Reminding us of the incident, 46 years ago, when John Rhodes, Hugh Scott, and Barry Goldwater advised President Nixon that there weren’t enough votes in the Senate to prevent his being impeached, Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn wonders when Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan will face his “Nixon moment”:

So when are leading Illinois Democrats going to have their Nixon Moment with veteran House Speaker and state Democratic Party chair Michael Madigan?

Last month, Commonwealth Edison agreed to pay a $200 million fine after federal prosecutors charged the utility with orchestrating a bribery scheme that provided jobs, contracts and other perks to allies of “Public Official A,” whom the feds identified as the speaker of the House.

Madigan, who controls the movement of legislation through his chamber, has not been charged and has categorically denied wrongdoing, saying in a statement that he “has never made a legislative decision with improper motives.”

He may never be charged, of course. He’s famously cautious in what he says and how he acts, and the documents in the ComEd case quote one of his close associates agreeing with the nod-and-wink expression, “that which is understood need not be mentioned.”

Madigan may even have been oblivious to the slimy machinations going on all around him. More unlikely things have happened, though I can’t think of any off the top of my head.

It will almost certainly take years for the truth to come out.

But right now, Madigan is a Nixonian albatross on his party. His adjacency to scandal threatens every Democratic lawmaker in a close race this fall, and the idea that the imposition of graduated state income tax rates would put more money under Madigan’s control is animating opposition to the Democrats’ so-called Fair Tax amendment. To pass, that amendment needs approval from a supermajority of voters in November.

I don’t believe it will ever happen. For one thing there probably aren’t three clean people in the Democratic leadership and certainly none with the courage to confront Speaker Madigan with the bad news. He knows where the bodies are buried. They’d rather let the speaker take the Illinois Democratic Party down with him than change things as they are.

William Galston has a plan for winning the war against COVID-19. From his most recent Wall Street Journal column:

In March, President Trump rightly labeled the fight against the pandemic a “war.” But we are losing this war. By one estimate, more than 400,000 Americans are infected each day. Only about 60,000 are detected through tests. Many of the rest are asymptomatic and can infect others, risking an exponential spread of the disease. After falling in the late spring, the daily death toll is rising again.

We have relied on poorly coordinated efforts among 50 states and thousands of local jurisdictions to solve a national problem. No one is ensuring the nationwide availability of testing supplies. Many states lack adequate testing capacity, resulting in delays that render the results useless. Outbreaks in each state have been traced to other states, distant and contiguous. The virus does not respect borders.

To win this war, it must be fought the way the U.S. has fought other wars—as a united nation. The president must lead the fight, and every battle starts with a plan. Here is the best plan I have heard so far, from scientists and business leaders brought together by No Labels, a bipartisan organization that I helped found.

The national goal should be testing every American once a week for four weeks. Those who test positive should quarantine for 10 to 14 days until they are no longer infectious. Americans and others arriving from abroad should be required to submit to the same testing and quarantine. Those who test negative could return to work, send children back to school, eat at restaurants, and attend events. They could do so with the confidence that everyone else at these places had tested negative. By the fall we could be on our way to snuffing out the pandemic in the U.S., saving lives and reopening the economy and society.

There’s a model for this idea. In March, the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT converted its lab into a Covid-19 testing facility that can perform 700,000 tests a week and in theory could do five times as many using pooled testing. This facility uses off-the-shelf, interchangeable instruments and supplies. It has a 15-hour turnaround time from receipt of a sample to notification of results, at a cost of $20 to $30 a test. It was converted from an existing lab in two weeks.

To reach scale, we would need to convert between 100 and 500 existing university or pharmaceutical-company labs to testing facilities. Each would require approximately 10,000 square feet of lab space, $10 million in equipment, and 200 employees working in shifts.

The testing strategy would begin with a shallow nasal swab that, unlike the much-feared deep nasal swab, is painless and easy to administer. It would be conducted in a nationwide network, including pharmacies, other retailers and doctor’s offices. After the swabs are placed in bar-coded tubes, their shipment to testing centers would be coordinated by the National Guard in partnership with private airlines and shipping companies. After tests are completed, results would be sent in coded form, electronically whenever possible, to the individuals tested.

