Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog

The American paranoid political movie

December 16, 2016

media, US politics
When I was in high school and starting to get into politics as an interest, I read several political novels, including nearly all of Allen Drury’s beginning with Advise and Consent, along with Seven Days in May, written by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II.

Both became movies that were big hits in their day.

“Advise and Consent” was about a controversial secretary of state nomination. “Seven Days in May,” the script for which was written by Rod Serling, was about a potential presidential coup attempt. (That would seem to be a bit of a constitutional crisis.)

They were filmed around the same time as a number of movies about what might happen to our nuclear weapons, one of which was funny …

… the other two of which were not:

More recently, Ilya Somin writes …

As Eugene Volokh notes, Time recently published an article quoting various legal scholars on possible film and TV plots involving constitutional crises:

If James Madison were alive today, he might be working as a screenwriter in Hollywood.

TV dramas can’t get enough of obscure constitutional scenarios. On Scandal, an unsuccessful assassination attempt left the vice president temporarily in charge of the Oval Office. On Veep, a tie in the Electoral College sent the election to the House of Representatives. And on Designated Survivor, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development was sworn in after a terrorist attack.

And that’s not to mention just about everything on House of Cards.

But while these plotlines may seem a bit over the top, legal scholars say they are a useful way to tease out some of the weak points in the U.S. Constitution for a broader audience. Given the events of recent years—an impeachment, the Supreme Court intervening in a crucial election recount and recent talk of contested conventions and faithless electors—they may not be as implausible as they sound.

“It may be one of those areas where reality is getting a little bit ahead of fiction,” notes Ilya Somin, constitutional law professor at George Mason University.

With that in mind, TIME talked with legal experts about their favorite constitutional scenarios.

In the Time article, Ryan Beckwith skillfully outlines several possible constitutional crises that would both make good movie plots and have at least some plausible chance of occurring in real life. As he notes, several movies and TV shows have already addressed similar constitutional issues. But I fear that Hollywood may be focusing our attention in the wrong place. It is entirely understandable that TV and film producers would focus on scenarios that make for good entertainment. But I am skeptical that these kinds of sudden crises centered on discrete provisions of the Constitution are the perils we most need to worry about.

When I spoke to Beckwith, I instead emphasized the possibility that the real danger to constitutional democracy in the United States is not a dramatic, sudden crisis but a gradual deterioration of constitutional norms. For example, public and elite commitment to free speech, separation of powers and other safeguards against abuse of power could gradually fray, resulting in a process of democratic “deconsolidation.” Unscrupulous presidents could further concentrate power in their hands, often in ways that don’t immediately set off alarm bells. They might, for example, undermine the rule of law by taking actions that are — at least initially — actually popular. Growing partisan bias might extend the already worrisome pattern of both Democrats and Republicans excusing abuses committed by presidents of their own party.

The public is likely to notice and react negatively to a sudden, dramatic attack on constitutional democracy of the sort that makes for a good Hollywood plot. It is much more likely to overlook gradual deterioration — especially if the latter is packaged with popular policies.

Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have done a good deal to undermine constitutional limits on federal power, often with the support of their respective parties. For example, Obama has twice initiated wars without getting congressional authorization required by the Constitution and the War Powers Act. The election of Donald Trump — a man with little if any regard for constitutional principles — is hardly a reassuring sign that this pattern will reverse itself. At the very least, we must be more vigilant about the gradual deterioration of constitutionalism than most Americans have been over the past 15 years.

Slow-motion threats to constitutional norms do not make for as good a movie plot as a sudden crisis. I don’t blame the author of the Time article for largely ignoring such scenarios. Nonetheless, both Hollywood and the general public would do well to give this danger more consideration.

The current “House of Cards,” by the way …

… is based on a British series of the same name:

… with the delightfully witty yet similarly homicidal Ian Richardson in the lead role.
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On “fake news”

December 16, 2016

History, media, US politics
Barton Swaim wrote this in the Washington Post:

The arrest in Washington of the “Pizzagate” shooter — the North Carolina man who stormed the Comet Ping Pong restaurant in the District in hopes of exposing a child-abuse cabal that fortunately didn’t exist — has put “fake news” near the top of things to panic about in the strange new age of Donald Trump. “Fake news” is the name many journalists now use for fabricated Internet-based news stories, many of them generated from sites in Eastern Europe and Russia, and the pizzeria scare has encouraged many of them to conclude that Web-based rumor-peddling is a threat to the republic.

First (the thinking seems to be) this new and creative form of disinformation gave us Trump: All those Facebook stories about Hillary Clinton having Parkinson’s disease and Barack Obama’s closet Islamism poisoned enough minds to turn a presidential election. Now, as if that weren’t bad enough, it’s sending armed lunatics into kid-friendly pizzerias. Worries about lies in our political life aren’t baseless, to be sure. The Internet teems with these idiotic inventions, especially during election years — boxes of fraudulent Clinton votes found in an Ohio warehouse! White House tells Pearl Harbor vets to “get over it”! — and they introduce mental havoc into the lives of well-meaning people.

Fake news is real, yes, but the anxiety it has occasioned in the news media often seems motivated by something other than mere concern for the truth. By agonizing over “fake” news, journalists often appear to blame nameless others for the failings of the widely distrusted news industry. It’s not our fault, some in the media seem to be saying, it’s the fault of some teenage hoaxers in Romania. That modifier “fake,” to put the point slightly differently, suggests that non-“fake” news must be conversely genuine, truthful, factual.

But of course it isn’t. All of us, whatever our political attitude, have read what we regard as essentially false or inaccurate or wrongheaded stories in mainstream news sources. Does that make the reporters of these stories perpetrators of fake news? Surely not, as they were trying, however imperfectly, to report the truth. That’s not much comfort to the people and institutions these false or inaccurate stories damaged, however, and indeed they are entitled to regard this new term “fake news” with a degree of derision.

