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.

Juan Cole has some pretty sound observations about Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia. After casting cold water on any prospect of Biden’s being able to wring any additional oil out of the Gulf States, he turns to other explanations. Basically, he thinks that President Biden is “playing defense”. He then remarks:

By meeting with the Saudi royal family and, on Saturday, with the Gulf Cooperation Council, Biden is attempting to forestall a stampede of these countries to China, with which most of them already do a great deal of business, and which never bothers them about not having free and fair elections. How security-linked the trip was is obvious from the agreements the White House signed in Saudi Arabia.

Reuters quotes Jake Sullivan, the National Security Adviser, as saying of Biden, “He’s intent on ensuring that there is not a vacuum in the Middle East for China and Russia to fill.”

Of course, Biden is also striving for further Israeli integration into the Middle East. Saudi Arabia announced Thursday evening that it was granting all countries overflight rights, which benefits Israel’s El Al, which can now save fuel by not having to skirt the kingdom.

He also wants to cement the ceasefire in Yemen, and finally end the Saudi/ UAE war on Yemen, about which Congress has been upset.

concluding with some slightly less sound observations about détente between. Unlike Dr. Cole I suspect that any relaxation between Saudi Arabia and Iran is likely to fit the definition of diplomacy attributed to sports writer Walter Trumbull: the art of saying “nice doggie” while looking around for a stick.

James Joyner has a post at Outside the Beltway, musing about the January 6 committee hearings. The post is hard to summarize succinctly, consisting as it does of long quotes from a piece in Mother Jone, interspersed with “Yes, but” observations from James. Nonetheless I recommend you read it.

In my view the committee hearings have several potential objectives, some more necessary and legitimate than others:

• Informing the American people about what happened on January 6, 2021
• An investigation of the factors that led to the breaching of the Capitol with an eye towards preventing its recurrence
• A sort of grand jury proceedings, building a case for indicting Donald Trump
• Battlespace preparation

Information

IMO this is the most legitimate objective of holding these committee hearings as televised public events. The American public should know, in non-agonistic terms, what occurred. It does not appear that the hearings have been particularly successful in achieving this goal:

Investigation

This, too, would be a very legitimate objective of the hearings but televised proceedings are actually an impediment to this objective. In addition to what we’ve seen so far such an investigation would include a consideration of the organization, structure, and direction of the Capitol Police. To whatever extent this is an objective of the hearings, it’s not particularly successful, either.

Grand Jury

House committee hearings are not the proper forum for this. The Department of Justice investigation presently in progress is. Since January 6, 2021 I have said that Mr. Trump should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law but I hope we are prepared for how little that might be. Rules of evidence apply in actual criminal cases and guilt must be established beyond reasonable doubt.

Battlespace preparation

Battlespace preparation for the 2024 presidential elections is the least legitimate objective and the House members conducting the proceedings are increasingly making it appear that this is their primary objective in the proceedings.

At the Chicago Sun-Times Tom Schuba, Andy Grimm, Jesse Howe and Andy Boyle report that Chicago police activity has fallen to historic lows:

The police have made arrests in just 12% of crimes reported last year, according to a Chicago Sun-Times analysis. That’s the lowest level since at least 2001, the first year the data was made publicly available.

The overall arrest rate peaked at nearly 31% in 2005 and has dropped steadily.

The decline in arrests mirrors a drop in nearly every category of police officers’ activity tracked by the Chicago Police Department. The numbers of traffic stops, tickets and investigative stops — in which pedestrians are patted down or searched by officers on the street — all have plummeted. The number of investigative stops dropped by more than half between 2019 and last year, falling from 155,000 citywide to 69,000.
And fewer crimes overall are getting reported — by victims and by the police, who used to produce many crime reports themselves while patrolling their beats.

The slowdown amounts to a pullback by police officers as the city has experienced its most violent years in decades, a rise also seen in other major U.S. cities during the coronavirus pandemic and in the wake of the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer.

Rank-and-file police who patrol the streets and even top brass say officers are doing less.

