Latter-Day “Plumbers” Nail a Leak

Several sources cited on Lucianne.com this morning report a Senate Select Intelligence Committee staffer with security responsibilities - one James A. Wolfe - has been arrested for lying to the FBI. He falsely claimed he did not leak classified information to the press.

Meanwhile other stories report the FBI seized notes, phone records of a New York Times reporter - one Ali Watkins. It is claimed she moved in four years from unpaid McClatchy intern to NYT reporter.

The inference is this career “advancement” happened on the basis of her excellent “sources” which turns out to be a romantic relationship with Wolfe. The proverbial “honey trap” strikes again.

Similarly, at least some of the women now accusing Harvey Weinstein once voluntarily traded sex for hard-to-get film roles. Like Casablanca’s Capt. Renault, we’re now supposed to be “shocked, shocked” that such things would happen.

Quote of the Day

Bitter ironist H. L. Mencken, writing on the subject of democracy, as found at BrainyQuote.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

California primary voters just proved the truth of Mencken's maxim. They want the heaven Hugo Chavez promised Venezuela, but will get the hell Chavez delivered to his forlorn nation.

D-Day, Remembered

Once a year, on 6 June, we remember the World War II amphibious landings at Normandy. It's likely we'll not see their equal again.

The other DrC and I have toured the landing beaches and the fortified headlands which the GIs and their Brit and Canadian counterparts had to take, climbing into a hail of fire. The terrain very much favored the defending Germans, and yet the "boys" did the job, took the beaches and the headlands, and pushed on into France.

There's an excellent French museum of the landing nearby, if you go to Normandy I recommend it. Many of the German fortifications are still there to see as well.

While in the neighborhood, go see the unrelated Bayeux Tapestry. If you're expecting lush gigantic fabric hangings with fine gold and silk embroidery, you'll be disappointed.

Imagine instead folks decided to tell the story of the 1066 Norman Conquest of England in storyboard form, and hand stitched the resulting vignettes, in order, onto a very loooong bolt of muslin. There you've got the Bayeux Tapestry.

The "tapestry" was both a great teaching tool for non-readers in its day, and a historical record somewhat biased in the winners' favor, as is most history. In any event, it's a one-off, you'll not see its like elsewhere.

Farther east, Honfleur is a charming small river port, across the mouth of the Seine River from Le Havre. Our river cruiser moored there for a couple of days and we liked it a lot. It's maybe an hour's drive from Omaha Beach.

Yesterday's Primaries

Prognosticator Nate Silver, writing at his 538 website, indicates the GOP didn't do badly on the Super Tuesday primaries which happened yesterday. His main theme: both major parties tended to get their people chosen, when the votes were counted. He writes:

The Republican establishment also had a good night, including the strong second-place finish for Cox in California. Cox got more of the vote than polls projected after receiving the endorsement of President Trump. Thus, California Republicans will avoid the potential turnout-depressing nightmare of having neither a gubernatorial nor U.S. Senate candidate on the ballot in November.

Prediction: CA will give up its "jungle primary" and go back to parties choosing their own candidates. Hat tip to RealClearPolitics for the link.

Exquisite Timing

It is rare when Jeff Bezos' Washington Post runs opinion which, however grudgingly, finds President Trump on the "up" escalator, winning. Today, a David Von Drehle column, linked by Lucianne.com, does exactly that. Some choice excerpts:

From the moment late in 2016 when Hillary Clinton’s formless, themeless, listless campaign handed the White House to Donald Trump (assisted by Comrade Putin), Democrats have been counting on the reckless, heedless, careless novice to return the favor. Rather than melt down, though, President Trump is gaining strength.

After a rocky start, the president has cut himself loose from the highly unpopular Congress to create a clear account of his unusual reign, which he repeats with unflagging discipline. He’s a rulebreaker who gets results, and the enemies of change are conspiring to stop him. This is a polarizing message, indeed. But Trump appears to understand that popularity and unpopularity aren’t necessarily opposites.

The president has set the bar for himself so low that if November comes and he hasn’t been frog-marched from the Oval Office in handcuffs, and hasn’t rendered the Earth a glowing nuclear ember, a sizable number of Americans will judge him a success. Why? It’s the economy, stupid. Politics, like comedy, is all about timing, and Trump’s has been exquisite.

Trump trolls the legacy media like a trophy angler pulling in marlin. Reporters and pundits are constitutionally unable to resist taking his intentionally outrageous Twitter-driven bait.

Consequently he dominates all of the media nearly all the time - those which approve of him, and those which don't. He's the biggest spotlight glutton on the planet, a genius at getting attention.

Prediction: Looking back, historians will say Trump was a more accomplished showman than Ronald Reagan, and he did it without Mike Deaver's help.

