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Over at National Review they’ve reprinted a long review essay of Gene Dattel’s “fearless, eye-opening” new book, Reckoning with Race: America’s Failure. I tried to read the whole thing, but I’ll confess that after several thousand words telling me that northerners have long been racists too, I sort of gave up. Surely this isn’t news to anyone? “I have never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama, mobs as hateful as I’ve seen here in Chicago,” Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1966, and evidence for brutal and widespread northern racism both before and after that is plentiful. It’s hardly a secret.
(That said, it’s still true that legal slavery was worse than even circumscribed freedom, and statutory Jim Crow was worse than cultural bigotry. It matters that we hold two thoughts in our minds at once: racism wasn’t confined to the South, but it was still quite a bit worse than it was in the North.)
Anyway, the point of these thousands of words turns out to be simple: Dattel is apparently making the case that the rise in “black pathologies” starting in the 1960s is the fault of blacks themselves and the pernicious effects of 60s counterculture, not white racism and oppression. After all, as reviewer Myron Magnet says:
America fought a war to end [slavery], had a civil-rights movement to try to erase its malign remnants, and spent decades on affirmative action and other nostrums to expunge even the faintest remaining traces. Whatever white Americans could do to atone for and repair the damage they caused, they have done, as much as imperfect humans in an imperfect world can do.
We’ve done absolutely everything we could do. Everything! Later in the review, Magnet summarizes The Dream and the Nightmare, which he wrote in the 90s:
In that book, I argued that the counterculture’s remaking of mainstream white American culture in the 1960s — the sexual revolution; the fling with drugs…the belief that in racist America, the criminal was really the victim of society…[etc.] — all these attitudes that devalued traditional mainstream values trickled down from young people and their teachers in the universities, to the media, to the mainstream Protestant churches, to the ed schools, to the high schools, and finally to American culture at large. And when these attitudes made their way to the ghetto, they destigmatized and validated the already-existing disproportionate illegitimacy, drug use, crime, school dropout, non-work, and welfare dependency there, and caused the rate of all these pathologies to skyrocket startlingly in the 1960s and beyond.
….Aghast at the minority-crime explosion that rocked not just the ghettoes but much of urban America, voters began electing officials, especially in New York, who believed that the real victim of a crime was the victim, not the criminal — who ought to be arrested and jailed — and crime fell accordingly.
In other words, blacks today have no cause to blame their troubles on anyone but themselves. Unless they want to blame it on lefty counterculture. This is pretty putrid stuff, and I don’t feel like taking it on right now. Instead, I’m going to change the subject so suddenly you might get whiplash.
Here we go: it’s hardened beliefs like this that make it so hard for many people to accept the lead-crime hypothesis that I’ve written about frequently and at length. A lot of teen pathologies did start to skyrocket in the 60s, but the primary cause was almost certainly lead poisoning. Certainly lead was the proximate cause of increases in crime, teen pregnancy, and school dropout rates. And these effects were more pronounced among blacks than whites, because blacks lived disproportionately in areas with high levels of lead. The opposite is true too: the decline in these pathologies starting in the 90s was due to the phaseout of lead in gasoline.
In theory, none of this should be too hard to accept. The evidence is strong, and given what we know about the effects of lead on brain development, it makes perfect sense. In practice, though, if lead poisoning was the primary cause of the increase in various pathologies in the 60s and beyond, then the counterculture wasn’t. And if the phaseout of leaded gasoline was responsible for the subsequent decline, then the EPA gets the credit, not tough-on-crime policies. And that can’t be tolerated.
On the left, the problems are similar. Liberals tend to dislike “essentialist” explanations of things like crime rates because that opens the door to noxious arguments that blacks are biologically more crime prone than whites. As it happens, lead poisoning isn’t truly an essentialist explanation, but for many it’s too close for comfort. And anyway, liberals have their own explanations for the crime wave of the 60s: poverty, racism, easy availability of guns, and so forth.
This is why something that ought to be viewed dispassionately as a straightforward scientific hypothesis has such a hard time gaining traction: if it’s true, then everyone’s pet theories about the 60s have to be seriously reevaluated. And no one wants to do that: on the left, most people want to stick with racism and poverty, and on the right they want to stick with moral decay and black culture. It’s more fun that way, you see.
