Today’s news from SCOTUS

The New Neo Posted on by

Today is a big law news day. Not only do we have the Goodson acquittal, but we have two important SCOTUS rulings.

One involves race-conscious admissions policies in colleges. The case dealt with the University of Texas, and this was how it went down:

Today the Supreme Court issued its much-awaited decision in Fisher v. University of Texas, a challenge to the University of Texas’s use of race-conscious admissions criteria. When the case was first argued, many speculated that the days of relying upon race in university admissions were numbered. Justice Anthony Kennedy was seen as the swing vote, and he had consistently voted to limit (although not always to eliminate) the consideration of race in educational policies. The predictions were wrong, however, and race-conscious admissions policies have survived. Today’s decision reaffirms the ability of universities to rely upon race as one criterion among many when making admissions decisions, albeit within some limits…

In his opinion, Kennedy concluded that the petitioner had failed to demonstrate that the use of race in admissions by the university was so great or disproportionate as to create an equal protection violation. Noting that Texas’s admissions policies were, in some respects, sui generis (because of the automatic admission of students in the top 10 percent of each public high school), Kennedy concluded that reliance upon race as a part of the larger admissions process was constitutional, while also stressing (in ways reminiscent of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s opinion concerning the use of race by the University of Michigan law school in Grutter), that the university has a continuing obligation to periodically reassess the extent to which consideration of race is necessary in order to achieve the school’s pedagogical and other goals.

As some legal wags used to say when the Court had 9 justices and Kennedy was so often the swing vote, why don’t we just ask Kennedy what he thinks rather than bothering with the whole Court?

Then there’s the SCOTUS decision (4-4) on Obama’s immigration policy, in which the the tie had the practical affect of letting the lower court’s injunction against Obama stand. It’s not the same as it would have been had Scalia been alive, but it does represent a sort of conservative victory. As far as the future goes:

In either case, however, whether to continue legal defenses of the Obama policies will ultimately be up to the next administration, which will take office before the end of the next Supreme Court term. This also means a Clinton administration could adopt slightly revised policies (addressing the procedural complaints) to strengthen the substantive defense.

See also this for predictions.

When you ask yourself what the current GOP Congress has accomplished, one thing that should be on the list is to hang tough in not confirming any Scalia successor appointed by President Obama. It was widely predicted by those who on the right who detest this Congress—widely, and with great certainty—that the GOP would cave on this. They have not, but I don’t see a lot of people who predicted it owning up to that fact and giving them credit, even begrudgingly (granted, I haven’t done an exhaustive search on it, but I often came across the criticism and I haven’t come across the retractions). Does anyone believe that this decision would have gone the same way had an Obama-appointed successor been allowed to became the ninth SCOTUS justice?

No, Donald Trump is not the only GOP candidate who’d be harsh on Hillary

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m tired of a lot of things already in this campaign season.

But since Trump’s speech yesterday (the one I wrote approvingly about here), the one in which he gave Hillary a comprehensive what-for, I’ve seen remarks all around the blogosphere to the effect that Trump’s the only one of all the original GOP candidates who would have had the guts to rip Hillary like that.

No. He’s. Not.

Maybe it’s moot, because they’re out of the race now and he’s in. But it galls me to hear the charge, because I remember it a lot differently.

For example, dissing Hillary was Carly Fiorina’s thing. You might say it was her specialty right from the beginning of her campaign when I first saw her speak, back when Trump wasn’t going after Hillary all that much but was concentrating on destroying his opponents in the GOP (something that helped him become the frontrunner for the nomination, of course):

Rubio also wasn’t shy about saying Hillary was a liar:

There are also many clips of Cruz saying highly derogatory things about Clinton. In this one he says she embodies the corruption of Washington:

I am confident that any of them—had that person been nominated—would also have hit Hillary long and hard and repeatedly, as Trump did yesterday. That’s not to take away from what he did in that speech, by the way, which was excellent in that regard.

But again—no one, no one, was more verbally aggressive towards Hillary Clinton early on than Carly Fiorina. During her campaign she frequently made Hillary the focus of her very sharp attacks. To refresh your memory, get a load of this one (from back in January):

Freddie Gray case verdict: Officer Caesar Goodson found “not guilty” of all charges

The New Neo Posted on by

Officer Caesar Goodson’s acquittal is the second “not guilty” verdict for the six defendants in the notorious Freddie Gray case. Three defendants haven’t been tried yet, and one was due to be re-tried. Goodson was the van driver, against whom the prosecution had lodged its strongest complaints.

