Russia Russia Russia 

 Natalia Veselnitskaya, Magnitsky Act, Russian hackers, Putin’s tentacles, you name it…

 Forum: Will Media Outlets Like CNN Ever Practice Journalism Again? 

 Amerisclerosis

 Michael Brown: Punishment 
 

 CNN’s White House propagandist claims Trump delivered ‘white America’ speech in Warsaw. 

 Everybody wants you — flattering and overwhelming 

 Baltimore: Clueless 

 Face the Nation: US Ambassador Nikki Haley on Trump and Putin’s G-20 meeting 

 Testing Tyranny, Part 4 

 [VIDEO] Being a millennial: “self-responsibility is a form of cruelty” 

Russia is a regional power. China is a regional power. India is a regional power. The regions in which they are regional powers overlap. Some level of conflict is inevitable. Each of them has territorial disputes with the others.
A low level shooting war between China and India has been going on for decades.

The U. S. is a global power. Our interests are not the same as Russia’s, China’s, or India’s. We will have points of agreement with each of them and points of disagreement with each of them. We have no territorial disputes with any of them. We should work with each when it makes sense for us to do so and oppose each of them when it makes sense for us to do so.

We have no permanent alliances or enemies only permanent interests.

This stuff should be obvious. Apparently, it isn’t.

As you are probably aware that other than some mopping up the Iraqi army has retaken Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, which has been occupied by DAESH for most of the last two years. There will be months of cleanup, disarming IEDs and other booby traps, and years even decades of rebuilding.

How big a story is this? I’m inclined to think it’s a “dog bites man” story as opposed to the “man bites dog” story of DAESH’s taking Mosul in the first place, something that was only made possible by the national government’s incredible ineptitude.

It will have implications. Iraq is likely to be less interested in the Syrian border than otherwise might be the case; DAESH will devote more resources to southwest Syria and its notional capitol.

First, go over and look at the RealClearPolitics average of polls on Donald Trump’s approval rating. It’s stable at 40%.

It’s not worsening, it’s not improving. It’s stable at 40%. His floor of approval seems to be at about 38%.

Much of that approval is probably among Republicans. Indeed, if Gallup is to be believed his approval rating among Republicans is 85%. Do the math.

He’s not going to be impeached. The Republicans are likely to hold the House through the midterm elections. What we will probably see for the next three years is three years of depressing sameness. Where is there a basis for agreement with this dichotomy of views?

Frankly, I doubt that many progressives will take Kay Hymowitz’s City Journal review of progressive takes on reconciliation with the white working class seriously. Maybe I’m being unkind but I think that for every progressive like Kevin Drum or Michael Tomasky there are three who are just waiting for white working people to die.

Consider this:

A more complex analysis of liberal elitism comes from Joan Williams, a feminist law professor whose best-known previous book is Unbending Gender. In White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, Williams takes her fellow liberal professionals to the woodshed for their indifference to the hard-knock realities of working-class life and for their blindness to the shortcomings of their own cosmopolitan preferences. Married to the Harvard-educated son of a working-class family, Williams is astute about the wide disparities between liberal and white working-class notions of the meaning of work, family, community, and country. One of her proposals for solving class cluelessness is a conservative favorite: reviving civics education.

As long as progressives don’t recognize that today’s feminism is far too separated from most women’s lives and experience there will be a problem. Too much about more women in the professions and boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies and not nearly enough about the problems faced by lower income women. Lower income women have always worked outside the home. My maternal grandmother and her mother both worked, the latter as a cook for a wealthy home. My sympathy for that last is with the wealthy family. She was by most accounts an awful cook.

The emphasis should be on marriage, how women are treated in marriage, preserving intact families, working conditions for women in blue collar workplaces, and greater economic growth and employment. The real women’s issues are archetypally conservative ones.

May I kvetch about a minor thing? The slug on Catherine Rampell’s Washington Post column is “The left as well as the right are spurning our shared democratic values.” With a lead-in like that I couldn’t bring myself to read the column. If something is spurned by both the left and the right, by definition it is not shared. How about saying “historic values”, “legacy values”, or just “past values”?

I think that the decline of literacy has lent itself to an increasingly agonistic style of expression, fewer appeals to reason, and increasing tribalism. Our problem is not that the extremes are spurning previously shared values. The problem is that the values are no longer shared.

