I see that Ron Fournier is echoing a point I made in the wake of Eric Cantor’s primary defeat:

Americans see a grim future for themselves, their children, and their country. They believe their political leaders are selfish, greedy, and short-sighted—unable and/or unwilling to shield most people from wrenching economic and social change. For many, the Republican Party is becoming too extreme, while the Democratic Party—specifically, President Obama—raised and dashed their hopes for true reform.

Worse of all, the typical American doesn’t know how to channel his or her anger. Heaven help Washington if they do.

[…]

Which side of the barricade are you on? Populists from the right and the left—from the tea party and libertarian-leaning Rand Paul to economic populist Elizabeth Warren—are positioning themselves among the insurgents. Sosnik pointed to six areas of consensus that eventually may unite the divergent populist forces:

• A pullback from the rest of the world, with more of an inward focus.
• A desire to go after big banks and other large financial institutions.
• Elimination of corporate welfare.
• Reducing special deals for the rich.
• Pushing back on the violation of the public’s privacy by the government and big business.
• Reducing the size of government.

I could point out right populist websites without difficulty; I’m not sure I could point out a left populist website if you held a gun to my head. Naked Capitalism? Are left populists really interested in reducing the size of government? Or are they interest in expanding benefits in ways that would require a substantially larger federal government? That’s not a rhetorical question. I’d like to know the answer.

I’m not particularly interested in Eric Cantor any more than I’m interested in the Congressional caucus of any state other than my own. I figure that the other states can elect any tomfool representatives that suit them. Cantor’s position as House Majority Leader gives his defeat a more national character.

Cantor’s defeat might be just a defeat of Cantor and nothing more. It could be a repudiation of amnesty of illegal immigrants by the voters of his district. It might mean all sorts of things, few of them particularly interesting.

But if his defeat portends an anti-incumbent wave in November that could be very interesting, indeed.

I wanted to draw your attention to an editorial at the Christian Science Monitor on the sharp increase in the number of unaccompanied minors coming into the United States across the Mexican border:

Some observers suggest that the US has earned a reputation in Latin American countries for being “soft” on undocumented women and children, a policy, they say, that only encourages more of them to cross the border. Some of the children are being allowed to join family members already in the US legally. Others are being passed along to private aid organizations for temporary shelter.

Politicians in both US political parties, as well as private aid agencies, wonder how the US will be able to afford to care for such an influx of vulnerable children and, in some cases, their mothers. The cost of dealing with children entering the US illegally is expected to rise to $2 billion in 2015, up from $868 million in 2014, the Obama administration estimates.

It is in the nature of Americans – as well as in American self-interest – to want to help improve, through aid and diplomacy, the economic and political situations south of its border so that fewer desperate individuals, including children, will try to cross into the US illegally. The US can also try to put a stronger fence around its “yard” to keep unwanted immigrants and their problems outside.

But once a child is here, on the doorstep, Americans know that bringing that child inside and providing help is their only choice.

Something that has gone too long unremarked upon is that this isn’t just another American problem. Children aren’t coming from Guatemala and Honduras through 1,000 miles of Mexico by transporter beam. I do not believe such a thing could occur without Mexican acquiescence or connivance. This is a regional issue and we should be engaged in multi-lateral talks that include not just Mexico but the “donor” countries as well. Aid to assist these countries in helping the desperate people coming here would be cheaper than stemming a humanitarian disaster after it’s already arrived on our doorstep.

This is yet another example of unexpected secondary effects. There are so many to choose from! Dilatory American policy. Public musing by high officials. Confused immigration policy. The dangers of agricultural monoculture.

