Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog

Dueling winter predictions

August 31, 2018

weather
Country Living first reported …

You may want to swap out your snow boots for rain boots this year. Most of the country can expect more rain and less snow this winter, says The Old Farmer’s Almanac. The OFA, founded in 1792, just released its annual weather forecast—and it says that 2019 will be warm and wet.

“This winter, we expect to see above-normal temperatures almost everywhere in the United States, except in the Southwest, where we’re predicting a colder-than-normal season,” the OFA forecasts.

“Our milder-than-normal forecast is due to a decrease in solar activity and the expected arrival of a weak El Niño, which will prevent cold air masses from lingering in the North,” it continues.

So much for dreaming of a white Christmas. According to the report, precipitation will also fall in the above-normal range (except in Southern California, the Southeast, and a small patch of the Midwest), while snow levels will be below-normal (except the “interior West” and again, part of the Midwest).

… and then reported:

Don’t toss those snow boots just yet: Just days after The Old Farmer’s Almanacforecasted a warm, wet winter, the other Farmers’ Almanac has predicted the exact opposite: A long, cold, snowy winter.

“Contrary to some stories floating around on the internet, our time-tested, long-range formula is pointing towards a very long, cold, and snow-filled winter,” Farmers’ Almanac Editor and Philom Peter Geiger says in the press release. “We stand by our forecast and formula, which accurately predicted most of the winter storms last year as well as this summer’s steamy, hot conditions.”

In particular, the Northeast, Great Lakes, Ohio Valley, Midwest, and even Southeast can expect “teeth-chattering” temperatures due to a cold front in mid-February, according to the Almanac.

Those bummed about the OFA’s forecast of more rain and less snow this season will be happy to hear that they may get a white Christmas after all: The Almanac predicts plenty of snowfall in the Great Lakes states, Midwest, and central and northern New England (they even offer month-to-month predictions).

Above-normal precipitation is also expected in the Pacific Northwest, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic States, whether in the form of ice, rain, or freezing rain. Even the Southwest and Southeast will reportedly be wet in December 2018 and early 2019, respectively.

These cold conditions could be long-lasting, too. The Almanac says spring may get a late start, especially on the East Coast, as mid-March storms are expected to bring “snow, sleet, and/or rain as well as strong and gusty winds.”

First: I hate winter. The older I get, the more I hate winter. To be honest about it, I cannot for the life of me understand how anyone can like winter. Working in journalism, I own no winter toys and never will. Bad winters are expensive. if you have school-age children, bad winters are disruptive when school and athletic events are canceled due to the weather. If climate change is causing milder winters where I live, I am all for it. The only good thing about winter is my ability to broadcast basketball, which has nothing to do with winter weather. (See the previous comment about “disruptive.”)

The contrasting point is that the Farmers’ Almanac release sounds a lot to me like weather porn — essentially exaggerating their winter forecast for the purpose of pumping up sales. If anything, the weather forecasting profession, such as it is, seems to be doing that more and more on the reasoning that if they say, for instance, that if they forecast Stormageddon or Snowpocalypse and that doesn’t happen, the only damage is to their credibility, which isn’t great anyway due to this area’s very variable weather. (The heavy rain and floods of the past couple of weeks were on no one’s radar screen, so to speak, earlier this summer.)

For what it’s worth, the Old Farmer’s Almanac (note the singular) forecast seems more logical than the Farmers’ Almanac (note the plural) forecast if an El Niño is going to take place this winter. El Niños (or should that be Los Niños?) produce warmer Midwest winters, as opposed to La Niñas (or should that be Las Niñas?). It’s unclear whether the Farmers’ forecast is based on a prediction of a snowy October in Siberia, which was the alleged cause of the polar vortex that besieged the Midwest in the damnable winter fo 2013–14. (Which was followed by the first two tornadoes to hit the city of the Presteblog World Headquarters in 44 years, but we’ll deal with that later if we have to.)

Country Living adds a caveat:

It’s worth noting that the National Weather Service‘s predictions were similar to the OFA’s: above-normal temps for most of the country, particularly the Southwest, Northeast, and Northwestern Alaska.

