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January 30, 2018
JOEL KOTKIN: The Screwed Millennial Generation Gets Smart.
Despite the hype from the press and urban planners, millennials are following in the footsteps of previous generations by locating on the periphery major metropolitan areas and Sun Belt cities, most of which are simply agglomerations of suburbs.
This pattern seems certain to accelerate as millennials enter their thirties, the age when contemporary populations tend to marry, settle down, and have children. To be sure, notes Pew, more 18- to 34-year-olds now live with their parents than with spouses or significant others for the first time since the question was first asked in the 1880s. But when they do leave the nest, albeit later than in previous generations, they are becoming adults whose collective decisions are not so different from those of their parents.
Nice to see them normalizing.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Here’s How Reports of Trump’s Stormy Daniels Affair Gave SHARK CHARITIES a Boost Worldwide.
BYRON YORK: A Tale of Two Memos: The GOP Memo tries to discover what the FBI was doing; the Dem memo is about knocking down the GOP memo.
WELL, GOOD: North Korea, Under Sanctions Strain, Dials Back Military Exercises. “Winter maneuvers are less extensive than in previous years; restrictions on fuel imports are seen as having an effect.”
The North Korean maneuvers, which typically run from December through March, were slow in getting started and are less extensive than usual, according to American officials familiar with intelligence reports and experts outside the government.
One possibility is that restrictions on shipments of oil and refined petroleum products to North Korea imposed by the United Nations have led the country, which has one of the world’s largest standing armies, to conserve fuel by cutting back on ground and air training exercises.
“Where this will have an effect is on ground-force readiness,” said Joseph S. Bermudez Jr. , a military analyst for 38 North, a website on North Korean affairs run by Johns Hopkins University’s U.S.-Korea Institute. “Military units have to train to maintain their proficiency.”
Still, military analysts inside and outside the government cautioned that the development hasn’t yet led to a dramatic decrease in the North’s military capabilities. There also appear to be no signs that sanctions are limiting North Korea’s push to strengthen its nuclear and missile arsenal.
This is no time to go all wobbly.
REPORT: McCabe Stepped Down After Pressure From FBI Director.
FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe stepped down from his post after facing pressure from FBI Director Christopher Wray to leave the position, The New York Times reported Monday.
Wray reportedly said he was concerned about an inspector general report about McCabe and other top Department of Justice officials’ actions during the 2016 presidential race.
The FBI was investigating both Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of State and the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia at the time.
Wray offered for McCabe to be moved to another job at a lower level, but McCabe instead chose to leave the bureau.
McCabe’s departure had been anticipated for some time, and The Washington Post had reported he would retire in March.
But the announcement that he was stepping down on Monday was a surprise, and the Times reported that FBI employees learned of the development from the news as the FBI did not announce the exit internally.
You know, various anonymous sources have been saying that a housecleaning at DOJ and in the intelligence agencies was coming this spring. I was skeptical, but . . . .
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Historically black colleges and universities struggle with rock-bottom graduation rates.
ANDREW MCCARTHY: Rod Rosenstein Is Shirking His Duty to Supervise Robert Mueller. “Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has been AWOL for seven months. We seem to have forgotten that Mueller answers to Rosenstein — and Rosenstein seems only too happy to have us forget.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Rankings Scandal Unfolds At Temple Business School. “U.S. News has announced what may be the most egregious case yet: Temple’s online MBA has been ranked #1 for the past four years, based in part on its reporting that 100% of its entering students took the GMAT. Only 20% of its 2017 entering class did so.”
I’M DOWN WITH THE DARK CHOCOLATE AND RED WINE BUT SUGGEST GOING EASY ON THE GARLIC: Eat these foods to give your sex drive a boost.
I FOR ONE WELCOME… The key to surviving the forthcoming robot revolution.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Your dog could get the flu — here’s how to prevent it.
SECRET FLORIDA MAN! Naked man high on meth: Sex made me crash my truck.
OR AT LEAST OF: An Ideology to Die For.
LIFE PERSISTS IN IMITATING THE ONION: Stranger Than Fiction.
WELL, LEFTISM IS JUST NEUROTIC NONSENSE: Leftist Writer Says Patriotic War Movies are Just “Masculine Nonsense.”
