The century of the guitar seems to be over

If ever there were a sure cultural sign that we are well into the 21st century, this is it:

Guitar Center, the nation’s leading musical-instrument retailer, is in trouble. Changing musical tastes are partly to blame.

Ratings agency S&P Global downgraded Westlake Village-based Guitar Center Holdings Inc. for the second time last week as the troubled instrument retailer seeks to refinance and restructure more than $1 billion of debt.

“Most of what’s really selling today is rap and hip hop,” said George Gruhn, owner of the Gruhn Guitars shop in Nashville. “That’s outpacing other forms of music and they don’t use a lot of recognizable musical instruments.”

Now, I guess what qualifies as a recognizable musical instrument is going to change from time to time. Outside of specialized performances, one doesn't hear a harpischord much these days.

But rap and hip hop aren't known for fostering expansive musical vocabularies. From a rhythmic, harmonic or melodic standpoint, most contemporary popular music stays within well-worn ruts, which seems to stem from an increasing disinterest in music's possibilities, and the discipline required to mine them:

The bigger problem [than the lack of what, in the day, were called "guitar heroes"], according to [music-store owner] Concotelli, is that most aspiring players don’t want to put in the time to become proficient on the instrument.

“If they do want to learn they’ll just go to YouTube, but they’re not getting the proper instruction,” he said. “With kids these days, it’s all about instant gratification. No one wants to take six months or a year to learn. They don’t want to do the work.”

It would seem that software - capable of changing pitch, creating loops and otherwise taking the place of fingers placed on certain frets or keys - is the recognizable instrument of our age.


People interviewed for this article cite as a cause of the tapering-off the aging of the Baby Boomers. Fewer guitars are being sold, but the ones that are seem to be going to a consumer base that skews older.

I see this in my professional experience as a guitarist in the last few years. In both jazz settings, which tend to be private events, and rock / blues settings, which tend to be public venues, audiences tend to be in the 45-plus demographic.  You can put together a set list of Great American Songbook standards and a few bop charts for the former and a set list of classic rock, or maybe Chicago blues or Memphis soul, for the latter, and eminently satisfy your audience. It needn't hear anything composed in the last 30 years.

It gets one to wondering, does the guitar embody some kind of Boomer conceit that the undeniable impact of the musical flourishing of the 1955 - 1990 period was going to be the last word on cultural vitality generally? If so, that's going to come to a crashing halt as Boomers continue to age and avail themselves of less and less nightlife.

I'd been wondering for some time what the next step was going to be beyond the ubiquity of music, beyond everybody and anybody having access to every recorded performance in the world available for a couple of clicks. That ubiquity was the result of music assuming an outsized role in societal life during the aforementioned flourishing. During that time, as with everything else, Boomers' enthusiasms became society's norms, and it came to be assumed that there wasn't an occasion in life that didn't call for some kind of music. But it seems, here in the second decade of the 21st century, to have settled into a function we can describe as democratized noodling. Anyone can acquire the software needed to put some notes together over some kind of mechanized rhythm and be in the business of making "music." The dearth of guitar heroes discussed in the linked article is the manifestation on one instrument of a larger phenomenon: No one known for prowess on any instrument is generating the kind of excitement that leads to young aspirants wanting to acquire similar prowess.

Nor is this musical trend happening in a vacuum. The movie industry is similarly beleaguered. Box-office receipts get ever-more dismal, no matter what kind of budget and special-effects dazzle-dazzle Hollywood lavishes on its efforts.

The case can be made, I think, that what has happened with a number of our art forms over the last 50 years follows a pattern that exemplifies human nature generally. Inventiveness appears, and is followed by surfeit, which in turn is followed by burnout and ennui.

We just plain got tired of music.

The problem is that art has customarily given humanity a release valve, a respite from the kinds of polarization and ill will that characterizes any society that has lost sight of the whole notion of what is noble. We are mired in our bitter turf battles, with no backstop.

The only soundtrack to its life that the millennial generation is going to reminisce about is identity-politics screeching set to the compressed thud of a drum machine.

We're past our peak as a civilization.

The devil grips a small midwestern city by the throat

The city of 44,000 where I live has been in the national news way too much over the last few years.

I say "too much" because it's been for bad reasons.

Let me quickly set the table once again for what the general cultural atmosphere is like. The 800-pound gorilla in the local economy is a Fortune 200 company in the power-generation business. It's mostly known for making the world's finest Diesel engines. Its shares trade on the NYSE, but one family, going back to the company's founding, has owned a great deal of it, and members of that family have been high-ranking officers in it. The one at the helm from the 1940s to the 1980s was somewhat nationally known. (In 1968, Esquire ran a cover story on him, entitled "This Man Should Be the Next US President".) He was the first lay president of the National Council of Churches, he sat on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, and was once dubbed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as the most progressive businessman in America. He loved modernist architecture, and made the city showcase of it.

He established a corporate culture that has lived on past his own era. The last several CEOs and other top executives have come from the nation's most prestigious business schools, and, as is made clear from their pronouncements on matters such as "sustainability" and "diversity," fully absorbed the hooey about those matters dispensed during their educations.


The current US Vice President, Mike Pence, is from here. Because he signed a religious-freedom bill that the Indiana legislature sent him in 2013 while he was governor, he has been deemed "anti-gay" by the most influential cultural arbiters in our society.

So said cultural arbiters are having a field day over a local high-school senior getting academic credit for organizing a LBGT "pride" event, to be held next month - in Mike Pence's hometown, doncha know!

The most rancid example I've come across of this gloating coverage appears at Cosmopolitan. I'm not linking to it. The author's name is Hannah Smothers. If you're so inclined, it should be easy to Google. The tone of the piece becomes apparent from the tag line under the title characterizes the organizer as "another teenage girl being an absolute badass." And then the first line of the piece itself reads: "Teenage girls know how to get s--- done." It lauds as admirable teen-girl achievements, "spearhead[ing] national gun control protests and creat[ing] software to help women find abortion clinics."

Consider the layers of cultural rot presented here. There is the vulgar language. There is the fact that civic leaders in our city, as well as local news media, are now in the position of having to choose whether to deal with the article, and what tone to take in doing so. (I have a sense that I know how that's going to go.) Then there is this sick adulation of adolescence for its own sake, an imparting of nobility and moral purity to those who are, from the perspective of learning over an entire lifetime, basically blank slates.

