The why and wherefore of the Comey firing

The New Neo Posted on by

My title was a teaser. Obviously, I’m not privy to the real story of Trump’s motives in firing Comey now. But no one is, except Trump and those closest to him—and maybe not even them.

But I do have some observations, of course. The first is that Trump’s a guy who’s used to firing people, and to doing it with great fanfare and the spotlight shining fully on him. So the Comey firing is a sort of business-as-usual for Trump, although it certainly doesn’t appear that way to an awful lot of outside observers.

The reaction from much of the right has been joy at Comey’s departure. The reaction of the left and the Democrats has been predictable shock and outrage, as well as cries for a special prosecutor. The assumption there—or at least, the suggestion there—is that Trump is covering up something and trying to impede Comey’s investigation of his Russian connection. Here’s a good example of the genre from Politico, painting a believable picture of a fuming, stewing, enraged, frustrated, screaming Trump and a blindsided victim Comey—and this despite the fact that it has long been the left and the Clinton camp who have been bitterly criticizing Comey and blaming him for Trump’s win and Hillary loss. So there’s no small bit of irony here.

To me, Comey’s press conference last summer—the one in which he explained his reasons for not indicting Hillary—made no legal sense, and was a departure from the FBI’s usual commitment to silence in cases where it chooses not to indict. I wrote several posts at the time about Comey’s behavior (see this, for example). Andrew C. McCarthy’s summary from a few days ago is a recap of Comey’s actions back then, and what was wrong with them:

…[I]t is not possible to square [Comeys’ July 2016] press conference and the claim that politics did not influence the FBI’s decision-making. Ordinarily, the FBI does not confirm or deny the existence of an investigation and does not publicize the evidence uncovered in investigations that do not result in charges. In this instance, Comey decided not to follow those strictures. Why? As he put it during the press conference, he was making his “unusual statement” because “the American people deserve those details in a case of intense public interest.” Put aside that a lot of investigations are of intense public interest and yet the usual no-comment rules are followed. What made this investigation of intense public interest was politics, pure and simple.

…[H]ad the protocols been followed, the FBI and Justice Department would have made no statements about the investigation, including no statement that it had been closed. Mrs. Clinton had no right to a clean bill of health from the FBI. She should have had to content herself with being able to note that she had not been charged with a crime and to urge that this meant she was not guilty of one. But she had no right to have voters advised, before going to the polls, that there was no active investigation into her misconduct. Fourth, there is an important reason why the FBI does not make a formal announcement when an investigation is closed without charges: It frequently happens that new information surfaces, justifying the reopening of the file.

McCarthy wrote that almost a week ago, before Comey was dismissed, but it dovetails with the reasons the Trump administration gave yesterday to explain the firing. It is certainly a valid set of reasons. Most people on the right (and some on the left, secretly) are happy to see Comey go, for a host of reasons. But the fact that the firing happened now, when the Trump/Flynn/Russia investigation is still moving forward (albeit slowly), gives Trump’s action at the very least the appearance of suspiciousness/impropriety, an appearance that can and will be fully exploited by the left. The Nixon comparisons abound, however dissimilar the situations may be.

Andrew McCarthy wrote the following yesterday:

The memorandum issued by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to explain Comey’s dismissal Tuesday is well crafted and will make it very difficult for Democrats to attack President Trump’s decision. Rosenstein bases the decision not merely on Comey’s much discussed missteps in the Clinton e-mails investigation ”” viz., usurping the authority of the attorney general to close the case without prosecution; failing to avail himself of the normal procedures for raising concerns about Attorney General Lynch’s conflict of interest. He goes on specifically to rebuke Comey’s “gratuitous” release of “derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal prosecution.” That “subject,” of course, would be Mrs. Clinton.