MUCH SHOCKED. SO MY FACE: Hillary Clinton Shielded Top Adviser In Spite Of Sexual Harassment Claims.
NO. PROBABLY NOT EVEN THEN: You Can Have my Meat When You Pry It from My Cold, Dead Hands.
THIS IS THE DAUGHTER OF A FRIEND: And she sings beautifully.
January 29, 2018
AT AMAZON, deals in Men’s Shaving and Hair Removal.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Easy-pass policy fails students. To be fair, the policy was never there for students’ benefit.
I DO NOT TRUST THE INTERNET OF THINGS*: Google Sells Out of Creepy New Always-On Camera That Recognizes, Watches Your Family.
* To coin an Insta-phrase.
GET WOKE, GO BROKE: The 2018 Grammys Ratings Were an Unmitigated Disaster.
JOHN HINDERAKER: Are The Democrats Fighting A Civil War? In a way, they never stopped.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON IS RIGHT ABOUT THE IMPORTANCE OF SLEEP: Sleepy U.S. teens are running on empty. Sleep deprivation is an invisible public health crisis.
TRANSPARENCY: House Intelligence Committee votes to release controversial GOP surveillance memo.
UPDATE: And note something that’s being spun away in coverage:
UNEXPECTEDLY: CNN’s Jeff Toobin Regrets Being Too Tough On Hillary Clinton in 2016: ‘False Equivalence’ to Trump.
Two guesses as to which side of the scale Halperin was pushing down on with his thumb back in October of 2004.
Just think of the media as being Democratic operatives with lavaliers, and it all makes sense.
CHUCK SCHUMER, MEET CHUCK SCHUMER: Brendan Kirby at LifeZette found an interesting speech on immigration issues delivered by the present Senate Minority Leader in 2009. Schumer said things then that Schumer today would condemn as racist. If he’s intellectually honest, that is. Why are you vigorously shaking your head and saying “No, he’s not!!!!”?
THEY DON’T MIND A CORRUPT AGENCY WHEN IT’S CORRUPT ON THEIR SIDE: Why aren’t the Democrats horrified by the corruption at the FBI and DOJ?
JIM TREACHER ON HILLARY CLINTON: PRESIDENT OF WOMEN. She’s spent her entire life showing solidarity with her sisters. Just ask Juanita, Paula, Kathleen, Gennifer, Monica…
WELL, THERE’S NOTHING TO LIKE ABOUT THAT: Virus looks like flu, acts like flu, but it’s not influenza.
AT AMAZON, deals in Sports Nutrition.
BLOCKING KOREAN CASH: Joe Pappalardo: The CIA’s Shadow War Against North Korean Smuggling. The Trump Administration seems to be trying a lot harder on this front than its predecessors.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:
● Shot: Do Millennials Hate Real Men, And Real War, And Real Sex, And Real Life?
—Headline, Red State, yesterday.
● Chaser: The Question that Reveals the Heart of the Culture Wars: What is a man?
—Headline and subhead, column by David French at NRO, today.
● Hangover: Millennials Want Spain To Change Their Word For Black Because ‘It’s Racist.’
—Unilad, January 22nd.
Fight over the word all you want – just try taking my Negroni cocktail from my cold, drunk hands.
PAUL CASSELL: In Supporting the Gymnastics Victims, Judge Aquilina Got It Right. “When sentencing a justly-convicted criminal, the judge is perfectly entitled to be the voice of the community she represents—a community that was no doubt shocked by the magnitude of Nassar’s crimes.” I dunno, it still seemed to me that she was mugging for the cameras.
TOY STORY, THE EARLY YEARS: At the 24th annual Florida Toy Soldier Show, These toy soldiers came ready to fight — but time is running out on their value:
Anybody interested in larger-scaled obliteration of the human race could visit the table of retired University of Maryland business school professor Jim Spina, who was selling a mint-in-box Gilbert Atomic Energy Laboratory set from the early 1950s.
The lab, made by a company that specialized in sciency playthings like chemistry sets, was created at the behest of the U.S. government’s Atomic Energy Commission, which “wanted to prove nuclear energy was so safe you could play with it at home,” said Spina, chuckling mordantly.
