A tale as old as time

In other words, do as I say, not as I do:

Since declaring her candidacy in May 2017, [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign heavily relied on those combustible-engine cars — even though a subway station was just 138 feet from her Elmhurst campaign office.

She listed 1,049 transactions for Uber, Lyft, Juno and other car services, federal filings show. The campaign had 505 Uber expenses alone.

In all, Ocasio-Cortez spent $29,365.70 on those emissions-spewing vehicles, along with car and van rentals — even though her Queens HQ was a one-minute walk to the 7 train.

She likes to fly, too:

Instead, her campaign embraced the friendly skies, logging 66 airline transactions costing $25,174.54 during campaign season.

The Democratic firebrand or her staff took Amtrak far less — only 18 times — despite high-speed rail being the cornerstone of her save-the-world strategy.

Most of the flights came after her primary win gave her superstar status and Ocasio-Cortez spent weeks jetting around the country, burning fuel to support her fellow Dems.

Do I blame her for using planes and cars? Of course not. Cars take you exactly where you want to go, almost always on a timetable you choose. That's why people buy them and use them. I live 27 miles away from my office. It's not optimal to live that far away, but I own my home outright and the commute isn't the longest one among my co-workers. When we first moved to our home, I worked in downtown Minneapolis and rode the 4 bus every workday. The 4 bus stop is a block away from my house and some people in the neighborhood work downtown and ride it.

Ocasio-Cortez and her staff have work to do. I think the work they do is absurd and counterproductive, but I don't have any say concerning that, as her presence in Congress is at the behest of her constituents, who apparently like her nonsense. As it happens, my representatives in Congress (Betty McCollum, Amy Klobuchar, Tina Smith) are as daft as AOC is, so my views, and the people who agree with me, aren't likely to get an airing in Congress. I do appreciate the New York Post pointing out that AOC's actions don't square with her rhetoric, but it won't change how she operates. One of the great joys of being on the portside is that the rules you require for others don't really apply to you.

Marquette gets its ass kicked

I never attended Marquette University, but it's always had a place in my heart, especially from my childhood memories of Al McGuire's great basketball teams of the 1970s, which was about the only successful sports entity in Wisconsin in those days. I always rooted for those teams. To this day, I still root for Marquette's basketball team, even when they are playing my otherwise beloved Wisconsin Badgers.

Having said that, I'm delighted that Marquette lost yesterday. And they lost a big way:

The Wisconsin Supreme Court is ordering Marquette University to give a suspended professor his job back.

"That feels very good. My case has finally been vindicated," John McAdams said Friday, July 6.

It's been nearly four years -- seven semesters -- since John McAdams taught a political science course at Marquette University.

"It's frustrating. I don't like being out of the classroom. I like teaching," McAdams said.

McAdams was suspended in 2014 for a blog post that criticized another instructor who had refused to allow a debate over gay marriage in her classroom.

As a reminder, Marquette is a Catholic university. And as a reminder, in 2014 gay marriage was still very much a topic of conversation and debate -- the Obergfell case did not come down until 2015. Writing for National Review, David French provides a succinct summary of what happened:

The facts of the case are relatively simple. In late 2014, a student approached Professor McAdams and told him that his instructor, a graduate student named Cheryl Abbate, had “listed a number of issues on the board” — including “gay rights” — and then said, “Everybody agrees on this, and there is no need to discuss it.”

After class, the student approached the instructor and attempted to engage her in a discussion about gay marriage. After an initially appropriate exchange, the instructor shut down the discussion, saying that “you don’t have a right in this class to make homophobic comments” and “in this class, homophobic comments, racist comments, will not be tolerated.” She then “invited the student to drop the class.”

The student recorded the encounter and played the recording for McAdams. McAdams wrote up the encounter on his blog, the “Marquette Warrior,” named the instructor, and linked to her public personal webpage. As his post gained increasing public attention, Abbate received a series of hateful messages from third parties, including some that threatened violence.

Marquette decided that McAdams had doxxed Abbate. Back to French:

Marquette responded to this incident by rallying behind Abbate and immediately placing McAdams under investigation. It convened a Faculty Hearing Committee (FHC) that featured a member who’d signed a statement condemning McAdams and then laughably claimed that the statement showed no disqualifying bias. After a four-day proceeding, the FHC recommended that the university suspend McAdams for “no less than one and no more than two full semesters.”

The president of the university then suspended McAdams without pay and said that his reinstatement would be contingent upon his signing a letter that — among other things — acknowledged his blog post “was reckless and incompatible with the mission and values of Marquette University.” McAdams refused to sign the letter and thus remained suspended. He filed suit, seeking reinstatement and back pay.

