French Election

And just remember, there's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other.

Madeleine Albright, Campaigning for Hillary Clinton

 

I saw this link on Instapundit and suddenly realized that I have not read of the feminist support for Marine Le Pen, the first woman who might win the French presidency.  Why is that?  Is it only important to break the old boys' network when the woman in question is leftwing?  Isn't it interesting how it is sexist to speak against a leftwing woman but hanging Sarah Palin in effigy didn't trigger a firestorm about a war on women?

 

Marine Le Pen is the National Front (FN) candidate.  The National Front is described as right-wing populist and nationalist.  Among the horrible things that the FN proposes is law and order, especially as regards immigration.  Anti-immigration strongly defines the party and that aspect has only grown stronger in the face of Islamization.  Though in favor of lower taxes, less government intervention, and a diminished bureaucracy, the FN - at least as Le Pen has espoused - is entirely content with the state running healthcare, education, transportation, banking, and energy.  Hardly free market capitalism.  Moreover, FN views protectionist policies favorably.  Oh, the horror!  Such right-wing villainy!  FN would like to do a Frexit, getting France out of the EU and dumping the Euro.  FN is much more isolationist and opposed both Iraq Wars as well as recent French interventions in Africa.  Amazingly, FN is generally pro-Russia and views Vladimir Putin favorably.  The biggest black mark against the party is party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine's father.  He has unfavorable ratings that make Trump and Hillary look beloved by comparison.

 

France has been in decline for decades.  Once a great power, it now plays second fiddle to Germany in the European Union.  As half-baked and inconsistent as the FN platform is, it is the only party that offers policies that might reverse the cultural suicide that France is currently pursuing.  The French have a fertility rate that is below replacement rate while culturally incompatible immigrants have a fertility rate that will overwhelm the nation.  Where Charles Martel turned back the invading Muslims at the Battle of Tours in 732, the modern French are mostly surrendering without a fight, believing their multicultural proclamations will protect them when they are no longer the majority culture.  How are the Copts fairing in Egypt?  Hmm, that's about the best some future French Christians can expect.

 

Germany is committing cultural suicide to atone for Hitler.  I have no idea why France is doing the same.

Your Name.

One morning, Taki awoke to discover he was a high school girl named Mitsuha who lived in a small town in the boondocks of Japan.  That same day, Mitsuha awoke to discover she was a boy named Taki who lived in Tokyo.  However, the following day, each has only a dream-like memory of the switch that quickly fades though the antics and errors do not.  The two swap on a regular basis and soon develop a means of communicating with each other to stay apprised on recent events.  Each first asks "What is your name?"  Mysteriously, a comet binds them together but offering more than that is a spoiler.

Here is a standard anime movie that is done quite well.  The art work is top notch, the characters are fun, and the teenage awkwardness is classic anime fare.  Writer/Director Makoto Shinkai is being compared with the legendary Hayao Miyazaki.  Miyazaki has far more fantastical stories and settings, whereas Your Name fits nicely into the real world in a Freaky Friday sort of way.

Clearly, the box office success and wide release show that this is a cross-over film for those who are not generally fans of Anime.  Thumbs up!

 

Rewarding Bad Behavior?

We are still in the early days of every incident having video available and are shocked by events that will eventually not be newsworthy.  Sunday's United Airlines kerfuffle is one such incident.  When asked to leave the plain, he refused.  When security came to escort him from the plane, he still refused.  When they sought to use minimal force, he resisted.  At each step, he could have submitted to leave the plane.  This path of escalation has happened before.  Last year, there was a middle school girl who refused her teacher's instruction to go to the principal's office.  Her refusal and resistance eventually escalated to a police officer manhandling her, which was filmed.  This is an easy game to play and it will continue to be played so long as it has the current impact.  Anyone can do it.  Get pulled over for a defective blinker and then refuse to hand over license and registration.  Then refuse to get out of the car.  Eventually, you will find yourself handcuffed in the back of a police car on the way to jail.  Easy.  Infallible.  And if only that last bit of being dragged out of the car, thrown to the street, and cuffed is on film, you are golden.  The headline writes itself:

 

Police brutality over faulty tail light!

