This is some scary stuff

Your second greatest gift from your Creator, after your life, is your freedom.

Our culture has clearly done a poor job of instilling that fact in the generation now emerging into adulthood:

Young Americans seem to be losing faith in freedom. Why?
According to the World Values Survey, only about 30 percent of Americans born after 1980 believe it is absolutely essential to live in a democratic country, compared with 72 percent of Americans born before World War II. In 1995, 16 percent of Americans in their late teens and early adulthood thought democracy was a bad idea; in 2011, the number increased to 24 percent.

Young Americans also are disproportionately skeptical of free speech. A 2015 poll from the Pew Research Center found that 40 percent of millennials (ages 18 to 34) believe the government should be able to regulate certain types of offensive speech. Only 27 percent of Gen-Xers (ages 35 to 50), 20 percent of baby boomers (ages 51 to 69) and 12 percent of the silent generation (ages 70 to 87) share that opinion.

These views are showing up within both political parties among this age group.

It is so very late in the day.

California leads post-America's descent into complete darkness

Making the repudiation of common sense, science, and reverence for the way God designed the universe official policy:

California just became the first state in the union to officially recognize a third gender option, paving the way for "non-gender binary" to be included on most official state documents.

Governor Jerry Brown signed SB179, the Gender Recognition Act, as part of a wave of legislation that passed through his office on Sunday. The act allows California residents to select an "option x" or "non-binary" option on drivers licenses, birth certificates, marriage licenses, and other-state issued documents.

Democratic state senator Scott Wiener introduced the bill, and took to Twitter Monday to show his appreciation to Governor Brown for passing the bill into law, claiming the legislation now allows California residents to "be who they are."

I'll tell you "who they are." They're either males or females.

God's patience with being mocked is not inexhaustible.

"Civil war" is an apt term for post-America's polarization - today's edition

If you're a prominent radio talk-show host who outspokenly supports the Second Amendment, you will be a target of haters:

Radio host and NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch explained on Fox News' The Story with Martha MacCallum Monday why she has been forced to pack up and move her family out of her house.

Following the Las Vegas massacre, Loesch said she and her family -- including her children -- have received credible violent and vile threats from gun-control advocates and other political opponents because of her role with the National Rifle Association.

Some of the specific threats:

Loesch tweeted on Sunday that one guy threatened to shoot her in her front yard.  Another guy posted photos of her house on social media and threatened to "rape her to death," she said.  Another gun-control advocate threatened to

hunt her down and assault her, and then dragged her kids into it.
She wrote: "The culture is only non-conservative women deserve respect. It’s idiotic, demonstrated daily, and deserving of more than 140 chars."

"These threats are why I'm leaving!" Loesch told MacCallum. "These threats are why I'm moving my family at a horrible time in terms of real estate, before the holidays -- which is never fun."

Loesch said she doesn't hate her political opponents, she just wants people to have a choice to carry a weapon. 

It's important to give kudos where they're due, and Chelsea Clinton did the stand-up thing on Twitter:

Dana - this is all awful & unacceptable. Those of us who disagree with you the strongest have a particular responsible to strongly condemn. https://twitter.com/dloesch/status

The thread underneath Chelsea's tweet has some encouraging contributions, but a lot of them are nothing but vile and divisive garbage.

/919726564933332995 

… 

I'd say this qualifies as a bombshell

From The Hill:

Before the Obama administration approved a controversial deal in 2010 giving Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium, the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States, according to government documents and interviews.

Federal agents used a confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show.

They also obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill.

The racketeering scheme was conducted “with the consent of higher level officials” in Russia who “shared the proceeds” from the kickbacks, one agent declared in an affidavit years later.

Rather than bring immediate charges in 2010, however, the Department of Justice (DOJ) continued investigating the matter for nearly four more years, essentially leaving the American public and Congress in the dark about Russian nuclear corruption on U.S. soil during a period when the Obama administration made two major decisions benefiting Putin’s commercial nuclear ambitions.

The first decision occurred in October 2010, when the State Department and government agencies on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States unanimously approved the partial sale of Canadian mining company Uranium One to the Russian nuclear giant Rosatom, giving Moscow control of more than 20 percent of America’s uranium supply.

The LITD post immediately below this one only tangentially has to do with Russia, but I mention it now, because this revelation makes more clear than ever that Russia is not our friend. They must be dealt with warily.

 

The Iran deal in the overall context of Iranian hegemonic designs

At LITD, we like to keep things simple. Murkiness inevitably begets problems.

Consider the JCPOA. The consensus, at a minimum, seems to be that just tearing it up and walking away would create massive diplomatic confusion amongst US allies, economic upheaval, given that lots of Western nations have cemented deals with Iran for supplying all manner of goods and services. The argument then goes that Iran would be more motivated than ever to resume its nuclear program and accelerate its pace.

