A few more wedding pictures.
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From time to time I post articles I believe are so insightful they are worth re-posting. This is one I believe fits that bill. (See 1 below.)
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Can The New York Times sink any lower? Will Bret Stephens speak out? You decide. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Has a nuclear breakthrough with N Korea occurred? (See 3 below.)
Meanwhile: Today the economic news continued to be favorable. It is ironical that a "nut case" president has been able to do much good in such a short period of time.
Perhaps crude businessmen who have had a lot to do with working with people. hiring and firing people and building buildings and creating architectural beauty better serve us than politicians who never did a meaningful day's work, never showed for a lot of votes and organized communities with tax funded money.
Just another strange thought of mine. You decide.
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Dick
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1) Blame Congress for Politicizing the Court
By Ben Sasse
amily: Helvetica; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px;"> Mr. Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. This is adapted from his opening statement at Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++When lawmakers hand power to bureaucrats, the people expect judges to act as superlegislators.
It’s predictable now that every Supreme Court confirmation hearing will be a politicized circus. This is because Americans have accepted a bad new theory about how the three branches of government should work—and in particular about how the judiciary operates.Brett Kavanaugh has been accused of hating women, hating children, hating clean air, wanting dirty water. He’s been declared an existential threat to the nation. Alumni of Yale Law School, incensed that faculty members at his alma mater praised his selection, wrote a public letter to the school saying: “People will die if Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed.”In the U.S. system, the legislative branch is supposed to be the center of politics. Why isn’t it? For the past century, more legislative authority has been delegated to the executive branch every year. Both parties do it. The legislature is weak, and most people here in Congress want their jobs more than they want to do legislative work. So they punt most of the work to the next branch.The consequence of this transfer of power is that people yearn for a place where politics can actually be done. When we don’t do a lot of big political debating here in Congress, we transfer it to the Supreme Court. And that’s why the court is increasingly a substitute political battleground. We badly need to restore the proper duties and the balance of power to our constitutional system.If there are lots of protests in front of the Supreme Court, that’s an indication that the republic isn’t healthy. People should be protesting in front of this body instead. The legislature is designed to be controversial, noisy, sometimes even rowdy—because making laws means we have to hash out matters about which we don’t all agree.How did the legislature decide to give away its power? We’ve been doing it for a long time. Over the course of the past century, especially since the 1930s and ramping up since the 1960s, the legislative branch has kicked a lot of its responsibility to alphabet-soup bureaucracies. These are the places where most actual policy-making—in a way, lawmaking—happens now.What we mostly do around this body is not pass laws but give permission to bureaucracy X, Y or Z to make lawlike regulations. We write giant pieces of legislation that people haven’t read, filled with terms that are undefined, and we say the secretary or administrator of such-and-such shall promulgate rules that do the rest of our jobs. That’s why there are so many fights about the executive branch and the judiciary—because Congress rarely finishes its work.There are rational arguments one could make for this new system. Congress can’t manage all the nitty-gritty details of modern government, and this system tries to give power and control to experts in technical fields, about which most of us in Congress don’t know much of anything.But the real reason this institution punts most of its power to executive-branch agencies is because it is a convenient way to avoid responsibility for controversial and unpopular decisions. If your biggest long-term priority is your own re-election, then giving away your power is a pretty good strategy.But when Congress gives power to an unaccountable fourth branch of government, the people are cut out of the process. Nobody in Nebraska, Minnesota or Delaware elected the deputy assistant administrator of plant quarantine at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. If that person does something that makes Nebraskans’ lives difficult, where do they go to protest? How do they navigate the complexity of this town to do executive-agency lobbying? They can’t.They don’t have any ability to speak out or to fire people through an election. When the administrative state grows—when there is this fourth branch of government—it becomes harder for the concerns of citizens to be represented and articulated by officials who answer to the people. The Supreme Court becomes a substitute political battleground. It’s only nine people. You can know them; you can demonize them; you can try to make them messiahs. Because people can’t navigate their way through the bureaucracy, they turn to the Supreme Court looking for politics. They look to nine justices to be superlegislators, to right the wrongs from other places in the process.When people talk about wanting “empathy” from the justices, that’s what they’re talking about—trying to make the justices do something Congress refuses to do as it constantly abdicates its responsibility. The hyperventilating that we see in this process shows us a system that is wildly out of whack.The solution is not to try to find judges who will be policy makers or to turn the Supreme Court into an election battle. The solution is to restore a proper constitutional order with the balance of powers. We need a Congress that writes laws, then stands before the people and faces the consequences. We need an executive branch that has a humble view of its job as enforcing the law, not trying to write laws in Congress’s absence. And we need a judiciary that applies written laws to facts in cases that are actually before it.This is the elegant, fair process the Founders created. It’s a process in which the people who are elected can be fired, because the men and women who serve America by wearing black robes are insulated from politics. This is why we talk about an independent judiciary. This is why we shouldn’t talk about Republican and Democratic judges and justices. This is why we say justice is blind. This is why we give judges lifetime tenure.And this is why this is the last job interview Judge Kavanaugh will ever have. Because he’s going to a job in which he’s not supposed to be a superlegislator.
