Dominic Green Asked

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In his lede, Green asked

Which is worse, a young Englishman bleeding out in handcuffs while police ignore his cries for help, or the vice president of the United States expressing his opinion about it?

What JD Vance, the supposedly miscreant Vice President, said was this:

Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies, abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer, through his spokesman (apparently because Starmer is too timid to speak for himself on this),:

accus[ed] unnamed foreigners of “trying to interfere in our democracy and seeking to stir up division on our streets….”

How does Green’s question even exist? Given the naked bigotry demonstrated by the British police and by the government that created that police department, there can be no question of relative morality here. The one is an accurate commentary; the other is naked, state-sanctioned, and this time murderous, bigotry.

Nor was Vance’s statement in any way an interference in British democracy. There was no push for the British to do anything differently, only an objection to what that government has chosen to allow on its streets. If there was any pressure from Vance’s remarks, it was only because his words struck hard into what passes for a conscience in that government’s collective mind.

There’s a hint on the whole interfere in our democracy matter, though:

The administration-adjacent Elon Musk, whose X website outflanks Britain’s speech laws, told his 28.5 million followers to share the Nowak footage “to everyone you know,” so that all can see how the police “cravenly kowtowed to his murderer.”

Outflanks Britain’s speech laws. Maybe the nation that increasingly restricts what is permissible speech and that increasingly shrivels religious freedom is becoming less and less a democracy in the first place.

A Time for Choosing

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New York’s Congressional 10th District is a microcosm of the choices we face. The Progressive-Democratic Party primary features two far Left candidates. One is Dan Goldman, who is a virulent Never Trumper, to the point his Congressional votes are based on that rather than on any real policy objections, and an increasingly strident anti-Israel politician, to the point of working with ex-President Joe Biden (D) to deny Israel’s access to some of the weapons needed to defend itself against Hamas.

The other is  Brad Lander, former New York City Comptroller and an open, enthusiastic supporter of Progressive-Democrat Mayor Zohan Mamdani. Lander shares Mamdani’s naked antipathy for Israel and is openly antisemitic.

The choices come down to this. Progressive-Democrats must choose between a Never Trumper and anti-Israel politician and a candidate who, far beyond being merely anti-Israel, is both antisemitic and pro-Palestinian, the latter with no distinction between Palestinian civilians and the Palestinian terrorists epitomized by Hamas.

After primary season, we Americans in general must choose between a Republican party whose small-government positions are eroding but still leaning that way and a Progressive-Democratic Party that is rapidly strengthening its big, intrusive government ideology; is increasingly incapable of working with Trump or anything Republican; and that is, in this context, increasingly opposed to the only Middle East democracy and staunch US ally while actively strengthening its antisemitic bigotry.

Irrelevant

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In the ongoing struggle between Progressive-Democrat-run States and the Federal government, the Attorneys General of New York, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont have filed suit in the DC District Court in an attempt to undo an administration deal with TotalEnergies that has the latter ceasing its US-centered offshore wind projects and instead starting work on developing US oil and natural gas projects.

The Progressive-Democrat AGs’ argument centered on this:

We are fighting back to stop this illegal agreement that threatens to erase over a thousand union jobs and cheat millions of New Yorkers out of clean, affordable energy[.]

The “illegal agreement” bit is nakedly conclusory and has no merit in any guise. Stipulate the other factors are accurately presented. They are, though, purely business decisions made within a political and economic framework that is solely within the purview of the political branches—i.e., those two which are elected by We the People—and regarding which, the courts have nothing legitimate to say.

The AGs’ argument is wholly irrelevant and without merit in court. It is worthy of debate in the Congress and the White House only.

The role of judges. and of Justices who are a subset of that group and sit at the group’s top, under our form of government is to check the political branches from excess. Their means of doing so are at once powerful and limited. Judges must apply our Constitution as it is written, and must assess the constitutionality of any statute before them in a particular case. If the judges determine the statute to be constitutional, they must apply it as it is written. If they find the statute unconstitutional, they must strike it.

In particular, judges may not alter or disregard any part of our Constitution in favor of their own view of what it ought to be in order to achieve their own view of societal needs or of justice. Nor are they permitted to alter in any way the statute before them to suit those personal views of societal needs or of justice; they must strike it or apply it.