This (as I noted in a recent column) is exactly the line of attack Democrats have adopted since Clinton lost the election…

I disagree strongly with McCarthy’s statement that the reasoning in Rosentein’s memorandum “will make it very difficult for Democrats to attack President Trump’s decision.” On the contrary, they will find no problem whatsoever in doing so. It doesn’t matter how well-crafted Rosenstein’s enumeration of Comey’s errors is, and it doesn’t matter how many Democrats Rosenstein manages to quote who were in agreement months ago with what he’s saying now about Comey. Those Democrats are on another side of the political divide, and will act accordingly—as McCarthy himself seems to acknowledge towards the end of his piece when he writes:

Or at least it should be tough [for Democrats to criticize]. Trump being Trump, he could not resist saying, in his letter to Comey, “I greatly appreciate you [sic] informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.” On the off chance that the former director’s memory does not jibe with the president’s, Trump’s statement invites Comey to respond that this is not what happened. If Comey seizes on the invitation, the press angle would write itself: Comey, it would be said, was fired because he was trying to conduct the investigation of Trump-Russia ties about which he recently testified, not because of the bipartisan consensus that is described in Rosenstein’s memorandum.

And that, in a nutshell, is what many people say and/or believe—and, although they didn’t really need Trump’s “invitation” or assistance to make them think along those lines, they got it. But the press angle already wrote itself, because it makes sense, whether it’s actually true or not. And with the release of the news on the same day that prosecutors had issued subpoenas in connection with the Flynn investigation, the plot has thickened:

Federal prosecutors have issued grand jury subpoenas seeking business records from people who worked with former U.S. national security adviser Michael Flynn when he was a private citizen, CNN reported on Tuesday.

Citing people familiar with the matter, CNN said the subpoenas were issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Alexandria, Virginia. They targeted people who worked with Flynn on contracts after he was pushed out of his job as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014, it reported.

I don’t know about you, but I agree with Republican Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, who said that “Comey’s firing and…dismissal ‘further confuses an already difficult investigation by the committee.'” Indeed. Burr’s statement does not seem to emanate from any particular Trump animus, either; he was a supporter of Trump and an advisor during his campaign.

Will the Comey firing and the reaction to it matter in the political sense? Or will it be another tempest in a teapot that dies down as the next crisis rears up? That will depend in part on who Trump chooses to replaces Comey, and whether that person is perceived to be proceeding with all the investigations in an objective manner, or whether he/she is seen as being too Trump-friendly and essentially a Trump stooge.

And about that, I have to say this: well see.

Just a few more facts on the GOP AHCA bill and pre-existing conditions

The New Neo Posted on by

Sick of the topic? Well, I am too. But this is well worth reading nonetheless. Despite everything we’ve already learned about pre-existing conditions and the GOP health care coverage bill, some of the following details may be news to you:

You’re not affected [by the change in the law concerning pre-existing conditions] if you get insurance through your employer (155 million people), or through Medicaid or Medicare. You’re not affected if you live in a state that doesn’t request the waiver, a category that will certainly include every blue state and most red states, too. Even if you buy insurance on the individual market and live in a state that gets a waiver, you’re not affected if you’ve maintained insurance coverage continuously and not had a gap in coverage longer than 63 days.

By this point, we’re talking about a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the population. If you do have a pre-existing condition in a waiver state and haven’t had continuous coverage, you can be charged more by your insurer only the first year. The state will have access to $8 billion in federal funds explicitly to ease the cost of your insurance, and the state must further have a high-risk pool or similar program to mitigate insurance costs for the sick.

Clearly, if Republicans set out to recklessly endanger the well-being of people with pre-existing conditions, they didn’t do a very good job of it. The purpose of these provisions isn’t to punish people who are sick, but to create an incentive for people to buy insurance while they are healthy.

The outright lies and the many distortions and scare tactics around how this part of the bill would work are legion, however, and will remain so. I don’t think there is any topic in the Obamacare/Trumpcare argument that lends itself more to emotional blackmail than this one.

Comey’s out!

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, well, well.

By now you may know that Trump has fired James Comey from his position as FBI head, to take effect immediately.

I’m not going to write an in-depth post about this tonight—I’m visiting relatives—but I wanted to provide an open thread for you to discuss it. Tomorrow I plan to have more to say.