Let’s get at the problem by asking this question: Which is more dangerous — the entirely fabricated story your ornery uncle links to on Facebook, or the story we read in a respectable news source containing an important and substantially false claim? The fabricated story that exercises your uncle is dangerous in its way, but it’s unlikely to sway anyone’s opinion about the subject. The only people inclined to believe the hoax headline “FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide” are those who already loathe Clinton. The story may intensify hatred, but it doesn’t alter opinion or allegiance.

The false or inaccurate story published in a mainstream venue, by contrast, does the opposite. Maybe the story consists of mostly true statements, but it’s built on an egregiously false premise. Or maybe it includes a key line that infers far more than the facts allow. Or it presents a tendentious interpretation of the facts. Take this sentence, published last week in the New York Times about House Republicans breaking with Trump over the latter’s trade policies: “He [Trump] repeatedly insisted that trade deals had displaced American workers and harmed the economy, upending two centuries of American economic policies that held trade up as a good thing, a position that Republicans have pushed in recent decades.” The latter half of the sentence (a) implies that Trump opposes not just disadvantageous trade deals but trade itself; and (b) suggests that American policy has unswervingly favored free trade for 200 years. Both are false, but the uncareful reader may easily imbibe one or both without realizing it, so subtle is the misinformation and so authoritative the source.

I don’t know the reporter’s views, but the article’s tone leads me to suspect that a dislike of Trump gave her license to interpret his pronouncements in the worst possible light, even at the cost of sense and factual truth. And that — the ever-present danger of allowing our likes and dislikes to dictate our interpretations of facts — may be what mainstream journalists preoccupied with “fake news” haven’t yet appreciated. The facile and stark distinction between real and fake, fact and invention, truth and lie suggests a failure on the part of mainstream American journalists to grasp the importance of interpretation. There is no such thing as an uninterpreted fact, and journalists are just as much interpreters as reporters of facts. Indeed I suspect one of the chief reasons so many Americans prefer harrowing Internet rumors to mainstream news is that they’ve grown impatient with journalists’ pretense that their assertions involve only truth, only facts unmediated by opinion or partiality. These Americans may have their gullible moments, but they know better than that.

The rise of fake news, if it’s anything, is an indictment of America’s newsrooms. Yet somehow I doubt the newsrooms will interpret it that way.

One thing “fake news” is not is new. Binghamton University Prof. Robert G. Parkinson gives a history lesson that includes my favorite Founding Father:

Last week, The Post reported that Paul Horner, “the 38-year-old impresario of a Facebook fake-news empire,” believes he turned the election in favor of Donald Trump. For many, the claim signals an alarming turn into uncharted political territory. But fake news is part of American history. In fact, it goes back to the founding of the republic.

In 1769, John Adams gleefully wrote in his diary about spending the evening occupied with “a curious employment. Cooking up Paragraphs, Articles, Occurrences etc. — working the political Engine!” Adams, along with his cousin Sam and a handful of other Boston patriots, were planting false and exaggerated stories meant to undermine royal authority in Massachusetts.

Several other leaders of the American Revolution likewise attempted to manage public opinion by fabricating stories that looked like the real thing. William Livingston, then governor of New Jersey, secretly crafted lengthy pieces that newspaper publishers featured. One, titled “The Impartial Chronicle,” was anything but, claiming that the king was sending tens of thousands of foreign soldiers to kill Americans.

But the most important was crafted in 1782 at a makeshift printing press in a Paris suburb. Benjamin Franklin, taking time out from his duties as American ambassador to France, concocted an entirely fake issue of a real Boston newspaper, the Independent Chronicle. In it, Franklin fabricated a story allegedly from the New York frontier .

The story was gruesome: American forces had discovered bags containing more than 700 “SCALPS from our unhappy Country-folks.” There were bags of boys’, girls’, soldiers and even infants’ scalps, all allegedly taken by Indians in league with King George. There was also a note written to the tyrant king hoping he would receive these presents and “be refreshed.”

None of this was true, of course, but it struck a frightful chord. To drive the point home, Franklin composed a fake letter from a real person, naval hero John Paul Jones, that ventriloquized almost verbatim the Declaration of Independence, including the accusation toward the end of that document suggesting the colonies must declare independence because the king has “engage[d] savages to murder . . . defenseless farmers, women, and children.”

Franklin sent copies of his fake newspaper to colleagues insisting, “the substance is truth.” Sure enough, the story appeared in real papers in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New York and Rhode Island. What did those readers believe? Did they know they were being manipulated?

Franklin wrote a friend about the power of what he had just done. “By the press we can speak to nations,” he wrote with pride. With the power of the newspaper, politicians could not only “strike while the iron is hot,” but also stoke those fires by “continual striking,” Franklin wrote with a wink.

Franklin’s concoction didn’t swing the Revolution. By this time, the Americans had defeated the British at Yorktown, and independence was all but secured. But the topic of Franklin’s gory hoax was significant: What an independent United States would do about the people Franklin spread this untruth about was entirely up in the air.

To be sure, many Native Americans had allied with the British and inflicted deep wounds to families across the frontier. But not all of them had. Franklin’s lies added to the notion that all Indians were “merciless,” as the Declaration referred to them. None of them, by that reasoning, could be Americans, even the thousands who served alongside George Washington. By the “continual striking” of that idea, Franklin’s bags of scalps obliterated such nuance. They were all enemies to the republic.

Flash forward 30 years. It is 1813, and America is again at war with Britain. The king’s men are again making alliances with native people. At the Raisin River in Michigan, a combined force of British soldiers and natives routed the Americans, killing hundreds of Kentucky militiamen. An outraged public then adopted the rallying cry “Remember the Raisin!” for the remainder of the War of 1812.

How did newspaper publishers remember the Raisin River massacre? By resurrecting Franklin’s hoax. That spring, to illustrate the long roots of this terrible bloodshed, U.S. newspapers introduced a new generation to Franklin’s fake bags of scalps, heating up the iron once again. And, once again, reinforcing the idea that Indians — supposedly bloodthirsty, dangerous and in league with the British — were America’s enemy.