As I’ve pointed out before Chicago Emergency Management (911) reports that in more than 400,000 “serious” cases in which a timely police response could have reduced the harm police did not respond at all. It’s not that there’s less crime. It’s that less crime is being reported or responded to.

Here’s something else that’s interesting:

CPD’s budget isn’t going down. There are just fewer police officers.

They say that the “Ferguson effect” but I don’t think that’s the whole story. This is what happens when an organization is thoroughly demoralized. I recall when TeleType was folding, the few remaining souls walked the hallways with glazed expressions on their faces.

At the Wall Street Journal Jesse Newman and Jaewon Kang report that, although it isn’t making headline news as it did a month ago, the shortage of baby formula has little abated:

U.S. stores are still struggling to stock baby formula despite monthslong efforts by manufacturers and the Biden administration to boost supplies.

Availability of powdered formula products in U.S. stores earlier this month dropped to the lowest level so far this year, with about 30% of products out of stock for the week ended July 3, according to the market-research firm IRI. While availability improved slightly last week, out-of-stock levels remain higher than in recent months, and shortages remain acute in states including Alaska, Utah and Wyoming, IRI data showed.

At the same time, consumers are finding fewer choices of brands, sizes or formats of formula on grocery-store shelves as the variety of available products shrinks. U.S. supermarkets over the four weeks ended June 26 sold an average of 11 different formula products per store weekly, according to IRI, compared with a weekly average of 24 from 2018 to 2021.

and

Formula supplies have run low partly because of a surge in buying earlier this year that depleted store inventories, said Krishnakumar Davey, president of client engagement at IRI. Mr. Davey said consumers are now working through supplies at home and buying smaller-size containers when they do make purchases.

The baby-formula shortage, sparked by supply-chain problems and the shutdown of a major plant, has for months left parents and caregivers scouring stores and websites for formula to feed their babies. The Covid-19 pandemic caused disruptions beginning in 2020, with problems for some formula makers tied to shipping, raw materials and packaging. In February, Abbott Laboratories, which makes Similac and other brands, halted production at its factory in Sturgis, Mich., and initiated a recall while food-safety regulators investigated a possibly deadly contamination.

Abbott restarted its Michigan plant—which had been responsible for producing roughly one-fifth of U.S. formula—in early June, but stopped less than two weeks later after thunderstorms flooded part of the facility. Abbott said last weekend that it had reopened the plant again on July 1 and restarted production of EleCare formula, made for babies with digestive problems, which will begin shipping in the next few weeks. Abbott is working to resume production of its widely sold formula Similac as soon as possible, the company said.

Abbott has imported tens of millions of pounds of formula from its manufacturing facilities in Ireland and Spain, the company said.

The balance of the report largely consists of statements from major retailers, e.g. Piggly-Wiggly, Kroger, Hy-vee, etc. that the situation is little changed from what it was a month ago.

Let’s be very clear about this. Although there are multiple culprits in this problem, it was a catastrophe waiting to happen given the construction of WIC or, in other words, the primary culprit is Congress. WIC created an oligopoly and what we’re seeing are the risks of having oligopolies. And make no mistake oligopoly is the situation preferred by the federal bureaucracy. Big Government likes doing business with Big Business. It’s easier to manage the relationships with a very few extremely large companies than it would be to wrangle thousands of companies.

And it’s not just baby formula. Practically every sector of the economy has the same problem. Just google “industry consolidation”. There are fewer companies in almost every sector than there were 25 years ago and the rate at which start-ups are formed has declined. This problem will recur over and over again in different sectors, possibly with less urgency and less publicity, until we reform how our government works.

And again I don’t think the solution is laissez-faire. We have government regulations for good reasons. Congress and federal agencies need to do their jobs rather than identifying the jobs they want to do and doing that.

I also suspect that when you dig into the composition and manufacturing of baby formula we would find that Shanghai’s lockdown and bottlenecks in West Coast shipping are significant factors but that is fodder for another post.

The editors of The Economist have lurched uncontrollably onto a view of the present political situation here in the United States that roughly approximates my own:

The country needs parties that actually represent voters, few of whom belong to the extremes. And yet Democrats too have fallen prey to their activists.