You can go almost anywhere to find articles about the event; it’s the talk of the internet and the MSM at the moment, as you might expect. Memeorandum has a varied roundup of sources, if you want to start there.

A sonnet in praise of sonnets

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post.]

I write some poetry from time to time,
And gravitate to forms, I must confess.
I crave some meter and a bit of rhyme.
Free verse can be illusory progress.
The sonnet with its prescribed fourteen lines
Presents a special challenge to be met,
A game that Frost, my hero, thus defines:
No point in playing tennis with no net.

Ah, freedom! It’s a lofty modern goal.
And rules? Meant to be broken, don’t you see?
Let’s shed the last vestige of stiff control
And revel in a life and art that’s free!
But rules are guides, not just constraints or chains.
Throw all out, and mere anarchy remains.

For those of you unfamiliar with what it’s like to try to write a sonnet (and I’d guess that might be most of you), please take my word for it when I say that it is really a very demanding form of poetry.

But fun, like a game with rules. If you like to solve double-crostics or crossword puzzles you might have a taste of what I’m talking about.

The form I follow in the above sonnet is the basic Shakespearean or Elizabethan one. Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter (five pairs of stressed/unstressed syllables per line), rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg. The convention of this type of sonnet also involves setting up a theme in the first eight lines and moving in a slightly different direction for the next six, including a sort of summing-up or even reversal in the final couplet.

That’s a lot of rules, to be sure. That’s why Frost’s likening the writing of formal poetry to a sport such as tennis is apropos: the point is to do it well despite the constraints, and to make of it something beautiful and free. Having no rules would spoil the game.

My sonnet here is not one of the greatest examples of the art, to be sure. I wrote it in about fifteen minutes, if that’s any excuse.

Some of the finest examples are to be found in Shakespeare, as one might expect from someone who gave his name to a popular subset of the form. More recent (although not all that recent) famous sonnet-crafters have been Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Gerard Manley Hopkins (what’s up with all these lengthy poet names, anyway?).

The sonnet is experiencing a small modern revival after a period of being way out of fashion. The New Formalists have led the movement.

Some of my favorite sonnets are the subtle ones in which you barely notice the form is being used, and yet all the rules have been followed. Here’s an example from Archibald Macleish (first published in 1928):

THE END OF THE WORLD

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all.

Selling health insurance across state lines is not that simple

The New Neo Posted on by

It would seem to be a no-brainer: why not allow insurance policies to be sold across state lines? There are such huge differentials in state regulations and prices and policies, why not let market forces operate and give the consumer more choices that way?

But allowing health insurance to cross state lines is nowhere near as simple as that. See this, for example. The problem is not just a question of state regulations (although that is part of it), it’s economics and the peculiarities of the health care market.

For example:

“Currently individual states can decide whether or not to allow insurers to sell plans from another state in their state,” the Center for Health & Economy wrote…“However, even where this is allowed, various barriers such as the difficulty of building a network and attracting enough customers to create a large enough risk pool make it unappealing to insurers to pursue this option.”

And there’s the rub, which is a similar problem President Obama’s Affordable Care Act has faced with risk pools not having enough healthy people buying policies to pay the mounting costs of the sick.

“Sales across state lines would reduce premiums for those who are healthy at a given time while increasing premiums and reducing access to coverage for those with current or past health problems,” according to an analysis earlier this year by the Urban Institute’s health policy center.

Furthermore, consumers need to have an adequate network of doctors and hospitals in order to get the care they need and that means insurers have to spend more money to pay these providers. Since it’s a costly proposition for the insurers to build these networks of doctors and hospitals in new regions, health plans aren’t generally willing to enter new markets, analysts say.

More here:

Several states, including Georgia, Maine and Wyoming have passed laws allowing companies from other states to come in and compete for patients. The Georgia experiment is particularly noteworthy, given that it was highly praised by Republicans when it passed the Legislature in 2011.

Five years later, there have been no takers. Maine and Wyoming have had no better luck attracting insurers.

