You should read The Untold History of the Biden Family about Joe's so-called middle class dad

It's a doozy, in The New Yorker no less, here, August 15, 2022:

Relatively little has been known about the President’s father, whose story reveals a family’s fraught relationship with money, class, and alcohol.

Jonathan Mitchell, the man ultimately behind the overthrow of Roe vs. Wade, is a constitutional departmentalist whose real target is judicial supremacy

Early on, Mitchell insisted that, although he personally opposes abortion, “I’m not an anti-abortion activist. I never have been.” His goal is to destroy “judicial supremacy”—the idea that the Supreme Court is the final authority on the meaning of the Constitution—a campaign with bipartisan potential at a moment when liberals and progressives have little to gain from an imposing conservative Court. ...

Mitchell disapproved of the Supreme Court’s use of “language that makes its precedents seem sacrosanct or irreversible,” even going “so far to equate its interpretations of the Constitution with the Constitution itself.” The conventional idea that courts can “strike down,” “invalidate,” or “block” statutes was, he wrote, simply wrong. A court can “opine” that a statute is unconstitutional and tell an official not to enforce it, but the statute nonetheless “remains a law until it is repealed by the legislature that enacted it.” ...

In their dissenting opinions on S.B. 8, both Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Sonia Sotomayor went to first judicial principles by invoking Marbury v. Madison to rebuke Mitchell’s judiciary-evading tactic. In Marbury, in 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall proclaimed, “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” There, the Supreme Court, for the first time, declared an act of Congress unconstitutional and “entirely void.” Because the Court implied that its own authority to interpret the Constitution is superior to that of the other branches, the case is the fountainhead of judicial supremacy. One could view it as a power grab that we have mostly accepted for more than two hundred years.

Mitchell said he found it telling that Roberts and Sotomayor treated judicial supremacy as “axiomatic” rather than as “a choice that must be defended.” From the beginning of the country, there were prominent anti-federalists who were opposed to judicial supremacy. Thomas Jefferson—who was President when Marbury was decided—believed that “each department is truly independent of the others, and has an equal right to decide for itself what is the meaning of the constitution.” Jefferson’s view, which scholars have called departmentalism, countered judicial supremacy with the claim that the power to determine whether acts violate the Constitution is enjoyed by each branch in its own sphere of action.

Several Presidents since have embraced departmentalism to varying degrees. Andrew Jackson explained his veto of Congress’s bill to recharter the Second Bank of the United States as being based on its unconstitutionality, even though the Supreme Court had approved Congress’s authority to so act years earlier. He said, “The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both.” The same year, Chief Justice Marshall held that Georgia’s regulations on Cherokee lands violated federal treaties. An enraged Jackson didn’t enforce the ruling, which enabled Georgia to disobey it.

Abraham Lincoln resisted judicial supremacy in his scathing reaction to Dred Scott v. Sandford, in which the Court declared that Congress’s prohibition of slavery in the territories was unconstitutional. Lincoln, who was not yet President, acknowledged that the Court resolved the parties’ dispute, but he rejected the idea that the ruling authoritatively answered the constitutional question of slavery. In his first Inaugural Address, Lincoln further worried that, if policy on “vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court,” then “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.” ...

Like other critics of judicial supremacy, Mitchell believes that Congress, rather than the Court, should have final say on constitutional meaning, even if it means rights might shift along with electoral outcomes—and the Court, where possible, should decide matters based on congressional statutes rather than judicial doctrines on constitutional rights.

That approach has recently put Mitchell at odds with other conservative lawyers.

More.

Chotiner interviews Wax in The New Yorker, but it couldn't possibly be that she was sent to make WASPs look bad just in time for you know what, no, no way

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

C'mon, it's election season, people, and the narrative-building is well underway.

The icky Jeffrey Toobin was targeting Brett Kavanaugh already in March 2012 in The New Yorker

Here, over Obamacare.

The New Yorker ignores how wildfires contribute gargantuan quantities of emissions compared with power plants

A Summer of Megafires and Trump’s Non-Rules on Climate Change:

Compared with the Clean Power Plan, [the EPA's new Affordable Clean Energy rules] could, over the next few decades, allow hundreds of millions of tons of additional carbon emissions.

Hundreds of millions of tons over decades, eh?

How about gigatons from wildfires in just one year?