The lab — complete with four radioactive ores! — sold for $50 when it was new, not exactly a budget toy. (Gasoline was 14 cents a gallon, to give you a sense of scale.) But Spina was asking $7,500 for his, and seemed pretty confident he’d get it. “I’ve had a lot of interest,” he said. “But you’ve got to find the right guy.” And how to tell the right guy? “The one with $7,500 to spend,” Spina explained with the canny instincts of a business-school professor.
Heh, indeed.
(H/T: Virginia Postrel.)
MORE ON MCCABE:
As recently as last week, Mr. McCabe had told people he hoped to stay until he was eligible to retire in mid-March. Instead, Mr. McCabe made his intentions known to colleagues on Monday, an American official said, and will immediately go on leave.
In a recent conversation, Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, raised concerns about a forthcoming inspector general report examining the actions of Mr. McCabe and other senior F.B.I. officials during the 2016 presidential campaign, when the bureau was investigating both Hillary Clinton’s email use and the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia. In that discussion, according to one former law enforcement official close to Mr. McCabe, Mr. Wray suggested moving Mr. McCabe into another job, which would have been a demotion.
Instead, the former official said, Mr. McCabe chose to leave.
In a message to F.B.I. employees on Monday afternoon, Mr. Wray said he would not comment on “specific aspects” of the inspector general review.
Sounds like that IG report just might live up to the hype.
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Northeast braces for double snow storms this week with up to six inches falling as commuters are warned of dangerous road conditions.
(Classical reference in headline.)
HMM: Sara Carter: Sources in FBI Tell Me More Resignations To Come.
FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was forced to resign Monday, just as the House Intelligence Committee is expected to vote on the public release of a classified memo this afternoon revealing extensive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse under the Obama administration, sources told this reporter.
McCabe apparently lashed out to his colleagues when he was told he would be asked to resign, according to sources. FBI Director Christopher Wray viewed the four-page memo on Sunday, sources familiar with the discussions said.
McCabe, who is facing three federal inquiries for conflicts-of-interest during his time at the FBI, is one of the numerous names mentioned in the classified memo detailing FISA abuse, according to sources who reviewed the memo.
The federal inquiries into allegations against McCabe, who was expected to resign in March, are based on documents and interviews conducted by this reporter over the past year and range from sexual discrimination to improper political activity.
McCabe, a central figure in the ongoing Russia investigation against Trump, is also part of the Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s ongoing review into the FBI’s handling of former Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to send classified information.
Current and former FBI officials said McCabe’s resignation is the beginning of more resignations to come.
“There are people lining up in the bureau to go after McCabe,” said a former FBI official, with knowledge. “There will be a clean up at the Bureau of his cronies.”
Good.
ANNALS OF FEMINIST AUTOPHAGY: Margaret Atwood is the Next Course at the Feminists Cannibal Feast, Sarah Hoyt writes.
As Megan McArdle wrote earlier this month, funny how the “bad feminists” are the ones “who still believe women have power.”
2018 GRAMMYS HAD THE LOWEST RATINGS EVER AS AWARD SHOW TURNS POLITICAL:
According to the Hollywood Reporter, the CBS telecast was down a staggering 21% from 2017 — potentially an all time low.
This mirrors the slide in NFL ratings that several surveys have attributed to players’ decisions to kneel during games.
“Virtue signaling is tricky business, especially for an entertainment world trying to be holier-than-thou,” Nick Gillespie writes at Reason, wondering why “Grammys Have Time for Hillary Clinton, But Not Lorde, To Perform?”
Let’s assume that the Grammys, like the Olympics, the Oscars, the NFL, and other 20th-century televised institutions, no longer command attention and interest the way they used to. It’s less because of politicization and more simply because audiences have more and more freedom to go elsewhere. (In the case of the Olympics, the loss of audience is precisely because of de-politicization: the end of the Cold War robbed every archery and ski jump contest of specifically political interest.) The more important question for me is whether consumers of art, culture, sports, and entertainment are more or less able to access the fare we want. To borrow the pretzel logic of multiple Grammy-winning band Steely Dan, any major dude with half a heart will tell you, my friend, any minor world that breaks apart falls together again. Music has never been more accessible and varied than it is today. While the “rock star” archetype may well be dead as a meaningful cultural touchstone, there’s more stuff to listen to in any possible genre you can imagine. If the Grammys and boring old fare like it must die for entertainment to live, well, that’s the sort of grave I’m happy to dance on.
