JustOneMinute

Back To School, With BIG Tests Waiting...

OK, flashbacks to middle school! The NY Times finally gets around to noticing that DeBlasio's plan to make the top eight NYC high schools less selective will also put the top middle schools in a spot. (I thought I had posted on this; I know I tweeted.)

Eventually they may bring themselves to report on why or whether the city could simply open more selective schools to serve this surfeit of talented kids. Bloomberg added four (five?) in 2002/2006 ( HSAS, HSMSE, and QHSSYC in 2002, Brooklyn Latin in 2006) . DeBlasio can't add any? OK, he could but there is a problem - if he opens new schools with, hmm, a more racially acceptable admissions standards they may not achieve the same academic and public stature as the current group of selective schools. De Blasio really needs to combine opening new schools with crushing the standards at the current ones. Or hope that the now less selective schools can ride on their legacy, for a while anyway.

And for Bonus Reporting, since the big concern is racial diversity they could examine the racial mix of the 'near miss' kids who just miss the cutoff for the selective schools on the current test. I will re-find the link regarding the NYC Discovery program (here, a pale substitute), but the gist is, the near-misses look just like the winners - too Asian and white.

Here we go!

For the third year in a row, a smaller share of black and Hispanic students are benefiting from a program designed to boost diversity at the city’s elite and hyper-segregated high schools. 

The city’s recent expansion of the program has disproportionately benefited Asian students, who are already overrepresented at the eight specialized high schools, according to new data.

...

In 2017, the most recent year for which data is available, white and Asian students comprised 78 percent of the students who were offered admission through Discovery, a slight increase from the previous year. By contrast, black and Hispanic students made up between 18-20 percent of the program’s offers, a percentage that has been shrinking since 2015.

Advocates who are pushing the city to diversify the schools say the latest data proves more aggressive efforts are needed.

“It’s clear at this point that it’s not an effective approach,” said Lazar Treschan, youth policy director at the Community Service Society and who has studied specialized high school admissions.

MORE: Lots of background in this recent Atlantic article. Note the creative tension between these two ideas:

First, why Stuyvesant works:

This peer effect is critically important for understanding how Stuyvesant alums turned out, and has a simple lesson for all schools: If there is a critical mass of achievement-oriented kids (and it doesn’t have to even be the majority at a school), it’s going to have a positive impact on the rest of the student body. There’s a student-driven culture of achievement at Stuyvesant—one that is independent of parents, teachers, and administrators—that raises everyone’s game. 

Second, De Blasio's new plan to send the top 7% from every middle school:

Whatever the merits of de Blasio’s proposal, it would have a limited effect on the system-wide problem of school inequity he’s interested in fixing, as specialized high schools only account for about 6 percent of seats in the city’s public high schools. (It may, however, have a larger impact on diversifying the city’s middle schools, in that it could incentivize parents to choose “worse” schools for their kids, where those kids might have a better shot at finishing at the top of their class and thus gain entry to a specialized high school.)

My concern has been that the magnet middle schools cannot survive once parents realize their child will be on the bench in the majors instead of starring in Double-A.

So the question is, as these talented, Stuyvesant-capable kids spread out across the city, will they reach critical density in other middle schools? Or will the cream be diluted down to tastelessness?

YET ANOTHER WORRY - THE BALANCE OF COMPETITION AND COLLABORATION: Under the current rules, each kid taking the high school test is competing against every other kid in the city. If Sally helps Johnny with his math skills that has only a miniscule chance of boosting Johnny past Sally for the last of the several thousand seats in the program. Twenty kids in an advanced math class can really believe that if they all work hard and help each other they will all advance on the test.

But in a school with two hundred eight-graders, under deBlasio's plan only fourteen kids will move up, no matter how much they learn and how proficient they become at math. Does this change the risk/reward of Sally helping Johnny?  Well, yes - six kids in that advanced class won't be moving up. Sorry. Avoiding the bottom six may become a bit of an academic focus in a way that does not encourage team building. That does not have to be the case, and there is already a similar dynamic in trying our for sports teams and school plays but still - eventually some experts may chime on on just what the impact might be. Re-imagining 'Hunger Games' as an academic process may not be the best idea yet from de Blasio.

Newspaper Shooting

A local man's vendetta gets homicidal.

Going South of the Border For Some Fake News

CNN runs a terrifying story about political violence in Mexico and it reminds us that our War on Drugs has become Central America's War On Each Other.

However, although ghastly, the numbers aren't quite as ghastly as they present. The closing paragraph has this:

But it's not just political violence that's spiking in Mexico. The country's homicide rate in 2017 was the highest on record, with more than 25,000 killings registered by the government.

 

And May 2018 was the deadliest month recorded in Mexico, since the government began releasing homicide data.

 

According to the government's most recent report, there has been a total of 20,506 homicides this year, with 4,381 homicides in May alone.

 

Now wait - 20,506 homicides in the first five months of 2018 is about 4,000 per month; that puts Mexico on a pace for roughly 48,000 homicides in 2018, almost double last year's total.

 

Yet their earlier chart comparing monthly homicides for 2016-2018 does not show that 2018 has double the deaths of 2017; the monthly increases from 2017 to 2018 look to be around 20%. Que pasa?

 

 

It turns out that CNN has lost track of their Spanish language skills. The 20,506 homicides for 2018 are both willful ("doloso") and negligent, such as traffic accidents ("culposo").

 

 

For purposes of this story, willful homicides in 2018 have been 13,298, which projects to about 32,000 over twelve months. That is a 28% increase from last years 25,000. Still dreadful, but less so. 

 

We'll see if CNN can sort this out. Meanwhile, the Fake News Spanish Language Team is back on siesta.

 

 

 

To Quote Joe Biden, This Is A BFD.

Scott Walker's war on labor goes national.

Wow, outwaiting Obama and Garland came up aces. I blame Hillary. And Scalia, for dying.

