I see that the editors of the Washington Post have caught up with me. Democrats shouldn’t fund the campaigns of extreme Republicans:

The country needs a broad coalition to defeat candidates who would help former president Donald Trump, or another politician in his mold, again attempt a coup in 2024. Which is why it is not just shameless, but dangerous, that Democrats have spent tens of millions this year promoting Republican extremists.

By boosting the primary campaigns of right-wing zealots running against more moderate Republicans, Democrats seek to set up favorable races for themselves, against less electable candidates, in the general election. The result is that Democrats have helped Trumpian fanatics move one step closer to offices from which they could directly threaten the nation’s democracy.

Tuesday night brought the latest example. State Sen. Darren Bailey (R) won the Illinois GOP gubernatorial nomination after Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) and the Democratic Governors Association spent $30 million to help him. The Trump-endorsed Mr. Bailey made his name by opposing covid-19 public health measures, pushing to evict Chicago from Illinois and favoring the banning of abortion in the state.

Even worse was Democrats’ use of this strategy in key presidential swing state Pennsylvania, where state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R), a leading 2020 election denier, last month won the GOP gubernatorial nomination. He spent a mere $370,000 on television ads. His Democratic opponent, Josh Shapiro, spent more than $840,000 on ads designed to help him win the Republican primary.

Note the numbers. Democrats were the primary sources of funding for some Republican candidates. Now they’d better hope like the dickens that President Biden’s declining popularity and inflation don’t drag whole Democratic tickets down and elect the candidates their funding got tapped in the primaries.

Update

It seems like I’m being confronted with picture of Darren Bailey grinning everywhere. The editors of the Wall Street Journal get into the act:

Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin, a moderate African-American from Chicago’s suburbs with a compelling biography, would have been the most formidable opponent. That’s why Democrats spent millions of dollars tearing him down. One ad accused him of “profiting by defending some of the most violent and heinous criminals” as a defense lawyer.

Mr. Bailey’s victory probably had less to do with Donald Trump than with his cultural conservative bent that resonates downstate. Former Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner supported abortion rights and won election in 2014 by campaigning against Chicago’s public-union machine. But he lost re-election in 2018 after cultural conservatives soured on him.

Mr. Bailey’s best but longshot bet is to avoid talking about divisive social issues like abortion and instead run against Illinois’s public-union mal-governance, which has resulted in some of the nation’s highest property taxes, soaring pension liabilities and an exodus of businesses and residents.

and conclude:

While many Republicans are ready to move on from Mr. Trump, Democrats find it politically useful to keep him around. It’s hard to take seriously their anguish about the condition of democracy when they gamble on helping Trumpian candidates. They’d better hope the GOP tsunami isn’t so large that it sweeps into office the candidates they claim are threats to democracy but whom they helped nominate.

Having no one to blame but themselves will not stop them from blaming Republicans, even if a lot of the voters who voted for these guys’ candidacies were one day crossovers.

I was going to post on Alan Blinder’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal examining the reasons for the present inflation. The TL;DR version is that none of it is Biden’s fault.

However, Barry Ritholtz’s post on the underpinnings of the present inflation is so much better IMO we should consider it seriously. Mr. Ritholtz attributes the present inflation to (roughly in descending order of importance):

1. Covid-19
2. Congress
3. President Biden CARES Act 3
4. President Trump CARES Acts 1+2
5. Consumers (overspent without regard to cost)
6. Consumers (shift to Goods)
7. Russian Invasion of Ukraine
8. Just in Time Delivery (supply chains)
9. Fed/Monetary Policy
10. Wages/Unemployment Insurance
11. Home Shortages
12. Semiconductors/Automobiles
13. Corporate Profit Seeking
14. Tax Cuts (2017) / Infrastructure (2022)
15. Crypto

which he follows with a more detailed analysis of each of the factors. I would quibble with some of his remarks but all in all I think he’s produced a very good first order approximation. Maybe better than a first order approximation.

Examples of some of my quibbles are that COVID-19 and the policy responses to COVID-19 aren’t the same thing and I would place the Fed higher in the list of contributing factors than Mr. Ritholtz does. I would also add two additional factors: appointing Jerome Powell as chairman of the Fed, for which President Trump must shoulder the blame, and re-appointing him, which is clearly President Biden’s fault.

Don’t get me wrong. I think that Dr. Powell is in a no-win situation. If he had acted with more alacrity he would have been blamed and not re-appointed but not having acted with alacrity he comes in for more blame for high inflation. Nonetheless he’s proving day by day that he’s not the right person for the job.

There are many things that Mr. Ritholtz gets right. Blaming Congress is always a safe bet. He correctly attributes at least part of the housing issues to the rent jubilee:

The Eviction Moratorium also plays into this; the unintended consequences may be that landlords are raising apartment rents in order to catch up on lost revenues from nonpaying renters from 2020-21.

I commend the entire post to your attention.