* * * * * * * *
Which isn’t to say that the Grammys didn’t go out of its way to bother the majority of Americans who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. For a show that didn’t make time for popular (and political!) artist Lorde to perform despite her being up for the prestigious “album of the year” award, the Grammys still found time to run an explicitly anti–Donald Trump sketch featuring Hillary Clinton reading from Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury. Because when you’ve got a roomful of musical talent, what you really want to see is a failed politician who spent a good amount of her time in power railing against pop culture.
As with most of broadcast television, the Grammys have been heading slowly south in the ratings for ages. Their recent hyper-politicization aligns perfectly with Robert Tracinski’s theory regarding the hard left bias of the network late night TV hosts – it’s the best way for the Grammys, and the network that hosts it, to keep what’s left of a inexorably shrinking audience.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Grip A Semi-Auto Pistol.
CLEVELAND INDIANS: WE’RE DUMPING CHIEF WAHOO — BECAUSE MLB TOLD US TO. With the All-Star Game scheduled to be played in Cleveland in 2019, as Ed Morrissey writes, it sounds very much like league executives threatened the Indians along the lines of, “Nice official event ya got there … shame if anything happened to it, eh?”
UPDATE: “Trump’s going to suggest Elizabeth Warren be the new Cleveland mascot isn’t he?”
Heh.™
I WAS EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Better erections with nitroglycerin.
Here’s the actual paper.
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NEWS YOU CAN USE: Vitamin D could help millions of people with irritable bowel syndrome.
AND NOW HE’S OUT, THE DAY AFTER THE FBI DIRECTOR SAW THE HOUSE MEMO: New Book: McCabe Initiated White House Meeting That Led To Leak.
The book is Howard Kurtz’s Media Madness: Donald Trump, the Press, and the War over the Truth, out today.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: From Conspiracy Theories to Conspiracies.
FORGOTTEN BUT NOT GONE: This 40 Year Old Antibiotic Could Fight Back Against The Worst Superbugs. “Based on a new study of the antibiotic and tests on animal models, an international team of researchers thinks octapeptin has the potential to replace colistin, one of the drugs of last resort that bacteria have slowly been able to outsmart.”
MICHAEL LEDEEN: Making Iran Great Again.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University Of Texas Faculty Rebels Against Use Of Metrics To Assess Scholarly Performance.
A REVIEW OF THE GARMIN SPEAK PLUS, which brings Alexa and a dash cam to your GPS.
But now that Alexa’s gone full SJW, I don’t think I want her.
ANDREW McCABE OUT AS DEPUTY FBI DIRECTOR: “Stepped Down?” Or “Removed?”
IT’S WORTH THE FIVE MINUTES IT WILL TAKE: How to Clean Your Gadgets to Make Them Feel Like New Again.
FATHER. SON. CELLMATES. GENERATIONS OF PHILLY FAMILIES ARE INCARCERATED TOGETHER:
But that there are regular family reunions in the visiting rooms of state prisons reflects an incarceration rate that — despite attempts to turn the tide — remains at near historically high levels and deeply concentrated in poor communities of color. By one estimation, there are 36,000 black men ages 25 to 54 missing from Philadelphia, either killed or incarcerated. Philadelphia leaders are working to cut the city jail roster by one-third in three years, while the state system has shed about 3,000 inmates since the population peaked at more than 51,000 inmates in 2009. But these efforts seek to bend a curve that tracked upward for decades. Pennsylvania admitted more than 19,000 state inmates in 2016, including parole violators; that annual figure remains double what it was 20 years ago, even as the violent crime rate has declined.
The Butterfield Effect strikes again!
(As spotted by Kurt Schlichter.)
EDUCATION APOCALYPSE UPDATE: Is Spending $1 Trillion on Education a Waste of Money? Bryan Caplan Says Yes.
His book is The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money.
UNEXPECTEDLY: Grammy Awards Ratings Down Sharply From 2017 in Early Nielsen Numbers.
Who wants to watch MSNBC with uglier fashions and a lousier soundtrack?
And astonishingly enough, even worse journalism, to boot: ‘Don’t ruin great music with trash’: Nikki Haley complains after Grammys feature Hillary Clinton reading ‘Fire and Fury’ with UN envoy saying she prefers her ‘music without the politics.’