On Tuesday Islamic fundamentalist radicals affiliated with Al Qaeda took control of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. That was quickly followed by Tikrit. Yesterday Kurdish peshmerga took control of Kirkuk. Over at Outside the Beltway Doug Mataconis has a link-filled post on the upheaval in Iraq:

Obviously, any decision to intervene in Iraq even in a limited fashion would be fraught with domestic political complications for the Obama Administration. At the top of that list, of course, there’s the fact that President Obama campaigned for office on his opposition to the Iraq War and for re-election on the fact that he presided over the end of that war. Making the case to the American public for what would obviously be new American intervention in Iraq that could not credibly be sold as an extension of the 2003 war would be difficult for any President, of course, but it would be doubly difficult for him. Second, of course, there’s the fact that the the American public has a negative opinion of the Iraq War even today, an opinion that has shaped public opinion regarding the propriety of U.S. involvement in other world hot spots such as Libya, Syria, and Ukraine.

The balance of this post is a comment of mine I’ve resurrected from that thread.

I think the Kurds taking Kirkuk, something I predicted shortly after the fall of Mosul, is an important development. Although there haven’t been any reliable censuses of Iraq for decades back in the 1960s Kirkuk’s population was 75% Kurds and Turkomans. Mosul was mostly Kurds and Assyrians (Christian Iraqis—Syriac, Chaldean, Nestorian). In the 1970s Saddam began his program of “Arabization”, ethnic cleansing, forcibly removing Kurdish and Christian families from their homes and replacing them with Muslim Arab families so that now both cities are majority Arab.

I expect a bitter fight for both cities. Kirkuk is oil-rich and it’s a valuable prize. I don’t expect things to end here.

It certainly looks as though Iraq were collapsing into ethnic enclaves. I hope that those who think that a war raging from the Mediterranean to the Tigris (or, worse, to the Hindu Kush) won’t affect us are right.

Update

From Daniel Henninger’s column at the WSJ:

Now if you want to vent about ” George Bush’s war,” be my guest. But George Bush isn’t president anymore. Barack Obama is because he wanted the job and the responsibilities that come with the American presidency. Up to now, burying those responsibilities in the sand has never been in the job description.

Mosul’s fall matters for what it reveals about a terrorism whose threat Mr. Obama claims he has minimized. For starters, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) isn’t a bunch of bug-eyed “Mad Max” guys running around firing Kalashnikovs. ISIS is now a trained and organized army.

The seizures of Mosul and Tikrit this week revealed high-level operational skills. ISIS is using vehicles and equipment seized from Iraqi military bases. Normally an army on the move would slow down to establish protective garrisons in towns it takes, but ISIS is doing the opposite, by replenishing itself with fighters from liberated prisons.

An astonishing read about this group is on the website of the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War. It is an analysis of a 400-page report, “al-Naba,” published by ISIS in March. This is literally a terrorist organization’s annual report for 2013. It even includes “metrics,” detailed graphs of its operations in Iraq as well as in Syria.

Mr. Henninger’s predictions of “a) a second Syria or b) a restored caliphate” are, unfortunately, the best-case scenarios. The “Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham” is inclusive not only of Iraq and Syria but Lebanon as well. Their ambitions are much grander than a second Syria.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal have a scathing editorial on the fall of Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, to the Al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS—the last word is al Sham, not Syria):

Since President Obama likes to describe everything he inherited from his predecessor as a “mess,” it’s worth remembering that when President Bush left office Iraq was largely at peace. Civilian casualties fell from an estimated 31,400 in 2006 to 4,700 in 2009. U.S. military casualties were negligible. Then CIA Director Michael Hayden said, with good reason, that “al Qaeda is on the verge of a strategic defeat in Iraq.”

Fast forward through five years of the Administration’s indifference, and Iraq is close to exceeding the kind of chaos that engulfed it before the U.S. surge. The city of Fallujah, taken from insurgents by the Marines at a cost of 95 dead and nearly 600 wounded in November 2004, fell again to al Qaeda in January. The Iraqi government has not been able to reclaim the entire city—just 40 miles from Baghdad. More than 1,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in May alone, according to the Iraq Body Count web site.

