Squad Goals

As I recall, #squadgoals was a popular hashtag around 2015 or thereabouts. The always useful Grammar Girl wrote about the term back then:

"Squad goals" can be simply the goals of your squad (your friends or your clique), but sometimes that seems to play out in practice as simply "awesome," as in "This is awesome," meaning "I or we want this someday," or "We want to be like this." So when you see just a picture of hot women with nothing but the comment "squad goals," it means something like "We want to be like them" or "We want to date them." 

It's good to have goals and it's useful to have a squad. But do you want the Squad? As we've learned in recent days, the four principal members of the Squad are Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley in the Zeppo role. Aside from Pressley, they've all taken star turns in 2019 and bedeviled Nancy Pelosi something fierce. And now Donald Trump has decided to bring them to center stage:

Impeach the MF-o, Al-Qaedo, Zeppo, Clapbacko

Trump went all Merle Haggard on these four, but he seemed to be training particular fire on our local hero, Omar, who walked right into the trap:

Al-Qaeda? Shmal-Qaeda! She won't dignify the question with a response, you see. I'm showing you this clip now because you might as well get used to seeing it; it should be part of just about every Republican ad you'll see in the next cycle.

Democrats want 2020 to be a referendum on Donald Trump. Donald Trump wants 2020 to be a referendum on the Squad and their supporters. Let's go back to Grammar Girl's definition:

"Squad goals" can be simply the goals of your squad (your friends or your clique), but sometimes that seems to play out in practice as simply "awesome," as in "This is awesome," meaning "I or we want this someday," or "We want to be like this."

Maybe the folks in Linden Hills find Ilhan Omar awesome and want to be like the Squad, at least as long as the Cedar-Riverside denizens don't take over all the tables at the Starbucks at 50th and France. But the eternal question remains -- does the Squad play in Peoria? Trump knows the answer. So does Nancy Pelosi, but because Trump will keep these four luminaries front and center, Pelosi has to defend them. And the folks in Peoria are paying attention, to say nothing of the folks in Grand Rapids, and Eau Claire, and Altoona, and even Duluth. Trump knows this, too. And Trump doesn't mind giving offense as long as he stays on offense.

Bye, Acosta

Alexander Acosta is gone:

Labor Secretary Alex Acosta has resigned amid controversy over his role in a 2008 plea deal with accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

President Donald Trump said Friday that it was Acosta's decision and not his as he spoke to reporters as he left the White House for a trip to Wisconsin.

Acosta was standing next to Trump as the president called him "a great labor secretary, not a good one."

So Trump is going to Wisconsin today? Wonder who might be there?

Tanned, rested and ready

Man, I hope I'm right about this.

It's a gas, gas, gas

I was born in a cross-fire hurricane

And I howled at the morning driving rain
But it's all right now, in fact, it's a gas
But it's all right. I'm Jumpin' Jack Flash
It's a gas, gas, gas

It's starting to hit the fan. We now have a name for what was happening in 2016 -- Crossfire Hurricane:

The FBI investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia was originally known as "Crossfire Hurricane" before it was widely known to the public and even the bureau itself, officials told The New York Times.

The case, named after a Rolling Stones lyric, was used by only the small group of agents sent to interview the Australian ambassador to the United Kingdom, who had evidence of possible collusion between Russia and a Trump adviser. 

What this means -- at the behest of someone within the Obama administration, the FBI was spying on the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. This isn't G. Gordon Liddy and his crew breaking into the Watergate -- this is the executive branch actively interfering in a presidential campaign. This is huge.

We can also assume the Inspector General's report is imminent and that the reportage we're seeing now is an attempt to get out ahead of the story. If the trail leads back to the White House, we're talking about a political scandal that makes all the others look like a game of checkers.

A guess on how this plays out:

• The IG report drops and it's damming
• Trump then, finally, declassifies all of the information -- the redactions and ass-covering included
• As the corruption oozes forward, it becomes quite easy for Trump to shut down Mueller, so he does

So you remember the notion that the Obama administration was "remarkably scandal-free?" Guess not.

Good riddance

Al Franken resigned, sort of, from the Senate yesterday. It almost appeared he was trying to leave himself a little wiggle room, though:

 Facing a barrage of sexual harassment complaints and calls to step down from friends and foes alike, Sen. Al Franken took to the floor of the U.S. Senate Thursday to announce he would resign — a swift and historic fall for an unlikely Minnesota politician who had become one of the Democratic Party’s most recognizable leaders.