As a matter of law, this is easy. Marquette and McAdams had a contract. Marquette breached the contract and McAdams is entitled to relief. While I would prefer that private universities have latitude in how they run things, a contract is a contract. Back to French:

When a private university makes binding promises to its employees, courts can and must hold the university to its word. In my more than 20 years of battling censorship on college campuses, I’ve seen the same pattern time and again. Elite private universities — often using flowery, aspirational language — promise a marketplace of ideas and then deliver less academic freedom than the community college across town. They use their academic freedom to make a poetic promise, and then claim that same freedom allows them to go back on their word.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected this reasoning, noting that the university could not “excuse its breach of the Contract as an exercise of its academic freedom.” Instead, the analysis was simple: If McAdams’s blog post fit within the scope of protected academic expression, then the university was barred — by the terms of its own faculty handbook — from punishing McAdams for it. The handbook was crystal clear: “In no case, however, shall discretionary cause [for discipline] be interpreted so as to impair the full and free enjoyment of legitimate personal or academic freedoms of thought, doctrine, discourse, association, advocacy, or action.”

For its part, Marquette doesn't get it. The university posted a remarkably snotty response on its webpage:

The McAdams vs. Marquette case strikes at the core of who we are as a university. When a professor violates professional responsibility toward one of our students, Marquette must be able to respond with discipline. This is not about academic freedom or freedom of speech – it is about a professor’s unprofessional conduct toward a student teacher that resulted in direct, irreparable harm. John McAdams treated our student in a manner that does not represent our Guiding Values as a Catholic, Jesuit university, and in doing so, violated his contract.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's a pile of crap. The only contract that matters in this case is the employment contract Marquette had with McAdams. McAdams did not violate his contract in any way. Marquette knows that, which is why they aren't going to appeal. There's more:

This case has never been about academic freedom or a professor’s political views. Had the professor published the same blog without the student-teacher’s name or contact information, he would not have been disciplined. Marquette has been, and always will be, committed to academic freedom. Marquette welcomes a wide variety of views and perspectives and is a place where vigorous, yet respectful, debate happens every day.

The point of publishing the name of Cheryl Abbate was simple -- to warn people who might take her classes that the academic freedom Marquette claims to revere was not operative in her classroom. People have a right to know that. As for the claim that she received threats after McAdams published his blog post, I would hope that law enforcement would seek out the individuals who made those threats and deal with them appropriately.

At bottom, the problem here is hardly unique to Marquette. Plenty of colleges have decided to set themselves up as judge, jury, and executioner by setting up one-sided and frankly ludicrous disciplinary processes. French asks the relevant question:

How many times must universities lose in court before they learn to embrace true academic freedom? Time and again, they’ve lost challenges to their speech codes, speech zones, and restrictive rules that defund conservative and religious organizations. McAdams’s case represents the latest loss to a conservative professor who cried foul. At present, however, the calculation seems to be that universities would rather endure litigation than face the internal consequences of defying the most radical members of their academic communities — the professors, students, and administrators who demand censorship and repression.

Conservative students and professors have precious little internal leverage, so they are forced to appeal to courts to vindicate their rights. 

Or, in the case of the University of Missouri, universities face other consequences:

In an effort to manage a $49 million budget shortfall, the University of Missouri will eliminate 185 positions and lay off 30 staff members.

In addition, the university will reduce travel, eliminate some courses with low enrollment, cut down on sponsorships of some events and convert several printed products into online-only publications, said MU Chancellor Alexander N. Cartwright and Vice Chancellor for Finance Rhonda Gibler in an announcement made public Thursday.

Marquette could turn this around by affirming it is a place where academic freedom is revered and available to all. It does not appear they are ready to do so yet. Al McGuire isn't going to be able to help them.

Come and get me, copper

I suppose it's easy for me, with over 1,000 miles of the North American landmass and the North Atlantic separating me from its jurisdiction, but I suggest the Merseyside Police do something that's anatomically improbable:

Big Merseyside is watching you

If you click on the actual tweet and read the comments, you'll see this exchange, which sums the matter up pretty well:

Freedom of speech, just watch what you say

The world is full of Kierans, lying on their backs and thinking about the National Health Service. If you want to understand how completely lost the Brits truly are, recall their Olympic Tribute to the NHS at the opening of the London Games back in '12:

You might recall the composer of this Riefenstahlian ditty, Mike Oldfield, who is best known for composing the theme from "The Exorcist." I don't know that it's possible to exorcise what's taken root in England, but we'd better damned well understand that the world they inhabit, where parents of Alfie Evans are denied the ability to seek medical treatment for their child, a child the NHS would prefer to scrub off the books, is what many of our neighbors seek for us. And if you object in a public manner, the Merseyside Police are going to be monitoring you. And I have no doubt our neighborhoods have plenty of people who would happily sign up for such a world.

The heel of the boot is always closer to your throat than you know. And the North American landmass and an ocean aren't going to matter. The Merseyside Police may not be coming for you, but they have contemporaries.

Sleep with the fishes

The saga of Kevin Williamson, acerbic Never-Trumper, went into full-on frog and scorpion territory yesterday, as he was ashcanned from the Atlantic only a few weeks after he'd been hired to be the fully caffeinated Jennifer Rubin on their masthead. Where to begin?

• Williamson is a talented guy and his primary value as a pundit is his willingness to call things as he sees them. Who could forget his initial discussion of the Trump campaign, Witless Ape Rides Escalator? You want invective? Have some! 