Boats lined up outside Ross Castle in Killarney, waiting for next summer and the expected horde of tourists wanting tours of Lough Leane. We just took the tour boat instead.
“Net neutrality” is a simple thing: it mandates that ISPs (internet service providers, usually your cable or mobile phone company) provide the same level of service to all comers—from mighty Disney to modest Breitbart to tiny little startups. Without it, internet providers can sign exclusive deals with big companies so that their sites are nice and fast, while the also-rans are sluggish and unreliable.
But would internet providers do this? One of the arguments against net neutrality is that it addresses a problem that might happen in the future, not a problem that actually exists. This argument doesn’t do much for me, since I think the probablility that internet providers will sign lucrative deals like this is pretty close to 100 percent. Hell, some internet providers have already come pretty close. Netflix pays Comcast for fast service on its lines. In the past, T-Mobile has “zero rated” certain sites so they don’t count against your data limit. These should be viewed as opening salvos, not full-blown non-neutrality, but they’re certainly a sign that monopoly internet providers know they have a very valuable commodity that they can auction off to the highest bidders if they’re allowed to.
But what concrete evidence do we have about the future of a non-neutral internet? How about overseas, where net neutrality isn’t universal? I was thinking I should look into that, but Rep. Ro Khanna beat me to it:
In Portugal, with no net neutrality, internet providers are starting to split the net into packages. pic.twitter.com/TlLYGezmv6
Although both countries are part of the European Union, which has an explicit commitment to network neutrality, they’re allowed under provisions giving national regulators some flexibility. These regulators can open loopholes permitting “zero rating,” through which ISPs can exclude certain services from data caps….The potential for abuse is obvious: The system gives ISPs the ability to set terms for any service’s inclusion in one of these special tiers.
…. In early January the FCC staff, in one of its last published reports before President Trump appointed Pai chairman of the FCC, concluded that zero-rating deals offered to broadband customers by AT&T and Verizon violate net neutrality principles. The deals “present significant risks to consumers and competition…because of network operators’ potentially unreasonable discrimination in favor of their own affiliates,” the staff reported.
….The arrangements that offended the FCC staff were AT&T’s “sponsored data” and Verizon’s “FreeBee Data 360.” AT&T, according to the FCC staff, gives content providers the ability—for a fee—to offer programming to its subscribers without its counting toward the subscribers’ monthly data usage limits. The problem is that AT&T offers this service to programmers at terms worse than those it gives DirecTV, which it owns….Verizon pulled the same stunt to favor its own go90 video service, the FCC staff found.
This is just the start. At the moment, ISPs like Comcast and Verizon are being careful because they don’t want to do anything to jeopardize the elimination of net neutrality. But once they’re convinced it’s gone for good, they’ll start experimenting to see how far they can push things.
Can I prove this? Of course not. But it’s obvious that in a non-neutral market, ISP’s can make a huge amount of additional money by charging content providers for fast service. So why wouldn’t they do it? It’s not as if their customers can switch to someone else, after all.
Their duel was set for high noon—Excel spreadsheets at twenty paces—but there’s no word yet on how that turned out.
As a reminder, here’s the basic dispute:
The 1998 Vacancies Reform Act gives the president the power to fill vacant positions in the executive branch. It is the “exclusive” means for filling positions “unless” another statute expressly names a successor.
The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act expressly says that the deputy director of the CFPB “shall” become director in case of a vacancy.
The White House position is that Dodd-Frank doesn’t remove the president’s VRA power. It merely means that VRA is no longer the “exclusive” means of filling the vacancy. The president still has the option of using it.
The lawyers will sort this out, but here’s the part that was tickling my brain last night. It’s one thing to disagree about what statutory language means, but surely it has to mean something. Right? But if the White House interpretation is correct, then the language in Dodd-Frank is literally meaningless. VRA still controls, and the president had the power to name the deputy as the new director all along if he wanted to. So why bother even including it?
This is the question I haven’t seen addressed. If VRA is the controlling statute regardless, then why did Congress even bother including language about a CFPB successor in Dodd-Frank? It might make sense if this applied only to temporary absences (due to illness, for example), but that’s not the case. Everyone agrees that the Dodd-Frank language applies equally to both temporary absences and resignations.
My untutored view is that the Dodd-Frank language means exactly what it says: if the director resigns, then the deputy director takes over, full stop. And it was included as a means of maintaining CFPB independence from the White House, something that Congress clearly intended. This is the only interpretation that seems to make consistent sense.
