Countdown to Brexit

The New Neo Posted on by

A two-year process starts a little more than a week from now:

Britain will begin divorce proceedings from the European Union on March 29, starting the clock on two years of intense political and economic negotiations that will fundamentally change both the nation and its European neighbors.

Britain’s ambassador to the EU, Tim Barrow, informed European Council President Donald Tusk of the exact start date on Monday morning.

“We are on the threshold of the most important negotiation for this country for a generation,” Brexit Secretary David Davis said. “The government is clear in its aims: a deal that works for every nation and region of the U.K. and indeed for all of Europe – a new, positive partnership between the U.K. and our friends and allies in the European Union.”

Some personal divorces take a lot longer than that to iron out.

Whatever the specific subject or program that’s in place, political divorces are not easy. We in the US don’t belong to the EU, but we face a not-completely-dissimilar situation in the attempt to dismantle Obamacare.

The process of undoing would seem to be easy—after all, knocking a building down is simpler and quicker than erecting one. It’s the decisions about what will replace that building that are hard. Whether it be Brexit or Obamacare or any number of other systems (as opposed to buildings) people may want to do away with, the clock can’t simply be turned back to a previous time. Old institutions surrounding and supporting the structure have been dismantled, too. New expectations and dependencies have been created (health care as a right, for example). And the press that is against the dismantling is careful to keep stoking fears of what will happen without that thing that’s being torn down.

Those who favored the programs in the first places and fought to get them adopted were well aware of such phenomena. They knew that inertia, dependence, and time’s arrow all tend to combine to keep programs and policy structures in place once adopted:

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”

That quote from the Rubaiyat is certainly true. Time cannot run backwards, and we can’t undo any event. But we can undo a program, and the electorate has spoken in both the case of Brexit and of Obamacare: they want Britain out of the EU and they want Obamacare gone. I agree with both decisions. But now the big question is what will replace each, how long it will take to implement it, and whether the replacement will be meet with favor or disfavor.

[NOTE: And yes, I’m well aware that some conservatives want government out of the health care policy business (the business formerly known as health insurance) totally. Not gonna happen.]

Compare and contrast: the endings of “Pygmalion” and “My Fair Lady”—and life

The New Neo Posted on by

First, the straight play “Pygmalion,” movie version with Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller:

Now, the musical “My Fair Lady” with Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn:

The scene continues in this next brief clip. The part where Howard as Higgins furiously paced in the street in “Pygmalion” now features Harrison as Higgins (what’s up with all those “h”s?) singing the song “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” which demonstrates (as the movie of “Pygmalion” shows in a far more subdued and subtle manner) how he softens and comes to realize how much he cares about Eliza. I’ve left the song out of this clip (although you can go back to an earlier spot in it and watch it if you care to), and I’ve cued it up to start when Higgins re-enters his house, in order to have it better match the “Pygmalion” action:

Audrey Hepburn is gorgeous and charming. Wendy Hiller is attractive, but more cute than beautiful (two more “h” names, by the way). And yet I’ve always felt Hepburn to be grievously miscast in the role of Eliza. She does the best she can, but always seem too mannered and measured—too much of a lady, even at the beginning. Hiller convinces you that she is this person, and the emotions that flit across her face are more changeable and realistic.

Rex Harrison is so much older than Hepburn that the musical version feels a bit unbalanced in terms of age in addition to the class and education issues that are part of the script. Harrison also plays it for laughs, deliciously. But Howard is not only closer in age to Hiller, he has the intensity and seriousness—and those eyes!—that make you believe something else, something much more serious, is going on with him. He’s more of a bastard, too.

And notice how often the camera allows Howard (and Hiller, at times) to turn their backs to the audience. We watch Rex Harrison’s face as he asks Eliza for his slippers at the end; we can see that he’s joking and affectionate. With Howard, we’re not sure, because all we see is the back of his hat. We know he cares, but he’s still holding back a big part of himself. He is who he is, and although he’s changed he’s not transformed. He remains in character, consistent.

Still, despite its cooler emotional tone than “My Fair Lady,” the ending of the movie “Pygmalion” that you saw in that first clip was different than the ending of Shaw’s original stage play. The film “Pygmalion” is more conventionally romantic than the stage play of the same name, and “My Fair Lady” (both on stage and on film) retained the ending of the film “Pygmalion.” In contrast, the original “Pygmalion” stage play had a sort of “Gone With the Wind”-ish ambiguous, will-they-or-won’t-they ending, and Shaw even wrote a post-play explanation saying that of course Eliza and Higgins really don’t get back together:

[Shaw] wrote a “Sequel” to Pygmalion and, like most sequels, it’s not nearly as good as the original. It’s just a really long explanation of what happens. It “need not be shewn in action,” he says. Shaw just wants us to know that everybody reading the play is silly and sentimental, and, no, Higgins and Eliza aren’t reunited. Instead, she marries Freddy and they open a flower shop and they pretty much live happily ever after.