Donald Trump, being Donald Trump, announced his candidacy at Trump Tower, making a weird grand entrance via escalator — going down, of course, the symbolism of which is lost on that witless ape. But who could witness that scene — the self-made man who started with nothing but a modest portfolio of 27,000 New York City properties acquired by his millionaire slumlord father, barely out of his latest bankruptcy and possibly headed for another one as the casino/jiggle-joint bearing his name sinks into the filthy mire of the one U.S. city that makes Las Vegas look respectable, a reality-television grotesque with his plastic-surgery-disaster wife, grunting like a baboon about our country’s “brand” and his own vast wealth — and not see the peerless sign of our times?

• So, if you're looking for a guy who can bash Le Grand Orange with flair, he's a great choice. But the problem is a guy who can write like that might have a few other opinions that might frighten the neighbors. And Williamson does: 

KEVIN WILLIAMSON (CO-HOST): And someone challenged me on my views on abortion, saying, “If you really thought it was a crime you would support things like life in prison, no parole, for treating it as a homicide.” And I do support that, in fact, as I wrote, what I had in mind was hanging....

 Later in the same episode of the podcast, Williamson continued that when it came to punishment for those who had abortions, he “would totally go with treating it like any other crime up to and including hanging” -- going so far as to say that he had “a soft spot for hanging as a form of capital punishment” because “if the state is going to do violence, let’s make it violence. Let’s not pretend like we’re doing something else.”

• Was Williamson serious about that last part? You could read it as an argument against capital punishment, but not if your goal is to get a guy ashcanned. And so he was.
• Now, in some ways this is a classic frog/scorpion moment -- you would think a guy who has lived in the media world as long as Williamson has would recognize that liberals like his former boss, Jeffrey Goldberg, aren't really his friends, and that he liable to get the Luca Brasi treatment at any moment that seemed propitious. But at the same time, if hacks like Jennifer Rubin can collect that sweet sweet Bezos money from the Washington Post simply by being reflexively against the Leader of the Free World, why wouldn't a more talented writer assume he could cash in, too, at a different portside enclave?
• In some respects, Williamson is no different from Cindy Sheehan or the latest flavor of the moment, David Hogg. Williamson was potentially useful as long as he did the dance as it is choreographed, but the only opinions his minders really wanted were the ones they could sell to their audiences. He wasn't allowed to have any opinions of his own. And if you want a "peerless sign of our times," that's it.

Keyser Soze Strzok

Yeah, this is a problem:

A former top counterintelligence expert at the FBI, now at the center of a political uproar for exchanging private messages that appeared to mock President Donald Trump, changed a key phrase in former FBI Director James Comey's description of how former secretary of state Hillary Clinton handled classified information, according to US officials familiar with the matter.

Electronic records show Peter Strzok, who led the investigation of Hillary Clinton's private email server as the No. 2 official in the counterintelligence division, changed Comey's earlier draft language describing Clinton's actions as "grossly negligent" to "extremely careless," the sources said.

The drafting process was a team effort, CNN is told, with a handful of people reviewing the language as edits were made, according to another US official familiar with the matter.

Why does changing the verbiage matter? Back to the report:

The shift from "grossly negligent" to "extremely careless," which may appear pedestrian at first glance, reflected a decision by the FBI that could have had potentially significant legal implications, as the federal law governing the mishandling of classified material establishes criminal penalties for "gross negligence."

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, raised questions over why the change was made after receiving documents from the FBI last month, but the identity of who was behind the edit has not been reported until now.

Strzok appears to be at the center of a lot of things:

CNN has also learned that Strzok was the FBI official who signed the document officially opening an investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, according to sources familiar with the matter. As the No. 2 official in counterintelligence, Strzok was considered to be one of the bureau's top experts on Russia.

But the news of Strzok's direct role in the statement that ultimately cleared the former Democratic presidential candidate of criminal wrongdoing, now combined with the fact that he was dismissed from special counsel Robert Mueller's team after exchanging private messages with an FBI lawyer that could be seen as favoring Clinton politically, may give ammunition to those seeking ways to discredit Mueller's Russia investigation.

The FBI lawyer in question is Lisa Page. Strzok was also having an affair with her. But there's more:

The FBI agent who was fired from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation team for sending anti-Donald Trump text messages conducted the interviews with two Hillary Clinton aides accused of giving false statements about what they knew of the former secretary of state’s private email server.

Neither of the Clinton associates, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, faced legal consequences for their misleading statements, which they made in interviews last year with former FBI section chief Peter Strzok.

And so who was in charge of the interview with Michael Flynn, now in the crosshairs for lying to the FBI? It would be our guy Strzok:

But another Strzok interview subject was not so lucky.

Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, pleaded guilty last week to lying during an interview he gave on Jan. 24 to Strzok and another FBI agent. Circa journalist Sara Carter reported on Monday that Strzok took part in that interview with the retired lieutenant general.

And why does that matter?