But I suppose a judge will decide I’m wrong soon enough.
The Republican plan to kill off Obamacare’s individual mandate would affect the entire country, but its biggest effect would likely be in sparsely-populated rural areas. According to an LA Times analysis, insurers there would either pull out entirely or else raise rates drastically because the pool of customers is so small:
That could leave consumers in these regions — including most or all of Alaska, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada and Wyoming, as well as parts of many other states — with either no options for coverage or health plans that are prohibitively expensive. There are 454 counties nationwide with only one health insurer on the marketplace in 2018 and where the cheapest plan available to a 40-year-old consumer costs at least $500 a month. Markets in these places risk collapsing if Congress scraps the individual insurance mandate.
….Eighty-six percent of these 454 at-risk counties have fewer than 50,000 residents, census data show. Healthcare costs are often higher in rural areas, as there are fewer medical providers and populations tend to be older and sicker. These counties also overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump last year, with 9 out of 10 backing the Republican presidential ticket, according to election data.
It’s yet another way that Donald Trump is screwing the very people who put him in office. Most of these folks don’t seem to realize it, though. They’ll either blame Democrats or else shrug and figure that at least Trump hates the same people they do.
You think the kids these days are out of control? Pfft. Just wait until that hummingbird gets a taste of my mighty leap and razor sharp teeth. *That's* out of control.
I am sick again, with a reprise of the exact same stomach bug I had earlier this week. I’m pissed. What’s going on here?
Anyway, I feel too lousy to do any actual thinking, but this Noah Smith tweetstorm represents my view of the kids these days so perfectly that I have to pass it along. I probably would have added a caveat that I think there is a genuine lack of respect for free speech rights on campuses these days, but that’s about it. However, I don’t really have any idea how serious this problem is, so let’s just leave it alone for now and let Noah have the stage while I go back to bed.
7/More importantly, we have evidence that professors are a politically MODERATING influence, and that when students are radicalized, they radicalize each other: https://t.co/gKKaoznufD
9/And notice that all the scare stories you read about in the media, including Evergreen State and Reed College, are stories about STUDENT activists attacking their moderate-lefty professors.
Not about extremist professors leading the charge.
11/When I was a college kid, students protested for higher wages for janitors. They protested the WTO. They protested the shooting of Amadou Diallo. They protested the Iraq War.
15/Now, I respect @JonHaidt‘s campaign for more ideological diversity in the social sciences. Get some conservative viewpoints in there, go ahead! Intellectual monoculture is boring. Have some real debates!
16/And sure, I do turn up my nose at the sociologists (and the increasingly small # of economists) who think political activism and scientific inquiry go well together. They don’t. Objectivity is important.
19/And meanwhile, let’s not fall victim to the Availability Heuristic.
Outrage over lefty campus protests is an intentional distraction from the real, important bad things being done (and being attempted) by the Trump Administration.
20/Right-wing media outlets like the Daily Caller, Breitbart, etc. are trying to find something that’s viscerally scary to conservatives, and shove in their face in order to distract them from the damage that Trump is doing to the country.
21/Just like antifa provided a bogeyman that let right-wing media do the “both sides” defense when murderous Nazis rampaged in the streets of Virginia, campus protests provides a bogeyman that lets right-wing media distract from and excuse Trumpism.
Watch in awe as the fearsome Jaws surges from the underbrush and overwhelms a defenseless plant. Nearby, a furry killer whale joins playfully in the carnage.
Here are a few more quick hits. I promise to keep this shorter than yesterday.
The lead stories in both the Washington Post and the New York Times are about Jared Kushner losing influence in the White House. Maybe this is true, maybe it isn’t. But it sure looks like someone close to Donald Trump is eager to push this narrative. I wonder who?
Yesterday I wrote about the fact that we now have two directors of the CFPB following the resignation of Richard Cordray. Today the Office of Legal Counsel released its memo explaining why Trump has the authority to fill the vacancy even though, by statute, the deputy director automatically moves up in the “absence or unavailability” of the director. I figured the whole thing would turn on the meaning of that phrase, but no. As it turns out, OLC agrees that “absence or unavailability” also encompasses the resignation of the director.