But hey, what did he know? In the movie and the musical film they do get back together. But how long do they last together? Methinks not so very long.

By the way, Leslie Howard the actor was known as a ladies’ man, who “once said that he ‘didn’t chase women but ”¦ couldn’t always be bothered to run away.'” As for Rex Harrison—well, take a look. And Shaw? Shaw was unusual, to say the least:

For many people, the one detail of Shaw’s life which seems to transcend all others is the fact that his marriage, at the age of 42, to the Irish heiress and fellow Fabian activist Charlotte Payne-Townshend was apparently never consummated, an arrangement arrived at by mutual consent. “Do not forget,” he wrote in Sixteen Self Sketches, “that all marriages are different, and that marriages between young people, followed by parentage, must not be lumped in with childless partnerships between middle-aged people who have passed the age at which the bride can safely bear a child.” Still, while Shaw’s admiration for strong, emancipated, and independent women was genuine, his attitude towards sexual relations remained a curious mixture of disdain as well as an almost obsessive interest. His first physical relationship was an eight-year affair with a widow, Jenny Patterson,15 years his senior, who was his mother’s friend and vocal student. They eventually broke up over his involvement with Florence Farr, an actress, following several heated scenes among the three of them, which went directly into one of his earliest plays, The Philanderer…

There were apparently additional pre-marital conquests, as well as some curious involvements in which Shaw inserted himself into other marriages, playing a subtle game of flattery and innuendo with the wife, while using his friendship with the husband as a safety net for when he danced too close to the edge…

Shaw’s devotion to and abiding love for his wife might have been driven by a deep and enriching sympathy. But, while he did remain loyal to her, and would do nothing to cause her pain or embarrassment, he was still amazingly flirtatious with other women and would remain so throughout his life. Shaw was actively pursued by women well into his seventies, but more seriously troubling for Mrs. Shaw was the period of her husband’s middle-aged infatuation with the actress Patrick (Stella) Campbell. Although he had no intention of leaving his wife, and Campbell was already engaged to the man who became her second husband, it seemed for a few dangerous months in 1912 that infatuation had slipped into genuine love. In his letters, the fiercely anti-romantic Shaw fell into the high-flown rhetoric of romance…

Happily ever after? Not quite.

Terrorist shot dead at Orly Airport

The New Neo Posted on by

A man on the French terror watch list shot and wounded a police officer in northern Paris before traveling to Orly airport where he tackled a female soldier and tried to take her rifle. She was among the French soldiers on anti-terror patrols of the airport. She did not release her weapon to the terrorist, and he was subsequently shot and killed by other soldiers.

The dead terrorist has been identified as Ziyed Ben Belgacem, a radicalized Muslim whose apartment was among those searched following the coordinated Paris terror attacks in November 2015.

Another “known wolf.”

I’m also thinking that a female officer may have been targeted because she was presumed to be easier to physically overpower. If someone is carrying a weapon, that person had better look strong as well as be strong.

See also this.

Obama’s judiciary legacy

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t recall that in my youth people spoke all that much about a president’s “legacy.” In recent decades it’s been all the rage, though, and that legacy usually gets evaluated and re-evaluated while a person is president, and not just afterwards.

Legacies are written by the winners, and the academics. What will Obama’s legacy be? It depends who’s talking or writing, and it depends what happens next.

I see his legacy as ISIS, for example, Obamacare, and a heightening of racial tension. I also see the election of Donald Trump as part of his legacy. Trump was elected for many reasons, but one of them was to create a legacy that involves undoing some of Obama’s would-be legacy (particularly concerning immigration, but certainly not limited to that). Whether Trump will succeed remains to be seen.

Lately we’ve had a dramatic demonstration of a particular part of Obama’s legacy, one that I am fairly certain is very dear to Obama’s heart and which has directly affected the ability of his successor Trump to do what he was elected to do. That legacy concerns the makeup of the federal judiciary, something to which a lot of voters don’t pay much attention. And yet it affects us dramatically in a host of ways, and its effects can persist.

President Trump will get to appoint many federal judges, too, now that the nuclear option has been activated (by the Democrats in the Senate, back when Obama was president) for these positions. That’s a sort of Obama legacy, too, and it’s a significant one.

The following was written in 2014, and it describes how Obama has changed the federal judiciary’s balance:

When President Barack Obama entered the White House in 2009, the federal appeals court based in Virginia was known as one of the most conservative benches in the country.

