When Houston narcotics officer Gerald Goines arrested Otis Mallet in 2008, he described a crack cocaine purchase in which Mallet retrieved the drug from a can inside a truck and handed it to his brother, Steven, whom Goines had paid $200. Thanks to Goines’ testimony, Mallet was sentenced to eight years in prison. But today, the Houston Chroniclereports, Harris County prosecutors joined Mallet’s lawyers in urging a judge to declare him “actually innocent” because Goines “repeatedly lied about nearly every aspect” of the case. The judge agreed.
The handling of Mallet’s case seems to be in character for Goines, who wrote the fraudulent search warrant affidavit for the January 2019 drug raid that killed a middle-aged couple, Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, in their home on Harding Street. To justify the Harding Street raid, which resulted in state murder charges and federal civil rights charges against Goines, the officer invented a heroin purchase by a nonexistent confidential informant. His story about Mallet’s involvement in the 2008 crack deal appears to have been equally fictitious.
“Now we know [Goines] was lying and using the district attorney’s office as a tool to convict people wrongfully as early as 2008,” said Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, whose office is reviewing some 14,000 cases involving Goines and other members of the Houston Police Department’s Narcotics Division. “Anybody who was convicted as a result of Gerald Goines’ testimony, or involvement in a case that is significant or relevant, will now be given a presumption when they file their writ that Goines’ testimony or evidence in their case was false.”
Mallet, who served two years in prison before he was released on parole, has always maintained that Goines framed him. “Goines gave conflicting testimony about why he didn’t use marked bills,” the Chronicle reports. “Mallet’s neighbors disputed seeing him engage in a drug deal or carrying the blue can Goines said he’d handled.” And while Goines claimed in an expense report that he paid $200 to a confidential informant who helped incriminate the Mallet brothers, he testified that he gave that money directly to Steven Mallet.
Goines declined to testify during Otis Mallet’s hearing, citing the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination. Ogg said Goines’ silence about Mallet’s case is “compelling evidence that the entire alleged narcotics transaction was a fraud.” Judge Ramona Franklin’s recommendation that Mallet be declared innocent will be reviewed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
Ogg said the Mallet case “raises questions about how buy money was being issued by the Houston Police Department’s narcotics division and used by narcotics officers like Gerald Goines, and how drug payouts were being supervised—and audited.” Goines was employed by the department for 34 years before he retired in the wake of the raid that killed Tuttle and Nicholas. If he routinely lied to incriminate people that he arrested during that long career, the fault for such fraud and the resulting injustices cannot be his alone.
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Chris Matthews was roundly derided by progressives Monday morning after the MSNBC host delivered a two-minute diatribe against 2020 Democratic presidential primary frontrunner Sen. Bernie Sanders, claiming that the Vermont senator would lose to President Donald Trump in a general election matchup.
“The Bernie surge has Chris Matthews on the verge of tears,” tweeted Sanders supporter Samuel Finklestein. “It’s okay, Chris.”
MSNBC host Chris Matthews on “Morning Joe” Monday said he was unhappy with the direction voters are taking the Democratic Party. (Image: screenshot/MSNBC)
Matthews appeared on MSNBC‘s “Morning Joe” as part of a panel discussing the primary. Arms crossed and looking upset, the “Hardball” host claimed that while all of the candidates in the primary contest were flawed, Sanders was one of the worst.
“I’m not happy,” said Matthews. “I’m not happy with this field.”
The longtime newsman and onetime Democratic congressional aide said that Sanders reminded him of George McGovern, whose 1972 bid for the White House against incumbent Richard Nixon was a disaster for the party.
“Moronic cable tv millionaires like Chris Matthews truly believe nothing good can ever happen in America because of an election that happened 50 goddamn years ago,” said Rousseau. “Cry more, Chris, we love to see it.”
Despite his concerns, Matthews admitted that Sanders is likely headed to a strong showing in Iowa’s Monday night caucuses.
“I think he’s gonna win big tonight, real big,” said Matthews.
The cable news host also disparaged Sanders as analogous to the kind of older activists manning anti-war tables at rallies — a comment that echoed Trump’s red-baiting attacks against Sanders in a Super Bowl interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity.