Then there's the Mike Pence angle. Pence actually stands in as the embodiment of what the Left deems as an evil force to be extinguished.

He recently filled that function at this year's Oscars awards show:

[Within] Jimmy Kimmel's fetid stew of ugliness, smugness and banality at last night's Oscars awards show . . . one particular remark of Kimmel's has stuck with me throughout the day, namely, this:

"We don't make films like 'Call Me By Your Name' for money. We make them to upset Mike Pence," Kimmel said.

Let's get real. The bottom line of all this is the removal of the notion of sin from acceptable societal discourse.

There are a lot of aspects of Christian doctrine that we might want to be other than what they are (Hell comes to mind), but acting like they don't exist, and mocking those who assert that they do doesn't make them any less real. What Romans 1 says about natural and unnatural ways for men and women to relate to each other must be grappled with.

Again, I say, this is not a matter of bigotry. Christians will not be cornered into a defensive crouch, made to preface anything they say with, "Look, I have gay friends and this is not an issue." Of course, Christians often have gay friends. Being Christian doesn't stop you from being friends with anybody.

I've also mentioned before that a sizable portion of black clergy in post-America understands Christian doctrine regarding homosexuality, so the attempt to conflate these demographics doesn't wash.

And Christians, contrary to what the Left would have you believe, don't judge, or, at least, are commanded not to. A Christian understands the primacy of volition in human behavior and the motives behind it. Our freedom is the second-greatest gift we have, right behind our lives. So a Christian is going to understand that his or her non-Christian friends are going to make choices based on their own sense of what serves them. It's important to pray for them, yes, but we know it's futile to think we can change them. That's the Holy Spirit's job.

Now, here's the rub: In a civil society, in situations of real friendship, that respect has to work both ways. The gay person has to accord his or her Christian friend the respect of acknowledging the embrace of an understanding of sin. For heaven's sake (pun intended), do we not all have friends about whom we think, "I wish that person didn't have this or that aspect to his lifestyle, or hadn't made this or that moral choice, but I still think of this person as one of my close pals"?


No, the point of our supposed betters is to shame us into tossing out the basis for Christian faith.

And a small Midwestern city is going to have to decide whether to give that effort its official endorsement.

This is supposed to be red-state territory, but there is nowhere in post-America that is immune to demonic permeation.

Good Friday 2018: We're as in need of His saving blood as ever

I may have an official Good Friday post later. I'm sure at some point this weekend I'll have a reflection on the weekend it commemorates.

But right now, one thing is clear: If ever a species needed to be absolved of its folly, it's ours.

I think of one situation characterized by layer upon layer of obnoxious people being ever-more obnoxious. The latest salvo in their spiral of obnoxiousness, however, has a truly chilling aspect to it.

Laura Ingraham, a former conservative who, early on, decided to be a "populist" instead, a slavish devotee of the Very Stable Genius, gratuitously noted that David Hogg, the foul-mouthed grandstander who has it in for the NRA due to his utter ignorance, has had his applications to four schools declined. So Hogg, using his newfound star status, organized a boycott of sponsors of Ingraham's show. And it's been somewhat successful. Some are pulling out. And a precedent is thereby set. Mention some indisputable facts on social media, and you may have your career jeopardized.

Then there is Roseanne Barr, she of the infamous remark that people who eat at Chick-Fil-A deserved to get cancer. She jumped on the VSG train some time back, which is reflected in the first episode of her revived sitcom. Said sitcom thereby becomes a major cultural bellwether, allowing people to wear their tribal badges and preen. Sean Hannity has offered to let her host his show some night.

Then there's Pope Francis, further exacerbating divisions within the Catholic Church with his remark - that apparently has to be taken at face value - that there is no Hell.

In all cases, there is sheepish backtracking occurring. Ingraham has issued a mea culpa. The Vatican has tried to explain away the Pope's remark with a technicality.

And lost in the cacophony is any semblance of truth, reason or love.

Wednesday roundup

Eli Lake at Bloomberg on why Trump should not pull out of the JCPOA: according to Lake, his strategy of getting it fixed is working.

. . . to withdraw from the Iran deal now would be a mistake. The U.S. and its allies now enjoy the best of both worlds: Iranian compliance without the international investment Tehran had counted on.

European banks and businesses are wary of the Iranian market at this point. U.S. officials tell me Europe is asking for further clarifications from the Treasury Department on what kinds of investment will not violate existing sanctions. Deals that appeared to be done at the close of the Barack Obama administration -- like Boeing's multi-billion dollar aircraft sale to Iran -- are now in doubt. Iran's rial has been in free fall, losing a quarter of its value in the last six months. 

There are many reasons why Iran's economy isn't attractive in 2018 to significant foreign investment. Its secret police keep arresting dual nationals on false charges; its proxies and revolutionary guard keep waging war in Syria and Yemen; and its banks won't stop laundering money for the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah. Add to this a new Saudi-led strategy to pressure businesses not to enter the Iranian market.

While discarding the Iran deal now would be a mistake, Trump does deserve credit for throwing its future into doubt. We all know the drill. Every few months Trump is required to certify Iran's compliance with the agreement. And every few months, he has hemmed, hawed and threatened not to do it. When Trump finally introduced his Iran strategy in the fall, he gave an ultimatum: Unless Congress and European allies commit to fixing the deal's flaws he will withdraw. This is why the May 12 deadline looms so large.

But in order for the current strategy to work in the long term, we need to really leverage this current "safe harbor" period:

Mark Dubowitz, the chief executive of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and one of the architects of the strategy to pressure allies to fix the Iran deal, said there are technical ways Trump can claim to be withdrawing from the Iran deal without implementing the sanctions right away. He called this a period of "safe harbor," where there would be six months for any banks and corporations to unwind their business in Iran. "You then prolong uncertainty and give more time for the Europeans to agree to a real fix to the deal," he said.

Perhaps this sort of escalation will be necessary at a future date. For now it is not. Some critics might say that Trump has to follow through on his promise or he will lose credibility. But he can just as easily delay his decision, point to the European negotiations, and follow through on his own promised plan to ramp up non-nuclear sanctions on Iranian entities.

What's more, he can do all this and claim success, if not victory, for his strategy to fix the nuclear bargain he campaigned against.  