All of which flows into Iowahawk’s observation about the left’s long march into cultural institutions, pop and otherwise:
Related: CBS fail in progress: #Grammys fans are pissed CBS is showing golf instead of the red carpet.
Perhaps the golf game was pulling in better ratings?
JIM GERAGHTY: Koch Network Prepping ‘Largest Investment Ever’ in Midterm Cycle.
Speaking to reporters at the opening session of the Koch Seminar Network’s winter meeting, Phillips said he foresees a “very challenging environment at both the federal and state level to protect the policy majorities that made these victories possible.” (The group is eager to avoid being perceived as partisan, and thus emphasizes its preferred lawmakers as “policy majorities.” The overwhelming majority of political figures the Koch network and AFP supports are free-market conservative or libertarian-leaning Republicans.)
To deal with that challenging environment, the Koch network is prepared to spend a sum “on the high end” of $300 million to $400 million, according to James Davis, a spokesman for the network.
Phillips called that “the largest investment we’ve ever had in a midterm election. To give you a sense of that, that is 60 percent more than we [spent] in the in 2016 presidential cycle.”
That’s yuge, even in a non-off year election.
IN THE MAIL: From Peggy Grande, The President Will See You Now: My Stories and Lessons from Ronald Reagan’s Final Years.
Plus, fresh Gold Box and Lightning Deals.
ROGER SIMON: Democrats Are the New Palestinians on Immigration.
Read the whole thing.
HARDBALL: Senator Encourages Democrats to ‘Reveal and Shame’ Trump’s Judicial Nominees. “Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said Democrats should ‘reveal and shame’ President Trump’s judicial nominees since they do not have the power to filibuster them.”
Judicial confirmations is one area where the GOP majority has been performing inarguably well, as Blumenthal’s apparent desperation shows.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: From Conspiracy Theories to Conspiracies.
One ingredient for removing a president would entail a nonstop effort by the opposition to use the courts, the legislative branch, the investigatory agencies, and the administrative state to discredit, undermine, and remove an elected government. In modern terms, that might entail opponents suing to challenge the legitimacy of the election, perhaps by charging in court that according to “experts,” voting machines were dysfunctional and thus some state tallies were null and void.
The effort might embrace trying to subvert the Constitution by pressuring state electors not to honor their constitutionally defined responsibilities to vote in accordance with the popular vote in their respective states. It might also include an effort to introduce articles of impeachment in the House.
A resistance might sue under the 25th Amendment to find the president non compos mentis, accompanied by a popular campaign to clinically diagnose the president as mentally unfit or physically decrepit. Or a resistance might use the courts to seek the removal of an elected president on grounds he was a rank profiteer and had violated the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution—or to file suits with cherry-picked liberal judges to delay and stop the president’s executive orders. On the petty side, an organized effort to discredit a president would range from boycotting the Inauguration to deliberately holding up and delaying confirmation of his appointees.
In fact, in just Trump’s first year we have seen all these things and more.
They won’t like it when it’s their turn to live under the new rules they’ve established, as Kurt Schlichter likes to say.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The University of California, Berkeley student who was detained by immigration officials over New Year’s should never have been allowed to enroll in the first place, according to ICE. “In order for a non-citizen to legally attend a U.S. college, that person must have DACA status or posses a student visa. ICE confirmed that Mora does not have DACA status, which his lawyer previously made public. According to ICE, government records also indicate that Mora does not possess a student visa. When Mora overstayed his temporary visa in 2009, breaking federal law, he became ineligible to obtain a student visa.”
QUESTION ASKED: Is US bailing on Syrian Kurds?
Turkey’s local partners in the Afrin campaign include jihadis, Salafists and those looking to settle scores with the YPG. Tastekin explains, “It worries many people that even as Erdogan claims to be ridding Afrin of ‘terrorists,’ that’s how Syria describes some of the groups he wants to move into the area. Many have backgrounds, ideologies and attitudes that are unfavorable to Kurds. Those groups include former al-Qaeda members, Salafi jihadis, a variety of Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood, mercenaries and some volunteers controlled by Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT).