If prosecutor Marilyn Mosby was smart she’d cut her losses now and withdraw the charges against the others, because it’s become even more clear than it already was at the outset that there’s no “there” there, except for the fact that the mob demanded these trials and Mosby quickly acquiesced to provide them.

If you’ve followed the excellent trial coverage by Andrew Branca at Legal Insurrection (the linked post above is one of his analyses), you would have found this verdict no surprise. As Branca puts it:

Goodson had been charged with second-degree depraved heart murder, manslaughter, two counts of vehicular manslaughter, second-degree assault, reckless endangerment, and misconduct in office. He faced up to 30 years in prison…

The state has argued a revolving array of three different theories of the case for criminal liability of the officers: (1) “Murder by failure to seatbelt”; (2) “Murder by failure to provide timely medical care”; and (3) “Murder by rough ride.”

In order to obtain a conviction on any of the criminal charges the prosecution must, of course, prove each and every element of that charge beyond a reasonable doubt. Over the course of the last three “Freddie Gray” trials, however, it has become increasingly apparent that the prosecution not only lacks sufficient evidence to meet that high burden, it may lack any direct evidence for any of its theories of the case.

In addition, prosecutors have been repeatedly found to have concealed exculpatory evidence from the defense, that the state’s medical examiner originally believed Gray’s death to have been an accident after testifying that she had always believed the death to be a homicide, and just yesterday it was revealed by the Baltimore Sheriffs Office that the “parallel” investigation purported conducted by that office on behalf of prosecutors never actually took place.

According to Baltimore defense attorney Warren Brown (who was not an attorney in the case):

[In this case you have] an African-American judge who was in the Justice Department prosecuting police misconduct. So this is not someone that is going to be sympathetic on the face [of it] to the defendant who happens to be a police officer, on the contrary. His opinion was well-reasoned. He juxtaposed the law to the facts, and made it very clear that what you are asking me to do, States Attorney, I cannot do because you haven’t presented the evidence necessary for me to do that. And that’s justice, that’s what we expect from a judge or jury ”“ to render the decision based on the evidence juxtaposed to the standard that the state is held to ”“ which is proving their case beyond a reasonable doubt. To say that Goodson murdered Freddie Gray was absurd right from the start, but as I indicated before, they made their decision, the State’s Attorney office, to prosecute and then work backwards as opposed to getting all of the evidence, looking it over, and deciding where to go. And we know that because the police turned their investigation over to Marilyn Mosby’s office on a Thursday and on Friday morning she’s coming down the steps of War Memorial indicating what she’s going to do, and it left us all wondering, “How could you have decided that quickly?” So they made the decision to prosecute and work backwards and now they are having to pay the price for that because the evidence is just not there to support it.

Let’s hope they pay the price of at least losing their jobs. Because there are civil suits by the defendants, they may lose even more than that as well, although to successfully sue a prosecutor in the line of duty requires clearing the high hurdle of “malicious intent.”

In this situation, it just might be possible to do so.

[NOTE: By the way, since race was a huge issue in the furor surrounding Freddie Gray’s death, it is relevant to note that, as far as I can tell, just about everyone mentioned by name in this post on both sides was/is black: Freddie Gray, Mosby, Officer Goodson, Judge Williams, and defense attorney Brown.]

Ringo Starr, ordinary lad

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve never been one of those folks who seek out and soak up obsessive details about rock musicians—the minutiae of their lives and loves and drug habits and the like, although I realize it’s somewhat of a cottage industry. But I was doing some research the other day on the Beatles (probably just procrastinating, one of my favorite activities) and I found myself impressed by what a hard life Beatle drummer Ringo Starr (Starkey then) had at the outset.

You’d never have pegged him to succeed at anything. Abject poverty. Absent drunken father (he later acquired a good stepfather, though). Starr was grievously ill twice in childhood—the first time with post-appendectomy peritonitis that put him in a coma, the second with tuberculosis which he contracted at 13, a scourge one would have thought had practically disappeared from the developed world at that time. But I guess Starkey’s world as a youngster wasn’t all that developed.

