In his most recent Wall Street Journal column James Freeman remarks on the active life of Anonymous:

The government “whistleblower” seeking to overturn the results of an election in which more than 120 million Americans identified themselves and then voted is still insisting on anonymity. But a second anonymous federal employee is now blowing the whistle on the first one, alleging a problem with anonymous donations.

Gregg Re of Fox News reports:

A newly filed complaint to the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) alleges that the whistleblower whose allegations touched off House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry may have violated federal law by indirectly soliciting more than a quarter-million dollars from mostly anonymous sources via a GoFundMe page.
The complaint, which was filed last week and obtained by Fox News, alleged the donations from roughly 6,000 individuals “clearly constitute” gifts to a current intelligence official that may be restricted because of the employee’s official position pursuant to 5 CFR 2635.203 and other statutes. To date, the GoFundMe has raised over $227,000.
The first anonymous whistleblower’s lawyer tells Fox that the fundraising is being conducted legally. None of the attorneys involved is seeking to remain anonymous.

Another fundraising effort, which does not appear to be related, is the anonymous publication of a book critical of the President and purportedly written by a senior government official. “White House laughs off Anonymous book as old news” is the headline on a Politico story by Daniel Lippman.

None of which is really relevant to much of anything at all. I just find it amusing. Or frustrating. I guess that’s the cost of a 24-7 news cycle and social media. Never have so many done so much anonymously. It’s like everyone has become Sy Hersh.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal the present state of the march to impeachment in the House:

The impeachment case—after the failure of non-collusion with Russia and the non-obstruction of Robert Mueller —now boils down to President Trump’s dealings over a few weeks this summer with new Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. Readers who want to save time should read Mr. Schiff’s opening statement Wednesday because it offers the most damning interpretation of events.

Mr. Schiff’s claim is that Mr. Trump sought to “condition, coerce, extort or bribe an ally into conducting investigations to aid his re-election campaign.” He did this by having his Administration threaten to withhold U.S. military aid and deny an Oval Office meeting until Mr. Zelensky publicly announced a corruption probe. That sums up the case.

We are not defending Mr. Trump’s phone call with Mr. Zelensky or any plan to deny military aid. Sending his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to lobby Ukrainian officials outside formal U.S. diplomatic channels was dumb, ran counter to Mr. Trump’s own policy, and was ultimately self-destructive.

Mr. Giuliani was hardly quiet about his efforts, and it appears that most of the American bureaucracy had heard something about it. Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, opposed it. In the end the aid was delivered and Mr. Zelensky never began a corruption investigation. Like much else in this Administration, Mr. Trump’s worst impulses were blocked.

Mr. Schiff says this is still an impeachable “abuse of power” because criminals can be prosecuted if their attempts fail. But there is no underlying crime here. Democrats have given up calling it a “quid pro quo,” which must not have played well in polling. Instead they are using “extortion” and “bribery” to suggest a crime without citing any specific statute.

The Justice Department has already dismissed the bribery claim because there was no “thing of value” exchanged. And the extortion charge is absurd regarding U.S. aid to a foreign government.

or, said another way, despite the wall to wall news coverage and the many revelations very little has actually changed since my first post on this subject. It is likely that the House Democrats will vote to impeach and it is likely that the Senate Republicans will vote to acquit. A narrow majority of Americans think that Trump should be impeached. The House Democrats still need to define what it is that Trump did they are impeaching him for and do it in such a way that doesn’t undermine the ability of future presidents to negotiate with other countries. Most negotiations with foreign countries, involve the exchange of something tangible, e.g. monetary aid to the country, for something intangible, including things that may have political benefit for the president, e.g. fulfilling a campaign promise. They will be interesting articles of impeachment.

And I return to something I have mentioned from time to time. I would not be upset if the president were impeached but I would be upset if, in their zeal to impeach Trump, the Democrats fail to remove him from office and instead succeed in ensuring his re-election with the presidency itself as collateral damage.