Streiff at Red State on why Justice Stevens's NYT call for repeal of the Second Amendment is so badly flawed, and why the general post-American public must have that convincingly explained. The first thing Streiff dismantles is the since-the-Framers'-concern-was-the-threat-of-a-national-standing-army-to-the-individual-states-the-amendment-is-a-relic canard:

There is a lot wrong with the article. The errors are so glaring that it is hard to attribute them to mere carelessness and not to a deliberate attempt to deceive.

Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.

I’m not sure this is entirely true. And by entirely true, I mean true in any respect. Congress did have a fear of a standing army, a fear they inherited from the British experience with Cromwell’s military dictatorship. In fact, the U. S. Constitution copies part of the British Mutiny Act in that it forbids any appropriation to the military for a period longer than two years:

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

In common with British law, no such restriction was applied to the Navy. At the time the U. S. Constitution was ratified, the strength of the U. S. Army was about 700 men in a single regiment. Hardly a threat. The Second Amendment is more properly seen as an alternative means for national defense that did not involve a standing army rather than as a check and balance against an army that did not actually exist.

He goes on to look at the Dred Scott  SCOTUS decision, the questions about blacks, citizenship, the right to bear arms, and the Fourteenth Amendment.

Particularly juicy is his review of Stevens' employment of his view of the 1939 Miller decision (a case about importing a sawed-off shotgun across state lines) in his dissent over the Heller decision, and Antonin Scalia's smackdown thereof.

Israel is deploying 100 sharpshooters on the Gaza border as Palestinians from several factions set up tent cities on the other side and begin their annual period of ranting about the "catastrophe" and demanding the "right of return."

Michelle Malkin on a particularly creepy jackboot outfit you may not have heard of before: Smiles 4 Keeps:

Mom Trey Hoyumpa shared a letter last week on Facebook from a dental office called Smiles 4 Keeps in Bartonsville, Pa. It informed her that if she did not make a dental appointment for “regular professional cleanings” for her child, she could be charged with “dental neglect.” Citing a law called “Pennsylvania Act 31,” on child-abuse recognition and reporting, the dental office threatened to report the mom to state authorities if she did not schedule an appointment.

Hoyumpa wrote: “Smiles 4 Keeps bullies the parents, controls the care behind closed doors, and turns parents into villains . . . and I will not stand for it anymore!!!”

On social media, parents who’ve encountered the toxic alliance of snoopy medical providers and child-welfare agencies shared their own experiences with government bullies who operate on a presumption of guilt.

Brett Darken wrote: “Anyone familiar with ‘family court,’ DCF, state probate and guardianship courts know well this story. In any other context, it would be considered a threat, coercion, and intimidation under RICO laws. But because it’s the government, it’s legal.”

This is a menacing threat to have hanging over customers of dental practices, or any medical providers for that matter: If you leave, you better tell us where you are going or we could report you to government child-welfare agencies for suspected abuse. 

It gets creepier:

Dr. Ross Wezmar of Smiles 4 Keeps actually boasted to local news station WNEP about the snitch letters’ ability “to jar the parent to realize that with a child comes responsibility.” Benevolent Dr. Marcus Welby he is not. Wezmar claimed his bully notes are the first in the nation to be dispatched. With the encroachment of socialized medicine in America, they certainly won’t be the last.

Think it can’t happen to you? Last year, in Ontario, Canada, Melissa Lopez wanted a second opinion on getting fillings for her daughter and decided to change providers. The jilted dentist, as Lenore Skenazy reported at Reason, called Child Protective Services to report possible “oral neglect.” The case was dismissed, but CPS refuses to remove Lopez’s file from its books — it is part of a permanent record that keeps a permanent cloud of suspicion over her.

Skenazy drills down to the core: “The issue here is how easy it is to drag a family into an abuse investigation, and how hard it is for the family, like an impacted molar, to get itself extracted.”

Indeed, the partnership between medical providers and government child-welfare services has threatened innocent families across the country under the guise of “protecting the children.” It is a short hop from cavity-shaming and misdiagnoses to ripping families apart. 

Students at Bellaire High School near Houston went in a novel direction in response to the recent attention to the school-shooting phenomenon. They organized a unity rally, specifically because, in the words of Adam Hoffman, one of the organizers, "our social fabric is tearing." Both Senator Ted Cruz and House member Joachin Castro, about as diametrically opposed as any two elected officials could be, were both invited, and both attended, as did the Democratic and Republican state party chairs.

 

Kim's China visit - initial thoughts

First off, all involved wanted it to be splashy. This was a big deal. Kim was accompanied by his wife, Ri Sol Ju, who is rarely seen in public. Lots of formal pictures of them with Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan in various contexts. A big banquet in the Great Hall of the People. A visit to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Crowds at each departure-and-arrival point.

This was carefully orchestrated, given that recent news reports had given the world a picture of two leaders who, on a personal level, regarded each other with contempt.

Kim made a point of stressing that this was his first foreign visit and that he very explicitly wanted that to be to China.

What kind of message is this meant to send regarding the planned May one-on-one between Kim and Trump?

Consider how much evidence has come before us just recently about Xi's aims. The Chinese constitution was changed to enable him to be president for life. More revelations have surfaced about Chinese cyber-mischief, as well as military buildup.

The message to the US may take some time to parse, but it sure looks like Xi's message to Kim was, "Kid, if you'll play ball, we can have us one powerful east Asia."

How feelings-based post-America confers moral leadership on ignorant adolescents

The two most prominent figures on the left side of the Parkland students skipping classes to grandstand over the shooting at their school are Emma Gonzales and David Hogg.

John Sexton has a piece today at Hot Air, the gist of which is a look at a New Yorker piece that gushes over Gonzales's delivery of her remarks at last weekend d's rally in Washington. The New Yorker piece goes into great detail about Gonzales's breath and eyelids and such, and sums up with a comparison to Joan of Arc. Seriously.

Two pieces at NRO today, one by Rich Lowry and one by  Joe Bissonette, look at Hogg. Between then, they examine his foul mouth, his sanctimony, and his demonization of the NRA.

An unsettling possibility is arising as the aftermath of the Parkland shooting morphs into something else (and it is, as evidenced by the increasing injection of identity politics). These high-school students may be on the verge of being credentialed in a way one used to have to earn a degree or toil in some capacity for some kind of organization to be thusly recognized.

