The metaphors are turning pretty violent:
The scary movie coming this Halloween: Revenge of the Childless Cat Ladies. Eek! They're coming to tread on you, bunkie!
The yard sign rhetoric is escalating, and so is the Sunday TV gabfest rhetoric. Real Clear Politics recounts the talking points made by James Carville on MSNBC:
We had General Flynn say, "The gates of hell are going to rain on Trump’s enemies when he wins." We had General Milley say that Trump is "fascist to his core." We heard Trump on FOX this morning say he was going to use the military to round up his political enemies.
Trump has announced that he will be giving a speech at Madison Square Garden on October 27th. Please, Google "Madison Square Garden February 10th, 1939" and see what happened there. They are telling you exactly what they're going to do. They are telling you, "We are going to institute a fascist regime," and the press and all the Alan Dershowitz wannabes out there are out here, saying, "She sold have gone to the Al Smith dinner, she doesn’t do enough long-form interviews." I am so sick of these people. The entire Constitution is in jeopardy. The Supreme Court and Clarence Thomas have totally greenlighted the idea that you could use the military to round up your political enemies.
I had a pretty good idea of what happened at MSG on 2/10/1939, but I looked to make sure: yup, a well-attended Nazi rally organized by the German American Bund.
Now, to be fair, the rants and ravings of Trump and Flynn make it pretty easy for the Carvilles to rant and rave.
Which, in turn, makes this sort of thing (as reported by the Dispatch pretty inevitable:
Law enforcement officials arrested a 49-year-old man at a checkpoint near former President Donald Trump’s rally in California’s Coachella Valley on Saturday, finding he was “illegally in possession of a shotgun, a loaded handgun, and a high-capacity magazine.” The man reportedly also possessed fake press and VIP credentials, and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco told reporters Sunday that the arrest “probably prevented” a third assassination attempt against Trump in recent months. The U.S. Secret Service and FBI issued a joint statement about the incident, concluding that it “did not impact protective operations” and that “former President Trump was not in any danger.”
We'll undoubtedly hear more about this guy, but I can't help but think he had little birds flying around inside his skull, tweeting about "whatever means necessary".
And there's just the normal lawfare, too. A new front opened up, as described by Andrew C. McCarthy: Harris Campaign Revives Logan Act Idiocy (Gifted NR link!):
We’re in the campaign stretch-run, so the rival candidates are liable to make any allegation against each other if it might sway voters who are already casting ballots. No surprise, then, to find a Harris spokesperson blathering to Axios that Donald Trump’s reported post-presidential contact with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin may warrant criminal prosecution under the Logan Act. The spokesperson is unidentified by Axios, which makes sense: You’d presumably want your identity concealed, too, if you said something so idiotic.
Earlier this week, reporting about Bob Woodward’s new book, War, spotlighted the author’s claim that Trump, since his presidency ended in 2021, has had at least seven phone calls with Putin.
As I have pointed out a number of times, the Logan Act (codified in §953 of federal penal law) is an almost-certainly unconstitutional statute that purports to criminalize a private citizen’s correspondence or other “intercourse” with foreign governments and their agents. It is a vestige of the John Adams administration’s roughshod run over free-speech rights. I invoke the qualifier “almost-certainly” in describing the act as unconstitutional because the federal courts have never weighed in on the question and probably never will. Recognizing its patent infirmity, the Justice Department never tries to enforce it. In its over two centuries on the books, the Logan Act has not resulted in a single conviction. In fact, there have only been two indictments under the act, the last one 172 years ago.
Perhaps a Harris/Walz Administration will also bring back John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts.
Also of note:
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Hey, let's have a nationwide rerun of 2000 Florida! Tim Walz recently advocated abolishing the Electoral College, and just elect presidents via the nationwide popular vote. Robert F. Graboyes has an excellent article that
peesthrows water on that idea: Electoral College as National Firebreaks.To those who advocate scrapping the Electoral College and choosing presidents by national popular vote … be very, very careful what you wish for. Among other things, the paragraphs below explain how one highly popular blue-state proposal could force Democratic states to support Republican presidential nominees while leaving Republican states free from such soul-crushing strictures.
Across the American West, fire wardens create firebreaks—vegetation-free swaths gouged through forests and fields to slow and limit the spread of wildfires. In U.S. presidential elections, the Electoral College serves the same purpose—limiting the spread of one state’s malfeasance, manipulation, ineptitude, and/or operational failure to other states. For all the trauma and bitterness that emerged from Florida in 2000, the catastrophe was limited to one state.
For years, a choir of voices has demanded that we eliminate the Electoral College and elect presidents via national popular vote (NPV)—an idea that is appealing in theory, but treacherous in execution. NPV is the electoral equivalent of filling firebreaks with pampas grass, scrub oaks, dead brush, bails [sic] of hay, and discarded chemicals. Eliminating the Electoral College could turn virtually every presidential election, every four years, into a 50-state Florida-2000-style conflagration—with a partisan arms race of electoral machinations in the years between elections.
Graboyes also analyzes, and finds wanting, an alternate proposal that might circumvent the Electoral College, the so-called "National Popular Vote Interstate Comact. He says it's "fraught with constitutional, legal, and practical landmines." And it's hard to disagree.
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I'll give you the TL;DR summary. But you should read the whole thing: Arnold Kling wonders How Much Dissent is Optimal? And, as promised:
The authority to police disinformation will inevitably be used to crush dissent.
Crushing dissent is bad.
Therefore, we should not give anyone the authority to police misinformation.
No, not even a nice guy like you, Tim Walz. And especially not you, Nina Jankowicz.
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Sounds like a bad idea. Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. has a timely observation: Taxpayers Pay People to Be Hurricane Risk Takers.
In the wake of devastating storms, the least popular argument is nevertheless an important one. We wouldn’t be asking of people in storm-prone areas anything not asked of every other American. Insurance markets exist—indeed, all markets exist in a sense—to inform people of the cost of their choices so they can make better ones.
Hardly a point emphasized by climate obsessives, today’s rising storm damage is due mainly to more people putting up more expensive and elaborate structures in places where destructive weather is a predictable hazard.
They do so not least because of the availability of federal rebuilding money, including federal flood insurance that is underpriced and subsidized by taxpayers who don’t benefit from beachfront charms.
Jenkins also refers to the news covered in our next item!
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A myth is as good as a mile. Bjørn Lomborg writes for the NHJournal, pointing out the ‘Green Energy Transition’ Is a Myth.
Despite huge enthusiasm for shifting from fossil fuels to green energy, this transition just isn’t happening. Implementing a significant change in our current trajectory would be prohibitively expensive. A major policy overhaul is needed.
On a global scale, we are investing nearly $2 trillion annually to create an energy transition. In the last 10 years, solar and wind power use has reached unprecedented levels. However, this increase hasn’t led to a reduction in fossil fuel consumption. In fact, fossil fuel use has grown during this period.
Numerous studies show that adding renewable energy adds to energy consumption instead of replacing coal, gas or oil. Recent research reveals that for every six units of new green energy, less than one unit displaces fossil fuels.
Lomborg's point seems pretty irrefutable, but (as sometimes happens) NHJournal makes space available for a counterpoint from Tyson Slocum, a Public Citizen spokesperson, asserting the Future of Energy Is Renewables; Fossil Fuel Exports Feed CEO Greed
Yes, "CEO greed". I think that Lomborg vs. Slocum is facts vs. demagoguery, but see what you think.