Here's the important part.  Those who game this early will get the most benefits.  I have no doubt that United will pay a very large settlement to the man who refused to get off the plane.  Compared to the $800 offer to get bumped, he is going to make out like a bandit.  If he had gone quietly, that is all he would have gotten.  Making a scene, and the news, is going to be very profitable.

 

One passenger supposedly offered to be bumped for $1600.  Was that amount beyond the discretion of the boarding agents?  Probably.  That discretion is likely to increase to avoid a future incident like this.

 

Overbooking flights inevitably leads to bumping passengers from time to time.  If Joe has paid for a seat, there is a good case for breech of contract if he is then booted (doubtless there is fine print on the ticket about bumping).  Though United is far from blameless, the intransigent passenger is more in the wrong.  If I tell someone to get off my plane, I expect to be obeyed.  They may sue me later but private property is private property.

Apples, Oranges, and Reuters

Here is an article from Reuters that gives the clear impression that the Democrat resurgence is about to begin in Georgia's 6th District.  With Tom Price having been confirmed to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, his seat will have a special election to fill it.  The article is best described as very optimistic for Democrat chances.  Here we have a "grassroots anti-Trump fervor" and there we have a candidate raising "a jaw-dropping" amount of money.  A veteran activist explains that she has "never seen Democrats around here so enraged" and attributes it to Trump.  Then we have a rundown of the exciting demographics that are likely to benefit Democrats.  Gee, it sounds like it's in the bag, a sure thing.  Fourteen paragraphs into the story, it is mentioned that Tom Price (R) won the 6th district by 62-38.  Yeah, that sounds like a really competitive district.  But what is more important is that Trump only won the district by 1.5% margin.  So in a congressional race, Reuters decided to base Democrat chances on the margin in the presidential election.  Apples and oranges.

 

Of course, what is Reuters recent record on predicting election results?

 

Reuters/Ipsos Polling results

November 3rd

1. Hillary leads in Ohio by 3, lost by 8.5
2. Hillary leads in Pennsylvania by 6, lost by 1
3. Hillary leads in Michigan by 4, lost by less than 1

November 4th

1. Hillary leads in North Carolina by 2, lost by 3.5

November 7th

1. Hillary 90% likely to win presidency
2. Democrats 55% likely to recapture the Senate
3. Republicans 70% likely to hold the House

 

It is no wonder that so many were shocked by the eventual results.  With this record, I suspect that the 6th District in Georgia will be handily won by a Republican in the likely June 20 runoff.  Reuters will offer one of their standard 2 sentence stories to report it rather than this 1,100 word wishful analysis.  Reuters certainly will not confuse the results of a Republican win as an endorsement of Trump policies.

Filibuster Folly

On Thursday, Majority Leader McConnell invoked the 'nuclear option' - also called the Reid Rule - to rewrite senate rules to overcome the filibuster of Judge Neil Gorsuch.  When put to a vote, he won confirmation by 54-45.  The Republicans have a 52-48 majority in the Senate.  This incident is supposedly evidence that Republicans are wrecking the traditions of the Senate.  Hmm.

 

In 1991, the Democrats held a majority of 55 to 45 seats in the Senate.  In that same year, Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court by a vote of 52-48.  By current standards, Thomas was far outside the 'mainstream' of judicial thought.  How did he get confirmed?

For the entire history of the Senate, judicial nominations were not considered to be subject to the filibuster with the possible exception of Abe Fortas who had some ethics issues that sank his elevation from a Supreme Court Justice to Chief Justice.  However, in 2003, the Democrats decided to filibuster judicial nominees.  They used the filibuster to defeat about ten of George W. Bush's judicial nominees.  This was payback for when the Republican-controlled Senate had bottled several times that many Clinton nominees in committee, never even allowing them to come to a floor vote.  But then the Republicans were getting payback for the smear job against Thomas and the 'borking' of Robert Bork.

