In an op-ed in the Washington Post George P. Shultz proposes an interesting strategy:

Adopting a carbon dividend approach would pay huge dividends for the global climate, the U.S. economy and U.S. leadership in the world.

Our carbon dividend strategy has four interrelated elements that account for its strength: a gradually rising and revenue-neutral carbon tax; carbon dividend payments made equally to all Americans, to be funded using all the carbon-tax revenue; rollback of costly command-and-control regulations that were implemented because the environmental costs of carbon fuels have not been incorporated into their price; and border adjustment to ensure a level playing field and U.S. competitiveness.

From my point of view it’s just missing one thing: progressivity. The “carbon dividends” paid to those with the lowest incomes should be highest, decreasing until no dividends at all are paid to the highest income earners. If my calculations are correct and carbon emissions increase geometrically with income that’s the only way to produce presumably desired effect.

CNN has proclaimed Republican Karen Handel the victor over Democratic tyro Jon Ossoff in the race to replace Tom Price in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District:

Atlanta (CNN)Republican Karen Handel defeated Democrat Jon Ossoff in a high-stakes special election for a Georgia House seat on Tuesday, denying Democrats their first major victory of the Donald Trump era.

Handel bested Ossoff by 5 percentage points in the most expensive House race in history.
It was a much closer margin than the 20-plus point wins typically posted by former Rep. Tom Price — whose departure to become Trump’s health and human services secretary created the vacancy.

An astonishing $55 million was spent on the election, mostly by Democrats and much of it provided by outside groups. Consider this graph, helpfully provided by the New York Times, carefully:

Note that the total money raised and spent is a lousy predictor of the outcome but that the money raised in Georgia is a pretty good one. Democrats managed to narrow the lead but didn’t win. To state the obvious: that isn’t enough.

Democrats need to rediscover basic retail politics.

• Present a candidate. Karen Handel is an experienced, seasoned politician, known in the district. Jon Ossoff has never held elective office and doesn’t even live in the district.
• Have issues and an agenda. At Vox Matt Yglesias suggests:
  

  One thing they might want to try is developing a substantive policy agenda to run on. They came close this time, and they’ll just need to put forth an attractive package for voters in the 2018 midterms.

• Think local. Stop trying to nationalize everything. People are more likely to turn out and vote about the issues that touch them the most which are overwhelmingly local.
• Build a grassroots organization and support.

It will take sustained effort and attention but it’s the only way to win.

One final thought. Question: who benefited from all of the money that was spent losing the run-off election? Answer: television, consultants, and Democratic operatives. Follow the money.

There is no generally accepted definition of terrorism but the factors typically mentioned in definitions usually include:

• Unlawful
• Use of violence or intimidation
• Against civilians
• With political objectives

Webster’s definition is “the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion”.

Hence my question. Was the guy driving his van into a group of people coming out of a mosque in Finsbury Park in North London and shrieking “I want to kill more Muslims” committing an act of terrorism? He’s apparently being charged with terrorism.

I don’t believe it is terrorism because there are no indications it had the political objectives associated with a terrorist attack. I also don’t think the guy was crazy. I think he was angry.

Here’s the thing. I don’t think that the attacks in Westminster, Manchester, or London Bridge were terrorist attacks either because I don’t think they were intended to produce political results, at least not political results within the United Kingdom. I think that more than anything else they are intended to signal the virtue of the perpetrators to other Muslims, perverse as that may sound, although they might have been expressions of anger, too, or hatred or just plain crazy.

So, that’s my question. Was it terrorism? If you think it was, please supply your definition of terrorism, taking care that your definition does not overflow its banks and drown any meaningful use of the word.

In his latest New York Times column David Brooks is baffled:

In retrospect Whitewater seems overblown. And yet it has to be confessed that, at least so far, the Whitewater scandal was far more substantive than the Russia-collusion scandal now gripping Washington.

There may be a giant revelation still to come. But as the Trump-Russia story has evolved, it is striking how little evidence there is that any underlying crime occurred — that there was any actual collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and the Russians. Everything seems to be leaking out of this administration, but so far the leaks about actual collusion are meager.

There were some meetings between Trump officials and some Russians, but so far no more than you’d expect from a campaign that was publicly and proudly pro-Putin. And so far nothing we know of these meetings proves or even indicates collusion.

Let me remove his confusion. The purpose of the investigation is not to determine the facts behind the allegation of collusion between the Trump Administration and the Russian government. That’s already been accomplished and there wasn’t any.

No, the purpose of the investigation is to provide covering fire for the DNC. Let me explain. Shortly after Trump’s election, the Clinton campaign advanced the notion of collusion between Trump and the Russian government as an explanation for Hillary Clinton’s loss, a loss that could easily be explained by the candidate’s incompetence.

But Hillary Clinton was foisted on Democratic voters by the Democratic National Committee. A group of unreconstructed Clintonistas, put in place for just this purpose, conspired and put roadblocks against any other candidate. That was the truth revealed by the leak of their emails and it is the truth that is unforgiveable.

Here’s how the editors of the Wall Street Journal report the story:

A bipartisan conceit has been that the U.S. can defeat Islamic State by ducking the larger conflict in Syria, and now we’re finding out that may not be possible. A U.S. F-18 jet shot down a Syrian bomber on Sunday to protect U.S. allies fighting Islamic State, and on Monday Russia and Iran threatened to target U.S. planes in response.

A U.S. fighter shot down the Syrian SU-22 plane after Syrian aircraft made their second bombing run against Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) allied with the U.S. near Taqba. The regime was clearly testing whether the U.S. would assist its allies on the ground. The U.S. needed to send a deterrent message or Syrian President Bashar Assad will continue to press his offensive across SDF-held territory.