Franken was quick to explain that he was stepping down not because he thought he had done something wrong, but because he had determined that Minnesotans deserved a senator who wasn’t distracted by mounting allegations and a looming Senate Ethics Committee investigation.

Would resign. He hasn't yet. Could he try to wait it out and rescind his resignation if, say, the citizens of Alabama send Roy Moore to the Senate next week? If Mark Dayton delays announcing his replacement, that might be the game, but I don't it will happen. The moment Franken tried to wiggle out of the mess, more accusers would surface. I bet the eight women we've heard from are only a fraction of the people whose experiences would be something Franken "remembers differently." It would be helpful if, some day, a reporter would actually ask Franken precisely how his recollections differ from the accusations, and why we should choose to believe him. That question doesn't seem to get asked very much.

The long game for the Democrats is to go after Le Grand Orange, of course. Everything they do these days is designed to get rid of Trump. I don't know that it will work, though. For every scandal the Democrats attempt to hang on Trump, there are others tied to their party that are worse. We'll have plenty to talk about in the coming days and weeks.

Meanwhile, in other things now beyond Al Franken's grasp. . .

. . . Al Franken's blue slip is now made of Charmin:

Minnesota Supreme Court Justice David Stras’ candidacy for a seat on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals received new life on Thursday, when a key U.S. senator said he would do away with a long-standing tradition that allowed home state senators to stall nominations.

After months of speculation, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said Thursday he would proceed with Stras’ confirmation and scheduled a Nov. 29 hearing for Stras and a Fifth Circuit nominee.

Stras was nominated in May by President Donald Trump, but his candidacy has been in limbo since September, when Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., said he was withholding his “blue-slip,” a document that by Senate tradition grants home-state senators the courtesy of approving a hearing for a jurist’s nomination.

Grassley told senators Thursday that the blue slip could not be used by home-state senators as “veto power” over nominees.

While I'm guessing the timing of this announcement was coincidental, it's yet another sign that Franken's clout as a politician continues to wane.

Stras is a conservative, but no one familiar with his career as a jurist in Minnesota thinks he's a hack. As the linked article from the Star Tribune mentions, he has received support from across the legal community in Minnesota. He's clearly qualified. And he'll be headed for the 8th Circuit soon.

We'll get to Al Franken anon

Get your Götterdämmerung on. And getcha popcorn. If anyone deserves a trip through the sex creep spin cycle, it's our self-satisfied, sanctimonious junior senator. In the meantime, forgive me for a post with more tags than text.

You Dropped the Guam on Me

Getting all bellicose up in here:

North Korea and the United States traded escalating threats, with President Donald Trump threatening Pyongyang "with fire and fury like the world has never seen" and the North's military claiming Wednesday it was examining its plans for attacking Guam.

The comments follow reports that North Korea has mastered a crucial technology needed to strike the United States with a nuclear missile.

Despite regular North Korean threats against Guam, a U.S. territory in the Pacific about 2,100 miles (3,400 kilometers) from the Korean Peninsula, it is extremely unlikely that Pyongyang would risk the assured annihilation of its revered leadership with a pre-emptive attack on U.S. citizens.

Two things about that last statement. First, I suspect the Norks don't have a death wish, so a pre-emptive strike is unlikely. Second, reverence toward the the leadership isn't necessarily a given. I'm not worried. Yet.

Get to it

Victor Davis Hanson, with a call to action. The whole piece is brilliant. Two excerpts:

The Republicans should announce far more forcefully to the media that Vladimir Putin may have been funneling via shady third-parties millions of dollars to anti-fracking groups. Such collusion, if proven through investigation, really is treasonous—given that the crashing price of oil, brought about solely due to North American frackers, is about the only check on Putin’s ambitions that the West enjoys. So, to take one example, did the San Francisco-based, family-controlled, and hedge-funded Sea Change Foundation receive laundered Russian money to help enhance its anti-fracking messaging? If so, when, how, and who?

Did you know that? It seems important. One more:

Fourthly, what an Orwellian world it is when progressives allege “obstruction of justice” (which  Mueller’s burgeoning team of lawyers is apparently investigating) in the case of Donald Trump’s sloppy, off-handed, and out-loud wishes to FBI Director James Comey that he hoped “good guy” Michael Flynn did not get ruined by a loose investigation.

Yet obstruction is not much pursued even when no one seems to deny that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch met stealthily for private discussions with the spouse of a suspect of a current Justice investigation (subsequently dropped), and when she unapologetically seems to have directed the self-described moralist, Director Comey again, to alter the nomenclature of his ongoing investigation of fellow Democrat and presidential candidate Clinton (and Comey shamelessly acceded to Lynch’s detailed requests).