AP: Comey "Insubordinate"

According the the Associated Press, sanctimonious fired FBI Director James Comey is described by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz as having been "Insubordinate." Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch is also "rebuked" for her handling of the Clinton email matter, according to those who've seen the yet-to-be-released report.

I sincerely wish President Trump would pry the IG's report loose and make it public. Then we can see indictments of those found misbehaving. Hat tip to Lucianne.com for the link.

Normals Win, Soros Loses

The Los Angeles Times, editorially leaning left as does most legacy media, nevertheless reports the very progressive George Soros group that was funding lenient challengers to tough district attorneys mostly wasted the money spent in California. Hat tip to Lucianne.com for the link. That's good news for the law-abiding, bad news for career criminals.

California voters appeared to reject liberal challengers in three closely watched district attorney races, delivering a sharp defeat to a national network that is attempting to reshape the criminal justice system by electing liberal prosecutors.

Incumbent district attorneys in Sacramento, San Diego and Alameda counties led by large margins, according to unofficial results posted Wednesday by county elections offices. A fourth contested race, in Contra Costa County, appeared headed to a runoff in November if results remain the same.

Since 2014, Soros has spent more than $16 million in more than a dozen races outside California. (snip) In California, he spent more than $2.7 million. The money from Soros and others helped challengers match or surpass the millions of dollars — mostly from police, prosecutors and local business groups — flowing to incumbents unaccustomed to such organized liberal opposition.

Like several others, Soros is awash in billions of dollars and obsessed with leftist causes and very public virtue signaling. Anytime he loses, we "normals" win. Hat tip to snark-blogger Kurt Schlichter of Townhall.com for his choice of "normals" to label the center right.

Mini-travelogue

Yesterday we drove from western Wyoming to eastern Idaho to get our truck serviced and to check out the superior scenery en route. The region must have had a somewhat wet winter as everything is lush and green, pretty as anything.

Our destination was Soda Springs, a mining town and rail stop. What’s mined nearby is phosphate, from which Monsanto, Simplot, and others extract elemental phosphorus, used in many things, including soft drinks and explosives.

It is open-pit mining, which creates enormous piles of overburden which they are required to carefully convert back into low mountains covered with grass. The mining area is, of necessity, not pretty but interesting.

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Apropos of the post immediately below, Idaho is next door to Wyoming. It has a state income tax, WY has none.

Along their shared border both have scenic and resort-like environments (no mining). Both states are politically conservative.

Which side of the border do you expect is more developed? If you guessed WY you'd be correct and the difference is dramatic. The only differentiator I can identify is the existence of an ID income tax.

Where You Live Matters

The changed Federal income tax law went into effect 1 January. Its changes will be reflected in the return you file next spring.

One major change is the limitation on the amount of state and local taxes those who itemize can write off against their taxable income. It was unlimited, but as The Wall Street Journal reports, is now limited to $10,000.

My envelope-back calculations suggests any Californian with taxable income over $112,000 will pay more tax than before. WSJ notes that, under the new law, a person making $3 million might save roughly $400,000 by moving to one of the 7 states with no income tax. That is a non-trivial savings.

The Journal observes substantial numbers of high earners can be expected to move from New York and California to, for example, Texas or Florida. Both of these are no-income-tax states with relatively warm winters. Connecticut and Minnesota also have high income taxes.

The seven states with no personal income tax are Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas. Washington, and Wyoming. In two more states - New Hampshire and Tennessee - only dividends and investment income are taxed. States listed in case you're interested in exploring options.

Down Memory Lane

Yahoo News carries an Associated Press story about ICE busting 114 illegal immigrants at an Ohio landscaping business. In the greater scheme of things, this is no big story.

It, however, reminds me of a landscaper we hired in CA in the late 1980s. He was an Anglo but his entire crew turned out to be wiry little hard-working guys from one poor village somewhere in rural Mexico.

We asked the owner about it and his reply was telling: "It's hard work and Americans don't want to do it. I've tried 'em and had them cheat me, steal from me, and disappear without a backward glance. These little guys work their butts off and go home each winter when there isn't much work. When they're here I take care of them, have a place for them to live, food for them to eat, uniforms to wear, and take 'em to the doc if they're sick. If I need a couple more guys, I let the crew know and a week or two later a cousin or brother-in-law shows up grinning."

The other DrC and I marveled at it, their relationship was unlike anything I, as a business school prof, ever taught. It was positively feudal,  very much "You give me your loyalty and work, I'll care for and protect you." John was the patron and they were happy workers, very much volunteers. I believe there was genuine  liking and trust in both directions.

What the owner had done, largely by trial and error, was conform his business practices to their culture. It worked. Am I defending the practice of hiring illegals? No. But as someone who studied and taught employer-employee relations, how he operated was an eye-opener, a look at another way of organizing work, very paternalistic.