Two Obama terms later, Democratic appointees hold a 10-5 majority on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a panel of which issued a groundbreaking ruling this April backing transgender rights…

Since President Barack Obama came into office in 2009, he has shifted the alignment of several federal appeals courts to the left, resulting in nine of the 13 now having a majority of Democratic appointees.

That certainly doesn’t reflect the party breakdown of the country, which is not 70% Democratic/liberal. But the federal appeals courts are about 70% liberal-dominated, thanks to Obama.

That’s a president’s prerogative, of course; to reshape the judiciary if and when he/she gets the opportunity. And Obama, as a lawyer and a former con law teacher, is well aware of what he was doing and why. It has borne fruit, as we can see by the recent decision blocking Trump’s EO: both judges are recent Obama appointees, Watson of Hawaii in 2013, and Chueng of Maryland confirmed in 2014.

I’ve already written at some length about what I think of their decisions, so I’ll just say here that I find their legal reasoning not just poor but shocking in its reach. Although I sometimes think I have lost the capacity to be shocked by such things, apparently I retain it.

When I was in law school, many moons ago, the main occupation of the student was to read judgments which often consisted of a majority and a minority opinion, plus dissents. The student therefore was exposed to the reasoning and logic on both sides. Usually I agreed with a certain point of view, as did most students (not always the same point of view, of course). But almost always I read the opinions of judges espousing the opposite point of view and felt respect—sometimes a grudging respect, but a respect nevertheless—for the tightness of their arguments and the aptness of their citations.

That’s not how I feel about these most recent decisions on Trump’s EO, which are troubling in a host of ways, and I’m not referring to their outcomes when I say that. Judges often seem to come to their conclusions and then find the legal justification for them. But in these cases the legal justification is simply too flimsy to sustain the conclusions. The decisions constitute an extreme and dangerous case of judicial overreach (one I’ve also described elsewhere, so I won’t bother to go into the details now).

These judges and these decisions are Obama’s legacy, too. When he was issuing his executive orders as president, it was always known that his executive orders could be reversed by a subsequent president. Most people—and certainly Obama—thought that subsequent president would be Hillary Clinton. It’s not; it’s Donald Trump. But Obama’s hand reaches out through his judges to tie Trump’s hands, at least for now.

Note, for example, that the 4th Circuit—the one the Reuters article described in 2014 as having switched under Obama from being “one of the most conservative in the country” to being 10-5 Democratic—is the very court to which Trump will be appealing Judge Chuang of Maryland’s decision to block his travel ban.

Why is Trump not appealing (at the moment, anyway) the Hawaii decision? Because the federal appeals court there is the 9th, which is even more liberal than the 4th.

[NOTE: I highly recommend this article. Here’s an excerpt from it (and by the way, the authors do not appear to be the least bit pro-Trump or conservative):

Our point here is not that the district judges are clearly wrong. It’s merely that they are not clearly right””on a whole lot of points. And in the face of real legal uncertainty as to the propriety of their actions, they are being astonishingly aggressive. It is not, after all, a normal thing for a single district judge to enjoin the President of the United States nationally from enforcing an action that the President contends is a national security necessity, much less an action taken pursuant to a broad grant of power by the legislature in an area where strong deference to the political branches is a powerful norm. And it really isn’t a normal thing for multiple district judges to do so in quick succession””and, moreover, to do so in the face of substantial uncertainty as to the actual parameters of the constitutional and statutory law they are invoking and powerful arguments that they are exceeding their own authority.

“Substantial uncertainty” is an understatement.]

Turning up the heat

The New Neo Posted on by

It occurs to me that one consequence of the election of Donald Trump has been to turn up the heat on politics in this country.

Trump’s election is both a result of greater anger on the part of many voters, and of more willingness to take risks and vote for someone highly unconventional; and a cause of greater anger on the part of the opposition.

That last sentence is observation only, rather than an assignment of blame to Trump. He is a lightning rod for various feelings that have been brewing for a long long time.

A lot of people compare what’s going on at present to the turmoil of the Sixties. I don’t see it that way. I actually think things are worse now, but perhaps that’s because I was young then—and although I was paying attention to events, I wasn’t quite as involved in the news of the day (and its details) as I am now. What I see at present is a more basic undermining of the social contract and the rule of law, and a more profound lack of knowledge on the part of much of the populace about the underpinnings of our government and what makes this country special.

Extremely distressing and disturbing. That’s why, no matter what the topic du jour on which I’m writing may be, there’s an underlying concern that’s become extreme.