All told, Hanson identifies six ripe scandals worthy of investigation and exposure. He doesn't even need to go back further, into the perfidy of Lois Lerner and the IRS, or Solyndra, or Fast and Furious, all of which were effectively buried earlier.

And Hanson also identifies the reason this perfidy isn't getting the full airing it deserves:

[I]n contemporary Republican La-La Land, the party in power with control over all three branches of government allows its minority-status opponents to dictate the rules of special investigations and inquiry—a Jeff Sessions recused, a Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) excused from his investigations of unmasking and leaking, a Robert Mueller appointed as special counsel, friend of to-be-investigated James Comey, and employer of partisan attorneys.

Is naiveté the cause of such laxity? Do Republicans unilaterally follow Munich rules because they hope such protocols will create a new “civility” and “bipartisan cooperation” in Washington?

Or is the culprit civil dissension among the ranks, as the congressional leadership secretly has no real incentive to help the despised outsider Trump? When Republicans get re-elected on repealing and replacing Obamacare during the assured Obama veto-presidency, and then flip in the age of surety that Trump would reify their campaign boasts, should we laugh or cry? Is the Republican establishment’s aim to see Trump’s agenda rendered null and void—or does intent even matter when the result is the same anyway?

Republicans told us they should govern. It's time they get to it. More, much more, at the link.

Boomtown

The best reporting on the latest Trump scandalette has been coming from John Solomon and Jonathan Easley of The Hill. They bring the story forward here:

Two months before Donald Trump Jr.’s encounter with a Russian figure, a key House subcommittee chairman received a similar overture in Moscow offering derogatory information about a U.S. policy that was upsetting Vladimir Putin.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican with a reputation as a Moscow ally in Congress, told The Hill the information he received in April 2016 came from the chief prosecutor in Moscow and painted an alternative picture of the Russian fraud case that led to the passage of anti-Russia legislation in Congress known as the Magnitsky Act.

“I had a meeting with some people, government officials, and they were saying, ‘Would you be willing to accept material on the Magnitsky case from the prosecutors in Moscow? ‘And I said, ‘Sure, I’d be willing to look at it,’” Rohrabacher recalled in an interview.

The congressman’s account provides the latest evidence that the overture to President Trump’s eldest son in June 2016 by a Russian lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya was part of a larger campaign by Moscow that predated the Trump Tower encounter and continued afterwards.

I don't think anyone is calling for Rohrabacher to be prosecuted for meeting with Russian operatives, at least not yet. There's more:

The focus was to sow distrust among American leaders about the Magnitsky Act, and influence far more than Trump’s inner circle. It included lobbying overtures to journalists, State Department officials and lawmakers and congressional staff from both parties, according to interviews with participants and recipients of the campaign.

Congress passed the law and President Barack Obama signed it in 2012, punishing Russia with sanctions for alleged human rights violations in connection with the prison death of a lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky who claimed to have uncovered a massive money laundering scheme based in Moscow.

U.S. officials argued the fraud was perpetrated by Russian government leaders and hurt American companies. But Russians have countered the fraud was actually committed by Magnitsky and his clients. Prosecutors in Russia eventually won a posthumous conviction against the dead lawyer, and retaliated against the U.S. for passing the law by suspending Americans’ ability to adopt Russian children.

So let's think about this. Knowing your audience is key to getting your message across. If you are a Russian and you want to get Team Trump's attention about an issue, how best to get the attention of Fredo Trump, who is thinking about how he can help his father beat Hillary Clinton? Pull a bait and switch, of course. Would Hillary's campaign take similar meetings or get help from a foreign nation? Of course:

Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.

A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails.

You may have heard this, but in case you were unaware, Russia and Ukraine tend to have an, ahem, problematic relationship. Also, Manafort was in the room with Fredo when they met the Russians, by the way.

So What Does It All Mean? Less than we think, as usual. Remember this?

As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.

And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.

That's from the New York Times, back in 2015. The bleating about corruption in the Trump campaign is coming from the same people who didn't say a word about what Team Clinton was doing.

One of my favorite songs from the 80s is "Welcome to the Boomtown" by David & David. The chorus sticks in my head:

So I say 
I say welcome, welcome to the boomtown
Pick a habit 
We got plenty to go around
Welcome, welcome to the boomtown
All that money makes such a succulent sound
Welcome to the boomtown

In the 80s, the boomtown in question was Los Angeles. It's been D.C. for a lot longer, though. People are going to fight for their prerogatives and there are a lot of people in D.C. who enjoy their prerogatives. At bottom, that's what this scandal is really about -- protecting the ol' rice bowl. And the ugliness and hypocrisy we're seeing at the moment are just the surface.