As the Outline‘s Shuja Haider pointed out, that’s not necessarily a knock on Sanders.
“Chris Matthews says Bernie is like an old guy distributing socialist literature at an antiwar rally, as though that’s a bad thing,” said Haider.
“Old people at protests from CodePink, Vets for Peace, etc., are some of the most authentic people you will ever talk to,” said Walker. “Chris Matthews thinks they’re kooks because they spend their time giving a shit about our foreign policy instead of going to brunch because he’s a pig.”
“Leafletting and commenting on matters of public concern are classic forms of speech that lie at the heart of the First Amendment, and speech in public areas is at its most protected on public sidewalks, a prototypical example of a traditional public forum.” So held the U.S. Supreme Court in Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network of Western New York (1997). Unfortunately, the Michigan Court of Appeals has taken a dimmer view of what the First Amendment protects. In Michigan v. Wood (2018), that court upheld the criminal conviction of Keith Eric Wood for handing out pro-jury-nullification pamphlets while standing on the public sidewalk outside his local courthouse. The Michigan Supreme Court is now weighing Wood’s appeal.
The matter arose in 2015, when Wood took to the sidewalk in front of the courthouse in Big Rapids, Michigan, and distributed pamphlets he had obtained from the Fully Informed Jury Association. “You may, and should, vote your conscience,” the pamphlets told prospective jurors. “You cannot be forced to obey a ‘juror’s oath.'”
Two of the people who took the pamphlets had been summoned to court that day for jury duty. This led the authorities to bring Wood up on charges of jury tampering, a crime defined by the state as “willfully attempt[ing]…to influence the decision of a juror in any case by argument or persuasion, other than as part of the proceedings in open court in the trial of the case.”
The Michigan Court of Appeals rendered its judgment on Wood’s fate three years later. Pushing back against the argument that Wood’s conduct was “pure speech” and that “the state has no compelling interest in preventing a person from distributing educational pamphlets to potential jurors in public spaces,” Chief Judge Christopher Murray ruled that his behavior was “precisely the type of speech states have a compelling interest in regulating through validly enacted statutes.”
In a friend of the court brief submitted to the Michigan Supreme Court on Wood’s behalf, Cato Institute legal scholars Clark Neily and Jay Schweikert offer a persuasive diagnosis of that ruling’s constitutional ills. “The State not only lacks a compelling interest in censoring the speech at issue here,” the brief points out, “but rather has no legitimate interest at all in preventing people like Mr. Wood from educating their fellow citizens about the injustice-preventing role that juries have played in our system of government for more than eight centuries.”
Exactly. We’re not talking here about a violent thug menacing jurors in the hopes of gaining an acquittal. We’re talking about a civically minded citizen exercising a bedrock constitutional right in a public forum. There is no good justification for this censorship. The Michigan Supreme Court should overrule the lower court’s judgment and wipe Wood’s speech-suppressing conviction from the books.
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The University of California has been requiring prospective faculty members to affirm that they support diversity. This was Orwellian in its own right—reminiscent of the university system’s 1950s loyalty oaths, which required faculty to attest that they were not members of the Communist Party.
It now appears that at one campus, UC-Berkeley, the diversity initiative goes much further than previously understood. Whether a candidate has proposed a specific, concrete plan to advance diversity is now being used as a litmus test for some positions. No candidate who fails the test can even be considered for employment.
Abigail Thompson, a UC-Davis math professor and department chair, sounded the alarm regarding the modern-day loyalty oaths in a December Wall Street Journal piece. Thompson wrote that increasing diversity is a laudable goal but requiring prospective hires to pledge fealty to the concept seems like forcing them to subscribe “to a particular political ideology.”
Sure enough, a report on Berkeley’s diversity initiative—recently publicized by Jerry Coyne and John Cochrane—shows that eight different departments affiliated with the life sciences used a diversity rubric to weed out applicants for positions. This was the first step: In one example, of a pool of 894 candidates was narrowed down to 214 based solely on how convincing their plans to spread diversity were.