“Among the groups besieging Afrin and participating in the operations under [Turkish Armed Forces] and MIT guidance are Faylaq al-Sham, Jaish al-Nasr, Jabhat al-Shamiya, Ahrar al-Sham, Nureddin Zengi Brigades, Suqour al-Jaber, Sultan Murad Brigade, Samarkand Brigade, Muntasir Billah Brigade, Sultan Mourad Division, Fatih Sultan Mehmet Brigade, Hamza Company, Northern Storm, Turkistan Islamic Party and Salahaddin Brigade.”
Metin Gurcan writes, “It appears Turkey had Moscow’s go-ahead for the offensive, given that Russia controls all Syrian airspace west of the Euphrates River. Russia no doubt sees that the operation will drive a deeper wedge between the NATO allies Turkey and the United States in light of the latter’s support for the YPG. Moreover, Russia probably calculates that, faced with the threat of being overrun by Turkey and its Free Syrian Army (FSA) allies, the YPG will now be more open to Moscow’s earlier suggestion of handing Afrin back to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.”
Gurcan adds that Turkey “has gone back and forth on the issue of whether Assad should remain in power, [and] has been negotiating with Assad about possibly working together against the YPG and the Kurdish nationalist [PYD]. But the Syrian president knows Erdogan’s preference is an Assad-free Syria, so the Syrian army may end up assisting the Kurdish forces to an extent.
There’s actually little in the article related to the headline, but the story does a solid job of detailing a sticky situation.
XENNIALS: Micro-Generation Born Between 1977-1983 Given New Name. I feel the same way. I’m technically a Boomer, but I was in first grade for the Summer of Love, never had a Davy Crockett hat, never had to worry about the draft, etc. Mostly I followed along after the core Boomers, trying not to trip over the trash they left behind. I think some people call my generation Tweeners, since we came between the real Boomers and Gen X.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Guess what? Trump’s not a feminist. “No, I wouldn’t say I’m a feminist. I mean, I think that would be, maybe, going too far. I’m for women, I’m for men, I’m for everyone.”
Tyler O’Neil is filling in for Liz this morning.
COMPETITIVE VICTIMHOOD: Julie Delpy says it’s easier to be black than to be a woman.
STILL AT #1 ON AMAZON, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.
ANN ALTHOUSE ON HOW WE WERE LIED TO BY OUR BETTERS: Fake news: Preventive care will, in the long run, save money. “It is so irritating that this article blames us the believers — ‘Sorry, It’s Too Good to Be True,’ ‘many people believed….’ This is the same newspaper that will turn and blame us for doubting what it tells us, as though we’re a bunch of yokels when we don’t adopt the beliefs it serves up as true.”
LEAN FORWARD: Grammys president: Women need to ‘step up’ after men sweep this year’s awards. Raise your game, ladies!
SO FAR, HE’S DOING PRETTY WELL: Inside the mind of Leonard Leo, Trump’s Supreme Court right-hand man.
He’s been called the “judicial puppet master,” “Trump’s Supreme Court whisperer,” and the “conservative pipeline to the Supreme Court.” He has played roles big and small in the confirmations of four of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices, including the most recent, Justice Neil Gorsuch. . . .
“There are lots of countries around the world that have very long enumerations of rights, social and economic rights, political rights, civil rights. The Soviet Union had a Bill of Rights that was multiples longer than ours. Most of these countries around the world sign on to lots of [United Nations] charters that contain fundamental rights and other freedoms,” Leo said. “But at the end of the day, those are parchment barriers without serious limitations on government powers that can be enforced. And that’s what I came to realize, that the structural Constitution was the genius of the American founding and was ultimately going to protect our freedom and our dignity as people.
“That’s why I wanted to get involved,” he said of his decision to work at the Federalist Society. “I felt that was an important enterprise, and that this was the institution that was really promoting that idea in a way that no other institution had or was going to.”
Leo accepted the job offer 26 years ago, and today, serves as the organization’s executive vice president.
“This is someone who has fallen in love with the Constitution, with the American principles, and has spent his life trying to advance those,” Carrie Severino, chief counsel of the Judicial Crisis Network, told the Washington Examiner. “He had so many opportunities. He could have gone down a route of a high-paying firm. But he was crazy about the Federalist Society, and he ended up trying to follow his heart and his patriotic impulse there, and how amazingly successful that has become.”