Facelifts and pearl clutching

Oh, that Trump. As always, read from the bottom up:

Wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door

I have it on good authority that Trump is worse than ever for writing these tweets. Presidents don't say these things, I'm told. Then again, John Adams would have done quite well on Twitter. Consider this less than 140 character putdown of Benjamin Franklin:

"His whole life has been one continued insult to good manners and to decency."

Or his summation on Alexander Hamilton, which might have required 2 tweets to complete:

"That bastard brat of a Scottish peddler! His ambition, his restlessness and all his grandiose schemes come, I'm convinced, from a superabundance of secretions, which he couldn't find enough whores to absorb!"

The difference, as far as I can tell, between Trump and his predecessors, is that he likes to do the dirty work himself. As a general rule, it's considered bad form to punch down, and yes, it would be better to ignore the likes of Mika Brzezinski, but Trump isn't going to do it.

Again, the salient point comes from the Ace of Spades:

A major schism in the party is over the question of how much pretense we're fighting to keep lying about. A lot of people seem to think that even though we're plainly in a Cold Civil War, and even thought Joe and Mika spend three hours a day ripping Trump, Trump's supposed to pretend we're all (as John McCain says) Good Friends.

I'm not saying Trump scored some tactical victory here. I'm saying, as I usually do- - who gives a wet shit?

How can the flailing old women of the Nominal Right huff themselves up so much to pretend outrage that a guy being attacked by the media everyday decides to occasionally attack them back?

I understand the leftist media's interest in pretending that they're behaving normally and haven't rewritten the professional code of conduct to allow attacks on Trump which would have been near-hanging-offenses on Obama.

But what is the interest of the sissified Nominal Right over defending the media and pretending along with them?

It's the question of the moment, really. Is there any compelling reason to assume that anyone in the MSM is playing it down the middle? John McCain and Mitt Romney always went all Marquess of Queensberry in their presidential ambitions. We know how that turned out.

All the basketball coaches in the Big Ten loved Steve Yoder when he coached the Wisconsin Badgers in the 1980s. They were fulsome in their praise of his coaching skills and the way he ran his program. Of course, they kicked his ass, but it was quite gentlemanly. When Bo Ryan took over the Badgers, he was not very well liked among his peers, but that was because he was beating his opponents.

If your objective is to be dignified and keep your conscience clear, then you can hang out with the pearl clutchers. At this point, my objective is to keep the Left from doing any further damage to this nation. We all have choices to make. Choose wisely.

Update: My good friend and blogging colleague Brad Carlson has a different take.

Tweetin'

Say what you want about Le Grand Orange, or his Twitter habits, but he raised a fair question on his Twitter feed yesterday:

Because they hate you, that's why

I still contend that the best thing Trump could do at this point is start investigating the hell out of the Democrats, from Hillary on down. He has the power to make it happen. He should do so and let the chips fall where they may. Let's see all the corruption in Washington.

Trial Balloons

Powerline is floating so many trial balloons right now you'd think you were at Temecula. A number of the posts seem to be suggesting that the Leader of the Free World ought to give Robert Mueller the Archibald Cox treatment. Here's Paul Mirengoff, discussing Mueller's hiring decisions:

Mueller has selected Deputy solicitor general Michael Dreeben as one of his advisers. Dreeben is a premier criminal law expert. However, he’s considered a left-winger by people whose judgment I trust. And Preet Bharara — former US attorney of the Southern District of New York and current Trump adversary — says he’s over-the-moon about Dreeben’s selection.

Dreeben does not owe his selection to investigative prowess. He’s on the team to evaluate whether the fruits of the investigation give rise to a crime.

That’s fine if Dreeben has no agenda. But if he’s anti-Trump, there’s reason to fear he will bend over backwards to spin out a theory through which Trump can be prosecuted.

Mueller has also tapped Jeannie Rhee, formerly a federal prosecutor and high-level Justice Department official. Rhee provided legal services for the Clinton Foundation, a fact the Washington Post omits from its account. In addition, she donated $5,400 to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign PAC “Hillary for America.”

As bitter as the Clintonistas are about losing the election (or rather having it “stolen” by the Russians), it seems unconscionable that Rhee would be on a team that will decide whether to prosecute President Trump at the end of a “Russian interference” investigation.