What's more, I'll bet there are tens of thousands of illegals working for landscapers all over the country. They, and meat-packing plants are probably some of the biggest employers of the undocumented.

An Unwanted Record

You have to wonder who or what set the record for being wrong most often in a 2 year period? Maybe our frenemies, the Democrats? Ben Shapiro writes in National Review:

In 2016, CNN Money warned, “A Trump win would sink stocks.” Nope. Pelosi warned that Trump’s tax cuts were mere “crumbs” that would amount to nothing. Nope. Hollywood celebrities warned about the significant possibility of global thermonuclear war. Nope. Democrats promised a dystopian hellscape. Instead, they got an economy so good that the New York Times ran a piece headlined “We Ran Out of Words to Describe How Good the Jobs Numbers Are.”

Meanwhile Obama recedes, in the popular mind, to a historic and photogenic, but ultimately ineffectual place-holder in the 230 year string of presidencies. As it stands now, he will be known for who he was instead of for what he did.

If it can be shown, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Obama was complicit in spying on the Trump campaign, perhaps like Richard Nixon he will be known for what he did wrong.

CO Civil Rights Commission Loses

Today the Supreme Court decided the case of the CO baker who wouldn’t bake a custom wedding cake for a gay couple’s wedding. It decided in favor of the baker, arguing the Colorado Civil Rights Commission didn’t respect the baker’s religious beliefs.

Depending on your point of view, the court could be said to have decided the case “narrowly” because it cautioned lower courts not to generalize the finding to all cases where religious belief and LGBT rights conflict. Or it could be said to have made a clear decision because the justices voted 7-2 in favor of the majority opinion. Take your pick.

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The notion, now taken as a given, that those with non-binary or non-cis sexuality are guaranteed equal rights under the law is very recent. Across the sweep of human history, it has happened in the last minute of a 24 hour day. Established religions, typically, are rooted in the past and enshrine its less flexible beliefs.

That the two should come into conflict is unsurprising, in the extreme. Reconciling religion’s long-standing behavioral prescriptions and proscriptions with current civil rights CW is a tough call.

Reaching an answer should not be viewed as “obvious to anyone with a good heart.” It is difficult to see how it can be accomplished without somebody losing big.

How the FBI’s Upper Echelon Got Bent

John D. O’Connor was the attorney who revealed FBI Deputy Associate Director Mark Felt’s identity as Watergate’s Deep Throat, the source for the Woodward and Bernstein investigations that blew its lid off. Today O’Connor writes in The Daily Caller describing how James Comey, as FBI Director, avoided making the Watergate mistakes as he led a politically motivated investigation into the Trump presidential campaign.

Along the way, O’Connor makes the point that Watergate’s Mark Felt was the FBI straight arrow that Comey should have been, but wasn’t. Comey staffed the upper reaches of the FBI with Democrat partisans (McCabe, Strzok, Page, Ohr, etc.) who went along with his attempt to smear candidate Trump with manufactured evidence of Russian collusion.

As Mark Tapscott, guest blogging at Instapundit, observes, “If you read nothing else today, this is the one with which to sit down and spend some quality time.” COTTonLINE wholeheartedly agrees.

Maybe Obstruction-by-Trump Isn’t Possible?

Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus does a longish piece on the President’s assertion via his legal team that he cannot obstruct justice, in a legal sense, because all of the investigators work for him and must obey his orders if lawful (or resign). If he calls off the dogs, so to speak, it is within his constitutional authority to do so.

What Marcus fails to mention is that the sovereign remedy for presidential misbehavior is impeachment, with which his pardon power and executive power do not conflict. If Congress finds the President has misbehaved, they can remove him or her from office. Constitutionally, that appears the only unambiguous route to regime change in the U.S.

This whole kerfuffle may end up giving the Supreme Court the final say on who has power to do what, legally and constitutionally. Meanwhile Mueller needs to get off the dime and either charge some folks with Russian collusion - which he was appointed to do - or go home. Trying to nail some poor slob for tax evasion or campaign finance fiddling is not his brief, the regular DOJ exists to handle such offenses.

Oregon-Bashing

A snarky Kevin Williamson article in the Weekly Standard begins with a line I cherish, although most often I find myself disagreeing with him:

The world is full of stupid and angry people, and most of them live in Portland.

If not "most," it's at least "too many." As longtime COTTonLINE readers know, I'm no fan of Oregon in spite of (because of?) living there for three years. Williamson continues:

One can understand Portland’s inconsolable rage. It’s a second-rate Seattle, which makes it, by extension, a fourth-rate San Francisco. Which is to say: Austin without the sunshine and higher education and tacos.

And Eugene, where I lived, is a Portland wannabe, relegated downstate, resentful of it, and working harder at being ugly.

