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November 2022

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The FBI and Disinformation A worthy inquiry for a Republican House.By James Freeman

By on November 16th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbi-and-disinformation-11668550298?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Now that Republicans appear poised to capture a House majority, what should they do with it? This column is largely in agreement with those urging the GOP to focus on thoughtful legislative proposals to advance individual liberty and fiscal sanity, rather than partisan investigations. But there is at least one issue at the heart of individual liberty that demands investigation, even if Democrats aren’t eager to participate. U.S. citizens will not continue to enjoy foundational constitutional liberties if the FBI is permitted to abuse its powers as it did in targeting the 2016 Trump campaign and may have done in assisting the 2020 Biden campaign. A responsible defense of our First Amendment freedoms requires a thorough inquiry to determine to what extent the FBI and other federal agencies lean on social media companies to suppress government-designated “disinformation.”

The need is even more urgent given an exchange between a reporter and President Joe Biden at a White House press conference last week. Here’s an excerpt from the official transcript:

Q … Mr. President, do you think Elon Musk is a threat to U.S. national security? And should the U.S. — and with the tools you have — investigate his joint acquisition of Twitter with foreign governments, which include the Saudis?
THE PRESIDENT: (Laughs.) I think that Elon Musk’s cooperation and/or technical relationships with other countries is worthy of being looked at. Whether or not he is doing anything inappropriate, I’m not suggesting that. I’m suggesting that it wor- — worth being looked at. And — and — but that’s all I’ll say.
Q How?
THE PRESIDENT: There’s a lot of ways.

Sunshine is especially needed here because with those words President Joe Biden is encouraging his executive branch to investigate Twitter’s new owner. It happens that this new owner is determined not to repeat Twitter’s disgraceful censorship of the New York Post’s accurate 2020 reporting on Biden family enrichment schemes.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Fox News Liz Peek: Gen Z stopped Republicans’ expected red wave — here’s how GOP can win over young voters

By on November 16th, 2022

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/gen-z-stopped-republicans-expected-red-wave-how-gop-win-over-young-voters

One week after the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans want to know: what happened? Why were expectations about the midterms so completely wrong? How could a deeply dishonest and unpopular president score one of the best midterm outcomes in recent history?  

Like a great many Republicans, I am deeply disappointed, having hoped to see Americans deliver a well-deserved rebuke to a party in charge of all three branches of government – a party that set inflation soaring and sowed the seeds of recession.

There is much finger-pointing underway; many blame former President Trump for endorsing flawed candidates, prioritizing personal fealty over GOP victories. Some have dumped on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for failing to support Trump-endorsed candidates. There is lots of chatter on social media about the need to get out ahead of the ballot harvesting and mail-in voting which helps Democrats.

All those complaints are valid, but another reason that the polling was so inaccurate and that so many critical races swung to Democrats is the growing importance of Gen Z voters, which appears to have been completely ignored by the GOP.

An estimated 27% of eligible voters aged 18-29 turned out to vote, compared to roughly 20% of young voters who typically participated in elections in the 1990s.

Not only did Gen Z show up in force, they overwhelmingly picked Democrats, by a 28-point margin. That preference was close to their vote in 2020, which went 62% Democrat and only 32% GOP.

This is important, especially because this group, which now accounts for about 10% of eligible voters, will continue to grow. In 2020, their votes totaled almost three times the number cast just four years earlier, when they reached voting age.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The midterm results are good for Republicans, if not great If Democrats have deluded themselves into thinking they won last week, that’s a huge opportunity for the GOP Erin Norman

By on November 16th, 2022

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/midterm-results-good-republicans-not-great/

The dust is still settling around the congressional midterms, but it looks like Republicans will retake the House by a very slim margin and Democrats will have an ever-so-slight lead in the Senate.

