I think that the argument that Howard J. Shatz and David A. Shlapak are making at RAND, in favor of the next president’s maintaining the global U. S. security and economic regime is a noble one:

There is no doubt this system has been good for the world, producing 70 years without a great power war—the longest such stretch in modern history—a standard of living in the West that is the highest ever achieved, and billions lifted out of poverty around the globe.

But less remarked upon is the fact that it has also been good for America.

Carefully built and tended following the destruction and horror of World War II, the system has kept America out of devastating foreign wars in Europe and Asia. It has enabled Americans to attain lifestyles that the last generation that fought a global war could never have imagined as they suffered horrific casualties at Iwo Jima or wondered if they would survive the Battle of the Bulge.

Even less remarked upon is that the global system was designed by and made in America. The United States built it and has sought to sustain and expand it, joined in partnership with a voluntary association of a large and diverse array of the richest, freest, most advanced countries in history, all of which find it in their interest to work with the United States. Because of it, the United States enjoys a remarkable position of power and possibilities.

I just wish they’d do a better job of it. For example, where’s the cost-benefit analysis? Few would doubt that keeping the peace is good. I don’t think it’s as clear that our paying $600 billion a year is more effective than it would be if we paid $400 billion a year.

I also think they should be considering the run-on effects. Does our shouldering as much as we do of the bill have the dual effect of building U. S. support for dubious adventurism by our notional allies as well as encouraging them to engage in it? I’m thinking in particular of the war in Yemen.

Also, doesn’t who pays the bills and who reaps the rewards make a difference? At this point the top 1% of income earners pay something between a third and half of federal taxes but they also receive by far the greatest proportion of incremental income—at least half and maybe a lot more. When the foundations of the present U. S. security and economic regime were laid, ordinary Americans received a lot more of its benefits than they do now.

I concur with the four steps identified by Cass Sunstein in his op-ed at Bloomberg for ending the stalemate in American politics. They are:

1. Civility now.
2. Compromise, early and often.
3. Identify a set of attractive proposals from “the other side,” and champion them.
4. Ease up on the process for confirming executive-branch nominees.

I’d add one more: stop legislating by regulating, something for which Mr. Sunstein was the intellectual champion. It’s been a flop for the Obama Administration, it infantilizes the Congress, and it weakens the rule of law.

I thought you might be interested in the video above. Starting at about 2:00 and continuing until about 9:00, Al Jazeera compares and contrasts the media coverage of the battle for Aleppo with that for Mosul. in the piece journalist Dmitry Babich makes a good point (roughly transcribed by me):

The “fog of war” is now in media editors’ offices. American media don’t notice civilian casualties in Mosul; Russian media don’t notice civilian casualties in Aleppo.

And nobody notices civilian casualties in Yemen.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal underscore a point I’ve been making pretty much since I began posting on this blog:

The Band memo reveals exactly what critics of the Clintons have long said: They make little distinction between the private and public aspects of their lives, between the pursuit of personal enrichment, the operation of a nonprofit, and participation in U.S. politics.

Mr. Band writes that he and his colleague Justin Cooper “have, for the past ten years, served as the primary contact and point of management for President Clinton’s activities—which span from political activity (e.g., campaigning on behalf of candidates for elected office), to business activity (e.g., providing advisory services to business entities with which he has a consulting arrangement), to Foundation activity.”

This excerpt and all the potential conflicts it describes, plus Chelsea’s warning about business “hustling” at foundation events, would seem more than ample cause to trigger an IRS audit of the foundation. For that matter, why aren’t the IRS and prosecutors already on the case? Any normal foundation has to keep records to show it is separating its nonprofit activity from any for-profit business.

Mr. Band’s memo confirms that donors were not seeking merely to help the sick and the poor. He explains that the Clinton Foundation had “engaged an array of fundraising consultants” over the past decade but “these engagements have not resulted in significant new dollars for the Foundation.” In other words, it wasn’t working as a conventional charity.

Mr. Band then explains how he and his Teneo partner Declan Kelly had to carry the fundraising load, and did so by packaging foundation solicitations with other services such as a meeting with Bill Clinton, $450,000 speeches or strategic advice. Many of the donations, from U.S. companies like Coca-Cola and Dow Chemical and foreign firms like UBS and Barclays, occurred while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.

Why exactly were donors writing checks? The Band memo makes clear that donations untied to additional Clinton or Teneo services weren’t all that appealing to potential supporters. This is significant, because the large grant-making foundations in the U.S. are almost entirely run by Clinton voters. So you know they weren’t turned off by the brand name. They’d contribute more if they thought they were also buying goodwill and influence with a current Secretary of State and a potential future President.

which is that elected officials inevitably come to conflate their own personal benefit with the public good. It isn’t unique to the Clintons; in fact the Clintons aren’t particularly distinguished in it other than by scale. It isn’t limited to one political party. I think it’s a human characteristic.

And it’s corrupt. In some cases it’s amazing that any public business is conducted at all. That’s certainly the case in Illinois where public business is not in fact being conducted but public money continues to flow to the law firms, etc. of elected officials.

The solutions are to keep elected officials on much shorter leashes, to give them greater scrutiny, and limit their terms of office.