Big Wins For Trump, Conservatives At Supreme Court

Travel ban, free speech (including the right to not talk about abortion) upheld.

NY Times meltdown ensues:

When Trust is Gone...

Was Crossfire Hurricane launched as part of an entrapment exercise to take out insurance against a Trump Presidency? I have no idea if this is true but it certainly strikes me as plausible, which is an alarming comment on my cynicism at a minimum and public distrust of our 'establishment' at worst.

Well. I have sounded this kazoo before.

 

Let Them Eat, Well, Whatever Is On The Menu

The WaPo sidles up to the "No Service Here" ploy popularized in recent days:

The latest sign of political divide: Shaming and shunning public officials

Oh, geez - you mean Democrats who vote to fund Planned Parenthood are getting shouted down in the streets? Not exactly...

Anger and division in American politics are creating a rising phenomenon: the public shaming and shunning of political figures while they are going about their private lives.

Few laws expressly prohibit a business from refusing service to a customer because of political views. Civil rights lawyers said that while there have been many cases in recent history involving establishments barring black people, women or members of the LGBT community, shunning people for their political ideology or affiliation has been relatively uncommon.

Until now. And in a time of intense political division, social media is magnifying the confrontations.

The suspense mounts! Oh, spoiler - the WaPo editors discourage this behavior in a separate piece:

Let the Trump team eat in peace

OVER THE WEEKEND there was a fair bit of argument about the decision by a small restaurant in Lexington, Va., not to serve dinner to President Trump’s press secretary. It wasn’t the first time recently that strong political feelings have spilled into what used to be considered the private sphere. We understand the strength of the feelings, but we don’t think the spilling is a healthy development.

Darn. I think it is one more behavior for the "This Is How We Get More Trump" file and since progressives gotta progress I am sure this will continue.

And not to wax nostalgic for the calm and good-will of the Watergate era but this NPR story of a flamboyant chef grappling with whether to serve Nixon's chief of staff is well worth the read.

I Admire His Optimism!

The optimistic John Hinderaker follows the ongoing progressive meltdown and suggests we have reached Peak Insanity.

No way. We're still in the foothills, November is a long way off, and even November 2020 might not be the peak.

 

On To Saturday!

The traditional post-TGIF open thread.

Now What?

Apparently the latest from the border is that 'zero tolerance' will be implemented with 'zero coordination' and 'zero competence':

President Trump’s executive order to halt family separations unleashed confusion in Washington and at the Mexico border Thursday, as U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it would stop referring such cases for prosecution and migrant parents arrived at courthouses in Texas and Arizona wearing handcuffs only to be led away without facing charges.

After a senior Customs and Border Protection official told The Washington Post that the agency would freeze criminal referrals for migrant parents who cross illegally with children, Justice Department officials insisted that their “zero tolerance” policy remained in force and that U.S. attorneys would continue to prosecute those entering the United States unlawfully.

On Capitol Hill, a hard-line immigration bill failed to pass and a key vote on a more moderate version of the legislation was postponed. The Pentagon, meanwhile, agreed to house up to 20,000 unaccompanied migrant children on military bases in coming months. And despite the ongoing outcry over the separation of more than 2,300 migrant children from their parents since May 5, Trump administration officials gave no assurances that the families would be swiftly reunited.

In scenes reminiscent of the botched “Muslim ban” in the early days of the Trump presidency, federal agencies Thursday were largely left to interpret the sudden changes ordered by the White House the day before and figure out how to implement them. A family separation system that had been planned and tested over several months vanished at the president’s pen, with no stated plan to reverse its effects.

Administration officials held a meeting Thursday evening to grapple with the conflicting understandings of what the executive order was meant to do. People familiar with the discussions said the president had indicated his main goal was to lessen the public controversy surrounding separated families. Within the administration, however, the two main agencies tasked with following the order interpreted it very differently. The Justice Department filed court papers seeking permission from a judge to detain families together; Customs and Border Protection officials initially decided the order meant adults apprehended with children should be released, these people said.

The administration’s about-face leaves intact its “zero tolerance” policy toward those who break the law, but the senior Customs and Border Protection official, asked to explain how the government would change enforcement practices, said Border Patrol agents were instructed to stop sending parents who arrive in the United States illegally with children to federal courthouses for prosecution.

“We’re suspending prosecutions of adults who are members of family units until ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] can accelerate resource capability to allow us to maintain custody,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to explain how the agency has interpreted and implemented Trump’s order.

The Department of Winging It really got lit up with this one.

Back To The Border And Back In Time

Trump has moved ahead by retreating, signing an Executive Order which may change the storyline on the border, although legal issues remain.

But ending the practice of separating families still faces legal and practical obstacles. A federal judge could refuse to give the Trump administration the authority it wants to hold families in custody for more than 20 days, which is the current limit because of a 1997 court order.

Once again, those who over-invested in defending Trump's former approach experience whiplash.

John D Davidson of The Federalist tells us how we got here. I should add, given the large and growing backlog, Team Trump had to know that a shift to 'zero-tolerance' would lead to the chaos currently in the news. But of course, Trump courts chaos - when everybody is screaming the person with the biggest megaphone wins. Or substitute 'Twitter account'.

On The Border

Apparently the border is all people are talking about. Incredibly, there is also some political posturing taking place.

Privacy Overwatch

Facial recognition is on the march, which is troubling. But let me add this - suppose that, for the next few years anyway, facial recognition can't separate one person from 500 million, but can suggest a few hundred most likely matches.

Now, overlay that data with cell phone tracking, license plate readers and credit card usage. How often would the authorities, or Google/Facebook be able to determine with near-certainty that a particular photo matched to a specific person?

At a wild, I-hope-I'm-kidding-but-maybe-not guess, urban Asian youth might have excellent privacy protection since they are unlikely to be driving and, well, all look alike to us. And AI. And Harvard.

