Thursday roundup

Everything Robert Reich says or writes is, without exception, completely idiotic, but he has outdone himself with his latest proposal:

Robert Reich isn’t merely a former cabinet secretary, he’s a Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law grad . . . You need some mighty elite education to produce something this embarrassing.

The only response to an unconstitutional presidency is to annul it. Annulment would repeal all of an unconstitutional president’s appointments and executive actions, and would eliminate the official record of the presidency.

Annulment would recognize that all such appointments, actions and records were made without constitutional authority…

After all, the Supreme Court declares legislation that doesn’t comport with the Constitution null and void, as if it had never been passed.

It would logically follow that the Court could declare all legislation and executive actions of a presidency unauthorized by the Constitution to be null and void, as if Trump had never been elected.

What does “eliminate the official record of the presidency” mean? In the presidential portrait gallery, there’ll just be a big question mark in a frame where number 45 should be?

Thinking about the chaos that would result if the courts suddenly nullified 18 months’ worth of executive branch action across all arms of the government makes me crave sedatives. The immigration tangle alone would be a mess of historic proportions. If only to avoid the bureaucratic red-tape apocalypse, SCOTUS would never go along with Reich’s suggestion. Plus, how could one hope to show that collusion was a but-for cause of Trump’s victory? Absent the Kremlin fiddling with vote totals, which no one has claimed, the counterargument will always be offered that collusion was essentially harmless error — an impeachable offense, sure, but by no means evidence in itself that Trump wouldn’t have won anyway without Putin’s help.

My recent posts about McCain have generated some spirited back-and-forth, and in the days since his passing, I've thought a great deal about just how much weight his basic and undeniable patriotism should be given vis-a-vis the hard-to-forgive moves - voting against "A"CA skinny repeal comes to mind - which is one way his pettiness and vindictiveness (granted, not uncommon traits in the world of politics) manifested itself. But this business of deciding before he passed who would and would not be welcome at his funeral, and putting his 2008 running mate Sarah Palin in the latter group stains his legacy not a week out from his death.  Especially juxtaposed against the fact that the Most Equal Comrade is going to deliver a eulogy.

LITD likes this: A trend is afoot whereby restaurants are starting to ban diners' use of cell phones at their tables.

What is the best way to proceed on this? Victor Davis Hanson at NRO says the VSG administration should declassify any and all documents pertaining to the Mueller probe.  On the other hand, Lee Smith at Real Clear Investigations sees reasons why the VSG continues to opt to not do so.

LITD and other outlets have had some titters over this year's Burning Man and how it's become stratified, ranging from the scroungy hippies to high-livin' types who have lobster flown in, and how rules of conduct for the Orgy Dome have become a point of focus. A piece in the SF Gate today looks over the gathering's entire history and makes clear that, from the outset, it's been a prime example of how bored and worn-out the counterculture - which some time ago really became the culture - is, and how full of themselves those who've been perpetuating it for the last 50-plus years are.

Michael R. Strain of the American Enterprise Institute gives a big thumbs down to Marco Rubio's idea of funding paid family leave by letting people take some of their Social Security build-up early.

Identity-politics jackboots never let an opportunity to baselessly accuse someone of racism, and they got right to work when Florida Pub gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis said this:

Florida elections are always competitive, and this is a guy who, although he’s much too liberal for Florida, I think he’s got huge problems with how he’s governed Tallahassee, he is an articulate spokesman for those far-left views, and he’s a charismatic candidate. I watched those Democrat debates, and none of that is my cup of tea, but he performed better than those other people there. So we’ve got to work hard to make sure that we continue Florida going in a good direction, let’s build off the success we’ve had on Governor Scott, the last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state. That’s not going to work.

You know exactly what word they pounced on, don't you? Of course, all normal people are going to roll their eyes at the ridiculousness of the attempt to impart a sinister motive, and so you'd think that the Dem candidate, Andrew Gillum - he of the proposal to raise the corporate tax rate to 40 percent - would have just quietly moved on to something substantive, but, no, he got in on the grandstanding.