Meanwhile, Mirengoff's colleague John Hinderaker is making a related argument:

The idea that Jeff Sessions had something to do with a spearfishing expedition into the DNC’s email server (the Russians, if they were Russians, tried the same thing with the RNC, but the Republicans weren’t dumb enough to fall for it) is ridiculous. No one believes it, not even the most rabid Democrat. To say that there is no evidence to suggest any such thing is an understatement.

No doubt CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Times will pretend to find something “troubling” in Sessions’s testimony tomorrow, no matter what he says. But it is becoming increasingly obvious to any sane person that with regard to the “Russian investigation,” there is nothing to investigate.

Meanwhile, Le Grand Orange is tweeting again this morning:

Sad!

Do you think something's up? I do.

Justice Gorsuch

It won't do to pretend Neil Gorsuch is now on the Supreme Court because of high principle, even if his rulings on the Court demonstrate high principle. The whole thing was about a raw exercise in power. And given the stakes, raw power is what matters. Instead of Barack Obama putting a jurist on the court who would have rolled back the First, Second and Fourth Amendments to fit current leftist desires, Donald Trump put a jurist on the court who might protect those amendments. One can never be sure with justices appointed by Republican presidents. One can always assume a leftist jurist will vote in lockstep, because they always do.

Last year, Mitch McConnell rolled the dice. This time he won. And now that the filibuster is gone, it's likely Trump will have more justices to appoint. I could see him naming the replacements for four more jurists -- Kennedy, Breyer and Ginsburg are getting up there, and Thomas has made noises about retiring in the past. A lot of Democrats are thinking they will flip the Senate and/or the House in 2018, but I doubt that will happen. I would not be surprised if we start seeing a lot of 7-2 decisions in the future.

1000 Words

It's Bernie Sanders, listening to Trump's kinda State of the Union address last night with evident discomfort:

Not happy, Bob

I didn't watch the speech, but I've looked at the transcript. From what I understand, Trump did not deviate much from the speech as written. To a certain extent, it mirrors much of what we've heard from his predecessors. A few of the proposals caught my eye, including this one:

I have ordered the Department of Homeland Security to create an office to serve American Victims. The office is called VOICE --- Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement. We are providing a voice to those who have been ignored by our media, and silenced by special interests.

It's a useless office, but it's an effective shiv. There were more than a few of those in the speech. Another:

Remember when you were told that you could keep your doctor, and keep your plan?
We now know that all of those promises have been broken.

And another:

 My job is not to represent the world. My job is to represent the United States of America. 

If Trump wants to accomplish anything, he needs to remind the country why he won the election. On that score, here's Victor Davis Hanson:

Urban elites seldom experience the full and often negative consequences of their own ideologies. And identifying people first by race, tribe or gender — by their allegiance to their appearance rather than to the content of their characters — has rarely led anywhere but to tribalism and eventual sectarian violence.

The result was that when Trump, the outsider without political experience, appeared as a hammer, rural America apparently was more than happy to throw him into the glass of the bicoastal establishment, without worrying too much about the shards that scattered.

Trump was at the podium last night because he is the tribune of people who don't have the luxury of throwing out 1000 words to express their concerns. It may not end well, but it's still important to understand why he, and not Hillary Clinton, is now Leader of the Free World.

Boozin' on Sunday

As most readers of this feature know, I grew up in Wisconsin, where you can buy alcohol pretty much any time you'd like, any day you'd like. When I moved here nearly 25 years ago, I was surprised to learn that you couldn't buy alcohol on Sunday in Minnesota, aside from warm 3.2 beer. That may change now, the Star Tribune reports:

The Minnesota House passed a bill on Monday legalizing the retail sale of alcohol on Sundays, but tipplers must win over a more resistant Senate before they can buy their beer, wine and spirits any day of the week.

This is the first time in state history that a legislative chamber has passed a bill overturning the Sunday ban, a law that has been in effect since statehood in 1858 and remained in place after Prohibition.

“It’s time to bring Minnesota liquor laws into the 21st century,” said Rep. Jenifer Loon, R-Eden Prairie, the bill’s chief author.

For the most part, blue laws are gone, although you can't buy a car in Minnesota on Sunday, either.  It's never been a major problem for me, since I don't drink much any more, but if you are throwing a football party or something similar, it's nice to have options other than piling in the car and driving to Hudson.

While the Star Tribune article reports that passage in the Senate is far from certain, it's possible we could have a change soon. This is a classic battle of special interests:

A wall of interest group opposition has for years stymied efforts to end the ban. It is led by the Minnesota Licensed Beverage Association, which represents bars and liquor stores that prefer the status quo and fear the end of the Sunday ban will lead to a cascade of deregulation — and with it, new competition — in what is currently a heavily regulated industry.