2)The week's news that wasn't
The anonymous 'senior official'
Much ado is being made over the op-ed published inThe New York TimesWednesday, allegedly written by a member of the internal resistance on Donald Trump's staff. But while the op-ed's created a bruhaha among the nattering classes and, of course, amped up the idiot neocon #NeverTrumpers and mindless leftists, we see it as confirmation that there is a Deep State, something both the #NeverTrumpers and idiot leftists have repeatedly told us is fake news.
Additionally, the column doesn't accomplish what the author -- if he/she is indeed a "senior official in the Trump Administration" (which we highly doubt, given The Times' record quoting "senior officials") – attempts to accomplish. AsThe Washington Examiner notes, the "senior official in the Trump Administration" acknowledges that Trump's policies have "already made America safer and prosperous," citing "effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more." But the complaints about Trump boil down to Trump's "leadership style" and that he's not a "philosophical conservative" in the mode of John McCain.
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The writer admits there's a soft coup underway, something many of us outside the District of Criminals have been saying was happening since before Trump was inaugurated. And while the nattering nabobs of the chattering and political classes focused on real "senior officials" like Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General Jeff Sessions as the possible author, former Obama White House Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri noted that "this person could easily be someone most of us have never heard of and more junior than you'd expect."
Experience has shown us that "anonymous sources" in the mainstream media most often equals "we made it up." Given that this big reveal dropped on the heels of the release of excerpts from Bob Woodward's new book – and echoes Woodward's claims contained therein – we think this is just more fake news. And the "senior official" is likely just one of the sources for his book, the contents of which is already coming into question.
But when push comes to shove, it doesn't matter who wrote it or if it's legitimate. It's not going to change any minds among Trump's supporters. They voted for him because he's not a "philosophical conservative" like McCain or one who goes along to get along like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. That's precisely what they were sick of, because so-called "philosophical conservatives" in Washington have grown government, given us perpetual war, advocated for amnesty and surrendered to leftists on virtually every important policy for the last 30 years. And that's what the #NeverTrumpers can't seem to grasp.
Was civility buried with John McCain?
Of all the ridiculous sophisms to emanate from the McCain deification ceremonies we just endured, none exceed the notion that "civil discourse" perished with the grumpy insane senator from Arizona.
As Dallasnews.com puts it, during the seemingly perpetual blarney-fests over the warmongering political hack, "speaker after speaker praised McCain's dedication to civil discourse across our political differences." That narrative was repeated in editorial cartoons (see the example below) and editorials.
But the narrative is, as we say in Alabama, hogwash. It's also known as fake news.
Here are a few examples of McCain's brand of "civil discourse:"
- Reported in The New Yorker on July 16, 2015, a few days after a Trump campaign rally held in Phoenix, in McCain's home state, McCain offered his displeasure over the rally. "It's very bad," he said. Going farther, "[t]his performance with our friend out in Phoenix is very hurtful to me," McCain said. "Because what he did was he fired up the crazies."
- In an interview with the Huffington Post after Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul's 13-hour filibuster of CIA nominee John Brennan, McCain referred to Paul, Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Republican Michigan Rep. Justin Amash as "wacko birds." -- "They were elected, nobody believes that there was a corrupt election, anything else," McCain said. "But I also think that when, you know, it's always the wacko birds on right and left that get the media megaphone."
- Reading from a Wall Street Journal editorial, McCain panned the right-wing idea of refusing to increase the debt ceiling in order to force Democrats to tackle entitlement reform and a balanced-budget amendment, after which "the Tea-Party Hobbits could return to Middle-earth having defeated Mordor."