At the time, Strzok was the FBI’s top investigator on the fledgling investigation into Russian interference in the presidential campaign. He was appointed to supervise that effort at the end of July 2016, just weeks after the conclusion of the Clinton email probe. CNN reported on Monday that as the FBI’s No. 2 counterintelligence official, Strzok signed the documents that officially opened the collusion inquiry.

The starkly different outcomes from Strzok’s interviews — a felony charge against Flynn and a free pass to Mills and Abedin — are sure to raise questions from Republicans about double-standards in the FBI’s two most prominent political investigations. FBI Director Christopher Wray will likely be pressed on the Strzok scandal on Thursday when he attends an oversight hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.

Either we have a justice system, or we don't. Either we treat everyone in the same way, or we don't. If we don't, we're past the rule of law and fully into something entirely different. When federal agents are simultaneously political operatives and use their powers to absolve their friends and indict their enemies, we are in a truly dangerous place. Mueller and others associated with the FBI have been stonewalling Congress for months now, precisely because proper oversight would reveal such improprieties and lead to a public outcry against the schemes of those who are supposed to serve the cause of justice. And there's more:

Along with Justice Department attorney David Laufman, Strzok interviewed Clinton herself on July 2, 2016. The pair also interviewed Mills, Abedin and two other Clinton aides, Jake Sullivan and Heather Samuelson.

Summaries of the interviews, known as 302s, were released by the FBI last year.

A review of those documents conducted by The Daily Caller shows that Mills and Abedin told Strzok and Laufman that they were not aware of Clinton’s server until after she left the State Department.

“Mills did not learn Clinton was using a private server until after Clinton’s [Department of State] tenure,” reads notes from Mills’ May 28, 2016 interview. “Mills stated she was not even sure she knew what a server was at the time.”

Abedin also denied knowing about Clinton’s server until leaving the State Department in 2013.

“Abedin did not know that Clinton had a private server until about a year and a half ago when it became public knowledge,” the summary of Strzok’s interview with Abedin states.

But that wasn't true:

But undercutting those denials are email exchanges in which both Mills and Abedin either directly discussed or were involved in discussing Clinton’s server.

“hrc email coming back — is server okay?” Mills asked in a Feb. 27, 2010 email to Abedin and Justin Cooper, a longtime aide to Bill Clinton who helped set up the Clinton server.

“Ur funny. We are on the same server,” Cooper replied.

So is lying to the FBI a crime, or is it not? Here's James Comey on the matter in 2016:

Former FBI Director James Comey defended the Clinton aides’ inconsistent statements in a House Judiciary Committee hearing held on Sept. 28, 2016.

“Having done many investigations myself, there’s always conflicting recollections of facts, some of which are central [to the investigation], some of which are peripheral,” Comey told Jason Chaffetz, a former Utah congressman who served on the committee last year.

Chaffetz was not buying Comey’s dismissive response.

“I think she lied to everybody,” he said of Mills in an interview on Fox News the night of the Comey hearing.

“There’s direct evidence that she actually did know [about the server],” said Chaffetz, who added that Comey’s defense of Mills “makes no sense.”

If Michael Flynn should be brought to justice for lying to the FBI, then Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills should be, too. Either we have a justice system, or we have something else. It's increasingly clear we have something else.

Posse Comeytatus

Comey is gone. You can find a million links to the story, so I won't bother. My thoughts:

• I was nine years old, almost 10, when the Saturday Night Massacre took place. It was actually on my brother's 7th birthday. By the time Nixon moved against Archibald Cox, there was ample evidence of criminal activity. At this point, there is no evidence of criminal activity at all, at least on behalf of the Trump administration, especially in terms of a coverup. As a result, comparing what happened today, right in the middle of the news cycle, with the cynical move that Nixon made on a Saturday night, when he hoped no one would pay attention, is asinine. It's simply not an apt comparison, especially since Trump's attorney general and his deputy were the ones who made the recommendation. Not analogous in the least.
• As far as the Democrats are concerned, Comey has been a hero and a goat and a hero and a goat and now, apparently, a hero, because he's been given the pipe. I don't think he's either, actually. He's a bureaucrat trying to survive, but he'd long overrun his headlights in a deep, deep wood. I'm pretty sure Obama would have given Comey the pipe, too, but he didn't feel like he could get by with it, because he thought it would jeopardize the Clinton campaign. As it turned out, Obama was protecting something that was doomed, anyway.
• The largest problem with Comey was his approach to his job -- he's an investigator, not a prosecutor, so his regular pronouncements about whether criminal charges were warranted in the Clinton email case were, to put it mildly, outrageous. I understand why Comey did speak up on the case initially -- Loretta Lynch was clearly in the bag for Clinton and the meeting she had with Bill Clinton on an airport tarmac in Phoenix was astonishingly improper. It was equally improper for Comey to render a judgment on whether charges were warranted. The right approach would have been to let Lynch kill the investigation, and then resign his position out of principle. That was what Elliot Richardson and William Ruckleshaus did in 1973. Comey apparently wasn't that principled. He tried to split the difference and it did not work.
• I see that John McCain, who still hates Trump, is now calling for an independent committee on the Russia business, while Chuck Schumer is calling for a special prosecutor. If I were Trump, I would name McCain the prosecutor and let him go full Captain Queeg on the deal. It would get McCain's butt out of the Senate and would allow the governor of Arizona to appoint a more coherent replacement in the Senate. If my suspicions are correct, Trump doesn't have anything to fear, because if Trump had done something untoward, we'd have found out about it a long time ago. Trump has very few friends in Washington, even in his own party, and there are probably thousands of people who would love to give him the shiv.
• My guess on what happens next? Trump will be okay. The more time Chuck Schumer spends in front of a microphone with his sonorous blathering, the better. If Trump is truly interested in clearing the decks, he ought to fire the odious IRS Commissioner John Koskinen next. He ought to then have Sessions turn loose some of his deputies to take a real look into what's been going on at the IRS for the last 8 years. I guarantee that if he did that, some bureaucrat would take his revenge on Trump by releasing his tax returns, which will actually help Trump. I think in about three months, it will become clear that the Trump administration began in earnest this day.