“As much as people talk about the Affordable Care Act as a national system, all health care is essentially local,” said Rene Santiago, director of the Santa Clara Valley Health and Hospital System. “It all comes down to the doctor-patient relationship and the willingness of doctors and health care providers to enter into agreements with insurance companies.”…

It’s not just that the market is different from Mississippi. The health care market in Northern California is vastly different from the Central Valley and Southern California markets.

Both of the articles I linked to in this post are written from an anti-Trump perspective. But I had read similar facts before about the difficulty of insurance being sold across state lines, long before Trump’s candidacy and even long before Obamacare was passed.

The American Enterprise Institute has chimed in on the topic as well, explaining somewhat better what the conservative point of view is:

It is clear that regulatory competition can’t work if the federal government is the primary regulator. That is why Republicans also support returning regulatory authority to the states as part of a broader reform of the health system. But even in that context, one should not expect interstate sales to significantly reduce the cost of health insurance.

A health plan offered in New York City will charge a higher premium than the identical plan offered in rural Colorado because of differences in those markets other than regulations. New York City has higher costs for housing, food, and other consumer purchases, and those costs are built into the prices of medical services. New York has an older, less healthy population that uses more medical services. In addition, New York has more local physicians and greater access to expensive medical technologies, which also drives up the cost of coverage.

Supporters of allowing insurers to sell across state lines are making an important policy point. Health insurance in this country is overly burdened by regulations that raise costs without providing value for many consumers. Even with substantial subsidies, enrollment in exchange plans has fallen well below what was expected when Obamacare was enacted. Reforms are needed to make the individual insurance market more responsive to consumers and taxpayers.

Regulatory competition is one tool in establishing a balance between cost and consumer protection in health insurance, but it must be part of a broader reform agenda to be effective.

I’m puzzled by one sentence in that AEI article: “supporters of allowing insurers to sell across state lines…” But it is already completely legal for insurers to sell across state lines; they are allowed to do it, it just doesn’t make much sense to do it at the moment.

If you want to see other possible drawbacks to selling health insurance across state lines, take a look at this. Are these just scare tactics? Or are they valid projection of what would probably happen?

Trump’s EO and the law, revisited

The New Neo Posted on by

In her hearing before the Senate, Sally Yates changed her tune from some of her previous statements on her reasons for not defending Trump’s immigration EO.

In other related news, the legal reasoning several judges used to invalidate Trump’s immigration EOs—that his campaign statements were extremely relevant and indicated his supposedly discriminatory intent in issuing the orders as president—leads inevitably to preposterous conclusions such as these:

ACLU lawyer Omar Jadwat, arguing today before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, told the court that President Trump’s travel order “could be constitutional” if it had been written by Hillary Clinton…

The last part of the audio is rather funny. Jadwat, asked whether the order on its face is valid, says No. Why? “I don’t think so, Your Honor, because the order is completely unprecedented.” To which one of the Fourth Circuit judges replies, with astonishment that seems mostly genuine: “So the first order on anything is invalid?”

In his post, John Hinderaker calls that kind of legal argument “lawless nonsense.” But such lawless nonsense follows directly from the judicial decisions handed down against Trump’s EO. As the rulings were issued it became clear—because of the liberal judges’ reliance on Trump’s supposed thoughtcrime, as evidenced in some of his campaign statements—that no subsequent EO of Trump’s on immigration that involved any majority Muslim country would ever be held constitutional by these judges, no matter how carefully and fairly drafted. Trump had committed the original sin during the campaign, and all the perfumes of Arabia cannot sweeten that little hand.

Time to ditch that Stradivarius?

The New Neo Posted on by

People seem to think that new violins sound better:

In tests at concert halls in Paris and New York, audiences were asked to listen to soloists performing on brand new violins, and three made by master fiddle maker Stradivari.

The ”˜internationally renowned’ violinists performed behind a screen ”“ so the audience could not see what they were playing.

And to ensure the experiment was not influenced by the music makers themselves, they performed blindfolded.

The researchers focused on which violins were louder ”“ allowing audiences to hear them better ”“ and which were preferred.

Not only were the new violins louder, but the audience said they liked them better.

