Trump may have stopped threatening Jerome Powell?but he?s still got designs to control the Fed.
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We don’t need no stinking independent Federal Reserve!
Category Archives: politics
Who’s afraid of big, bad socialism? I am (afraid of the word)
According to the WSJ, socialism is on the rise. Sort of. Depends on what you mean by socialism.
As I wrote several years ago, the word socialism needs to be retired. To summarize my earlier argument, it means one thing on the left (the Scandanavian model) and another on the right (the Cuban or Venezuelan model). It conveys no information beyond the speaker’s disdain for whatever’s being discussed (when used by the right) or the speaker’s disdain for our current economic system (when used by the left). It does nothing but sow confusion. The word is a victim of what C.S. Lewis called verbicide; it’s dead and needs to be buried.
Mandani, AOC, Sanders, and the others are not helping themselves (or progressivism) by touting themselves as socialists. No doubt our current economic system is deeply flawed and we could perhaps learn from the social democracies of western Europe but when most people hear the word socialist, they think, not of Sweden, but of Cuba or North Korea. These “democratic socialists” should be pushing their ideas on pragmatic grounds, i.e., the benefits outweigh the costs and they improve on what we currently have. Mandani seems poised to win his election but he could hurt progressives elsewhere with his “socialism.”
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A demon in disguise?
According to Dante (Inferno, Canto XXXIII), the souls of those who betray their guests (and are not at least some immigrants to be considered guests?) fall into the pit of hell while their still-living bodies, now inhabited by demons, continue to plague mankind on earth. So great is their evil. Is Stephen Miller perhaps one of these?
Everything you loathe or love about Donald Trump?s America, you hate or cherish about Stephen Miller?s republic of fear.
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The Spirit of Lee Atwater lives
“There is no real hope that the Supreme Court will stop Texas or white people from overrepresenting themselves in Congress. The more practical response is for other Democratically controlled states to play hardball and aggressively gerrymander their congressional districts to counteract Texas. Trying to live in a society with Texas is like trying to share a Thanksgiving turkey with a rabid dog: All you can do is snatch some flesh with your hands and take your vaccinations. Etiquette and manners are no use here.”
New York State is a case study in Democrats? failure to understand the evolving political landscape.
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Disenfranchising women is a feature and not a bug
The SAVE Act, which purports to fend off the phantasmal threat of voter fraud, would throw millions of women off the voting rolls.
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But abortion is murder (so he says)
And there is no statute of limitations on murder. And I somehow suspect that he supports the death penalty.
<p>That's not a leak — Robinson said it himself in a new ad. <br/></p>
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Here’s a suggestion
I have a slightly different idea for a simple Supreme Court that could be done by statute without amending the Constitution. Congress could create the position of Senior Justice, analogous to Senior Judges in the lower courts, who continue to sit by designation with a much reduced caseload and who get to decide which types of cases they will take. Retired Supreme Court Judges generally become Senior Judges. Justice Souter continues (as far as I know) to hear cases on the First Circuit. Here’s how it would work. Senior Justices would no longer vote on writs of certiorari (i.e., on which cases the Court will take) but, once the Court has granted certiorari, they could choose to take part in that case, e.g., by so informing the Chief Justice within 30 days. The result would be to draw Justices Breyer, Kennedy, and Souter out of retirement for any cases they deeply care about. If Justice Sotomayor were to retire and be replaced with another liberal, that could undermine the current 6-3 conservative majority (if you ever had tie, e.g., at 6-6, that would merely affirm the lower court ruling in that case without creating binding Supreme Court precedent).
I have no idea how feasible this would be in practice but I throw it out as something that might be possible, if only because Congress can do it by statute (or they could simply enlarge the Court but that might be a bridge too far for some, even on the Democratic side).
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Who’s afraid of a Republican trifecta?
Biden may (or may not) be losing ground with minorities
From the New Republic: “A closer examination of the polling indicates Biden is not in as much trouble with minority voters as the Trump campaign believes (or at least would have the public believe). The president indeed suffers from a dearth of enthusiasm from a cranky electorate, but that’s an across-the-board problem. It’s not particular to Black and Hispanic voters. And if historical trends hold, Biden has a solid chance of bringing those traditional Democratic voters back home come November.”
Yes, the president has work to do with Black and Hispanic voters, but no, they?re not flocking to Donald Trump.
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