In a race for the North Carolina legislature heated campaigning went beyond an exchange of words. The Bladen Journal reports:

According to witnesses, Republican District 46 candidate Brenden Jones and Democratic candidate Tim Benton were exchanging words Saturday afternoon at the main entrance to the festival near U.S. 242.

“Some flyers have evidently been circulating saying Mr. Benton was involved in (a white supremacy group), and he was accusing Mr. Jones of being responsible for the flyers,” said eyewitness Woody Hester. “Mr. Jones told him he wasn’t responsible for the flyers and there wasn’t anything he could do about it, and he suggested they continue the conversation across the street away from the crowd.

“Mr. Benton kept nudging him with his shoulder the whole time they were walking across, and then he just stepped back and little and coldcocked him,” he said.

“To beat all, he (Benton) left a little child in a stroller to walk across the street, and if Mr. Jones’ (companion) hadn’t caught her, the child would have rolled into the street,” Hester added.

I’m surprised there isn’t a lot more of this sort of thing. As Chesterton said, it is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.

More care should be taken with all of the reckless name-calling. There are such things as “fighting words” which justify a physical response and “racist” might just be one of them.

There is such a thing as principled disagreement and if we’re self-editing for fear of being called a racist, misogynist, etc. that too is a form of bigotry. Inferring bigotry from disagreement is fallacious and may even spill over to bigotry of its own. When every disagreement is bigotry nothing is and it distracts from identifying actual bigotry.

Recently, I’ve caught local news media quoting me at length without attribution. I’m not offended or upset by it and I haven’t complained about it. Actually, I think it’s funny.

What I think is happening is that they’re Googling for things, The Glittering Eye comes up, and they’re lifting paragraphs straight from my blog into their copy. Coming up with material day after day after day ain’t easy. I’ve been writing 2,000 words or more per day, seven days a week, 365 days a year for some time. That puts me up there with Dumas and way ahead of Hemingway, both of whom produced something every day as part of their daily routines. David Brooks, Nicholas Kristof, and George Will only need to produce 800 words a week.

I know I don’t do it right by social media standards. If I were to do it right, I would need to publish something on an hourly basis 24 hours a day. That would be too limiting.

Pretty obviously, plagiarism ain’t what it used to be. It does make you look differently at the media conglomerates’ pursuit of intellectual property violators. It’s as I’ve been saying for some time patent, copyright, etc. law isn’t there to protect the little guy from the big guy. It’s to give Goliath an edge over that upstart David.

At War on the Rocks Richard Sokolsky and Jeremy Shapiro outline U. S. support for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia:

During the span of the Bush and Obama administrations, total U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia increased by nearly 97 percent. The U.S. has offered $115 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia during the Obama administration. Over the last three years alone — since the start of negotiations with Iran on its nuclear program — America has sold nearly $36 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia. These sales are certainly in the commercial interests of the United States and the American firms that manufacture the weapons. They create jobs, generate corporate profits, and improve the U.S. balance of trade.

But whether the massive sale of American arms to the Saudis serves U.S. geopolitical interests is a much more debatable proposition. U.S. military assistance to Saudi Arabia is a mere tool of American policy toward the Kingdom, not an end in itself. As such, it should serve broader objectives in the relationship. It should influence the Saudi government to make decisions that support American interests and priorities in the relationship and in the region more broadly.

There is a truly peculiar silence about our support for the KSA. The rulers of Saudi Arabia are certainly no better than the Assad regime and in many ways much worse. Mysteriously, we support the Saudi regime and oppose the Assad regime. In the Saudis’ war against Yemen 10,000 people, many of them civilians, have died and nearly a million have been displaced. And our fingerprints are all over the conflict from destabilizing Yemen to supporting the Saudis.

I have the sinking feeling that over the course of the next four years we’re going to be subjected to the world’s largest and highest-stakes games of Now I’ve Got You, You Son of a Bitch.

I think that we can safely assign a probability of zero to John Kass’s suggestion in his Chicago Tribune column. Referring to Hillary Clinton and the reopening of the FBI’s investigation of her he writes:

What if she is elected? Think of a nation suffering a bad economy and continuing chaos in the Middle East, and now also facing a criminal investigation of a president. Add to that congressional investigations and a public vision of Clinton as a Nixonian figure wandering the halls, wringing her hands.

The best thing would be for Democrats to ask her to step down now. It would be the most responsible thing to do, if the nation were more important to them than power. And the American news media — fairly or not firmly identified in the public mind as Mrs. Clinton’s political action committee — should begin demanding it.

American politics isn’t responsible, prudent, or fair and the time to do that was in the primaries. Now for good or ill the Democrats are stuck with her. I think they’ll see it as good.

I do agree with him on one particular:

I’ve always figured that, as secretary of state, Clinton kept her home-brew email server — from which foreign intelligence agencies could hack top secret information — so she could shield the influence peddling that helped make the Clintons several fortunes.

The Clintons weren’t skilled merchants. They weren’t traders or manufacturers. The Clintons never produced anything tangible. They had no science, patents or devices to make them millions upon millions of dollars.

All they had to sell, really, was influence. And they used our federal government to leverage it.

There are other explanations but they require so many assumptions, the implications of which are even worse and less likely, that it would be amazing to me if most people even Sec. Clinton’s supporters believed anything else.