Following up on their complaint about Democrats’ lying about President Biden’s condition, the editors of the Washington Examiner follow up with a complaint about lies with respect to the climate:
Climate change is real. The world’s average temperature is rising. It is just not rising as fast as Democrats claim and is not causing the damage Democrats say it is.
Take Biden’s statement about heat, deaths, and extreme weather events. Not one claim in that paragraph is true. In the U.S., extreme cold kills twice the number of people as extreme heat. Internationally, the numbers are even more stark, with extreme cold claiming nine times as many victims as extreme heat.
Turning to “extreme weather events,” hurricane frequency and intensity have not increased since 1900. Floods have not increased in frequency or intensity since 1950, and tornadoes have not increased in frequency or intensity since 1950 either.
I wish they were devoting that kind of attention to how the Republicans are lying as well.
My own view about climate change is that I think that climate change is a risk but not an issue by which I mean that is something which needs to be considered but is not an emergency. Furthermore, there is a fundamental flaw in the notion that we can combat global warming due to carbon emissions by buying solar panels and batteries from China. Chinese manufacturing is beyond our ability to regulate and the sad reality is that there’s a direct causal relationship between increasing Chinese manufacturing and increasing carbon emissions.
but a little later in the column she states pretty clearly why President Biden’s inner circle is undoubtedly giving him exactly the opposite advice:
The race for the Oval today is between two delusional, selfish, stubborn old guys, and that’s a depressing state of affairs.
As for those D.C. careerists surrounding Biden who a) hid his true condition; b) gaslighted the press for focusing on what they called a nonexistent age issue; c) shielded the president from the truth about his cratering chances of winning; and d) seem to have put their self-interest first?
One way or the other, they’ll probably be out of their jobs soon.
What she doesn’t do and to the best of my knowledge no one else has either, is explain how we got in the position of having a choice between “two delusional, selfish, stubborn old guys”, one of whom has been rejected by the country once already and the other was rejected multiple times by his own party before becoming its standard-bearer.
BTW there’s bad news for Kamala Harris if President Biden stays in the race and re-elected. According to the Social Security Administration actuarial table, he’s likely to be alive at the end of his second term. What condition he will be in in 2028 I can only speculated on. And the full depletion of the Social Security Trust Fund should take place during a second term of his successor whoever that might be.
At The Hill Jeff Greenfield does his level best to explain the balloting rules of the Democratic National Convention and how, although unless he withdraws President Biden is likely to be renominated, almost anything can happen:
Particularly in an open convention, some early procedural votes could make all the difference. They could pave the way for Vice President Kamala Harris to quickly seize the nomination, for instance, or allow for a broader, more competitive contest. But either way, the rules will matter. (In what follows, I have drawn deeply from the wisdom of Josh Putnam, whose FHQ site is absolutely required reading).
The TL;DR version is it’s complicated.
At present I hold two seemingly contradictory opinions. First, I think it is very likely that President Biden will not withdraw, resign, or otherwise voluntarily remove himself from the 2024 election. Second, I think the optimum outcome for the Democratic Party would be if he did.
As we can see, a modest Biden lead in Virginia would actually be consistent with a roughly 3-point Trump lead in the popular vote. While Biden’s current polling deficits in the “classic” swing states (specifically the Michigan/Pennsylvania/Wisconsin trio) are not necessarily as large as they are on the furthest right column on Table 1, the fact that we’re having a serious conversation about whether he could lose Virginia is telling. Aside from Virginia, other stronger Biden 2020 states, such as Oregon, Colorado, and New Mexico are within single digits.
We are not directly addressing down-ballot races here, but this is not the kind of Electoral College situation where Democrats could be plausibly expected to win either the House or the Senate majority. It may also be that Democrats are being caught at a low point right now—but, it must be reiterated, Biden was trailing before the debate anyway. So maybe he could pull some of the bluer states back from the brink as the election got closer, but the really important states at the center of the electorate are quite possibly a different story.
The pressure to step aside as a candidate has been rising to intolerable levels, especially over the past few days.
Democrats fully expect polls after the Republican National Convention to show a possible blowout that could bring down Democrats in Congress, too.
“His choice is to be one of history’s heroes, or to be sure of the fact that there’ll never be a Biden presidential library,” one of the president’s close friends told us. “I pray that he does the right thing. He’s headed that way.”
Yesterday’s AP poll, showing nearly two-thirds of Democrats want Biden to withdraw from the presidential race, ricocheted through the White House and Congress.
The Fair Model, updated with the BLS’s estimate of real per capita GDP growth, predicts that if he remains President Biden will not receive a majority of the popular vote. To remind you the Fair Model is neither a political analysis nor does it reflect opinion polls. It is an econometric model which has shown pretty fair accuracy over the last half dozen or so election cycles. Importantly, it also predicts that the Democratic share of the popular vote will actually decline if President Biden does not run.
That may provide us with an opportunity to see if my prediction, that complaints about the undemocratic character of the Electoral College will evaporate should Trump receive a larger percentage of the popular vote than Biden, holds true.
I have not watched the Republican National Convention. Did I miss anything?
National conventions have undergone substantial evolution over the years. When I first became politically aware, they actually held some significance although most of the real decisions were made in the proverbial “smoke-filled rooms”. They might have been on the radio or televised but the action was always behind the scenes. As primary elections have assumed more significance the national conventions have increasingly appeared anticlimactic, performative, and superficial.
What little I have read in the media about the Republican convention could well have been written a week or a month ago except for brief passages referring to the assassination attempt. Sadly, I’m not sure those reporting and writing for the major media outlets are capable of reporting what happened rather than telling you what to think about what happened.