The cost of this unprecedented effort is difficult to estimate, but some line items are clear. Setting up the centers would cost between $1 billion and $5 billion. Each of the four rounds of weekly tests would cost an additional $6 billion to $9 billion. Transport costs would be negotiated with private shipping companies, with an additional allocation for the Defense Department. Some provision for information systems would be needed as well.

Only Washington can provide the funding, leadership, coordination and legal architecture this plan would require. It would call on America to summon the spirit we displayed at the outset of World War II. The alternative is waiting for a safe and effective vaccine to become widely available in the U.S. Meanwhile, social life will be disrupted, many schools won’t reopen, and the economy will be hobbled. A national war against this insidious disease is the better course.

The problem with this plan is neither in coordination nor cost. It is that it is wishful thinking. We can’t even get people not to drive drunk. We don’t even know who is in the country. How could we determine that everyone has been tested? There will inevitably be a large underclass, tens of millions of people or more, among whom SARS-CoV-2 will continue to circulate. Those people will be serving you in the restaurants, cooking for you, cleaning up after you, cutting your lawn, tending your children. As long as that’s the case no such plan can ever work, not even at the margins.

I find myself largely in agreement with the editors of the Washington Post, unsurprising since they’re now saying much what I’ve been saying all along:

VACCINE OPTIMISM is understandable in these days of anxiety about the virus. Almost every day, there are upbeat reports about a vaccine starting a new phase of clinical trials, and the worldwide research effort spans technologies old and new. Surely a safe and effective vaccine must arrive before too long — as promised, in “warp speed,” such as later this year or early next?

A dose of realism would be prudent. Vaccines are truly remarkable medicine and have proved effective in stopping diseases such as measles and polio. But they are not simple to discover, manufacture or distribute. Many research efforts fail. The first clinical trial for an HIV vaccine was in 1987, and there still isn’t one, despite much hard work. As Carolyn Y. Johnson reported in The Post on Monday, once a vaccine is found to be safe and effective, the process will be at the beginning, not the end. Vaccines must be manufactured to exacting standards. Distributing the vaccine fairly to people in the United States and around the world will strain health networks, the supply chain, public trust and global cooperation. This may take months or, quite likely, years.

Another reason for caution is that the vaccine timeline depends on human physiology. It may take a while to build up the antibodies to fight the novel coronavirus. A second inoculation may be required. Immunity could be short-lived or partial. Also, it is possible that the first vaccines to win approval may not be perfect, and not work all the time on everyone.

That last is one area of disagreement. I think that a vaccine whose benefits are extremely short-lived or, worse, unpredictable in its prophylactic effect would actually be worse than no vaccine at all.

They conclude:

Let’s suppose it is summer of 2022, and there is still no vaccine. What would we wish we had done today? Let’s do it.

Okay, what would that be? And should we be preparing for a vaccine at all? My speculation is that of materials and personnel personnel will be the graver bottleneck. Maybe I’m overestimating that since nowadays every Walgreens is offering flu vaccinations.

I think we should be preparing for the eventuality that a practical vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 is never developed. What would we be doing in that case? I don’t know but I know what we should not be doing. We should not be threatening to close down businesses due to a rising test positivity rate as long as the risk of a system failure in the health care system is nominal as is the case in Illinois.

I wish more people recognized the reality of what Sarah Zhang says in her piece in The Atlantic on the most likely scenario for COVID-19:

The coronavirus is simply too widespread and too transmissible. The most likely scenario, experts say, is that the pandemic ends at some point—because enough people have been either infected or vaccinated—but the virus continues to circulate in lower levels around the globe. Cases will wax and wane over time. Outbreaks will pop up here and there. Even when a much-anticipated vaccine arrives, it is likely to only suppress but never completely eradicate the virus. (For context, consider that vaccines exist for more than a dozen human viruses but only one, smallpox, has ever been eradicated from the planet, and that took 15 years of immense global coordination.) We will probably be living with this virus for the rest of our lives.