This comes about at a time when, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 12 percent of post-America's high-school students are proficient in history.

Parallels are being drawn to the 1960s, in particular the student protests over matters related to civil rights and the Vietnam War, which ranged from earnest concern about bigotry and the draft to highly organized efforts by Soviet-bloc front groups to foment polarization in US society. Across the spectrum, however, the moral preening and self-congratulation we're seeing with pussy-hat marches and gun-control rallies was a major factor.

The difference was that, fifty years ago, the nation still had a reserve of stability and wisdom gleaned from the experience of history to which it could turn for a standard. There were institutions with authority that insisted on the primacy of order.

We prized actual wisdom.

Whether the brittleness being exacerbated by the likes of Gonzales and Hogg is such that the country is now utterly lacking in a sufficiently absorptive quality for them to be put into some kind of sane perspective is in real question.

The irony of Billy Graham passing just before Hogg and Gonzales took center stage should not go unnoticed.

Post-America, behold your new moral leaders.

The difficulty some people have in taking the full measure of the Very Stable Genius

Just like with cabinet members and White House staff, Trump's legal team is in chaos. John Dowd, longtime inner-circle strategist, is gone.  Then there was the giddiness among his shills about Joe diGenova and Vitctoria Toensing coming on board, but that's been scuttled, due in part to the notable smell of conflict of interest, since Toensing is representing Blackwater founder Erik Prince.

The shills will find some way to spin it. They always do.

At American Greatness, they spin the tariffs as sound policy based on the primacy of some proverbial small-town blue-collar family huddled at the kitchen table with a stack of bills and a calculator. Kurt Schichter's Townhall column this morning (you can look it up if you'd like; I ain't linkin'.) lamely attempts to persuade readers that they shouldn't be dismayed by the recent omnibus bill-signing, much less consider it a deal-breaker. I say lamely, because his column is shot through with acknowledgements that Trump, in customary fashion, stayed disengaged from the crafting process until it was too late and his choices were shut down government or sign the damn thing.

It's particularly delicious to hear about (I didn't see it firsthand; been ages since I've watched one minute of Pirro's show) the dustup between Jeanine Pirro and Ann Coulter. Coulter was desperate and furious at the same time, barely able to get her head around the depth of betrayal to which her idol had stooped. The Wall has been her singular focus since she lost her mind a few years ago, and now it's as remote a possibility as it ever was. And then there was Pirro, who wanted to put, for all intents and purposes, the entire onus on Congress. They weren't "supportive" enough of Trump's "agenda," you know.

Then there's the field day Anderson Cooper has been able to have in the last few days, scoring interviews, on on CNN and one on CBS News, with the two women (that we know about) who were having concurrent affairs with the VSG in the middle of the previous decade, while the VSG's third wife was changing the diapers of the baby she'd just had.

We all know about the Lake Tahoe golf tournament where both affairs got started.

What is telling is the parallels in the women's accounts of their first visits to the actual Trump home.


He said this to Stormy Daniels:

Anderson Cooper: Melania Trump had recently given birth to-- to a son, just a few months before. Did that-- did he mention his wife or child at all in this?

Stormy Daniels: I asked. And he brushed it aside, said, "Oh yeah, yeah, you know, don't worry about that. We don't even-- we have separate rooms and stuff."

This account of someone else's visit to his apartment involves the same kind of moment:

McDougal also tearfully recalls feeling guilty when she went to Trump's apartment in Trump Tower and he showed her Melania Trump's bedroom.

McDougal thought it was odd that Trump's wife slept in a separate bedroom.

'I thought maybe they were having issues,' she said.

Trump, in these vignettes, seems to be at the shrug-off stage of a long-established pattern:

Of all Ivanka Trump’s similarities to her father, perhaps the most evident is the effect of her childhood on her current disposition. Donald Trump, who grew up in Queens and attended military school, endeavored to make his name in Manhattan and has displayed an affinity for men in uniform. Ivanka Trump, meanwhile, has long shown the scars inflicted during her parents’ divorce. “Even before the divorce, Donald did nothing for the kids,” one old friend of Ivana and Donald Trump told me recently. “When they were on vacations or on summer break, he had a habit of disappearing in the morning and not coming back until night.” Another longtime associate of the family told me that he would often lament Donald Trump’s parenting to his face. “I would say, ‘Donald, would you even know if your kids were in Europe?’ And he wouldn’t, because he didn’t [know] when they were.”

I guess, if we're really going to stretch things to the point of impossibility, we could chalk Donald Trump Jr.'s wife's filing for divorce, on small factor in which was DJT Jr.'s affair with a Celebrity Apprentice contestant, up to mere coincidence. But isn't it far more likely that he was merely growing into the kind of "man" for which his father had provided the role model?

I'm reminded of another Townhall column, this one from about early 2016, I think. It was by Doug Giles, a Florida-based writer who shares with Schlichter the felt need to pump his conservatism full of an extra dose of testosterone. His pieces are often full of references to big-game hunting, cigars, good bourbon, and theoretical situations in which he'd have to beat guys up to defend his daughters' honor. The column I'm thinking of was called, "If Trump Is So Bad, Why Are His Kids So Awesome?"

Doing any rethinking of that premise, Doug?

There's no way to minimize the impact of this mindset on the state of, and prospects for, the Republican Party. By virtue of the dualistic nature of American politics, the GOP is still the home of the only good guys on the scene - Ben Sasse, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Marco Rubio (he who is coming in for a recent lava flow of vitriol from the thugs putting the sobbing Florida high school kids up to their campaign of gun-control grandstanding). I'm trying to think of others. Some House members, maybe? Not my representative, apparently. His TV ads proudly tie him to the Trump "agenda." This is sad. The first time I ever even heard of Luke Messer, I stood beside him at a small gathering for a mayoral candidate in my city. I chatted with him a bit and found his conservative bona fides to be in order. I think he'd like to speak in terms that weren't adulterated by Trumpist populism, but here we are. Mike Pence, then Indiana governor, was also in attendance. Which brings me to another cause for dismay. Yes, I understand his job requires it, but I still cringe when Pence starts in to that Trump-as-great-man dog vomit.