But perhaps it’s just mud season—although the mud got covered over with quite a bit of snow this past weekend. But March snow melts pretty quickly, even in New England.

Germany and its Turkish residents: Erdogan’s referendum

The New Neo Posted on by

Germany has many Muslim residents, the majority of whom are of Turkish origin and citizenship. This article is a must-read if you want to understand what’s happening in Turkey right now and how it affects Germany:

The evening’s events exposed the deep divisions in Turkish society that have been created by the constitutional referendum campaign. President Erdogan is seeking to tighten his grip on power by making himself head of government in addition to his current role as head of state. But it is by no means clear that he will get his way. Which is why he is also doing all he can to secure the vote of Turkish citizens living overseas, thus making the conflict over Turkey’s future into a German conflict as well — one which is becoming a threat, and deepening rifts within German society as well.

On the one hand, the Turkish community is perhaps more divided than it has ever been in the 50 years since Turks began coming to Germany as guest workers. On the other, German skepticism of their Turkish neighbors has grown of late. How is it possible, they wonder, that so many young people who grew up here venerate a man who is seeking to erode those democratic values of which Germans are so proud? Conversely, many of those with Turkish roots wonder why Germans still see them as Muslim aliens, even if they are cosmopolitan, successful and perfectly integrated. Why are the group’s achievements so rarely highlighted?

We certainly have our problems with immigration and immigrants, and questions of citizenship and assimilation. Birthright citizenship is another bone of contention. But this article illustrates the problems inherent in having an immigration policy that favors the importantion of workers from other countries that differ greatly in terms of culture, and in not having birthright citizenship. It creates a huge group of people within their new country who have daul allegiance (or even primary allegiance to another country), and offers an even greater incentive for them to fail to assimilate:

Around 3 million people with Turkish roots live in the country. If they have a problem, Germany does too. Every political tremor in Turkey triggers aftershocks in Berlin, Cologne and Stuttgart. When the Turkish military launches a putsch to topple Erdogan, tens of thousands of people in Germany likewise sit glued to their televisions out of concern for Turkey’s future…

The atmosphere, particularly on the radical fringes of the two camps, is becoming more hostile to the point that German security officials have now become concerned that the conflict could erupt in violence in Germany as well. “The fault lines between the various camps in Turkey are mirrored in Germany,” says Hans-Georg Maassen, head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency. There is, in short, a part of Germany that is deeply affected by Erdogan.

You might say the solution is obvious: don’t import so many people from a country such as Turkey in the first place. If you do, be aware of the minefield of cultural conflicts you will be entering. But it’s too late for that for Germany (and if our federal courts have anything to say about it, it may be too late for us as well).

More:

Many AKP [Erdogan] supporters, though, have a different understanding of democracy — despite their integration in Germany and lessons on politics and civics in school. If the majority of a population decides to place its faith in a single party and a single head of state, then other countries simply have to accept that, many believe. The lessons of German history — the reflex most Germans have to think back to 1933 when hearing such arguments — are not as deeply rooted among all of those with Turkish roots. They view the separation of powers as largely unnecessary because they believe that Erdogan’s patriotism will lead him to act in Turkey’s best interests. Plus, those in Germany who watch pro-government broadcasters from Turkey have difficulty separating the propaganda from reality. Because they live in Germany, they have little experience with the more ominous elements of Erdogan’s rule.

I would say that lack of historical knowledge, as well as ignorance about the importance of separation of powers (and of equality of the branches of government), is not limited to Germany or its immigrants. I observe something similar as a general trend in this country, particularly among the young.

Judicial review and political shenanigans

The New Neo Posted on by

If you had to study American history, you may recall that the 1803 SCOTUS case of Marbury v. Madison established the right of federal courts to review acts of Congress and declare them unconstitutional:

This conflict raised the important question of what happens when an Act of Congress conflicts with the Constitution. Marshall answered that Acts of Congress that conflict with the Constitution are not law and the Courts are bound instead to follow the Constitution, affirming the principle of judicial review. In support of this position Marshall looked to the nature of the written Constitution””there would be no point of having a written Constitution if the courts could just ignore it.

It may be obvious why I suddenly decided to revisit Madbury; if not, read yesterday’s post of mine about two federal courts’ blocking of Trump’s new executive order on immigration and travel.

I may have more to say about the issue of judicial review than I’ll be writing in this post, because it’s a very rich topic. But I’ll mention here that you’d do well to review the fact situation that led to Marbury and reflect on it. It might remind you—as it did me—that the tricky machinations of political parties back then were every bit as twisted and opportunistic as they are now, if not more so.

You might also want to take a look at what Jefferson had to say about Marbury’s flaws:

You [Justice Marshall] seem to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps…. Their power [is] the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.