Throw in Uber and Lyft data as well as Metrocard usage and it would take a determined effort to stay off of surveillance.

Courts will no doubt rule on stuff like this, if they haven't already - e.g., evidence from license plate scanners on public roads does not require a warrant because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. One might think that walking down a public street would lead to the same result. 

Welcome to the future. Go long face masks.

Back In Action!

OK, I am semi-live!

Saturday Morning Kickoff!

Away we go!

Something For Everyone From The IG

Even the flailing NY Times felt obliged to admit the IG report was not all roses and chocolate for Hillary supporters and Trump bashers. 

Report Gives Trump an Opening, but Undercuts His Narrative

WASHINGTON — The report that had much of Washington buzzing on Thursday required 500 pages to outline its findings, but to President Trump, three words mattered most — “we’ll stop it.”

Those were the words that a senior F.B.I. agent texted in August 2016 to a colleague who was worried that Mr. Trump would win the election. For the president, that text seemed to validate his claim of a “deep state” conspiracy out to get him.

But the same inspector general report also undercut Mr. Trump’s narrative. Whatever the agent, Peter Strzok, meant, the F.B.I. did not “stop” Mr. Trump, nor did the inspector general find evidence it tried. To the extent that the F.B.I. and its director at the time, James B. Comey, did anything wrong in 2016, according to the report, it was to the disadvantage of Mr. Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Yeah, yeah. This will not satisfy either side. Not to suggest I have any idea what would.

Waiting For The Inspector General

The Department of Justice Inspector General will report on the FBI handling of this and that. The NY Times attempts to soundbite the plot, and good luck to them:

Did the F.B.I. really put the fix in to save Mrs. Clinton?

This has become the most important question of the report, and it is one that the inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, did not even set out to answer. He began his investigation last year to scrutinize the actions of the F.B.I. director at the time, James B. Comey, and his deputy, Andrew G. McCabe.

But Mr. Trump has pushed a theory that a secret cabal of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters inside the F.B.I. conspired to clear her of wrongdoing over her handling of classified information. This same group of agents, Mr. Trump argues, then cooked up a phony investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia as a way to undermine his presidency.

No public evidence has surfaced to prove this theory, and the inspector general is unlikely to claim a wide-ranging political conspiracy at the heart of the F.B.I. There is evidence that at least some agents on the Clinton investigation disliked Mr. Trump. But look for Mr. Trump to seize on aspects of the report that support him, and probably discard those that do not.

Let me pause for a moment - if public evidence had in fact surfaced proving this point we wouldn't be waiting with bated breath for the IG report, now would we?

Mrs. Clinton’s supporters find this entire argument baffling. It was Mr. Comey, after all, who chastised her at a nationally televised news conference, and then — over the objection of the Justice Department — announced just days before Election Day that the F.B.I. was again investigating Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Trump now says the F.B.I. was on her side all along.

Mrs. Clinton's supporters are baffled by the possibility that the FBI is not monolithic and that Comey occasionally pushed back against a pro-Clinton-faction? Geez, these supporters must be hopelessly over their heads with "Game of Thrones". Or even "The New Girl".

A major concern is that McCabe slow-walked the investigation of the Hillary emails discovered on Anthony Weiner's server in late September. On the one hand, announcing bad news just before an election is not standard FBI procedure. On the other hand, if sometime after the election the FBI finally established that the Weiner email trove constituted clear evidence of Clinton crimes, well, there was the ever-so-slight possibility that people would infer the FBI had dragged their feet to protect the candidate of the incumbent's party. Awkward! But is that really baffling? Is maintaining a Clinton cover-up so as to avoid interfering with the election really the best thing for the FBI or the country?

I do not share their puzzlement.

Building Confidence

The NY Times is unexpectedly fair and balanced in covering Trump's suspension of 'war games' with our South Korean ally.

Ending the joint military exercises could help Mr. Kim persuade his people, especially hard-line generals, to agree to denuclearize and focus on building the country’s poor economy, said Cheong Seong-chang, a senior analyst at the Sejong Institute in South Korea. Still, Mr. Trump’s announcement stunned many South Koreans.

Well, yes. Even iron-fisted dictators have to deal with rival factions. The NoKo military-industrial complex is surely at least as empowered as its US counterparts so this easily-reversed gesture may give Little Rocket Man some running room.

That said, heaven help us if Obama had tried something similar. And the usual questions remain as to whether Trump has the impulse control, patience and team-building skills to lead the US down this long and winding road.

But as Byron York notes, it is not as if the old playbook was producing yardage. C'mon, maybe one day historians will be writing about the Age of Trump, In a good way!

ERRATA: Football metaphors in June while the Best Team Bargain Shoppers Can Buy is trampling out the grapes of wrath? I can't explain it either; maybe I've been blogging too long without a helmet.

Waiting For Little Rocket Man

While we wait for the meeting of the Two Dictators let's pause for a moment and ask this - what knucklehead laid off the guy who was hired to stand near Wild Bill Clinton with a thorazine tranquilizer gun? Matt Drudge just can't let go, with this link to Old News featured prominently.

Sunday Afternoon

Away we go.

Whither LeBron?

I say the greatest player of all time will go to Houston, where he has the best chance of knocking that annoying smirk off of Draymond Green's face next year. Philly is a better long term bet if LeBron wants to win a ring at age 45 while delivering fifteen minutes a night of 3-and-D and playing with his son.

I happened to off this view at a wedding in Virginia which included a number of Greensboro, North Carolina university people. Hmm. MJ went to UNC Chapel Hill, but still - not my most well thought through conversational gambit.

Peace For Our Time

China's ZTE to be fined, reorganized in a bid to dial back the US-China trade war.

Lots To Criticize For The DoJ IG

Based on leaks of the nearly-finished report by the Inspector General of the DoJ, there was a lot to dislike about the Comey/Lynch handling of the see-no-evil "investigation" of the Hillary email debacle.

