Politics, Government & Public Policy: April 2018 Archives
Last month I wrote about government Democrats scrambling to hire Andrew McCabe after he was fired from the FBI for-cause, and I warned them that they might regret embracing the former acting FBI director after his perfidy became more widely known. Obviously I was right.
Comey has declared that McCabe is simply not telling the truth when he said that Comey knew of his leaking information to the media. Indeed, he said that he ordered the investigation into finding the culprit. McCabe's lawyer Michael Bromwich has insisted that people should not buy Comey's "white knight" account and that he is offering a false narrative.In the meantime, McCabe is lashing out at this accusers, including the career officials of the Inspector General's office who took the unprecedented step of calling for the former acting FBI Director to be fired. Bromwich says that McCabe will now sue the Trump administration for defamation and wrongful termination. Good luck with that. The Office of Professional Responsibility and the Inspector General's office is composed of career officials who decided that McCabe should be fired. The IG found that McCabe leaked the information for his own personal interest and not the public interest. That hardly seems like a compelling basis for either wrongful termination or defamation unless Bromwich knows some major fact that that is not public.In the meantime, after raising over $500,000 on GoFundMe (a campaign that I criticized as being premature), Bromwich has announced that he is going back for more donations. The last campaign ended just before the IG disclosed that McCabe lied not once but four times -- and before Comey himself effectively called McCabe a liar. Indeed, Comey is invested in showing McCabe is a liar since he previously testified under oath that he never leaked or approved a leak as director.
I defended James Comey almost a year ago, but that was clearly a mistake considering the motivations he has explained in his book.
We must have the worst political class in American history.
Former deep-stater Jack Goldsmith describes how the intelligence community is damaging American and itself by flailing wildly against President Trump. Before I even begin the quote, it's worth mentioning that there is so far no public evidence that anyone in the Trump campaign or administration illegally conspired with Russia.
Even if it turns out that Flynn and others close to Trump were in the bag for the Russians, many people will for a long time view the anti-Trump leaks as political abuse of intelligence to harm political enemies.This perception will be deepened by the Trump administration's relentless and often false attacks on the integrity of the intelligence community, including its false suggestion that the original collection that incidentally captured Flynn's communications, as opposed to the leaks of such information, was illegitimate.
The Flynn and related leaks didn't just violate the law - they violated a core commitment the intelligence community made in after the era of Hoover not to politicize, or appear to politicize, the use of surveillance tools or the fruits of their use.
Can it Happen Here? review: urgent studies in rise of authoritarian America
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The whole intelligence collection system - which has an importance that far transcends its undoubtedly large importance in this discrete context - is vulnerable here for the simple reason that the intermixture of politics with intelligence collection is the intelligence system's Achilles' heel.
However bad you think Trump is, he manages to bring out even worse from his opponents.
As civilization gets more complex, we should expect to see a proliferation of unintended consequences. The human mind simply can't foresee the consequences for its actions, and most of the time unintended consequences are bad. Wariness of unintended consequences should be a strong motivation for limited, simplified government.
... the problem facing the U.S. was that deaths from so-called semi-synthetic opioids, such as oxycodone (the drug in OxyContin) and hydrocodone, ballooned to more than 10,000 in 2010 -- up from fewer than 3,000 a decade before, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation.The part of the plan to get addicts off OxyContin worked reasonably well, at least initially. Many addicts no longer abused the reformulated medication.
But it didn't necessarily result in a happily-ever-after scenario.
Instead, the junkies quickly switched to heroin, according to the NBER research.
"The reformulation did not generate a reduction in combined heroin and opioid mortality -- each prevented opioid death was replaced with a heroin death," states an April-dated paper titled "How the Reformulation of Oxycontin Ignited the Heroin Epidemic."
"We attribute the recent quadrupling of heroin death rates to the August 2010 reformulation of an oft-abused prescription opioid, OxyContin," continues the report, authored by William Evans and Ethan Lieber, both from the University of Notre Dame, and Patrick Power from Boston University.
Good intentions aren't enough, and something doing nothing is the best course of action.
This is one of the dumbest things I've ever read.
No excuses: there is never a reason to carry a knife. Anyone who does will be caught, and they will feel the full force of the law. https://t.co/XILUvIFLOW
— Mayor of London (@MayorofLondon) April 8, 2018
Knives have been essential tools since our Stone Age ancestors banged rocks together to sharpen them. Somehow Boy and Girl Scouts have managed to carry knives for a century without stabbing anyone.
Maybe London's problem isn't knives, but people who want to stab each other.