Our own fake news purveyor, Paul Horner, suggests that Americans today are “definitely dumber” than they used to be. Perhaps. But we are not the only ones who fell for hoaxes, and American leaders — even ones we revere as Founding Fathers — were not above embracing such fabrications to shape opinion.

These stories from America’s past, however, are not dissimilar to ones in our own time. Then, as now, they were about who belongs to the republic and who does not. Then, as now, they were about stirring up fear and passions. We need to proceed cautiously. Stories that we think may vanish as a blip in our social media news feeds may end up having a longer life than we expect, causing more damage than we can anticipate.
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Presty the DJ for Dec. 16

December 16, 2016

Music
The number one British single today in 1965 wasn’t just one song:

Today in 1970, five Creedence Clearwater Revival singles were certified gold, along with the albums “Cosmo’s Factory,” “Willy and the Poor Boys,” “Green River,” “Bayou Country” and “Creedence Clearwater Revival”:

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The state deficit caused by excessive spending

December 15, 2016

Wheels, Wisconsin politics
Legislative Republicans are debating between themselves whether or not to raise the state gas tax and vehicle registration fees, opposed by Gov. Scott Walker, to fund new road construction.

Before they decide to do that, they may want to read Jerry Bader:
While Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature argue over whether a gas tax increase is needed to pay for road repair, one GOP lawmaker is making the case that millions of dollars can be saved at the State Department of Transportation. DOT secretary Mark Gottlieb was grilled by lawmakers on the Assembly Transportation committee on December 6 over Governor Scott Walker’s plan not to raise gas taxes or vehicle fees. Walker has instead proposed closing a two-year, one-billion-dollar budget gap through borrowing and project delays, a plan Gottlieb defended. But West Allis Republican State Representative Joe Sanfelippo said in an interview this week that tens of millions can be saved from DOT spending and that lawmakers should look there first before raising any taxes or fees.

Sanfelippo’s questions to Gottlieb on agency spending received sparse coverage in the media. But Sanfelippo has been examining DOT practices for years and he says cutting wasteful spending could save tens of millions of dollars. Sanfelippo says lawmakers don’t even know how much money they would need to raise in taxes and fees because no one is looking at the money the department has now and what they’re spending. He gives several examples:
- Sanfelippo says in two major projects in the Milwaukee area, the Zoo Interchange reconstruction and the Hoan Bridge, the DOT chose to use stainless steel rebar in the concrete, as opposed to the epoxy coated iron rebar that is commonly used. Sanfelippo says the stainless-steel rebar costs 250% more than the iron rebar. Sanfelippo says Gottlieb told him the intent was to have the bridge deck last as long as the bridge structure. But Sanfelippo says the stainless steel will long outlive the concrete structures. He says between those two projects the difference was $28 million for an item Sanfelippo argues was unnecessary. Sanfelippo says he’s continuing to investigate to determine how many times the stainless-steel rebar has been used in projects around the state.
- New traffic signals that the DOT claims are safer but Sanfelippo is dubious. He says the DOT is replacing the long-used “trombone arm” style traffic lights with large, costlier “monotubes.” Sanfelippo says the DOT spent $57.5 million more in the past five years on 1,100 of the monotube units than would have been needed for the traditional traffic lights. Sanfelippo says the DOT’s claims that the new design is safer go no further than claiming “studies show…” Sanfelippo says he’s asked to see those studies but has never been provided specifics.
- Purchasing cards: Sanfelippo says hundreds of DOT employees have access to “purchasing cards,” which he describes as essentially being credit cards. Sanfelippo says employees can use the cards to make purchases that don’t go through the normal procurement process. Sanfelippo says tens of millions of dollars are being spent by employees using these cards with “no checks and balances. “There are individuals on this list spending three hundred thousand, four hundred thousand, five hundred thousand dollars annually on these purchasing cards.” Sanfelippo says when the cards were developed in the 1990’s they were intended for “small purchases.” He asks: “how can you have $500,000 a year, in small purchases, for just one year. Sanfelippo stresses that he is not alleging wrongdoing. But he wonders what auditing procedures are in place to “watch all this money going out the door” and to make sure it’s being used properly.
Sanfelippo says that the DOT, in effect, is spending money on top of the line items and then “at the same time they’re telling us they’re broke and they can’t afford to continue their road construction projects that we need done, it just doesn’t make sense.” Further, he believes the DOT needs to account for the money spent on the purchasing cards before any revue increases are approved by lawmakers. And Sanfelippo says these items are the tip of the iceberg, while already totaling well into the tens of millions of dollars.

And Sanfelippo says these examples are just the tip of the iceberg. “We’re not talking nickels and dimes here. Every one of these items are millions and millions of dollars.” Sanfelippo says he has binders full of other examples. And Sanfelippo says the legislature needs to examine those costs before starting any discussion on revenue increases.
You would think $86 million (the total in Sanfelippo’s three examples) would have been better used on road projects.

And speaking of WisDOT employees, Owen Robinson adds:

I wrote about this fact last May when this issue flared up again and it has not changed. A look at the Reason Foundation’s most recent 21st annual highway report shows Wisconsin is spending way more than comparable states.

For example, Wisconsin and Minnesota have almost the same number of highway miles at 11,766 and 11,833, respectively. They also have almost the same number of lane miles. They are both cold-weather states with a major metropolitan area. In terms of total spending on roads, Minnesota spends just over $132,000 per state-controlled mile. Wisconsin spends 72 percent more for a total of almost $227,000 per mile.

Breaking down the numbers is even more interesting. Wisconsin spends 25 percent more on administrative costs, but actually spends 38 percent less on maintenance. The big difference comes with construction. Wisconsin is spending 75 percent more than Minnesota for every new mile of road. In summary, Wisconsin spends a lot more money on administration and construction, but less on maintenance than Minnesota. That is a difference in priorities.

To think of it another way, if Wisconsin just lowered its spending to the same amount per mile as Minnesota and prioritized maintenance over construction, it would save Wisconsin $1.1 billion per year and solve the transportation budget problem overnight while leaving a surplus to return to the taxpayers.