Self-marketing

One of the most important, if unwritten rules of Minnesota politics is this -- don't get in the crosshairs of James Nobles: 

A special nonpartisan report on Tuesday found ethical violations by the Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority (MSFA) in its use of two luxury suites at U.S. Bank Stadium.

The 100-page review by the legislative auditor also generated a testy four-hour House-Senate committee meeting as well as a sharp defense of the agency by the governor.

Legislative auditor James Nobles released the findings of his investigation into the MSFA’s use for friends and family of two “Norseman Suites” at the new $1.1 billion stadium in Minneapolis. He found the board had violated state law by not keeping records about who had been in the 18-person suites since the building opened on Aug. 3.

If you'll recall, the review came because we discovered last year that the MSFA had been using the suites for "marketing" purposes that seemed only to be giving free tickets to DFL politicians and their friends and families. There's more from the Star Tribune report:

The MSFA’s “misuse of a public resource has damaged its credibility and diminished public trust,” Nobles said. His office often conducts routine financial audits of the MSFA, but in the future “will expand our scope — or conduct supplementary audits — to examine many other aspects of the authority’s performance.”

The review was consistently critical of the MSFA. Records provided to Nobles’ office were sloppy and incomplete, the report said. The auditors had trouble matching who the guests were with who attended games, who had been given free VIP parking passes to the lot adjacent to the stadium and who had reimbursed the authority after the public outcry.

Of course, Gov. Dayton responded in his usual churlish manner:

“I expect a handful of legislators will ignore these accomplishments, and instead deride and impugn the dedicated public officials who made these successes possible. Their attempts to use this single episode to achieve their own political objectives do nothing to benefit the stadium’s operations or advance the public good,” his statement said.

It wasn't a single episode, of course. The MSFA folks used the suites on a number of occasions and would have continued to do so until the practice was exposed. Had the Star Tribune not reported on the matter at the end of November, it's likely that Michele Kelm-Helgen and Ted Mondale, who run the MSFA, would still be doling out the sweet, sweet suite tickets.

Oh, and there's one other revelation that came out. See if you can spot the larger outrage:

In a surprise that wasn’t in his report, Nobles said the MSFA had acquired a third luxury suite for $300,000 annually for the next five years. The so-called cabins and Truss Bar were built by the Vikings at the highest level of the building for $8.5 million. The MSFA will pay $1.5 million over five years to use the suites for the next 30 years — but cannot use them for Vikings games. SMG markets the suites and has brought in $192,000 since the building opened, Kelm-Helgen said.

Is it the extra suite? Nope. Instead, note that SMG, the Pennsylvania-based company that does the day-to-day operational work for the stadium, is in charge of marketing. So why would MSFA need to control two suites for marketing? That's a larger question that has yet to be answered satisfactorily. I suspect Nobles will be looking into that matter eventually.

Another MNsure success story

Do you have insurance through MNsure? Good luck paying for it next year:

Minnesota health insurers are seeking big premium increases next year for people who buy coverage on their own, with proposed jumps for thousands of people averaging anywhere from 36 percent to 67 percent.

About 270,000 people buy coverage through Minnesota’s individual market, where shoppers buy through insurers, brokers or the state’s MNsure health insurance exchange.

Insurers defend the proposed spikes as necessary given escalating medical costs among enrollees. One health plan, in fact, said the only alternative would be to drop out of the market entirely.

Yeah, the numbers don't look good, especially if you have UCare -- they want to go up 66% But don't worry -- Mark Dayton is gonna subsidize you!

Gov. Mark Dayton said in a statement that consumers should check MNsure to see if they can obtain a tax credit.

Uh oh -- "if." Better not make too much money, otherwise you're gonna be on the hook for the whole thing. And if that's a family plan, it's a big hook:

Rates vary by region. In Rochester, the benchmark plan for a 40-year-old costs $335 per month, compared with $290 per month in Duluth.

The dollars get considerably bigger for people in family plans, where some cite annual health insurance costs of $25,000 to $30,000. With the information released Thursday, consumers still don’t know exactly what will happen to their costs, since the increases are averages of rates that can vary considerably according to age and geography.

