May 2018 Archives

Why does our political class have such an obsession with style? "Never Trump" Republicans loathe the president primarily because he offends their aesthetic sensibilities, and now Justice Neil Gorsuch's critics are condemning him for his style as well.

Gorsuch quickly antagonized his colleagues on the bench, reportedly skipping a justices-only meeting Chief Justice John Roberts had asked him to attend and then dominating oral arguments in the first case he heard, about a workplace-discrimination claim. He later dissented in the case, lecturing the majority for overstepping its bounds. "If a statute needs repair, there is a constitutionally prescribed way to do it. It's called legislation," he wrote. "Congress already wrote a perfectly good law. I would follow it." In cases since, he has come across as "awkward," "condescending," and "tone-deaf," in the words of NPR's Nina Totenberg, and has prompted Court watchers to comb his opinions for egregiously gassy prose -- then launch them into Twitter orbit with the hashtag #GorsuchStyle.

"That style stuff is what has infuriated people on the left more so than anything else," says Ian Samuel, who teaches at Harvard Law School and co-hosts the influential Supreme Court podcast First Mondays. "He's not any more conservative than Justice Alito, for example, but attracts a disproportionate amount of hate.

Is this appeal to stylistic sensibilities growing more common because it garners more agreement from the target audience? Perhaps more people dislike Trump's style than dislike his policies, and more people dislike Gorsuch's style than dislike his rulings?

I don't think the fixation on style over substance does America any good.

I saw "Solo" yesterday with my family, and it was good. Apparently it isn't making as much money as expected, and many people are luke-warm towards it. However, it was light-years better than "The Last Jedi", and pretty much delivered exactly what I expected. The plot wasn't brilliant, but that has never been the point of Star Wars.

I grew up on Star Wars and love Star Wars, but let's be honest: the magic of those movies is inextricably dependent on the magic of our own youth. Nothing we see now as adults will elicit the same response.

Great job America! It's quite an accomplishment to be both the largest and most competitive economy in the world. Of course competitiveness leads to growth, but growth also leads to size which in many realms leads to stagnation.

The U.S. dethroned Hong Kong to retake first place among the world's most competitive economies, thanks to faster economic growth and a supportive atmosphere for scientific and technological innovation, according to annual rankings by the Switzerland-based IMD World Competitiveness Center.

Hong Kong, scoring first in categories for government and business efficiency, held an edge over regional rival Singapore, which kept its No. 3 spot from 2017. Rounding out the top five were the Netherlands, which jumped one spot, and Switzerland, which tumbled three slots as it endures a slowdown in exports and concerns about its potential relocation of research and development facilities.

The U.S., which reclaimed the No. 1 spot for the first time since 2015, scored especially well in international investment, domestic economy and scientific infrastructure sub-categories while earning below-average marks in public finance and prices.

The government doesn't get to redact stuff just because it's embarrassing. These kinds of shenanigans undermine trust in our public servants.

Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, who was fired for lying under oath, spent $70,000 in taxpayer dollars on a conference table. The FBI also redacted the conference table's steep price tag from documents that members of the Senate Judiciary Committee requested, in an apparent attempt to hide it from Congress. ...

"Congress, and the public, have a right to know how the Department spends taxpayer money," Grassley wrote. "I am unaware of any legitimate basis on which the cost of a conference table should be redacted. Embarrassment is not a good enough reason. The manner in which some redactions have been used casts doubt on whether the remaining redactions are necessary and defensible."

FBI leakers admit to spying on Trump campaign 100 days before the election. The purpose of the leaks to to cover-their-butts in advance of the Inspector General report.

It's been nearly 24 hours since it has been revealed to the world that President Barack Obama's Justice Department conducted a counterintelligence investigation on the Trump campaign. The investigation began 100 days before the presidential election and was executed with all the traditional tools of spy trade-craft including informants (spies) and electronic surveillance (wire tapping.)

These stunning revelations were memorialized in the bible of the Mainstream Media: It was written in the Gospel According to the New York Times.

Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says it's "a good thing" that Obama was spying on his political opponent.

Clapper admitted the FBI "may have had someone who was talking to them in the campaign," referring to President Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. He explained away the possibility of an FBI informant spying on the campaign as the bureau was trying to find out "what the Russians were doing to try to substantiate themselves in the campaign or influence or leverage it."

Obama's Director of National Intelligence then went on to say, "So, if there was someone that was observing that sort of thing, that's a good thing."

Mollie Hemingway dissects the NYT article based on the leaks.

This is a stunning admission for those Americans worried that federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies might use their powers to surveil, leak against, and target Americans simply for their political views or affiliations. As Sean Davis wrote, "The most amazing aspect about this article is how blasé it is about the fact that the Obama admin was actively spying on four affiliates of a rival political campaign weeks before an election."

The story says the FBI was worried that if it came out they were spying on Trump campaign it would "only reinforce his claims that the election was being rigged against him." It is easy to understand how learning that the FBI was spying on one's presidential campaign might reinforce claims of election-rigging.

Muller's indictment of Russian conspirators appears to be backfiring.

Against all expectations, in April, lawyers for one of the Russian corporate defendants, Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, entered their appearances in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. They followed up by serving extensive discovery requests on Team Mueller seeking full disclosure of the government's case and investigation including sensitive national security and intelligence information.

This type of discovery is called "graymail" (as distinguished from blackmail) in which the government is faced with having to disclose closely guarded state secrets in order to proceed with the prosecution. The alternative is to drop the charges.

Given that the maximum penalty against Concord is an uncollectable $500,000 fine or equally uncollectable compensation to anyone damaged by the alleged conspiracy, the choice is all the more bitter for Team Mueller. Should they litigate the discovery requests? If they lose and are faced with having to disclose sensitive intelligence information about the case and their investigation, should they withdraw the indictment against Concord? And, if they drop the charges, are they prepared for the resulting public mockery and howls of derision?

Andrew C. McCarthy has more on the topic of judicial hardship for Mueller. Seems like it's past time to wrap up this investigation.

I don't care what some scientists say, Pluto is a planet. No scientist has the right to tell us how to use words.

But the process for redefining planet was deeply flawed and widely criticized even by those who accepted the outcome. At the 2006 IAU conference, which was held in Prague, the few scientists remaining at the very end of the week-long meeting (less than 4 percent of the world's astronomers and even a smaller percentage of the world's planetary scientists) ratified a hastily drawn definition that contains obvious flaws. For one thing, it defines a planet as an object orbiting around our sun -- thereby disqualifying the planets around other stars, ignoring the exoplanet revolution, and decreeing that essentially all the planets in the universe are not, in fact, planets.

Even within our solar system, the IAU scientists defined "planet" in a strange way, declaring that if an orbiting world has "cleared its zone," or thrown its weight around enough to eject all other nearby objects, it is a planet. Otherwise it is not. This criterion is imprecise and leaves many borderline cases, but what's worse is that they chose a definition that discounts the actual physical properties of a potential planet, electing instead to define "planet" in terms of the other objects that are -- or are not -- orbiting nearby. This leads to many bizarre and absurd conclusions. For example, it would mean that Earth was not a planet for its first 500 million years of history, because it orbited among a swarm of debris until that time, and also that if you took Earth today and moved it somewhere else, say out to the asteroid belt, it would cease being a planet.

Language is descriptive, not prescriptive. Not to mention the absurdity of this particular decision.