Lest you think the audiences were a bunch of musically unaware Philistines, ponder this:

The audience in Paris were 55 ”˜musically versed’ people including violinists, violin makers and acoustics experts, while those in New York were 82 who were less musically experienced.

What’s more:

The authors say that previous research has found that violin soloists generally prefer new violins in blind tests and cannot distinguish between new and old at better than chance levels.

I guess progress—at least, in violin-making—isn’t an illusion.

Less than a third of Americans approve of the AHCA (Trumpcare, that is)

The New Neo Posted on by

Sounds bad, doesn’t it?

Then again, considering the fevered coverage of Trumpcare, it’s amazing that anyone approves of it at all.

But if you take a look at what the HuffPost/YouGov poll is actually saying, the headline about “less than a third” is true but misleading. Thirty-one percent of respondents were in favor, 44% against, and 25% percent say they don’t know enough yet.

25% is an awful lot of “don’t know enough yet,” but I think that it should actually be 100% in that last category, if people were being honest. How many people know anything about it but the headlines? That would probably be close to 100%, too.

But I cannot tell you how ver many people I’ve heard in the last week or so making casual derogatory contemptuous remarks about the bill. Clearly, the MSM propaganda has made its mark. But the proof of the AHCA pudding—as it was with Obamacare—will be in its actual effects on people’s lives, if and when the GOP ever does manage to pass and implement a final bill.

And then…we’ll see.

Talking about vaginas

The New Neo Posted on by

Feminist author Naomi Wolf writes about “the resurgence of blatant sexism in politics.” The opening paragraph of her article goes like this:

When I published a book called Vagina four years ago, arguing that targeting the genitals and sexuality of women was a political ploy, and that women need to defend their sexuality””and even their genitals””overtly in order to be a potent political force, the topic was seen to be outré, and I was chastised for introducing women’s reproductive organs into politics. The vagina has since made many rather shocking appearances in the political fray. Donald Trump and Billy Bush talked about grabbing women’s vaginas without permission. The New York Times ran the word “pussy” on the front page for the first time in its history. And when a woman with a national platform””Fox News’s Megyn Kelly””called Donald Trump out on broadcast television, like a metronome, Trump invoked for viewers the image of Ms. Kelly’s bleeding vagina. This attack was meant to silence Kelly, just as attacks on women’s vaginas always have been.

So now, let’s see where this “resurgence” came from. Donald Trump and Billy Bush’s “talk about grabbing women’s vaginas without permission” made a “rather shocking appearance in the political fray” solely because Trump’s enemies searched for something to use against him, and dug the incident up from a minor 2005 appearance of his that wasn’t part of the “political fray” at all (or, for that matter, the public fray) even back in 2005. It was a private conversation “caught on tape” during a recording session for an “Access Hollywood” clip. It could not have been further from public political discourse until the Democrats went looking and found it and publicized it, hoping to make political hay of it. And then that’s why the Times ran the word “pussy”—because Democrats hopefully introduced it into political discourse.

And what of the invocation of the image of Megyn Kelly’s “bleeding vagina”? Let’s revisit that incident:

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Friday night that Fox News Channel anchor Megyn Kelly “had blood coming out of her eyes” when she aggressively questioned him during Thursday’s presidential debate.

“She gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions,” Trump said in a CNN interview. “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever. In my opinion, she was off base.”

(On Saturday morning, Trump tweeted that he was referring to Kelly’s nose. His campaign also issued a statement, claiming Trump said “whatever” instead of “wherever,” while again repeating that the reference was to her nose.)

Trump certainly mentions blood, but the orifice he specifies is eyes. You can fill in the blank yourself for the “wherever” or the “whatever” that follows, but “vagina” would not have been the first thing I would assume he meant, and it doesn’t even make sense. “Blood coming out of his/her eyes” means someone being agitated or vehement, and Trump also used the phrase again in the same interview to refer to Chris Wallace’s eyes, as well. No vagina image there. If Trump “invoked” the image of Kelly’s bleeding vagina in people’s minds, it was in a subtle way that relied on an association that I certainly didn’t make. It was his enemies who specifically invoked that image, once again—and I wonder what percentage of listeners would even have thought of it without their helpful and explicit suggestions.