To reiterate what LITD has said perhaps over a hundred times since the summer of 2015, our times are being defined by a narcissistic, shallow, bombastic, rudderless blowhard whose overriding motivation in life is to be praised. It sets the agenda for the Left that hates him, the former conservatives who have swallowed the tribalist Kool-Aid and are now faced with the irreversible erosion of their intellectual integrity, and those of us who all along saw a path by which we could have ushered in an actually fine era, where not only sound policy but character and nobility prevailed.

Look squarely at what we have imposed on ourselves. What set of conditions did we, over the course of decades, put in place to bring us to this juncture?

Holy Week, the denouement of Lenten season, is a fine time to look squarely at things. Of course, there's the cross. Remember one of the last things our Lord said, prior to "It is finished": "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Why big left-leaning companies don't mind government regulation

Jeff Zuckerberg overtly welcomes Leviathan's involvement in his organization's activities:

Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg is under fire, so he’s running behind the Big Government barricade that has sheltered Big Businesses for decades.

“The question,” the Facebook CEO said in an interview with Wired this week, “isn’t 'Should there be regulation or shouldn’t there be?' It’s, 'How do you do it?'”

No, that's the reverse of the truth. The core question remains whether or not there should be regulation. Business embracing government is nothing new. We’ve seen this retreat to regulation before countless times, and the results aren’t pretty.

He knows Facebook is already positioned to throw resources at whatever government requires of Facebook that any other social-media company is going to be hard-pressed to amass:

 . . .what regulations is Zuckerberg thinking about?

He suggested that “companies have a responsibility to use [artificial intelligence] tools to kind of self-regulate content ...” That is, maybe social media platforms should be forced to have advanced software to detect and block the posting of “hate speech.” (That, of course, raises the specter — actually, it's already a reality — of left-liberal dominated tech companies deciding what news and opinion they will allow customers to read).
This wouldn’t be too hard for Facebook, Zuckerberg explained. “We’re a successful enough company that we can employ 15,000 people to work on security ...”

What about smaller companies that don’t have that sort of staff, or can’t afford artificial intelligence technology? Under Zuckerberg’s regulation, they’d be crushed.
This is the beauty of the retreat to regulation. Washington and most of the media applaud your embrace of it as a sign of “taking responsibility.” Meanwhile, you’re just strengthening your hold on your market and making it less competitive and therefore poorer at serving customers.

Philip Morris supported former President Barack Obama’s tobacco regulation. Mattel supported federal regulation on toy manufacturing. Goldman Sachs said of Dodd-Frank, “We will be among the biggest beneficiaries of reform.” H&R Block is still fighting for federal regulation on tax preparers.

We could go on for an entire editorial, but the point is this: When a big business starts helping build regulatory barricades, we shouldn’t applaud.
Regulation, by raising costs, acts as a barrier to entry. It rewards those who, like Microsoft and Goldman Sachs today, have the best lobbyists and the most access to power. In so doing, it protects monopolies and oligopolies.

The single biggest problem with Facebook, from a consumer perspective, is its sheer market power. Users who want more privacy don’t have anywhere else to go. Regulations that keep out competitors and thus cement Facebook’s position would be counterproductive.

Zuckerberg surely knows this. He remembers former titans of tech, such as Netscape and MySpace. He knows how fickle the market is. So, he is seeking safety today, behind the barricade of big government. 

When talking about corporate America's statist and collectivist leanings, I often use the example of diesel-engine giant Cummins, due to my living in the city where it's headquartered. I remember, during the Most Equal Comrade's time of gripping post-America by the throat, then-CEO Tim Solso standing behind the MEC at a Rose Garden signing ceremony for stricter fuel-emission standards. The smile on Solso's face, conveying a mindset of "Yes, Dear Leader, tell us more about how to make our products" was hurl-inducing indeed.

I suppose the degree to which any of these corporate leaders really swallow their own self-congratulatory hooey about making the world cleaner or more fair or whatever varies from on to the next, but you can be damn sure they're all aware that it elbows the little pipsqueak contenders our of their markets.

You knew this was coming

Well, that didn't take long:

The world's second-largest economy has responded to President Donald Trump's controversial trade tariffs.

China's commerce ministry proposed a list of 128 U.S. products as potential retaliation targets, according to a statement on its websiteposted Friday morning.

The U.S. goods, which had an import value of $3 billion in 2017, include wine, fresh fruit, dried fruit and nuts, steel pipes, modified ethanol, and ginseng, the ministry said. Those products could see a 15 percent duty, while a 25 percent tariff could be imposed on U.S. pork and recycled aluminium goods, according to the statement.

The statement did not go into greater detail. U.S. agricultural products, particularly soybeans, have been flagged as the biggest area of potential retaliation by Chinese President Xi Jinping's administration.

Spin that, Sean Hannity, Wayne Allen Root, Conrad Black, Bill Mitchell, Laura Ingraham, editorial staff at American Greatness, Breitbart, Gateway Pundit.

How much help is your proverbial blue-collar American family huddled at the kitchen table with a stack of bills and a calculator going to get now?

We have a stupid party and an evil party, and a grown-up party with a spine is nowhere to be found

The federal debt, deficit and spending situation is one of those sad facts of post-American life that quickly make any description of it into a uselessly trite platitude. At this point, nothing of any substance is conveyed by saying that Washington is "broken" or that "the process" is "out of control." The image of speeding headlong toward the precipice has even lost its ability to jar.

Maybe raw numbers can still have some effect. Let's look at the latest and see:

It has taken a little more than six months for the U.S. national debt to grow by a trillion dollars, a quick clip that has little precedent over the nation’s recent history. 

Last week, the debt hit $21 trillion for the first time, rising from the $20 trillion mark it notched on Sept. 8. The debt is guaranteed to go higher, with President Donald Trump having signed a debt-limit suspension in February, allowing unlimited borrowing through March 1, 2019. Economists expect wider deficits to result from the tax cut Trump signed in December. 

While a trillion-dollar increase over roughly six months isn’t unprecedented — there was one in 2009, during the Great Recession, and another in 2010 — it’s certainly fast. 

The national debt exceeded $20 trillion in September 2017, after taking 20 months to add a trillion dollars. A debt limit that had been in place since March 2015 was raised in March 2017, and again on Sept. 8, 2017. 

And now the omnibus spending bill has passed the House, in another of those frantic conclusions to the sausage-making process hours before a government shutdown would go into effect.

