Roundup
(1) Russian ballet dancer, critic of Putin, falls to his death.
(2) Trump’s proposed FCC head says the administration will crack down on censorship online.
(3) Dana Carvey is so good at this:
(4) The Democrats are embracing the filibuster, now that it benefits them. Of course.
(5) The vote-counters in Bucks County PA say that rules and laws are for the little people, not for them. And yet we are supposed to trust them to be fair:
“I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country,” Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia, a Democrat, said Thursday as she and other Democrats voted to reject a GOP-led challenge to ballots that should be disqualified.
“People violate laws anytime they want. So, for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention. There’s nothing more important than counting votes.”
The court had already ruled against what she’s trying to do; her actions defy the statute that governs vote-counting in the state.
Do you feel the winds of change?
Ever since the election there’s been a sea-change, an atmospheric something that’s a bit hard to describe but has the whiff of possibility. I think everyone feels it to a certain extent. The left dreads and fears it, and perhaps it will go sour not just for the left but for everyone. But right now, the feeling is of hope that, finally, America really is on the path to becoming Great Again.
And truth seems stranger than fiction. Donald Trump still seems an unlikely figure to spearhead this kind of renewal, even if we’ve gotten at least somewhat used to him occupying the Oval Office. A great many people would probably date the more recent change from July 13, 2024, when he survived an assassination attempt that came within an inch – literally – of killing him. That was followed by so many other events it could make a person dizzy: the removal of Biden and the temporary elevation of Harris, the campaign in which podcasts became tremendously important, the disgrace of Nancy Pelosi, the post-election grin of Biden, and in the Middle East exploding pagers and targeted assassinations proving that Israel knows exactly where its enemies hide and is newly determined to take them out. Now we have a government in which not only Trump, but Elon Musk and RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard and Vivek Ramaswamy will have a place.
And now, world leaders seem poised on the edge of the change, too, for better or for worse – for example, in Ukraine. Jack Smith’s day in the sun may be over. Javier Milei, the change agent of Argentina, visited Trump, who called him a “MAGA person” as in “Make Argentina Great Again.” The MSM has egg on its face, and now Joe and Mika (of all people) have also come to see president-elect Trump as MSNBC’s rating have dropped precipitously.
And maybe it’s time for a little Bee Gees:
Computers – love ’em, hate ’em
Computers bring us so much. Just to take one obvious example, they bring this blog to you and your comments to me. They bring us the ability to bank online, get news from anywhere in the world, and buy just about anything without leaving home.
They bring us social media and its contagions, and an easier way for abusers to stalk and for criminals to bilk. They make it less likely that we get together in the real world, although that’s up to us.
And they bring us the kind of frustration I’ve been feeling in the last day or two, when my effort to diagnose and fix one problem with my computer by changing a single seemingly-innocuous setting caused a cascade of other problems that were far more serious and which wouldn’t be fixed even by getting a new computer. To explain what happened would be almost as tedious as going through it, so I’ll spare you unless I need to ask you all for help in the future. I think I’m on the way to fixing it; let’s just say it’s half-fixed. But that took about ten hours yesterday and additional time today.
It brought home to me once again – not that I needed reminding – how dependent we’ve become on computers.
Open thread 11/18/2024
Spambot of the day
Oh my, you almost fooled me:
Hi, i read your blog occasionally and i own a similar one and i was just curious if you get a lot of spam remarks? If so how do you protect against it, any plugin or anything you can suggest? I get so much lately it’s driving me mad so any help is very much appreciated.
To all those who say that Trump’s appointments are too radical …
… I would counter by pointing to Biden’s appointments, equally radical in the opposite direction.
Elections do indeed have consequences.
New Hampshire displays its split personality once again
Some people would call New Hampshire a purple state. But I think that’s misleading. New Hampshire is blue at the national level and red at the state level. In recent years, its senators and House members are all Democrats. But its governors and legislature are Republican, and not just by a small margin.
Now, with Tuesday’s election providing stronger majorities in the State House and Republican Kelly Ayotte’s victory in the race for governor, Republican lawmakers have the opportunity to pass bolder legislation.
Barring any changes from recounts, the House is expected to have 222 Republicans and 178 Democrats, according to the House Clerk’s Office; the Senate is projected to have 16 Republicans and eight Democrats.
The article has a list of legislative goals for the state Republicans, such as banning sanctuary cities in the state and having a parental rights bill. And of course there is New Hampshire’s well-known tax conservatism.
A person could be forgiven for thinking that New Hampshire is a red state. But at the national level, the state went for Harris – granted, by a narrow margin of 50.7 to 47.9, but in line with the fact that Clinton won there in 2016 and Biden in 2020. This year, there were no senators in New Hampshire up for election, but New Hampshire’s two current members of the US House are both Democrats. One was incumbent Pappas, who won easily: by eight points. The other seat was open but the Democrat won by six points.