But consider the cost to American stature in the world in the way the agreement was arrived at. (You can refresh your memory by scrolling through LITD posts in such categories as "Iran," "John Kerry," and "Appeasement of Rogue States.") Iranian foreign minister routinely humiliated Kerry and Wendy Sherman at their meetings in Vienna and Geneva. Iran made no effort to scale back its alliances with Hezbollah, the Houthis, North Korea, or any of the other bad actors it supports and shares technology with.

How pathetic did the obsequiousness get during the hammering out of the deal?

The United States and its negotiating partners agreed "in secret" to allow Iran to evade some restrictions in last year's landmark nuclear agreement in order to meet the deadline for it to start getting relief from economic sanctions, according to a report reviewed by Reuters.

The report is to be published on Thursday by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, said the think tank’s president David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector and co-author of the report. It is based on information provided by several officials of governments involved in the negotiations, who Albright declined to identify.

Reuters could not independently verify the report's assertions.

"The exemptions or loopholes are happening in secret, and it appears that they favor Iran," Albright said. 

Among the exemptions were two that allowed Iran to exceed the deal's limits on how much low-enriched uranium (LEU) it can keep in its nuclear facilities, the report said. LEU can be purified into highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium.

The exemptions, the report said, were approved by the joint commission the deal created to oversee implementation of the accord. The commission is comprised of the United States and its negotiating partners -- called the P5+1 -- and Iran.

One senior "knowledgeable" official was cited by the report as saying that if the joint commission had not acted to create these exemptions, some of Iran’s nuclear facilities would not have been in compliance with the deal by Jan. 16, the deadline for the beginning of the lifting of sanctions.

And, as we know, the humiliation didn't stop once the patty-cake culminated in the deal. In fact, on the one-year anniversary of having (on the day of Obama's 2016 State of the Union Address) seized the crew of two US naval vessels and lifted the data from the crew's phones and laptops, the Khomeini regime put up a huge billboard in Tehran sporting the photograph of the sailors kneeling with their hands behind their heads.

And, as is always the case in this ever-churning world, events keep unfolding.

Yes, it's wonderful that ISIS is collapsing across Iraq and Syria. But Iranian-backed-and-trained militias are now incorporated into the official Iraqi army, and they are routing the Kurds, the player in all this that has been most aligned with US aims, from the region where they live - and have been enjoying relative stability throughout the turmoil that has roiled Iraq for the last couple of decades:

One of the anomalies of the fight against ISIS is that our strategic monomania on suppressing one of the frequent millennia cults that arise in Islam (Christianity has them too, they just don’t kill people–at least on the industrial scale–and tend sit on empty hilltops awaiting the Second Coming) is that we found ourselves allied with a state sponsor of terror: Iran. Today, the Iranian militias we trained and equipped rolled over an ostensible US ally, the Kurdistan Regional Government, began what looks like a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kirkuk and topped it all off with the beheading of captured Kurdish peshmerga.

This is the result of a lack of thorough housecleaning of foreign-policy employees of the US government from the previous administration:

In all fairness, this strategy was developed by the Obama administration and it was developed without any real complaints out of CENTCOM. And the monomaniacal focus on the destruction of ISIS made partnering with the IRGC inevitable, never mind their track record of blowing up American installations. This policy has continued under the current Defense Secretary and National Security Adviser because they were pretty much co-opted by the status quo when they came on board. We’ve kept on staff Brett McGurk–the nimrod who screwed up Iraqi SOFA negotiations while sleeping with a Wall Street Journal reporter (FEMALE, THANK HEAVEN!!) and getting blow jobs from a State Department staffer (FEMALE, THANK HEAVEN!!) on the roof to the US embassy in Baghdad–who has seen this plan through to its unfortunate, though logical and foreseeable, consequences.

The pro-JCPOA argument I referenced above has as its bottom line the view that, while it does nothing to stop Iranian permeation of most, if not all, Middle East hot spots, nor curb Iranian missile development, it delayed the most existential threat of all by a decade.

But a regime that behaves as Iran has since 1979 and continues to is not going to miss any opportunities to thwart and harm the US, its declared number-one enemy.

Yes, our European allies would feel confused and betrayed if we abruptly tore up the JPCOA.

But how do you think the Kurds feel today as Kirkuk falls?

 

I didn't want anything vague, or any trace of relativism, as I pursued what I was basing my worldview on

I did something this morning that pretty much surprised me. I came out on Facebook as a full-fledged Christian.