So what is their justification? As near as I can tell, they make a lengthy argument that the statutory language doesn’t overrule the Vacancies Reform Act, which allows the president to fill vacant positions, it sits alongside the VRA. In other words, it merely gives the president a second choice. He can either appoint someone or he can allow the deputy to become acting director.
The OLC’s reasoning seems sort of half-assed to me, but I’m no lawyer. Stranger things have been upheld by courts. The more interesting question is why Trump is bothering with this in the first place. Why not just nominate a new director? The Republican Senate would surely vote quickly to confirm and that would be the end of it. It might delay things two or three months, but that’s hardly a big deal.
So far, the leading theory seems to be that Trump wants a court battle in order to set a precedent that he can do this. He has a habit of installing his people in jobs before they’re approved by the Senate, and it’s not at all clear that this is legal. But if he can get a court to agree with OLC’s legal argument, he’d have a free hand to install his nominees all over the government without being delayed by pesky Senate confirmation hearings. So much winning!
After the first 27 minutes of today’s Alabama-Minnesota basketball game, Minnesota led 57-50. In the next three minutes, the entire Alabama bench was ejected; an Alabama player fouled out; and another one was injured. At that point, Minnesota led 67-54. Alabama then played the last ten minutes with only three players and outscored Minnesota 30-22. That wasn’t quite enough to win the game, which means there will probably be no ESPN 30-for-30 story about this, but it certainly suggests a novel strategy for playing better basketball.
Gardiner Harris presents the latest smdh story about Rex Tillerson’s apparently deliberate program to destroy the State Department. No explanation for Tillerson’s behavior truly makes sense. It’s just inexplicable. There’s been a mass exodus of top diplomats; Tillerson basically hides in his office all day; and people who decline to quit when he asks them to are assigned scutwork:
Even more departures are expected as a result of an intense campaign that Mr. Tillerson has ordered to reduce the department’s longtime backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests. CNN reported that the task had resulted from Mr. Trump’s desire to accelerate the release of Mrs. Clinton’s remaining emails. Every bureau in the department has been asked to contribute to the effort. That has left midlevel employees and diplomats — including some just returning from high-level or difficult overseas assignments — to spend months performing mind-numbing clerical functions beside unpaid interns.
All because Trump continues to be convinced that somewhere there must be a smoking-gun email that will put Hillary Clinton behind bars.
He sees the calls for Mr. Moore to step aside as a version of the response to the now-famous “Access Hollywood” tape, in which he boasted about grabbing women’s genitalia, and the flood of groping accusations against him that followed soon after. He suggested to a senator earlier this year that it was not authentic, and repeated that claim to an adviser more recently.
This is the kind of thing that makes you think maybe all those lies Trump tells aren’t actually lies. Maybe he’s really so divorced from reality that he convinces himself they’re true. What else could explain him saying something like this in the face of crystal clear documentary evidence to the contrary?
My Twitter feed is full of outrage over this profile of Tony Hovater, a neo-Nazi who lives in Huber Heights, Ohio. Hovater, according to the story, is a welder by trade; owns four cats; just got married; and is “polite and low key”—or, as author Richard Fausset puts it, “He is the Nazi sympathizer next door.”
The outrage is over the story’s seeming normalization of white nationalists and neo-Nazis, but I think that’s probably overblown. Fausset’s goal was perfectly reasonable: to dig into Hovater’s past and explain how a guy who was basically normal ten years ago suddenly took a U-turn that transformed him into a racist zealot. The real problem, as Fausset basically admits here, is that the story fails on its own terms. Hovater himself doesn’t really seem to know how it happened, and Fausset comes away from hours of interviews without any compelling insights either.
This is yet another case of a story that should have been spiked. No one wants to do that after putting a lot of work into something, but sometimes days or weeks of reporting just doesn’t pan out. This was one of those cases.
More generally, this was the latest entry in a popular recent category of journalism that could be described as the “well-dressed racist” genre. The motivation for these pieces is obvious, and their goals are pretty obvious as well: to let people know that hardcore racists don’t all advertise themselves these days with white hoods or swastika tatoos. In other words, don’t be fooled by a nice suit or a mild manner. They’re still just as dangerous as the Klansmen of old.
There’s a high risk to writing these pieces, because they really need to be done well. Screw it up, as Fausset did, and you do more harm than good. And I’m not at all sure it’s worth it anyway. There were plenty of vicious but well-dressed racists in the old days too, and frankly, I’m not sure it’s news to anyone that some of today’s racists are also well dressed and college educated. Maybe it’s time to put this whole genre to bed. Even the good examples probably don’t really accomplish much.