I have thought that since January. The conclusion I draw is not that we’ll be in lockdown forever but that we’ll accept a higher level of risk. And that will be true whether a vaccine is developed and effective treatments are found or not.

It’s also why I think that elected officials like Illinois Gov. Pritzker, who has been warning about the need to tighten up on the restrictions he’s (illegally) imposed despite the reality that there are no signs that COVID-19 is threatening the health care system but there’s loads of evidence that the restrictions are hurting people financially, are either fools, cowards, or malicious. I don’t think he’s a fool.

I encourage you to read Andrew Sullivan’s essay on the “roots of wokeness”. Here’s its peroration:

My view is that there is nothing wrong with exploring these ideas. They’re almost interesting if you can get past the hideous prose. And I can say this because liberalism can include critical theory as one view of the world worth interrogating. But critical theory cannot include liberalism, because it views liberalism itself as a mode of white supremacy that acts against the imperative of social and racial justice. That’s why liberalism is supple enough to sustain countless theories and ideas and arguments, and is always widening the field of debate; and why institutions under the sway of Social Justice necessarily must constrain avenues of thought and ideas. That’s why liberalism is dedicated to allowing Ibram X. Kendi to speak and write, but Ibram X. Kendi would create an unelected tribunal to police anyone and any institution from perpetuating what he regards as white supremacy—which is any racial balance not exactly representative of the population as a whole.

For me, these theorists do something less forgivable than abuse the English language. They claim that their worldview is the only way to advance social progress, especially the rights of minorities, and that liberalism fails to do so. This, it seems to me, is profoundly untrue. A moral giant like John Lewis advanced this country not by intimidation, or re-ordering the language, or seeing the advancement of black people as some kind of reversal for white people. He engaged the liberal system with non-violence and persuasion, he emphasized the unifying force of love and forgiveness, he saw black people as having agency utterly independent of white people, and changed America with that fundamentally liberal perspective.

When he says “liberalism” he means Enlightenment values not progressivism. I’m not as optimistic as Mr. Sullivan. He sees what’s presently emerging is liberalism clawing its way back from the pit. I don’t believe that accommodation with the “woke” is possible. Those of us who continue to believe in Enlightenment values can submit to the authoritarian tribunals which will police the new and ever-changing cacophony of “wokeness” or we can betray Enlightenment values by suppressing the “woke”. There is no living with them; there is no middle ground and they cannot leave us alone. Allowing others to believe as they wish is an Enlightenment value.

There is a video of George Floyd’s arrest making the rounds that begins somewhat earlier than previous videos. In this video Mr. Floyd is saying “I can’t breathe” before he is arrested and before a chokehold applied to him. The claim has been made that Mr. Floyd had taken fentanyl, one of the likely side effects of fentanyl overdose is cessation of breathing, and that’s what killed him.

Does it make any difference? I don’t believe that a single individual who has taken to the streets in protests could be convinced by any evidence that Mr. Floyd was not killed by the Minneapolis police in the course of an arrest.

It would certainly make a difference to the impending court cases. I have little doubt than an acquittal will result in another round of demonstrations and riots.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post ornithologists Gabriel Foley and Jordan Rutter argue that birds named for individuals, i.e. “eponymous” names for birds”, should be renamed:

When we name an animal species after the person who first made it known to science, we are effectively honoring that person’s contribution. Unlike a name describing a bird’s color or habitat, there is nothing “natural” about honorific names: They imply a choice, and we can also choose not to honor the person whose name has been affixed to the species. Bachman’s sparrow, Townsend’s warbler, Bendire’s thrasher, Hammond’s flycatcher, McCown’s longspur — these are all examples of North American common bird names. For the bird community — ornithologists, bird-watchers, conservationists and more — these names are collectively referenced every day. For many, the esteem inherent in these names is unconsciously overlooked, and comfort lies in their familiarity.