Berkeley’s diversity rubric shows just how much specificity was expected. Three aspects of the applicants’ diversity statements were graded on a five-point scale: knowledge of diversity, experience in advancing diversity, and a plan for advancing diversity in the future. The highest possible score was thus a 15. Discounting the importance of diversity, failing to specifically discuss gender and race, and making only vague statements (such as “the field of History definitely needs more women”) were listed as the kinds of things that would earn the lowest possible score.
Organizing or speaking at a diversity workshop earned high marks. (Merely attending a workshop wasn’t nearly enough.) Being “happy to help out” with diversity initiatives was bad—good candidates should insist on coordinating the initiatives themselves, and must demonstrate that they “intend to be a strong advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion within the department/school/college and also their field.”
UC-Davis seems to take a similar approach. The Pacific Legal Foundation’s Daniel Ortner writes that search committee members first review candidates’ diversity statements, and that “candidates who do not ‘look outstanding with regard to their contributions to diversity'” are explicitly rejected. Think about what this means: The foremost job qualification is a sufficient commitment to spreading diversity.
According to Ortner,
Berkeley rejected 76 percent of qualified applicants without even considering their teaching skills, their publication history, their potential for academic excellence or their ability to contribute to their field. As far as the university knew, these applicants could well have been the next Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk, or they might have been outstanding and innovative educators who would make a significant difference in students’ lives.
And there is reason to believe that the results at UC Davis were similar. A recent letter from the vice chancellor to the UC Davis faculty reveals that in at least some schools, more than 50 percent of the applicants were eliminated solely because of their diversity statements.
Ortner toldThe College Fix that the mandatory diversity plans for new faculty might be unconstitutional, and he is considering a lawsuit. But whether or not the university’s initiative is permissible, it’s astoundingly misguided—a striking example of the bureaucratic capture of higher education.
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“Leafletting and commenting on matters of public concern are classic forms of speech that lie at the heart of the First Amendment, and speech in public areas is at its most protected on public sidewalks, a prototypical example of a traditional public forum.” So held the U.S. Supreme Court in Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network of Western New York (1997). Unfortunately, the Michigan Court of Appeals has taken a dimmer view of what the First Amendment protects. In Michigan v. Wood (2018), that court upheld the criminal conviction of Keith Eric Wood for handing out pro-jury-nullification pamphlets while standing on the public sidewalk outside his local courthouse. The Michigan Supreme Court is now weighing Wood’s appeal.
The matter arose in 2015, when Wood took to the sidewalk in front of the courthouse in Big Rapids, Michigan, and distributed pamphlets he had obtained from the Fully Informed Jury Association. “You may, and should, vote your conscience,” the pamphlets told prospective jurors. “You cannot be forced to obey a ‘juror’s oath.'”
Two of the people who took the pamphlets had been summoned to court that day for jury duty. This led the authorities to bring Wood up on charges of jury tampering, a crime defined by the state as “willfully attempt[ing]…to influence the decision of a juror in any case by argument or persuasion, other than as part of the proceedings in open court in the trial of the case.”
The Michigan Court of Appeals rendered its judgment on Wood’s fate three years later. Pushing back against the argument that Wood’s conduct was “pure speech” and that “the state has no compelling interest in preventing a person from distributing educational pamphlets to potential jurors in public spaces,” Chief Judge Christopher Murray ruled that his behavior was “precisely the type of speech states have a compelling interest in regulating through validly enacted statutes.”
In a friend of the court brief submitted to the Michigan Supreme Court on Wood’s behalf, Cato Institute legal scholars Clark Neily and Jay Schweikert offer a persuasive diagnosis of that ruling’s constitutional ills. “The State not only lacks a compelling interest in censoring the speech at issue here,” the brief points out, “but rather has no legitimate interest at all in preventing people like Mr. Wood from educating their fellow citizens about the injustice-preventing role that juries have played in our system of government for more than eight centuries.”
Exactly. We’re not talking here about a violent thug menacing jurors in the hopes of gaining an acquittal. We’re talking about a civically minded citizen exercising a bedrock constitutional right in a public forum. There is no good justification for this censorship. The Michigan Supreme Court should overrule the lower court’s judgment and wipe Wood’s speech-suppressing conviction from the books.