I blew it. Sorry. It turns out that SurveyMonkey allows only 100 reponses to their free surveys. The cheapest option that would allow me to retrieve all the responses costs $408, and as much as I cherish my readers, that’s a little steep for a crummy little web survey joke. However, here are the results from the first 100 responses:
You guys are really law abiding! That makes me kind of sad, actually. Atrios may be wrong about driverless cars, but he wins this round about yellow lights. And next time I guess I’ll use Google Forms if I do any further scientific polling.
The I405 Bristol Street offramp to South Coast Plaza, 2:01 PM on Friday, November 24, 2017. When these folks finally get off the freeway, they still have half a mile to go before they'll get to the mall.
I’ve got a bunch of stuff clogging up my browser tabs and RSS reader, and I don’t think I’ll get around to doing full-blown posts about any of them. So here’s a quick dump of interesting stuff that caught my eye over the past couple of days:
The New York Times reports that Mike Flynn’s lawyers are no longer cooperating with Donald Trump’s lawyers. The Times suggests that this means Flynn has been flipped and may be providing dirt on Trump. As one person “close to the administration” told the Washington Post, it’s a “classic Gambino-style roll-up”—not a phrase one normally associates with a president of the United States. Stay tuned.
A few days agoDavid Dayen wrote a piece explaining that Donald Trump can’t unilaterally name a successor when Richard Cordray steps down as director of the CFPB. It turns out that the deputy director automatically takes over. This was interesting, but a bit moot, since Cordray has never appointed a deputy. But today, a few hours before his resignation took effect, he finally did:
Cordray on Friday appointed the agency’s chief of staff, Leandra English, as the CFPB’s deputy director, establishing her as his successor when he steps down at the end of the day. The move appears designed to thwart any move by President Donald Trump to name another temporary official to head the controversial agency. Trump has been reported to be considering White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney for the role.
Dayen thinks this signals an “epic fight” over the position. What happens if Trump appoints someone new, claiming that the Federal Vacancies Reform Act gives him the authority to do so, but English stays on, insisting that she’s the only legitimate director because language in the Dodd-Frank bill overrides FVRA? Pass the popcorn!
I suspect this is a fight Trump won’t pick, but I guess you never know.
UPDATE: That was quick. It looks like Trump decided to pick this fight after all. As of midnight Friday, there are two dueling directors of the CFPB. I imagine this will go to court quickly, possibly directly to the DC Circuit Court as the court of original jurisdiction.
Via Alex Ward, here’s the most likely reason that there’s suddenly been a lull in North Korean missile tests, and it has nothing to do with Donald Trump’s blathering:
Until 2012, North Korea never tested missiles during autumn and winter. That changed when Kim Jong-un took over, but not by a lot. They still conduct very few tests in the fourth quarter. The reason comes down to simple bad weather:
Missile launches require good weather. Even NASA delays rocket launches sometimes because of storms. That poses a problem for North Korea, which suffers from brutally cold and blustery winter weather…..At the same time, North Korea’s harvest season takes place during the last three months of the year….Come winter time, Pyongyang prioritizes food transportation over missile launches.
The bad news is that missile tests are likely to pick up next year, and very likely to pick up in February, when South Korea is hosting the Winter Olympics.
Just to remind everyone, there are three separate rules that the Republican tax bill has to conform to:
The Republican budget resolution, which limits the bill to additional deficits of $1.5 trillion over its first ten years (2018-2027).
The Byrd Rule, which limits additional deficits to zero after the first ten years (2028 and beyond).
PAYGO, or pay-as-you go, which, when combined with the Budget Control Act, mandates that any new deficits need to be offset with equal spending cuts.
#1 appears to be pretty well in hand. #2 is still a problem as far as I know, though we haven’t yet seen the latest JCT estimates. And #3 is basically an ICBM headed straight for the Capitol dome: we can all see it coming, but for some reason hardly anyone is talking about it. I don’t quite understand this.
By the way, all of this could have been avoided if Republicans were willing to work with Democrats. The fact that this sounds so ridiculous is a sign of the times, but the fact is that there’s plenty of corporate tax reform that Democrats would go along with—but only if it’s deficit-neutral, which is the one thing Republicans are dead set against. Their goal is, and always has been, budget-busting tax cuts, not economy-growing tax reform.
