Like, I think, many Americans I am very discouraged about politics right now. Far too many Republicans persuaded themselves that Donald Trump was someone he wasn’t. Now the Democrats are just as eagerly persuading themselves that Kamala Harris is someone she isn’t. If she is elected, expect a rerun of the major media outlets avoiding covering the White House critically as assiduously as possible while defaming any outlets that do.

I plan to avoid writing any posts in opposition Vice President Harris but I won’t write any in support of her, either.

I wanted to make an observation about the Venezuelan election but rather than try to work it into a longer post I’ll just make the observation

Was Hugo Chavez not democratically elected? His election was certified as free and fair by international observers including the Carter Center. I would submit that when you elect a military dictator to the presidency of your country, you should anticipate that it is likely to be the last free and fair election your country will hold. Complaining that Maduro cheated is about 25 years too late.

Let’s turn to the United States. What do Americans, particularly the U. S. press expect us to do? Our choices are to intervene presumably forcefully whenever any country makes what we consider a bad, undemocratic decision whether that decision is made by democratic means or not or accept that other countries will occasionally do stupid, undemocratic things.

If you choose the former, congratulations, you’re an imperialist. If you choose the latter, bad things will continue to happen. There’s a corollary to our acceptance that people in other countries sometimes make bad choices. We shouldn’t subsidize those bad choices. When you subsidize something you get more of it. Letting Venezuelans cut into the line for immigration is a subsidy.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Bjorn Lomborg summarizes my views pretty accurately:

There is ample evidence that man-made emissions cause changes in climate, and climate economics generally finds that the costs of these effects outweigh the benefits. But the net result is nowhere near catastrophic. The costs of all the extreme policies campaigners push for are much worse. All told, politicians across the world are now spending more than $2 trillion annually—far more than the estimated cost from climate change that these policies prevent each year.

Scare tactics leave everyone—especially young people—distressed and despondent. Fear leads to poor policy choices that further frustrate the public. And the ever-changing narrative of disasters erodes public trust.

Telling half-truths while piously pretending to “follow the science” benefits activists with their fundraising, generates clicks for media outlets, and helps climate-concerned politicians rally their bases. But it leaves all of us poorly informed and worse off.

It’s easier for me to suggest some things we shouldn’t do than to tell you what we should do. We shouldn’t cripple our own economy to fend off a catastrophe that always seems to recede into the future faster than mitigation measures can be implemented. We shouldn’t be buying as many manufactured goods from China or India as we are let alone buying more. We shouldn’t impose a carbon tax. It is regressive—it falls most heavily on those least able to pay.

Probably the cleverest approach to reducing carbon emissions was Elon Musk’s: make an all-electric vehicle chic, stylish, and expensive enough to be a good status symbol. That encouraged the wealthiest to reduce their carbon emissions and they are responsible for a disproportionate amount of emissions.

With the assassination of the Hamas commander in Iran and the death of Hezbollah’s top military commander in an airstrike in Beirut it seems that the war in the Middle East is expanding. It is hard to imagine that neither the Iranians nor Lebanese Hezbollah will retaliate.

I also find it hard to believe that anyone will think the Jewish Israelis are the problem The attack by Hezbollah in the Golan Heights which killed 12 Druze children would seem to have put that to bed. For more on the Druze see here or here.

The Druze are an ethnic or ethno-religious minority that are genetically mostly Arabs, speak Arabic, and practice a religion that is an offshoot of Islam, distinct to the Druze. Other Moslems generally consider them heretical. They live in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel. Sir Richard Francis Burton, one of the founding figures in serious Western study of the Middle East called them “the only men in Palestine worthy of the name”. The Druze themselves have rejected retaliation in their name.

But this is the point: they are not colonizers by anyone’s standards. They have as much right to be where they are as anyone in the region. The attack on the Druze confirms that Hezbollah is composed of murderous radical thugs. Hostis humani generis.

In my view the United States should maintain a low profile with respect to this escalating conflict. Given a choice among Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, or the Israelis our preference should be the Israelis but that does not mean that our interests are perfectly aligned with theirs. We should be willing to sell arms to the Israelis but that should be the limit of our military support. I would further suggest that anyone demonstrating in the streets here in the U. S. in favor of Hamas are either our enemies or have been cruelly misled.

We cannot assume the role of interlocutor among these groups: we are too closely associated with the Israelis to be considered impartial.

I honestly have no idea what Donald Trump was trying to accomplish by agreeing to be interviewed by the National Association of Black Journalists here in Chicago yesterday. Consequently, I have no idea whether it was worthwhile or whether he accomplished his objective or not. Here’s how the editors’ of the Wall Street Journal’s read the tealeaves:

Half of politics is showing up, even for a roomful of critics. That’s the best way to think about Donald Trump’s appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention in Chicago on Wednesday.

In her opening question to Mr. Trump, Rachel Scott from ABC News told Mr. Trump that “a lot of people” didn’t think he should be invited. “You have pushed false claims about some of your rivals . . . saying they were not born in the United States”; told “four Congresswomen of color . . . to go back to where they came from”; and “attacked black journalists” saying the questions they asked were “stupid and racist,” Ms. Scott said.

Mr. Trump called the question “rude” and “disgraceful,” but he had to know this wouldn’t be a love-fest. Mr. Trump also said, oddly, that Kamala Harris was “always of Indian heritage” and he “didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now she wants to be known as black.”

The main thing I can think of that he might have accomplished is that he showed he’s willing to talk to a hostile audience.

I think I’ve mentioned that I do all of the cooking and all of the shopping here at Chez Schuler. It was already becoming harder pre-Covid but it has become much harder post-Covid.