Fringe and sometimes dotty ideas have crept into Democratic rhetoric, peaking in the feverish summer of 2020 with a movement to “defund the police”, abolish immigration enforcement, shun capitalism, relabel women as birthing people and inject “anti-racism” into the classroom. If the Democrats are defined by their most extreme and least popular ideas, they will be handing a winning agenda of culture-war grievance to an opposition party that has yet to purge itself of the poison that makes Mr Trump unfit for office.

The Democrats have begun to put this right, but they lack urgency. That may be because some of them blame their problems on others—as when the White House points to “Putin’s price hike” or the negativity of Republican politicians and the conservative media. Although there is something to this, the party also needs to ditch cherished myths that empower its idealists.

One is that a rainbow coalition of disaffected, progressive voters is just waiting to be organised to bring about a social revolution. The truth is that those who do not vote are politically disengaged and not very liberal. Some black, Hispanic and working-class voters may well see each other as rivals or have conservative views on race, immigration and crime.

Another myth is that winning over centrist voters is unnecessary, because Democrats’ fortunes will be rescued by grand structural reforms to American democracy that are tantalisingly within reach. The constitution biases the Senate and electoral college towards rural America, and thus away from Democrats. Some in the party dream of using a congressional supermajority to shift representation in Washington towards the popular vote by adding states to the union, amending the constitution or packing the Supreme Court. Yet even in better times, there is a slim chance of that actually happening.

The greatest myth is that the party’s progressive stances invigorate the base and are off-putting only to the other side. Consider the governor’s election in Virginia in 2021. After favouring Mr Biden by ten percentage points in 2020, voters elected a Republican whose signature campaign pledge was ridding schools of critical race theory (crt). That concept has become a catch-all term for conservative gripes, some real and some fantastical. Republican attacks on Democrats as out-of-touch socialists ring true to many voters in the centre.

The good news is that Democrats are showing signs of turning back from peak progressive. In San Francisco irate voters have recalled their district attorney as well as three school-board members whose zeal for ideological coups de théâtre neglected bread-and-butter problems with crime and schooling. Last year Minneapolis defeated a referendum to defund the police and New York chose a former police captain as mayor. All these causes were backed by non-white voters, including Asian-Americans in San Francisco and African-Americans in Minneapolis. Prominent Democrats running in battleground states are steering clear of the rhetoric that enthralled the party in 2020.

My primary disagreement with them is that I think they’re overestimating the sincerity of both the Republican and Democratic leaderships. I don’t believe that the Republican leadership has any particular fondness for Trump. Their fondness is for power and money. They support Trump because they see him as a means to those ends. The Democratic leaders for their part don’t have any particular fondness for democracy or reform. Their fondness, too, is for money and power.

But other than that I think they’ve pretty much nailed our political conundrum. Our political parties are completely controlled by those who staff and donate to political campaigns and those people are much more extreme than rank-and-file party members.

At Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball Kyle Kondik declares that the Repbulicans are presently favored to hold the majority in the House of Representatives in 2023. And at RealClearPolitics Sean Trend says the Republicans are favored to take control of the Senate as well:

In short, the battle for the Senate comes down to Democrats’ ability to win at least three of four seats that would likely be highly competitive if President Biden’s job approval were about ten points higher than it is today. But in a situation where Senate outcomes correlate heavily with presidential job approval in the state, that’s a tough row to hoe. While we should give more than a cursory nod to the possibility that Democrats will hold the Senate (unlike the possibility that Democrats will hold the House, which is barely worth that nod), we should also say with some confidence that Republicans are the favorites to win.

Probably the best counter-argument is that our high levels of polarization insulate Democrats from Biden’s job approval. In other words, there are voters who may disapprove of the job the president is doing, but will nevertheless vote Democratic. We saw this in 2008, where Republican candidates ran far ahead of President Bush’s job approval in many states. Republican voters may have recognized the poor job he was doing, but in the end, they were still Republicans.

There’s no doubt that we’ve reached that point, as most Democratic Senate candidates are running ahead of Biden’s job approval right now. We’ve become much more polarized since 2008, and Democratic candidates in these states probably have a higher floor than we might have seen 10 years ago. But this is a two-way street; Republican candidate quality won’t matter as much as it might have a decade ago either.

