Category Archives: Law

Business, Economics, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

The EPA Climate Regulations

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How Scott Pruitt could gut them:

s Pruitt and President Trump look to unwind Obama’s major climate policies, the endangerment finding might be imperiled.

“You know what’s interesting about the situation with CO2, Joe, is we’ve had a Supreme Court decision in 2007 and then the endangerment finding that you’re making reference to in 2009,” Pruitt told CNBC host Joe Kernan, referring to the Supreme Court’s Massachusetts v. EPA decision — the court ruled that greenhouse gases are air pollutants under the Clean Air Act and the EPA has to determine whether they should be regulated.

“Nowhere in the continuum, nowhere in the equation, has Congress spoken. The legislative branch has not addressed this issue at all,” Pruitt said.

“The decision in 2007 was not that the EPA had to regulate. The decision in 2007 was they needed to make a decision.”

And what was decided can be undecided. Live by the pen and the phone, die by the pen and the phone. Though I’d like to see Massachusetts v. EPA reversed as well, given that we now know, since the release of the emails from CRU, that it was based on junk science. The notion that plant food as a trace gas is a “pollutant” is nonsensical.

[Update a few minutes later]

Speaking of Massachusetts, it could get up to two feet of snow tomorrow, a week before the vernal equinox. Because, you know, the earth is overheating.

[Update early afternoon]

Yes, Scott Pruitt is right on CO2. But he’s a religious heretic, so he must be condemned.

[Tuesday-morning update]

Let’s talk about Scott Pruitt’s “denial” of global warming.

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The IRS Non-Scandal

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They’re still withholding 7000 documents that show how (as Koskinen himself admitted) they were targeting conservatives.

As I wrote on an email list this morning (in the context of Big Data, Facebook and government spying): “I’m much more worried (or at least was in the last administration) about being targeted as a “right-wing” (i.e., someone who is a classical liberal, and gives a s**t about the Constitution) rather than Islamic terrorist, if they’re looking through my contacts and statements. And I think that the previous administration was the worst since Woodrow Wilson in terms of targeting what it perceived to be its political enemies (including through the campaign…). I’d call it Nixonian, except Nixon didn’t get away with it.”

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

A Classic SLAPP

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Popehat shows how this works. As he says, Colorado doesn’t have an anti-SLAPP law, but it may just get dismissed.

By the way, while I don’t generally discuss my own case, briefly, because he’s a public figure, if it ever actually gets to trial, he has to show that I acted “with malice.” Legally, what this means is that I had a “reckless disregard for the truth,” which means that I either knew what I was writing wasn’t true, or I didn’t care whether or not it was.

Whatever else you might think of him, you know who recklessly disregards the truth every day? Donald J. Trump. Though Barack Obama did it a lot, too, to cram ObamaCare down our throats (among many other things).

Business, Education, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

The American “Elite”

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Are they really elite?

No:

Elitism sometimes seems predicated on being branded with the proper degrees. But when universities embrace a therapeutic curriculum and politically correct indoctrination, how can a costly university degree guarantee knowledge or inductive thinking?

Is elitism defined by an array of brilliant and proven theories?

Not really. University-sired identity politics has not led to racial and ethnic harmony.

Is there free speech or diversity of thought on campuses? Did progressive government save the inner cities? Are elites at least better-spoken and more knowledgeable than the rest of us?

Long before Trump’s monotonous repetition of “tremendous” and “great,” Barack Obama thought “corpsmen” was pronounced “corpse-men,” and that Austrians spoke “Austrian” rather than German.

Not long ago, Representative Hank Johnson (D., Ga.) warned that if Guam became too populated it might just tip over and sink.

They’re just credentialed. Elite people are actually educated, knowledgable and competent.

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Trump And The Judge

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I’m no Trump fan, but I think all the pearl clutching from the media over his “so-called judge” tweet was ridiculous. So does Jonathan Turley. And as always, it’s particularly ridiculous coming from people who probably had no problem with Obama upbraiding (and in the process lying) the Justices who had honored him with their attendance at the State of the Union over Citizens United.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Political Assassination Of Michael Flynn

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I was no big fan of Flynn, but this sort of thing makes me support Trump, on principle. If they figure out who the leakers were, they should bring the hammer down on them. It’s a very frightening precedent.

[Wednesday-morning update]

What happened here is deeply worrying:

The whole episode is evidence of the precipitous and ongoing collapse of America’s democratic institutions — not a sign of their resiliency. Flynn’s ouster was a soft coup (or political assassination) engineered by anonymous intelligence community bureaucrats. The results might be salutary, but this isn’t the way a liberal democracy is supposed to function.

Unelected intelligence analysts work for the president, not the other way around. Far too many Trump critics appear not to care that these intelligence agents leaked highly sensitive information to the press — mostly because Trump critics are pleased with the result. “Finally,” they say, “someone took a stand to expose collusion between the Russians and a senior aide to the president!” It is indeed important that someone took such a stand. But it matters greatly who that someone is and how they take their stand. Members of the unelected, unaccountable intelligence community are not the right someone, especially when they target a senior aide to the president by leaking anonymously to newspapers the content of classified phone intercepts, where the unverified, unsubstantiated information can inflict politically fatal damage almost instantaneously. . . .

But no matter what Flynn did, it is simply not the role of the deep state to target a man working in one of the political branches of the government by dishing to reporters about information it has gathered clandestinely. It is the role of elected members of Congress to conduct public investigations of alleged wrongdoing by public officials.

What if Congress won’t act? What if both the Senate and the House of Representatives are held by the same party as the president and members of both chambers are reluctant to cross a newly elected head of the executive branch who enjoys overwhelming approval of his party’s voters? In such a situation — our situation — shouldn’t we hope the deep state will rise up to act responsibly to take down a member of the administration who may have broken the law?

The answer is an unequivocal no.

In a liberal democracy, how things happen is often as important as what happens. Procedures matter. So do rules and public accountability.

That hasn’t been the case for eight years. This is just a continuation, likely by the same people.

[Update a while later]

The Empire strikes back:

Welcome to the Deep State, the democracy-sapping embeds at the heart of our democracy who have not taken the expulsion of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party lightly. They realize that the Trump administration poses a mortal threat to their hegemony, and so have enlisted an army of Democrats, some Republicans, the “neverTrumpumpkin” conservative die-hards, leftist thugs, Black Lives Matter and anybody else they can blackmail, browbeat or enlist. They mean business.

Time for a rebel alliance. I hope Pompeo doesn’t have anything that can be used against him. But I fear that these people are morally capable of manufacturing things.