The risk of escalation is real, but this isn’t a skirmish the U.S. can easily avoid. Mr. Assad and his allies in Moscow and Tehran know that ISIS’s days controlling Raqqa in Syria are numbered. They want to assert control over as much territory as possible in the interim, and that means crushing the SDF.

Here’s how I would report the facts:

• The U. S. has been illegally providing support to anti-Syrian government rebels.
• Russia has been legally providing support to the Syrian government.
• On Sunday a U. S. jet shot down a Syrian government bomber.
• On Monday in a colossal irony the Russians proclaimed a “no fly” zone over Syria.

Assad is not a good guy. We would be right in wanting him removed by legal means, i.e. diplomacy. We should not be trying to remove him by force of arms and in particular we should not be supporting Al Qaeda to get rid of him which is what we’ve been doing. We should doubly not want to foment direct military conflict with Russia.

Most of the news reports surrounding the arrest of a man for killing a 17 year old girl in Virginia do mention that the girl was a Muslim returning from a Ramadan event but they don’t mention that the man was an illegal immigrant from Salvador. They do mention that the crime is being treated as a road rage incident but they don’t say what sparked the incident.

Here’s my question: what’s relevant? I think that the girl was a Muslim is probably irrelevant if it was road rage but that the man’s immigration status was relevant because of the very high rate at which illegal immigrants commit crimes in the United States, particularly homicide. I can see reasonable arguments that both facts were relevant or that neither were.

I find that the reporting of this incident highlights how news reporting, even the reporting of local news, is being slanted to promote, even unintentionally, a political agenda.

As temperatures rise, both metaphorically and actually, and an increasing percentage of Americans believe that our political discourse is uncivil and that the differences between us are not reconcilable, people are starting to wonder how we started on the present path. E. J. Dionne blames it on Newt Gingrich. Others blame it on the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas or Robert Bork.

I think it started with the confirmation hearings of John Tower. John Tower was a long-time senator from Texas whom George H. W. Bush nominated to be his Secretary of Defense shortly after he was elected to the presidency. Senate Democrats loathed John Tower.

He was a Republican who had taken a seat that had been held by Democrats since Reconstruction and that they had believed belonged to them by right. By most accounts he was not a nice guy. He drank too much, chased women, and was a nasty political infighter. He was rejected by the Senate 47-53 on a straight party line vote—hard to justify as anything other than political retribution. It was the first time the Senate had ever rejected a newly-elected president’s nominee to the his cabinet.

Some say that Tower’s repudiation by the Senate was retribution for the Newt Gingrich-engineered ouster of Jim Wright as House Speaker but 1) there’s pretty good evidence that Wright was dirty; 2) it was the House, which has had dirty political infighting since there has been a House; and 3) the House never rejected Wright—he resigned. Jim Wright’s ethics investigation did lay down a marker for increasing Congressional partisanship and there are some that attribute George H. W. Bush’s election to the scandal surrounding Jim Wright. I think that’s a stretch.

The campaign against Jim Wright wasn’t shocking. The bitterness of the campaign against John Tower in the theretofore collegial Senate was.

I’ve written about the change in demographics of agricultural workers in the Southeast in the past here. While looking for something completely different I stumbled across this account at Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project of the changing demographics of agricultural workers in Washington State:

Until the late twentieth century, the majority of agricultural workers in Washington State were white, native-born, mostly single men under the age of 40. Therefore, early organizing strategies among farm workers usually involved male white migrant men. Organizing efforts that did involve people of color generally occurred separately from white labor struggles, as in the case of Filipino labor unionism in the 1930s.

What caused that change? What happened in the 1970s? I don’t think it was a surge in alternative employment opportunities elsewhere for white workers. Did farm work suddenly become distasteful? Or was there some other change?

Speaking of Whig history, consider this post from Robert Samuelson at RealClearMarkets on how the U. S. is suffering from the “post-industrial blues”:

The coming of the “postindustrial society” was first popularized by Harvard University sociologist Daniel Bell in a 1973 book by the same name. At the time, the U.S. economy was still dominated, symbolically at least, by heavy industry: steel, autos, appliances, aluminum, coal mining and oil production, among others. But Bell showed that the industrial sector was rapidly being overtaken by services — retailing, health care, travel, education, entertainment (including eating out), banking and other services.

The consequences of this upheaval would be many, Bell said. The record of scholars — or anyone else — in divining the future is dismal. But Bell is the exception; many of his predictions have actually come to pass. Among them:

Services would continue to expand their share of the economic pie. True. They now represent almost two-thirds of the economy, up from about half in the early 1970s.

The problem with looking at things that way is how horribly slanted it is. Consider the graph at the top of the page. Let me interpret it for you.

In real terms we’re producing more agricultural goods than ever and more manufactured goods than ever and both have maintained roughly the same share of the economy over the period of the last 70 years. In what sense are we “post-agricultural” or “post-industrial”? Only in the sense that we’re producing more agricultural goods with something between a third and a half as many workers as we did in 1950 and more manufactured goods with slightly over half the workers we did in 1950 while the number of people in the services sectors of the economy, particularly health care and education, continues to rise.

Millions of people continue to work in agriculture and millions in manufacturing. They’re both still important sectors of the economy from the standpoint of employment.

What does all of this “post-” talk mean? I think it means that people in the services sector are desperate to believe that they are on the “commanding heights of the economy” as Lenin put it. Perhaps the question we should consider is how many people would be employed in the services sector if we weren’t subsidizing it so ferociously?

My point here is not that services is not where job growth is. That’s obvious. It’s that we have and must have a diverse economy. We still farm. We still manufacture.