What is the “fair share” of taxes that the rich should pay? For that matter who are “the rich”?

I’ll answer the second question. Those who earn incomes three standard deviations (the top 1%) from the median income are well-to-do. Basically, somebody who earns $400K/year isn’t rich—I would say “well-to-do”. Those who earn incomes four standard deviations (the top .01%) from the median income are rich. That varies considerably from state to state but it’s no less than $4 million per year.

I don’t have an answer for the first question. I don’t think “so we have enough money to do whatever we want” or “so that incomes are more equal” are good enough answers.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Dean Foods, the largest milk company in the U. S., has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy:

 Dean Foods Co. , the biggest U.S. milk company, filed for bankruptcy protection, a fresh setback to a U.S. dairy industry struggling against declining U.S. milk consumption and rising competition.

Dean and dairy farmers for years have grappled with consumers’ decadeslong move away from traditional cow’s milk, as beverage sales shift toward bottled water, fruit juices and milk alternatives made from soy and oats.

Within the milk business, Dallas-based Dean’s brands have struggled as grocery chains push low-price store brands and in some cases build their own milk plants, reducing their reliance on Dean. A recent jump in milk prices, up 10% over the past three months, boosted costs while Dean has worked to close plants and reduce expenses.

The company said it has secured financing to continue operations and pay employees while it discusses a potential sale to Dairy Farmers of America Inc., the largest U.S. dairy cooperative.

I think there is an important factor in this that goes unmentioned in the article: demographics. Worldwide about 65% of the people are lactose intolerant. In Northern Europe it’s 10%. In parts of Asia and Africa the prevalence is as much as 95%. In Mexico although lactose intolerance is not a major factor, dairy malabsorption is and fresh milk just doesn’t play the same role in the diet that it has over the last century in the United States.

So I suspect that demographic factors including changes in tastes play a role in the decline of the dairy industry. It isn’t the only one. Retail is having similar problems. They’ve needed to adapt to the changes in the population and it isn’t easy.

This development will be inconvenient for me. Dean’s has been the only readily available source for real cream. The stuff that’s generally sold in the stores as cream is actually ultra-pasteurized which won’t whip unless you add thickeners to it which they do. The results in cooking aren’t the same as those when you use real cream. I’ll need to hunt around for another source.

Update

This article from Canada echoes the point I made above:

The overall decline of all types of milk since 2009 may be the result of more dairy milk substitutes available to consumers, such as soy milk and almond milk. Some people are also choosing frozen desserts with alternative bases, such as coconut oil, instead of ice cream. This rise in dairy alternatives may also reflect demand from people who are lactose intolerant or who have specific dietary preferences

The consumption of dairy milk started to tank seriously in 2009 and nobody seems to have a really good explanation for it. It can’t really be explained by alternatives and it doesn’t seem to be related to prices.

In his latest Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead joins Emmanuel Macron in lamenting the state of NATO:

NATO is brain-dead. So said French President Emmanuel Macron in an interview published last week.

He’s not wholly wrong. A generation after the collapse of communism, the Western alliance that won the Cold War is adrift and confused. The trans-Atlantic gap is wider than ever, and the fissures between Brexit-minded Britain, Gaullist France and an increasingly powerful Germany seem to deepen and grow from year to year.

Mr. Macron’s description of Europe’s current predicament is brutally frank. With the U.S. losing interest in NATO (a shift Mr. Macron believes predates the Trump administration), Europe can no longer count on American protection as much as it did in the past. Intensifying U.S.-China competition leaves Europe high and dry; neither China nor the U.S. seems particularly interested in what Europe wants or thinks.

NATO’s problem is that it won a sweeping victory. This is what victory looks like. Now it’s time to move on. There are no permanent alliances.

But the Europeans have grown fat and lazy and they don’t want to take money away from their other pressing needs (like paying for health care) to build up their defense capabilities. We have never been part of “the West” because there is no “the West”. That was just a clever British propaganda ploy to encourage us to help them in the war against Germany. That war was concluded three generations ago. We have as much in common with Russia, as de Tocqueville pointed out, as we do with Germany and soon we may have very little in common with the England. The New World is the new world and like it or not we’re a part of it.