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But the paper’s latest long-form piece about Dalio and Bridgewater was especially scathing. Essentially, the paper accused Dalio of being a fraud who portrays himself as a champion of deliberate and hyperrational thought and debate, but is privately vindictive and intolerant of dissent and perceived disloyalty. And they didn’t even get into Dalio’s latest embarrassing virus-inspired flip-flop.
The billionaire hedge fund took to LinkedIn over the weekend to publish a screed lashing out at WSJ’s “fake and distorted” news.
Then on Monday morning, he followed that up with a series of tweets thanking his ‘supporters’ and asserting that he will be “fine”, in case anybody was worried about how he was handling this latest media dragging.
Thank you all for your overwhelming support and your understanding of my particular experience as a result of The Wall Street Journal’s lack of quality control. However, don’t worry about me as I will be fine. (1/4)
But just in case you were worried about Dalio, (for example, if you depend on his reputation for a paycheck), he’s arrived to insist that you shouldn’t worry about him. No, dear reader: what you should be worried about is the corrosive effect that all of this fake and distorted coverage has on society. Dalio’s case is but one example among thousands that transpire every day.
Worry about the state of media, the lack of controls on its quality, and what the resulting false or distorted news means for our society. My case is just one of thousands that transpire in the way I described. (2/4)
The main reason I wanted to draw your attention to it is because I’m in a position to describe this very typical case knowledgeably. I constantly hear of other similar cases that those involved are unwilling to publicly describe because… (3/4)
…they are afraid of the consequences and hope it will blow over. I hope more people will speak up so the problem will be more recognized. If it was more recognized, we might see the pendulum swing against bad journalism and back to more quality journalism. (4/4)
We wonder: Has Dalio spoken to the president lately? When was the last time he really ‘took the temperature of the room’ in Westport?
As much as I’m enjoying watching this ludicrous @raydalio vs @wsj feud from afar, I feel compelled to mention that people inside Bridgewater have been whispering about most of what was in that story for months but only on radically non-transparent background.
Either way, we’d like to welcome Ray to the party. We couldn’t have put it better ourselves. Though for somebody who’s worried about distorted media narratives, Dalio sure spends a lot of time on CNBC.
Rabobank: “Coronavirus Is The Kind Of Risk That Doesn’t Just Put You Out Of Your Portfolio, But Out Of The Game”
Submitted by Rabobank’s Michael Green
China returned from a longer-than-usual lunar New Year holiday today. Not the swathe of businesses that have been forced to close temporarily; and not the now tens of millions under quarantine at home; and not the villages that have barricaded themselves in from the outside world; just the financial markets. And, despite the promise from the PBOC of CNY150bn (USD21.7bn) in extra liquidity, lower rates, and whatever it takes to get through this ahead of market open, the initial response was a complete collapse: at one point the Shanghai stock exchange was -8.7% on the day – and recall that under the terms of the Phase One US-China trade deal, US financial firms are supposed to be diving in to this kind of market aggressively; the Chinese currency, both off and onshore, has crashed through the psychological 7 level once again; and trading in Chinese commodity markets has been suspended after iron ore, copper, crude oil, palm oil, and eggs all closed limit down on the day.
Of course, there is going to be a spill-over into other markets. You wanted to know what a real decoupling from China might look like, and/or what a “What if everyone just stayed at home and didn’t buy anything?” economic thought-experiment looks like? Well here you are, folks.
In terms of trade, Australia and New Zealand are at the front of the queue, as well as time zone-wise. Add plunging iron ore to a cessation in Chinese tourist arrivals, and to the news that high-value agri imports like lobsters are allegedly not allowed into China anymore, and you have all the ingredients for AUD to give up the 67c level and NZD to give up 65c. Yet other global commodity exporters are likely to feel the pain. For just one example, China’s oil consumption is now down 20% according to sources quoted on Bloomberg. That is the equivalent of an economic depression, not a recession, landing overnight. Expect prices, and global inflation expectations, to follow suite. Indeed, there is already talk of an emergency OPEC meeting. Yet even ordinary exporters (and more so net exporters) of goods and services are going to get hit. In fact, you’d need to be a continent-sized, inward-focused, commodity importer to be able to ride this out comfortably. Perhaps the US and India fit that bill to some degree, but less than one might think, perhaps.