I have quite a few grocery stores fairly close to me:

2 blocks away

Whole Foods

Less than 2 miles away

Happy Foods
Mariano’s

Less than 5 miles away

Jewel
Fresh Farms
Costco
Aldi

Unfortunately, none of them carries everything we buy and they each have their strengths and weaknesses. I would do all of my shopping at my beloved Happy Foods but it doesn’t carry everything we use and there are better places for produce. Pre-Covid its meat was matchless. I believe they changed suppliers during Covid and it just hasn’t been the same. Still, Happy Foods has an amazingly broad selection considering its small footprint.

Mariano’s (acquired in 2015 by Kroger’s) has been declining in quality since its acquisition and the traffic getting there is daunting. I go there because my dogs’ prescriptions come from their pharmacy and they have a few things that Happy Foods doesn’t carry. With the Kroger’s-Albertson’s merger it’s going to get tougher. Our Mariano’s location will close. I don’t know what will replace it.

I rarely go to Jewel. It’s more than twice as far away as Mariano’s and has about the same selection. Like Mariano’s I don’t much care for its produce or meat and poultry.

Fresh Farms is sort of an odd duck. It has an amazing selection of ethnic specialties and its produce is probably the best of any grocery near me. Oddly, it carries Costco-branded items. I find competing with a retailer for stuff I buy at Costco troubling. If you’re looking for goat, Fresh Farms is your place.

Costco is Costco.

Whole Foods is Whole Foods. Its produce is pretty good but limited in variety. Its meat and fish are fine but price-y.

I went to an Aldi’s once about forty years ago. I doubt I’ll go back.

The bottom line is that I need to go to two or three places to get the things we need. I can get the milk my wife drinks at Happy Foods or Whole Foods. I can only get the string cheese she likes at Mariano’s. I get the skyr my wife likes at Whole Foods or Mariano’s. I get the laundry detergent we use at Happy Foods, Mariano’s, or Jewel. I get our dishwashing detergent, paper towels, and toilet paper at Costco. I get the breakfast cereal my wife likes at Happy Foods, Mariano’s or Jewel.

My impression is that Whole Foods, Jewel, and Mariano’s have been focusing increasingly on store-branded items. Items I used to be able to get from several different places I can now only get from one or need to obtain via shopping online.

The present name-calling that passes for presidential campaigns is a good example of why I have been so quiet lately. First, Republican VP candidate Vance calls Kamala Harris a “childless cat lady”. Then Hillary Clinton calls Donald Trump and J. D. Vance “creepy” and “weird”. Both names (“childless cat lady” and “weird”) are unkind but, let’s admit it, Donald Trump is weird from his hair plugs and comb over to the spray tan (“Orange Man”) to his vestigial Eastern seaboard prep school honk. About Mr. Vance I couldn’t comment. I haven’t read his book or listened to him and am not particularly interested in doing so. And Kamala Harris is childless. Whether she likes cats I couldn’t say.

But is this the rhetorical level at which our political campaigning should be taking place? I recognize it’s not new and rather tame compared to some epithets that have been hurled going back 200 years. It was crude then and it’s crude now. Can’t we be better than this?

Are there no issues at stake?

For what? Maybe forty years? My impression has been that Seymour Hersh gets his scoops from barflies in the watering holes of Washington, DC. This one may be no different but at the Post Millenial Libby Emmons is reporting that Sy Hersh’s most recent claim is that what we’ve been hearing from the White House and major media outlets has been baloney:

A new Substack out from Seymour Hersch indicates that former President Barack Obama and VP Kamala Harris, now presumptive Democrat nominee for president, threatened sitting President Joe Biden with the potential invocation of the 25th Amendment if he didn’t drop out the presidential race and cede that spot to the veep. This would mean that not only did they force Biden out of the race, but that the Democrats know full well that Biden isn’t fit to serve out the rest of his term, but are comfortable letting him continued as a figure head if it serves their efforts to retain power for the party.

Biden engaged in a debate with former President and GOP nominee for president Donald Trump on June 27. It was so bad that almost instantly Democrat leaders and pundits were looking for a way to get Biden off the ticket. They could see that there was very little chance that Biden, in his diminished state, coudl beat Trump at the ballot box. The party elite were aghast and worked hard both in public and private to oust Biden. While much of that played out in leaked rumor, speculation, it turns out, per Hersch, that what was going on behind the scenes was a kind of coup, complete with threats from the Obama Kamala team.

It’s a sad commentary when a presidential address to the nation carried on multiple networks has about the same level of credibility as the scuttlebutt in DC bars. Mister, we could use a man like Walter Cronkite again. Maybe he was no more credible than the present crop. He just didn’t have anybody fact-checking him.

Speaking of the White House I found the “Fact Sheet” produced there an interesting exercise in giving the impression of doing something while actually doing nothing interesting:

In the face of this crisis of confidence in America’s democratic institutions, President Biden is calling for three bold reforms to restore trust and accountability…

Here are the three bullet points:

1. No Immunity for Crimes a Former President Committed in Office
2. Term Limits for Supreme Court Justices
3. Binding Code of Conduct for the Supreme Court

Each of those would require a constitutional amendment. How likely is any of those amendments to be achieved in the foreseeable future?

I did have a couple of questions. Why term limits for Supreme Court justices but not for members of the House or Senate. There are presently members of each house who have held their seats longer than any Supreme Court justice presently sitting. And why not a “binding code of conduct” for members of Congress? Or for the president?

Update

At Axios Stephen Neukam and Andrew Solender report that President Biden did not confer with congressional Democrats before making his Supreme Court reform proposals:

The White House didn’t consult Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin and other key congressional Democrats on President Biden’s proposals to dramatically overhaul the Supreme Court, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: The lack of coordination with Capitol Hill signals that Biden’s SCOTUS proposals amount to more of a pre-election messaging push than a legislative imperative.

So it looks like my hipshot reaction was right.