, they wonder, can Buttigieg possibly be trusted to run the country?

“If he’s the next president, I fear for our country. He couldn’t run our city. How can he run the United States?,” said Michelle Burger, 42, a stay-at-home mom who lives in South Bend’s impoverished and predominantly black West Side.

Much has been made of Mayor Pete's trouble with "people of color." There appears to be something to that criticism as economic development during Buttigieg's tenure in office seems to have been lagging in the black community.

Another West Side resident, Cornish Miller, 62, said of Buttigieg, “Rating him 1 to 10, I’d give him a 2.”
“Buttigieg talked about all the improvements he made, but he hardly made a dent,” said Miller, who works for a military supply company.

“The West Side is the most neglected part of town. The street I live on is the only street around here that has lights. That’s because we’re a gateway to Notre Dame.”

Young, articulate, attractive -- and gay. Is that why Democrats are taking this guy seriously? To go from being a mayor of a city with at $350 million budget to running a country with a $5 trillion budget would seem to be a leap too far.

But he's a Democrat and he's gay so he's got that going for him.

Taking credit for the work of others is part of politics but Buttigieg appears to have taken the concept a bit too far.

But Indiana Republican Party Chairman Kyle Hupfer countered that while Buttigieg “certainly had a few economic development wins,” he actually had “little, if anything, to do with that.”

“I found it ironic that when he announced his presidential run, he did it in front of Studebaker Building 84, which had sat vacant since 1963,” Hupfer said.

“But it was $3.5 million from then-Gov. Mike Pence’s Regional Cities Initiative that made that project go.”

Hupfer said increased employment in the area covering South Bend — where the unemployment rate dropped from 9.3 percent in 2012 to 3.6 percent in 2018 — was largely a function of “statewide economic strength under Republican leadership.”

Rush Limbaugh had the temerity to point out that Buttigieg's election to the presidency would be extremely difficult due to his homosexuality. We can bemoan the unfairness of it, criticize those who wouldn't vote for him because he's gay, and make fun of those with religious objections to his lifestyle.

But you cannot deny the reality that Pete Buttigieg will lose a presidential contest against Donald Trump because he's gay. And South Bend residents say we should breathe a sigh of relief because of it.

SOURCE 

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Whopper Alert: 'Study' Finds Medicare for All Would Save $450 Billion a Year and 68,000 Lives

A study by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health shows that contrary to just about every other study published on the subject of Medicare for All, the program would actually save $450 billion a year and 68,000 lives.

Now really, who could ever vote against that? Will this study elect Bernie Sanders president?

How did they come to those conclusions? Smoke and mirrors, of course.

The Fiscal Times:

Previous estimates of the cost of Medicare for All have reached significantly different conclusions, ranging from a roughly 16% increase over current national health-care spending levels to a 27% decrease. This latest study relies on a new analytical tool to measure the impact of different provisions within Medicare for All as applied to real-world data (you can review and adjust the parameters of the analysis in the  Single-Payer Healthcare Interactive Financing Tool).

A "new analytical tool"? "Real-world data"? Sounds impressive. Sounds like they actually know what they're talking about. Is M4A the Holy Grail we've been praying for?

Not exactly. One of the most widely quoted studies on the true costs of M4A tells quite a different story.

The leading current bill to establish single-payer health insurance, the Medicare for All Act (M4A), would, under conservative estimates, increase federal budget commitments by approximately $32.6 trillion during its first 10 years of full implementation (2022–2031), assuming enactment in 2018. This projected increase in federal healthcare commitments would equal approximately 10.7 percent of GDP in 2022, rising to nearly 12.7 percent of GDP in 2031 and further thereafter.

Doubling all currently projected federal individual and corporate income tax collections would be insufficient to finance the added federal costs of the plan. It is likely that the actual cost of M4A would be substantially greater than these estimates, which assume significant administrative and drug cost savings under the plan, and also assume that healthcare providers operating under M4A will be reimbursed at rates more than 40 percent lower than those currently paid by private health insurance.

The Yale study proceeds from some very different assumptions that don't sound very "real-world" to me.

The researchers found that the proposed system would reduce total health-care expenditures by about 13% based on 2017 spending levels. Savings would come from a variety of sources. Here are some of the major savings the researchers found with Medicare for All, based on the 2017 total health care expenditure of nearly $3.5 trillion:

Reducing pharmaceutical prices via negotiation: $219 billion

Improving fraud detection: $191 billion

Reducing reimbursement rates for hospitals, physician, and clinical services: $188 billion

Reducing overhead: $102 billion

Eliminating uncompensated hospitalization fees: $78 billion in savings.