Of course, as The Washington Post notes, you should take all this with a grain of salt, as weather forecasting is simply not yet advanced enough to ensure accurate predictions this far out. Still, it never hurts to be prepared for any kind of weather. Time to shop for snow boots—or better yet, boots that double as rain and snow boots!
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The profane and the sacred

August 31, 2018

Culture, US politics
Charlie Sykes:

Two weeks ago the satirical website The Babylon Bee posted a parody in which the pope says that he will address the sex abuse scandal after he’s finished talking about climate change.

The head of the Roman Catholic Church claimed he is deeply concerned with the tragic report, but is “just too swamped” with work fighting climate change, criticizing capitalism, and advocating for other issues of social justice to talk about the repulsive report at the moment.

But parody can no longer keep up with the pace of reality.

This week, Chicago’s Cardinal Blasé Cupich, channeled the Bee, when he told a local television station that “the Pope has a bigger agenda,” than responding to charges by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò that he knew about incidents of sexual abuse. “He’s got to get on with other things,” Cardinal Cupich said, “of talking about the environment and protecting migrants and carrying on the work of the church. We’re not going to go down a rabbit hole on this.”

The rabbit hole, of course, is the decades-long molestation of thousands of children and the church’s role in enabling and covering up the crimes. More specifically, the cardinal was referring to allegations that Pope Francis knew that former Washington Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick had preyed on seminarians and had been admonished by the pope’s predecessor.

But as tone deaf as Cupich’s comments were, they reflect a more depressing turn in the church’s struggle to come to grips with the crisis. Progressives in the church have assumed a defensive crouch around the pope because they see him as besieged by right-wing critics who have seized on the reports of abuse to weaken his papacy.

Perhaps it is inevitable that every issue is drawn into the vortex of tribalization, but there is still something profoundly disconcerting about the way that the abuse scandal has been subsumed by the larger cultural war in the church that pits left versus right.

The New York Times was among the first to cast the new allegations in ideological terms. In an article headlined “Vatican Power Struggle Bursts Into Open as Conservatives Pounce,” the paper said that with the release of Vigano’s letter an “ideologically motivated opposition has weaponized the church’s sex abuse crisis to threaten not only Francis’ agenda but his entire papacy.”

Slate quickly picked up the same theme in an interview with Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University.

Viganò, professor Faggioli insisted, “is just using the Western church, and American Catholicism, and the shock caused by the revelations against Cardinal McCarrick, to make his own personal case against the Vatican, which expelled him and didn’t make him a cardinal.” But he is quick to put Vigano’s charges in the context of the larger culture war between “liberal progressives who like Francis and conservative traditionalists who don’t like Francis.”

And he is using the right-wing rhetoric in the United States against Francis to rally ideological forces that are interested in regime change in the Catholic Church because they think Francis is a heretic. They are not concerned that Francis might be an accomplice in a cover-up. They have waged a war against Francis since his election.

This all sounds familiar to anyone who has even casually followed the rhetoric of our polarized politics, where even the most serious charge can be dismissed as part of a vendetta.

But we are not dealing here with normal politics; the church is confronting a Reformation-level crisis involving a horrendous pattern of abuse, rape, and silence. And while legitimate question can and ought to be raised about the credibility Archbishop Vigano’s charges, isn’t the central—really the only— question here whether or not they are true?

Whatever Vigano’s politics, shouldn’t the church be united on those questions: Is he telling the truth? Did the pope know, or didn’t he? Did Pope Benedict sanction Cardinal McCarrick or not? What actually happened here?

Of course, progressives feel they have a stake in Francis’s papcy, but is this the hill they really want to die on? How do they imagine this will end?

Ross Douthat writes that it is understandable “why certain organs and apostles of liberal Catholicism are running interference for McCarrick’s protectors—because Francis is their pope, the liberalizer they yearned for all through the John Paul and Benedict years, and all’s fair in the Catholic civil war.”

But, he warned, “the inevitable, even providential irony is that this sort of team thinking never leads to theological victory, but only to exposure, shame, disaster.”