Sanfelippo is not new to this subject. M.D. Kittle reports:

Before Republicans join Democrats in selling motorists tax and fee hikes for the privilege of driving on Wisconsin roads, one conservative lawmaker wants to detour the taxing conversation.

State Rep. Joe Sanfelippo, R-New Berlin, said not every Republican is jumping on board the revenue-hike train to “fix” a transportation budget shortfall nearing $1 billion. He and other conservatives are calling for a thorough review of how the Badger State builds and pays for its transportation projects.

“There are so many things we can enact in transportation, from how we fund projects to how we finance them to how we build them,” the lawmaker said, insisting there are significant cost savings to be had. “This isn’t pie in the sky stuff. All we have to do is look at other states.”

Sanfelippo’s office has put together a white paper on alternative building and financing ideas, including telling the federal government what it can do with its strings-attached shared transportation funds. …

In his white paper, Sanfelippo proposes the state research the savings of a design-build-finance method in which the design-builder assumes responsibility for the brunt of the design work, all construction tasks, short-term financing and the risk of providing the suite of services for a fixed fee.

“The model takes advantage of the efficiencies of design-build and also allows the project sponsor to completely or partially defer financing during the construction phase,” the white paper states.

As of January, more than 40 states – including California and Texas – had “authorized broad use of design-build as a cost-savings technique,” according to the Albany, N.Y., Times Union.

The savings in New York through design-build have been remarkable, despite limited use to date.

“The Tappan Zee Bridge project has saved taxpayers $1.1 billion compared to the cost under the traditional design-bid-build model, according to the newspaper. ”The bridge will also be completed 18 months early, relieving taxpayers of the annual $100 million maintenance cost of the old bridge sooner.”

Sanfelippo’s white paper also recommends the Legislature explore keeping the federal fuel tax revenue marked for the federal highway account of the Highway Trust Fund. Wisconsin gets back just over a dollar on every dollar it sends to Washington, D.C., but the myriad strings attached to the “free money” drive up the cost of road projects, Sanfelippo said.

“Screw you, federal government. We’re not sending you that federal gas tax money. We’ll keep it here, fund our own projects and therefore we don’t have to jump through all of these stupid hoops,” the lawmaker said.

Waukesha County recently rebuilt County Highway L (Janesville Road) in the city of Muskego. Local funds paid for the first 1.2 miles of the project; the second 1.2 miles with 80 percent federal dollars.

Phase 1 cost $352,000 for construction management, and $5,928,000 for construction. Phase 2, completed with federal funding, cost $719,600 for construction management services, and the construction bill was $7,196,139. That’s a cost difference of more than $1.9 million.

Sen. Duey Stroebel, R-Saukville, and Rep. Rob Brooks, also a Saukville Republican, are sponsoring legislation that would “swap” federal money currently in appropriation accounts for specified highway programs with state money. Not surprisingly, Waukesha County heartily supports the concept of the legislation.

“The states sold our souls to the devil a long time ago when we started taking this federal money,” Sanfelippo said. “Now we are addicted to it.”

“We’re not getting a gift from the federal government. It’s our own money.”

One of the federal strings attached is the requirement under the federal Davis–Bacon Act to use prevailing (that is, union) wages on projects funded with federal money. The state prevailing-wage law was repealed, but the federal law, as you can imagine, has much more impact. Perhaps Congress can be led by Wisconsin’s representatives in a repeal of Davis–Bacon.
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Government as business, from the Mike Smiths

December 15, 2016

US business, US politics
Facebook Friend Mike Smith, who like me didn’t vote for Donald Trump, has an interesting perspective on Trump’s Cabinet:

Mr. Trump is approaching his job as “CEO of the United States of America” (CEOUSA) rather than as a typical President-Elect. So, given that, by far his most important duty is to find great people to run each governmental department. Unless you were expecting Mrs. Clinton to appoint conservatives, there is no reason to be surprised or disappointed that Mr. Trump is not appointing liberals to his cabinet. This conservative is very impressed with most all of his picks, so far.

As Scott Adams, and others, have pointed out, Trump is signaling a new CEO is in town. That was the purpose of the whole Carrier escapade along with his public discussion with Ford and the others. These are fine, for now, and they are valuable in signaling his different focus (strengthening our economy and the middle class in particular) from Pres. Obama’s. However, I don’t want many more of these as it is a bad thing when Presidents or the government interfere in the free enterprise system, regardless of their party.

As CEOUSA, I’m not the least surprised he is skipping the daily intelligence briefings. #1, he is not yet President, so he cannot act on them. #2, he wants to get a top-notch team in place to handle these matters going forward and that is where he is devoting his severely limited time.

Are some of these people wealthy? Yes. So? If you voted for Hillary Clinton, you have no standing to complain about wealth. Mrs. Clinton is wealthy via book deals and, most of all, via their ‘foundation.’ She did say something very gracious and wise in her concession speech: “Mr. Trump “deserves and open mind and a chance to lead.” Let’s get him sworn in before anyone freaks out too much.

Yes, President Obama spent eight years weaponizing the government and President Trump could take these weapons (IRS, for example) and turn them on his enemies. I do not believe he will do so. I’m hoping he will respect, and strengthen, the rule of law (something Mr. Obama clearly did not).

My age has some value. Thirty-six years ago at this time, over and over and over I heard, “That actor [Ronald Reagan] will get us into a nuclear war!!” Silly movies like, “The Day After”[a nuclear war] were produced. Reagan not only didn’t get us into a war, the Soviet “evil empire” collapsed without the U.S. firing a shot thanks to Reagan, Thatcher and Pope Paul II (with an assist from Charlie Wilson). Besides, the media tells us every Republican = Hitler.

So, I’m very optimistic. The stock market (people voting with their money) is also very optimistic.

Facebook Friend Michael Smith notices a similar parallel:

“The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated. In the lastseven deals that I’ve been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pretax profit of 12 billion dollars. Thank you.

I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them!”