So the “resurgence” of all this vagina talk is on the Democratic side (and Wolf gives many example when she describes the images women brought to the post-inauguration march on the Mall), not the Republican or Trumpian. And that’s exactly what Ms. Wolf says she had been accused of doing when she wrote her book Vagina: “introducing women’s reproductive organs into politics.” It makes perfect sense for the left to do so, because the idea that Republicans are attacking their genitals is certainly a good way to encourage women’s natural tendency to vote Democratic anyway. Wolf knows that full well, and exploits it mightily, just as she’s doing in her New Republic piece.

Here’s another genitalia invocation by Wolf:

Within days of assuming office, President Trump signed an executive order limiting access to birth control and safe abortions in countries that receive US aid. In the photo of the signing, he is flanked by seven white men with their hands folded nervously over their gray-suit-clad penises. With its painful irony, the photo went viral.

I think Ms. Wolf needs help; she’s fixated on genitals, both male and female, and seeing them everywhere.

Speaking of which, she adds:

The penis has made dramatic political appearances as well. Anthony Weiner’s snaps of his genitals on social media became a powerful opposition tool for Republicans. Missteps””even serious missteps””of errant sexuality by powerful white men in the past were politely glossed over by other white men. Now, they have became lurid fodder for political battle. Anthony Weiner’s penis was used as a way to attack both his wife, Huma Abedin, and her boss, Secretary Clinton, replaying traditional uses of the phallus to smite powerful women.

So, let’s get this straight. According to Wolf, when Democrats uncover a private Trump conversation from 2005 and use it politically during the 2016 campaign, it’s Trump who’s responsible for bringing pussies into today’s political discourse. But when Weiner emails photos of his genitals in the present, and Republicans use that fact politically, it’s the Republicans who are responsible for bringing penises into the fray as “lurid fodder for political battle,” and a way to attack women, not Weiner, thus “replaying traditional uses of the phallus to smite powerful women.”

I wasn’t particularly familiar with Wolf prior to writing this post, but while researching it I discovered that she’s parlayed writing about women’s bodies and genitalia from an outraged feminist point of view into an entire career, not just in leftist academia (where you’d expect it) but on the popular front as well. Along the way, she’s become so profoundly paranoid and irrational in her writing that even many of her fellow leftist feminists have been condemning her.

And then there was the time in 2004 when she accused Professor Harold Bloom of having made a pass at her twenty years earlier when she was an undergrad at Yale. There are many articles on the subject; you can Google and read them yourself if you’re the least bit inclined (here’s one more). But the gist of it—if you take everything Wolf herself says as the gospel truth, which we’ll do here for the sake of discussion—is that he was her professor, they were having dinner at her house, they were both drinking and probably drunk, he touched her thigh, she told him “no,” and he stopped and left the apartment, but not before she had vomited in the sink at the horror of it all and he had delivered the line “You are a deeply troubled girl.”

It’s hard to disagree with him; the remark sounds nothing if not perceptive. How on earth would a student of twenty (Wolf’s age at the time) not understand that the setting—her apartment, the drink, the older prof with the beautiful (Wolf is quite attractive) younger woman—would be highly likely to engender a pass? Bloom didn’t press the situation, either. So why the horror, wherefore the outrage?

I’ve already written too much about Wolf and her oeuvre, probably more than it warrants. But Wolf has influenced—and continues to influence—generations of young women, and continues to be published. Reading her work, I’m struck not just by the extremity of her feminist rage and paranoia and her reliance on jargon, but in particular by her intellectual laziness and lack of logic. With her impeccable academic credentials (Yale, Rhodes Scholar), how is it that she can’t seem to think straight?

That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.

[NOTE: In somewhat related news, Michael Goodwin believes we will have Hillary Clinton to kick around some more.]