Here's my post:

I know a lot of people come to Christ after some personal crisis. That hasn't been the case for me. I just got to the point where, after exploring / considering / making a serious attempt to live out other "ultimate answers" ranging from Buddhism to Christian-esque belief systems to a focus on the secular aspects of conservatism, it became apparent to me that nothing but actual Christian doctrine tied every last strand of all my questioning together. (I'm sometimes told I overthink everything, and there's surely some truth to that.) And my inquiry was exhaustive. I went for decades thinking that doctrine was the most cornball, outlandish and even unfair gobbledygook I'd ever come across. 
But I'm now convinced that nothing else will provide the healing our postmodern hearts are screaming and crying for.

I really see no way out of the basic human predicament other than the cross.

Once you say to the Most High, "I know what I have done that has violated your design for this universe, and I am sorry from the bottom of my heart. I accept your offer of restoring our relationship," an odd thing happens: You simultaneously become more of an absolutist, but you also start looking for ways to inject more gentleness and humility into your engagement with the world.

I started this blog five years ago in response to the very real darkness that was descending over Western civilization, and felt that a combative tone was appropriate for establishing the level of my concern, and my determination to resist it. And I don't regret the assertions that I began making early on: that the Democrat party, as constituted for the last several years, is based on a fundamental and visceral hatred for basic human freedom and dignity, that the coarseness that had come to be the defining characteristic of our culture was going to make our society more barbaric, and that appeasement of the West's enemies would exponentially increase our vulnerability to their intentions.

And I was constantly thinking about the other side of the ledger. If I stood against this array of things - a push for tyranny, cultural degradation, and willful denial of the fact of enemies - I needed to examine and articulate what it was that I stood for.

My personal way of expressing the three basic pillars of conservatism,

1.) Free-market economics, which begins with the premise that a good or service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth - period. No other party has any business being involved in that agreement - certainly not government.

2.) An understanding that Western civilization has been a unique blessing to humankind. (Judeo-Christian morality, Greco-Roman model of representative democracy, the great scientific and artistic achievements.)

3.) A foreign policy based on what history tells us about human nature. This plays itself out as our allies knowing we have their backs, our adversaries respecting us, and our enemies fearing us.

 took me far, and are still the basis from which I argue pretty much anything.

But once I had taken the spiritual leap and come to see grace as the centerpiece of my entire worldview, I began to look at the question of demeanor. And it wasn't just because I wanted to learn how to more effectively win arguments, although I still relish winning arguments. It was a question of whether I was being an authentic agent of that grace.

It's not as if I have shed my lifelong personality. I have no interest in "compromise" on anything involving immutable principles, and I don't think that an attempt to understand the root causes of someone's wrongness ought to result in giving that wrongness a pass.

But there's a certain kind of calmness, and I guess you'd even say restraint that begins to enter one's thought process at this point. It becomes ever more important to not add to the sum total of buzz-saw rancor that permeates public discourse in 2017 post-America.

It just plain does no one any good.

It's why, as I mentioned in yesterday's roundup post, it was so dismaying to see the Family Research Council book two of today's most vituperative public figures, Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, as speakers at this year's Values Voters Summit. As Susan Wright puts it at The Resurgent, it's the quintessential application of the Lord's teaching about salt losing its saltiness.

That decision raises the broad question of how to deal with Trump supporters' basic assertion - "Yes, he's bombastic, inconsistent, and not particularly religious (given his stance that he needs no forgiveness for his years of hedonistic behavior), but look at how far he's moved the needle on policy matters that concern us with his executive orders and judicial appointments. For crying out loud, what do you want? Absolutely perfect conservatism?"

To that crowd, I have to reply, "Sorry, but his utter lack of humility and depth looks me like it can do nothing to reduce our societal brittleness."

When push comes to shove, you can tell the difference between someone motivated by pragmatically settling for a three-quarters victory on the policy level and someone who insists on a more noble and dignified culture, a culture that values basic safety, warmth and connectedness.

Maybe what I'm saying is that I've found the real reason I'm a three-pillared conservative. What we are after is what is good, right and true, and there's only one place to go to find it and have all one's doubts removed.

It was time to declare publicly that I know Jesus to be the Truth. No countervailing force can prevail against that.

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.

Music is more ubiquitous than ever, but humanizes us less than ever

Craig Havighurst at Cuepoint has a supremely important essay today on music's diminishing role in our lives. That seems like a weird thing to say, given that music is everywhere, but when you read this, you will see that that is his point.
 Most such essays focus on how dauntingly hard it is for musicians to make a living these days, and he touches on that:

In their many (justified) laments about the trajectory of their profession in the digital age, songwriters and musicians regularly assert that music has been “devalued.” Over the years they’ve pointed at two outstanding culprits. First, it was music piracy and the futility of “competing with free.” More recently the focus has been on the seemingly miniscule payments songs generate when they’re streamed on services such as Spotify or Apple Music.