Tony Chesak, executive director of the group, issued a statement calling the vote “one step in a long legislative process.” Ending the prohibition, Chesak said, would “raise costs for small, family-owned businesses and consumers.”

Deregulating the liquor industry would “lead to reduced choices for consumers and the un-leveling of the playing field in favor of big box retailers,” he said.

A wave of lobbying muscle on the other side, led by such retailers as Total Wine, has weakened resistance to Sunday sales.

There's little question that Total Wine's entry into the market has made a difference. We have one nearby in Roseville, and the sheer scope of the enterprise makes smaller liquor stores seem inferior. I've mostly bought my booze from one of the two municipal liquor stores in Saint Anthony, although there are several other choices nearby. If I were looking to have a big blowout, I'd probably go to Total Wine -- the only reason I avoid going there is because it's too close to Rosedale Mall and I'm not a fan of the crowds or traffic in the area. Yeah, I'm getting cranky. Not as cranky as one of the foes of Sunday sales, however. Back to the Strib article:

Rep. Glenn Gruenhagen, R-Glencoe, said it was a “libertine” measure representing “licentious freedom.”

“I grew up in a time where adults limited and restricted their freedoms for the benefit of children, when it came to a product that has severe negative consequences,” he said.

How do I put this delicately? Gruenhagen is a moron.

On balance, I think opening sales up on Sunday is the right thing to do. Municipal liquor stores are a dubious enterprise on a number of levels, even though I currently use one. I'll be watching the results, more as an academic exercise than anything else.

Incentives

The Deep State is on offense now following the successful hit on Michael Flynn. And as usual, the whole thing is straight out of the funhouse, as Eli Lake, an old hand himself, writes for Bloomberg:

It's not even clear that Flynn lied. He says in his resignation letter that he did not deliberately leave out elements of his conversations with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak when he recounted them to Vice President Mike Pence. The New York Times and Washington Post reported that the transcript of the phone call reviewed over the weekend by the White House could be read different ways. One White House official with knowledge of the conversations told me that the Russian ambassador raised the sanctions to Flynn and that Flynn responded that the Trump team would be taking office in a few weeks and would review Russia policy and sanctions. That's neither illegal nor improper.  

Then again, the Russians have problems of their own:

Meanwhile Trump, who some believe is under Putin’s control, is focused on driving down oil and gas prices and pushing NATO to increase defense spending, both of which are hard blows to Russia. Trump is also promoting pro-growth policies which will help fund a military buildup and modernization.

Russia has no prayer of matching this. 

Putin has real problems, with no real solutions.

Trump is confronting Putin with challenges he cannot overcome, which will only grow worse over time.

The idea that Russia is capable of embarking on a new Cold War against the United States is laughable.

Russia is only considered to be a country of the first rank because of its nuclear arsenal. But that arsenal is useless, other than as a deterrent to invasion, or as a way to commit suicide. No one is going to invade Russia any time soon. More importantly, Putin and his cronies are not suicidal. Putin may even be the richest man in the world. Putin and his posse have a nice life, and a lot to lose. They likely want to enjoy the benefits of their despotism in peace, not see their dachas reduced to radioactive ash.

What we're seeing, both from the Russians and from the Deep State, is a group of people who are scared to death and defending their prerogatives. Back to Lake:

Flynn was a fat target for the national security state. He has cultivated a reputation as a reformer and a fierce critic of the intelligence community leaders he once served with when he was the director the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama. Flynn was working to reform the intelligence-industrial complex, something that threatened the bureaucratic prerogatives of his rivals.

He was also a fat target for Democrats. Remember Flynn's breakout national moment last summer was when he joined the crowd at the Republican National Convention from the dais calling for Hillary Clinton to be jailed.

Trump is getting a message -- stay in your lane. We'll know soon enough if he accepts the message.

Gorsuch and Game Theory

Trump makes his pick for the Supreme Court:

President Donald Trump will nominate Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, Trump announced Tuesday night at the White House.

The nomination of Gorsuch, a 49-year-old federal appellate judge from Colorado, gives Trump and Republicans the opportunity to confirm someone who could cement the conservative direction of the court for decades.

Actually, that's not right. Gorsuch would be going into the seat occupied by Antonin Scalia, who died last year. Scalia was a brilliant conservative. By most accounts, Gorsuch is as well. His elevation to the Supreme Court doesn't change the calculus.