Do you happen to have 30 large lying around somewhere?

Confidence games

This piece from Walter Russell Mead, discussing some of the email traffic found in the DNC hack, falls into the "read the whole thing" category. A taste:

Too bad that we now have to depend on leaks from Putin moles to know what’s going on in our country, but the donor stroking industry revealed in these emails is anything but secret. Thousands of prominent people are involved, either as strokers or strokees. Many of these people are extremely well known to journalists at major newspapers, and not a few of them are married to journalists.

Yet here is the NYT treating these leaked emails as a window into an unknown world. The unwillingness of the press to delve into the Vanity Fair at the heart of modern progressive politics (there is no such reluctance to peer into the mysteries of Republican finance) is a real problem.

It is a con and I imagine people involved start to feel like this:

Mead reminds us of the larger toll:

It’s the indirect costs that are high; if anyone wonders why so many of our career politicians are cynics with deep contempt for the public they serve, years of fawning over dumb rich people, pretending to take their silly ideas seriously, assuring each of them that you aren’t like the other stupid rich people, no, you are special, you are smart, and our ten minutes a year friendship punctuated by check writing is deep and sincere—all this tends to corrode the soul. Having a political class who subsist on exploiting the character weaknesses and insatiable narcissism of dilettante plutocrats isn’t the best way to cultivate an ethos of responsibility and patriotism at the highest levels of government.

And because the political class is so thoroughly compromised, it's easier for an orange-hued charlatan to run his own con. More, a lot more, at the link.

The landscape

I'm deeply unhappy with our politics. And I can't see any circumstances in which supporting Donald Trump makes sense, at least personally.

So What Does It All Mean? Not sure, but two voices are worth considering today. Let's start with Victor Davis Hanson:

On race, Trump supporters are tired of hearing that black lives matter, while no one mentions that all lives matter. They are sick of seeing protestors wave the flag of the country they do not wish illegal aliens to be sent back to and trash the country they under no circumstances want them to leave. They don’t like getting a letter from an IRS that employs Lois Lerner — a letter that would be ignored with impunity by those who are here illegally, or who run the Clinton Foundation. They are tired of wealthy minorities claiming they are perpetual victims of ill-treatment at the hands of people who are less well off than they. They don’t like hearing from elites that huge trade deficits have little to do with loss of jobs or that cheating by our trade partners is just a passing glitch in free trade. They cannot stand lectures from those who make more money in an hour than they do in a year about their own bad habits or slothfulness. They don’t know what the on-screen savants mean by a leg-tingle or a perfectly pressed pant leg or a first-class temperament or a president as god — and they don’t care to find out. They do not hate political correctness so much as one-sided political correctness, which gives a pass to some to say things that would get others fired or ruined. They don’t want to be lectured that their own plight is part of a larger, healthy creative destruction or a leaner, meaner competitiveness or an overdue restructuring — by those who are never destroyed, rendered noncompetitive, or restructured. And they don’t like to be talked down to by the experts who ran up $10 trillion in debt, ruined the health-care system, dismantled the military, and screwed up the Secret Service, the IRS, NASA, and the VA. Trump is their megaphone, not their solution. The Trump supporters have seen plenty of politicians with important agendas, but few with the zeal to push them through; at this late date, they would apparently prefer zeal without agendas to agendas without zeal.

Emphasis mine. At the same time, I wonder if Trumpism has any meaning beyond the black swan with the combover. Take it away, Walter Russell Mead:

Many analysts have argued that Trump’s popularity shows that elite GOP orthodoxy—limited government, lower taxes, entitlement reform, hawkish foreign policy—is a dead letter, and what Republican primary voters really want is Trump-style welfare state ethnocentrism at home coupled with America First-ism abroad. There may well be some truth to this (especially the first part; the tenets of traditional Republicanism really are in desperate need of re-imagination if the party wants to address today’s problems). But are voters dead-set on Trumpism as the alternative? The absence of successful Trump-like candidates for Congress raises some doubts. After all, if there were a huge, unfulfilled demand in the Republican primary electorate for white identity politics, wouldn’t we expect enterprising candidates for state, local, and Congressional offices start supplying it? European far-right parties, like Front National, don’t just run candidates for the presidency—they compete for seats in Parliament as well.

Now that Trump is going to be the GOP nominee, he'll have to run on something other than invective. I have a difficult time believing he will be in any great congruence with the GOP platform. So what do you do with a candidate who doesn't believe what his party believes? That's one of the questions we'll be facing in the next six months.

Spiritus Mundi

Ace Commenter Brian pointed us to a very long piece in New York magazine from Andrew Sullivan, concerning the rise of Trump and its larger meaning. There's more to the essay than I can tackle this morning; as is usually the case with Sullivan, it alternates between brilliance and incoherence. A pull quote to get us started:

The deeper, long-term reasons for today’s rage are not hard to find, although many of us elites have shamefully found ourselves able to ignore them. The jobs available to the working class no longer contain the kind of craftsmanship or satisfaction or meaning that can take the sting out of their low and stagnant wages. The once-familiar avenues for socialization — the church, the union hall, the VFW — have become less vibrant and social isolation more common. Global economic forces have pummeled blue-collar workers more relentlessly than almost any other segment of society, forcing them to compete against hundreds of millions of equally skilled workers throughout the planet. No one asked them in the 1990s if this was the future they wanted. And the impact has been more brutal than many economists predicted. No wonder suicide and mortality rates among the white working poor are spiking dramatically.