And, as usual, it includes things that it should include, but a number of things that it most definitely should not include, because those were necessary to get Democrats on board. Yes, it provides a much-needed boost to financing of the national defense, but your tax dollars are going to continue to fund Planned Parenthood's extermination of fetal Americans, sanctuary cities, the "Affordable" Care Act, and this $900 million earmark for rail and tunnel improvements between New York and New Jersey.

Oh, there's some funding for a wall, but let's be candid about this whole wall business. The Very Stable Genius pretty much has to continue to push for it, given that it was largely what caused the formation of his base when his campaign got going. But most illegal aliens now are here due to visa overstays, not big influxes over the border. E-Verify is far more important.

And, as usual, the bill itself is huge (2,300 pages) and there was no time for lawmakers to actually study it.

And, as always, it leaves intact the Departments of Education, Commerce, Energy, Agriculture, Health and Human Services, and the EPA, and nothing is done to begin restructuring of Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security.

Mr. Madison, call your office.

Compare and contrast

In the last few minutes, I've run across two widely divergent views of Jared Kushner's role as a broker of Middle East power dynamics.

Harvard constitutional and international law professor Noah Feldman, writing at Bloomberg, seems rather impressed with Kushner's ability to make the most of a long shot:

It was easy to miss it, what with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson being fired and President Donald Trump fueling rumors of more personnel shake-ups. But last week Jared Kushner, presidential adviser and son-in-law, presided over a highly unusual White House conference on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Who participated was noteworthy: Israel was there, alongside Arab states with which it does not have diplomatic relations, such as Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Who didn’t participate was noteworthy too: the Palestinians, who have been boycotting Trump since his announcement that the U.S. will have an embassy in Jerusalem.

The meaning of the conference can only be deciphered in relation to the Kushner-led peace effort. That long-shot effort is alive, notwithstanding Kushner’s defeat by chief of staff John Kelly in the White House palace intrigue over security clearance.

He says that the thrust of the Kushner approach is to put specific issues, in particular the Israel-Palestine question, into a broader regional perspective, but that, ironically the way to do that is to cultivate one particular key relationship:

His laser-like focus has been on Saudi Arabia, which is signaling that it’s prepared to develop warm and even official ties to Israel if only peace can be established. The basic idea is for the Saudis and other Gulf states to pressure the Palestinians to the table. Then Trump and Kushner will deliver the Israelis -- or at least try.

Other negotiators in the past have sought to regionalize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Kushner has gotten further than any of his predecessors on this front.

His strategy has been to form an extremely close relationship with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is expected to become king in the near future when his father abdicates.

This relationship is a two-way street. MBS, as the Saudi prince is invariably called outside the country, is in the process of attempting a high-risk transformation of the Saudi monarchy, from a power-sharing arrangement among siblings to centralized kingship dominated by one man. For that, MBS needs unprecedented personal backing from the White House. And Kushner and Trump have delivered exactly that. Witness their Oval Office meeting Tuesday.

There are a few key phrases in Feldman's piece that have a funny smell to them. Notice, for example, the neat and tidy way he characterizes what MBS is up to domestically as a "high-risk transformation of the Saudi monarchy, from a poor-sharing arrangement among siblings to centralized kingship dominated by one man." Then there is this odd line:

If this is a nonstarter for Netanyahu in his politically and ethically weakened condition, then all Kushner’s successes with MBS won’t be enough to deliver a deal. 

Well, now, wait a minute. If Netanyahu is politically and ethically weakened, why is his deeming the initiative a nonstarter the dealbreaker? Wouldn't an Israeli leader's position have to be stable for that to be so?

Now, about that "transformation . . . to a centralized kingship." Susan Wright at Red State offers some rather chilling backstory:

Kushner had a particular interest in intelligence involving the Middle East. At first blush, it may not seem so unusual, considering President Trump has announced that his son-in-law would be the person to bring peace to the Middle East.

The Intercept, however, has published a report of the uncomfortable entanglement of Kushner with Saudi royalty.

In June, Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman ousted his cousin, then-Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, and took his place as next in line to the throne, upending the established line of succession. In the months that followed, the President’s Daily Brief contained information on Saudi Arabia’s evolving political situation, including a handful of names of royal family members opposed to the crown prince’s power grab, according to the former White House official and two U.S. government officials with knowledge of the report. Like many others interviewed for this story, they declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak about sensitive matters to the press.

In late October, Jared Kushner made an unannounced trip to Riyadh, catching some intelligence officials off guard. “The two princes are said to have stayed up until nearly 4 a.m. several nights, swapping stories and planning strategy,” the Washington Post’s David Ignatius reported at the time.

That alone should be concerning enough, but it gets better [worse?].

What exactly Kushner and the Saudi royal talked about in Riyadh may be known only to them, but after the meeting, Crown Prince Mohammed told confidants that Kushner had discussed the names of Saudis disloyal to the crown prince, according to three sources who have been in contact with members of the Saudi and Emirati royal families since the crackdown. Kushner, through his attorney’s spokesperson, denies having done so.

Really? What could be the purpose of whipping up conflict in the region by giving the names of those “disloyal” to the prince?

Kushner lawyer Abbe Lowell scoffed at the report, calling it “false and ridiculous.”
Whatever the case, a week after Kushner returned from his little field trip, on November 4, the crown prince (MBS to his friends) did a bit of housecleaning, launching what he called an “anti-corruption crackdown.” Dozens of members of the royal family were arrested by the Saudi government, imprisoning them in the Ritz-Carlton Riyadh.
At least one was reported to have been tortured.
The odd (yeah, right) thing is that these were individuals listed in the President’s Daily Brief.

It is likely that Crown Prince Mohammed would have known who his critics were without Kushner mentioning them, a U.S. government official who declined to be identified pointed out. The crown prince may also have had his own reasons for saying that Kushner shared information with him, even if that wasn’t true. Just the appearance that Kushner did so would send a powerful message to the crown prince’s allies and enemies that his actions were backed by the U.S. government.

One of the people MBS told about the discussion with Kushner was UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, according to a source who talks frequently to confidants of the Saudi and Emirati rulers. MBS bragged to the Emirati crown prince and others that Kushner was “in his pocket,” the source told The Intercept.

That would be the same UAE Crown Prince who was present in the Seychelles meeting with Trump supporter, Erik Prince, as well as several Russian officials, and an Arab spy.
President Trump can give authority to Kushner to disclose what’s in those briefings, but to do so and meddle in the tense situation going on in another nation is a bit much. If Trump did not give Kushner authority to give over such information, he’s on the wrong side of the law, regarding the sharing of classified information.