— Gordon Gekko, Wall Street (1987)

I finally figured out of what Trump’s cabinet picks remind me. There has been an eerie familiarity about them as the headcount builds and today it hit me and it’s not from the “Art of the Deal”. It’s actually something straight out of the Gordo Gekko 80’s and the stories of companies like TWA, ACF Industries and from MGM to Motorola, Texaco to Nabisco…it is the hostile takeover.

Trump’s rise and opening salvos have a lot in common with the actions of someone he has often spoken of – Carl Icahn. Icahn’s modus operandi is the hostile takeover – a hostile takeover is accomplished by going directly to the company’s shareholders and/or fighting to replace management to get the acquisition approved. In 2013 and 2014, Icahn launched takeover campaigns at 16 different companies and they all began with him taking significant positions in them.

As described by Investopedia, “a hostile takeover can be accomplished through either a tender offer or a proxy fight. The key characteristic of a hostile takeover is that the target company’s management does not want the deal to go through. Sometimes a company’s management will defend against unwanted hostile takeovers by using several controversial strategies, such as the poison pill, the crown-jewel defense, a golden parachute or the Pac-Man defense.”

Trump went right to the shareholders (the voters) with a tender offer (he offered gains through an improved economy) and he vowed to oust the old management, slice and dice headcount, cut costs and to spin off unprofitable and inefficient operations.

I may well have been wrong all along. In the past I have believed that government could not be run as a business because government had different motives and objectives. While businesses are about conservation of limited resources and maximizing returns on those resources, governments are about depleting resources toward social (often immeasurable) goals…but that was before a President stocked his cabinet with people who have significant business and real world experience.

When I have selected teams to help turn businesses around, I have often looked for people with strong values first, impeccable skill sets second and industry experience last. I have found if I get the first two right, significant industry experience is of less importance and often a hindrance because those people often bring a “this is the way we have always done it” attitude with them. One thing is for certain, Trump’s cabinet will certainly be a disruptive force in the way government has been run. For the most part, these are people with real world experiences.

One thing important to remember is that the folks in elected office never subject themselves to the vicissitudes they vest on the general populace. They always exempt themselves from the laws they pass. From Rex Tillerson as the head of Exxon (started with Exxon in 1975 as a production engineer) to Trump’s apparent pick at Interior, Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana, a SEAL Team 6 member who achieved the rank of Lieutenant Commander, these are folks who have had dirt under their fingernails, not the Harvard Law School/Kennedy School of Government grads who have only known white collars and government jobs. These are also people who have had government done to them rather than making a career in government doing it to other people. Even as the governor of an oil producing state, Rick Perry has had to fight the very agency he has been tapped to lead.

I have no idea if they will be successful but I do know that these folks are the very definition of the change agents you need in a takeover/turnaround team. Their focus is creating value for the shareholder. I heard Juan Williams state on The Five today that in his opinion, these picks were only interested in making money, that they weren’t concerned about helping people throughout the strata of American society. The minute I heard this, I knew why the progressive left is freaking out. They don’t have a defense for this kind of disruption and as the management, they have been bypassed as Trump went directly to the shareholders with is tender offer. Juan wants to continue the failed 50 year handout model but that ship has sailed.

I think the new management believes the same as Ronald Reagan believed when he said, “The best social program is a productive job for anyone who’s willing to work.” More government handouts won’t change things, a growing economy and the individual opportunities for success it brings will.
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Presty the DJ for Dec. 15

December 15, 2016

Music
The number one single today in 1973:

The number one British single today in 1979 was the last number one British single of the 1970s:

The number one British single today in 1984:

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The Russians, the election, Democrats and the media

December 14, 2016

International relations, US politics
James Taranto:

“Top Republicans must reject the ridiculous notion that a national election can be ‘rigged,’ ” the New York Times demanded in an Oct. 18 editorial. That was then, this is now: “[President-elect] Trump should be leading the call for a thorough investigation, since it would be the only way to remove this darkening cloud from his presidency. Failing to resolve the questions about Russia would feed suspicion among millions of Americans that a dominant theme of his candidacy turned out to be true: The election was indeed rigged.”

What occasioned the turnabout was the report Friday, first in the Washington Post and then in the Times, that, as the Post puts it, “the CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.”

The claim that Russia was behind the hacking of email accounts belonging to the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, isn’t new. It was well-aired during the campaign. On Oct. 19 a CNN.com report sought to reassure a public “understandably concerned about the integrity of next month’s election”: “Election officials and cyber experts say it’s virtually impossible for Moscow or some other outside group to influence the election outcome.”

Like the Times, CNN seems to have experienced a dramatic change of attitude. Yesterday on “Reliable Sources,” during a discussion of the Russia news, host Brian Stelter posed this question to Politico’s Julia Ioffe: “Julia, we’re talking about a candidate who has lost in a historic way in terms of the popular vote but clearly won in the Electoral College. Is this something of a national emergency? And are journalists afraid to say so because they’re going to sound partisan?” (The Media Research Center’s Brian Baker has video.)

Ioffe answered that “it does feel like we’re on the verge of something potentially awful,” what with the “chaos sower in chief undermining the validity of intelligence reports, undermining the work of the press, of various government institutions, democratic institutions.” She noted that “we’ve been reporting on this all along . . . but A, people aren’t listening and, B, [they] don’t believe us.”

Could there be a good reason for that? When Mrs. Clinton’s victory seemed certain, media organizations were demanding that Americans accept the election’s legitimacy. Now that Trump has won, those same media organizations are actively trying to undermine it. The inconsistency is glaring, but so is the consistency: Many in the media not only sound partisan, as Stelter suggested in framing his (partisan) question; they manifestly are partisan.

As for the Friday reports, they are confusing and inconsistent. The Post is unequivocal in attributing to the CIA the view that the Russians were trying to help the GOP nominee; it quotes an unnamed “senior U.S. official”: “It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected. That’s the consensus view.”

But according to the Times, it is “far from clear that Russia’s original intent was to support Mr. Trump, and many intelligence officials—and former officials in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign—believe that the primary motive of the Russians was to simply disrupt the campaign and undercut confidence in the integrity of the vote.