Fly Eagles, Fly

Trump versus sports. This went well.

LeBron and Steph say the NBA will be a hard pass on a White House visit.

But if Justify wins the Belmont maybe he will come to the White House. Will that be even bigger than a horse in a hospital? Stay tuned!

More On A Trump Subpoena

Douglas Kmiec, former head of the DoJ OLC under Reagan and Bush 41, gives a definitely maybe to the idea of a successful subpoena against Trump:

In 1988, with a White House entangled by Iran-contra, the O.L.C. was asked whether a president could be ordered to comply with a criminal subpoena seeking his testimony. We also responded in the negative — but it was not a simple, categorical no. The presidential subpoena is a valid legal tool, as Chief Justice Warren Burger made clear in United States v. Nixon, but a president may find case-specific reasons to resist it.

Recall that Richard Nixon had to give up his tapes — but the narrow ruling regarded pre-existing documents (as opposed to testimony), and the president himself was not the criminal defendant. The Supreme Court explicitly noted the absence of “a claim of need to protect military, diplomatic or sensitive national security secrets.” Watergate history affirms the common-law maxim that the law is entitled to every person’s evidence, but the court is sensitive to both interference with presidential responsibility and refusals for information anchored within executive privilege or the protection of open investigations.

...

About the only thing one can say for sure about the enforceability of a presidential subpoena is that, should the Trump and Mueller sides fail to agree on a setting for presidential interview, both sides have a basis to litigate the matter tenaciously.

The subpoena outcome is necessarily informed by highly contextualized facts. 

And since we don't know the full set of facts behind a possible Mueller subpoena of Trump it is hard to say in advance what the court would do.

I would welcome some legal advice on this passage, from the intro:

The letter [From Trump's legal team to the DoJ] is more monarchal than respectful of the separation of powers and our democracy’s constitutional checks and balances. Its claims that the president can “order the termination of an investigation by the Justice Department or F.B.I. at any time and for any reason” is unprecedented and far exceeds even Harry Truman’s brazen and rejected attempt to take over the steel mills to blunt labor unrest in the 1950s.

Say what? I would have thought the President's control of the Executive Branch was far stronger than his control of external unions and industries, regardless of Truman's national security arguments.

Then again, my recollection from Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre is that the President can not give orders to the underlings in the DoJ. Nixon wanted to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox but could not do so directly. Therefore he kept firing Attoneys General until he found one willing to do the deed.

Of course, Archibald Cox's Special Prosecutor office was a legislative creation that differs from Mueller's Special Counsel status. Congress has mooted legislation specifically protecting Mueller but has not passed it. On the other hand, I believe I have read that there is chain-of-command legislation governing the DoJ, the upshot of which is that Trump can fire the AG but not any of the underlings. If I am right about that than the President can not directly, e.g., order the halt of an FBI investigation; he would need to find a cooperative AG.

So, my question - is that the sort of objection Kmiec has in mind - that a Trump order to the head of the FBI to halt an investigation would specifically exceed a statutory limit in a way that attempting to nationalize the steel industry would not? I'm baffled.

Can Mueller Subpoena Trump?

The NY Times tells us that they have gotten a copy of a January memo from Trump's legal team (at the time) to Mueller arguing that Mueller can not subpoena Trump. To their credit, they note in passing that a Mueller subpoena is not a slam-dunk:

Mr. Trump’s broad interpretation of executive authority is novel and is likely to be tested if a court battle ensues over whether he could be ordered to answer questions. It is unclear how that fight, should the case reach that point, would play out. A spokesman for Mr. Mueller declined to comment.

It was relatively easy to find legal experts saying that this is a fight Trump won't win when the issue arose recently. Vox, reliably lefty, contacted nine legal experts and the general theme was pro-Resistance. Keith Whittington stood out as wondering just how clear-cut Mueller's power to subpoena would be; he provided more at Lawfare. Do let me add that all this ought to be subject to a caveat about dramatic new information from Mueller that could sway the undecided, uninterested or confused.

Also at Lawfare, Benjamin Wittes and Steve Vladek gave Mueller a strong 'definitely maybe':

The bottom line, in our view, is that Mueller would probably prevail if and when a battle over a grand-jury subpoena makes its way into court. But it is not a sure thing, and the president has plausible arguments available to him that a court would have to work through before enforcing a subpoena for his testimony.

So, better odds of prevailing than the Cavaliers but not as good as the Yankee's chance of winning the AL East (currently 57% at FanGraphs).

Stuart Taylor, writing at The Weekly Standard, has similar handicapping:

Mueller’s risk in starting a subpoena fight is that he might win less in the Supreme Court than he could have gotten in negotiations, or even lose entirely.

This last possibility is something that Trump’s critics greatly underestimate. The popular analysis is that the Supreme Court’s decisions in U.S. v. Nixon (1974) and Clinton v. Jones (1997) require the president to obey a subpoena to testify before Mueller’s grand jury. Harvard’s Laurence Tribe exemplifies those who hold such presumptions. “The Supreme Court held in the Nixon Tapes Case that executive privilege cannot overcome a grand jury subpoena,” he told Business Insider in March. “So Trump would have to answer every question or be held in contempt—unless he takes the Fifth Amendment.”

We are far less confident in this reading of Nixon and Clinton and that the Supreme Court would award Mueller an unqualified win. If Mueller subpoenas Trump to testify, and Trump fights, then the Court may well decide to limit the questions that the president must answer, if not quash the subpoena altogether. It would have leeway to deal such a setback to the special counsel within the parameters set in the Nixonand Clinton decisions. And whatever the justices may think of this particular president, they will show more care for the needs of the presidency than have the analysts who favor a total victory for Mueller in any battle with Trump.