The Democrats have a decision to make. They are understandably bitter that the Republicans ashcanned their nominee, Merrick Garland, last year. Had Garland gone on the Court, the balance of power would have shifted decisively to the Left. That's not going to happen now. So if you're a Democrat, what do you do, especially with all the rent-a-mobs out on the streets protesting everything the Trumpster does? They can either try to stop Gorsuch, or they can keep their powder dry. If they try to block Gorsuch, Mitch McConnell will eliminate the filibuster entirely for judicial appointees, and that will be the end of it. After that, Trump would be able to put anyone he likes into the next slot. And that is where the real challenge for control of the Supreme Court comes, as it is reasonable to assume the next nomination will be to replace either Anthony Kennedy, who is the swing vote, or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who holds down the left wing. Both are in their 80s, so their time may be running short. Meanwhile, Stephen Breyer will be 80 years old in less than two years. If Trump gets to replace any of these three Justices, the court will tip decisively to the right. And it's quite possible he'll get to replace all three.

The Republicans hold the majority in the Senate now. It's tenuous, but it's a majority. The Democrats have a number of senators in red states who will be up for reelection in 2018. Some of them, especially Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, Joe Donnelly in Indiana, Jon Tester in Montana, and Claire McCaskill in Missouri, are going to be looking over their shoulders. Others who might have been safe otherwise, including a couple of big-time lefties, Sherrod Brown (Ohio) and Tammy Baldwin (Wisconsin), also have reason to think twice about how to proceed.

Gorsuch has outstanding credentials and was named to the 10th Circuit by unanimous voice vote in 2006. This may not be the fight the Democrats want, nor the time. We're about to find out how much influence the freeway blockers really have in Washington.

Acting Attorney General Warhol

In the future, everyone will be Eliot Richardson for 15 minutes:

President Donald Trump fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates as conflict escalated over his executive order banning entry to the U.S. by citizens of seven predominantly Muslim nations.

Yates, an Obama administration holdover, was ousted Monday just hours after she told Justice Department staff not to defend the ban in court because she didn’t think it was legal. A White House statement said she was removed for “refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States.” 

An acting attorney general who runs the office on whim? Yeah, that sounds like someone from the Obama administration. There's more:

Trump quickly named another Obama appointee to the post, Dana Boente, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who instructed the department’s lawyers to defend the immigration ban against legal challenges. Boente would stay until Trump’s choice for Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, is confirmed by the Senate -- though Democrats are vowing a vicious fight to block the nomination.

We can argue the merits of Trump's decision; I fully expect we'll be arguing the merits of all of Trump's decisions rather a lot over the next four years. What is unacceptable is the idea that an attorney general, even an acting one, can take the law into her own hands. Yates admits as much:

My role is different from that of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), which, through administrations of both parties, has reviewed Executive Orders for form and legality before they are issued. OLC’s review is limited to the narrow question of whether, in OLC’s view, a proposed Executive Order is lawful on its face and properly drafted. Its review does not take account of statements made by an administration or it surrogates close in time to the issuance of an Executive Order that may bear on the order’s purpose. And importantly, it does not address whether any policy choice embodied in an Executive Order is wise or just. 

Similarly, in litigation, DOJ Civil Division lawyers are charged with advancing reasonable legal arguments that can be made supporting an Executive Order. But my role as leader of this institution is different and broader. My responsibility is to ensure that the position of the Department of Justice is not only legally defensible, but is informed by our best view of what the law is after consideration of all the facts. In addition, I am responsible for ensuring that the positions we take in court remain consistent with this institution’s solemn obligation to always seek justice and stand for what is right. At present, I am not convinced that the defense of the Executive Order is consistent with these responsibilities nor am I convinced that the Executive Order is lawful.

Emphasis mine. In other words, Yates felt she had the ability to determine what is "wise or just." And that's a problem, as Jonathan Adler writes at the Washington Post:

A few quick observations. First, the statement seems to indicate that the executive order was reviewed by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which apparently concluded that the executive order was lawful. Second, Yates does not claim that she cannot defend the executive order because it is unconstitutional or because the Justice Department would be unable to offer good-faith arguments in defense of its legality. To the contrary, Yates claims she is ordering the Justice Department not to defend the executive order because it is not “wise or just.” This is quite significant. I am not aware of any instance in which the Justice Department has refused to defend a presumptively lawful executive action on this basis.