So, what gives in New Hampshire? I think the state’s tax tradition is one of the reasons it remains Republican at the local level. It is also commonly thought that the trend at the national level has to do with new residents from Massachusetts, but I’ve read several analyses that say the new arrivals haven’t tended to vote consistently for Democrats. So the mystery remains.
“Under Biden, the Democrats should have been more radical”
[Hat tip: commenter “AesopFan”]
From this article by Park MacDougald [my remarks in brackets]:
And in other dodged-bullet news, Jonathan Last of “The Bulwark,” the never-Trump Republican webzine dedicated to “defending democracy” and bilking large checks out of gullible liberal donors, expressed regret, as the results came on Tuesday night, that the Biden administration hadn’t been more “radical” in rigging the system against Trump. Here’s Last, as transcribed by Tom Elliott on X [I watched the video of Last and others, and was struck by the sentence MacDougald excerpts here]:
[The Biden Admin] should have been quite radical. They should have made D.C. a state, they should have actually expanded the Supreme Court, they should have done a whole bunch of stuff that would have been deeply unpopular, but … would have restructured the framework in such a way as to make it harder for the next authoritarian attempt.
To me, this encapsulates a lot of things about the present-day left. There’s the complete lack of realization that it was actually the administration’s radicalism that turned so many voters off. There is the embrace of actions that would be extremely authoritarian in a transparent drive for more power under the guise of stopping the right from being authoritarian. And there’s also the air of expertise coupled with what appears to be a complete lack of knowledge about what actually happened during the Biden administration regarding the very things that Last seems to think they didn’t attempt to do.
“They should have made DC a state,” says Last. Why does he think that didn’t happen? Is he even aware of how hard they tried to do exactly that? I bring you, Mr. Last, history in the form of HR51, a bill introduced on January 4, 2021 – the day after the new Congress resulting from the 2020 election took office. Sounds like it was a top priority, doesn’t it? The bill passed in the House on April 22, 2021, by a vote of 216 to 208. At the time, the Democrats had 221 seats and the Republicans 211, with some not present for the vote, which was on strict party lines. Here’s an excerpt from the bill’s summary:
This bill provides for admission into the United States of the state of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth, composed of most of the territory of the District of Columbia. The commonwealth shall be admitted to the Union on an equal footing with the other states.
The Mayor of the District of Columbia shall issue a proclamation for the first elections to Congress of two Senators and one Representative of the commonwealth.
The bill applies current District laws to the commonwealth and continues pending judicial proceedings.
The commonwealth (1) shall consist of all District territory, with specified exclusions for federal buildings and monuments, including the principal federal monuments, the White House, the Capitol Building, the U.S. Supreme Court Building, and the federal executive, legislative, and judicial office buildings located adjacent to the Mall and the Capitol Building; and (2) may not impose taxes on federal property except as Congress permits.
District territory excluded from the commonwealth shall be known as the Capital and shall be the seat of the federal government.
But guess what? The bill suffered a sad fate in the Senate, much as a previous bill passed by the House in 2020 had:
The House voted Thursday on a bill that would admit Washington, D.C., as the 51st state, although the measure is likely to fail in the evenly divided Senate. The legislation passed along party lines with a vote of 216 to 208, with no Republicans voting in favor. …
The House approved a D.C. statehood measure by a vote of 232 to 180 last year, but it did not get a vote in the Senate, which was then controlled by Republicans. Although Democrats now hold a 50-seat majority, most legislation requires 60 votes to advance, and this bill is unlikely to garner support from 10 Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has committed to bringing the measure to the floor for a vote, but a motion to move forward with the legislation would almost certainly fail.
Ah, but Jonathan Last would no doubt say that they should have canned the filibuster and just passed it in the Senate, if they really meant business. And in fact:
Many D.C. statehood supporters are pushing the Senate to eliminate the filibuster, which would allow measures to advance with a simple majority. But this would require support from all 50 Democrats in the Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote. Two Democrats say they won’t support it — all but dooming the prospects for H.R. 51.
I bet you can guess who the two were, even if you don’t remember the incident: Sinema and Manchin. If not for them, the filibuster would have been eliminated back in 2021.
The article goes on:
However, it’s unclear whether all Senate Democrats would support D.C. statehood, even if the filibuster was eliminated. The two Democrats who oppose eliminating the filibuster, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, have not signed onto the Senate bill as co-sponsors. Democratic Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Mark Kelly, and independent Senator Angus King, who caucuses with Democrats, have also refrained from co-sponsoring the bill.
And then of course in the next Congress, Republicans got control of the House and no such bill was going anywhere.
I wonder what Last thought the Democrats and/or Biden should have done to have “made DC a state.” Just declared it, by royal decree? Threatened Manchin and Sinema with removal from office? Obiously, there was no way to do it democratically or Democratically, although my guess is that Last knows nothing about any of this history – including the makeup of the legislature – and thinks the problem was just lack of trying.