The Times also reports that intelligence agencies reached with “high confidence” the conclusion “that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.” But RNC officials “have consistently said that their networks were not compromised, asserting that only the accounts of individual Republicans were attacked.”

It may just be that the Democrats’ emails were juicier. The Times reports that a site called DCLeaks posted “a collection of more than 200 emails of Republican officials and activists,” but they “have drawn little attention because most are routine business emails.” One of the GOP hacking victims, Chicago venture capitalist Peter W. Smith, told the Times: “I try in my communications, quite frankly, not to say anything that would be embarrassing if made public.” Podesta and some of the other Democrats were not as careful.

Another Post report notes that the FBI isn’t “on the same page” with the CIA. In a closed-door Capitol Hill briefing last week, the FBI was “fuzzy” and “ambiguous,” according to one unnamed official in attendance, whereas the CIA was “direct and bald and unqualified” in asserting the Russians were plumping for Trump. Part of the explanation:

The competing messages, according to officials in attendance, . . . reflect cultural differences between the FBI and the CIA. The bureau, true to its law enforcement roots, wants facts and tangible evidence to prove something beyond all reasonable doubt. The CIA is more comfortable drawing inferences from behavior.

“The FBI briefers think in terms of criminal standards—can we prove this in court,” one of the officials said. “The CIA briefers weigh the preponderance of intelligence and then make judgment calls to help policymakers make informed decisions. High confidence for them means ‘we’re pretty damn sure.’ It doesn’t mean they can prove it in court.”

This columnist does not have sufficient intelligence to form a firm opinion as to whether the FBI is too cautious in its conclusions or the CIA is reckless in its. We would observe, however, that broadly speaking, those who side with the CIA approach here are the same people who favor the FBI method when it comes to foreign terrorists—i.e., treating them as criminal suspects entitled to due-process protections, including the benefit of any reasonable doubt.

Two additional points. First, the Post describes the CIA’s report as “secret.” So how is it that everyone knows about it? The answer, obviously, is that officials who were privy to the secrets improperly provided them to the press. (Here we should note that we do not fault the Post or the Times for having published the information they received, and that we would have done the same.)

Second, according to the Times report, even if the Russians were trying to help Trump, they didn’t expect to be successful:

The Russians were as surprised as everyone else at Mr. Trump’s victory, intelligence officials said. Had Mrs. Clinton won, they believe, emails stolen from the Democratic committee and from senior members of her campaign could have been used to undercut her legitimacy.

So American officials made secret information public with the effect—and, one may surmise, the intent—of raising questions about the legitimacy of President-elect Trump. That’s exactly what they accuse the Russians of having planned to do to Mrs. Clinton.
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Presty the DJ for Dec. 14

December 14, 2016

Music
It figures that after yesterday’s marathon musical compendium, today’s is much shorter.

The number one album today in 1959 was the Kingston Trio’s “Here We Go Again!”

The number one single today in 1968:

Today in 1977, the movie “Saturday Night Fever,” based on a magazine article that turned out to be a hoax, premiered in New York:

(more…)
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In half the U.S., including here

December 13, 2016

US politics, Wisconsin politics
Kyle Peterson notes the Nov. 8 election results:

In the war of ideas, a think tank is like a munitions factory, churning out the matériel to push the trench line a few miles forward. As luck would have it, Republican state lawmakers will be well equipped next year when they begin one of the largest conservative offensives in recent memory. Come January the GOP will hold “trifectas”—total control of both legislative chambers and the governorship—in 25 states, up from 10 in 2009.

If lawmakers have any questions about where to begin, one place with answers is the State Policy Network, a federation of 65 free-market think tanks ranging from Anchorage, Alaska, to San Juan, Puerto Rico. “At the end of the day, people want jobs. They want security. That’s our bread and butter,” says Tracie Sharp, the group’s president. “We feel like for such a time as this, we’ve built up this network. We need to really run. This is a state moment.”

She seems to mean that in two ways. The first is the obvious: What can conservatives get done in capitals nationwide, and how can her think tanks help? Ms. Sharp says that lawmakers, especially in small states, are hungry for economic analysis: “If I raise taxes, what, really, does it do? Does it create jobs or does it drive jobs out?”

That doesn’t necessarily mean producing dusty policy reports. “In the early days, there was a lot of ivory tower, highfalutin, white paper stuff,” Ms. Sharp says. “That is one way I think the network has really evolved in the last 10 years is to be able to communicate and message the ideas to the average American.”

Take Tennessee, where earlier this year the network’s Beacon Center led what its president called an “all-out siege” on the state’s Hall Tax, a 6% levy on investment income. Beacon made a football-themed video ad arguing that the tax hurt seniors and drove jobs to Florida. The think tank then used what’s called “geo-fencing” to serve the ad to cellphones only within a certain set of coordinates—the capitol building.

It did the trick. In May the governor signed legislation that will phase out the Hall Tax by 2022. When the network’s think tanks gathered in October to compare notes—what’s working in one place that could be adapted to another?—the Beacon Center presented an hour-long case study. “This Hall Tax,” Ms. Sharp says, “has got people inspired now.”

The second opportunity is that states could help untangle some of the legislative knots in Washington, D.C. As the new Congress contemplates repealing ObamaCare, perhaps the biggest challenge is how to avoid pulling the rug out from under Americans relying on it. “Whoever’s going to drive this has to give a very clear answer for that,” Ms. Sharp says. “You’re dealing with needy, chronically ill people that no one wants to see tossed out without insurance. They have to be taken care of.”

Here’s the kicker: “I think it can be best done locally, or state and locally.” The gist is that if Congress wants to send Medicaid back to the states through block grants, an idea floated in Paul Ryan’s “Better Way” agenda, Republican governors and legislatures will be ready. Ms. Sharp expresses similar sentiments about Donald Trump’s promised $1 trillion spending on roads, bridges and airports: “There are better ways to build infrastructure: Devolve.”