In the months that followed, the arrestees were coerced into signing overbillions in personal assets to the Saudi government. In December, the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi reported that Maj. Gen. Ali al-Qahtani had been tortured to death in the Ritz. Qahtani’s body showed signs of mistreatment, including a neck that was “twisted unnaturally as though it had been broken,” bruises, and “burn marks that appeared to be from electric shocks,” the New York Times reported earlier this month.

Nasty stuff. 

Wright goes on to discuss the concerns Rex Tillerson and H.R. McMaster had about this freelancing approach to foreign policy, as well as the role Kushner family-business finances had in Trump and Kushner backing the UAE and Saudi Arabia over Qatar when things heated up among those nations.

In light of this, Feldman's assessment of Kushner's role seems awfully white-bread.

He may have gotten a Saudi major general tortured to death.

Are the shills still going to make fun of the insistence on some modicum of character?

Cue the apple-falling-near-the-tree cliche:

Years before Vanessa Trump filed for divorce from Donald Trump Jr., their marriage was rocked when — around the time she was pregnant with their third child — he cheated on her with a contestant from “The Celebrity Apprentice.”

Page Six has exclusively learned that Don Jr. — then a so-called “adviser” on the NBC show — fell for busty Danity Kane star Aubrey O’Day while filming “Celebrity Apprentice” in 2011.

Sources say that Vanessa — who filed for divorcefrom President Donald Trump’s eldest son last week after 13 years of marriage — was devastated when he told her that he planned to leave her for O’Day.

Vanessa was pregnant with their third child, Tristan, around that time.

Don Jr. “pursued [Aubrey]. It was him who chased her,” said a source familiar with the situation. “He told her that his marriage was already in the process of dissolving.”

Now, having an affair per se is a particular kind of stinky behavior. Don't stand up in front of family and friends and promise God to form a sacred bond with somebody if you think that, even if you mean it now, you might consider it jive down the road.

But lots of human beings do it, and a lot of them have other aspects of their lives that constitute undeniably positive contributions to public life or culture.

But consider that DJT Jr. had a professional role at Celebrity Apprentice.  This was a major aspect of the family business before DJT Sr. was elected president. Like Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump casinos and everything else with the tawdry Trump logo on it, it was gauche and devoid of dignity.

Consider also that Jr. grew up in a family ethos that basically said, "Yes, your dad busted up this family, but you stay close to him, because that's how you're going to assure yourself of a cushy 'work life' when you come of age." An ethos of opportunism, in other words.

What it amounts to is an ethos that, Ivanka's current stature notwithstanding, makes second-class family members out of Trump women.

The water-carriers are on ever-thinner ice with this attempt to mock an insistence on some character.

We wouldn't have had to be saddled with this soap opera, and we'd have had at least as many laudable policy accomplishments.

Can post-America ever hope to again have a presidency that is neither tawdry nor leftist?

The larger implications of the Putin "election"

The first thing to say is that it's no surprise. There was no serious opposition.

The main significance is that it further entrenches the pattern that's been established over the course of the Putin era.

Leon Aaron of the American Enterprise Institute elaborates on the two main implications we ought to consider:

First, there is the date. A Sunday in March is the only criterion for the Presidential election. Any Sunday. Suggesting a pattern, two previous elections were held on the first Sundays of the month: March 4th in 2012 and March 2nd in 2008. Putin chose the third because March 18 is the date of Putin’s triumphant address to the extraordinary joint session of the Federal Assembly where he “requested” the ratification of the treaty on “admitting” the occupied and annexed Crimea into the Russian Federation. For last’s week victory rally on the Manezhnaya Square next to the Kremlin, Putin chose a “concert” titled “Russia, Sevastopol, Crimea.” The message could not be clearer: no second thoughts, not to mention remorse in seizing part of the neighboring country. On the contrary, Putin must have felt that this theme would boost the turnout and the vote.

The second portentous feature of the pre-election context is the assassination attempt of former intelligence officer Sergei Skripal. It is possible, of course, that this could have been a “rogue” operation. Possible but very unlikely. By protocol deploying nerve gas in Britain, something that even the Soviet Union did not dare do, should have required the green light from the very top. Living openly and without protection, Skripal could have been killed at any time and in any other manner. Attempting to do so ten days before the election with an agent traceable to the hidden Soviet stockpile of chemical weapons sent another message of defiance.

Putin's personal style is not quite like that of the customary world-stage thug. He has remarked that Russian society ought to be more reliant on its traditional Christian underpinnings, and he's spoke about some social issues in a way that seems to stem from that. On the other hand, there are the two features of the just-concluded election that Aaron stresses, not to mention the track record of other mysterious poisonings, the harassment by Russian planes and ships of their US counterparts, the obvious support for the unspeakably evil Assad regime in Syria, the cyberattacks, and stunts like showing up at a meeting of Pacific-rim leaders with a formidable naval fleet in tow.

His ambition is what has propelled him. His path to his present level of power has not been a straight line. There was a time, during the Yeltsin era, when he was sleeping on a friend's couch in St. Petersburg, casting about for a gig.

In interviews, he is inclined to characterize his view of Russian geostrategy as an attempt to keep the West from diluting the essential identity of a huge nation with a long, culturally rich history of which it is immensely proud.

But, as the United States, Britain and various other countries have shown, a nation-state doesn't have to resort to thuggery to preserve its identity and viability.

He takes that nationalism to a level that precludes the kinds of moral considerations one should expect of a great power.

And, as Ben Shapiro points out today at NRO, he sets an example for other "leaders" in this age of rising nationalist fervor:

Romantic nationalism gives people a feeling of meaning. In doing so, it allows them to look beyond the failures of their leadership, and to ignore even material privation. And romantic nationalism is on the rise. Perhaps we have lived too long in the sunlight of capitalism and freedom, without bothering to educate our children on why these magnificent things exist; perhaps Nietzsche’s death of God left a hole in our hearts that cannot be filled by walking-around money. Whatever the reason, Putin’s continuing popularity should be a warning sign to freedom-lovers around the globe: Cults of leadership are on the rise. And if we don’t provide an alternative worldview for millions of young people from Russia to the United States, bad men will fill that gap with alacrity.