Good news coming on the judicial front

The New Neo Posted on by

Very good news indeed:

President Trump is expected to announce his selection of at least five conservative nominees to federal appeals courts as early as Monday, building on his successful nomination of Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

Sources close to the process said Mr. Trump will nominate Michigan Supreme Court Justice Joan Larsen and Louisville, Kentucky attorney John K. Bush to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals; Minnesota Supreme Court Justice David Stras to the 8th Circuit; University of Notre Dame law professor Amy Coney Barrett to the 7th Circuit, and Alabama lawyer Kevin Newsom to the 11th Circuit.

Justices Larsen and Stras were on the president’s list of conservative judges whom he said during the campaign he would consider for the Supreme Court.

The president also will appoint four judges to district court seats.

This is the reason a lot of conservatives voted for Trump. And this will have far-reaching effects, just as President Obama’s many federal appointments did.

The nominations should sail through the Senate, thanks to the Republicans’ continuation of the nuclear option the Democrats put in place when they controlled that legislative body.

Macron wins…

The New Neo Posted on by

…handily.

Which shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone at all.

However, it may be somewhat surprising that the polls were relatively accurate in the case of this election, at least in the general sense that they forecast a Macron landslide victory with an enormous gap between the two candidates. In fact, Macron seems to have done even better than the 20% margin predicted by most polls towards the end, getting around 66% to Le Pen’s 34%.

France now follows in the footsteps of the US and Canada in choosing a neophyte to politics for its highest post. I’m unaware of any other time in recent history when this was the case in so many major countries in the West, or even any countries in the West (unless you count this):

Macron will now face huge challenges as he attempts to enact his domestic agenda of cutting state spending, easing labour laws, boosting education in deprived areas and extending new protections to the self-employed.

The philosophy and literature lover is inexperienced, has no political party and must try to fashion a working parliamentary majority after legislative elections next month.

His En Marche movement — “neither of the left, nor right” — has vowed to field candidates in all 577 constituencies, with half of them women and half of them newcomers to politics.

Macron was a socialist just a short while ago, but some of his proposals don’t seem to fit into a socialist box:

…[Macron’s] economic agenda, particularly plans to weaken labour regulations to fight stubbornly high unemployment, are likely to face fierce resistance from trade unions and his leftist opponents.

Macron is a supporter of the EU, so Brussels can breathe a sigh of relief. But although I’m not an EU supporter, I’m also not a big Le Pen fan and would have been extremely nervous had she been elected. As commenter “expat” writes:

I’m happy about Macron because he is not the anti-American pro-Putin socialist Le Pen…She was also proposing 2 currencies, the Franc and the EU. Macron maybe an unwritten chapter, but he is said to be smart and he wants economic reforms. He did not pin himself down to many specifics, which I hope means that he will be able to look at situations and act pragmatically. We will have to wait and see.

Where have we heard that before? We’ll see.

Sheila Nevins and sleeping with your boss

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t get HBO and don’t think I’ve ever watched one of their documentaries. So the name “Sheila Nevins” meant very little to me, but the headline of this article caught my eye. It features an interview in which Nevins is promoting her new book, and the title (of the article, not the book) is “HBO Docs Genius Sheila Nevins Says She Slept With Bosses Early in Her Career.”

So hey, my curiosity piqued, I clicked on it. Here’s Nevins, who is one of the most honored (in the sense of Emmys, that is) documentary producer in television history, describing her rise to power:

Sheila Nevins, the lauded documentary maven of HBO, recently told “CBS” that she slept with her bosses early in her career. “I don’t know that I slept my way to the top, but I didn’t not sleep with my bosses in the early days, when they wanted me,” she said in an interview with Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes.”

However, with the rise of feminism, and taking inspiration from Gloria Steinem, Nevins said she ditched what can be described as a “Mad Men”-era strategy and began succeeding on her own merit.

“It just splashes you in the face and you say, ”˜Why have I done this? Why am I wearing tight jeans to work? Why am I starving myself on some diet? Why am I sleeping with the boss? And why am I thinking that’s the way to go up?’ And it was the way. It worked. I would love to say it didn’t work. It would be so appropriate, so now. But it worked,” Nevins said.