 

Writing in Politico last February, William Yeomans used the word "crazy":

In the end, Trump will not agree to a voluntary interview. Mueller has the authority to subpoena him to appear before the grand jury, but for a variety of strategic reasons should be reluctant to do so. Most significantly, a subpoena would slow things down. Trump and his allies are now racing to undermine the legitimacy of Mueller’s investigation in the hope of muting the impact of its results. The longer the investigation takes, the more successful Trump’s campaign is likely to be. Mueller, therefore, would be well advised to weigh the burden of the time-consuming and distracting litigation that Trump would launch to block a subpoena against the limited value of Trump’s testimony and move on.

 

His estimate is that in a subpoena fight

 

"Mueller is likely to prevail, but victory will take time and distract his team from wrapping up the investigation, while giving Trump endless opportunities to denounce the “witch hunt.”

"Likely to prevail" means Mueller might lose.

 

Andrew McCarthy of NRO has a table-pounder outline the many objections to the Mueller investigation that Trump is sure to raise.

 

My long elevator ride summary of the above: In the Nixon case the judges agreed that executive privilege, like everything else, is weighed against competing Constitutional objectives. The tapes in question represented important evidence in a criminal case that was not available elsewhere and did not overlap with military or diplomatic issues. Consequently, executive privilege cast only a tiny shadow. Notably, the court did not order the President to devote his time to a personal appearance with the investigators - the tapes were the topic.

 

In the Clinton/Paula Jones civil suit the court ruled that a civil suit should not take up much of a President's time and should be allowed to proceed, with the President's testimony. Some experts infer that a criminal case, being more important, should get more support from the court. Others note that given the higher stakes a criminal case clearly is more burdensome and maybe the Presiden should get more deference, not less. Again, precedent is not clear.

 

And my two cents, not made in these articles (IIRC): fighting with Trump is like wrestling a hog - win or lose you get covered with mud. John Roberts et al will be very keen to stay out of this scuffle if they can find any reasonable way to do so, since - barring game-changing new information from Mueller - half the country will loathe whatever decision they make.

 

Time will no doubt tell.

Saturday Action

We're off!

The MAGA Jobs Report

Tom Keene of Bloomberg Radio is calling this the MAGA jobs report - unemployment down, U6 underemployment down, wages up, jobs added, Trump re-elected... OK, I made that last one up but the Blue Wave of 2018 might be diminished somewhat by this sort of economy.

OTOH Bob Mueller can add insider trading and market manipulation to his list of Trump's imagined crimes, so there's that.

DO LET ME ADD: Could Mueller indict Trump for market manipulation? Since everybody has a Jack Nicholson impression I am imagining the courtroom scene where Trump shouts "You're damn right I bragged about that unemployment report!"

Do Dems actually want to slug it out on whether a President can be proud of economic growth? It's Trump (and they're progressives), so they just might. Sort of like when the Dems cleverly shut down the US government because Trump wasn't giving undocumented Democrats a break. Yeah, that worked well.

The Maltese Phantom - Good One

OK, the notion that the Maltese Professor, Joseph Mifsud, is an asset or associate of Western intelligence agencies rather than the Russkies is taking hold. Obviously this is a BFD requiring a Maximum Cone of Silence from the Legacy Media since if we learn that the current pretext for the FBI Russian investigation was a British intelligence operation well, yikes - that will surely put the 'special' back in "special relationship".

My favorite part of the linked story is this non-denial denial:

In the January interview, Roh asked Mifsud if he was working for MI6. “No,” said Mifsud, “no, never, I was never an agent.”

Lawyers who think in terms of principals and agents may find that to be satisfactory. However, in the spy novels I read "agents" are folks like James Bond, with the extraordinary background and special training. "Assets" can be anyone recruited by the agents. For example, the other professor in the news, Stefan Halper, was an asset but not an agent.

Send better denials.

 

Dying In Darkness, UK Edition

Mark Steyn tells us about Tommy Robinson, 'disappeared' in Leeds, England for protesting outside the trial of what I believe to be the Huddersfield grooming gang. Here is May 2017 coverage - its The Sun, so NSFW Page Three promos adorn the sidebar. Use discretion. Or show your colleagues and give HR a chance to write you up for an Islamaphobic/misogynistic twofer!. [Or see the Huddersfield Daily Examiner.]

In any case, we glean that the Huddersfieled group was yet another deplorable example of multi-culturalism run amuck in England, engaging in a long-time child sex abuse ring.

A day later, the judge's order of silence has been lifted after press protests. However, without a decoder ring this BBC coverage is pretty cryptic - apparently Tommy Robinson was arrested for engaging in behavior that might disrupt a trial. What trial? Don't ask.

The Daily Mail also seems to have found work for displaced Pravda editors, since their coverage is equally opaque. If the court ordered the topic of the trial kept secret could the press report that? Hall of mirrors.

To be fair, it is possible that both papers are hiding the facts in the linked videos. As if I have time.

Anyway, people arrested with a subsequent media blackout can't happen here! Until the "hate speech = violence" mindset migrates from the campus to the newsroom, anyway. Meanwhile we know the "Democracy Dies In Darkness" will be all over this, with hard hitting coverage of... hmm, a baseball trade? 

Gone Fishin'

I have no desire to see the great Mike Trout this October in a one-game wild card playoff against the Yankees. He'd look great playing one game in Fenway, however.

Away We Go

Happy M Day weekend.

Off Again On Again

The flailing NY Times has forgotten the last two years:

Trump Says North Korea Summit May Be Rescheduled

WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Friday that his administration was back in touch with North Korea and the two sides may reschedule his summit meeting with Kim Jong-un, perhaps even on the original June 12 date, a stunning reversal just a day after the president canceled the get-together.

"Stunning"? For a normal President, sure.

Nobel Peace Prize On Hold

Its a no go on the NoKo summit. I presume this is posturing subject to possible revision. 

Trump Collusion

Andrew McCarthy explores the origin story for the Trump Collusion investigation. His gist - the Papadopoulos ex-post rationalizations notwithstanding, it has to have started with Carter Page, probably in early spring.