These are serious issues, and many agree that the industry and lawmakers have a lot of work to do. But at least there is dialogue and progress being made toward new models for rights and royalties in the new music economy.

He then touches on a subject I've had ample opportunity to consider, given that, in the past decade-plus, most of my musical associations have been with jazz players:

When I hear songwriters of radio hits decry their tiny checks from Spotify, I think of today’s jazz prodigies who won’t have a shot at even a fraction of the old guard’s popular success. They can’t even imagine working in a music environment that might lead them to household name status of the Miles Davis or John Coltrane variety. They are struggling against forces at the very nexus of commerce, culture and education that have conspired to make music less meaningful to the public at large. Here are some of the most problematic issues musicians are facing in the industry’s current landscape.

This has come up in my conversations a lot. The days of the nightclub bandstand and the recording studio being the main environments in which a jazz musician earned his wherewithal have been replaced with an era where the classroom and the workshop are the main sources of bread and butter. And those places churn out hundreds of excellent players who in turn have to find teaching gigs to churn out yet more.

Then he gets to his list of factors creating the current situation:

• the death of context
• commercial radio
• the media
• conflation
• anti-intellectualism
• movies & games
• the 'makes-kids-smarter' approach to music in schools

The whole thing is a must-read, but I'll share here a couple of particular observations of his that merit note. Here's what he means by conflation:

A little noticed but corrosive quirk of the digital age is the way our interfaces conflate music with all other media and entertainment choices. iTunes started it by taking software ostensibly for collecting and playing music and morphing it into a platform for TV, film, podcasts, games, apps and so on. This is both a symbol and a cause of the dwindling meaning and import of music in the multi-media onslaught that is our culture. The shiny displays distracting people away from “just” music are already ubiquitous. So why impose them on a music player? I believe that one reason vinyl and phonographs are hot again is that musically oriented people crave something of a shrine for their music — a device that is for music only.

The anti-intellectualism  element touches on something I've discussed at LITD a few times: this notion that music's value comes from the feelings it evokes in us. And I would add that feeling is, as time goes on, less about noble emotions and more about more basic nervous-system responses to repeated rhythmic points and short - very short - melodic phrases:

Music has for decades been promoted and explained to us almost exclusively as a talisman of emotion. The overwhelming issue is how it makes you feel. Whereas the art music of the West transcended because of its dazzling dance of emotion and intellect. Art music relates to mathematics, architecture, symbolism and philosophy. And as such topics have been belittled in the general press or cable television, our collective ability to relate to music through a humanities lens has atrophied. Those of us who had music explained and demonstrated to us as a game for the brain as well as the heart had it really lucky. Why so many are satisfied to engage with music at only the level of feeling is a vast, impoverishing mystery.

I still play music professionally a fair amount, but at this point in my life, I can see that it's worked out well for me to mainly be a writer.

The irony is that's a shame. Music ought to have a sublime place in human life, but since it no longer does, and I have bills to pay, I settle for an arrangement that allows me to be a positive force without putting everything on the line for it.

 

Let's review just what "cost sharing reductions" are, and how they came to be

For starters, let's take a moment to reflect on what a gobbledygook term it is. It's a syntactical train wreck. What is being reduced? The cost? The sharing?

Like so many terms one sees in the realm of health-care insurance and "insurance" - "doughnut hole" comes to mind - it glosses over what is really happening with a surfeit of wonkiness.

Peeps, CSRs are nothing but raw redistribution:

[They] are direct payments to insurance companies that were designed to hide the true cost of Obamacare by shifting cost to taxpayers while bribing insurance giants to participate in the law’s exchanges.

Congress gave the Most Equal Comrade a big thumbs-down in 2013 to making this a component of the "Affordable" Care Act.

So the next step was . . . to do it anyway!

When Congress refused, Obama’s Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, without offering any public legal justification for the move, ordered the administration to begin making CSR payments. You can imagine the outcry if Donald Trump simply began funding a massive border wall without a congressional appropriation to authorize the funding.

Since Lew’s decision to unilaterally create a massive new appropriation, Obama (and now Trump) have been sending around $7 billion each year to insurance companies participating in the supposedly self-sufficient and competitive state health care exchanges. They continued to do so after the House sued. They continued to do so after a federal judge found the payments unconstitutional and ordered them stopped.

“Congress authorized reduced cost-sharing but did not appropriate monies for it,” U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer wrote. “Congress is the only source for such an appropriation, and no public money can be spent without one.”

So all of us taxpayers were forced at gunpoint to shore up the difference between what insurance companies needed to make a profit after being made to take all comers as customers, and what they'd actually be taking in without this scheme. And the House, where money for stuff government does is supposed to come from, per Article 1 of the Constitution, was left out of the proceedings. And the market value of a given insurance policy was distorted beyond all recognition.