The deal between the administration and TotalEnergies is entirely legitimate from a legal standpoint, and it should be upheld in the district court, the DC Circuit, and at the Supreme Court.

The Cost of Ethanol-laced Gasoline

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A number of corn State Senators, Chuck Grassley (R, IA), Joni Ernst (R, IA), Deb Fischer (R, NE), Pete Ricketts (R, NE) and Roger Marshall (R, KS), have written about the financial benefits of ethanol in our gasoline.

Expanding E15 availability lowers gas prices by 20 to 40 cents per gallon on average.

Compared to what, though? See below.

And

E15 is a net positive. We know E15 will lower prices at the pump….

Again, compared to what?

I won’t go into the production costs of cars whose fuel-related seals must be designed to handle the corrosive nature of ethanol, nor will I address the maintenance costs of cars burning ethanol-laced fuels, even with those corrosion-resistant (but only resistant) seals, nor why the percentage of ethanol in gasoline tops out at 15% before ethanol’s corrosive nature overwhelms even these toughened up seals.

I won’t mention, either, the increase in the cost of food, including meat, from the diversion of corn away from the grocery store or the production of animal feed toward the production of ethanol. I’m only going to mention the immediate fiscal costs to the consumer of ethanol-laced gasoline, taking corn-based ethanol, corn being the primary source today for ethanol production, as my illustration.

It costs $1.74 in 2001 currencyto produce a gallon of ethanol from corn, and it costs 95 cents to produce a gallon of gasoline.

A gallon of E15 gasoline consists of 85% gasoline, and 15% ethanol. According to my 3rd grade arithmetic, the costs embodied in that gallon are 85% of $0.95 plus 15% of $1.74, or a skosh under $0.81 plus a skosh over $0.26. That’s $1.07 per gallon of the hybrid fuel. Using my 3rd grade arithmetic again, that’s $0.12 per gallon more than for unadulterated, and much easier on the car, gasoline.

That’s not cheaper fuel for our cars; it’s much more expensive. Those Senators bragged that

Expanding E15 availability lowers gas prices by 20 to 40 cents per gallon on average. That could mean around $400 per year in savings for a US household—precious dollars that could be spent on other needs.

The irony in that isn’t lost on me, even if it seems lost on those Senators. Instead of those 30 cents per gallon (to take the middle of their range) in ethanol-laced gasoline, not having to spend that baseline of 12 cents extra per gallon at all, all year long, would save roughly $160 per US household—precious dollars that could be spent on other needs, like food, including meat, made cheaper by no longer diverting corn to making alcohol. (OK, a little mention.)

Not “Back to Other Agencies”

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are dismayed that an intel naif like Bill Pulte has been designated the Acting Director of National Intelligence. They go farther and want the whole office of the DNI eliminated altogether. I’ll not go into Pulte’s qualifications, or lack, for the position; my disagreement with the disposition of the office.

Its first director, John Negroponte, quickly hired hundreds of people who duplicated the job of the analytical side of the CIA. It’s now a vast political bureaucracy.

The editors are correct in this criticism.

However.

From the editors’ penultimate paragraph:

In a better world, Congress would use Mr. Pulte’s appointment to eliminate the DNI and send its staff back to other agencies.

No, if that staff really is redundant (and the vast bulk of them are), that better world would see the large excess returned to the private sector, rather than reallocated elsewhere in the government, inflicting their unneeded employment on other agencies.

Better yet would be for Congress to amend the legislation creating the Office of DNI: cap the total number of employees, volunteers, staff on loan to the DNI, and political appointees, Senate confirmable or not, at some low number like 100 and no more. In conjunction with this, explicitly limit the ODNI DOC to coordination among the other intelligence agencies, facilitating communications among them, and the like. Explicitly bar ODNI from doing its own intelligence gathering or fact checking of other agencies’ data, and the like. Give the DNI some teeth: his instruction for an agency to share these data, unredacted, in toto, and immediately, with that (or those) other agency(s) should be directive, not suggestive, with bureaucrats stalling, slow-walking, or outright refusing, being a fireable offence on the DNI’s authority, with the President strongly encouraged to fire the obstructing political appointees.

But as the editors alluded with their own proposal, that’s in an ideal world. We live in a Congressional world, instead.