Forest fires may produce as much CO2 as half of all fossil fuels burned:

In 1997, a fire consumed 8,000 square kilometers of mostly peatland in Borneo. Researchers estimated 0.2 Gt of carbon were released in this one area that year, and that carbon emissions from fires across Indonesia in 1997 emitted between 0.8 and 2.5 Gt — or “13 to 40%” of the size of global human fossil fuel emissions. ... 

Other researchers, der Werf et al 2004, looked at fires around the world during the El Nino year and estimated that 2.1 Gt of carbon was released — which explained 66% ± 24% of the extra CO2 emitted globally that year. Bowman et al estimate fires produced emissions around 50% of the size of human emissions. ...

California, Nevada and Colorado could impact climate far more deeply, cheaply and effectively RIGHT NOW by preventing and containing the wildfires which are making moot the comparatively puny plans of the EPA.

Glenn Greenwald was not happy with The Intercept for its incompetent exposure of Reality Winner

Easy for him to say. She's the one paying the price for trusting The Intercept. Oh well, just another victim of a drone attack, or something.

Maybe the founder of eBay, Pierre Omidyar, should ask for his money back.

From a profile of Greenwald, here:

Greenwald went on to describe his frustration with an Intercept story, published last summer, that was based on an N.S.A. report leaked by Reality Winner, an N.S.A. contractor. The article described an attempt by Russian military intelligence to introduce malware into the computers of U.S. election officials in 2016. In Greenwald’s view, the story was overblown: the N.S.A. analysis included no underlying evidence. Before publication, Greenwald vetoed a suggestion that Snowden be invited to examine the leaked material. “I said, ‘I think it’s not a very good idea to send a top-secret N.S.A. document that purports to describe Russia to Russia.’ ” He laughed. “Not even I would look very kindly on that, if I were in the Trump Justice Department.” He was also dismayed, as many people were, that the Intercept had not properly disguised the document before showing it to the government for verification, making it easy for Winner to be identified as its leaker; she was arrested shortly after publication. The Intercept apologized, and supported her legal defense. The site “fucked up,” Greenwald said. He added that, if he didn’t work there, he might be wondering aloud why nobody was fired. (On August 23rd, Winner was sentenced to five years in prison.)

The superstitious George Packer of The New Yorker imagines that the 2009 stimulus which PASSED failed because Republicans put a hex on it

Proving that it isn't just George Will who suffers from the disease. As Paul Krugman pointed out at the time, the stimulus simply wasn't big enough.

It never is.

Here is Packer:

In February, 2009, with the economy losing seven hundred thousand jobs a month, Congress passed a stimulus bill—a nearly trillion-dollar package of tax cuts, aid to states, and infrastructure spending, considered essential by economists of every persuasion—with the support of just three Republican senators and not a single Republican member of the House. Rather than help save the economy that their party had done so much to wreck, Republicans, led by Senator Mitch McConnell, chose to oppose every Democratic measure, including Wall Street reform. In doing so, they would impede the recovery and let the other party take the fall. It was a brilliantly immoral strategy, and it pretty much worked.

The New Yorker's Amy Davidson would like to blame Hillary's loss in Michigan on Jill Stein, not on the 604,000 former Obama voters who didn't show up for her

These people cannot face how horrible Hillary Clinton's candidacy seemed to Democrats, horrible enough to keep them away from the polls. But Jill Stein received 51,000 votes in Michigan. Yeah, let's blame her. Democrats ... good! Third parties ... bad! 

Here:

(It is worth noting that Jill Stein won enough votes in Michigan and Wisconsin to account for Clinton’s losses there.)

Mr. Money Mustache: Obsessive compulsive, and a bunch of other enthusiasms

From the story in The New Yorker, here:

The blog, which he started five years ago, is really an attack on consumerism and waste—a theology of conservation—disguised as a personal-finance advice column. The prospect of retirement is in some respects just a lure—the carrot, as opposed to the stick of his relentless polemical thrashing of anyone who thinks it’s O.K. to buy lattes at Starbucks or drive “a gigantic piece of shit that can barely navigate a parking lot.” He told me, “I’m really just trying to get rich people to stop destroying the planet.” ... [A]t one point I realized that he was almost angry at me for my half-witting participation in the destruction of the world. ... When you play devil’s advocate—for instance, if you suggest that if everyone lived the way he does the economy would shrivel up—he can get riled . . .. [Peter] Adeney has the behavioral-economics view that we should set our policies to encourage sensible behavior—the obvious example being a carbon tax. “It’s libertarian paternalism, or maybe it’s paternalistic libertarianism,” he said. “I am trying to improve the commons.” On his blog, he dispenses deep thoughts, product recommendations (credit cards, brokerages, laser printers), and D.I.Y. work-arounds (“How to Carry Major Appliances on Your Bike”—“It is absolutely ridiculous to buy even your first bottle of wine or restaurant meal if you do not yet have a good bicycle and a bike trailer”).