 

This growing tit for tat exercise first saw some rollback when the Democrats again took control of the Senate and got sick of Republicans using the filibuster against Obama's nominees.  Though the Republicans had flirted with the idea of a nuclear option when they controlled the Senate, the Democrats used it.  The rules were rewritten so that only Supreme Court nominees could be filibustered.  Now the Republicans have completed the process by removing that last case and returning the Advice & Consent function back to where it was prior to 2003.  Oh the humanity!

 

The filibuster should be returned to its pre-1970 status where a senator had to speak for hours on end to hold up legislation.  Why have a cloture vote to end debate when no one is debating?  It is amazing how much use the filibuster has seen in the wake of that rule.

Resetting the Table

The strike on Syria coincided with President Xi Jinping visiting President Trump in Florida.  It is highly unlikely that the timing was coincidental.  Launching a military strike while the leader of one of the great powers is visiting sends a message, especially with the rising tensions over China's client state, North Korea.  If Trump is willing to attack a Russian client state, what's to stop him from doing the same with China?  Syria is the Gordian Knot of conflicts, involving Russia, Turkey, Iran, ISIS, the Kurds, Jordan, Israel, and others.  The boldness (recklessness?) of such an attack is a 180 degree shift from recent US policy.  Trump has not moved pieces on the chessboard, he has thrown the chessboard on the floor.

Trump has a long history of showmanship and running casinos.  Is this some grand bluff that no one risks calling?  Throughout the campaign, Trump gave the impression that his foreign policy would not be much different than Obama's, maybe less ambitious.  The Syrian strike came as a complete surprise.  To the good, Trump has swept away the America-as-doormat view that took hold during the Obama years.  To the bad, Trump might actually wage a war along the lines of Libya, bypassing congress and risking an even wider war because of all the players on that field.

 

If the attack is not sustained, this may have been a brilliant reset, a shock to the global order that restores America's primacy in one fell swoop.  However, there is talk of deposing Assad again which sounds like the entanglement is only just beginning.  Syria is a far more dangerous conflict than Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya.

Not Another Middle East War

It looks like we might be at war with Syria.  Will this be a limited volley of cruise missiles to slap Assad's hand and maybe dissuade from future chemical weapons attacks or is this going to be Trump's Libya campaign?  Though Assad is clearly a villain, it is hard to see a good end to entering this mess.  The time to get involved was before Russia stationed planes on Syrian airfields and ships in Syrian harbors.  As US ground troops are highly unlikely, what army is going to take the field against Assad?  When Russia planes bomb the army with which we ally, will we assist by shooting them down?  Are we going to duplicate the technique that pushed Russia out of Afghanistan by arming the rebels with stinger missiles?  Afghanistan is doing so well that we have been entangled there for 16 years and counting?  This is fraught with peril.

 

Best case, this is just a way of saying, "Knock it off!"  If Assad can expect to have an airfield and several million dollars worth of aircraft destroyed in the wake of using chemical weapons to kill a handful of civilians, it may convince him that the price is too high.  Obama drew the red line and did nothing when it was crossed.  Trump drew no lines and acted immediately.  Which is a better strategy?  Clearly, the results of Obama's strategy were bad but his alternatives may have been worse.  Sometimes bad is the best choice on the table.

 

Now for some dark thoughts: could this be Trump's way of undermining the notion that he is a puppet of Putin?  An attack on a country with which Russia is overtly aiding in a military campaign is about the last thing one would expect from a Putin puppet.  Maybe this is Trump's pushback on Russian expansion and adventurism and Assad's chemical weapon attack just provided a pretext.  If Trump will launch cruise missiles at a country where Russian forces are stationed, how eager will Russia be to keep pressing Ukraine or continue its propaganda campaign to annex part of Lithuania?  In that case, this would be extremely bold, verging on reckless.  Perhaps in the wake of his legislative agenda grinding to a halt, Trump has decided to make his bones in foreign policy.

 

Rand Paul makes a good point when he says the United States was not attacked.  Though Trump claims this is a vital national security interest, he has not yet made the case.  He needs to make that case and put it before Congress.  No more Libya-like wars.  Of course, Republicans are spineless, so I am not optimistic they will hold Trump to the War Powers Act any better than they held Obama.