We have been treated to a remarkable spectacle. A representative of public companies owned or with substantial stakes held by some of the richest men in the world writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal asking for exemption from antitrust laws so that they can maintain their business model:

The problem is that today’s internet distribution systems distort the flow of economic value derived from good reporting. Google and Facebook dominate web traffic and online ad income. Together, they account for more than 70% of the $73 billion spent each year on digital advertising, and they eat up most of the growth. Nearly 80% of all online referral traffic comes from Google and Facebook. This is an immensely profitable business. The net income of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, was $19 billion last year. Facebook’s was $10 billion.

But the two digital giants don’t employ reporters: They don’t dig through public records to uncover corruption, send correspondents into war zones, or attend last night’s game to get the highlights. They expect an economically squeezed news industry to do that costly work for them.

The only way publishers can address this inexorable threat is by banding together. If they open a unified front to negotiate with Google and Facebook—pushing for stronger intellectual-property protections, better support for subscription models and a fair share of revenue and data—they could build a more sustainable future for the news business.

But antitrust laws make such coordination perilous. These laws, intended to prevent monopolies, are having the unintended effect of preserving and protecting Google and Facebook’s dominant position. The digital giants benefit from legal precedent against collective action that has a chilling effect on publishers. Yet each newspaper or magazine on its own has only limited negotiating power.

Is that really their problem? Over the last decade total advertising spending has been flat in nominal dollars at around $200 billion, see here and here. The brief summary of what has happened is that newspaper advertising has declined by about $15 billion while online has grown by a little more than $15 billion. That sounds like the newspapers’ problem is slow private sector economic growth not Google and Facebook. I would also suggest that industry consolidation is a bigger problem for newspapers than Google and Facebook. National grocery chains are less likely to turn to local newspapers for advertising than small local grocers are.

To put the complaints of the president of the News Media Alliance into some perspective, very few of the 2,000 newspapers the organization claims to represent have any reporters. Most of them subscribe to wire services. Clearly, the pleading is on behalf of a very few media conglomerates, namely the New York Times and Washington Post. The Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim owns a major stake in the Times while Amazon’s Jeff Bezos owns the majority stake in the Post. One can’t help but speculate that these presumably savvy investors didn’t realize that these particular investment were actually very expensive hobbies.

Writing at Forbes Tim Worstall is skeptical of what’s being proposed:

When the US newspaper industry has slimmed down to that sort of level and also still can’t make a buck then perhaps something might need to be done.

There is also of course this other manner that we might want to consider. My fellow journalists think that having a large and vibrant newspaper industry is oh so terribly important to the citizenry of the country. By their actions the citizenry seem to be less convinced of this. I tend to think the people should get what they want, not what they’re told they should desire. No to the antitrust exemption therefore, let the newspaper industry adapt to the changing economic geography, don’t prop it up.

I think there’s good reason to be skeptical about the picture painted in the op-ed and not just for the reasons that Tim cites. The decline in newspaper ad revenues began more than a half century ago, long before Google and Facebook existed. What has actually happened is that media conglomerates have failed to change their business models even as the assumptions of those models failed.

The ad revenues of small local independent newspapers have declined much less in percentage terms than those of major newspapers. In some cases they’ve even increased. What I think has actually happened is that the subscription model for digital media has failed which has reduced online ad revenues for the digital outlets of major newspapers.

Instead of looking for exemptions from antitrust the Times and the Post might think less about being national journals and focus more on their local markets. That’s where the the ad revenues come from.

There’s another difference between small, independent local newspapers and media conglomerates. Media conglomerates have grown by taking on debt. It might just be the case the newspaper industry is not one in which carrying heavy debt loads is a good business decision. It isn’t the job of the federal government to indemnify investors against losses due to their own bad businesses decisions, Chrysler and GM notwithstanding.

Rather than repeat my old joke about the difference between conviction and commitment, I’ll just launch into a review of the reactions of Japan and South Korea to North Korea’s escalating provocations. If the editorials in the Japan Times and Korea Times are at all representative of those reactions, they are deeply conflicted to say the least.

North Korea must be stripped of the illusion that the U.S. can be decoupled from Japan and South Korea, its two Northeast Asian allies. Close coordination between Washington, Tokyo and Seoul is critical to the realization of that goal. Pyongyang’s dream is to divide our three nations; we must work harder to ensure that North Korea does not miscalculate or exaggerate its capabilities.