Naturally, this kind of market sell-off imparts a natural tendency on the part of our not-so-natural markets for aggressive dip-buying. However, as opposed to the headline of “World War Three!” which triggered a bout of risk-off action at the start of the year, this sell-off appears far more justified. The same op-ed writers who did not understand the real-politick of the Soleimani assassination and were wrongly screaming “Sell!” after that event are today trying the argument that “More people die from slipping in the shower, etc., than this Coronavirus.”
This overlooks the fact that this virus has the potential to go exponential and become a global pandemic. It’s a small risk, yes – but it’s a FAAAAAAAT tail risk, that tens of millions of people simultaneously slipping in the shower really isn’t. Indeed, it’s the kind of huge risk that doesn’t just put you out of your portfolio position, or out of business, but out of the game, full-stop. Markets are quite right to react in a strongly negative, preventative fashion to this risk until we see evidence that it is being brought under control and the threat has truly passed. And we are not there yet, very regrettably. When we are, we see the real bounce. In short, “panic measures” are not always a sign of panic – they can be rational.
The global establishment of the WHO are, by contrast, remarkably cavalier in their market-friendly approach that there should be no restrictions on free movement or free trade as a safety-first measure, and we should all aim to find a vaccine. All very IMF. It’s not a surprise, perhaps, that once again nation-states are thumbing their noses at that particular economic policy prescription from a famous acronym and imposing travel bans and, in China’s case, import bans too (if the no seafood report is true).
On which note, today is the first trading day of the bold new world of BoJo Brexit. Headlines in that regard are that the UK is going to play hardball and is aiming to keep all its own fish, and for an EU trade deal somewhere between those of Canada and Australia rather than the far closer relationship that had been initially promised. Indeed, BoJo is talking about preparations for full customs/border checks in 2021 once the transition period ends. That also suggests a healthy dose of risk-off is required. However, for whom? Some of the impacts of this kind of scenario could arguably prove more positive than the Brexit naysayers have long warned. Nissan, which runs a huge car plant in Sunderland that has long been flagged as at risk under hard Brexit, is today claimed to have a contingency plan to pull out of European production and double down on the UK market instead, where it would then have a competitive edge vs. tariffed European imports. So less EU exports, more UK local production, and more UK jobs – in that one industry.
The University of California has been requiring prospective faculty members to affirm that they support diversity. This was Orwellian in its own right—reminiscent of the university system’s 1950s loyalty oaths, which required faculty to attest that they were not members of the Communist Party.
It now appears that at one campus, UC-Berkeley, the diversity initiative goes much further than previously understood. Whether a candidate has proposed a specific, concrete plan to advance diversity is now being used as a litmus test for some positions. No candidate who fails the test can even be considered for employment.
Abigail Thompson, a UC-Davis math professor and department chair, sounded the alarm regarding the modern-day loyalty oaths in a December Wall Street Journal piece. Thompson wrote that increasing diversity is a laudable goal but requiring prospective hires to pledge fealty to the concept seems like forcing them to subscribe “to a particular political ideology.”
Sure enough, a report on Berkeley’s diversity initiative—recently publicized by Jerry Coyne and John Cochrane—shows that eight different departments affiliated with the life sciences used a diversity rubric to weed out applicants for positions. This was the first step: In one example, of a pool of 894 candidates was narrowed down to 214 based solely on how convincing their plans to spread diversity were.
Berkeley’s diversity rubric shows just how much specificity was expected. Three aspects of the applicants’ diversity statements were graded on a five-point scale: knowledge of diversity, experience in advancing diversity, and a plan for advancing diversity in the future. The highest possible score was thus a 15. Discounting the importance of diversity, failing to specifically discuss gender and race, and making only vague statements (such as “the field of History definitely needs more women”) were listed as the kinds of things that would earn the lowest possible score.
Organizing or speaking at a diversity workshop earned high marks. (Merely attending a workshop wasn’t nearly enough.) Being “happy to help out” with diversity initiatives was bad—good candidates should insist on coordinating the initiatives themselves, and must demonstrate that they “intend to be a strong advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion within the department/school/college and also their field.”