So, it was only Gloria Steinem who motivated Nevins to ask questions like “Why am I sleeping with the boss?” Did Nevins have no prior moral sense or psychological curiosity at all, irrespective of feminism? And was she sleeping with bosses she wasn’t even attracted to, in order to get ahead? Were some of these bosses married (I would be very surprised if the answer wasn’t “yes”)? Are any of them still alive—or are their wives—and is this revelation going to screw up what remains of their marriages?

Nevins’ blithe mindset, then and now, and her extreme self-interest and self-promotion, is hardly unique. Hey, it worked, as she says. So that must make it right—in the practical sense, anyway. And is there any other, according to Nevins?

Perhaps in her book Nevins expresses some form of regret. I haven’t read it; maybe I will, out of curiosity. But in that article she seems utterly pragmatic, as in it’s what you had to do to get ahead, and so I did it, and I didn’t question it until Steinem the feminist removed the scales from my eyes.

The subtext of Nevins’ discussion is that, prior to feminism, this was the only way to get ahead, but that after feminism merit was more likely to be rewarded, and that that justifies her earlier behavior. Well, for those who put ambition above all else, I suppose it would. Is it even true? Not strictly (I knew exceptions, even back when I was growing up), although Nevins seems to be using it as a justification.

It’s ironic, now that women are acknowledged to have achieved the ability to advance without sleeping with everyone in sight, they’ve become exceedingly touchy about anything that even smacks of sex or sexual advances in the workplace. But does anyone doubt that some women are still using the time-honored “sleep your way up” routine to facilitate their climb, and fully justifying it with hey, it works? Sometimes, anyway. The boss in question had better be careful though—because afterwards, he might get slapped with a harassment suit.

And, since I can’t seem to get away from talking about health care coverage reform lately, I couldn’t help but notice another quote from Nevins:

Early on at HBO, Nevins developed the series “Real Sex” and “G-String Divas,” which received backlash for their portrayal of sex work. She said that colleagues asked her, “How could you?” But Nevins found that there were far bigger issues. “Why not? Well, who was getting hurt? The real pornography of life is living without healthcare; it’s not sliding up and down a pole for a buck,” she told Stahl.

This is the caliber of the mind shaping the documentaries at HBO. Now, I have no doubt Nevins knows how to produce a documentary that grabs viewers. But no; pornography is pornography, and living without healthcare is living without healthcare, and it’s another problem entirely. And then there’s EMTALA (as I keep repeating)…

In researching Nevins and her life, I also happened across this incident in which Nevins and her husband were involved in January of 2009:

Sheila Nevins, the president of HBO Documentary Films, was flying with her husband Sidney Koch to New York January 20 [at the time of Obama’s first inauguration] from the Sundance Film Festival in Utah aboard a Delta Airlines flight. Ms. Nevins, in first class, had checked beforehand to make sure that live television would be available, according to her lawyer, John Horan.

But shortly after takeoff, many of the television monitors in first class failed, including Ms. Nevins’ monitor, Mr. Horan said.

Adding to the aggravation were announcements from the cockpit of the sort that “those on the left side of the plane can see some lovely scenery .”

“Sidney had been watching Obama’s speech and a couple times when President Obama was speaking, the airplane pilot made a public address interrupting Obama’s speech,” said Jean Frost, an assistant executive director at the Directors Guild, who was also in first class. “Sidney got very upset at that happening and went to talk to the stewardess.”…

“There was a customer who was upset that the in-seat screen wasn’t working and became verbally abusive to a flight attendant, and that flight was met by local law enforcement,” said Betsy Talton, a spokesperson for Delta…

Port Authority police at Kennedy Airport led Mr. Koch and Ms. Nevins off the plane and they were questioned in the public waiting area, Mr. Horan [Nevins’ lawyer] said. “They were detained at JFK in a public space for two hours and were humiliated by the experience. It was ghastly and unnecessary.”

Ah, but maybe that’s the real pornography .