Hold Politicians Accountable?

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Dave Brody, of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, opened his Friday op-ed in the WSJ with this:

Michigan voters appear poised to approve a ballot initiative opposing “dark money” in politics on November 3. What Michiganders don’t seem to realize is that this proposal could keep them in the dark by making it harder for journalists to hold politicians accountable.

Even if we could take is strenuous self-congratulatory second paragraph or his crocodile tears later in his piece seriously, he would be an isolated outlier in the field of what passes for American journalism.

American journalism studiously spiked all reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop while the elder Biden was President.

American journalism determinedly downplayed then-Senator Joe Biden’s (D, DE) casual mishandling of classified documents.

American journalism enthusiastically hyped—and still does—President Donald Trump’s (R) every move and statement of which those worthies personally disapprove.

American journalism avidly yoks it up over one of their own bantering and joking with Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D, MN) over the question of her alleged marriage to her brother.

American journalism hides its bias—and thereby exposes it—behind repeated cites and quotes of “officials familiar” and “people who were present” while just as determinedly refuses to answer any question of what standard of journalistic integrity they use after having long since walked away from an editorial requirement for at least two on-the-record sources to corroborate any number of anonymous sources in an article.

Journalists holding politicians accountable. It is to laugh. If Michigan voters vote up the dark money ballot initiative, they’ll lose nothing regarding journalism.

No, There Doesn’t

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Supposedly, there’s confusion on what the Federal Reserve is going to do this month, regarding interest rate levels. The headline worries,

Why the Fed Is Expected to Hold Rates Steady Despite a Case for Raising Them

And the lede adds to the confusion:

The Federal Reserve is expected to hold interest rates steady this week for reasons that have as much to do with what Fed officials have said as with what the economy is doing.

Confusion. It’s mostly in the fervid imaginations of some who think they’re pundits. For instance, Robert Kaplan, Goldman Sachs Vice Chairman and ex-Dallas Fed president:

If they had wanted to hike in October, there needs to be more stage management than what they’ve done.

No, there doesn’t. Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh has already been clear that folks should listen to what the markets are saying and not to what Fed Governors or the Chairman say, or do not say. There needs be no stage management. There needs be only heeding this bit of Fed advice as diligently as pundits listened to Fed prior (spoon-fed) advice.

There is No Difference

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Nathan Diament, Orthodox Union Advocacy Center Executive Director, wrote eloquently of the importance of St Mary Catholic Parish v Roy, Colorado’s effort to force Catholic schools to accept as students those who reject, or whose parents reject, the school’s religious mission. He also asked a couple of questions:

What if the state doesn’t explicitly exclude religious schools? What if it attaches conditions that force religious schools to choose between accessing public benefits and compromising their values?

The answer to these seems crystalline to me.

Applying criteria as a condition of participating in a program with which an institution cannot comply and maintain its character and mission is precisely the same as explicitly excluding that institution.

That’s OK, if not necessarily good, if the conditions are applied to private enterprise. No business has an intrinsic right to any particular business model or practice.

It’s entirely different, though, when the conditions are applied to religious institutions. Churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, whathaveyou have precisely that intrinsic right to operate under their specific practice. That inalienable right is clearly acknowledged in our Constitution’s First Amendment bars against government interference with an institution’s and its members’ right freely to exercise their religion (or lack of such) and the equally explicit bar against government establishing a government-devised or -run religion or religious entity, whether to compete with or to supplant other religious or areligious establishments.

An Answer

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Although it would take quite a bit of time to bring to fruition. The problem is getting low cost natural gas to the good citizens of New England. President Donald Trump (R) has proposed the beginnings of a solution.

New Englanders pay some of the highest energy costs in the nation, and the Trump administration says the Constitution Pipeline—a project New York successfully blocked once before—is the answer. New York, however, appears to remain stubbornly committed to stopping it.

The Constitution Pipeline would transport natural gas from Pennsylvania to New York. A complication in the matter is that all five of the New England States are just as adamantly opposed to pipeline development as is New York. Trump is looking at designating the pipeline a national security matter and forcing is construction, but that’s of sometime utility.

An alternative, or perhaps parallel, solution is to use the Federal government’s authority to appropriate State lands and its 5th Amendment power to seize, with just compensation, private lands as necessary to assemble the rights of way the pipeline would require to pass through New York and into each of the New England States.

Then let the State government men and women justify refusing to let their respective constituents to have access to that cheap energy that now sits on those constituents’ figurative doorsteps, needing only their local utilities’ abilities to hook those pipelines into the distribution’s last miles.

None of the moves won’t solve this winter’s problem, but they would address future winters.

An Unjustifiable Delay

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It’s unconscionable, too. Utah District Court Judge Tony Graf is looking at setting a 2029 trial date, even as late as the end of January 2028, for Tyler Robinson’s trial, the man accused of murdering Turning Point USA‘s Charlie Kirk. This is absurd, as his widow, Erika Kirk, has said.

The defense attorneys are claiming that they

have to sift through tens of thousands of files the prosecution turned over to them. They will need to conduct extensive investigations into Robison’s life to seek mitigating factors that could influence his sentence if he is convicted, and they also need to devote “substantial time” to issues such as jury selection…[,]

and they need those three(!) years to get ready.

Leave aside that seek[ing] mitigating factors that could influence his sentence if he is convicted is strictly and solely a matter for the sentencing phase if he is convicted. Any time spent on that, were he acquitted, would be a blatant waste of time and of the State’s money, and it does not need to be spent at all during trial prep and trial. The defense lawyers are just nakedly stalling.

If Graf is to take the defense’s move seriously, he needs first to demand to see those defense attorneys’ and their staffs’ time sheets in the 10-minute increments that law firms typically use to accumulate their billable hours. What else are these worthies working on besides Robinson’s case that would take up so much time that they actually need three years or more years just to get into jury selection?

We have these doofers commonly known as computers, have had them for some decades. We’ve also got these software packages, AI apps, many of which are tailored for the needs of lawyers and their research. Whatever happened to the general push for a speedy trial for defendants? Aside from that, does not the victim/victim’s survivor also deserve a speedy trial?

Kirk’s lawyers are much closer to the mark with their push for an October 2027 trial date. Graf should set the trial for that October and sanction those defense lawyers for their evident indolence and rule further that their behavior lays no ground for an ineffective assistance of counsel appeal.