All true. And more:

Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well. A struggling white man in the heartland is now told to “check his privilege” by students at Ivy League colleges. Even if you agree that the privilege exists, it’s hard not to empathize with the object of this disdain. These working-class communities, already alienated, hear — how can they not? — the glib and easy dismissals of “white straight men” as the ultimate source of all our woes. They smell the condescension and the broad generalizations about them — all of which would be repellent if directed at racial minorities — and see themselves, in [Eric] Hoffer’s words, “disinherited and injured by an unjust order of things.”

Sullivan is getting to what Charles Murray has been writing about recently, the idea that our elites live in a bubble and have little interest in understanding the concerns of those who don't travel in the same circles. And yet, and yet...

But elites still matter in a democracy. They matter not because they are democracy’s enemy but because they provide the critical ingredient to save democracy from itself. The political Establishment may be battered and demoralized, deferential to the algorithms of the web and to the monosyllables of a gifted demagogue, but this is not the time to give up on America’s near-unique and stabilizing blend of democracy and elite responsibility. The country has endured far harsher times than the present without succumbing to rank demagoguery; it avoided the fascism that destroyed Europe; it has channeled extraordinary outpourings of democratic energy into constitutional order. It seems shocking to argue that we need elites in this democratic age — especially with vast inequalities of wealth and elite failures all around us. But we need them precisely to protect this precious democracy from its own destabilizing excesses.

How, precisely, would the elites do this? We're at a dangerous place because, I think, the elites have been dining on the seed corn. And if the economy starts to go south this year, and there is strong reason to believe it is already happening, it could be an ugly year.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

I hear the birds.

World Where You Live

Let's start with a little music from the band Crowded House, circa 1986:

Here's someone now who's got the muscle
His steady hand could move a mountain
Expert in bed, but come on now
There must be something missing
That golden one leads a double life
You'll find out

The detail about being expert in bed is a tell. Just ask him.

Tell me, I don't know where you go
Do you climb into space
To the world where you live
The world where you live, oh-hoo

The world where you live matters. So if you ask an expert, what do you learn? Here's one right now:

Democrats' principal appeal isn't to philosophical coherence: They tell their coalition that they'll take care of their own - the gays, the blacks, the feminists, the transitioning, the environmentalists, the Hispanics, the educators... This time round, a big chunk of the Republican base has figured it'd like someone who's looking out for them, too.

If the present polls hold up through Iowa and New Hampshire, it'd be the reconfiguration of Mr and Mrs Main Street America as just another interest group. So a philosophical commitment to free trade means less to them than the degeneration of mill and factory towns into wastelands of fast-food service jobs and heroin addiction. An abstract respect for religious pluralism means less to them than reducing the number of crazies running around whose last words before opening fire are "Allahu akbar!" A theoretical belief in private-sector health care means less to them than not getting stiffed by crappy five-figure health "insurance" that can be yanked out from under you at any moment under Byzantine rules and regulations that change 30 times a day. And bipartisan myth-making about "a nation of immigrants" means a whole lot less than another decade of Press One For English, flatlined wages, sanctuary cities and remorseless cultural transformation...

That's Mark Steyn, surveying the scene. Everybody searching for something, and if it's true, a lot of people are landing on a blowhard with a combover. 

His steady hand could move a mountain

Meanwhile, out in exotic Wichita, our man Bud Norman and his "editorial we" aren't so sure:

We also note that except for the predictable schoolyard taunts that Trump prefers, and the frequent outright racist screeds from supporters won’t hold Trump responsible for, and there’s the strangely anachronistic argument that anyone who isn’t marching in lockstep with Trump must be supporting some evil creature called “Jeb!,” but the most common retort from Trump and his acolytes is that “at least he fights.”

But who is the fight against? Bud doesn't know, either.

By “establishment,” we no longer have no idea what Trump’s supporters mean to describe.

At the outset of Trump’s campaign we assumed he meant the likes of former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas and current Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who have so frequently angered such rebellious and old-fashioned conservatives as ourselves by signing off on big government crony-capitalist scams from ethanol subsidies to private property land-grabs to big-bank bail-outs and all those deficit-spending budgets, but now we’re told by Trump himself that Cruz was a loose cannon to have opposed all that as a Senator and that nobody in the establishment likes him as a result so the master deal-maker is best suited make the deals that will increase the ethanol subsidies that Iowa voters have a special interest in and uphold that “wonderful” Supreme Court decision that allowed him to tear down a widow’s home and build a parking lot for his casino and assure the next round of bail-outs that he didn’t think were big enough the last time around and pass a plan that cuts taxes and doesn’t decrease spending and will somehow end with a surplus. 