Indeed at the very moment when the Catholic church needs to renew itself, it faces a growing schism as the various factions retreat into their corners. And this is perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of the story. Tim Miller was unfortunately exactly right when he tweeted:

That the church pedophila scandal has evolved into a pissing match between liberals and conservatives rather than a united front against the pedos is more depressing evidence of the rot of political culture in the West.

It is unlikely to end well.
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Presty the DJ for Aug. 31

August 31, 2018

Music
Today in 1955, a London judge fined a man for “creating an abominable noise” — playing this song loud enough to make the neighborhood shake, rattle and roll for 2½ hours:

Today in 1968, Private Eye magazine reported that the album to be released by John Lennon and Yoko Ono would save money by providing no wardrobe for Lennon or Ono:

(more…)
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Bring on the Democrats

August 30, 2018

US politics, Wisconsin politics
Dan O’Donnell:

Officials with the Democratic National Committee are in Milwaukee this week, scouting the city as one of three possible locations for the 2020 Democratic National Convention. Really, though, they don’t even need to visit the other two finalists—Houston and Miami Beach—since there is no better place in America to highlight the impact of the Democratic Party’s platform than Milwaukee.

The only city in America to elect three socialist mayors, Milwaukee would represent a chance for Democrats to embrace what Chairman Tom Perez called “the future of the party” by highlighting its past.

And what a past it’s been! Milwaukee hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1908 and its Common Council has been dominated by liberals for nearly as long, meaning that Democrats can showcase a city that they have totally controlled for more than a century. Their policies and their policies alone are responsible for making Milwaukee the city that it is today…the tenth worst city in America in which to live.

Each year, the news and commentary website 24/7 Wall Street measures cities on a wide-ranging index of socioeconomic conditions, including crime rates, economics, education levels, environmental conditions, public health, housing, infrastructure, and recreation and leisure. This year, Milwaukee ranked tenth-worst.

“More than one in every four Milwaukee residents live in poverty, more than double the 11.8% state poverty rate,” researchers Samuel Stebbins and Evan Comen wrote. “Poor cities often have higher crime rates than more affluent cities, and Milwaukee is no exception. There were 1,546 violent crimes for every 100,000 Milwaukee residents, more than five times the statewide violent crime rate of 306 per 100,000.”

Yes, by holding their convention in Milwaukee, Democrats can show the nation how their crime prevention policies have led Milwaukee…to the 15^th-highest homicide rate in the nation in 2016 (the most recent year for which complete data is available).

“Milwaukee remains one of the most dangerous places in the country,” Comen noted. “Overall there were 1,533 violent crimes — which also includes rape, robbery, and aggravated assault — per 100,000 residents in 2016, nearly four times the national rate of 386 incidents per 100,000 residents and the eighth most of any city.”

Holding the 2020 convention in Milwaukee would also allow the Democratic Party to make further inroads into its all-important African-American voter base. As University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee researchers concluded in 2012, “no metro area has witnessed more precipitous erosion in the labor market for black males over the past 40 years than has Milwaukee.” Even more illuminating, after 108 years of Democratic rule Milwaukee is the single most segregated city in the country for renters and third most segregated overall.

Wait, how can this be? How can a place governed by Democratic policies not be the utopia that Democratic promises indicate that it should be? This disconnect is the very heart of why Milwaukee is so perfect a city to host the Democratic National Convention, as the city would stand as perhaps the most concrete example of liberal policy failures at a time when the 2020 presidential nominee would be making even more utopian promises.

As the Democratic nominee would invariably promise to incarcerate fewer criminals, overhaul America’s education system, and end the nation’s “school-to-prison pipeline,” voters would see a century of Democratic leadership resulting in Milwaukee’s sky-high violent crime rate and a public school system so dysfunctional that it boasts just a 59.7% graduation rate and includes “one of the lowest performing comprehensive public high schools in America.”

As the Democratic nominee would invariably promise to better America’s economy by “spreading the wealth around” and “making things fairer,” voters would see a century of Democratic leadership resulting in Milwaukee’s 28.4% poverty rate more than doubling the national rate of 12.7% and Milwaukee’s median household income of $36,801 totaling at just a little more than half of the national median household income $59,039.