I hope he reads this piece.
AXIOS: Trump team considers nationalizing 5G network.
We’ve got our hands on a PowerPoint deck and a memo — both produced by a senior National Security Council official — which were presented recently to senior officials at other agencies in the Trump administration.
The main points: The documents say America needs a centralized nationwide 5G network within three years. There’ll be a fierce debate inside the Trump administration — and an outcry from the industry — over the next 6-8 months over how such a network is built and paid for.
Two options laid out by the documents:
1. The U.S. government pays for and builds the single network — which would be an unprecedented nationalization of a historically private infrastructure.
2. An alternative plan where wireless providers build their own 5G networks that compete with one another — though the document says the downside is it could take longer and cost more. It argues that one of the “pros” of that plan is that it would cause “less commercial disruption” to the wireless industry than the government building a network.
Between the lines: A source familiar with the documents’ drafting says Option 2 is really no option at all: a single centralized network is what’s required to protect America against China and other bad actors.
A single, centralized network also means a single, centralized point of failure.
ROLL CALL: State of the Union Will Be Used to Prod on Immigration, Infrastructure.
In his first official State of the Union address, President Donald Trump will tell the country how the “roaring” economy is “lifting up” folks of all backgrounds and ask Congress to pass sweeping immigration and infrastructure legislation, says a senior administration official.
Trump will speak from the well of the House chamber shortly after 9 p.m. on Tuesday evening in an address the senior official described as crafted with a “bipartisan” and “unifying” message. . . .
On specific policies, Trump will try to “get the country excited about the urgency” of the need to devote a large sum of federal monies to rebuilding America’s “depleted” roads, bridges, airports, tunnels, and seaports, the senior official said. In addition to trying to sell the need for a massive infrastructure bill — perhaps as large as $1.7 trillion — he also will talk about “how we’re going to do it right and how we’re going to do it fast,” the official told reporters Friday.
But read the story and see how differently it’s written than an Obama story would have been. Or save yourself the click and don’t bother.
Until recently, both Roll Call and The Hill were noticeably more straightforward in their reporting and less obvious in their partisanship than most media. This seems to have changed in the last few months.
EVERYBODY ACT LIKE THEY DIDN’T HEAR A THING: Is China’s nuclear attack submarine too easy to detect? “Military experts say it may not be as quiet as it should be after Japanese navy discovered vessel while submerged near disputed Diaoyu Islands.”
ANDREW SULLIVAN: The Gay Rights Movement Is Undoing Its Best Work.
For a couple of decades, many non-leftists, in the wake of the plague, took more control of the messaging of gay rights. We emphasized those things that united gays and straights, and we celebrated institutions of integration — such as marriage rights and open military service. We portrayed ourselves as average citizens seeking merely the same rights and responsibilities as everyone else — Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. We were largely gender-conforming, which is not in any way better than non-gender-conforming, but this helped get the conversation started and sustained. We adopted a much less leftist stance — and few can really dispute that it was one of the most swiftly successful civil-rights movements in history.
But since Obergefell? As many of us saw our goals largely completed and moved on, the far left filled the void. The movement is now rhetorically as much about race and gender as it is about sexual orientation (“intersectionality”), prefers alternatives to marriage to marriage equality, sees white men as “problematic,” masculinity as toxic, gender as fluid, and race as fundamental. They have no desire to seem “virtually normal”; they are contemptuous of “respectability politics” — which means most politics outside the left. Above all, they have advocated transgenderism, an ideology that goes far beyond recognizing the dignity and humanity and civil equality of trans people into a critique of gender, masculinity, femininity, and heterosexuality. “Live and let live” became: “If you don’t believe gender is nonbinary, you’re a bigot.” I would be shocked if this sudden lurch in the message didn’t in some way negatively affect some straight people’s views of gays.
The left’s indifference to religious freedom — see the question of Masterpiece Cakeshop — has also taken a toll.
Yes, when you act like tyrannical jerks, people don’t like you as much. Go figure.