For a different perspective, David French has a 'pox on both sides' piece pointing out that Team Trump had plenty of suspicious actors and Team DoJ had plenty of partisans.

Thursday will see the big meeting between DoJ reps and two senior House Republicans to review classified information about Halper, the professor and 'spy' in the Trump campaign.

Meanwhile, I am holding out hope for my own madcap speculation. Remember Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese Professor who told George Papadopoluos about Russian dirt on Hillary? Perhaps one day we will discover that he was a British MI6 asset posing as Russian-connected and trolling in search of malcontents. In the highly unlikely (but wildly entertaining!) event that this is true and goes public, well, we'll need a bigger fan to process all that will hit it.

OH, WELL: Let me update my Mifsud speculation from "madcap" and "highly unlikely" to "good enough to put in print if you're Mark Steyn":

Mifsud is said to have ties to high-ranking figures in Moscow, but there seems to be more prima facie evidence of ties to high-ranking figures in London. That's Professor Mifsud above with my old friend Boris Johnson, Britain's Foreign Secretary, at some Brexit event last October 19th. On October 31st Joseph Mifsud disappeared and has not been seen since. I know how he feels: The same thing happened to me twelve days after I lunched with Boris at The Spectator in early 2006. Is (was) Mifsud an FSB asset? An MI6 asset? Both? Neither? Well, there's more circumstantial evidence of Mifsud's ties to British intelligence, including multiple meetings with, inter alia, Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee.

Huh.

Say What?!? Yellow Peril 'Journalism' Return To The NY Times

I will never pretend to have the mental agility required to keep pace with progressive standards of political correctness but even as troglodyte such as myself can see this is wrong: the NY Times has a guest piece essentially arguing that every Chinese person abroad is a national security threat because they're a potential cog in a vast Chinese intelligence effort.

If Trump had said this about, say, Muslims, to pick an example nearly at random, the denunciations from the left would be endless. But the Chinese abroad all have a dual loyalty problem? What is this, a Roosevelt revival with internment camps? No more visas for Chinese students? No more tech jobs for the Chinese?

Well. The guest piece offers a warning without policy recommendations. I can't wait to see the reaction after the Times editors get around to reading it.

A snippet:

China Has a Vast Influence Machine, and You Don’t Even Know It

By Yi-Zheng Lian

Mr. Lian, a native of Hong Kong, is a former lead writer and chief editor of the Hong Kong Economic Journal.

...

Rather than coercing, China manipulates, preferring to act in moral and legal gray areas. It masks its political motives behind laudable human-interest or cultural projects, blurring the battle line with its adversaries. When the job is done, the other side may not realize it was gamed, or that a strategic game was even going on.

If this sounds like the stuff of conspiracy theories, it’s because there is a conspiracy afoot, and it isn’t theoretical. The Confucius Institutes and Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.) cells being established on campuses outside China are but a few dots in this picture — when the whole lot are properly connected they outline a vast, smooth-running machine that taps Chinese people throughout the world to spread its influence and harvest intelligence in the service of the Chinese state.

And the conclusion:

Seven decades ago, Mao’s United Front was instrumental in catapulting the Chinese Communists to power. Since then, China’s influence machine has become infinitely more resourceful — and far more global.

They are everywhere!

 

Trump v. Mueller

Writing in The Weekly Standard, former Solicitor General Ted Olson reviews the groundwork for subpoenaing a President. His gist: based on (scant) past precedent Mueller would need to demonstrate a specific need for information only the President has; a 'let's chat' fishing trip would not pass muster.

Based on what we have seen so far I imagine there are folks out there hoping that Mueller is angling to have Trump invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and then contort that into an obstruction charge. Strange times!

Sunday Open Thread

Here we go again.

Wedding Bells!

I know we are all up at 7 Eastern to watch the Royal Wedding!

I am very excited to see the knot tied because I still believe that the marriage of Meghan Markle may be our last, best hope to get 'Suits' cancelled.

Another School Shooting

The NY Times has coverage. Per the Texas governor, the shooter had a clean record so there were no obvious missed warning signs. Also, potential accomplices are in custody.

Weapons were a shotgun and a revolver, obtained from his father.

Jumpin' Jim Comey, He's A Gas, Gas, Gas

Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist tells us about the coolest code-named project ever - Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI campaign to investigate and spy on the Trump campaign.

ERRATA: This is deep in the story and a minor point but I love the image if the NY Times wordsmiths defending this:

Another New York Times error was the claim, repeated twice, that Page “had previously been recruited by Russian spies.” In fact, while Russian agents had tried to recruit him, they failed to do so, and Page spoke at length with the FBI about the attempt before the agents were arrested or kicked out of the country.

Hey, college coaches recruit all sorts of players who end up elsewhere, so why assume that "recruited" means "successfully recruited", amirite? And if Times readers accidentally draw the wrong conclusion, well, that is Resistance Journalism.

That Nobel Prize Talk Was Fun While It Lasted

The North Korea we have come to know and loathe returns.

Say What?!?

Per The Hill, Mueller's Russian novel is taking yet another plot twist: Deripaska is an oligarch who hired, fired and sued Manafort and may be a witness against him.

But now we learn that in 2009 the FBI worked with Deripaska and let him finance an attempt to rescue an FBI agent from Iran. OK, I like where there head was but they liked Deripaska for this becasue he had business in Iran and (probably like a lot of his peers) had underworld connections. Those connections led to State Department travel restrictions and eventual US sanctions, but now he is on Mueller's side against Manafort? I can't tell the colluders without a scorecard.

And a Bonus Baffler - was subcontracting to Deripaska even legal?

Melanie Sloan, a former Clinton Justice Department lawyer and longtime ethics watchdog, told me a “far more significant issue” is whether the earlier FBI operation was even legal: “It’s possible the bureau’s arrangement with Mr. Deripaska violated the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits the government from accepting voluntary services.”   