Marbury concerns a very different fact situation from what’s going on today with President Trump’s EO and the courts. But it established the idea that federal courts are able to declare actions of another branch of Congress to be unconstitutional. This does tend to establish the Supreme Court as potentially supreme over the other branches, which is what Jefferson warned against (the only redress I can think of would be a constitutional amendment, notoriously difficult to enact).

Marbury concerned the constitutionality of an act of Congress, whereas the present-day Trump court decisions concern executive orders about immigration (as did the previous federal court decisions regarding Obama’s EOs). In other words, the constitutionality of executive actions is presently the issue. The Court decided it had the power to review executive actions in 1804, the year after Madbury was decided, in Little v. Barreme, in which “the Court found that the President of the United States does not have ‘inherent authority’ or ‘inherent powers’ that allow him to ignore a law passed by the US Congress.” You can see from that language that the issue in the case wasn’t just executive orders in a vacuum, but executive orders in contrast with conflicting acts of Congress.

One of the major bases for the challenges to Obama’s EOs on immigration was that they failed to carry out acts of Congress and the intent of Congress. In fact, I just found a concurring opinion by Justice Scalia in one of those cases, in which Scalia cites and discusses (pages 12-14 of this document) Little v. Barreme as it relates to Obama:

If Congress purported to vest the President with the unfettered discretion to enforce a law, or not, without any guidance, the executive would be engaging in a legislative act. He could not “execute” such a law, faithfully, or otherwise. He would be legislating.

A quick search I did just now seems to be indicating that most of the successful court challenges to EOs have occurred under similar circumstances, involving not just an EO but a Congressional statute as well, and/or conflicts between the EO and a Congressional statute. For example, Korematsu was the famous case in which SCOTUS declared the Japanese camps during WWII to be constitutional. They were originally established by EO, but shortly thereafter (about two weeks later) Congress enacted a statute authorizing the enforcement of FDR’s EO on the subject. Putting aside for now the weighty question of whether Court’s decision was right or wrong on the merits, I’m citing it merely to indicate the difficulty I had (so far) in finding a case in which a federal court overturned an EO without an act of Congress also being involved in some way (in Korematsu not only was there a statute backing up FDR’s action, but the Court upheld that action).

I’ll add that I haven’t yet had time to carefully read the two recent court opinions (Hawaii and Maryland), although I’ve read a couple of reactions to them,and I also have skimmed the Hawaii one. It’s my impression that the opinions don’t cite conflict with an act of Congress as the basis on which they made their decision—although the issue appears to have been one of many raised by the plaintiff in the Hawaii case. [see ADDENDUM below]

Andrew C. McCarthy has previously dealt with the issue of conflict between Trump’s EO and a Congressional statute in this article of his:

The [Trump executive order on immigration] has predictably prompted intense protest from critics of immigration restrictions (most of whom are also critics of Trump). At the New York Times, the Cato Institute’s David J. Bier claims the temporary suspension is illegal because, in his view, it flouts the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This contention is meritless, both constitutionally and as a matter of statutory law.

I suggest you read McCarthy’s piece in its entirety to get the reasons why he says there is no conflict between Trump’s EO and that 1965 act of Congress; suffice to say for the moment that his arguments seem very persuasive.

It occurs to me that, if any of the cases involving Trump’s most recent EO go to the Supreme Court, the decision by Republicans in Congress to block Obama’s choice to replace Justice Scalia could loom larger than ever. Of course, if Scalia’s replacement by Trump isn’t approved soon by Congress, the Court would probably be issuing a tie decision if it agrees to hear any of these cases at all. And a tie would allow the injunction to continue.

I don’t necessarily consider it a matter of great danger if the temporary ban doesn’t go into effect; we still have ways to vet arrivals, and I hope that nothing terrible will happen in the meantime. However, the legal issues involved are of great magnitude, and the precedent being set here in terms of judicial power are terrible.

[NOTE: Also please read Alan Dershowitz on the matter, as well as David French.]

[ADDENDUM: I just came across this article, which mentions that the Maryland court’s decision did indeed cite conflict with that 1965 act of Congress in the ruling, although the ruling seems to have been based on other issues as well.]

Trump’s budget proposal

The New Neo Posted on by

I look on it as Trump’s opening bid in a series of negotiations.