- "The only conclusion you can draw when he walks away is he has no argument to be made. He has no justification for his objection to having a small nation be part of NATO that is under assault from the Russians," McCain said. "So I repeat again: The senator from Kentucky (Rand Paul) is now working for Vladimir Putin."
- McCain, appearing on MSNBC, called President Trump a "stupid idiot" for considering [the nuclear] option [to push through Neil Gorsuch's nomination to the Supreme Court].
Another global warming alarmist proves global warming is fake news
This week The New York Times blamed Roger Federer's stunning loss in the U.S. Open to "the effects of climate change."
After the loss, Federer said the playing conditions played a role in his loss:
| "It was hot," Federer said. It "was just one of those nights where I guess I felt I couldn't get air; there was no circulation at all." |
From there, the "newspaper of record" went into a typical climate alarmist diatribe, claiming, "Under climate change, overall temperatures are rising — 2018 is on track to be the fourth-warmest year on record."
But this is just more fake news from the Old Gray Lady. In 1988, writing forDiscover magazine, global warming alarmist Andrew Revkin wrote a typically dire forecast of the great calamities awaiting us because of global warming. In his column he noted that the global temperature is currently (in 1988) a comfortable 59 degrees.
Last year's global temperature was 58.51 degrees, which we are told is the second or third-hottest on record -- a conclusion that only a math-challenged journalism school graduate or fact-challenged climate alarmist could reach.
So if global temperatures were "a comfortable 59 degrees" in 1988, and last year's temperature of 58.51 was the second or third hottest year on record, and this year's temperature is going to be the fourth-warmest year on record, what we learn is that there has been no global warming for 30 years.
But we've already seen from data supplied by the father of global warming, Dr. James Hansen, that the temperature has actually been stable for a lot longer than that. According to a graph printed in The Times – which apparently never consults its own archives -- in 1988 from data supplied by Hansen, the global temperature in the late 1800s was 58.5 degrees, and the average global temperature from 1950-1980 was 59 degrees.
Let me say this slowly for the mindless minions who have swallowed the global warming alarmist propaganda. The average global temperature today is the same as it was 30 years. The average global temperature today is the same as it was 130 years ago. There. Is. No. Global. Warming.
Kavanaugh didn't pull his hand back
Anti-gun activist Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jamie died during the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas School in Parkland, Florida, because of bad government policies and the ineptitude of the Broward County Sheriff's Department and the FBI -- neither of which followed up on information that the shooter was a psychopath who was about to break -- pulled a cheap and stupid stunt at the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and then blatantly lied about what happened.
Before the hearing, Guttenberg tweeted:
| "I will be at Kavanaugh hearings and I hope to play a role in ensuring that this man does not become the next Supreme Court Justice." |
So what was his plan? Bum rush the judge as he gets up from his hot seat during a break and then lie about Kavanaugh's reaction.
"Just walked up to Judge Kavanaugh as morning session ended," Guttenberg tweeted at the confirmation hearing. "Put out my hand to introduce myself as Jaime Guttenberg's dad. He pulled his hand back, turned his back to me and walked away. I guess he did not want to deal with the reality of gun violence."
That's not what happened. An obviously caught-off-guard Kavanaugh looked at Guttenberg like the idiot he was, probably trying to discern who he was and why and from where he should know him. Before Kavanaugh could react, security intervened and separated the two and Kavanaugh was ushered away. Kavanaugh never extended his hand at all. His hands were busy buttoning his coat.
We're very sorry your daughter is dead, Mr. Guttenberg. But like most leftists you're ignorant of the way American government works. If you want guns removed from American society you've got to convince congress to begin the process of repealing the 2nd Amendment or get enough states on board to call a convention of the states. Then you're going to have to deal with the violent repercussions that will come when confiscation begins.
It's not the Supreme Court's job to write law, and the 2nd Amendment is settled, and has been for 231 years.
— Jay Baker
2a)7 points on the anonymous New York Times 'resistance' op-ed
by Byron York
The New York Times' publication of an anonymously-authored article, "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration," set the world of political commentary on fire Wednesday afternoon. The author, whom the Times identified only as "a senior official in the Trump administration," claimed that he used his government position to thwart President Trump's "more misguided impulses." Others, also unnamed, joined him in the effort, he said. The article, quickly denounced by the president, promised to dominate cable news for days. Here are seven thoughts on what it means:
1) It concedes Trump's accomplishments are big. Early in the piece, the author admits that the Trump administration has had significant success on the issues most important to American voters. "Many of [the administration's] policies have already made America safer and more prosperous," he writes. Later, he makes a list: "effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more." Perhaps the author doesn't see it that way, but peace and prosperity are any president's two most important accomplishments. Conceding Trump's achievement undercuts the broader theme of the article.