Ted Cruz adopts Obama voter intimidation tactics in Iowa

From the story here:

'In 2008, academics at Yale published an influential paper showing that one of the most effective ways to get voters to the polls was “social pressure.” Researchers found that registered voters in a 2006 primary election in Michigan voted at a higher rate if they received mailers indicating that their participation in the election would be publicized. The mailer that had the biggest impact included information about the two previous elections and whether the recipient and his or her neighbors participated or not. “We intend to mail an updated chart,” the mailer warned. “You and your neighbors will all know who voted and who did not.”

'Insights from the Yale study have since been adopted by several campaigns, including MoveOn, which also faced criticism when it used the tactic to turn out voters for Barack Obama’s reëlection, in 2012. Given its obsession with political science, it’s no surprise that the Cruz campaign decided to adopt the “social pressure” techniques to turn out voters in Iowa for Monday night’s caucuses.'

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated . . .."

Obama thinks he has achievements, which must mean he is suffering a psychosis

From the long story in The New Yorker, here, by image-accommodating biographer David Remnick:

As Obama ticked off a list of first-term achievements—the economic rescue, the forty-four straight months of job growth, a reduction in carbon emissions, a spike in clean-energy technology—he seemed efficient but contained, running at three-quarters speed, like an athlete playing a midseason road game of modest consequence; he was performing just hard enough to leave a decent impression, get paid, and avoid injury.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Let's see.

Starting with the economic rescue, Obama said at the time in early 2009 that he had more than enough on his plate without having to worry about the financial crisis.

So who fixed that?

Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve. While everyone was fixated on the controversy over TARP and the crony capitalist, fascist character of that bailout in the mere hundreds of billions of dollars as millions of Americans were losing their homes, behind the scenes the Fed was providing multiple trillions of dollars of short-term loans to just about any bank or business in the world which was in trouble, at rock-bottom low interest rates which homeowners could only dream about, right into 2010. They all got fixed while 5.6 million Americans went on to lose their homes through 2013.

And what did Obama do in response to that?

Disgracefully fire Bernanke in public by saying he'd overstayed his time at the Fed, but that came only long after everything looked like it was truly stabilized. And I do mean "looked". The fact of the matter is extraordinary measures remain in place at the Fed because the banks' condition is still not healthy enough to do without them. When those end, the crisis will be truly over, not before. The rescue is still underway, with no end in sight.

Then there's the 44 months of job growth claim. Well, the truth is we are in the 72nd month of the jobs recession as we speak today, the longest jobs recession in the history of the post-war by a long shot. Bush's had been the longest previously, at 47 months. And it is estimated that the current jobs recession will not be over for another 6 months, which means we'll finally have matched the number of payroll jobs which existed at the time the recession began, but only after about 6.5 years have gone by.

But that says nothing about a return to normalcy. Include the shortfall which exists in the numbers because of net population growth over the period and the country will still be in a serious jobs deficit once the jobs recession is over, and for a long time to come without some major driver for jobs appearing on the scene.

Finally, I'm not sure how anyone measures a reduction in carbon emissions when China keeps them billowing into the air at a record rate, burning coal and oil in huge quantities. Obama can point to the closing down of coal power plants in this country if he wants, but all that does is make American electricity more expensive as China's waves of pollution waft ever eastward over the Pacific, polluting our air, water and farmland.

But if anyone's contributing to the reduction in carbon emissions in this country, it's the American worker who isn't working. Travel on the road in this country has been stuck at levels first reached between 2004 and 2005 for five long years because so many people no longer have a job to which to commute. Every month that goes by shows the same statistical result: no progress in miles traveled back to the levels of the 2007 peak. It's an odd thing to be taking credit for.

If it is clear from these facts that Obama is delusional and lives in a separate reality, it is also clear from Remnick's story that Obama has to work hard at crafting it, even about what is probably at the heart of his mental problems in the first place: 

When I asked Obama about another area of shifting public opinion—the legalization of marijuana—he seemed even less eager to evolve with any dispatch and get in front of the issue. “As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”

Is it less dangerous? I asked.