The MSM has predictably wailed about the meanness of it all. If you don’t want to wade through that, I think that Ed Morrissey has a fair summary of what’s in the proposal:

Say hello to the wall, a bigger military, and more robust immigration enforcement. Say goodbye to subsidies for public broadcasting, the arts, and a lot of what the EPA does now. The White House has released its so-called “skinny budget,” and it has winners and losers…

His post goes on to list and describe them, and adds this overview:

Pushing responsibility to states for all these purposes has been Republican doctrine for decades. Many of these programs started as part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society plan, but have produced not much more than stasis in these areas, in part (arguably, anyway) from a lack of accountability. Rather than have states and local authorities keep the resources and deal with problems that they know best, the federal government took over those tasks while taking the resources away, and then tried to apply one-size-fits-all approaches to them.

Republicans face a couple of problems in attempting to implement this paradigm shift now. First, states won’t necessarily get their resources back in the exchange, as the federal government will still need to fund its course of deficit spending, especially with entitlement reform on the back shelf. That leaves the vulnerable without much hope of a safety net. Second, it’s tougher politically to stop a federal program on which people depend than it is to not start it in the first place ”” a dynamic that will apply to entitlement reform too. Finally, while Republicans have talked plenty about deregulation and federalism, they haven’t won too many converts; it took a populist uprising rather than a conservative-federalist uprising to win the White House this time. The irony is that Trump’s budget takes the GOP much farther down that latter road than they’ve dared going themselves since Reagan.

…[T]he budget fight will show whether Republicans decide to fight for their federalist vision…

Morrissey concludes that Republicans will balk somewhat. I agree.

I want to add that cutting money to a department doesn’t inevitably mean gutting it. It can mean streamlining and focusing it. But government isn’t very good at that. The story of government in the last century has been mostly an inexorable increase in what the feds do and how much money they say they need to do it.

Putting aside all the vagaries and problems inherent in Donald Trump’s being the president who happens to be delivering this message right now, would the message itself ever fly? Are Congress and the federal government capable of backing it? Is the American public capable of accepting it? Or does the behemoth inevitably grow?

Two more judges block Trump’s new travel ban

The New Neo Posted on by

It was inevitable that some judge somewhere—or even quite a few judges in quite a few places—would find a reason to to block Trump’s new and very carefully-drafted travel ban.

There are thousands of federal judges in the US, and a very large percentage of them are liberal. There are millions of potential plaintiffs who would be happy to bring a cause of action and lawyers who would be happy to champion them in court, and under the seemingly anything-goes rules that appear to be in effect these days about who has a cause of action and what the reach of the court system can be, there may be no end to such challenges of everything Trump does and no end of judges willing to grant their wishes.

That’s why John Hinderaker of Powerline has called this process a “liberal coup”:

Derrick Watson, a Democratic Party activist who was appointed to the federal bench in Hawaii by President Obama in 2012, has issued a purported injunction barring implementation of President Trump’s travel order. I have not yet read Watson’s opinion, and will comment on it in detail when I have done so. But I have read Trump’s order, and the idea that it somehow can be blocked by a federal judge is ridiculous. The order is absolutely within the president’s constitutional discretion.

What we are seeing here is a coup: a coup by the New Class; by the Democratic Party; by far leftists embedded in the bureaucracy and the federal judiciary. Our duly elected president has issued an order that is plainly within his constitutional powers, and leftists have conspired to abuse legal processes to block it. They are doing so in order to serve the interests of the Democratic Party and the far-left movement. This is the most fundamental challenge to democracy in our lifetimes.

I am in agreement. I also have not yet read the opinion, and I certainly hope that Judge Watson has managed to come up with something other than rationalizations to back up his ruling, and that I will end up changing my mind about the seriousness of what we’re seeing. But I doubt it. People in power tend to want to aggrandize their power, and judges are hardly immune from this.

It will be interesting—and important—to see what happens to this case on appeal. If it wins, I fear that our entire judicial system has broken down.

After the 9th Circuit had upheld the injunction on the previous executive order, I wrote a post on the subject. In it, I quoted William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection, who made these prescient remarks:

The Executive Order, as the Trump administration has said it would be enforced (for example, excluding green card holders from its reach), is perfectly lawful and within the President’s power and authority. To accept the 9th Circuit ruling is to accept that the President does not have the powers vested in him by the Constitution and Congress.

This legal dispute no longer is just about the Executive Order. Democrats have made clear that they will fight in court over almost everything the Trump administration does. The 9th Circuit has opened the door to this tactic on an issue that goes to the core of presidential authority.

Yesterday, Professor Jacobson harked back to that earlier discussion, and added:

The net result is that Trump has been stripped of his constitutional and statutory powers to protect the nation through control of who is permitted to enter the country.

I warned about this, and the danger of Trump not seeking Supreme Court review in the first case…

And now it’s playing out…

…[T]he power to control who enters the country is uniquely a presidential power. Not anymore, unless the Supreme Court acts to restore that power.