In my view we have botched practically every foreign policy move made since 9/11 in two consecutive administrations (maybe much longer). I find the position that so many seem to be espousing these days, that the only lives that count are American military ones, to be inadequate if not downright opposed to our interests.

We should value stability much, much more than we do. That’s a difficult path with politicians and people as impatient as ours. We are not a radical power like the post-Revolution France or the early Soviet Union. Ours is a long game and stability fosters our interests. Overthrowing or conniving at the overthrow of dictators who put down more radical elements even more opposed to our interests is not a prudent move.

I suspect that the next move in Iraq will be by the Kurds. Much depends on how much they’re willing to tolerate a group largely composed of radical Islamist Sunni Arabs on their doorstep or even in a city they might possibly covet as their capital.

As we prepare to withdraw our forces from Afghanistan we might want to reflect on how well a war waged everywhere between the Bosporus and the Hindu Kush will serve our interests because that’s the direction in which events are heading. I don’t think we’ll be able to stave that off with armed drones.

As Niels Bohr wisecracked (frequently misattributed to Yogi Berra), prediction is hard especially about the future. In this WSJ op-ed medical industry researcher Stephen T. Parente tries to predict the future of healthcare insurance:

Using the 2014 health-insurance exchange enrollment data and a micro-simulation model funded in part by the Department of Health and Human Services, we estimate the national and state impact of the Affordable Care Act on insurance prices and enrollment from 2015-24. The average premium for an individual exchange health plan (Silver) will increase by $1,375 by 2019 while the average family premium for the same plan will increase by $4,198—outpacing the average increases from 2008 to 2013. Consumers who saw spikes in their health premiums last year will experience the same trauma this year. But the steepest price increases will not occur until 2017 and after, when three things happen.

The three things that will happen are

1. The PPACA’s mandatory required benefits will be kick in.
2. The reinsurance program that protects insurance companies from cost overruns will end.
3. More employers will drop their insurance plans.

All of these will work synergistically not only to increase the cost of healthcare insurance but the cost of healthcare as people perceive it based on what they actually pay out-of-pocket. Families, already paying more for healthcare due to the increased deductibles and copays on top of rising prices of the new plans in which they’re enrolled, will complain to their Congressional representatives.

Another factor not mentioned in the op-ed: the federal government’s share of the costs due to the expansion of Medicaid will expire. That on top of the predicted increased in Medicaid enrollment will put additional pressures on states for which Medicaid is already their largest spending line item. Pressure will build to do something.

Here’s Mr. Parente’s last prediction:

Either way, there will be a significant number of uninsured Americans unwilling or unable to pay for the inflated insurance available on the exchanges and forced to pay penalties, which for 2016 and thereafter will be the greater of $695 or 2.5% of income. More will choose this option every year. By 2024, Ms. Frogner and I estimate that there will be more than 40 million uninsured, roughly 10% more than today.

I don’t think, as Mr. Parente does, that will result in the death of the PPACA. I don’t know what will happen. To me it just highlights something that has been obvious all along, that if reducing healthcare spending is politically impossible so is universal coverage. The two go hand in hand but with a causality in reverse of what the architects of the PPACA believed. If healthcare costs go down you can afford to insure more people. Insuring more people does not necessarily mean that healthcare costs will go down.

I sense a disturbance in the Force. In what must be the big news of the day, a California judge has found teacher tenure to be unconstitutional:

LOS ANGELES (AP) – A judge struck down tenure and other job protections for California’s public school teachers as unconstitutional Tuesday, saying such laws harm students – especially poor and minority ones – by saddling them with bad teachers.

In a landmark decision that could influence the gathering debate over tenure across the country, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu cited the historic case of Brown v. Board of Education in ruling that students have a fundamental right to equal education.

Siding with the nine students who brought the lawsuit, he ruled that California laws on the hiring and firing of teachers have resulted in “a significant number of grossly ineffective teachers currently active in California classrooms.”

He agreed, too, that a disproportionate share of these teachers are in schools that have mostly minority and low-income students.