Get this now: Healthcare expenditures are rising at about 6 percent a year. And yet, M4A will reduce costs by 13 percent?

How did they figure 68,000 lives saved? Easy. Everybody knows that if everyone has health insurance, no one will die. Well, that may be a slight exaggeration. But perhaps the most bogus stat in this entire debate is that insurance coverage leads to treating disease early, thus "preventing" deaths.

The problem with that? In order to be treated early, a disease has to be diagnosed. And for that to happen, people actually have to go to the doctor when they're feeling bad. Even with insurance, most of us don't.

Radicals like Sanders will continue to try and sell this snake oil. But even if Democrats win the White House, the House, and the Senate, Medicare for All will never become the law of the land.

SOURCE 

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Bill Barr Derangement Syndrome
 
Can the republic survive Attorney General William Barr?

That’s the question that has seized the media and center left, which have worked themselves into a full-blown panic over an attorney general who is, inarguably, a serious legal figure and one of the adults in the room late in President Donald Trump’s first term.

Some 2,000 former Justice department employees have signed a letter calling on Barr to resign. An anti-Barr piece in The Atlantic opined that “it is not too strong to say that Bill Barr is un-American,” and warned that his America is “a banana republic where all are subject to the whims of a dictatorial president and his henchmen.”

This is impressive heavy-breathing over an AG whose alleged offense doesn’t hold a candle to the greatest hits of his predecessors:

Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer carried out raids to arrest suspected leftists in the wake of World War I.

Bobby Kennedy, serving as his brother’s attorney general, authorized the wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr.

William Barr changed the sentencing recommendation of Roger Stone from its original, excessive call for a sentence of seven to nine years.

It’s not clear why the country would collapse into dictatorship if Stone is sentenced to fewer than seven years in prison, especially given that the judge has complete discretion to impose whatever sentence she sees fit.

The suspicion is that Barr was doing Trump’s bidding, but the attorney general maintains — and he hasn’t been contradicted — that he was surprised by the initial, maximalist sentencing recommendation and he intended to amend it prior to Trump’s fulminations about the matter.

If Barr were truly Trump’s henchman, he would have squashed the Stone case rather than merely recommending a little less jail time at the end. Indeed, Barr said in an ABC News interview last week that he considered the Stone case a “righteous” prosecution.

Barr allowed the Mueller probe to reach its conclusion unmolested. The extent of his alleged interference was, prior to the release of the report, summarizing its findings in a way that wasn’t harsh or detailed enough for Trump’s critics.

Finally, he declined to prosecute former Department of Justice official and frequent Trump target Andrew McCabe for lying to investigators. If Barr is really Trump’s Roy Cohn, his personal enforcer masquerading as a top law enforcement official, nailing McCabe would have been his Job One.

No, all the evidence suggests that Bill Barr is doing his best to render fair justice in the treacherous environment created by a president of the United States who routinely comments on pending criminal cases and investigations and by the Justice department’s own politically fraught, overly zealous intervention in the 2016 election and its aftermath.

Anti-Barr polemics dwell on the parade of horribles that might come from his tenure at Justice, without pausing to consider that a norm-busting violation of the rules targeting a politically inconvenient individual already occurred — it was the abusive FISA surveillance of former Trump campaign official Carter Page.

The supposed institutionalists and civil libertarians who are piling on Barr are more outraged that the attorney general wants to get to the bottom of this abuse — and related 2016 investigatory over-reach — than by the abuse itself.

It’s no wonder that Barr has a poorly disguised contempt for his critics, many of whom are so inflamed by their opposition to Trump that they’ve lost any sense of standards. In a peppery speech to a Federalist Society conference last year that is now one of the counts against him, Barr rightly warned that “it is the left that is engaged in a systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law.”

At the end of the day, they really don’t want Trump to have an attorney general, but that’s not going to happen. If they force Barr out — or more likely, Trump’s continued tweeting pushes him over the edge — they’ll miss him when he’s gone.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

CLOSING ARGUMENTS BEFORE THE CAUCUS: The ninth Democratic presidential debate is set for Wednesday in Las Vegas, and it will feature a new billionaire on the stage (NBC News)

MEMO TO MICHAEL: Bloomberg School of Public Health says there's no evidence "assault weapon" bans reduce mass shootings (The Daily Wire)

NOT ISOLATED EVENTS: Plymouth Rock, other historic monuments vandalized on anniversary of Pilgrims landing (The Federalist)

LEFTISM FATIGUE: Secession in the Pacific Northwest? Some Oregon residents petition to join Idaho (USA Today)

POLICY: The hammer and sickle should be treated like the swastika (Foundation for Economic Education)

POLICY: School vouchers improve public schools (National Review)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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