What we’re probably seeing in the favorable polling for Democratic Senate candidates right now is what we see in almost every wave and semi-wave election: The wave doesn’t form until fairly late in the season. In 2006, Democratic candidates in Washington, Maryland, and New Jersey hadn’t yet put away their Republican challengers. (In fact, Republican Tom Kean Jr. led in the polling in New Jersey until September.) In 2010, Republican leads in states like Ohio, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Florida all suggested competitive races; Republicans won these states by double digits. In 2014, there was genuine doubt about the fate of the Senate throughout the summer. Even in 2018, there was genuine uncertainty about the fate of Republican senators in vulnerable states like Nevada and Arizona until the end; in both those races, Republican candidates won almost exactly what the polling averages suggested they should win (which also happened to be President Trump’s job approval in the states according to exit polls). But the undecideds broke heavily in the Democrats’ favor.

In a much-linked piece at Axios Josh Kraushaar proposes an explanation for what’s going on:

What’s happening: Democratic strategists say the party’s biggest vulnerability is assuming that the priorities of progressive activists are the same as those of working-class voters.

• Progressive activists led the push to cut police budgets. Communities of color have borne the brunt of higher crime.
• Hispanics living on the U.S.-Mexico border are more likely to favor tougher border security measures that Republicans have championed.
  The recall of liberal school board members and a district attorney in San Francisco was fueled by disillusioned Asian-American Democrats.

Between the lines: Add the reality of growing inflation and worries of recession, and you see why Democrats are losing ground with a core part of their coalition.

• Wealthier Americans aren’t feeling the day-to-day hardship hitting the working class.
• This week’s Times/Siena poll found affluent voters care about gun control and abortion rights. Working-class voters are squarely focused on the economy.

The issues that seem to be all-consuming for Democrats these days, e.g. abortion, gun control, trans right, aren’t aligned so much with the priorities of black and Hispanic voters as they are with those of the faculty lounges. Indeed, the views of those constituencies seem to be more closely aligned with those of most Americans than they are with those of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. The more quotidian issues of public safety and inflation are more important to them. Contrary to what at least some progressives seem to think, most Hispanics think that we should be controlling access at our southern border more energetically. That stands to reason. The most recent immigrants are in competition for jobs with those who just preceded them and the increased flow makes it harder to secure better wages.

My own view is that if they expect the most crucial parts of their base to show up and vote Democratic they need to pay more attention to the needs of those voters rather than simply assuming that they will only vote for Democrats.

At FiveThirtyEight Geoffrey Skelley reviews why President Biden’s approval ratings are the lowest of any sitting president of recent memory. He considers three reasons:

• 75% of Americans think the country is on the “wrong track”.
• The economy, particularly inflation.
• The president hasn’t pushed issues that matter to some of his most important enough, particularly climate change and debt forgiveness.

Here’s a snippet from his article:

As it currently stands, polls suggest that Republicans as a whole are more enthusiastic than Democrats about the upcoming election, although most recent surveys asking that question predate the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision establishing abortion as a constitutional right. This is an issue that could be motivating for Democrats this fall, and in fact, we’ve already seen some movement toward Democrats in our generic ballot average. It remains to be seen, though, whether that’s a short-term blip or a more long-lasting change in the electoral environment, and of course someone who is unenthusiastic can still vote — an unenthusiastic vote counts the same as an enthusiastic one.

Nevertheless, the historical relationship between presidential approval and the performance of the president’s party in midterm elections should scare Democrats. Generally speaking, the worse a president’s approval is, the more seats that party tends to lose in the House.2 Thinking back to that first chart, three of the four presidents preceding Biden saw their party lose at least 40 House seats in their first midterm election. The exception was Bush, whose party actually gained six seats in the 2002 election, but he had an unusually high approval rating at the time of his first midterm. That’s still notable, though, because it means it has taken that kind of anomaly to see the president’s party suffer fewer losses — or even achieve gains — in House elections.

In the very first sentence of his Wall Street Journal op-ed Karl Rove identifies some more:

Democratic midterm prospects are bad not only because of inflation, a slowing economy, rampant crime, the southern border crisis and culture clashes.