And the kicking-around of the idea that perhaps DeSantis should have paused and searched for a term less susceptible to controversy makes me want to puke. That's rank capitulation to the jackboots.

I'd rather see more of the attitude of this guy at Facebook:

"We are a political monoculture that's intolerant of different views," Brian Amerige, a senior Facebook engineer, wrote in a post entitled "We Have a Problem with Political Diversity." The New York Times first obtained and reported on the post.

"We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology," Amerige charged. "We throw labels that end in *obe and *ist at each other, attacking each other's character rather than their ideas."

"We do this so consistently that employees are afraid to say anything when they disagree with what's around them politically," the engineer explained. "HR has told me that this is not a rare concern, and I've personally gotten over a hundred messages to that effect." On political issues like "'social justice,' immigration, 'diversity', and 'equality,'" Amerige warned, employees "can either keep quiet or sacrifice your reputation and career."

The engineer also noted events that demonstrated these fears are justified. "We tear down posters welcoming Trump supporters," he admitted. "We regularly propose removing [Peter] Thiel from our board because he supported Trump. We're quick to suggest firing people who turn out to be misunderstood, and even quicker to conclude our colleagues are bigots."

Amerige warned that Facebook has "made 'All Lives Matter' a fireable offense." He noted the "witch hunt" against Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, who was pressured to leave Facebook when news spread he had donated to an organization that spread memes against Hillary Clinton online. "We ask HR to investigate those who dare to criticize Islam's human rights record for creating a 'non inclusive environment.' And they called me a transphobe when I called out our corporate art for being politically radical," Amerige noted.

A former A&R person for Atlantic Records has written a memoir that gives a sordid account of Ahmet Ertegun's behavior that is, shall we say, unflattering.

Watching porn in the office, using dildos as decor, and executives bragging about the size of their manhood: This was the record industry before the age of MeToo. 

Dorothy Carvello, the first female A&R executive for Atlantic Records - the label responsible for bringing us musical legends such as Ray Charles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Aretha Franklin - was 24 years old when she landed a job as a secretary for founder Ahmet Ertegun.

The music mogul had a nightly routine which consisted of downing 14 vodka tonics, four lines of cocaine, two joints, and plenty of women.

And every morning, it was Carvello's job to clean the drugs and vomit off his clothes and track down at which clubs he had left his credit cards.  

Once again, we see that a singularly visionary shaper of American culture had flaws commensurate with his greatness. Another post about human sexuality and human nobility may be brewing.

The older I get - and I mean with each passing day - and the more I witness the exposure of great artists' dark sides (and Ertegun while certainly a businessman, was also an artist), cultures of animal-level hedonism within heretofore respected institutions of entertainment, journalism and even Christianity, and the pettiness and turf protection that so thoroughly permeates our government, the more I see that there is no substitute for turning ourselves toward - and turning ourselves over to - Lord Jesus:

. . . genuine Christianity thrives under hardship. This does not mean that we should welcome persecution and the erosion of religious liberty but rather that if they do come, we’ll be alright. 

Don’t be afraid. Don’t allow the politics of fear to control and consume you. 

Do you remember in the last presidential election when President Trump kept claiming that the system is rigged? He was right but in a completely different way than he was intending. 

If you are a Christian, the entire system of the universe if rigged in your favor. No matter who gets elected or what rights are recognized or taken away, everything ultimately works together for your good and God’s glory (Romans 8:18-39). 

So the next time you step into the booth, don’t vote scared. 

Vote like the citizen of another, better, eternally good kingdom. 

You have a living hope. 

No one can take it away.

A Brown University professor of behavioral and social sciences published an article in a respected journal presenting the findings of her study of rapid-onset gender dysphoria - in other words, the phenomenon of momentum gathering in the number of kids wanting to claim they resent the DNA they were born with, because it's this decade's cool thing to do - and, once the school realized what she quite objectively presented, it removed the article from news distribution.