State think tanks are still relatively new, founded in earnest beginning in the late 1980s. But the network has sprawled since then, from 26 groups in 1991, to 54 in 2008, to 65 today with four more in the works. Combined revenues hit $80 million two years ago, and total staff has nearly doubled in the past six years to 525. “We have groups that are 20, 25, 30 years old, because we’ve built a durable infrastructure,” Ms. Sharp says.

“I think that is perhaps confounding to the left,” she adds. “They have been trying to launch state-based efforts over time. They usually are centrally controlled from a D.C. hub—this is my experience. They tend to have one or two donors. And then the tide changes, the donor changes their mind, and then it just doesn’t take root.”

Anyone wondering whether an advantage in the states truly matters should look at this year’s Electoral College map. In Wisconsin, union membership is down 133,000 since 2010, the year before Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 overhaul passed. Donald Trump’s margin of victory there? Less than 30,000. In Michigan, public-union membership is down 34,000 since 2012, the year before Gov. Rick Snyder’s right-to-work law kicked in. Mr. Trump’s margin? Only 11,000.

Ms. Sharp says she had always felt these two states were only “thinly blue,” and that the GOP has been put on better footing by the unions’ slide. “When you chip away at one of the power sources that also does a lot of get-out-the-vote,” she says, “I think that helps—for sure.”

So what can Republicans realistically accomplish in the next few years? A quick survey of think tankers in states where the GOP gained on Nov. 8 suggests that the mood averages somewhere between bullish and giddy. Visions of tax cuts and tort reforms are dancing in their heads.

• Kentucky: “Republicans now control the Kentucky House of Representatives for the first time since 1921,” says Jim Waters, the president of the Bluegrass Institute. The GOP flipped 17 of the chamber’s 100 seats and defeated the sitting Democratic speaker. With all the levers of power in Republican hands, right-to-work legislation looks like a shoo-in.

Also likely, he thinks, is a law establishing charter schools. Kentucky is one of only a handful of states without charters. “The Republicans need to grab this opportunity,” Mr. Waters says. “Our biggest concern is that the Republican leadership will be too timid.” Somehow that seems unlikely: Gov. Matt Bevin has already suggested calling a special session in 2017 to revamp the tax code—and maybe even eliminate the income tax.

• Missouri: A new Republican governor, Eric Greitens, will replace term-limited Democrat Jay Nixon. “I think that we’re going to see bills that have been vetoed in the past, like right to work, go through quickly,” says Brenda Talent, the CEO of the Show-Me Institute. Last year the Republican House tried to override Gov. Nixon’s right-to-work veto but fell short by 13 votes.

Expanding charter schools, Ms. Talent predicts, will be an “easy lift,” and tackling corporate welfare is a possibility. “To give you an idea of the magnitude of the problem,” she says, “you could eliminate the corporate income tax in the state simply by eliminating economic development tax credits.”

• New Hampshire: With the election of the first GOP governor in 12 years, add this to the pile of potential right-to-work states. “The odds certainly are better than they’ve ever been,” says J. Scott Moody, the CEO of the Granite Institute. In 2011 the Democratic governor vetoed a right-to-work bill, and the House could not muster the votes to override.

• Iowa: Republicans retook the Senate, defeated the incumbent Democratic majority leader, and regained full control for the first time since 1998. Don Racheter of the Public Interest Institute says flatter tax rates are likely, as is a goal long-sought by social conservatives: defunding Planned Parenthood. In April the Republican House passed a bill to block Medicaid dollars from flowing to groups that provide abortions, but the language was stripped out by the Democratic Senate two days later. “Now,” says Mr. Racheter, “I think that’ll happen.”

• Pennsylvania: In October the GOP House fell three votes short on a bill to move newly hired public workers away from traditional pensions. As it happens, on Nov. 8 Republicans picked up three additional seats. “Every indication we have,” says Charles Mitchell,president of the Commonwealth Foundation, “is pension reform is coming back and it’s coming back soon.” The legislature may also put on the Democratic governor’s desk a “paycheck protection” bill, which would bar the government from collecting union political funds. “The dynamic has shifted considerably,” Mr. Mitchell says. “A lot of these issues were laughed out of the room, even under the last Republican governor.”

• Minnesota: A gain of six seats in the Senate put the legislature under total GOP control. “We’ve got about a $1.4 billion budget surplus,” says John Hinderaker, president of the Center of the American Experiment. “I think our Republican legislators understand that if they don’t provide some tax relief people are going to say ‘Well, why the hell do we bother voting for Republicans?’ ”

The best targets for repeal, he suggests, are the state’s taxes on commercial property and on Social Security benefits. There’s also MNsure, the ObamaCare exchange. When open enrollment began Nov. 1, Minnesotans saw rate increases up to 67%. “Something is going to be done. Something’s got to be done,” Mr. Hinderaker says. “This is why the Republicans won the election, in large part.”

• Illinois: Democrats kept the House but lost their supermajority, which will give Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner’s vetoes a bit more bite. It may also strengthen his hand in negotiations to end the 18-month budget stalemate. “You’re starting to get the liberal chattering class in Illinois saying ‘Come on Democrats, why don’t you just agree to one thing that he wants to do,’ ” says Diana Rickert, vice president of communications at the Illinois Policy Institute.

She adds that there is more grumbling than ever—even from fellow Democrats—about Michael Madigan, the powerful House speaker who has held that office, excluding a two-year hiatus, since 1983. “We’re trying to dismantle a political machine that’s been in place for 40 years,” Ms. Rickert says. “It takes time. But we are making a lot of progress.”

None of these victories is assured. “I want to be clear: Sure, a lot of Republicans got elected,” Ms. Sharp says. “That’s no guarantee that they’ll do the right thing. That’s where our work is so important.”

What imperils those efforts is Democratic zeal to force nonprofits like the network’s think tanks to turn over the names of their donors. “We expect no fewer than 20 states in this next cycle to put forth some sort of disclosure bill,” she says. This is pitched as transparency, but Ms. Sharp says few people realize how much harassment conservative groups receive.

