At Atlantic Alec MacGillis makes a point I’ve made here from time to time. The failure of our legal system to identify, arrest, prosecute, try, and convict criminals in a timely manner is undermining the rule of law:

Criminologists have offered several explanations for the increase, including the rise in gun sales early in the pandemic, changes in police behavior following the protests over the murder of George Floyd, and the social disruptions caused by closures of schools and interruptions in social services. But many people who work in criminal justice are zeroing in on another possible factor—the extended shutdown of so much of the court system, the institution at the heart of public order.

This could have led to more violence in a number of ways. Prosecutors confronted with a growing volume of cases decided not to take action against certain suspects, who went on to commit other crimes. Victims or witnesses became less willing to testify as time passed and their memories of events grew foggy, weakening cases against perpetrators. Suspects were denied substance-abuse treatment or other services that they would normally have accessed through the criminal-justice system, with dangerous consequences.

Above all, experts say, the shutdowns undermined the promise that crimes would be promptly punished. The theory that “swift, certain, and fair” consequences deter crimes is credited to the late criminologist Mark Kleiman. The idea is that it’s the speed of repercussions, rather than their severity, that matters most. By putting the justice system on hold for so long, many jurisdictions weakened that effect. In some cases, people were left to seek street justice in the absence of institutional justice. As Reygan Cunningham, a senior partner at the California Partnership for Safe Communities, put it, closing courts sent “a message that there are no consequences, and there is no help.”

Where I differ from Mr. MacGillis is that I think that COVID-19 has practically nothing to do with the problem since the problem existed long before January 2020. I think our laws, law enforcement officers, judges, and states attorneys offices all need fundamental reform, starting with having laws that can be enforced and a commitment to enforcing the law.

Just to cite one example Kim Foxx assumed the office of Cook County States Attorney in December 2016, one of a group of states attorneys who are not committed to prosecuting crimes. Chesa Boudin, just removed as San Francisco District Attorney, assumed office in January 2020. He ran on a platform of decarceration and reduced prosecution so blaming the reduction in prosecutions during his tenure on COVID-19 is a stretch. He was doing what he promised to do.

At RealClearPolitics Steve Milloy argues that President Biden’s climate agenda is melting and, worse, meaningless:

President Biden is being urged to declare a climate emergency, which may happen as early as this week. If he does, the irony will be rich, as the 911 call should really be for the climate agenda.

The president apparently hopes to take advantage of the ongoing record-setting European heat wave and string of wildfires, and an ongoing heat wave in the U.S. Midwest.

While it certainly is very hot in Europe and the Midwest, it is relatively cool elsewhere. The unfortunate reality for Biden’s planned exploitation is that today’s average global temperature per the University of Maine is a mere 0.2C warmer than the average from 1979-2000. It’s called “global warming,” and yet there’s really not much of that occurring.

We also know that heat waves are not associated with carbon dioxide emissions. The frequency and intensity of heat waves has dramatically declined in the U.S. over the past 100 years despite ever-rising emissions, per the National Climate Assessment conducted by the Obama-Biden administration.

Carrying on with my question of yesterday, IMO claiming that the record high temperature being experienced across Europe is “natural variability” is weak in any but the most general sense. The temperatures they’re seeing are from 2-3°C above previously recorded highs.

I’m a bit disappointed that nobody is mentioning other possibilities like

1. The unusual La Niña pattern
2. The extraordinary sunspot activity

It could be global climate change but there are other possibilities, too, and I’m not sure how you’d go about determining the cause definitively. There’s a lot we don’t know about the weather.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is being mentioned by some as a potential Democratic candidate for president in 2024. The editors of the Wall Street Journal take note of Mr. Pritzker’s lackluster performance as governor:

Research outfit Wirepoints notes in a new report that Illinois’s real GDP grew a mere 0.5% between the first quarters of 2019 and 2022, the first three years of Mr. Pritzker’s governorship. That’s by far the slowest growth in the region. Indiana’s GDP increased by 6.1%, Iowa’s by 5.2%, and Michigan (3.7%), Kentucky (3.3%) and Missouri (3.1%) lapped it too. Even slow-growing Wisconsin (1.6%) recorded triple the growth of Illinois.

Mr. Pritzker can’t blame climate change. Illinois’s lagging GDP is especially remarkable given it benefited mightily from rising farm commodity prices. Agricultural GDP in Illinois rose 25.4% during the three-year period, which was more than in Iowa (21.2%), Missouri (15%), Michigan (11.4%) and Kentucky (0.4%).

Yet high taxes, crime and lousy schools are driving residents and businesses to other states. Ken Griffin recently said he’s moving his Citadel hedge fund and securities trading firm to Miami from Chicago. Caterpillar is replanting its corporate headquarters in Irving, Texas, and Boeing is relocating its head office to Arlington, Virginia.