The judge has stayed his order pending appeals. This is a state court and the decision only affects California but I strongly suspect that this decision will prompt other similar suits on related rounds all over the country, will be bitterly condemned by some, and roundly praised by others. In other words, I think this is probably a very polarizing decision pitting as it does teachers unions against students.

It’s an important moment in any young pup’s life when she meets the elders of the pack for the first time. Here Kara meets Tally, our old lady, in this picture just a few months shy of 16. Will Tally accept her? Reject her? Worse yet, ignore her? Tally has never shown much interest in any of the pups we’ve brought into the house. Her affect has said “Uh, dogs. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.”

Kara is obviously fascinated by Tally. In all of her young life she’s never seen anything quite like her. She never will again.

Remarkably, Tally actually likes Kara.

I wish this picture were in better focus. It warms my heart to see our oldest and our youngest pack members standing shoulder to shoulder. Kara, Tally has so much to teach you. Pay attention. She’s one of a kind.

As one frequent commenter here cleverly surmised, back in the bitter cold of February’s polar vortex we added a new member to our pack. This is Kara and that is her first baby picture. She’s eleven weeks old here. In the picture she is on her ride home, very nearly the first time she had been out-of-doors let alone away from the home with our breeders she’d known all of her brief life.

We had not set out or expected to buy a puppy. We’d gone to our dog breeders, friends of some twenty years standing, to visit, have lunch, and, perhaps, help socialize their new litter. We knew that the entire litter had already been sold.

When we arrived, however, we were informed that one of the buyers had backed out and, consequently, one puppy was available. We recognized that due to our friends’ advancing age this might well be the last breeding of this line and so, rather than be forced at some more convenient date to seek out a line that met our needs but with which we had little familiarity, we elected to seize our opportunity and the rest, as they say, is history.

Little does Kara know as she rides uncertainly to her new home the adventures waiting for her. Her life will only be limited by what she is willing to do, whether working dog, therapy dog, or even (unlikely) show dog. Or just a beloved companion. Oh, the places she’ll go!

Over the next days and weeks I’ll be posting regularly about Kara’s adventures.

My wife asked why I hadn’t posted about Kara yet. If my story is to be character-driven, I need a better understanding of my lead character. It’s taken my a while to come to an understanding of who Kara is, something I’ll be exploring in my unfolding tale.

Commenting on the EPA’s plan to curtail the use of coal for power generation, Robert Samuelson immediately goes to the numbers:

Let’s do the math. In 2005, power plants produced 2,402 million metric tons of CO2. A 30 percent reduction is 721 million metric tons. This is the target. But by 2012, CO2 emissions had already dropped to 2,023 million metric tons, a decline of 379 million metric tons. That’s 53 percent of the 2030 target. All of this has occurred without federal regulation of greenhouse gases.

The average coal-fired plant is 43 years old, says the Edison Electric Institute, the trade group for utilities. Many older plants have been retired, it says, for reasons “including plant age, fuel prices (i.e., low natural gas prices), decreased demand, and the projected cost of complying with pending EPA [non-greenhouse gas] regulations.” By the institute’s count, utilities have announced the closure of coal units equal to 20 percent of the coal total. Some have already shut; others will shut between now and 2022.

Obama would continue these trends. Coal’s share of electricity generated (including from nuclear and hydro power and renewables) has dropped from 50 percent in 2005 to 39 percent in 2013; in the same period, natural gas’s share rose from 19 percent to 27 percent. By 2030, the Environmental Protection Agency projects coal will fall to 31 percent and natural gas will increase to 32 percent. Renewables’ share, led by wind and solar, goes from 5 percent to 9 percent.

That’s something but the reality is that it’s not much. It’s not enough to have much environmental impact, to have a disastrous effect on the economy, or to impel China, for example, to follow suit.

The reality which I think those concerned about climate change should accept is that nothing effective will be politically acceptable. We should devote more energies to amelioration rather than avoidance.