As a result, he missed a lot of school, and ended up an early school dropout. He was placed in a TB sanitorium at the age of 13 and stayed for two years, and after he had emerged he never attended school again. But a turning point had already occurred while in the facility, although it may not have been recognized as such at the time:

During his stay the medical staff made an effort to stimulate motor activity and relieve boredom by encouraging their patients to join the hospital band, leading to his first exposure to a percussion instrument: a makeshift mallet made from a cotton bobbin that he used to strike the cabinets next to his bed. Soon afterwards, he grew increasingly interested in drumming, receiving a copy of the Alyn Ainsworth song “Bedtime for Drums” as a convalescence gift…Starkey commented: “I was in the hospital band … That’s where I really started playing. I never wanted anything else from there on … My grandparents gave me a mandolin and a banjo, but I didn’t want them. My grandfather gave me a harmonica … we had a piano ”“ nothing. Only the drums.”

Who can explain such an obsession in a youngster previously unfocused, who remained unfocused in all but that one area?:

After the extended hospital stay following Starkey’s recovery from tuberculosis, he did not return to school, preferring instead to stay at home and listen to music while playing along by beating biscuit tins with sticks…

After his return home from the sanatorium in late 1955, Starkey entered the workforce but was lacking in motivation and discipline; his initial attempts at gainful employment proved unsuccessful…

Fortunately for Starkey/Starr, the Beatles, and rock, he was successful at something—the drumming, and not just with biscuit tins and sticks. He not only acquired the skills (George Martin said, “He always helped us to hit the right tempo for a song, and gave it that support ”“ that rock-solid back-beat ”“ that made the recording of all the Beatles’ songs that much easier”), but he had the personality and the casually witty outlook shared by the rest of the Beatles and so apparent in their first film “A Hard Day’s Night.” The movie was a revelation to us fans who had liked their music but had no idea how funny they were. As Starr himself said, “Our appeal … is that we’re ordinary lads.” I’d say they come across as ordinary lads—even nice lads, which is not always true of rock stars—with extraordinary gifts and overwhelming charm.

[NOTE: It was after the breakup of the Beatles and the death of John Lennon that Starr really went off the deep end, although he finally managed to arrest the slide.]

Rubio will run for the Senate

The New Neo Posted on by

And Cruz has endorsed him:

“Marco Rubio [is] a friend and has been an ally in many battles we have fought together in the Senate. I’m glad to support him in his bid for re-election,” Cruz said in a Facebook post. “Marco is a tremendous communicator and a powerful voice for the American Dream.”

You may recall that Rubio had said for a long time that he was leaving public life and going into private life. But post-Orlando, he suggested that he had changed his mind, so this announcement should come as no surprise. The reason he gave, however, was this:

“In politics, admitting you’ve changed your mind is not something most people like to do. But here it goes,” he wrote. “I have decided to seek reelection to the United States Senate.”

Rubio’s announcement marks a 180-degree turn from where he was even just a month ago, when he insisted he would give up his Senate seat at the end of this term.

Rubio also told Fox News’ Chris Wallace, “I changed my mind.”

The Florida freshmen said he had reversed course because “the Senate’s role of being able to act as a check and balance on bad ideas from the president I think are going to matter more in 2017.”

In his email, Rubio said he’s aware his opponents will use his decision “to score political points against me.”

“Have at it,” Rubio wrote. “Because I have never claimed to be perfect, or to have all the answers.”

There are a lot of people on the right who detest Rubio for his Gang of 8 activities. I believe that his sponsorship of the bill was a huge mistake, not just because the bill itself was misguided and naive but also because it burned his bridges with many previous supporters, who felt (and rightly so) betrayed. I don’t want to fight the whole Gang of 8 controversy again, so I’ll just refer you to this comprehensive article, which explains some of the reasoning behind Rubio’s support of the measure. You either buy the explanation or you don’t; I do, with reservations.

And if you want to refresh you memory on my reaction to the Rubio/Christie battle in the debates, see this and this.

The bottom line for me, though, is this: if Rubio really does have a better chance of winning the Senate seat in Florida than the other GOP candidate would, I’m all for his entry into the race. It’s hugely important for the GOP to retain that seat whoever becomes president, Hillary or Trump. Rubio is otherwise quite conservative, and I think he’s learned his Gang of 8 lesson. I also happen to think that if he had steered clear of that bill, we’d be looking right now at GOP presumptive-nominee Rubio and probable next-president Rubio.