The first thing it’s important to understand about the Red Sea is that very little traffic through it has a U. S. origin or destination. It is used primarily to ship goods to and from Europe not the United States. It does support some traffic to the United States from India. Why, then, are we involved in pursuing the Houthi pirates impeding traffic in the Red Sea at all? Simply put because
To support our European allies and
Historically, maintaining free transit of the seas has been considered a vital U. S. interest. Some have maintained it is a component of our grand strategy.
U.S. naval forces are operating at a pace not seen since World War II as they try to block threat after threat. The U.S. Navy aircraft carrier strike group on station in the area for months returned over the weekend, and the sea service says the ship group conducted more than 750 engagements while deployed. The strike group expended 135 Tomahawk missiles, premiere land attack weapons that the services haven’t been buying in sufficient quantities.
In other words, the U.S. is burning through missiles with no apparent larger plan to restore order to the region. The obvious answer is to punish the Iranians who arm the rebels, but the Biden Administration hasn’t.
I think the editors are mistaken and I’d like to explain why.
Stopping the Houthi attacks is well within our capability but we are choosing not to do so. We have the military capability of rendering the areas of Yemen from which the attacks are emanating unhabitable. I suspect the reason is that we have decided that the cost in civilian lives is not proportional to the military gain.
Can anybody imagine the Department of Justice conducting an even-handed investigation of potential Secret Service lapses in the provision of security to Donald Trump in a presidential election year? I don’t believe it and I think that experience should lead us in that direction.
My reaction to New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez’s conviction on a variety of charges was pretty simple. Luc Cohen reports at Reuters:
NEW YORK, July 16 (Reuters) – U.S. Senator Bob Menendez was convicted on Tuesday on all 16 criminal counts he faced including bribery at his corruption trial in Manhattan federal court, completing the once-powerful New Jersey Democrat’s dramatic downfall.
Senior Democrats including U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and fellow New Jersey Senator Cory Booker quickly called on Menendez, who has served in the Senate since 2006 and avoided conviction in a prior 2017 corruption trial due to a deadlocked jury, to resign from the chamber.
My reaction was one down, 99 more to go. Furthermore, I think that Majority Leader Schumer’s and others’ quick reaction was to avoid the scrutiny from spreading any farther. They’ve known that Sen. Menendez was corrupt for decades. Knowing about it and doing nothing about it is itself corrupt.
The Senate does not have the power to eject Sen. Menendez from the body cf. Powell v. McCormack, but it does have the power to exclude him from committees and generally ostracize him. Sen. Menendez holds powerful positions on multiple Senate committees. Why?
Speaking of things I’m not interested in, I wanted to make an observation on Nikolai G. Wenzel’s review of Batya Ungar-Sargon’s book, Second Class, at the American Institute for Economic Research. I have no interest in Ms. Ungar-Sargon’s book and will never read it. Life is only so long. However, there’s something I think that Dr. Wenzel dismisses too quickly. Consider this passage, which in many ways is the meat of his review:
Finally, the US does not have the socioeconomic mobility it could have. But the country is not as static as Ungar-Sargon paints it: over the past 50 years, the share of national income earned by the lowest four quartiles has fallen slightly (by .7 percent to 2.6 percent) – but national income has tripled. This means that the bottom 80 percent now earn a slightly smaller piece of a significantly larger pie. The increased income – from innovation, trade, immigration, globalization – hides another key phenomenon: the drop in the consumption gap. The late great economist Steve Horwitz explained that “poor Americans today live better, by…measures [of consumption] than did their middle-class counterparts in the 1970s.” Ungar-Sargon flippantly swats away the fact of lower prices.
I think that Dr. Wenzel is doing some flippant swatting of his own here. I’ll just accept his numbers at face value. .7 percentage points of 2.6% is more than a quarter. That’s not falling slightly. That’s a significant drop.
Furthermore, the average Congressional district held 470,000 people in 1970 but 761,000 now. So what? (I hear someone ask.) The significance is that a Congressional campaign is much more expensive than it used to be in real terms which in turn means that major political contributors are more important than they used to be. That in turn makes it only natural that they are more likely to have the Congressman’s ear.
Finally, there is a yawning abyss between a typical person’s income and that of the ultra-rich. As F. Scott Fitzgerald put it so well a century ago, the rich are different from you and me. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos live in a world completely different from mine and have different priorities than I do just as I live in a different world with different priorities than the typical person living at 70th and Stony Island does but Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos have the ears of presidents, House members and senators so their interests and priorities have more weight than mine do.
The media outlets are buzzing with Donald Trump’s pick of Ohio Sen. J. D. Vance as his running mate. It’s not particularly interesting to me since I won’t vote for Trump in any event but I did have a couple of comments. First, Sen. Vance is a great pick if one of the objectives is for the VP candidate to fill a roles that VP candidates have traditionally filled: lightning rod. He will unquestionably draw and, possibly, relish a lot of criticism. He’s better suited for that than Mike Pence was.
Second, it certainly indicates that Mr. Trump is doubling down on the outsider thing. As a first term senator at the beginning of his term, Vance is still an outsider and his reputation is one of a critic of elites and the “Deep State”.
Unfortunately, President Trump is also doubling down on something I have criticized him for in the past: neither he nor his running mate understand how the federal government functions, how the Congress functions, how to get things done in Washington, or the constraints of the law. Maybe Vance will have more intellectual curiosity than Trump but I wouldn’t bet on it.
If it takes place, the vice presidential debate should be interesting. Vance is a pretty articulate guy which is not something you can say of Vice President Harris. Even her supporters mock her “word salad” style of speech.