The existential threat posed by North Korea motivates virtually all South Korean presidents to visit the U.S. on their first overseas trip. South Korean President Moon Jae-in was no exception. Last week, he journeyed to Washington to meet President Donald Trump and ensure that their two governments are in sync in dealing with Pyongyang. Although problems may blossom over time, their meeting was, by all accounts, a success. While those two countries alone cannot solve the North Korean problem, a meeting of the minds is a necessary condition for success.

[…]

Trump tweeted after their dinner that the two men had a very good meeting, while Moon said in a joint appearance that he and Trump had forged a friendship of “deep mutual trust.” Speaking in the Rose Garden, Trump said that the U.S. “will always defend our allies.” According to their joint statement, the presidents “affirmed their commitment to fully implement existing sanctions and impose new measures” on North Korea. Moon also offered support for the Trump administration’s policy of “maximum pressure and engagement.”

How that is translated into policy and how that balance is struck are unclear. For all the smiles, Moon and Trump see the North in fundamentally different ways. Moon would like to reopen the Kaesong Industrial Complex, a North-South economic project that has been shuttered since February 2016, which would undercut U.S. efforts to force Pyongyang to negotiate. Trump’s insistence that North Korea is a regime that “has no respect for human life” and “no regard for the safety and security of its people or its neighbors” undercuts the logic of engagement that Moon has championed.

President Moon Jae-in’s peace proposal to North Korea in Berlin, Germany, indeed sounds hollow, considering the palpable tension on the Korean Peninsula following Pyongyang’s recent test-firing of what it claims to be an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

It is hard to miss a striking contradiction between Moon’s peace initiative and the joint condemnation he made at the same venue together with U.S. President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. So are the decades of efforts to deal with this pariah state that keeps coming back to haunt the world.

Now the world is preoccupied with this isolated state’s latest blackmail but, if the past is any guide, it will pass and a relative lull will ensue. Despite loud alarms, the latest rocket is short of a working ICBM that can deliver a miniaturized nuclear payload through the stress of re-entry through the atmosphere.

Both of these reactions strike me as containing hints of desperation. When will North Korea’s nuclear-armed ICBM program be a threat? When San Francisco is in ashes?

It seems to me that Japan and South Korea should be taking more active steps rather than merely counting on the U. S. to handle the situation for them. As I’ve written before if I were in South Korea’s shoes I’d think I’d be doing a lot of digging right about now.

The Economist has joined me on the anti-German bandwagon:

There is much to envy in Germany’s model. Harmony between firms and workers has been one of the main reasons for the economy’s outperformance. Firms could invest free from the worry that unions would hold them to ransom. The state played its part by sponsoring a system of vocational training that is rightly admired. In America the prospects for men without college degrees have worsened along with a decline in manufacturing jobs—a cause of the economic nationalism espoused by Mr Trump. Germany has not entirely escaped this, but it has held on to more of the sorts of blue-collar jobs that America grieves for. This is one reason why the populist AfD party remains on the fringes of German politics.

But the adverse side-effects of the model are increasingly evident. It has left the German economy and global trade perilously unbalanced. Pay restraint means less domestic spending and fewer imports. Consumer spending has dropped to just 54% of GDP, compared with 69% in America and 65% in Britain. Exporters do not invest their windfall profits at home. And Germany is not alone; Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and the Netherlands have been piling up big surpluses, too.

For a large economy at full employment to run a current-account surplus in excess of 8% of GDP puts unreasonable strain on the global trading system. To offset such surpluses and sustain enough aggregate demand to keep people in work, the rest of the world must borrow and spend with equal abandon. In some countries, notably Italy, Greece and Spain, persistent deficits eventually led to crises. Their subsequent shift towards surplus came at a heavy cost. The enduring savings glut in northern Europe has made the adjustment needlessly painful. In the high-inflation 1970s and 1980s Germany’s penchant for high saving was a stabilising force. Now it is a drag on global growth and a target for protectionists such as Mr Trump.

That isn’t true only of Germany. No developed country should have as high a current account surplus as Germany’s. China at least has the excuse of the many millions still in poverty. Germany doesn’t have such a complaint.

What should Germany do? Either the government, businesses, or consumers should spend more. It should import more. It should not use the same currency as Greece or Romania. It should pay for its own defense. Don’t expect any of those things any time soon.