But back to the present. Indications are that Rubio is considerably more popular than the other GOP candidates for the position of Florida senator. Even Donald Trump—of all people—has said so:

“Poll data shows that @marcorubio does by far the best in holding onto his Senate seat in Florida. Important to keep the MAJORITY. Run Marco!” Trump said.

He’s running.

Trump ramps up his attack on Hillary with a speech

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not that he’s never criticized her before. But the speech Trump gave today focused on those criticisms. I’ve been expecting that to happen, because realistically speaking it’s his only chance—to ramp up the already-existent dislike and disapproval of Clinton (and the Clintons as a duo), and to make people vote for him as a reaction to her.

If I vote for Trump, that would be the reason.

The speech contained other elements, mainly focusing on his usual populist and nationalist appeals and promises. It was a good speech in the strategic/tactical sense, because that’s Trump’s main attraction for those attracted to him. Did he write it? I don’t know.

Anyone who’s been paying attention for the last year (and I certainly have) knows a great deal about how Trump operates and what sort of character he has. Those who already favor him will favor him even more after this speech. Those who don’t favor him but might reluctantly vote for him will probably find it a smart speech (as I did; but I’ve always said that Trump is a smart or at least a clever man—street-smart and combat-smart). Those who will never vote for him (and they are legion) will find it either more of the same or more fuel for their anger.

This does nothing to change my opinion of his character or his chance of winning—both low. The much more important question is whether, if he keeps pounding on these themes, it will change the opinion of a significant number of other people, enough to help him win. My answer is that I haven’t a clue, although I don’t see why it would for most people, whose opinions are quite solidified. However, there are a significant number of “undecideds” in a lot of polls, and they’re the ones I wonder about.

The odd thing about this election—actually, one of many many odd things about this election—is that the two opponents are people Americans know quite well. We may not know Trump in the context of political office, but we know him as a character and we certainly know Hillary both as officeholder and person. To me, that indicates that opinions about these two are less likely to change than could occur if lesser-known people were running for office. But since Trump has never held office and Hillary has, there’s more wiggle room (perhaps) in people’s opinion of what he would be like in office than there is about the possibilities with her. This could favor him or not favor him, depending on his behavior between now and November.

[NOTE: When I read his speech, one of the first things that occurred to me was: then why did you give her so much money over the years, and praise her so highly?

To me, the most powerful part of the speech—and a theme Trump should hammer home, because this is the sort of thing that could change the minds of people who are not already predisposed to vote for him, women and the LGBT community—was this:

I only want to admit people who share our values and love our people. Hillary Clinton wants to bring in people who believe women should be enslaved and gays put to death.

Note that he has eliminated his usual idea that Muslims would be banned, and focuses here on an ideological test for immigrants, which is something I’ve been advocating (not that he’s listening to me; he’s not).]

[ADDENDUM: I have never bought the “Trump is a stalking horse for Hillary and in cahoots with her” explanation of his candidacy. It seemed a possible but highly unlikely motive for a person like Trump who so very much loves to win. This speech should put that theory to rest, I think—although it’s also a remote possibility that he initially agreed to the set-up and then changed his mind and betrayed her.]

ADDENDUM II: Here’s the video—

A thought from John Keats

The New Neo Posted on by

The British poet (1795-1821) wrote:

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

By the way, I highly recommend the film “Bright Star,” about Keats’ romance with Fanny Brawne. It’s a bit of a chick flick, I suppose—but a deeply moving one, with beautiful cinematography and stupendous acting.

Congress and the latest on gun control

The New Neo Posted on by

Four measures—two by Democrats, two by Republicans—went down to defeat:

The measures Monday each went down in succession on largely party line votes. The 60-vote threshold required for passage prevented even Republicans, who control the chamber, from pushing through their favored measures.

The Senate rejected first a Republican proposal to update the background check system for gun purchases, which would have required states to add more information on mental health records to a national database. It also included a provision to alert law enforcement agencies when an individual who was on a government terror watch list in the last five years buys a gun.

See also this and this about some of the skewed coverage.

Is Trump’s campaign imploding?