2) Its complaints are small. Why does the author object to Trump? The president is not a true philosophical conservative, he says: "The president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people." In addition, the author complains that the president's "leadership style" is "impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective." And that can make White House meetings an ordeal: "Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back." The author may view that as a devastating critique, but to others it will seem like style points and inside baseball. And compared to his admission that Trump has made the country "safer and more prosperous," the article's gripes are relatively minor.
3) It suggests there is a government conspiracy to thwart the president. The author writes that he and others inside the administration are secretly working "to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump's more misguided impulses until he is out of office." At the same time, the author denies that there is a "deep state" seeking to stop Trump, preferring to call it a "steady state." That's not a distinction likely to make much of a difference. Certainly Trump has long believed that a "deep state" was out to get him. And now, as the conservative lawyer Will Chamberlain tweeted, the Times op-ed serves as "a confession that there is a deep state conspiracy to subvert" Trump. Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith tweeted: "I worry about how an open but anonymous celebration of a self-proclaimed 'steady state' thwarting not just the elected president's lying or illegality, but his whole policy agenda, will play before the many who believe that we're witnessing a soft coup by undemocratic means."
4) A "senior official" could be a lot of people. The Times identified the author only as "a senior official in the Trump administration." That could be anyone from officials we all have heard of, like the White House chief of staff, to an official in one of the departments whom no one has heard of. "There are hundreds of people at the White House who think they're 'senior' officials," former Bush White House spokesman Ari Fleischer tweeted Wednesday. "If this is a cabinet secretary, it's a problem. Maybe it's a National Security Council senior director. There are more than a dozen of them, and they're three levels down the NSC foodchain." Added former Obama White House communications director Jennifer Palmieri, "this person could easily be someone most of us have never heard of and more junior than you'd expect." On the other hand, the Washington Post's Karen Tumulty tweeted, "It is hard to imagine the NYT would have given anonymity on something like this to someone who was not at least as high as a cabinet secretary or assistant to the president." The truth of it all is, of course, unknown.
5) Anonymity is good marketing. What if the author had simply identified himself? Not only would everyone be able to evaluate his position, they would also look into his background and try to draw connections between his past and his role as self-appointed, in-house Trump resister. Instead, by remaining anonymous, the author — and the Times — have not only avoided scrutiny but have added an irresistible element of mystery and suspense to the story. That means more attention.
6) It looks like a Woodward tie-in. Perhaps the author has been planning the piece for months. Perhaps its release had nothing to do with the publicity campaign for "Fear: Trump in the White House", the new book by Bob Woodward. And perhaps the similarity between the article's theme and the book's theme — a small group of good-guy grown-ups protecting the country from Trump — is just a coincidence. But the article appears to be an effort to draft on the publicity around the Woodward effort.
7) We'll know more soon enough. The Times wrote that it granted the author anonymity because his "job would be jeopardized" by disclosure of his name. It seems hard to believe the author truly thinks he can remain anonymous — and keep his job — in the white-hot public attention his article will attract. One way or the other, his identity will likely come out, probably sooner rather than later. And then the story could become even more interesting.
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3) North Korea Announces Timeline For Denuclearization
North Korea has announced in a meeting with South Korea that it hopes to denuclearize by the end of Trump's first term.
According to The Daily Caller:
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3) North Korea Announces Timeline For Denuclearization
North Korea has announced in a meeting with South Korea that it hopes to denuclearize by the end of Trump's first term.
According to The Daily Caller:
It seemed as though the Trump administration had hit a roadblock with Kim's regime in discussions about denuclearization, but this new revelation may mean that progress is being made.North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is committed to a timeline for denuclearization that would see all his country’s nuclear weapons removed by the end of President Donald Trump’s term, South Korean officials said Thursday.
Kim met a delegation from Seoul on Wednesday to lay the groundwork for a summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in later this month.
The South Korean delegation said Kim’s faith in Trump remains “unchanged” and that he is committed to denuclearization despite recent setbacks in direct talks between Washington and Pyongyang.
“He particularly emphasized that he has never said anything negative about President Trump,” Moon’s national security adviser Chung Eui-yong said, according to Reuters.
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