Yet these honorific names — known as eponyms — also cast long, dark shadows over our beloved birds and represent colonialism, racism and inequality. It is long overdue that we acknowledge the problem of such names, and it is long overdue that we should change them.

I would bet that 9,999 of 10,000 readers who hear the words “Townsend’s warbler” would have no idea it was named for someone with a reprehensible past. As long as consciousness-raising exercises are eschewed, it seems to me the harm is very, very limited.

Oral language allows us to exchange information with each other. Written language allows us to exchange information across time and space. Eliminating names that have been accepted and standard for years, in some cases for centuries, necessarily means that everything written about them in the past would become incomprehensible.

This loss would not be limited to a handful of obscure bird names. It would be applicable to hundreds of thousands of names of birds, animals, plants, physical phenomena, place names, mathematical and philosophical terms, and every field of human knowledge. The gain from such renaming would be minor; the loss would be incalculable.

⁶And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

⁷ Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.

⁸ So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.

⁹ Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal have got this story wrong:

Can police keep citizens safe from lawless mobs if they have to worry about being safe in their own homes? That’s the question this week in Seattle, after a group of what Police Chief Carmen Best characterized as “aggressive protesters” targeted her home in Snohomish County Saturday night.

In a letter to the City Council, Chief Best says her neighbors kept the protesters from trespassing on or engaging in other illegal behavior “despite repeated attempts to do so.” She urged the council to “stand up” and denounce the behavior before “this devolves into the new way of doing business by mob rule.”

The chief is right. A big reason demonstrations have turned illegal and violent in so many U.S. cities is because progressive mayors and city councils have looked the other way or egged them on. Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan cheered on demonstrations for weeks and called a police no-go zone “a summer of love.” But on June 28 protesters marched on her home. Two days later the mayor issued an executive order to clear up the occupied zone, and the next morning it was carried out.

or, at least they haven’t figured out what actually happened. What actually happened is that Chief Best’s neighbors engaged in vigilante law enforcement. That’s what happened in the much-publicized incident in St. Louis’s West End in which firearms-waving homeowners pushed back against “demonstrators”.

When law enforcement stops enforcing the law it will not be replaced by nothing. People will defend themselves and each other. We call that “vigilantism”.

IMO elected officials must enforce the law. Otherwise we’re just one itchy trigger finger away from a major incident and each jurisdiction in which law enforcement is left to vigilantes makes that more likely.

Updated

At least one of the “neighbors” was visibly armed.

When the local government doesn’t say “no”, it’s up to us to say “no”.

said one of the interviewees.

I found Joel Kotkin’s critique of California in City Journal interesting:

What the state’s minorities need is not less policing, or systematic looting of upscale neighborhoods, or steps to reimpose affirmative action, or kneeling politicians; they require policies that empower working-class citizens of all races to ascend into the middle class.

The state’s leaders should prioritize improving middle-class jobs and opportunities, replacing indoctrination with skills acquisition, and encouraging local businesses. Considering the nature of California politics, this can happen only if minority Californians demand something different.

but puzzling in some respects. For example, I couldn’t reconcile this claim:

Based on cost-of-living estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, 28 percent of California’s African-Americans live in poverty, compared with 22 percent nationally. Fully one-third of Latinos, now the state’s largest ethnic group, live in poverty, compared with 21 percent outside the state.

with this table from KFF although both Mr. Kotkin and the KFF claim to be referencing the same source.

Mostly I see what has happened in California as the logical culmination of the foolish policies we’ve been following for most of the last half century. A prosperous white upper middle and upper class, impoverished mestizos and blacks. A lot like Mexico, in fact.

What struck me about the piece is that his prescription would be bitterly opposed by the “build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone” (BANANA) environmentalists who appear to wield more influence in California than anywhere else in the country. The state’s zoning requirements, high energy prices, and skepticism about manufacturing work synergistically to push housing costs up and wages for most people down.