That, folks, is what was undone yesterday, and not a minute too soon.

 

Friday roundup

It's important, when steering you folks to articles elsewhere, that I avoid hyperbole. I don't want you to dismiss anything based on my having trotted out a term too many times and thereby diminished its impact. But Noah Rothman's piece at Commentary entitled "Everyone Owns the Iran Deal's Deceits" is truly important. You read the details of how the deal was constructed so as to accommodate an overwhelming flood of subjectivity, and consider that it is therefore probably too late, or nearly so, to just completely tear it up, and then consider how a chillingly similar chain of events has brought us to the current mortal peril we faced from North Korea, and, well, it doesn't exactly brighten your mood.

James Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute says that exercises in economic nostalgia like Trump's speech yesterday in Harrisburg. Pennsylvania to truckers point up a lack of vision on the part of those - right-of-center economic-policy specialists - who ostensibly offer the only alternative to statism.

When setting up the terms under which he'd be leading his company, Harvey Weinstein basically acknowledged that he was a monster:

Serial sexual harasser Harvey Weinstein's contract with The Weinstein Company (TWC) included a clause that allowed for his sexual harassment as long as he paid the costs of settlements out of his own pocket, TMZ reported Thursday.

Therefore, it appears, Weinstein may have been wrongfully terminated by TWC.

According to Weinstein's 2015 employment contract, as seen by TMZ, if he got sued for sexual harassment or any other "misconduct" resulting in a settlement or judgment against TWC, as long as Weinstein paid the company what the company paid out, plus a fine, he was good to go.

Every damn day last week, there was a right-of-center speaker whose address was shut down by jackboots on a major post-American university campus.

As I said yesterday, since I didn't vote for DJT last November (and, to state again what I hope is obvious, neither did I press the button for Madame BleachBit), I'm in the position of being able to call out his recklessness, bombast and ignorance when appropriate, but also applaud his good moves. This one is a very good move:

President Donald Trump nominated a climate change skeptic to lead the White House’s environmental policy board Thursday night.

Trump picked Kathleen Hartnett White to serve as a member on the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), which ensures that agencies comply with environmental rules before approving projects. White has spent much of her public life making what she calls the “moral case for fossil fuels.”

White is a fellow for environment issues at the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), a free market group that has been a vehement critic of former President Barack Obama’s climate policies. She was also the former chairwoman of the state’s CEQ.

White’s position on carbon emissions is sure to roil environmental activists already concerned about Trump’s climate skepticism and environmental rollbacks. She has been upfront in recent months about her opposition to rules regulating carbon emissions.

“Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, and carbon is certainly not a poison. Carbon is the chemical basis of all life on earth. Our bones and blood are made out of carbon,” White wrote in a June op-ed.

She is vehemently opposed to the Environmental Protection Agency, and suggested in November that the agency will be dialed back to focus solely on pollutants posing harm to public health and will cease its present extracurricular focus on agenda-centered pollutants supposedly causing man-made global warming.

Mark Hemingway at The Weekly Standard on the significance of the "Boy Scouts" admitting girls.  For one thing, it's "a commentary on what a terrible organization the Girl Scouts has become." Also, it shows that the BSA is "operating out of fear." Quite a public stance to have when the oath your members take comments them to being brave.

DJT's mixed-bag week (so far)

There is his doubling down on the exhortation for - who, exactly? the FCC? - to yank NBC's "license." What kinds of licenses do networks have? I understand that it's a straightforward arrangement for individual stations, but how would this work at the network level?

Which led to Senator Ben Sasse asking on Twitter if DJT was recanting the vow he took last January to uphold the Constitution - and, by inference, the First Amendment.

Some have suggested that Sasse lowers himself getting preoccupied with this. Others say that he distinguishes himself by being the first and, so far, only Senator to step forward and express alarm at how far Trump has pushed the envelope on this.

What we do know is that Squirrel-Hair's slavish toady Sean Hannity now says that he regrets ever having supported Sasse.

Then there are divergent views - within the conservative pundit-sphere - on whether that NBC report was a complete fabrication or just a fairly factual account laced with the inevitable left-leaning spin.

The above-linked Red State piece by strieff flat-out calls it false:

I say blatantly false because Secretary of Defense James Mattis said it was false and I don’t think Mattis needs or wants any job bad enough to burn down a reputation he has built over four decades (some here though will disagree and have done so).

But at Commentary, Noah Rothman  takes a starkly opposite view:

Contrary to the president’s protestations and a denial by Secretary of Defense James Mattis, the report is compelling and thoroughly sourced. That’s the problem.