We should familiarize ourselves with the Putin approach to leading a nation-state, because it's an approach we'll be seeing more, not less, of.

Running the long race

For five summers in a row during the previous decade, I attended the Jamey Aebersold Jazz Improvisation Workshop, held on the University of Louisville campus. It's a weeklong event. On Sunday afternoon, once you get settled in your dorm room, you take a theory test and audition in front of the faculty members who play your instrument. On the basis of how you do on those, the organizers know where to place you so as to get the most out of your week.

The days consist of breakfast, ear training, theory class, practice with a combo into which you're placed, lunch, master class with one of the teachers who plays your instrument, and another combo rehearsal session. (The upshot of the combo practices is a recital by each combo on Friday afternoon. By that time, there's lots of bonding with you bandmates, vows to stay in touch, and that feeling that you have something that no one can take away.) There are faculty concerts during lunch and in the evenings after dinner.

There's a phenomenon that attendees talk about that takes place on the Tuesday evening of the week. I experienced it bad the first couple of years. It's the feeling that you just want to pack everything into your car and head home. You're surrounded by all this exquisite refinement, this musical excellence, and the feeling that you're never going to measure up overwhelms you. You just have to ride it out. That's how you get to the Friday afternoon sense that you're holding a gem of great price.

I'd like to talk to some other Christians who came to their faith walks later in life about whether they've ever experienced a Tuesday-evening syndrome, so to speak.

As my understanding, and more importantly, experience, of who and what Jesus is deepens, I sometimes get this nagging feeling that I'm a phony. I start thinking, who am I kidding? I'm jiving myself and everyone else, and God, who can't be jived, knows it.

I haven't really analyzed what brings the feeling on. I think it may be when I allow worry, anger or temptation to encroach on my thought process, but I'm also inclined to think it happens when I profess my faith. Sometimes my words ring hollow, even when I talk a good game.

I guess that's at least an aspect of what the apostle Paul means by perseverance. You come to a point at which you know too much to go back. You indisputably have had your moments of really letting it in. You've gazed squarely at the bloody and shredded Lord on the cross and been overcome with gratitude. But you can't sustain it. You easily revert to the plain old you that you've always been.

Something I noticed about the second year of the jazz workshop was that the impact of the Tuesday-evening syndrome was considerably less. In retrospect, I can see that was because I'd already been through the whole week once, and I knew how it concluded.

I get occasional glimpses of that with regard to my faith walk. I never completely give up, because I've seen enough hints of how this journey turns out to compel me to hang in there.

One such hint is the unflinching confidence that one who came before me had, and if anybody had reason to waver, it would have been him. Therefore, I can take it to the bank when he says

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and wsin which clings so closely, and xlet us run ywith endurance the race that is zset before us.

If we can stick with it and deepen our commitment, there will be a sunlit day when we're high-fiving each other and our instructor says, "You cats did great!"

Monday morning roundup

Michael Graham, writing at CBS News, says that it looks like the Very Stable Genius is correct that there is no collusion to be found between his campaign team and any Russian actors. Lots of ambition-fueled incompetence, yes, but not collusion. But Graham also points out that, true to form, Trump does himself no favors with his always-in-bad-taste tweets.

Many are likely to think that if there was no collusion, then the entire story really was the "witch hunt" President Trump keeps telling them it is. He will have turned out to be right, no matter how many other things he did wrong.

I believe this is the reason Trump stepped on his own good news regarding the McCabe firing.  Why he didn't do what many (myself included) considered the smart move: Let McCabe's firing speak for itself.  Why he sent out his first-ever tweet attacking special counsel Robert Mueller using the key word: "collusion:"

"The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime," he wrote Sunday. "It was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC, and improperly used in FISA COURT for surveillance of my campaign. WITCH HUNT!"

Susan Wright at RedState on what sure looks like Jared Kushner's development company having mastered the art of weaponizing construction.

Andy Smarick at AEI on how Betsy DeVos's overall orientation is great - decentralizing the way education is handled in this country - but that she needs to do a better job of letting local and state-level people involved in that know she supports them.

The problem, however, is that the secretary seemed to imply that state education leaders are lacking the energy, vision, or courage to do what America’s schools need. It is a strange sales job for federalism that publicly questions the capacity of those to whom power would be handed.

In her speech, DeVos said, “For too long, many of you have operated — and in many cases, been forced to operate — as if your work was only accountable to folks in my office.” Here the secretary used an unfortunate and inaccurate trope about state education leaders, suggesting that they sit around waiting for direction from Washington. In truth, state superintendents and state board members are constantly dealing with a vast array of challenges, from improving funding formulas and teacher-preparation programs to reforming school-discipline policies and data systems, to managing delicate relationships with governors, legislators, local districts, advocacy groups, and more. All of this is done by state leaders who are passionate about helping students.

Elsewhere in the speech, DeVos asked, “What are you going to do to serve students in your state?” giving the impression that this wasn’t already their driving force. She also asked, “So, don’t you think it’s time to do something different? To try something new that enhances student achievement?” and argued that state leaders shouldn’t launch a “PR push” to defend their plans. Again, intentionally or not, the secretary implied unflattering things about state leaders — that they aren’t trying to do things differently and that they focus on optics.

Not only does this undermine the case for decentralizing power, it also serves to possibly alienate potential allies. State-level education leaders could be strong advocates for her push for K-12 federalism. This isn’t the first time DeVos’s comments have rankled those on the ground. Early in her tenure the secretary said teachers seemed to be “on receive mode;” and that “They’re waiting to be told what they have to do.” This charge of passivity frustrates essential players in America’s school system and can make others wonder why a decentralized approach to education would be wise.

The secretary deserves kudos for trying to redefine her office as one primarily focused on advocacy and the empowerment of others. Hopefully, in the future, her comments, while containing the “tough love” necessary, will build stronger relationships with and inspire more public confidence in those working in states and schools.

Saudi Crown Prince Muhammed bin Sultan is coming to America for a whirlwind tour. He's scheduled to meet DJT and other major players in Washington and then head to Boston, Silicon Valley and Houston to court investors. This is a different kind of Saudi up-and-comer.

Madame Bleachbit composes a lengthy Facebook attempt at "clarifying" her universally panned India-trip remarks about white women's voting patterns.  It winds up being a double-down.