Today we enter the decisive phase of the impeachment process in the House of Representatives. If during this public hearings phase, the House Democrats succeed in convincing the people of the United States that President Trump should, indeed, be impeached and removed from office, it might sway enough Senate Republicans that he will not be acquitted. Otherwise there will be what will be seen as a purely partisan impeachment in the House followed by a purely partisan acquittal in the Senate.

Presently, a narrow majority of Americans and 87% of Democrats think President Trump should be impeached while only 7% of Republicans do. It should be kept in mind that 87% of Democrats is a narrower slice of the American people than the 71% of Democrats who thought Nixon should be impeached—the percentage of independents (who more closely mirror the American people as a whole) in the population has risen considerably while the percentage of either Democrats or Republicans has declined.

Update

Relevant: Politico reports that a recent poll finds 81% of Americans “unmovable” in their views on impeachment. We have, what?, three weeks to find out. It will be a long three weeks.

The sorry history of DACA that I posted yesterday did not include the role of the courts in the debacle. The editors of the Wall Street Journal have remedied that:

The Justices are being warned in DHS v. University of California Regents that if they don’t uphold lower-court injunctions, a million young adults who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children could be deported to a country of which they have no memory. We agree these young adults (often called Dreamers) should be able to remain in the U.S.

But this all started when President Obama, under the smokescreen of prosecutorial discretion, offered legal status and work permits if these adults came out of the shadows. That legal status was never secure, and states threatened litigation if Mr. Trump didn’t rescind Daca. In September 2017 Mr. Trump ordered the program wound down and gave Congress six months to protect Daca recipients with an option to renew work permits for two years.

The goal was to use the time to negotiate a political compromise, but Democrats walked away after lower courts enjoined the rescission and removed an impetus for compromise. The Dreamers have now become pawns due to a breakdown of the Constitution’s separation of powers that needs repairing.

If you can get what you want from friendly courts that are willing to torture the law into a pretzel to make it say what you want, why compromise? That’s why the Ninth and Sixth Circuits have higher rates of reversal than the other circuits—they’re the most political. We should be encouraging political compromise. The alternative is an ever more polarizing country at daggers drawn, perhaps literally.

The editors of the Washington Post have taken the same position as I have with respect to DACA and the Supreme Court case for which oral arguments will be heard today:

As the Supreme Court hears legal arguments Tuesday on the Obama-era policy that provided a reprieve from removal and gave job permits to hundreds of thousands of young unauthorized immigrants, and on the Trump administration’s 2017 attempt to rescind that policy, it’s worth remembering some history. Specifically, that members of Congress of both parties have been trying, and failing, to codify those very protections for so-called dreamers since nearly the turn of the century.

It was August 2001 when then-Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, a Utah Republican, and Sen. Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, introduced the Dream Act, outlining a pathway to legal permanent residency for migrants who entered the United States as minors, usually with their parents. Since then, repeated iterations of that measure have become enmeshed in the broader partisan impasse over immigration, even as lawmakers, including many Republicans, voiced ritual sympathy for dreamers.

and

But Congress could regain some respect by doing the right, the obviously right, thing before the court rules.

A narrowly-tailored bill could be brought to the floor and voted on quickly. I believe it would receive bipartisan support.

As you probably know November 11 was the day on which the armistice between the Allies of World War I and Germany was signed, leading to the end of the “Great War”. We have had several “wars to end all wars” since. That’s what it was called when I was a kid. It’s been Veteran’s Day since 1954.

I don’t have a problem with commemorating particular dates or individuals but I have reservations about broad sweep generic holidays like Memorial Day (originally commemorating those who died in the Civil War) or President’s Day (for nearly two centuries celebrated on February 22, the birthday of George Washington).

Should we still be celebrating Veterans Day and why?