Do you climb into space
To the world where you live

It's all irreconcilable, isn't it? We make America great again by fighting what, exactly?

Here's someone now who's got the muscle

How will it be deployed? Don't expect any help from our normal tutors. Back to Steyn:

All the Chumpy McDonorpants had to do was sit on their hands and not give 100 million bucks to another hereditary-class rich-boy stiff with no flair for retail politics who thinks that illegal immigration is "an act of love". But they couldn't help themselves. The Donor Class decided it would take its contempt for the rubes to the next level ...and now they're surprised that the rubes have decided to take it to the next level, too. They don't care when the insiders say that Trump isn't a "real Republican". To them, that's not a bug, it's a feature. But Rush posits that disenchantment with the only electoral alternative to the Democrats is now so great that they don't even care that Trump isn't a "real conservative". My old colleague Jonah Goldberg is pointing out today, yet again, that Trump is "not a conservative".

That's true. But he's not campaigning like one, is he? Cruz is running proudly under the conservative banner. Trump is running like a guy who got Frank Luntz to do one of his "words that work" focus groups and "conservative" came back with net unfavorables.

It's an impasse. I'm not sure how to bridge the gap, especially when the operative notion seems to be to burn it all down.

We're looking for wide open spaces 
High above the kitchen
And we're strangers here
On our way to some other place

I don't know that we're going to like the destination very much.

Bummer

I didn't write about the special election in SD35, mostly because I live behind the iron curtain in SD41 and I'm only aware of one SD35 voter who regularly reads this feature. That reader is our friend Brad Carlson, who shares the disappointing news:

Two months ago the Republican delegates in SD 35 (of which I am one) voted to endorse activist (and, for purposes of full disclosure, my friend) Andy Aplikowski. However, Andy would have to overcome a GOP primary challenge from Jim Abeler, who served 16 years in the MN House before opting to run for U.S. Senate in 2014 (he was soundly defeated in that race's Republican primary).

Over the past several weeks I was asked by a number of my local political friends how I felt the campaign was progressing and if I had any sense of who would prevail. I always uttered the obvious retort by saying "It depends on turnout." That and the fact Abeler never had to win votes in Andover, which is a much more conservative part of the Senate District. If we can turn out enough people there to effectively offset purplish Anoka (Abeler's hometown, where he consistently dominated by 3 to 1 margins in prior elections), Andy might have a chance.

In the end, turnout in SD 35 was a paltry 10% of registered voters and Andy won ruby red Andover by a mere 3%.

Ballgame.

For the record, Abeler moves on as the Republican candidate in the special election February 9 thanks to a 61% to 39% win in the GOP primary. 

The party endorsement is often useless in Minnesota, especially since we have an open primary and the other party can mess with the results. That is likely what happened in SD35. Andy is a friend of mine as well and he would have made a great senator. You'll find no one who is more principled and enthusiastic and he would have fought for the right things. Abeler is a time server, at best, and also someone who has voted with the DFL at key junctures. I'm sure that Andy will find other ways to serve, as he always has. I don't know what Abeler will do, but I suspect it will only be intermittently useful to causes we hold dear.

The people have spoken

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

-- H. L. Mencken

The results are in for the municipal elections in New Brighton. A screen shot from the Secretary of State's election web page:

Good heavens, we've been Menckened!

Last week, I wrote the following:

If you want a free-spending, liberal city government, you should support Val Johnson for mayor and Mary Burg and Paul Jacobsen for city council. You will get a bigger government and can safely assume that your property taxes will rise, perhaps significantly, over the next two years.

I stand by that prediction.

A few additional thoughts:

• For those who are jubilant at the election results, and there are rather a lot of people who feel this way, I would recommend that they attend the Truth in Taxation meeting on December 1. I'll publish more details on this meeting closer to the date. You may learn something. As an aside, it would be far better if the Truth in Taxation meeting happened a month before the election, not a month after.
• While I did support Gina Bauman for mayor, I have a lot of respect for Dave Jacobsen, a good man who did try to bring fiscal discipline to our community. I have little reason to believe his successor will be an improvement.
• It will be interesting to see what Paul Jacobsen, who was comfortably re-elected to his city council seat, does in the next session. Will he fight for fiscal discipline, or will he simply sign off on what comes down the pike? He's going to find that his vote doesn't matter very much any more, because the dynamics of the incoming council essentially guarantee that 3 of the five council members (incoming mayor Val Johnson and council members Mary Burg and Brian Strub) are going to vote the lefty, big government line. When Paul Jacobsen first came to the council, he had more conservative support, but he grew comfortable with going along with the liberals. Now that they no longer need his support, he may find his role diminished. 
• Gina Bauman will remain on the council for the next two years. She won't be able to stop much of what is coming, but she can continue to offer principled opposition and document what is to come. That will be a valuable service when it comes time to evaluate the city council in the next election cycle.
• When property taxes rise, and they will now, it's going to hurt the senior citizen population in our community. My neighborhood was built in the mid-60s and there are still a few original owners in their homes on my street. I will be curious to see if some "For Sale" signs start to pop up in the next two years.