Illinois lost $8.5 billion in adjusted gross income from out-migration in 2020, or about 1.9% of AGI, ranking 49th in the country. The only state that lost a larger share was New York. Florida gained $23.7 billion and New Hampshire $960 million. Maybe Mr. Pritzker has sojourned to these low-tax states to hit up Democratic donors who have decamped from Illinois.

Mr. Pritzker and Democrats were worried enough about his re-election that they spent more than $30 million during the GOP primary to boost Republican State Sen. Darren Bailey who was considered the weakest candidate in the field. But we wonder if Mr. Pritzker really wants to stick around for a full second term when the state and Chicago pension liabilities may again become a crisis.

Running for President might be a nice diversion that spares him from dealing with the mess Democrats have made of Illinois.

I didn’t want JB Pritzker as Illinois’s governor for a number of reasons:

• I don’t think much of billionaires being elected to executive office.
• To add insult to injury Mr. Pritker is a trust fund baby.
• He was basically elected as a figurehead so that Mike Madigan could continue to run the state unimpeded.
• His misprision of Rod Blagojevich’s felonies should, at the very least, have caused him to be disbarred and rendered unqualified for office.

As governor he has lived down to my expectations. The sole good thing about JB Pritzker’s being elected president would be that it would get him out of Illinois.

There’s quite a bit of bickering going on right now about the bill making its way through the Congress, the presumed intention of which is to increase the proportion of semiconductors manufactured in the United States. I’m not entirely in agreement with the editors of the Wall Street Journal whose inclination is to oppose the bill, making a more or less laissez-faire argument:

Global semiconductor capacity increased 6.7% in 2020 and 8.6% in 2021 and is expected to grow another 8.7% this year. The risk of over-capacity is growing as China heaps subsidies on its semiconductor industry as part of its Made in China 2025 initiative, and the U.S. and Europe race to compete.

Some 15,000 new semiconductor firms registered in China in 2020. Some have drawn investment from U.S. venture-capital firms. Intel has backed Chinese startups even as CEO Pat Gelsinger lobbies Congress for subsidies to counter Beijing. Intel has threatened to delay a planned Ohio factory unless Congress passes the subsidy bill.

The other claim for the bill is that the U.S. must subsidize domestic chip-making to compete with China, but this also isn’t persuasive. The companies like to point out that the U.S. share of the world’s chips has fallen to 12% from 37% in 1990. They don’t mention that the U.S. leads in chip design (52%) and chip-making equipment (50%). Seven of the world’s 10 largest semiconductor companies are based in the U.S. China trails American companies by years in semiconductor technology.

Chip fabrication has moved to South Korea and Taiwan because many chips are commodities with low margins. But chip makers are working to diversify their manufacturing bases to avoid future supply disruptions and have announced $80 billion in new U.S. investments through 2025. Samsung plans to build a $17 billion factory in Texas. TSMC has a $12 billion plant under construction in Arizona.

Uh, no. Most businesses in the United States have very small margins. If what the editors are saying were true most retail establishments, particularly grocery stores, would close. Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and China dominate chip fabrication because their governments subsidize them and they subsidize them for strategic reasons. The editors continue:

History shows that easy government money can undermine competitiveness. It often leads to inefficient spending and investment. The politicians will also attach their own strings, perhaps with limits on stock buybacks and dividends. Wait until Bernie Sanders is heard from on the Senate floor.

The chip bill isn’t needed to compete with China, and it will set a precedent that other industries will follow. Anybody who can throw up a China competition angle will ask for money. Why Republicans want to sign up for this is a mystery, especially when they might control both houses of Congress in six months.

I also don’t think that the editors understand engineering. Production engineering inevitably follows production and design engineering inevitably follows production engineering. We have seen that in any number of industries.

We need to ensure that more chips are fabricated in the United States for security reasons if for no other. My preference would be to start with strategies other than subsidies although we may end up with subsidies. A good start would be to require that companies bidding on defense contracts have supply chains 100% within the United States, a tall order that goes well beyond chip fabrication. The notion that we can be prepared to go to war with China when we are dependent on China for everything we use to make war is absurd on its face. Today if you walk into any federal government office including DoD offices you will be confronted with masses of things, all made in Taiwan and China or with components or materials made in Taiwan, China, or Russia. That needs to change and in my view the most organic, market-oriented way to accomplish that is by hitting companies on their bottom lines. Start with doing business with the federal government. However, we may ultimately end up with subsidies which is what Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and China have been doing.

The big news in Europe is the heat. They’re experiencing record-breaking heat all across Europe with many areas seeing temperatures over 100°F (38°C). Here in Chicago we’ve already had a protracted period with temperatures that high—a bit unseasonable for us but not a disaster.