According to NBC’s report, to which five reporters contributed and which was sourced to “three officials who were in the room,” Trump wants more nuclear warheads. Trump was confronted with a graphic that demonstrated how the United States nuclear warhead stockpile had declined since 1967—when, at its height, the U.S. had more than 32,000 nuclear warheads. Today, by contrast, the U.S. has only 7,000 weapons, approximately 4,000 of which are deployable. The president then reportedly “indicated” he wanted to see a much bigger stockpile.

Would we have to get inside the general's head to ascertain exactly what's true and false, or can corroboration or denial from one of the other officials in the room ever be expected to become public?

Then there is the tweet telling Puerto Rico that FEMA won't be on the ground forever and, by the way, there's still the endemic mismanagement and corruption to be dealt with. This, while the island is still 80 percent without power and huge numbers of citizens don't have clean water.

Here's one from the excellent-policy-highly-questionable-way-of-implementing-it file: Yes, it's great that health insurance plans will now be able to be purchased across state lines, but doing it by executive order perpetuates the extra-Constitutional murkiness that we didn't like when the Most Equal Comrade did it.

Now, I doubt if this one originated within DJT's very good brain, but someone did the right thing big-time by orchestrating the US pullout from UNESCO. One less front within the utterly worthless UN on which we have to have any ties to anti-Israel bias.

This is the ongoing benefit of not having voted for the guy: I don't have to own any of the cringe-inducing stuff, but can heartily applaud the good policy moves.

Well, well . . .

Check out this nugget from Jimmy Kimmel's portfolio of work as  one of America's beloved entertainers:

Twitter user Austen Fletcher shared an old clip of Jimmy Kimmel (from The Man Show) playing a game with women on the street where they had to guess what’s in his pants using their hands.

It’s worth noting that the women in the clip voluntarily played this game for a comedy bit, and is not equatable with Weinstein’s actions (despite what some social media have insinuated).

He suggested one woman “use two hands” and jokingly said “maybe it’d be easier if you put your mouth on it.”

Kimmel asked another woman how old she was, which she said 18.
“Are you sure?” Kimmel replied. “Because Uncle Jimmy doesn’t need to do time.”

When one of his contestants was aggressively feeling around his pants, he told her “You’re gonna make a fine wife.”
In the end, he revealed what he had in his pants: a zucchini with a rubber band on it.

Kimmel has gotten a lot of attention lately for weighing in on the health care debate and pushing for gun control in the wake of the Las Vegas massacre. 

Now, as this report on it from Mediaite says, the participants volunteered and, in general,  it was lighthearted and devoid of the creepy lechery of what has been garnering notoriety for Weinstein. In fact, I had to ask myself before beginning this post, are you sure you're not skirting the edges of excessive prudery?

But how much daylight is there between what Kimmel is up to here and truly creepy behavior? If he hadn't been a celebrity of at least some degree, and had the volunteers not been assured that it was all in good fun and would go so far in stoking the sexual energy with which the gag was charged and no further, would it not have been truly creepy?

This clip establishes where Kimmel stands on the intersection of sexual energy and dignity.

It comes from a period in his career when he was on a cable show with a rather specialized audience called The Man Show. Now, years later, he is host of a network late-night talk show.

So ask yourself this: Is anything like this in the pre-late-night-talk-show-host archives of Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson or Jay Leno?

And further ask, did any of the above go on to engage in moral preening about issues of their day from a position that advocated government intrusion into the rights of individuals the way Kimmel has with health care and gun control?

The way this ties together is that Kimmel, in the above clip, shows himself to be a moral relativist, taking the tee-hee factor with which sex is inextricably bound to a level at which hard and fast codes about sexual conduct are sneered at. And then, many years later, he assumes the role of moral arbiter, asking us to get all teary-eyed about infants needing surgical procedures as well as mass-shooting victims, and overtly demanding that government curb everyone's rights to address these particular situations.

It's sanctimony of the most nauseating sort.

Neither this old clip nor his recent diatribes about socialist health care or gun control exhibit the slightest bit of humility born of recognition of an absolute moral code.

It's all about letting the human sexual impulse run free while the brute force of the state is brought to bear on any other form of individual autonomy.

For a moment, I asked myself if there was any point to the discovery of this old clip, but then this became apparent to me.

We get Jimmy Kimmel as a rich and influential figure in our culture when we set ourselves up as own gods.

Steve Bannon wants to blow up actual conservatism's chance of ever prevailing

You must read Jim Geraghty's Morning Jolt at NRO. It's about Steve Bannon's bellow-fest on Sean Hannity's television program the other night. Bannon is on a tear to raise funds and find primary challengers in order to put every last Republican federal legislator on notice that they'd better be sufficiently conservative populist.