As the Democratic nominee would invariably promise to improve race relations and make America a better, more tolerant place, voters would see a century of Democratic leadership resulting in a place that is, “by many measures,” the “toughest U.S. city for blacks.”

Why is Milwaukee so perfect for the Democratic National Convention? Because Milwaukee is the inevitable result of Democratic leadership; Milwaukee is what happens when Democrats govern with unchecked and unbroken control for more than a century.

And it’s about time the rest of the country saw it.
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McCain vs. Trump

August 30, 2018

US politics
Jonah Goldberg:

The death of Senator John McCain has elicited an enormous amount of commentary about the differences between the former Navy pilot and POW and the current president of the United States, who received five draft deferments, one of them for “bone spurs,” and who once remarked that avoiding getting a sexually transmitted disease was his “personal Vietnam.”

Their personal differences are indeed profound, underlining the decline in “old-fashioned” notions of duty, honor, and character, and the new emphasis on personal celebrity and “winning” on your own terms. There’s an obvious symbol for the chasm between the two men in that already iconic picture of the American flag flying at full staff at the White House but at half-staff across the National Mall. (Late Monday, President Trump was forced to lower the flag and offer some grudging acknowledgment of McCain’s service to country.)

The two men are also imperfect avatars for a deep ideological divide on the right between what might be called the forces of democracy and the forces of nationalism. And right now the nationalists are winning.

Across the world, populist movements discuss nationalism as an old idea that is new again. Nationalists aren’t necessarily anti-democratic, but they emphasize a national will rooted in culture or ethnicity, not elections. It’s no secret that the president styles himself a nationalist. Skeptical of international institutions or too much hand-wringing about democratic norms, Trump defines national interest in almost autocratic terms.

McCain’s worldview was, properly speaking, patriotic, not nationalistic, in that it was credal, bound up in democratic principles.

Different worldviews yield different approaches.

Trump’s nationalism causes him to be forgiving or even admiring of foreign despotism. McCain’s patriotism led him to despise tyrannies and tyrants. McCain loathed Russian president Vladimir Putin, Trump gushes over him. Former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort’s record of working for dictators and Russia-backed goons made him radioactive to McCain, but that wasn’t a problem for Trump. (It may have even been a bonus.)

Both could be scathing critics of international institutions and alliances, but Trump’s indictments largely revolve around any obligation that impedes his “America first” nostrums, while McCain’s focused on threats to democratic values and American leadership.

In 2007, for instance, McCain proposed creating a League of Democracies to counter the influence of the United Nations and other organizations that do not really care about democratic values. After all, the U.N.’s admission criteria boil down to mere existence as a nation. The Security Council was created on the principle that might makes right, which is why China and Russia are on it. The various human-rights bodies are magnets for autocracies and dictatorships desperate to rig the system in their favor. The General Assembly is democratic solely in the sense that evil dictatorships get an equal vote to enlightened democracies.

It would be a fitting response to both the passing of McCain and the rise of nationalism around the globe if the League of Democracies were given a fresh look.

Creating a separate body with more selective — and higher — standards, McCain argued, “would form the core of an international order of peace based on freedom,” providing a counterweight to the axis of autocrats around the world.

Nations, like people, respond to incentives. Membership in an organization of shared values would give countries something to strive for beyond boosts to their GDP. The fact that embracing democracy (and a law-based liberal order) yields greater economic growth would be an added inducement.

The league wouldn’t “supplant the United Nations or other international organizations,” according to McCain. “It would complement them. But it would be the one organization where the world’s democracies could come together to discuss problems and solutions on the basis of shared principles and a common vision of the future.”

Right now, ascendant nationalist movements are struggling to find a common vision of their own. The problem is that these movements have no common transnational ideals, save a shared hatred for their rulers or migrants or some other group.

McCain’s vision of a shared commitment to freedom is the alternative needed now, at home and abroad.
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Presty the DJ for Aug. 30

August 30, 2018

Music
Today in 1959, Bertolt Brecht‘s “Threepenny Opera” reached the U.S. charts in a way Brecht …

… could not have fathomed:

T0day in 1968, Apple Records released its first single by — surprise! — the Beatles:

Today in 1969, this spent three weeks on top of the British charts, on top of six weeks on top of the U.S. charts, making them perhaps the ultimate one-number-one-hit-wonder:

(more…)
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The latest bad governmental idea

August 29, 2018

US business, US politics
The Los Angeles Times reports:

The announcement puts the search giant squarely in the White House’s crosshairs amid wider allegations against the tech industry that it systematically discriminates against conservatives on social media and other platforms.