Obama leaned back and let a moment go by. That’s one of his moves. When he is interviewed, particularly for print, he has the habit of slowing himself down, and the result is a spool of cautious lucidity. He speaks in paragraphs and with moments of revision. Sometimes he will stop in the middle of a sentence and say, “Scratch that,” or, “I think the grammar was all screwed up in that sentence, so let me start again.”

Why does the smartest president ever have to edit everything, all the time, until it makes sense to him?

Who do you call to have the president committed?

Rich Liberals Pay People Under The Table. Doesn't Everyone?

The Washington Post has drunk the KoolAid offered up by The New Yorker that there is an enormous underground economy out there where child-walkers and nannies get paid under the table helping to account for as much as $2 trillion in unreported income. $2T! Imagine it!

This must be part of a softening up campaign underway to raise taxes on the middle class. After all, we can afford to pay, they lie to themselves. But in all my long life in the middle class, I have known exactly two persons who could afford a nanny, one of whom can't anymore. She is an MBA who worked in an industry that actually made things. People stopped buying those things, and she lost her very good job. The other one deals in trouble. She is a liberal insurance company lawyer who still has hers. As for the child-walkers, I have known exactly none. In fact, I've never even seen one, not in Colorado, not in Illinois, and not in Michigan where I now live.

This is a liberal fantasy projected onto the rest of the country. It is rich liberals, denizens of America's great cities, who hire the nannies and pay the child-walkers, all under the table. The rest of us drive our own kids to school or walk them to the bus ourselves, clean our own homes, and do all the other things of daily living for ourselves. We can't afford to hire anybody. In fact, we're plundering our retirement accounts just to maintain our former standard of living. You know, the one we had in the years B.O., Before Obama. For many of us in the years A.O., our income has been cut in half because we got fired after long, productive careers. The nearly 30 million people who filed first time claims for unemployment in 2009 were a response to the 2008 election, not the effect of you know who. Employers knew what was coming, and boy, were they right. That contractor I'd like to hire and pay cash to replace the windows with the broken seals will just have to wait, about four more years is my guess.

In 2011 over 80% of wage earners made less than $60K per year, but we are somehow supposed to be the ones paying all these people under the table for services we can't afford? That's 122 million wage earners out of 151 million who are shelling out all this dough? You know, the same ones who've canceled cable, stopped eating out, jacked-up all their deductibles and learned a hundred ways to make red beans and rice.  

They used to call it liberal projection syndrome back in the day when education was good enough to transmit subtlety. Now we just call it bull.

The New Yorker Magazine Engages In Pure Fantasy About The Underground Economy

This is your stereotypical New York look-down-your-nose-at-the-rubes dismissal of fly-over country where God, guns and cash deals are the bogeymen gussied up with an appeal to an ignorant authority even as real retail adjusted for population shows we are still over 8% below the 2005 peak:

Off-the-books activity also helps explain a mystery about the current economy: even though the percentage of Americans officially working has dropped dramatically, and even though household income is still well below what it was in 2007, personal consumption is higher than it was before the recession, and retail sales have been growing briskly (despite a dip in March). Bernard Baumohl, an economist at the Economic Outlook Group, estimates that, based on historical patterns, current retail sales are actually what you’d expect if the unemployment rate were around five or six per cent, rather than the 7.6 per cent we’re stuck with. The difference, he argues, probably reflects workers migrating into the shadow economy. “It’s typical that during recessions people work on the side while collecting unemployment,” Baumohl told me. “But the severity of the recession and the profound weakness of this recovery may mean that a lot more people have entered the underground economy, and have had to stay there longer.”

It's pure fantasy that $2 trillion in income (!) didn't get reported to the IRS based on nominal numbers of less than, for example, $5 trillion in retail sales in 2012, all generated by suddenly sidelined people (!), when real retail adjusted for population growth and ex-gasoline is still over 8% below the 2005 high:

(See Doug Short's discussion, here.)

That's right. The patriotic core of the country is a bunch of dishonest tax-evaders who are robbing the government blind with their vibrant, dishonest cash economy! They don't even have bank accounts, the pikers!

How dare they?!

Libertarian Charles Murray Comes Out For Same Sex Marriage

At CPAC, where else?

Story here.