The New Neo Posted on by

Even though I’ve come to believe that Trump is a terrible candidate for the general election and would like to see him replaced by a viable conservative alternative, I take no comfort whatsoever in how poorly he seems to be doing right now. That’s because the prospect of a Clinton win fills me with deep alarm and even despair.

I have thought for a long time that both candidates would be very bad presidents, but in somewhat different ways. Lately, I have been leaning towards an exceedingly reluctant Trump vote, but I was hoping (not assuming, but hoping) that if he were to be elected—an event I think is extremely unlikely—he would be significantly better at the job than I feared.

So if his campaign is doing poorly, it not only distresses me because the prospect of a Clinton presidency distresses me, but because it indicates that, among other things, I could be correct in my assessment of his organizational skills as poor-to-middling in anything other than the narrow areas of his expertise, which are real estate development and self-promotion. Self-promotion helped him get the nomination; it may or may not get him the presidency (I think “not”). But it can’t make him a competent president, and running a country as its chief executive is not at all the same as running a business such as his.

It would not comfort me to be correct about this if he ends up as president. If he ends up as president I want him to be a much much better chief executive—and man—than I think he is.

Remember one of the main arguments for Trump in the beginning? The one all the Trump-supporters around the blogosphere were touting as his strong suit, that he wouldn’t be beholden to big money donors because he was self-funding? Some of the bad news about Trump concerns the fact that, although he may be self-funding at this point, it seems to be because he can’t get donors to give him money. And “self-funding” is a relative term, because it turns out (as many have long hinted) that he either won’t give his campaign much money, either, or that he can’t give his campaign much money because he’s neither as rich nor as liquid as he’d said he was.

If you want to see some of the myriad articles on this, go here. RedState also has a lot coverage of the funding story: see this, this (an especially interesting one), this, and this.

Trump’s campaign argument during the primaries has rested on four pillars. The first is his anti-immigration rhetoric. The second is his anti-PC-rhetoric. The third is that he’s less corrupt than the others, in part because he’s rich. And the fourth is that he’s a great manager.

His current money problems undermine those last two points. In the event that he somehow does end up winning it all, it will almost certainly be because of a fifth pillar: he’s not Hillary.

I don’t think it will be enough.

I’m going to sit down

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s my new plan, formulated last night: I will try to eat actual meals, and I will sit down to eat them.

Most of you might say: whaaat? Don’t you already do that? Doesn’t everybody?

No, and no. I’ve mentioned in the past that, because of my bad back, I stand to blog and to do work at the computer in general.

What’s more, blogging is an unpredictable thing. But one pattern is that things tend to take longer than I estimate they will. For example, today’s previous post—all 2,000+ words of it, plus the research that went into it—gobbled up a lot more time than I’d originally estimated it would. That’s the way it often goes, which means I’m usually playing catch-up, racing and in a hurry.

Which means that I tend to grab food on the fly and to stand while eating. It doesn’t hurt (or maybe it does) that my computer is not far from the refrigerator.

I don’t think this is a good thing. So today I actually forced myself to sit down to eat breakfast/lunch/brunch, or whatever I want to call my first meal of the day. It was a somewhat novel experience, and I think a good one. I’m not sure I can sustain this program, but I’d like to try. The food tasted better, for one thing. I felt less hungry when I was done, for another. And it got me away from my love/hate affair with the computer.

What did I eat? A half of one of these:

limeyog

And one of these (minus the pears):

engmuf

With a bit of this on it:

butteroliveoil

Who is Paul Ryan and why do all these people hate him?

The New Neo Posted on by

I never intended for this blog to become Paul Ryan headquarters. Nor do I intend that to happen now. In fact, most of what I’ve written about him here has been in the context of his 2012 run as Vice President on the Romney ticket. Back then (at least at the beginning) he was somewhat of a conservative favorite, and supposedly evidence that Romney had veered somewhat to the right with his VP pick.

Those days—ah, those days are gone. Since then (and I’m not sure when it began, but it wasn’t too long after that) Ryan has sunk like a stone with two groups: conservatives, and Trump supporters (not the same thing). The left, of course, can’t stand him; that’s a given. So seeing both right and left against him, I have long tried to ferret out the truth.

Yeah, I know. Good luck with that.