George Washington University constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley agreed: “If the operation with Deripaska contravened federal law, this figure could be viewed as a potential embarrassment for Mueller. The question is whether he could implicate Mueller in an impropriety.”

Now that sources have unmasked the Deripaska story, time will tell whether the courts, Justice, Congress or a defendant formally questions if Mueller is conflicted.

Mini-bafflers - was the Antideficiency Act invoked as part of the Iran-Contra debacle, with arms, hostages and cash moving off-book? [Yes, cameo appearances] And why is it always Iran? C'mon, send better baddies!

MORE: The Hill linked to a long Dec 13, 2013 NY Times piece about the FBI agent, Robert Levinson, who had specialized in Russian organized crime. In their telling he retired from the FBI in 1998 in order to make more money in the private investigations sector; he then re-aligned with the CIA as a consultant in 2006.

The Deripaska connection:

By mid-2008, the F.B.I. was fully engaged in the hunt. At that time, two F.B.I. agents met at a Paris hotel with a powerful new player who became secretly involved in the effort: Oleg Deripaska, one of Russia’s wealthiest businessmen.Mr. Deripaska’s entry into the case held great promise. He headed an international mining and metals empire with business ties to Iran.

His involvement also came with a price. The State Department had refused Mr. Deripaska a visa because of allegations linking him to organized crime — accusations he has denied. But Mr. Birshtein, the Toronto businessman, had approached the F.B.I. with a plan: He would persuade Mr. Deripaska to join the search and, if they succeeded, both would get their entry problems resolved.

Mr. Deripaska said he would put up millions to fund the venture, but he insisted that his role be kept secret. However, word that big money was in play made its way to Iran. Suddenly, a man with family connection

s to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, insisted that he could engineer Mr. Levinson’s release for a hefty price. F.B.I. officials were so confident about the plan that they told Mrs. Levinson to stay by the phone for a call from her husband. It never came.

Mr. Deripaska, who was scheduled to meet in 2009 with bankers in the United States, wanted to collect on his end of the deal. The State Department, after two heated meetings with Justice Department officials, refused to issue him a visa, according to government officials. The F.B.I., hoping to keep him in the game, made an end-run around State Department officials and issued him a visa under a special program, allowing him to enter the country twice.

In 2010, during a visit to New York, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then the president of Iran, was asked about Mr. Levinson by reporters. He said his government knew nothing of the former agent’s fate but offered to help find him.

Happy Mother's Day

Away we go.

Saturday AM.

Having lost two straight my Yankees are no longer projected to win 140 games. Probably down to about a 70 win season. Oy.

Blue On Blue At Yale

This incident at Yale is regrettable but watching the anti-racists tear up the white feminists does reflect the strains in the Democratic coalition.

The flailing NY Times coverage opens with a laugh line:

A Black Student at Yale Was Napping in a Common Area, and a White Student Called the Police

"Napping". Hold that thought.

A black graduate student at Yale who fell asleep in her dorm’s common room said she had a disturbing awakening this week when a white student flipped on the lights, told her she had no right to sleep there and called the campus police.

...

Ms. Siyonbola, 34, who is earning her master’s degree in African studies, said that she had camped out in the common room to work on a “marathon of papers.” On Monday night, she decided to take a nap.

Around 1:30 a.m. on Tuesday, she said, someone came in and turned on the lights, asking: “Is there someone in here? Is there someone sleeping in here? You’re not supposed to be here.”

Hmm. When I am sleeping at 1:30 in the afternoon I am napping. When I am out at 1:30 AM, that is "sleeping". There is a lot more backstory at the Yale Daily News.

In any case, Yale's location exposes it to the New Haven urban crime problem. The Daily Beast ranked it (in 2012), with UPenn, as the most dangerous of the Ivies and 13th most dangerous in the nation. Another college survey site has more on crime at Yale, but here is the summary:

Overall Crime Stats: 266 Incidents Reported

Yale University reported 266 safety-related incidents involving students on or near campus or other Yale affiliated properties in 2016. Of the 2,795 colleges and universities that reported crime and safety data, 2,439 of them reported fewer incidents than this.

 

Based on a student body of 12,385 that works out to about 21.48 reports per thousand students. In 2016, 1,855 colleges and universities reported fewer incidents per thousand students than did Yale.

New Haven is Connecticut's leading city for homelessness as well (as of 2014), although whether that spills over to people sleeping on campus is beyond me.

As to the target of the current two-minute hate, Sarah Braasch is an accomplished woman:

Sarah has two summa cum laude engineering degrees (aerospace and mechanical) from the University of Minnesota, as well as a JD from Fordham Law, and she is a member of the NYS Bar.  Her secularism and women’s rights advocacy (including with Ni Putes Ni Soumises in Paris, France) led her to obtain an MA in Philosophy, to address the sub-human legal status of the world’s women at the source, the philosophical foundations of law. 

Doesn't really fit the profile of a typical Trump voter. However, the outrage community managed to get a paper she wrote for The Humanist taken down recently. The Google cache had it as of May 6, 2018 and it is still here. Here is the rationale for the takedown:

We have removed the article “Lift the Veil, See the Light” by Sarah Braasch (published in the Sept/Oct 2010 issue of the Humanist magazine) from our website after it was brought to our attention that it contains racially offensive argumentation. The article was part of a point-counterpoint on the topic of laws barring Muslim women in France from wearing face-covering veils. In the article in question, which argues for the ban, the author equates the small number of slaves who wanted to remain with their owners after emancipation with women who choose to be “slaves” in abusive, misogynistic, or otherwise patriarchal religious traditions. She makes this analogy–which we have judged to be inaccurate and racially offensive–to argue that if human beings are conditioned to accept indignity, suffering, and an inferior position in society then that society has an obligation to make laws to correct that. While the author’s final point is one some humanists might champion, the analogy to American slavery is definitely not.