And what of Supreme Court packing? Last says, “they should have actually expanded the Supreme Court.” No doubt any such effort would have run into the very same roadblocks that HR51 encountered. But again, that’s not Last’s gig or his problem. They should have waved a magic wand.
And indeed, Biden tried as recently as this past July:
President Joe Biden on Monday proposed major changes for the U.S. Supreme Court: an enforceable code of ethics, term limits for justices and a constitutional amendment that would limit the justices’ recent decision on presidential immunity.
But alas, no magic wand was provided, and when last I checked, Biden was never made king:
There’s almost no chance of the proposal passing a closely divided Congress with Election Day looming, but the ideas could still spark conversation …
Almost no chance? Zero chance. But guess what? It was actually tried, and only about six weeks ago:
U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., today announced the introduction of new legislation to restore balance among the three branches of government, increase transparency to improve public trust in America’s courts, and modernize the courts to ensure greater access to justice for more Americans.
In the wake of recent rulings upending decades of precedent and evidence of unethical behavior, Wyden’s Judicial Modernization and Transparency Act would modernize the courts by expanding the Supreme Court to 15 justices over three presidential terms, prevent political inaction from bottling up nominations to the Supreme Court, and restore appropriate deference to the legislative branch by requiring a supermajority to overturn acts of Congress, among other modernizing provisions to improve access to justice.
“To restore balance” – that’s pretty funny. Not only does the bill feature court-packing, but note that it also requires a supermajority to overturn an act of Congress even though to pass such an act requires nothing of the sort.
The bill is still in committee; it obviously was going nowhere, but the intent was there. And a previous House version that had some different details was introduced in May of 2023 and met a similar fate.
You may wonder why I’m spending so much time on this. It’s because I can’t stand the combination of arrogance and ignorance that I see so often in people like Last who have all sorts of credentials. The credentials give them the arrogance; what gives them the ignorance? Laziness, preference bias, personality?
Open thread 11/16/2024
So articulate for their age:
Roundup
(1) Some theories about what might be behind the Gaetz nomination.
(2) Israel may have struck a secret nuclear research facility in Iran. And now that Trump is waiting in the wings, I’d expect to see more of that in the future.
(3) Chris Wallace says buh-bye to CNN:
CNN anchor Chris Wallace was reportedly told his two poorly rated shows would be canceled and his massive salary slashed before the veteran journalist announced he would leave the network.
Wallace, who was being paid a reported $7 million a year, was informed that he was welcome to stay on as an analyst but at a much lower salary as part of CEO Mark Thompson’s vast cost-cutting initiatives, according to Puck News.
Instead, Wallace announced earlier this week that he was exiting CNN, and portrayed the move in a Daily Beast interview as a pivot to podcasting and streaming — because “that’s where the action seems to be,” he said.
Well, both things can certainly be true. But does Wallace have that kind of a following, or the sort of style to make it in podcasting? I don’t think so.
(4) Rand Paul will be chairing the Homeland Security Committee in the new Senate.
(5) The left is saying Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian tool. I seem to recall that none other than good old Hillary Clinton started that sort of accusation against Gabbard way back in 2019; see this.
The Trump administration: the pursuit of justice or of revenge?
One can hardly blame Trump for wanting to go after the people who used lawfare against him – who invented charges and twisted the intent of statutes in order to end his political career, bankrupt him and his family, and ultimately imprison him if they possibly could manage it. Their actions should have put every American on notice that they were adopting Beria-like strategies and going very far in a dangerous direction.
That danger wasn’t only to Trump and the right. They were further undermining respect for the law itself, which had already been undermined by every miscarriage of justice that ever was, and the more obvious the injustice the more deeply the disrespect. Therefore, every time a political prosecution is mounted, the charges must be ironclad to avoid the inevitable conclusion that the prosecution is merely political and opportunistic. And the cases against Trump were quite the opposite of ironclad.
The left committed very real violations that need redress, as Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) has said:
“Now they’re like, ‘Oh, this is, this is retribution,’ and it’s like, ‘No, no. It’s justice. You really did do these things,” he said, laying out specifics of what the left has done.
“You really did target pro-life Catholics. You really did target parents who went to school board meetings, and weaponized the government. You really have put people in prison for non-violent offenses. You’ve tried to bankrupt people. You’ve completely corrupted and abused the whole purpose of the Department of Justice, and that is going to be remedied, and frankly, the people that have done it are going to be held accountable,” Davidson promised.
But there’s a caveat: it will be seen by the American people as tit-for-tat revenge unless the evidence against such offenders is crystal clear and the charges are not the result of the twisting of statutes to make them fit a situation to which they were never meant to apply. And that’s not just some sort of moral stance; it’s a practical one as well. If one of the reasons the GOP is in power is to right wrongs, the process of doing so must be seen as fair or the Republicans will lose the American people and the worm will turn once again, back to the left.