But I continue to attempt it, because I try not to judge people on the spin given them by left or right. Saturday’s post about what Ryan had really said about suing Trump was a good example of my efforts.

Now, this present post isn’t going to be a biography of Ryan. It isn’t even going to be a summary of what he has done or hasn’t done in the seven and a half months since he became Speaker. Those things would take a lot longer than the hour or so I’m going to spend writing this. But I want to discuss a comment that “snopercod” made today, because I think it’s both typical of attitudes towards Ryan and understandable as well, given the sort of coverage Ryan has had:

Neo asks:

“”¦did you ever wonder how much of your Ryan-hate was based on media spin and how much on reality?”

I ask that question to myself all the time. When confronted with an epistemological question, though, I always look at the results to determine who is lying to us. So far, Ryan is found wanting when it comes to results. The federal budget is still going up, Koskinen still hasn’t been impeached, and the U.S. is still spending Billions to build power plants in Africa and wind farms in Vietnam (corporate welfare for GE). I would love to change my assessment of Ryan; All it would take would be ONE small victory for conservatives ”“ just one little thing that I could look to as a sign that Ryan isn’t just another Boehner. Like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, I Am Waiting.

At the outset I will remind everyone that Ryan has been in office for not-quite eight months, and Congress is a notoriously slow engine. In addition, for bills to actually pass and become law, there’s a Senate that must be gotten through, as well as a Democratic president named Barack Obama with a veto pen and a phone—as he seldom tires of reminding us.

But let’s get back to snopercod’s comment. There are several issues here. The first is what snopercod would like to see Ryan have done—that is, snopercod’s agenda. On that, I will take the things he mentioned (which I’m sure are not inclusive) point by point. On the budget, I previously wrote this post—containing links that I’d recommend following or you won’t understand what I’m talking about—about Paul Ryan’s explanation for what happened with the budget and what some of his plans are for the future. I wonder how many people are familiar with what he said then, rather than what the MSM or many blogs on the right wrote about what they think he did or didn’t do and why.

Then there is the agenda for impeaching Koskinen, which is going forward. Probably not at a pace desired by those who would like Congress to be a speedier venue, but it’s going forward nevertheless, at least in the House (where Ryan resides). Instant gratification is not the sort of thing in which Congress specializes, and I repeat that Ryan has only been in office for a little less than eight months.

As for African power plants and Vietnamese wind farms, those are issues about which I know nothing and don’t have time to look into at the moment. But I think we can agree that dealing with whatever problems that might be involved with them has not been a big priority for the right within the last eight months, and Ryan is not a miracle worker who needs to quickly fulfill every single item on a particular voter’s legislative agenda.

Which brings us to the second big issue: what has Ryan actually accomplished? I wrote at length about one accomplishment that most people don’t even know about (or which they have minimized, if they do know about it), the fact that Obamacare was repealed by both House and Senate and then the repeal was vetoed by Obama.

In addition, Ryan’s plan is to vote on an Obamacare replacement. Now, coming up with a replacement plan is not easy, to say the least, and it’s been delayed much longer than I’d like to see. But that’s not surprising, either, considering the complexity of the issue and its contentiousness even among Republicans—and again, remember that Ryan has been in office not quite eight months. At any rate, yesterday this announcement was made:

Ryan and several key House committee chairmen believe they have finally come up with a concept and plan that could be used as the basis for the replacement of Obamacare, provided of course that Donald Trump succeeds President Obama in the White House and the Republicans can retain control of the House and Senate in the November general election.

The new plan set for release this week reportedly will include a refundable tax credit that could be used by low and moderate-income families or others who don’t have the benefit of employer-provided coverage to purchase health care insurance in the private market. One version getting a lot of attention provides a universal tax credit adjusted by age, so that the older you are the bigger the tax credit.

The proposed GOP tax credit would mark a significant departure from the refundable credit currently available under Obamacare, which is based on a sliding income scale and can only be used to subsidize the premiums on health care insurance plans purchased within state and federal Obamacare exchanges.

The proposal would also raise billions of dollars in revenue for the new program by imposing a cap on the federal tax exclusion on employer-based health insurance. Currently, premiums paid for employer-sponsored health insurance are excluded from taxable income. That reduces the amount that workers owe in income and payroll taxes by about $250 billion a year. The House Republican plan would substantially cut into that major tax break.