That's because there is no basis for defying a lawful executive action. And this is where the comparison to Eliot Richardson, who refused to fire Archibald Cox during the Nixon years, is apt. Back to Adler:

Some have asked what I think AAG Yates should have done, given her views of the EO. My answer is simple: Resign, and then publicly explain her reasons for doing so. If Yates believes that the President’s various comments about a “Muslim ban” undermine her ability to defend (or oversee the defense of) an executive action that OLC concluded (and she does not dispute) is “lawful on its face,” she should have stepped down as Acting Attorney General.

There is some precedent for this sort of thing. Recall the “Saturday Night Massacre,” when Attorney General Eliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckleshaus resigned rather than fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox at President Nixon’s insistence. If AAG Yates believes she is being asked to do something that violates her conscience — as she apparently does — this is the model she should have followed.

It won't matter in the end, because Jeff Sessions will be the attorney general eventually. But let's face it; this wasn't about conscience. It was a career move. Until yesterday evening, very people knew who Sally Yates was. Today, she's famous. At a minimum, she should get a few guest shots on MSNBC outta the deal. She also sends a signal that the rest of the entrenched bureaucracy will quickly note -- opposing Trump is a great way to get your name in the papers. I expect we'll see a lot more bureaucrats seeking their 15 minutes of fame in the coming weeks.

Starting point

Trump has been in office less than a week and the freakouts haven't ceased. If anything, the amount of shrieking I see on social media has only gotten louder. It feels a bit like this (a bit NSFW, by the way):

I'm not crazy about using executive orders generally; I would strongly prefer the power to reside in Congress. That genie left the bottle about the time Grover Cleveland left office, however, and the only president who wasn't fond of using executive power after that time was Calvin Coolidge. So for Congress to assert its prerogatives, we'll need to see a big change in thinking. It's difficult to use muscles that have only atrophied in the past 90 years.

Meanwhile, Trump's opponents would do well to consider who is in the opposite camp, as Myron Magnet reminds us:

Commentators are right that a big portion of Trump voters were working-class Americans displaced from their jobs by Obama’s war on fossil fuels, by globalization, automation, and the shifting balance in manufacturing from the importance of the raw materials that go into products to that of the engineering expertise that designs them. These are the people Trump referred to in his Inaugural Address as “the forgotten men and women of our country.”

But that’s only part of the new president’s coalition. As Amity Shlaes shows in her 2008 book The Forgotten Man, that term, which Franklin Roosevelt applied to the man on the breadline in the Great Depression, “the man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” more properly applies to those unhappy-if-silent taxpayers who funded the New Deal’s social-welfare schemes. And these are the forerunners of the Tea Partiers, another key class of Trump voter: the widow on a fixed income whose property-tax payment helps house a public-sector retiree comfortably but whose inexorable rise is making her own paid-off home unaffordable; the retiree whose IRA savings the Great Recession eroded or who can no longer get an adequate income from safe bond investments, thanks to  the Federal Reserve’s policies; the small businessman or farmer ruined by undemocratic government regulation lacking even the pretense of due process; the ex-soldier abandoned by a dysfunctional Veterans Administration; the parent disgusted with public schools that impose ideologies she abhors on her children, while leaving them inadequately educated; and all those sincere believers in God or traditional values whom Obama dismissed as clinging desperately to outmoded pieties, as the arc of history, which the elite professor-president claimed to understand and direct according to his politically correct enlightenment, swirled them down the drain.

Obama's IRS minions may have driven the Tea Party underground, but it did nothing to quell the reasons the Tea Party arose in the first place. We may have seen a counter to the Tea Party marching in the streets of our major cities over the weekend, dressed in pink hats. I'll be watching to see if the energy of the marches translates into a coherent political movement with specific goals, or if it remains virtue signaling writ large.

Strategery

Straight outta Dale Carnegie:

Democrats must provide “training” that focuses in part on teaching Americans “how to be sensitive and how to shut their mouths if they are white,” urged the executive director of Idaho’s Democratic Party, Sally Boynton Brown, who is white.

The event’s moderator, MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid, asked the candidates how the party should handle the Black Lives Now movement.

The candidates uniformly emphasized that the party must embrace the activists unreservedly.  

“It makes me sad that we’re even having that conversation and that tells me that white leaders in our party have failed,” Brown said. “I’m a white woman, I don’t get it. … My job is to listen and be a voice and shut other white people down when they want to interrupt.”

“This is life and death” she emphasized. “I am a human being trying to do good work and I can’t do it without y’all. So please, please, please, get ahold of me. Sally at we-the-dnc.org. I need schooling so I can go school the other white people.”

Emphasis mine. That approach should work very well. I should mention that Boyton Brown would like to lead the Democratic National Committee. She appears to be the perfect choice.