The best post I have read today is by Christopher Gage on the threat of racist babies. Here’s its kernel:

Home to noted intellectual Jeremy Corbyn and a sea of green-haired nutters fluent in gender studies and Mythical Melanin Theory, Islington is London’s answer to Berkeley. (Some say residents of Islington consume 98% of the world’s falafel, which might explain a great deal.)

Burping into the social Chernobyl that is Twitter, Islington Council shared a poster replete with helpful diagrams, skull measurements, and the typical physiognomies of these racist babies.

‘Children are never too young to talk about race,’ say those employed chiefly to talk about race. Apparently, two-year-olds ‘use race to reason about people’s behaviours,’ and to choose their playmates. By age five, ‘white children are strongly in favour of whiteness.’

“At three months,” it reads, “babies look more at faces that match the race of their caregivers.”

Perhaps those babies search for the face matching that of their parents because those babies are utterly dependent on their parents, their parents being the centre of their universe. When I’m poleaxed via whiskey and wine, I consult my memory for the colour of my front door and the rough location of the keyhole. So far, this method has proven 97% effective across my fifteen-year career as a semi-professional carouser.

Researchers neglected to divulge whether non-white children displayed racial bias.

I’d suspect such omission is telling. The answer is likely ‘yes,’ yet such findings prove unhelpful to those desperate to keep their ludicrous raison d’être in vogue amid a precipitous decline in those concerned with the density of another’s melanin.

Read the whole thing.

Here’s the TL;DR version of Thomas Hogan’s post at City Journal on the recent report of the U. S. Sentencing Commission. Meth prosecutions are up, immigration violation prosecutions are down (by a whopping 30%), and the recidivism rate for criminals convicted of firearms offenses is extremely high—70%.

None of those are what caught my eye. Consider this:

The Biden administration, already running behind in filling critical criminal justice positions, should consider filling the voting seats on the Sentencing Commission with clear-thinking, experienced nominees who can help reverse the surge of violent crime around the country. Meantime, the agency’s staff should keep recording and reporting the truth.

By statute the commission has a voting membership of seven and a quorum of four; there is presently one voting member serving.

Inaction is another way of implementing policy. IMO either the commission should be abolished or it should be brought to full strength.

My own views on sentencing are that I think that sentences tend to be too harsh and that the preferred policy should be to make arrest more certain, prosecution when there is a prima facie case very certain, and sentences less harsh. Present practices undermine the rule of law.

Consider the Cook Political Report’s assessment of the state of the races for the House of Representatives. They report 161 non-competitive Democratic House seats, 187 non-competitive Republican House seats, 13 likely Democratic seats, 12 “leaning” Democratic seats, 12 likely Republican seats, 11 “leaning” Republican seats, and 33 toss-ups.

Let’s assume that all of the likely and “leaning” seats break for their respective parties and the toss-up seats break 50-50. That would result in a House with 203 Democratic seats and 226 Republican seats.

However, midterm elections generally are at least to some extent referenda on the sitting president and President Biden’s approval/disapproval ratings are the worst of his presidency. If the toss-ups break 2:1 for Republicans that would mean 232 Republican seats and 197 Democratic seats.

The lower the president’s approval rating and based on previous experience the more likely toss-ups are to go to the Republicans and the more seats presently “leaning” Democratic will tend to break for the Republicans.

Democrats had best hope this isn’t a typical midterm election. Or that President Biden’s approval ratings improve soon. The present trend is not in the right direction for that.

Commentary 9n the developments of yesterday is presently dominated by the testimony before the Jan 6 Committee of a White House aide who reports President Trump’s egregious misbehavior on January 6 about which she was told by his Secret Service detachment. There are some rumors that his Secret Service detachment is preparing a formal refutation.

What did we learn? I learned nothing. I already thought that President Trump was not fit for the presidency by temperament or character. I never voted for him; I am no more likely to vote for him should he choose to run again in 2024.

I also learned nothing about the January 6 Committee. I already thought is was focused, as President Clinton might have said, like a laser on battlespace preparation for 2024. The proceedings did nothing to change that perception. I sincerely wish that President Trump and President Biden would both announce (even better: jointly announce) that they will not seek the presidency in 2024. Maybe that will put us out of our misery or, more accurately, subject us to different misery.

The news about Ukraine was largely about Russian missile attacks on a Ukrainian shopping mall containing a thousand of more shoppers. The Russians quickly retorted that the shopping mall had long been deserted and was next door to a facility in which advanced weaponry received from NATO was being stored with overflow storage in the abandoned mall. This morning I’ve already seen a rebuttal of that counter in the BBC.

I haven’t learned anything from that, either. I continue to think the Russians are completely capable of attacking a shopping mall. And I still believe that we cannot take any reports on that war at face value—everybody is lying when it suits their purposes.