The thing is, there's actually, in terms of voting records, a fair amount of solid support for the Trump "agenda," such as it is.

The problem for the Trump administration is not really one of insufficiently loyal or cooperative Republican senators. Peruse the tables over at Five-Thirty-Eight about how often GOP senators vote the way the Trump administration prefers. Fifteen Republican senators have voted with the White House 95.9 percent of the time. The least “loyal” Republican senator is Susan Collins of Maine, and even she has voted with the White House position 79 percent of the time. The most cooperative Democrat has been Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who votes with the White House position 55 percent of the time.

As I noted this weekend, one of Bannon’s targets, John Barrasso of Wyoming, is one of those senators who has voted with the White House’s position 95.9 percent of the time. The two times he didn’t was on Russian sanctions; on one of the votes the tally was 98 to 2. There is no right-of-center ideology or policy argument against Barrasso remaining as a senator. It is entirely stylistic. Ask a Trump supporter why Barrasso has to go – and I have – and you get answers like “they didn’t pass repeal and replace.” But that’s the fault of John McCain, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and, in the most recent case, Rand Paul! Barrasso voted for it.

No, the Bannon argument is entirely about style. Barrasso is an even-tempered, soft-spoken statesman and that sort of lawmaker doesn’t hold the interests of the angry populists. This is an argument about aesthetics masquerading as one about ideology and policy. The angry populists want to be entertained. They want drama.

Or, as the formerly principled and clear-thinking but now Kool-Aid-besotted Rush Limbaugh put it on his radio show yesterday, voting correctly is not enough. These people must "join the movement"!

I'm beginning to think I underestimated how creepy this was going to get. How long before journalism outlets and legislators have to sign loyalty oaths?

And loyalty to what? Certainly not a clear and consistent vision for "making American great again." I for one can't get excited about, much less be loyal to, a guy whose next utterance is entirely beyond prediction.

I hope GOP strategists are discussing how to thwart this.

Is there one subatomic particle of sound judgement in Donald Trump's entire being?

NBC has a report that DJT proposed increasing the US nuclear arsenal tenfold.

Yes, we're talking about a news outlet that has been busted for actually bending the truth before, and that clearly is rife with the same smug, insular Acela Corridor vibe that characterizes most purveyors of information and analysis.

And yes, the story reeks of agenda. It clearly takes the position that any increase is a bad thing.


But are the reporters whose bylines appear on it going to risk their reputations if there's absolutely nothing to the account?

President Donald Trump said he wanted what amounted to a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during a gathering this past summer of the nation’s highest-ranking national security leaders, according to three officials who were in the room. 

Trump’s comments, the officials said, came in response to a briefing slide he was shown that charted the steady reduction of U.S. nuclear weapons since the late 1960s. Trump indicated he wanted a bigger stockpile, not the bottom position on that downward-sloping curve. 

According to the officials present, Trump’s advisers, among them the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, were surprised. Officials briefly explained the legal and practical impediments to a nuclear buildup and how the current military posture is stronger than it was at the height of the buildup. In interviews, they told NBC News that no such expansion is planned.

Of course, rather than deal with particulars and fully flesh out just what his vision of a nuclear layer of US defense consists of, he goes all bonehead on Twitter, opening himself up for the Left to claim that he's shredding the First Amendment. And, really, what else is there to conclude?

With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!

Um, President Squirrel-Hair, you just squandered any credibility should you ever want to talk about the Left's attempts to go after talk radio.

This guy is clearly winging it.

Still, his water-carriers are going to focus on the media's long knives and willfully ignore the far more disturbing fact that Trump doesn't know what he's doing.

The presidency has not had a maturation effect on Donald Trump

My reactions to attempts by journalists and pundits of various stripes to treat Donald Trump as if he fell within the normal range of presidents ranges from bemusement to disgust. Not only is there no actual "Trump agenda" - for every seeming hard-and-fast set of bullet points for health care, tax reform or immigration, inconsistencies present themselves, and deals are even made with Democrats - but he has shown no change in his perspective on comportment. He continues to trash the dignity of his office with nauseating regularity.

There is much to be said about ESPN's suspension of Jemele Hill as a culture-war battle, but there are plenty of pundits on the payrolls of cultural-observation websites, magazines and radio and TV programs who can do the job. It is not something the president of the United States is supposed to be devoting any attention to.

Alas, that's asking too much in the age of Trump. But he adds nothing to our understanding of the development, much less the context surrounding it. No, he has to tweak the person in question about ratings, much as he did with Schwarzenegger regarding Celebrity Apprentice some months ago:

With Jemele Hill at the mike, it is no wonder ESPN ratings have "tanked," in fact, tanked so badly it is the talk of the industry!