T.A. Frank for Vanity Fair:
This year, though, we see rather a lot of Democratic senators in red states that didn’t enjoy being forced into brinkmanship over what their opponents could deride as the prioritization of foreign nationals who are in the country illegally. Five sat out the original fight altogether, and 26 more gratefully jumped ship on Monday. Whatever data these senators were viewing, the numbers must have been even more frightening than they’d expected. In politics, a focus on issues can lead people to forget that prioritization is half the battle. It’s one thing to support legalization for DACA recipients; it’s another to say it’s top of the agenda, or the country gets it.
As awkward as the shutdown may have been for Democrats like Missouri’s Claire McCaskill, however, all of the presidency-eyeing stars of the Democratic Party wished, officially at least, to keep it going. While most Democrats voted to end the shutdown, those who didn’t included Booker, Harris, Warren, and Kirsten Gillibrand. This, of course, reflects the blueness of their states (Dianne Feinstein also voted against stopping the shutdown), but it also suggests a belief that taking a hard-line stance on immigration, from the left, is the price of a fighting chance in the next presidential primaries. Such thinking might be valid, but things get trickier when it comes to weighing it against the sentiments of the broader public.
Hillary Clinton had a crooked DNC and plenty of superdelegates at her back, to prevent the party’s crazies from nominating Bernie Sanders. But the DNC “reform commission” is looking to limit the superdelegates, and the DNC is is already under the sway of the party’s far-left progressive base.
It’s too soon to make any predictions with confidence, but an early guess is that the Democrats are preparing for another McGovern Moment.
GOOD IDEA. AVOIDS A REPETITION OF THAT EMBARRASSING NODDING-OFF INCIDENT THAT MIGHT LEAD TO CALLS FOR HER TO RETIRE. Ruth Bader Ginsburg Will Not Attend Trump’s First State Of The Union.
YES. NEXT QUESTION? Is Venezuela on the Brink of Economic and Social Collapse?
As Venezuela limps into early 2018, it is increasingly isolated from a Latin America that is heading in a more market-friendly direction. That includes former allies, Argentina and Ecuador. Six presidential elections are scheduled for 2018—Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico and Paraguay—and none of them are likely to bring into office friendly governments willing to shield Maduro’s autocratic regime. The only friends left within the region are Cuba, Bolivia and Nicaragua, hardly shining examples of democratic governance and they are economically unable to help the regime. As the Venezuelan economy further melts down, more people from that country are going to flee to Colombia, Brazil and the Caribbean.
There have already been reports of boats with Venezuelans sinking and drowning, which gives the image that they could be Latin America’s newest round of “boat people,” fleeing horrible conditions at home.
Bernie Sanders must think it’s weird that the happy citizens of the Bolivarian people’s republic are fleeing for countries which are “heading in a more market-friendly direction.”
CHANGE: WSJ: The New Tax Law Is Roaring Through U.S. Companies. “Just weeks after the federal government adopted the biggest tax overhaul in three decades, the effects are rippling through corner offices and boardrooms, with companies large and small dusting off once-shelved plans, re-evaluating existing projects and exploring new investment in factories and equipment.”
MOVE ALONG CITIZEN, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Minnesota man explains mall stabbings.
TENSION ON THE SET: BBC Cuts Pay of Male Journalists After ‘Pay Gap’ Outcry.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. If Hillary were President, the #MeToo movement would not exist.
JOHN HINDERAKER: Grassley Pursues America’s Biggest Scandal. “Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley continues to burrow into the real scandal: the corruption of the Department of Justice and the FBI by Barack Obama, the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.”
DONALD TRUMP: I Wouldn’t Say I’m A Feminist.
“No, I wouldn’t say I’m a feminist. I mean, I think that would be, maybe, going too far,” Trump said in the interview, according to Morgan. “I’m for women, I’m for men, I’m for everyone.”
“I’m for everyone.” A better slogan than “I’m with her.”
January 28, 2018
WHAT HAPPENS ON CAMPUSES EVENTUALLY SPREADS ELSEWHERE: “The nation’s highest military court has thrown out the 2012 rape conviction of a Coast Guard enlisted man because admirals and prosecutors packed the seven-member jury with five women, four of whom held jobs as advocates for victims of sexual assault.”
ABOUT THAT “BLUE WAVE.”
Related: These 10 Democrat Senators Are Up For Re-Election.
If you’re interested in the future of the Trump presidency, you’ll do more good by picking a House or Senate race and working on it than you will commenting on blogs or tweeting.