Elysium-as-Blueprint

The Matt Damon, Jodie Foster film Elysium certainly lives rent-free in the heads of those of us who ponder California's future. We saw the film in April, 2014, and reviewed it here then.

COTTonLINE has made reference to it several times since, and we're not the only one who can't forget its Los Angeles-as-colonia imagery. See this from the latest Forbes:

In the 2013 science fiction film, “Elysium,” the rich have fled to a luxury satellite orbiting Earth while the poor toil in dangerous conditions below. Life in California today differs in degree, not in kind, from that dystopian vision.

The chowder-heads in Sacramento persist in taking every opportunity to make it worse, after which they go home to their serene gated communities. Not only have they maneuvered CA into a hole, they keep digging. And once-lovely Los Angeles looks worse every year.

Oh, Canada

Writing in the National Post, one of Canada’s two national papers, Andrew Coyne writes things fellow Canadians won’t like reading. He argues turning Trump’s tariffs into a trade war is self-defeating. After all:

The U.S. economy is more than 10 times as large as ours. Its exports to Canada account for two per cent of its GDP; our exports to them are 25 per cent of ours.

Oops, that ratio doesn’t look good for our hockey-loving friends in the chilly north. It does explain why Canadians follow U.S. politics while most of us ignore Canadian politics.

Some years ago, I astounded a young Canadian by sharing with her that the population of CA alone was larger than that of all of Canada. Most of Canada’s population lives within 100 miles of the U.S. border and visits the U.S. on-average every 18 months.

Most Americans don’t live within 100 miles of the Canadian border and we average a visit there roughly every 20 years. Using the time-worn analogy, it isn’t hard to determine which is the dog and which is the tail.

Economy Booms, Does American Dream Revive?

For The Daily Beast, demographers Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox look at population flows within the U.S. stratified by age and race/ethnicity. Trends and countertrends tend to cancel out, to some extent, but they conclude:

As America bifurcates by generation, race, and geography, dispersion has continued apace. Despite efforts by politicians, pundits, and planners—mostly Democrats—to foster dense urbanization, Americans have continued to seek space, affordable housing, and safety. As the most recent census data shows, the much ballyhooed “return to the city,” always exaggerated in the press, has all but ceased while suburban growth is accelerating.

On balance the authors report a finding of “Advantage: GOP.” The current booming economy and surfeit of available jobs should move the millennials out of their parents’ basements and on a path to the ‘burbs. Along the way they should shed their socialist leanings as they finally get to a place economically where they have more to lose than to gain from redistributionist schemes.

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Millennials “should shed socialist leanings” but perhaps will not if the economic trauma of their youth was severe enough. I’m remembering the adults around me as I grew to adulthood.

Having lived through the Great Depression and Second World War, they stayed “FDR Democrats” for several decades after he died, basically until the Reagan presidency. It took the rise of identity group politics among Democrats to turn those who survived into Republicans.

The question is whether the Great Recession of the late 2000s was sufficiently traumatic to “freeze” its youthful survivors into a redistributionist mindset lasting decades. They supported socialist Bernie Sanders nearly 10 years later. We won’t know the answer anytime soon.

Brennan: Uninhibited Partisan

Obama CIA Director John Brennan, an old leftist who admitted to CNN he voted for Communist Gus Hall as president, opines in The Washington Post:

I will speak out until integrity returns to the White House

Translation into normal English from Progressivespeak:

I will speak out until another Che Guevara wannabe - a true successor to Barack Obama - is elected president.

Barack Obama apologized to the world for our supposed "sins," tried to make Iran the hegemon of the Middle East, and was Brennan's idea of "integrity." Let's hope we never see his ilk in the White House again (note: “ilk” refers to globalist ideology, not race).

Unemployment at 18 Year Low

Let's begin by contemplating - with pleasure, mind you - a CNBC article's title:

The May jobs report is great news for everyone — except Democrats running for office

When your opponent is in difficulty, enjoying the moment isn't too great a sin in my book. A booming economy, if Trump's justified tariffs don't wreck it, is exactly the sort of gale force headwind you'd wish for untethered-to-reality leftists. Some key observations:

Among the many contentious topics swirling around this year's campaign, none is more important than the perennial issue of employment. Voters who are employed are historically more likely to favor incumbents than those who are out of work.

The economy added roughly 223,000 net new jobs in May, pushing the jobless rate a tick lower to 3.8 percent, an 18-year low.

The biggest job gainers have been groups that have historically suffered from stubbornly high levels of unemployment, including younger workers, black workers and so-called marginally attached workers, (snip) part-time workers who want a full-time job and people who want to work but have given up looking.

Tangential observation: Of all the manifold tentacles of the NBC leviathan, only the pro-business CNBC arm ever has much nice to say about Republicans. Do you suppose it makes them pariahs within the corporate fold?