Tag Archives: responsibilities

The FJC Has Become Unreliable

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Federal Judicial Center writes a manual that it alleges—and too many judges and Justices accept at face value—to be an unbiased source of information to help judges make unbiased assessments about scientific testimony.

It has ceased to be that. The Wall Street Journal has written before that the FJC‘s manual had a thoroughly biased chapter on so-called climate science, and that when that chapter was exposed for the disinformation section that it was, the FJC removed the chapter.

But wait—there’s more.

In the climate science chapter, footnote 77 says “discussion of attribution research has been adapted, and, in some cases, excerpted from the authors’ prior publications on this topic.” A review by American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Roger Pielke Jr noticed that one of those earlier publications was co-authored with a third person who wasn’t named as an author in the climate chapter.
Mr Pielke says the mystery author is Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center [of which the late chapter’s lead author is a Senior Fellow]. But here’s the shocker. He is also of counsel at Sher Edling, a plaintiff firm pushing climate-related lawsuits. The firm has promoted dubious legal theories, suing fossil-fuel companies for failure to warn about climate effects and public nuisance over the “cost of weather induced events.”

As nakedly biased as this chapter was, and which the FJC removed only when exposed, and whose authors defended the bias of their chapter with no correction of that disinformation, the obvious question becomes: what other nakedly biased “educational information” is included elsewhere in its manual that hasn’t been discovered yet?

The FJC, by rendering itself unreliable, has made itself irrelevant. Judges and Justices need to rely on their native intelligence and on better—or at least more and more varied—advisors.

Most of all, judges and Justices need to limit themselves to the evidence, scientific or otherwise, actually presented at trial. Outside sources of information are irrelevant and should be disregarded, even when disguised as “information” by sources like the FJC manual.

Talking Filibuster

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It’s complicated, claims Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R, SD), and it’s a mirage claim the editors at The Wall Street Journal.

Thune:

The talking filibuster idea “is much more complicated and risky than people are assuming,” Majority Leader John Thune told reporters this week. He said Tuesday that Republicans lack the votes to get to a talking filibuster or sustain one if they did.

The editors:

The reality is that Democratic Senators could take turns giving interminable speeches. Cory Booker last year went 25 hours all by himself. Meantime, Republicans would have to keep most of their Senators handy at all times, ready to answer a quorum call, meaning it would turn into an endless GOP campout. Bring your pajamas, toothbrush, and CPAP machine.

And

Democrats could offer amendments that either undermine the bill’s intent or put swing-state Republicans on the spot. Raise the minimum wage? Extend ObamaCare subsidies? What else?

The editors are straight up wrong with their claims, though. Look past this poster’s over-the-top polemics, and look at the facts presented. Under existing Senate rules, Senators are limited to two speeches per day on a particular piece of legislation. A Senate day, though, isn’t 24 hours; it runs from Senate adjournment to Senate adjournment. Recesses don’t count. And recesses could be had for hygiene breaks, grabbing a drink of water, eating something, etc. All Thune would have to do is not adjourn the Senate once the SAVE Act is brought to the floor until it’s voted on.

Endless amendment proffers? The Majority Leader controls the amendment process, including being first to offer amendments. Just as Reid did routinely (and other Majority Leaders of either party), Thune could fill the amendment tree with his own amendments, preventing the Progressive-Democratic Party, and Precious Republicans, from offering their own amendments. That imposes a small and finite number of amendments and votes on them.

Do the “camping,” but it would be only for a week or two. The limiting factor is those Republicans themselves. Republicans lack the votes to get to a talking filibuster or sustain one if they did? As recently as mid-February, the Republicans had 50 votes for the Act, which with the Vice President’s vote, is all he majority they need. Is Thune really saying he can’t hold his caucus together in the face of Progressive-Democrat intransigence? If so, that, in the eventuality, would be the end of the Republican Party for a long sequence of election cycles, as they would be exposing themselves as not having the stomach for serious struggle.

The editors rationalized their position with this cover excuse for those Reluctant Republicans’ timidity:

Democrats would have done it [used the talking filibuster] already—and they’d certainly copy the maneuver next time to pass far more transformational bills than the SAVE America Act.