Read the whole thing if you’re interested. But it’s just a preliminary report, so wait till next week to see the actual proposal as announced (assuming, of course, that is is announced). My point is that this represents a lot of effort and must have been difficult and time-consuming to iron out, but that whether you approve or not it’s something that’s been going on under Ryan’s watch.

If you want to see other bills that have been passed, it’s not easy. There haven’t been many comprehensive articles on that, so you have to go to something like this site and try to separate the wheat from the chaff, knowing that for the most part the vast majority of bills passed by the House are going to be about something minor. But how many people have actually tried to find out—not relying on the MSM or blogs—what has been done under Ryan so far and what hasn’t? Very few, I’d imagine, because it takes way too much time and effort.

Which brings us to a third issue: future plans. How many people have familiarized themselves with Ryan’s detailed and oft-laid-out plans for future legislation? Probably not many, because it’s long and bor-ing to do so. But if you care to see what he’s got in mind—or at least what he says he’s got in mind—go here and start reading.

A lot of people, of course, have already soured on Ryan and don’t want to hear what he has to say. They have already dismissed him because he didn’t do what they wanted, and he didn’t do it fast enough, and what he did (repealing Obamacare, if they even know that happened) didn’t matter because Obama vetoed it. So I’d ask them a question: what should he have done, and not just “what” but “how”? How might he have accomplished it, and please be realistic? If your answer to everything is “shut down the government”—well, I don’t think that would have worked, because I think it would have only resulted in greater Democratic power and popularity and an Obama stonewall. That’s an old question that we can debate ad nauseam (and have already), so I’m just acknowledging it here without getting too deeply into it.

What I see is that people are impatient, annoyed, frustrated, all too ready to lay blame. And I’m not saying there isn’t blame to be laid. I’m frustrated and annoyed, too. My goal here—as I’ve said before—is not to be some Ryan shill. But if I’m going to blame him—and I’m willing to do so because I have no dog in the Ryan race—I want to do so for reasons that are actually based on reality rather than propaganda. I see so much propaganda from left and right, and so much vulnerability to it (yes, the right is just as vulnerable as the left), that I feel compelled to at least raise these questions.

I’ll give the last word to The Atlantic, which published an article somewhat related to this theme. The Atlantic staff is hardly a bunch of Ryan-supporters, of course, but they make a good point here, and not just about Ryan but about a lot of Republicans this election cycle:

Except that, thus far, Ryan’s beloved agenda””the one his wonkish heart has been dreaming of and laboring over and counting on to define his speakership””has been something of a PR bust, yet another sad casualty of this election cycle’s Trumpsanity.

Just look at what happened at the rollout of the agenda’s first plank: Ryan’s pet anti-poverty plan. The speaker and seven colleagues crossed the Anacostia River to commune with the impoverished, overwhelmingly minority residents from the “bad” side of Washington. But after all the speechifying, the only thing reporters wanted to talk about was Donald Trump’s latest outrage, regarding the Mexican heritage of Judge Gonzalo Curiel. And so the big news to come rolling out of the event was Ryan’s “textbook” racism comment.

“The first six questions were about Trump,” AshLee Strong, Ryan’s spokesman recalled to me. The leader’s office has come to expect that sort of thing, she admitted. “Still, it seemed like an odd time to be hammering at Trump.”

For the second rollout (theme: national security), Ryan wasn’t taking any chances. He held the June 9 event at the Council on Foreign Relations, and lawmakers did not take questions from the press, only members of the council. But even then (and despite Ryan’s best efforts), the topic du jour was Trump, and the news stories to emerge focused not on the difference between Republicans’ governing vision and a Democratic one””which is kinda the whole point of the “A Better Way” theme””but on the gulf between Ryan and his own party’s presidential nominee…

There’s more, but you get the idea.

This actually isn’t Trump’s fault, not really. It’s the media, it’s the public, and it’s just the way of the world and in particular of the press. Someone like Trump gets our attention, whereas sober policy does not. Someone like Trump can be easily spun to reflect poorly on Republicans and it’s something people will read, whereas Ryan talking about how he wants to fix things presents more of a challenge. Is there any wonder the Trump news drowns out the Ryan news? Is it any wonder that the Ryan news, when covered at all, is often covered in such a way that it will hurt him with both left and right?