Kudlow’s remark to reporters outside the White House came hours after Trump fired off a series of predawn tweets complaining about Google search results for “Trump News.”

In a pair of tweets posted before 6 a.m., the president said the results included only “the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media.” He later deleted the tweets and reposted them, changing “New” to “News.”

“Google search results for ‘Trump News’ shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of results on ‘Trump News’ are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!” Trump wrote in his tweets.

Google said its searches aren’t politically biased: “When users type queries into the Google Search bar, our goal is to make sure they receive the most relevant answers in a matter of seconds,” the company said in a statement. “Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology.

“Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users’ queries,” Google said. “We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.”

On Tuesday afternoon, Trump escalated his attacks on the tech industry in response to questions from reporters in the Oval Office, where the president was meeting with Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, soccer’s international governing body.

“I think Google is really taking advantage of a lot of people,” Trump said. “And I think that’s a very serious thing, and it’s a very serious charge.… We have literally thousands and thousands of complaints coming in. And you just can’t do that. So I think that Google and Twitter and Facebook, they’re really treading on very, very troubled territory. And they have to be careful. It’s not fair to large portions of the population.”

Trump’s tweets came the morning after Fox Business News host Lou Dobbs aired an interview Monday night with the pro-Trump commentators Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, popularly known as Diamond and Silk, who have long claimed that their online videos are being suppressed by tech companies.

“I am not for big government, but I really do believe that the government should step in and really check this out,” Hardaway told Dobbs in the interview.

Google search results are affected not only by region but also by the user’s personal search history. It was unclear whether Trump had Googled himself, or whether he was referring to a recent report in PJ Media, a conservative blog, alleging that 96% of Google search results for news about Trump were from “left-leaning news outlets.” His accusations appeared to mirror those in the Aug. 25 piece.

“Is Google manipulating its algorithm to prioritize left-leaning news outlets in their coverage of President Trump?” asked Paula Bolyard, the “supervising editor” of the site who describes herself on Twitter as a Christian, a constitutional conservative and a “Cultural nonconformist.”

She said she searched “Trump” on Google News and weighed the results using a media bias chart developed by Sharyl Attkisson, a former CBS News correspondent. Bolyard said left-leaning outlets accounted for 96% of the results, with CNN stories making up nearly 29% of the total. She said she performed the search several times using different computers, and the results did not differ considerably.

But nowhere did the editor and blogger reckon with the fact that the sheer volume of content produced by different outlets plays a major role in determining the share of results they claim. She did, however, acknowledge that her methods are “not scientific.”

A search for “Trump News” shortly after the president’s posts returned three top stories. There was a Fox News report about Lanny Davis, an attorney and spokesman for Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, admitting he was an anonymous source for CNN’s report about Trump’s possible prior knowledge of the summer 2016 meeting at Trump Tower attended by a Russian lawyer. There was also a CNN account of Trump’s decision to issue, several days late, a statement praising the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). And there was an NBC story about the surge of Muslim candidates inspired to run for office across the country by Trump’s election.

Trump has raised increasing alarm about what he describes as political bias pervading technology and social media companies. In July, he accused Twitter of using a “discriminatory and illegal practice” to silence conservative voices. Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of the social media giant, said the company’s employees are “more left-leaning” but maintained that political ideology doesn’t affect what appears on Twitter.

Representatives of major technology companies appeared before Congress in July to answer allegations of censorship.

“We have a natural and long-term incentive to make sure our products work for users of all viewpoints,” said Juniper Downs, who works on policy for Google-owned YouTube.

Remember when Republicans were opposed to more regulation of the Internet (i.e. net neutrality)? Those were good times.

This also shows an alarming lack of memory on the Trump administration’s fault, if he’s serious about regulating search engines. The White House was Democratic two years ago. The White House could be Democratic a little more than two years from now. That which a GOP administration regulates now could be regulated in worse ways by Democrats after the next presidential election.