We are living not just in interesting times, but in dangerous times. But I suppose that’s the definition of “interesting” when the word is used in that manner. I feel as though a judicial Pandora’s box has been opened, and if it isn’t closed soon we are in unfathomably deep trouble.

Joyce Carol Oates, Trump, Twitter, John Lennon, and Jesus

The New Neo Posted on by

Famous author Joyce Carol Oates is known for the number and length of her fiction output. But she’s also a Twitter-user, and yesterday she retweeted this pithy thought:

“I could shoot 24 million people on Fifth Avenue & I would’t lose a vote”–#TheirFuhrer

It seems to have stirred up a predictable tweet-storm. But aside from the “Trump=Hitler” insanity—which is so common now that it’s become a cliché—I wonder what on earth this statement is trying to say and why anyone (even a Trump-detester) with an intellectual and/or literary reputation to uphold would approvingly retweet it.

And yes, that’s a rhetorical “wondering” on my part. I understand that among the intelligentsia, these sorts of statements about Trump and Hitler are regarded as not only acceptable, but true and courageous.

But does a joke in which a person says he could shoot someone (obvious hyperbole), and that even then his loyal supporters would still vote for him, have anything to do with a desire to actually shoot someone? Of course not. We used to say much the same thing about Obama—that he could strangle a puppy on the White House steps and his supporters would figure out a way to defend him. But even those who disliked Obama the most probably didn’t think he was actually into strangling puppies.

It was a joke of Trump’s, people. Not a very funny one, perhaps, but meant to illustrate a point about the devotion of supporters and nothing else. Dinosaur that I am, Trump’s original comment reminded me of all the flap around John Lennon’s 1966 (fifty years ago!) remark that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus:

During an interview, [Lennon] argued that Christianity was in decline and that it may not endure longer than rock music, explaining “We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first ”“ rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity…

When Datebook, a US teen magazine, quoted Lennon’s comments five months later in August, extensive protests broke out in the Southern United States. Some radio stations stopped playing Beatles songs, their records were publicly burned, press conferences were cancelled, and threats were made. The controversy coincided with the group’s US tour in August 1966, and Lennon and Brian Epstein attempted to quell the dispute at a series of press conferences. Some tour events experienced disruption and intimidation, including a picketing by the Ku Klux Klan.

Shortly after the controversy broke, Lennon reluctantly apologised for the comment, saying “if I had said television was more popular than Jesus, I might have got away with it”. He stressed that he was simply remarking on how other people viewed and popularised the band. The events contributed to the Beatles’ lack of interest in public live performances, and the US tour was the last they undertook, after which they became a studio-only band.

Revisiting that Lennon quote just now for the first time in all those years, I notice that his remarks were actually potentially more offensive to Christians than I had known, because he had added:

Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.

On the other hand, Trump seemed to be sticking to the subject of his popularity and the extreme loyalty of his supporters. Trump’s comment was uttered in January of 2016, over a year ago, so why it’s being recycled now I have no idea. But as relatively unfunny as Trump’s original joke was, multiply that by ten and that’s how unfunny and/or unwitty and/or illogical the retweet of Oates’ is.

How does Trump’s “I could shoot someone…” joke get translated into the mass murder of millions? And is this retweet a comment on Trump, on his followers (are they all supposedly intent on mass murder, too)? Or on both?

These also are obviously rhetorical questions, because the answer is that it doesn’t matter to those who love to tweet or retweet this sort of thing. And although I shouldn’t be the least bit surprised at the intellectual pretensions of those who do love to retweet this sort of thing (Oates, after all, was a Princeton professor for 36 years), sometimes I am surprised.

What kind of milk do you drink?

The New Neo Posted on by

Or do you drink it at all?

I don’t. It’s part of my generalized dislike of any flavored beverage (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, take a look here). But for milk I reserve a special repugnance. The last time I can remember liking it, or at least thinking I might like it, I was around two years old. After that it became a gummy, icky sort of thing, and I’d watch in bafflement as others swilled it down and sang its praises.

As a young adult, I also discovered I was lactose intolerant. I forget why they decided to test me, but in those days the definitive test was to fast overnight, have your blood drawn to measure your blood sugar, and then drink a vat of lactose (actually, about 12 ounces, which is a pretty big swig) in liquid form. That’s much much more than you’d ordinarily get in a serving of milk. Then every half hour they’d draw blood again, for about three hours or so.

A normal milk-digesting person’s blood sugar would rise somewhat and then start falling in predictable fashion. And the person would be feeling okay in the meantime, although a bit like a pincushion. As for me, my blood sugar never responded to the drink at all, which meant that my body was completely unable to digest the milk sugar in it. I was told that there are degrees of inability to digest lactose, and I exhibited the highest degree possible: 100% lactose intolerant.

