Sunday roundup

That national treasure Kevin Williamson, writing at NRO, succinctly distills the three main camps, with regard to the relationship between taxing and spending, within the Republican Party:

What’s under way here is a contest of three distinct Republican visions: In the House, Diane Black is offering up an old-fashioned bottom-line Republicanism, reform this year, next year, the year after, and beyond; in the Senate, they’re hoping that a massive tax cut will resuscitate the Growth Faerie, who will sprinkle upon Washington the magic dust in which hard decisions are wondrously dissolved; and the White House is offering up President Trump’s usual incoherent content-free populism, a combination of gimmicky showmanship and wishful thinking.

Why has that 2016 Phoenix-airport-tarmac  meeting between Billy Jeff the Zipper and then-Attorney General Lynch been shrouded in mystery all this time? IT hasn't needed to be that way. There's ample documentation about it, but it looks like someone has been sitting on it - until now:

he FBI has been forced to admit that it has 30 documents pertaining to that June 2016 meeting between Bill Clinton and former attorney general Loretta Lynch on the tarmac in Phoenix, after originally claiming to have no such documents.

That seems like a lot of docs for a chance, innocuous meeting about grandkids and golf, doesn't it?)

The FBI admitted to having the Clinton-Lynch tarmac docs only after conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch caught the bureau hiding them in another lawsuit. The FBI is asking for six weeks to produce the documents.
The new docs are being sent to Judicial Watch in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.

According to the watchdog group,  the bureau originally informed them that they were not able to locate any records related to the tarmac meeting, but in a related case, the Justice Department located emails about the meeting in which the DOJ had communicated with the FBI. As a result, the FBI on August 10, 2017, stated: “Upon further review, we subsequently determined potentially responsive documents may exist. As a result, your [FOIA] request has been reopened….” 

Have you ever thought about who Duncan Hines actually was? Here's the skinny - or maybe not-so-skinny - on it:

Duncan Hines couldn’t cook. The white-haired man who smiled reassuringly at 1950s homemakers from grocery store advertisements and cookbook covers was relegated to tossing salad or brewing coffee in his own kitchen. But his name—now best known as a cake mix brand—was synonymous with good taste.

Unlike his baking-aisle colleague Betty Crocker, Hines was not created by a marketing department. That amiable, wrinkled face belonged to a real person, born in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in 1880. A traveling salesman for most of his career, Hines had, on those long road trips, developed a hobby that was unusual for his time: he became an amateur restaurant critic, taking note of the best meals he had eaten in towns across the country, with special mention of the cleanliness of the kitchen.

There were few ways for travelers to find trustworthy recommendations in the early years of the 20th century, and Hines soon became a resource for fellow travelers, eventually self-publishing his restaurant guide, Adventures in Good Eating in 1938, which launched his second career as one of the country’s most recognized names. Metal signs announcing “Recommended by Duncan Hines” were a fixture of the restaurant landscape, a predecessor to today’s Zagat and Yelp signs, and by the time of his death in 1959, Hines was selling 300,000 copies of his regularly updated guide each year.

Hines was hooked up with Andre Arlen, a food scientist who focused on testing dry cake mixes by a marketer for a produce cooperative named Roy Park. The arrangement worked out among the three called for Hines's name to appear on any products he endorsed, which included the cake mix Arlen's team had settled on.

And now you know the rest of the story.

Steve Bannon came to this year's Family Research Council Values Voters Summit and shot off his mouth about waging war on the "GOP establishment" without a word about restoring God's presence in our culture, the ostensible reason for the gathering. Who ever booked the guy made a bad, bad move.

Great essay by Robert Tracinski at The Federalist. His main point is how the recent strong-arm protest by campus jackboots against the ACLU, of all organizations, shows that the Left's  intolerance is proving to be its undoing.

But in the course of fleshing this out, he takes us on a historical trip through the evolution of the word "liberalism" - and how the notion that intellectual freedom and economic freedom were two different critters:

The deepest roots of modern American “liberalism” go back to John Stuart Mill and his 1859 essay “On Liberty.” Mill was a prominent member of Britain’s Liberal Party back when it still stood for free markets, and to this day its remnant, the Liberal Democrats, use a copy of “On Liberty” as a symbol of the party’s leadership.

Mill set out to make a case for liberty that was not based on “natural rights” but on utilitarianism. He starts with the principle that everyone should be allowed to do whatever he likes, so long as it doesn’t harm others: “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

But what constitutes a “harm”? Refusing to give someone a job? Charging “too much” rent for an apartment? Hurting someone’s feelings? To limit the concept of “harm,” Mill emphasized the difference between the private and the public, and between ideas and actions. The ideas you hold privately are nobody’s business but your own, while actions you take publicly might be harmful to others and can in principle be controlled by government. Here is how he summed up his argument:

The maxims are, first, that the individual is not accountable to society for his actions, in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself. Advice, instruction, persuasion, and avoidance by other people if thought necessary by them for their own good, are the only measures by which society can justifiably express its dislike or disapprobation of his conduct. Secondly, that for such actions as are prejudicial to the interests of others, the individual is accountable, and may be subjected either to social or to legal punishment, if society is of opinion that the one or the other is requisite for its protection.

Under this framework, you could still make a very compelling argument that, just as free speech leads to a more vibrant and creative society that benefits everyone in it, so do free markets—and Mill did just that. (His father, James Mill, was a classical economist influenced by Adam Smith, and he learned those lessons well.) But Mill’s main legacy was the creation of this division between intellectual freedom, which he treated as an inviolate basic principle—”over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign”—and economic freedom, which was to be defended on purely pragmatic grounds. The first kind of freedom was way more important than the second.

But here's why you can't separate them:

This strict separation of ideas from action, of the private from the public falls apart the moment you try to apply it to reality. What’s the point of being free to think if you’re not free to act on your thinking? And how can we say that private thinking and private preferences have no effect on others, when they clearly influence the way people act?

Once that fallacy became obvious - most recently in the troubles that employees of corporations have found themselves in for speaking their minds about "diversity" initiatives and all such hooey - the Left had to start eating its own.