Then there is the "joke" about the comparative IQs of himself and Rex Tillerson. You know the backstory. NBC reported that Tillerson had called Trump a "moron" in July. Tillerson hastily convened a press conference to attempt to reassure the public that he and Trump have a great relationship, but tellingly declining to deny having called him a moron.

Asked about the situation yesterday a Forbes interview, Trump responded thusly:

“I think it's fake news,” Trump told the magazine of Tillerson’s “moron” remark, “but if he did that, I guess we'll have to compare IQ tests. And I can tell you who is going to win."

Then today, the current person holding the world's most thankless job, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was left to handle cleanup crew duties, as well as signal a possibility about Tillerson's fate, prattling about "working hand-in-hand" notwithstanding:

Speaking to the press on the issue earlier Tuesday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders gave an “Aw, shucks” explanation for the comment.

“[Trump] certainly never implied that the secretary of state was not incredibly intelligent,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters on Tuesday.

OH… I guess it’s all in the wording, right?

So is he saying that Tillerson is smart, but he’s more smarter?

Trump did inform us all on the campaign trail that he had the best brain and the best words.

“He made a joke, nothing more than that,” Sanders said. “He has full confidence in the secretary of state. They had a great visit earlier today and they’re working hand-in-hand to move the president’s agenda forward.”

Uh-oh.

How many times have we heard about the president’s “full confidence,” only to see another contestant kicked off the island?

Then there was the back-and-forth set off by DJT first wife Ivana Trump's remarks about having a direct phone line to her former spouse in the White House, and how she is really the First Lady, and picked up by Melanie Trump's office, which issued remarks calling it a self-serving attempt to grab some limelight (which it was). It was the reality-TV vibe brought to the highest office in the land. This one doesn't directly involve DJT, but nearly so, since he is the first president to have had three wives and children by each.

All this is unprecedented. We've had sybarites, hotheads and narcissists in the White House before, but they knew how to pull off acting like someone with real dignity. That bar has been so lowered, it's questionable as to whether it can ever be raised again.

Which is why Rush Limbaugh sounded utterly ridiculous on his radio show today hammering away at his one-note-johnny spin about how the "Washington Establishment" is determined to thwart Trump at every turn merely because he is an "outsider." Went into a can-you-imagine-if-Republicans-worked-with-him-to-enact-his-agenda schtick, as if there were a damn agenda.

Rush, they're embarrassed, along with a whole hell of a lot of us outside the Beltway.

The latest Wayne Allen Root column, which I won't accord the dignity of a link, is rank cheerleading of the sort far better suited to a campaign fundraising letter. Record-high stock market! Great jobs picture! Manufacturing output up!

Yeah, Wayne, 2017 post-America is one healthy, robust, rosy-cheeked nation-state.

Stop it.

Trump enthusiasts, you look desperate and foolish.

And your attempts to make it an either-or game and place all the blame for the nation's lack of unity, lack of confidence, lack of cultural vibrancy, and, yes, lack of rising prosperity on an admittedly bumbling Congress ring really hollow.

Donald Trump is a mistake, and we'll be living with the effects of it for quite some time.

One for the excellent-move side of the ledger

Human freedom and advancement live to see another day in post-America:

The Trump administration this week is expected to formally repeal the Clean Power Plan, taking direct aim at former President Barack Obama’s climate change legacy and delivering a major win for the coal industry.

A draft proposal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s looming decision, leaked late last week and posted online, says the plan — which would have limited carbon emissions from power plants and, in the process, drastically reduced the amount of coal-generated electricity in the U.S. — goes beyond the bounds of federal law and unnecessarily hikes energy prices for consumers.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, as Oklahoma’s attorney general, sued the federal government over the policy. He and others who took legal action contend the agency doesn’t have authority under the federal Clean Air Act to enact such sweeping changes to how power plants are run.

“The EPA proposes to determine that the CPP is not within Congress’s grant of authority to the agency under the governing statute. It is not in the interests of the EPA, or in accord with its mission of environmental protection consistent with the rule of law, to expend its resources along the path of implementing a rule, receiving and passing judgment on state plans, or promulgating federal plans in furtherance of a policy that is not within the bounds of our statutory authority,” the agencysays.

The document concludes months of review of the policy, which was to become effective shortly after Mr. Pruitt took charge in February.

“The EPA is proposing to repeal the CPP in its entirety,” the agency says in its draft conclusion, the final version of which is expected to be released any day.

Power companies had already incurred some costs in anticipation of the CPP going into effect should another Freedom-Hater succeed the Most Equal Comrade, but at least now the damage is contained.

And executive overreach is reversed, at least on one front.

And the principle that free citizens can choose to consume whatever energy forms they damn well please is upheld.