The last time I checked, there were other search engines besides Google. That was the result of a largely unregulated Internet. More regulation is not the answer.
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Presty the DJ for Aug. 29

August 29, 2018

Music
Today in 1966, the Beatles played their last concert for which tickets were charged, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.

Today in 1970, Edwin Starr was at number one on both sides of the Atlantic:

Britain’s number one album today in 1981:

The number one song today in 1982:

(more…)
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The I word

August 28, 2018

US business, US politics
The Wall Street Journal is of two not necessarily contradictory minds on what might be happening to Donald Trump.

First, the WSJ editorial board:

Shhhhhhhhh. Whatever else you do, please don’t mention the “I word” between now and November. That’s the public message from Democratic leaders and most of their media friends this week after Michael Cohen’s guilty plea and his criminal allegations against President Trump. Between now and Election Day, “impeachment” is the forbidden word.

“If and when the information emerges about that, we’ll see,” says once and perhaps future House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “It’s not a priority on the agenda going forward unless something else comes forward.”

Mr. Cohen’s charges are serious, says Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin, but impeachment talk is “premature” because “more information has to come forward” and it’s “too early in the process to be using these words.”

Under the coy headline “Can Trump Survive?”—you already know his answer—Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne counsels Democrats that “the argument for impeaching Trump suddenly became very strong, but this does not mean that turning 2018 into an impeachment election is prudent.”

And if you believe this misdirection, you probably also believe that Donald Trump didn’t canoodle with Stormy Daniels.

The political reality is that Democrats are all but certain to impeach Mr. Trump if they take the House in November. After what they’ve said and the process they’ve set in motion, Democrats won’t have much choice. They simply don’t want to admit this now before the election lest they rile up too many deplorables and independents who thought they elected a President for four years.

***

Let’s make the reasonable guess that Democrats retake the House with 228 seats, a narrow but solid 10-seat majority. They’ll have done so after two years of claiming that Mr. Trump is an illegitimate President who conspired with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election, that he is profiting from the Presidency for personal gain, that he obstructed justice by firing James Comey, and that after Michael Cohen’s plea the President is now “an unindicted co-conspirator” in campaign-finance fraud.

If Democrats finally gain the power to do something about this menace to mankind, do they suddenly say “never mind”?

No doubt Democrats would start slowly by revving up the investigative machinery: subpoenas, hearings, all covered to a fare-thee-well by the media. Michael Cohen will be a major witness, as will the others named in the plea-deal documents. The Trump tax returns will get a star turn.

Once this starts, it will be hard to stop even if Democratic leaders want to. It will be even harder to stop if special counsel Robert Mueller writes a report to his superiors (that will inevitably leak) saying he couldn’t indict a sitting President but here is the evidence that he may have obstructed justice or have shady finances. The evidence may not even matter much since impeachment is a political process and Congress defines what are “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Meanwhile, the battle for the 2020 Democratic nomination will be underway, with multiple candidates vying for the hearts and minds of liberal voters. They’ll compete to see who can be the loudest voice for impeachment. Even Terry McAuliffe, the former Virginia Governor who wants to run for President and who defended Bill Clinton against impeachment, has said impeaching Donald Trump is “something we ought to look at.”

There will be more-in-sorrow-than-anger calls for sober judgment, but political momentum has a mind of its own. The party’s liberal base will demand that Democrats be counted on an impeachment vote, and so will its media elites, who want vindication for believing that Mr. Trump could never have legitimately defeated their heroine.

The smarter political play might be to wait until 2020 and ride a potential wave of national fatigue with Mr. Trump, but don’t underestimate the degree to which liberals want this President to be politically humiliated and legally punished. Read their Twitter feeds and columns if you don’t believe us.

We don’t know how impeachment would play out politically in 2019 and 2020. An impeachment based on acts that have nothing to do with Russian collusion would offend much of the public, but as the New York Times joyfully put it this week, “that may not matter.” While a conviction in the Senate may seem improbable at this point, Democrats might not care because they’ll have made Republicans defend Mr. Trump’s behavior.