Well, OK. From "Lift the Veil, See the Light":

WE WERE STUDYING the American Civil War in one of my middle school social studies classes when we were charged with the task of debating the pros and cons of slavery. I know, in retrospect it seems a bit odd to me as well. But, in a sense, what better way is there to learn about any historical subject than to debate it? And rather than debate the subject from the perspectives of late twentieth-century teens, we approached it as if we were abolitionists or southern plantation owners during Abraham Lincoln's presidency. 

I was placed on the pro-slavery side of the argument. 

Oooh, stop hating, hater! Pretty sure this wouldn't be done today but she says it was the late 80's. The key bit seems to be this:

I read about the trials and tribulations of both escaped and freed slaves. I read about the cruel world waiting to pounce mercilessly upon penniless, illiterate, and uneducated former slaves. About how former slaves were torn from the stability of family and community and the paternalism of the slave owner (including the legal protections afforded slaves). About how former slaves struggled to rebuild their lives in a world that didn't want them.

And then I had a eureka moment. Some--not many, but some--of the slaves didn't want to stop being slaves. A small number wanted to remain with their owners or return even after being freed. 

I knew I had just won the debate. And indeed I did. I led our team to victory. The pro-slavery contingent defeated the abolitionists because, in a democracy, in the land of the free, who are we to tell people that they can't be slaves if they want to be? Who are we to tell someone that she has to be free?

OK, what? Her endpoint is that in France a no burqa law makes women free whether they want it or not and that is a good thing. Isn't that the opposite of the point she is making here?

Well, yes - she switched sides and no longer accepts the :some want to be slaves" view:

It's ironic that I had to acquire that argument from a Time Life book, because I was living that argument. I was a slave who extolled the virtues of being a slave. I was a slave who insisted that I had chosen slavery of my own free will, of my own volition, as a conscious and educated choice. Because, you see, I was a Jehovah's Witness who had been brainwashed from birth to believe that God had created me subhuman--below man. I had been indoctrinated to accept this truth as part of God's divinely ordained scheme for mankind (not humankind), to serve the men in my family and community, and nothing more. I had been inculcated to wait patiently for my post-Armageddon blessings in the hereafter or suffer the dire consequences in the here and now, including demonic attack. 

...

I decided that I didn't want to hate myself anymore, no matter the cost. Even if it meant rejecting God's plan for me. I chose to claim my humanity, my personhood, my human and civil rights. While I was still a teenager myself, I walked away from everything and everyone I had ever known. I made a new life for myself. A human life, not a subhuman, slave life. It was anything but easy and at times seemed like an impossible choice. I know that death and even suicide sometimes seemed easier. And now I think that maybe it shouldn't have to be that hard to be human. Maybe we should make it a little easier to reject slavery. 

She has become an ardent feminist but that won't help her now. The outrage community has decided she is a racist and a hater, so away she goes. Let's see what Yale does.

 

Drain The Cohen

C'mon, man:

Cohen, touting his access to President Trump, convinced companies to pay millions

If I'd wanted grifters and hustlers around the President I'd have backed Ms. Foundation.

Wednesday AM

Lots to take in, so I am hitting the road for a bit. This NY Times explainer on Trump's goal with Iran is surprisingly sympathetic.

Behind Trump’s Termination of Iran Deal Is a Risky Bet

WASHINGTON — For President Trump and two of the allies he values most — Israel and Saudi Arabia — the problem of the Iranian nuclear accord was not, primarily, about nuclear weapons. It was that the deal legitimized and normalized Iran’s clerical government, reopening it to the world economy with oil revenue that financed its adventures in Syria and Iraq, its missile program and its support of terrorist groups.

Now, by announcing on Tuesday that he is exiting the nuclear deal and will reimpose economic sanctions on Iran and companies around the world that do business with the country, Mr. Trump is engaged in a grand, highly risky experiment.

Mr. Trump and his Middle East allies are betting they can cut Iran’s economic lifeline and thus “break the regime,” as one senior European official described the effort. In theory, America’s withdrawal could free Iran to produce as much nuclear material as it wants — as it was doing five years ago, when the world feared that it was headed toward a bomb.

I do love this Nixon-to-China, Nixon detente with Russia summary of Obama's strategery towards Iran:

And it is a clear example of Middle East brinkmanship that runs counter to what President Barack Obama intended when the nuclear deal was struck in July 2015.

Mr. Obama’s gamble in that deal — the signature foreign policy accord of his eight years in office — was straightforward. He regarded Iran as potentially a more natural ally of the United States than many of its Sunni-dominant neighbors, with a young, educated Western-oriented population that is tired of being ruled by an aging theocracy.

By taking the prospect of nuclear weapons off the table, the Obama administration had argued, the United States and Iran could chip away at three decades of hostility and work on common projects, starting with the defeat of the Islamic State.

It did not turn out that way. While the deal succeeded in getting 97 percent of Iran’s nuclear material out of the country, Iran’s conservatives and its military recoiled at the idea of cooperating on any projects with the West.

Months before it became clear that Mr. Trump had a decent shot at being elected, the Iranian military increased support for President Bashar al-Assad in Syria; it expanded its influence in Iraq and accelerated its support for terrorist groups. And it doubled down on deploying cyberattacks against targets in the West and in Saudi Arabia, embracing a weapon that was not covered by the nuclear accord.

So Obama wanted to be Nixon, hoping that giving the Iranian hardliners $100 billion upfront and more money over time would prompt liberalizing reform. Because China and Russia never happened, I guess. Hey, Barry, the '70's called - they want their foreign policy back.

Conversely, Trump wants to go Reagan on Iran. 

Time will tell.

And Now Over To The Primary Watch

Three states have Senate primaries today fraught with promise and peril. I'll be watching the Yankees scuffle with the Red Sox and the Pelicans, briefly, but enjoy!

Sanctions Watch

We can start the day with an Iran Watch. Trump is slated to announce his decision at 2 PM.