From the deputy Washington editor of the New York Times:
People who use 2027 distribution tables to say tax plans hurt the middle class are being disingenuous. Tax writers had middle class tax cuts expire precisely because they know Congress will extend them. The damage is to the debt.
Oh come on. If Republicans were really that confident, they’d have the entire bill expire in 2027. That would sure make passage a whole lot easier. But they aren’t all that confident, so they had to make a decision: which part would they prefer to jettison if worst comes to worst? And the answer was the middle-class tax cuts.
It appears that thousands—or maybe millions—of comments submitted to the FCC in favor of repealing net neutrality were fake. New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has been trying to investigate, but apparently the FCC has refused to cooperate. This is very strange. It’s unlikely that these comments had any actual impact on the Republican FCC commissioners, who were all dedicated to repealing net neutrality from the get-go, so why would they be so uninterested in finding out how this happened and who was behind it?
John Eligon went to Vallejo, California, recently to take a look at one of the most diverse cities in America. “About 30 miles north of Oakland,” he writes, “it is the rare place in the United States where black, white, Asian and Hispanic people not only coexist in nearly equal numbers, but actually connect.”
I found that most people in Vallejo interacted quite comfortably across racial lines and were accepting of one another, more so than in much of the rest of the United States. Several black people told me, for instance, that they did not feel profiled anywhere they went in town, something I certainly do not hear in most other parts of the country to which I travel.
Despite this, the entire “behind the scenes” piece is devoted to Fred Hatfield, an explicitly racist white guy Eligon met in a diner. Hatfield was “very much an exception in Vallejo,” Eligon says, but he was apparently worth a thousand-word spotlight anyway. Why?
Eligon explains that his piece is really about himself: “Mr. Hatfield’s disparaging remarks about minorities and his quickness to stereotype me underscored a truth about covering race in America as a black man: The story is never far from home.” I’d buy that if his article really was about his experience covering race in America—which would probably be pretty interesting. But it’s not. It’s basically a thousand words about Hatfield.
I struggle a bit to understand why Hatfield was worth this attention. After all, it’s hardly news that if you look around you’ll find some people willing to be overtly racist to your face. Nor, as Eligon acknowledges, is Hatfield even remotely typical of Vallejo. In the end, then, this piece is just the latest in the tired genre of liberal anthropology: stories about “regular places” that inevitably feature “regular people” saying terrible things. This is understandable if (a) these people are representative and (b) there’s a good reason to profile the place itself, but often it seems to be little more than an excuse to highlight non-college graduates outside of big cities being appalling.
Maybe I’m missing the point, but surely this genre is old in the tooth? Reporters should describe the world as it is, warts and all, and that means showing us raw racism and stupidity when that’s how the world is. But it doesn’t mean going out of our way to highlight this stuff just because it confirms our liberal pieties.
That’s thanks to a design concept called “shared space,” where urban planners drastically lessen the presence of traffic lights, signs, and barriers, encouraging all forms of transportation to share the road….The heightened risk forces commuters to remain on high alert as they pass through an intersection, in theory leading to safer travel….After installing shared spaces, Ipswich’s accident rates with injuries fell from 23 over three years to just one per year. Pedestrian injuries at London’s Kensington High Street fell by nearly 60 percent.
I just spent three weeks living near Kensington High Street, and I didn’t notice any lack of signs or crosswalks. What did I miss? Not much, apparently: it appears that some modest changes were made there starting in 2000, but not so much that it’s surprising I didn’t notice them. Still, it was apparently enough to produce impressive results: for the past decade reporters have been dutifully passing along the news that collisions involving pedestrians, bicycles, and motorcycles dropped by 48 percent in the three years after the project was completed in 2003.
But there’s a gotcha. First, it turns out that these same collisions dropped by 37 percent everywhere in the borough. Second, it mostly happened before the KHS simplification was carried out:
Color me confused. The entire borough got safer, obviously for reasons unrelated to road simplication. And it mostly happened between 2000 and 2002, before the traffic simplification was even finished. If Kensington High Street followed the same trend, it mostly benefited from the global changes and has probably seen only modest improvement from the simplification. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any studies of KHS more recently than 2005, so who knows?