Which was no sorrow to me, since I never had any inclination to drink milk in the first place. I still seem to do fine with yogurt and cheese, which contain a lot less lactose.

But that test—oh, that test! I got so sick within about a half hour of drinking that vile concoction that I spent most of the next five hours or so in the bathroom. It was a highly unpleasant day, one I hope to never repeat. And I’m not sure anyone else will ever have to repeat it, because I heard that years later they invented a much kinder, gentler test that didn’t involve a huge lactose challenge like that.

Which brings us to this article about problems with certain proteins in milk versus problems with lactose (milk sugar):

But, according to Miller [who is a dietician], compelling scientific research suggests people may not be reacting to lactose, but to a protein found in milk called A1.

‘As cows’ milk protein allergy can be diagnosed relatively easily and doesn’t tend to last into adulthood, the traditional view is that people with continued problems with milk are lactose intolerant.’

‘There are two major proteins in milk, whey and casein. Within the latter, there are two subtypes called A1 and A2. These are natural genetic variants that occur in cows’ milk.’

‘While human breast milk, goat’s milk, sheep’s milk and all other mammalian milks only contain A2 type protein; the A1 protein seems to be only found in European dairy cows,’ says Miller.

And the push for diversity aside, American cows are basically European cows in terms of their protein.

This is not a new issue, although it’s new to me. Here’s Wiki on the evolutionary history:

Scientists believe the difference originated as a mutation that occurred between 5000 and 10,000 years ago””as cattle were being taken north into Europe””when the proline at position 67 was replaced by histidine, with the mutation subsequently spreading widely throughout herds in the western world through breeding.

The percentage of the A1 and A2 beta-casein protein varies between herds of cattle, and also between countries and provinces. While African and Asian cattle continue to produce only A2 beta-casein, the A1 version of the protein is common among cattle in the western world. The A1 beta-casein type is the most common type found in cow’s milk in Europe (excluding France), the USA, Australia and New Zealand. On average, more than 70 percent of Guernsey cows produce milk with predominantly A2 protein, while among Holsteins and Ayrshires between 46 and 70 percent produce A1 milk.

Much of the previous brouhaha about health risks seems to have been about things like cancer and diabetes, and there’s no scientifically-accepted indication that A1 milk is any more harmful in terms of those diseases than A2 milk is. But what about GI discomfort, as reported in the Daily Mail article to which I linked? Perhaps, but the evidence is weak.

All of this is just a way to segue into this question: do you like milk? Do you drink it regularly? If so, is it just with cereal (that, even I can understand)? Or do you chug down a huge glass of it with meals?

Rachel Maddow’s clickbait

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, it wasn’t exactly clickbait, because it was on TV rather than online.

But Maddow’s promise to reveal Trump’s tax returns was the sort of thing you see on the internet all the time, an ad that promises some amazing game-changing revelation but turns out to be very much ado about nothing.

Maddow’s teaser that she’d obtained Trump’s tax returns did have some mild news value in that the particular return she featured (2005) showed that he’d paid more taxes in the year in question than many people would have thought.

Here’s Slate—not ordinarily a bastion of Trumplove and Maddowhate—on the subject:

TV is a ratings game, but an entire episode about highly damaging tax returns is just as likely to get you great ratings as milking the possibility that you have highly damaging tax returns and less likely to get you compared to Geraldo. Maddow even went so far as to hold the tax returns back until after the first commercial break, as if we were watching an episode of The Bachelor and not a matter of national importance””because we weren’t, in fact, watching a matter of national importance, just a cable news show trying to set a ratings record…

The form revealed that, rather than not paying taxes and making no money, Trump paid $38 million on $150 million in income. Maddow promised to pull a sordid revelation out of a hat and instead plucked out ”¦ Trump’s credibility?

The author of that Slate piece, Willa Paskin, seems very disappointed in Maddow. It’s easy to see why. Maddow is no TV neophyte, and must have known her revelation was more inclined to help Trump than hurt him. Paskin writes that rumor is that Trump himself leaked the returns, based on the fact that they are favorable to him. I’d rather that were the case than that they were obtained illegally, but I believe the latter is far more likely.

[NOTE: By the way, regarding Paskin’s dig at “The Bachelor”—say what you will about the show (and I’ve said my piece here)—the “Bachelor” directors certainly know how to entice an audience into eagerly anticipating something. In fact, a great many viewers make a sport out of deciphering what the promos really indicate about what happens versus what they purport to indicate.]