The main point about this election year is that no one should believe Democrats when they say that impeaching Donald Trump isn’t on their agenda. It’s their only agenda.

The first two thoughts are that any dip in the market represents a buying opportunity, and people in the market should be long-term investors anyway. The Nixon market is a classic correlation vs. causation issue given that thanks to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries oil prices jumped substantially at a time when inflation had been an issue for most of the decade to that point, leading to such bad Nixon policies as wage and price controls.

Next, Spencer Jakab:

Assigning credit or blame to the man in the White House for the stock market’s performance is an unwinnable argument. Guessing what would happen if he were to unexpectedly leave office is another matter.

President Trump in an interview on Fox News that aired Thursday said he thinks “the market would crash” and that “everybody would be very poor” if he were impeached. History says otherwise. When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, for example, the S&P 500 fell 2.8% but recovered within a couple of days.

The near-impeachment of Richard Nixon and impeachment of Bill Clinton, meanwhile, happened during epic bear and bull markets, respectively, that continued after the events.

Or think back to January 1992, when President George H.W. Bushfainted while having dinner with Japan’s prime minister. Rumors during U.S. market hours that he had died sent stocks down less than 1%. If the prospect of “President Quayle” didn’t do the trick, then investors can breathe easy about Mr. Trump’s legal travails.

Democrats may think that impeachment is a no-lose issue for them. Republicans did terribly at the polls in 1974 following Nixon’s resignation, though Democrats already were in charge in Washington. Republicans took some losses in 1998 following Clinton’s impeachment, but retained control of both houses of Congress and everything they had in this state.
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The way to go out

August 28, 2018

US politics
Whether you agreed with his positions (wrong on campaign finance deform and ObamaCare) or not, you must admit U.S. Sen. John McCain (R–Arizona) gave us all an example of how to exit this planet:

My fellow Americans, whom I have gratefully served for sixty years, and especially my fellow Arizonans,

Thank you for the privilege of serving you and for the rewarding life that service in uniform and in public office has allowed me to lead. I have tried to serve our country honorably. I have made mistakes, but I hope my love for America will be weighed favorably against them.

I have often observed that I am the luckiest person on earth. I feel that way even now as I prepare for the end of my life. I have loved my life, all of it. I have had experiences, adventures and friendships enough for ten satisfying lives, and I am so thankful. Like most people, I have regrets. But I would not trade a day of my life, in good or bad times, for the best day of anyone else’s.

I owe that satisfaction to the love of my family. No man ever had a more loving wife or children he was prouder of than I am of mine. And I owe it to America. To be connected to America’s causes — liberty, equal justice, respect for the dignity of all people — brings happiness more sublime than life’s fleeting pleasures. Our identities and sense of worth are not circumscribed but enlarged by serving good causes bigger than ourselves.

‘Fellow Americans” — that association has meant more to me than any other. I lived and died a proud American. We are citizens of the world’s greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil. We are blessed and are a blessing to humanity when we uphold and advance those ideals at home and in the world. We have helped liberate more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history. We have acquired great wealth and power in the process.

We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.

We are three-hundred-and-twenty-five million opinionated, vociferous individuals. We argue and compete and sometimes even vilify each other in our raucous public debates. But we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement. If only we remember that and give each other the benefit of the presumption that we all love our country we will get through these challenging times. We will come through them stronger than before. We always do.

Ten years ago, I had the privilege to concede defeat in the election for president. I want to end my farewell to you with the heartfelt faith in Americans that I felt so powerfully that evening.

I feel it powerfully still.

Do not despair of our present difficulties but believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here. Americans never quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history. We make history.

Farewell, fellow Americans. God bless you, and God bless America.

In retrospect there was probably no way McCain could have been elected president given how things were in the late 2000s. A poor campaign gave us Obama, who did serious damage to this country.

But to call McCain a traitor is beyond decency. The political parties — especially the Democrats, but also the Republicans — could stand more people who don’t necessarily sing for the hymnal, or who ask why they’re singing from that hymnal. And no one criticizing McCain after his death Saturday, I will bet, suffered in a North Vietnamese prison camp.
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