In any case, the borough itself says that “although the scheme is often cited as an example of ‘simplification’ (since some barriers and other street furniture were removed) it should properly be considered as a holistic re-design of the area that produced (on average) a simplified space although many features were added as part of the scheme.” And it doesn’t appear to have had a big effect. So it might be best to stop using this as one of the half dozen examples that shows up in every article about traffic simplification.
The latest hotness in conservative circles is a proposal to create a whole bunch of new judgeships. Back in 2013, when Democrats merely wanted to fill three empty seats on the DC Court of Appeals, conservatives argued that, properly measured, caseloads were down and we really ought to just eliminate the empty seats entirely rather than let President Obama fill them. But now that a Republican is president, guess what? The court system is groaning under the weight of increased caseloads. We need new judges, and we need them now—with “now” defined as prior to November 2018 when Republicans might lose their Senate majority.
However, the primary author of this proposal, Stephen Calabresi, is pretty frank that although increased caseloads should be the public rationale, it’s really about getting more conservative judges appointed. And don’t call it court packing!
In fact, it is a court-unpacking plan. It counteracts Democratic court-packing under President Carter and a Democratic Congress in 1978…and it counteracts the partisan effects on the judiciary of Senator Chuck Schumer’s shameful filibustering of lower-court federal judges under the younger President Bush and his abolition of the filibuster of lower-court federal judges under President Obama.
….Republicans will have controlled the presidency for 32 of the 52 years between 1969 and 2021. By all rights, Republicans ought to have a three-fifths majority on all the federal courts of appeals. Instead, there is a Democratic majority on almost all of those courts….This is a national scandal of epic proportions, which Congress should and could address by increasing the size of the federal courts of appeals and district courts by 33 percent.
Really? It’s a “national scandal” that Republicans don’t have the same percentage of judges as they’ve had of presidential years between 1969 and 2021? How about if we rerun this from, say, 1993 to 2016? Let’s see. That gives Democrats 67 percent of the years but, shockingly, only 56 percent of the seats on federal courts of appeals. My goodness.
This is a dumb game. If you pick the years right, you can get any percentage of Republican or Democratic years you want. (Though, at the very least, you should probably stop at the present instead of using a range that, comically, goes out to 2021.) And the composition of the courts is always weighted more heavily toward the most recent president’s party.
But why stop there? Democrats won 49 percent of all votes for the Senate in 2016 but won only 35 percent of the open seats. They won 49 percent of the two-party House vote but occupy only 44 percent of the seats. And Hillary Clinton won 51 percent of the two-party presidential vote but Donald Trump is currently occupying the White House. Is this an epic national scandal too?
And by the way, Calabresi also wants to summarily dump all 250 administrative law judges currently on the books and turn them into trial judges with lifetime tenure too. Pronto.
I’d call this a sad joke if it weren’t for the fact that sillier things than this have turned into real-life movements thanks to Fox News and talk radio. Luckily, Calabresi seems not to know anything about reconciliation rules, so he suggests that this should all happen as part of the Republican tax bill. I believe the Senate parliamentarian would have something to say about that. Still, as dumb as this is, it’s worth keeping an eye on. After all, I thought Randy Barnett’s invented-from-whole-cloth argument against the individual mandate was silly too, and that came within a hair’s breadth of overturning all of Obamacare.
What kind of roundup would this be if I didn’t end it with Donald Trump’s latest bit of self-parodic narcissism?
Time Magazine called to say that I was PROBABLY going to be named “Man (Person) of the Year,” like last year, but I would have to agree to an interview and a major photo shoot. I said probably is no good and took a pass. Thanks anyway!
I feel for him. Cat Fancy called a few weeks ago to say that Hilbert and Hopper were probably going to be named Cats of the Year, but they’d have to be groomed and videoed and photographed and—long story short, I took a pass.¹ It would have interrupted nap time, after all, and they might have lost out to Serwer’s brood anyway. Who needs the grief?
¹This joke stolen from Atrios. Used without permission.
Hilbert had his beauty shot in the leaves a couple of weeks ago, so Hopper gets her chance today. It’s not quite as good as Hilbert’s, but blame the photographer for that, not the cat.
REVISE AND EXTEND: Actually, the picture of Hilbert is more dramatic than this one, but it’s not better. Hopper has a lovely, feline expression in this shot, doesn’t she?
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