But with stubbornly moderate Democrats such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, Republicans can be fairly confident the upper chamber will not try to advance the most extreme parts of President Biden’s agenda, even if they do increase their majority by one seat in the December runoff in Georgia. And of course, because of the flip in the House, those uber-progressive proposals will never make it up to the Senate. The governor’s houses in Maryland and Massachusetts may have flipped blue, but Republicans knew they were lucky to be holding them in the first place.

Even so, at the topline level it is understandable Republicans are disappointed. With a struggling economy and a sitting Democratic president with approval ratings stuck in the forties, conventional wisdom says they should have picked up thirty to forty seats in the House and easily taken the upper chamber. There was also a hope, realistic at the time even if fantastical now, of taking control of some blue-state governor’s mansions like Oregon that didn’t materialize. Yes, the GOP flipped Nevada, but that was canceled out by Katie Hobbs’s victory over Kari Lake in neighboring Arizona.

But if conservatives can look past the disappointment they feel from overblown expectations, they will see there is plenty of good news. They have control in the House of Representatives and hold the majority of gubernatorial seats. In North Carolina and Ohio, Republicans won all of the Supreme Court races on the ballot, winning and preserving Republican majorities, respectively. Democratic Kansas governor Laura Kelly hung on to her job, but Republicans gained a super-majority in the House to match their existing advantage in the Senate. While Republicans lost chambers in Minnesota, Michigan and Pennsylvania, they gained a super-majority in Iowa and West Virginia and took away one held by the Democrats in Oregon. Overall a good result, if falling short of great.

A look at 2018 and 2022’s exit polls also quantify the narratives about Democrats losing ground with minority voters. Compared to the 2018 midterms, Republicans grew support among all minority groups: +4 among Black voters, +10 among Hispanics and an impressive +17 among Asians. If Republicans can continue to improve on these trends, even at the marginal level, it puts a significant number House districts previously out of reach on the table and solidifies their positing in current swing districts. For example, Florida’s 25th and 26th congressional districts flipped in 2020 as Republicans increased their margins among Hispanics and Democrats were unable to regain power during the midterms.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A True Progressive Top Court Takes On Climate Change: The Case Of Germany Francis Menton

By on November 16th, 2022

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-11-14-how-a-true-progressive-top-court-handles-climate-change-the-case-of-germany

Two of my recent posts have looked at critiques from the left of the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA — the June 30 decision that held that the Clean Air Act did not clearly give EPA authority to order the phase-out of all fossil-fuel generated electricity in the U.S. My July 5 post, “How To Think Like A Liberal Supreme Court Justice,” summarized Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent in the West Virginia case. My September 12 post, “How The Left Views Administrative Law,” discussed the presentation at the Federalist Society convention by Professor Sally Katzen of NYU Law School, where she stated her belief that EPA did have the authority in question, and criticized the Court for having taken “an extreme action to shut down rule-making.”

But the Kagan dissent and Katzen presentation are just critiques of the approach to this matter taken by our constitutionalist-dominated Supreme Court. A separate question is, what would the liberals do if they suddenly found themselves in control of the top court — say, if a new Democrat-controlled Congress decides to create six new justices to be appointed by President Biden?

At the lunch following the panel where Professor Katzen spoke, I found myself sitting next to two lawyers who had come from Germany to attend the convention. One of them said to me, in essence, you have no idea what a country’s top court might do when it feels that its powers are unconstrained. He then referred me, on the subject of climate change, to a Decision from the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) from March 2021; and he gave me sufficient pointers to find information about the Decision in English.

It turns out that the Constitutional Court has an English-language portion of its website, where can be found both a press release of April 29, 2021, summarizing the Decision, as well as a full translation of the Decision itself. The full Decision has some 270 “paragraphs,” some quite long, and would likely be around 200 pages if typed out in the format used by our courts. It is unanimous, and there are no concurrences or dissents. Unlike cases from our Supreme Court, the Decision does not have a caption naming plaintiffs and defendants. They suggest referring to the Decision as the “Order of the First Senate of 24 March 2021.” (The Constitutional Court is divided into two halves, called “Senates,” of eight judges each. They divide the cases between themselves based on subject matter.)

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