In 2011, during a dispute over a subsidy for an NHL hockey team, the president of the Goldwater Institute in Arizona had her home vandalized. “Someone gutted a rabbit and smeared the entrails across her front steps,” Ms. Sharp says. A year later the network’s headquarters in Arlington, Va., were broken into and ransacked.

The political left—or at least the segment of it that wields power—hasn’t been very sympathetic. But if anything can convince liberals of the unwisdom of forced donor disclosure, perhaps it’s President Donald Trump. Consider this recent phone call: “An ACLU chapter in a state,” Ms. Sharp says, “called the state think tank and said, ‘Hey, things have changed—we really want to talk about donor privacy.’ ”

Notice that Wisconsin is not one of the states listed in potential policy innovations. That is a mistake, because this state needs to (1) figure out a way to fix the state’s roads without raising overall taxes, and (2) eliminate the minimum-markup law, which hurts consumers. Also, government is still too large, and government continues to spend too much and tax too much.
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Welcome to the name-brand fray

December 13, 2016

Madison, media
David Blaska formerly wrote for Isthmus before Isthmus decided it didn’t want him anymore.

Blaska then wrote for InBusiness before InBusiness (for which I used to write) decided it didn’t want a couple of his columns anymore.

So Blaska decided to do it himself:

Welcome to Stately Blaska Manor. Over the Thanksgiving week and in the dead of night, likely Trump supporters and other insurgents moved the Stately Manor, its Policy Werkes (and Tanning Salon) and the indentured servants (fast asleep) from InBusiness to higher ground. Easier to defend. Free to be and say what needs to be said. In other words, No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Please tell your friends to bookmark me! Now, on with the show!

Blaska started with …

What happens when a campus organization invites a speaker to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to talk about free speech?

Young totalitarians who disagree with the speech — making the usual claims of victimhood — try to shut it down, of course! It happened November 16 when Young Americans for Freedom invited Ben Shapiro, editor of the DailyWire, to speak on the infantilization of our great universities.

As if to prove his point, 20 Black Lives Matter vigilantes disrupted his talk. At one point, the young brownshirts marched to the stage while police permitted the heckler’s veto. Demonstrators interrupted Shapiro several times, barely allowing him to utter a few sentences at a time, WKOW-TV reports.

“So you get to interrupt lectures if you’re the right gender, or the right sexual orientation. You get to do these things without punishment because after all, that’s in the nature of social justice, group justice,” Shapiro said as he looked towards the protesters.

In the lobby of the Social Studies Building, WIBA-AM’s Vicki McKenna was trying to report the story when several of the protestors seemed to menace her. White man with ring in his lips tells her the disruption “needed to happen” because the mere “presence of this event is violence.” The future of America, right there!

University police pushed the diminutive woman away as the protestors sprayed the MF word at her. (That video here.)

Police made no attempt to protect her right to be present in a university building or the invited speaker’s right to be heard.

“If we have any police officers here, this is now absolutely a disruption,” Shapiro pleaded, to no avail. (Source here.)

But remember, there’s no such thing as reverse discrimination. (There’s no such thing, there’s no such thing, there’s no such thing.)

The Policy Werkes demands — a statement from Chancellor Rebecca Blank affirming the right of free speech at the University of Wisconsin’s flagship campus. That includes the right to be heard over the heckler’s veto. The Board of Regents should investigate. Expel students who deprive the rights of free speech — a civil rights issue if ever there was. The State Legislature should convene hearings of top administrators to determine if they have not created a climate of fear and repression on campus by labeling as “hate speech” all political speech. And how about course work on the Constitution of the U.S. be required for graduation for all students — especially sociology majors.

To no one’s surprise, UW–Madison is not the only Madison institution that stifles free speech:

Not to be outdone by UW-Madison, the Sturm und Drang stirred up by the hateful election of Donald Trump has reached the formerly placid shores of bucolic little Lake Wingra here in Madison.

Someone left a hateful Post-it® sticky note on a hallway office window at Edgewood College — surely “an act of cowardly hatred,” as officials there are describing it. And the damn thing is bright fuschia, to boot!

Students at the small liberal arts college were traumatized by the results of November 8 (a date that will live … in INFAMY!). The private Catholic school set up a table in the food commons for students to express their hurt feelings via heartfelt little sticky notes.

“In an act of intimidation and cowardice,” explains Edgewood’s vice president for student development, someone posted a sticky note inside the window of the Office of Student Diversity and Inclusion. (Scholars, take note: consider a career in Inclusion.)

“A great deal of fear, sadness, and anger among students, faculty and staff resulted,” relates college veep Tony Chambers. “The message was hateful and harmful toward members of our community.”

The term “micro-agression” does not begin to describe this assault on all that is decent and holy. Edgewood College responded by convening an emergency meeting. At the table: campus security, the dean of students, human resources, Title IX enforcement, and the diversity and inclusion crowd.

(One pictures the White House situation room as the Navy Seals took down Osama bin Laden.)

“The group determined that the message constituted a hate crime.”

The incident of the hateful sticky note has been reported to Madison police (Mike Koval, chief head cracker). No doubt, the sticky note, a particularly offensive shade of pink, will be introduced as States’ Evidence No. #1. Hand writing analysts will be sworn to tell the whole truth and nothing but. Various victims, selected according to race, creed, and gender identification, will commit their personal suffering to the court transcript.

The college is asking anyone with knowledge of the perp contact Campus Security at 608-663-3285. As the proud parent of an Edgewood alumnus, The Squire takes this merde seriously. (I can vouch for Number #1 Son; we were instilling fear and hate on another campus that day.)

Vice president Chambers vows an Old Testament smiting of the pink sticky noter. (Or is it the stinky pink noter?) “Any attempt to discriminate, instill fear in or intimidate our students, faculty or staff will result in serious and stiff consequences!”

Serious is bad enough, but need we go “stiff”?

Did the note bear a swastika? No, it did not. A burning cross? Negativo!

This should be fun reading as Madison college students continue to cowardly burrow into their safe spaces. Wait until these delicate little flowers enter the real world.
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