In Europe it’s a disaster. They’re accustomed to much milder temperatures than we are. Air conditioning is rare; many homes don’t have central heating. That means when it gets very hot in the summer or very cold in the winter they suffer more than we probably would.

Why is Europe experiencing a heatwave? The explanations I’ve read aren’t particularly satisfying, things like “the jetstream has split in two”. Okay, why has the jetstream split in two?

Quite a few people are attributing the heat to global warming. Maybe. Unlike several regular readers here I actually think that anthropogenic global warming is a thing. Unlike others I think that localized climate change is a much more pressing problem. Plus I would not be a bit surprised if localized climate change didn’t have effects that spread far beyond those local areas. For example, what effect does dumping millions of gallons of hot water into the Western Pacific have? Can that affect the La Niña/El Niño cycle?

So here’s an opportunity to give your explanation for Europe’s extremely hot weather.

Rather than analyzing or remarking on Perry Bacon’s Washington Post column attributing President Biden’s low approval rating to adverse press coverage in the mainstream media, I will, as they say on Jeopardy, put it in the form of a question. Has President Biden’s press coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, CNN, and Politico been too negative?

Frankly, I’m skeptical. I’m reminded of Mme. de Cornuel’s wisecrack: “No man is a hero to his valet”. It’s less that Biden’s media coverage is excessively negative than that the coverage is excessive. IMO the days of presidential approval ratings in the 60s or higher like Eisenhower or Kennedy are long gone. 24/7 news coverage practically ensures that we know too much about presidents to think well of them.

I materially agree with Bryan Stryker’s observations in his New York Times op-ed. After characterizing the present situation as an existential crisis for Democrats he makes the following recommendations:

Democrats can focus on three things. First, we need to talk about the work we’ve done to rebuild America — for example, through the infrastructure bill, which has engaged construction in places all over the country. Making things in America is not just a so-called Rust Belt issue, it’s an American-voter issue. People are getting hammered by inflation, and when they can afford something, it’s often back-ordered or plain out of stock. There are no easy answers to inflation, but voters want to hear that Democrats see it as the big problem that it is. And voters everywhere want to bring supply chains home, if possible, so Americans can build things in states all over the country.

Democrats have too often shied away from talking about outsourcing — possibly because Mr. Trump’s anti-outsourcing talk has made us wary of remotely sounding like him. We need to get over that and start owning this issue again.

Second, Democrats should continue to push legislation that helps the working class, particularly in building things — and point out how it will make a difference in people’s lives. The White House’s Buy American executive order and the American Rescue Plan help make sure that American companies get first crack at any contract funded by American taxpayers. That means jobs and income. We should immediately pass some version of the China competitiveness bill that brings critical supply lines like semiconductor production back to America, invests in American manufacturing, takes on China’s intellectual-property theft and illegal subsidies and expands worker training.

Democrats can also improve trade deals so they deliver tangible benefits for American workers. Hundreds of Democrats voted with Mr. Trump to make NAFTA better for workers, and they should continue to do that for other trade pacts. It wasn’t so long ago (2005) that Mr. Obama explained his vote against George W. Bush’s Central American Free Trade Agreement by pointing out that trade agreements too often have been “about making life easier for the winners of globalization, while we do nothing as life gets harder for American workers.”

In addition, the tax code should be reformed to incentivize companies to pay American workers an honest day’s pay here, not hire cheaper foreign labor.

Third, Democrats need to draw a contrast between themselves and Republicans, who have been all too glad to see corporations ship jobs overseas. For example, Republicans overwhelmingly supported Mr. Trump’s tax cuts for outsourcers. Democrats took Mitt Romney down for his outsourcing at Bain Capital and held John McCain to account in Michigan for his cheerleading of job-killing trade deals. We should bring this tactic back to the forefront of Democratic campaigns.

And fourth, Democrats should draw inspiration from our roots and union friends. We should remind voters over and over again about who saved the American auto industry: Barack Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden.

I’m concerned that he underestimates the problems facing Democrats. I think it’s far from certain that they want to be the party of making and building. Talking a good show is not enough. They’ve got to follow their supportive words up with actions.

I didn’t want to let Fareed Zakaria’s recent Washington Post column disappear into the memory hole without comment. In it he argues that Democrats should abandon identity politics or, at least, put it on the backburner while emphasizing actually performing and building:

There is plenty of evidence that the Democratic Party has moved left, that it is out of sync with Americans on many of these cultural issues, and that it needs to correct course. But it needs to do so clearly, forcefully and repeatedly. Republicans are clever at weaponizing the words of a few left-wing Democrats and branding them as the face of the party. For example, I have not found a single senior national Democratic leader who has ever endorsed the idea of “defunding the police” — Biden actually proposed increased funding for cops — and yet Republicans have repeated this mantra constantly.