That’s not an excuse for timidity; it’s simply stating a fact. The Progressive-Democrats most assuredly will use it, whether or not they eliminate the cloture vote filibuster when next they get a Senate majority. Republicans using it now is irrelevant to that.

General George Patton:

Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time.

That appears to be not the case with today’s crop of Republicans, if Thune is right.

“Homilies Won’t Liberate Iran”

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That’s the headline of William McGurn’s Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed, and he’s right. His laid out his case early on.

This may sound harsh, but it’s necessary to say. The Catholic Church and its last few popes have understood only the destructive force of war. They appear to have given little thought to the terrible consequences for innocent people when soft words are offered as a substitute for tough but necessary action.

Pope Leo earlier this month, proving McGurn’s point in advance:

I am following with deep concern what is happening in the Middle East and in Iran during this tumultuous time. Stability and peace are not achieved through mutual threats, nor through the use of weapons, which sow destruction, suffering, and death, but only through reasonable, sincere, and responsible dialogue.

Dialogue with whom, exactly? With terrorists who have no concern about the lives of innocents beyond their propaganda value as dead bodies? With terrorists whose agreements and commitments with others are routinely and at convenience violated? The only thing the Iranian government’s terrorists are sincere about is their desire for the destruction of the Great and Little Satans—the US and Israel. The only dialogue they’re interested in being responsible for is negotiations as stall and distraction tactic.

McGurn’s response [emphasis his]:

Stability and peace are achieved only through dialogue? Is that what history tells us? It seems more accurate to say that the kind of rightly ordered world the pope desires can’t be built by armies alone—but can almost never be built without armies and without the threat of force. Most often it is force or the threat of it that makes dialogue possible.

I branch off from that, slightly. In the end, the Pope’s teaching, the Catholic Church’s teaching, the teachings of most any Christian or Jewish faith are important to maintaining the virtuous and religious populations that a republican democratic nation (or popular democratic nation, come to that) needs in order to survive. But, morals don’t win—can’t win—wars for survival, however critical they are to maintaining the backbone and endurance necessary to persevere and win those wars.

Winning wars comes down to physical, kinetic activities of one side being better and stronger and more lethal than those of the other side. And, yes, assuredly yes, some wars are just wars, even are wars that are required by morality to be fought.

As a man asked some time ago, then, how many divisions does the Pope have? Better if, instead of generalized moralizing, he offered concrete solutions and concrete mechanisms for achieving them along with his explanations of the morality underpinning them.

Target Placement vs Targeting

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The US might have hit a girls school as collateral damage when it struck an IRGC compound in Minab, Iran, on the Minab River and 15 miles as an IRGC rocket flies from the Strait of Hormuz.

The school is located on the edge of a compound linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps…. There are indications the school building had previously been used as an IRGC headquarters….

There’s this, too, from IDF Spokesperson for International Media, LTC Nadav Shoshani. Scroll to the second video, which shows the extent of Khamenei’s underground bunker, its widespread and widely separated access points—and its placement in the heart of Tehran in the middle of a densely built up civilian neighborhood.

Such placement of military and critical governing facilities in the middle of civilian areas or adjacent to high propaganda value civilian facilities like hospitals and—in the present case—schools, using them and especially their occupants as shields, is typical of terrorist entities.

While collateral damage should be minimized, especially as that damage includes deaths of civilians and their children, that risk is both the moral and legal responsibility of the terrorists who create it and must not be allowed to leave the military targets unscathed.

No They Don’t

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I’ll be brief.

The lede lays out the question.

Companies say President Trump’s climate overhaul makes it tough to frame their future emissions plans and prepare for what they see as inevitable environmental restrictions—particularly as their goals extend beyond the president’s term.

No, they don’t.

Quit planning their future emissions. Quit distorting business decisions away from simple economics and away from what’s optimal for the business’ owners—the shareholders.

Easy peasy, once business managers get up out of their deep defensive crouches and stop cowering in front of climate funding industry pushers.

The hard work, while remaining straightforward, is to engage those duck and cover energies and their existing lobbying budgets to getting the current Congress to codify in statute those Trump moves. Therein lies business planning stability and lower costs for business’ customers.