And speaking of NIMBYism, Anne Bradbury’s post at RealClearEnergy is largely an appeal for the Biden Administration to adopt an “all of the above” energy policy. She characterizes present policy as “peak energy absurdity” but I don’t think that’s correct. I think it’s nearing peak NIMBYism: oil imported from the Middle East does not emit carbon while oil produced in the U. S. does.

She does produce some interesting quotes in defense of her position:

• “Let me answer your question very directly: President Biden remains absolutely committed to not moving forward with additional drilling on public lands.” (Gina McCarthy, April 2022).
• “We have to put the industry on notice: You’ve got six years, eight years, no more than 10 years or so, within which you’ve got to come up with a means by which you’re going to capture [emissions], and if you’re not capturing, then we have to deploy alternative sources of energy.” (Secretary John Kerry, April 2022).
• “Oil prices are decreasing, gas prices should too…. Oil and gas companies shouldn’t pad their profits at the expense of hardworking Americans.” (President Joe Biden, March 2022)

I not see how those quotes can be reconciled with the claim that the Biden Administration is doing everything it can to increase domestic oil and gas production.

In his Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead muses on the predicament in which Germany finds itself:

As recently as 2020, almost the entire world agreed with the smug German self-assessment that Germany had the world’s most successful economic model, was embarking on the most ambitious—and largely successful—climate initiative in the world, and had perfected a values-based foreign policy that ensured German security and international popularity at extremely low cost.

None of this was true. The German economic model was based on unrealistic assumptions about world politics and is unlikely to survive the current turmoil. German energy policy is a chaotic mess, a shining example to the rest of the world of what not to do. Germany’s reputation for a values-based foreign policy has been severely dented by Berlin’s waffling over aid to Ukraine. And German security experts are coming to terms with a deeply unwelcome truth: Confronted with an aggressive Russia, Germany, like Europe generally, is utterly reliant on the U.S. for its security.

Can you guess who did not agree with “the smug German self-assessment” he describes? Yes, that would be me. I made my assessment by speaking with actual Germans in Germany and several things were always obvious to me:

• German policies were and always have been guided by German national interest.
• One of those policies continues to be what it has been for 150 years—German domination of Europe.
• Those policies are deeply mercantilist, relying on running a substantial trade surplus.
• The Germans are deeply resentful of depending on the U. S. for security but they’re more than willing to let us keep paying to defend them as long as we’re willing to do it.
• Germany’s relationship with China was contingent on running a substantial trade surplus with it.

I also find Germany’s energy policies completely baffling. It is NIMBYism run riot—apparently, they believe that carbon emissions in China stay in China and clear-cutting old growth Brazilian forests to make compressed wood pellets to burn in German stoves is carbon neutral.

Now all of their assumptions are falling apart at once. The very large trade surplus they ran for so long with China has largely evaporated. It was predicated on Germans building factories in China and then on the Chinese building their own factories using German machine tools. Now the Chinese are making their own machine tools and in some years Germany actually runs a trade deficit with China. Their gamble on relying on Russian oil and gas has lost which puts their energy policy in a shambles I think they’re trying to straddle in the hopes that the problems with Russia will evaporate before Germany actually needs to spend anything.

Not only do the Germans continue to be dependent on the U. S. for security but they are coming face-to-face with being economically dependent on the U. S. and dependent on the U. S. for energy as well. I’m not sure how it’s all going to work out.

“Direct democracy” refers to the form of government in which all policy initiatives are determined by direct popular vote. The closest approximation to that of which I am aware is in Switzerland where, although there is in fact a bicameral legislature, all matters of substantial scope are approved by popular vote. H. L. Mencken called that “mobocracy”. The Founding Fathers were deeply distrustful of it. In Federalist 55 James Madison wrote:

In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates; every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

Our present government is blithely referred to as a “democracy” but in reality it is quite distant from a democracy and becoming more so all of the time. That’s not merely because small states have equal representation to large ones in the Senate as averred by many of those who complain about “rule of the minority” but, as Ezra Klein recently astutely observed, our political parties are dominated by “those who staff and donate to them” and they are more radical than most party members.

So, why not direct democracy? I think the reason can be inferred from American opinion on the issue presently dominating news broadcasts, abortion. Consider Gallup’s determination going back 50 years:

The results are even more stark when the question is phrased more specifically. Fully 71% of Americans think that third trimester abortions should be illegal.

Given that perspective complaints about our undemocratic system ring hollow. Those making such complaints don’t mind minority rule as long as they’re in the minority that rules.

That brings me to my own principle complaint about our present system of government. Neither extremists who call themselves Democrats nor extremists who call themselves Republicans represent me or anything that approximates my views and my views are demonstrably closer that of most voters than either one of those groups. How democratic is it, what good does it do me to vote when all of the candidates share similar views and those views are little like my own?

If you cannot tell from the contents of this post, I have just returned from voting in Illinois’s primaries. I left a lot of blanks.