Unmentioned is the bad taste left by our leaving Afghanistan. It is possible to do the right thing in the wrong way and IMO evacuating Afghanistan is a prime example of that. Personally, I don’t blame Biden so much for that as I do three consecutive presidents who set unrealistic goals for Afghanistan and committed verbally to withdrawing from Afghanistan without actually doing it. I think they should have withdrawn from Afghanistan or levelled with the American people, telling them we had no intention of leaving Afghanistan. That attitude is probably one of the many reasons they were president and I’m not.

Meanwhile, one of the things that puzzled me yesterday has been cleared up—President Biden’s trip to the Middle East. I now think it indicates that the 2024 campaign for president has begun and Biden is running. There’s nothing like foreign receptions by cheering crowds and being received by foreign heads of state to make a president look presidential. It’s not quite “wag the dog” but it’s in that general direction.

BTW, I have one bit of unsolicited and no doubt unwelcome advice to offer President Biden. His approval rating goes up when he’s out of the public eye and goes down when he makes a big policy speech. He might consider that the key to winning in 2024 might be to maintain a low profile. That pertains to his wife, one of his main surrogates, as well.

While I disagree with the conclusion that Simon Watkins draws in his post at OilPrice his observations about China’s reactions to the sanctions imposed on Russia are interesting. His conclusion is that China is preparing to attack Taiwan. I doubt it but I’ve been wrong before.

Here are his key observations:

urning a profit is unlikely to be top of President Xi’s agenda in invading Taiwan, but ensuring China’s energy security in such an event will be. However, as analyzed in-depth in my new book on the global oil markets, China has long been strengthening its energy security both through its expanded activities in the Middle East connected to its ‘One Belt, One Road’ program and through its broadening and deepening of its energy links to Russia. Direct infrastructure links between China and Russia have been extremely extensive in recent years, with recent notable examples of this being, in the oil sector, Rosneft signing an US$80 billion 10-year deal to supply the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) with 100 million metric tonnes of oil over the period (slightly over 200,000 barrels per day). In the gas sector, at almost the same time, Gazprom signed a 10 billion cubic meters per year (bcm/y) deal to supply gas to CNPC, adding to another supply contract between the two companies signed in 2014 – a 30-year deal for 38 bcm/y to go from Russia to China. This, in turn, is part of, and augments, the ‘Power of Siberia’ pipeline project – managed on the Russian side by Gazprom and on the China side by CNPC – that was launched in December 2019. In recent weeks, though, China has been buying massive extra quantities of Russian oil, on top of the levels previously required in its regular usage pattern. According to industry data, China bought a record quantity of Russian crude oil in May, increasing purchases by around US$1 billion more than in April, to just under US$7.5 billion, which is more than double the amount China bought from Russia in the same period last year, making Russia China’s largest supplier of crude oil.

Crucially as well, for both China and Russia, China has long seen increased internationalization of its renminbi currency as a fitting reflection of its growing status in the world, and trading between the two countries in their local currencies has increased dramatically in the past few years. Back in September 2018, the chief executive officer of Russia’s Novatek, Leonid Mikhelson, said that Russia had been discussing switching way from US$-centric trading with its largest trading partners such as India and China, and that even Arab countries were thinking about it. “If they [the U.S.] do create difficulties for our Russian banks then all we have to do is replace dollars,” he added. At around the same time, China launched its now extremely successful Shanghai Futures Exchange with oil contracts denominated in yuan (the trading unit of the renminbi currency). Such a strategy was tested initially at scale in 2014 when Gazpromneft tried trading cargoes of crude oil in Chinese yuan and roubles with China and Europe.

I think that China is just insuring itself against sanctions similar to those imposed on Russia being imposed on China, regardless of why they’re imposed. That seems only prudent to me. Said another way if the U. S. had intended for China to makes these moves it could hardly have done so more effectively than by imposing them on Russia.

The lesson here is that we may have blown our only shot at applying such sanctions. They won’t be nearly as effective if we try a second time and they haven’t been extremely effective the first go round.