Democrats need to learn how to fight back — for example, by highlighting the most extreme abortion laws passed in Republican states and branding the Republican Party with them. In Oklahoma, abortions are now banned, with very few exceptions, from the moment of conception onward. In Mississippi, a doctor could face 10 years in prison for performing an illegal abortion.

Yet Democrats have another big weak spot, and it centers on performance. Democrats in power often seem unable to get anything done. Democrats squabble more — and more in public — than Republicans. Despite the fact that much of the GOP establishment despised Trump, once he was elected, they nearly all fell in line, mostly passed his agenda and supported him unfailingly. Democrats, by contrast, rarely remind the public of the two big bills that they did pass — covid-19 relief and infrastructure — and in fact spent months bickering over the third one they’ve proposed, Build Back Better. Why is the Biden administration not announcing large new public works projects every week, financed by the federal funds appropriated in those two bills?

The answer is that it has become very difficult to build anything in America, especially in blue states. President Barack Obama, who passed another big infrastructure bill in 2009, famously said later that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” That’s because, as New York Times columnist Ezra Klein has noted, the number of permits, reviews, and delays that have become part of the normal approval process have delayed or doomed the prospects of large-scale public projects. Democrats have become paralyzed by their own ideas and interest groups, and no one seems able to break through and actually get things done.

Ironically, this column provoked a furor on social media, less over its contents than about its caption. The original caption, still present in my browser, was

Now it’s

The irony is that the argument itself substantiates Mr. Zakaria’s point. For a segment of Democrats, clearly pronouns are vitally important. That segment may not be large but it is vehement, noisy, and influential.

Let’s consider an example. In California a highspeed rail project has been in progress for 14 years and has spent $5 billion of the estimated $105 billion the project will ultimately cost. At the end of 14 years not a single usable mile has been built. By comparison the entire 1,911 miles of the transcontinental railroad was built in just 6 years. How could that possibly be? There are many reasons including litigation, regulation, and the sad fact that for some just plain jawboning about a project is actually more important than completing it. They get paid one way or the other.

Let’s consider another example: Boulder Dam was built in 5 years. Modern Southern California would be impossible without it. It was brought in on time and under budget. It’s what put Bechtel on the map. I don’t believe it could be built at all today.

When I think of the prodigious amount of making and building that the ambitious plans of those for whom anthropogenic climate change is the pressing issue of the day would require I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. If past performance is any gauge, should their plans be approved by 2050 very little would have been accomplished but they’d have talked about it a lot.

Footnote

“BANANA” is an acronym for “build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything”, generally used as a criticism of advocacy groups opposed to land development. Such steadfast opposition is one of the impediments to what Mr. Zakaria is proposing and there is yet another small but vehement, loud, and influential group of mostly Democrats providing such opposition.

All of this reminds me of Will Rogers’s response when he was asked whether he were a member of an organized political party. He said, “No, I’m a Democrat”.

Peggy Noonan’s latest Wall Street Journal column has two snippets I wanted to share. The first, the opening of the column, is about as good a characterization of politics in today’s United States as I’ve seen:

Public opinion on how America does its policing has devolved into two camps. The first is highly progressive, driven by ideological certitudes and made possible by a generally limited experience of life. These are the defund-the-police people, small in number and suffering in public support but effective at pushing their agenda through highly ideological district attorneys.

The other camp is all “back the blue”—police are heroes who put their lives on the line to protect us.

In neither camp do people feel free to depart to any degree from their side. A progressive can’t say, “Jeez we’re going too far against the cops, my grandmother’s afraid to leave the house.” That person would be thrown out of Democratic Socialists of America. If you are back-the-blue, you can’t look with a critical eye at the cops.

All I can add to that is that ideological bias is always wrong. Ideology always fails to match up with objective reality, with empirical facts.

She follows that with a characterization and analysis of the recently published videos of the Uvalde school shooting which leads to the next snippet:

Later the police veteran sent me a Texas state directive, training guidance published in 2020, on active-shooter response for school-based incidents. It puts the first priority in caps: STOP THE KILLING. The second, also in caps: STOP THE DYING. “First responders to the active shooter scene will usually be required to place themselves in harm’s way and display uncommon acts of courage to save the innocent,” it reads. ”They must accept the role of “Protector”: “A first responder unwilling to place the lives of the innocent above their own safety should consider another career field.”

When force protection becomes the highest priority of law enforcement officers, it naturally leads on to wonder what we need them for. Wouldn’t completely avoiding dangerous situations be the surest way to ensure force protection? I can’t help but wonder if that’s not what we’re seeing in the reduced police activity about which I posted yesterday.

Being a police officer is a hard, unpleasant, dangerous, necessary job. I wouldn’t want to do it but I’m glad that somebody does. It’s not like being a firefighter. Firefighters are always heroes. A police officer is always the goat to somebody.