UC-Davis seems to take a similar approach. The Pacific Legal Foundation’s Daniel Ortner writes that search committee members first review candidates’ diversity statements, and that “candidates who do not ‘look outstanding with regard to their contributions to diversity'” are explicitly rejected. Think about what this means: The foremost job qualification is a sufficient commitment to spreading diversity.
According to Ortner,
Berkeley rejected 76 percent of qualified applicants without even considering their teaching skills, their publication history, their potential for academic excellence or their ability to contribute to their field. As far as the university knew, these applicants could well have been the next Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk, or they might have been outstanding and innovative educators who would make a significant difference in students’ lives.
And there is reason to believe that the results at UC Davis were similar. A recent letter from the vice chancellor to the UC Davis faculty reveals that in at least some schools, more than 50 percent of the applicants were eliminated solely because of their diversity statements.
Ortner toldThe College Fix that the mandatory diversity plans for new faculty might be unconstitutional, and he is considering a lawsuit. But whether or not the university’s initiative is permissible, it’s astoundingly misguided—a striking example of the bureaucratic capture of higher education.
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Conservative radio icon Rush Limbaugh announced on his Monday show that he has been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer.
Rush Limbaugh just announced on his radio program he has been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. Says there will be days he won’t be able to be there due to treatment…
All of a sudden, events are looking a bit fluxy out there, as though the world is shuddering through some spooky ch-ch-ch-changes, like a monster waiting to be born, with strange convergences of ecology, politics and economy, and there’s only so much you can do to prepare, really. Criticality is in the air!
The horses are out of the barn on the Wuhan Coronavirus. Air travel was curtailed too late in the game — and still only partially — with asymptomatic-but-infectious human carriers winging to every corner of the world and probably contaminating airports all along the way. There’s plenty of thought and counter-thought on what exactly is going on behind the scenes in China. The ruling party has knocked itself out demonstrating its earnestness in the crisis, performing great feats like the construction of a one-thousand-bed hospital in ten days, shutting down the lunar new year festivities (like cancelling Christmas here), and locking down a hundred million citizens in quarantine. Pretty impressive.
But there’s also a theory that the Coronavirus affords a cover for cascading failures in China’s corrupt and shifty banking system. The country had already stepped across some frontiers in demographics, energy consumption, and industrial growth that were shoving it toward contraction for the first time in two generations. Coronavirus has shut down a lot of production in big things like cars and big-little things like cell phones, and supply lines are shutting down to world markets. This amounts to the first big test of the integrated global economy, as well as the world’s debt-saturated business model.
When a lot of parties and counterparties can’t pay each other because their revenue flows are cut off, the securities, currencies, equities, and other abstract representations of wealth go south. The US and Europe are no better positioned for a crisis in their banking arrangements, and confidence is starting to crack. Both economic mega-regions have relied on central banking hocus-pocus to prop up stock markets and maintain the illusion that the logic of bonds still applies. The first thing to go moneywise in a contracting financial system is the magic of compound interest.
The US Federal Reserve has been massively gaming the Repo markets — overnight lending that uses bonds as collateral — since September, raising suspicions that more than one of its “primary dealer” banks are insolvent. Juicing them with “liquidity” is like painting over sheetrock infested with black mold. Looks good for a week or so, and then you’re in intensive care. Nobody knows yet what the effect of Britain’s escape from the EU will do to the Union’s remainers, but Europe’s bonded debt arrangements are even dodgier than America’s, since there is absolutely no EU central control of each member’s fiscal affairs. Anyway, the meta-trend now is the devolution of governance from giant-and-central to smaller-and-local, so the real question is how much disorder and damage do these nations endure as that happens. It’s been manifesting vividly in France for a year in the yellow vest protests.
Here in the USA, the knock-on effects of converging crises begin to look like a game of four-dimensional eight-ball. The oil markets are getting slammed around the $51 hashmark, making it more difficult for the shale oil producers to meet their onerous debt repayments (in an industry that just doesn’t make a profit). Lower gasoline prices may seem like a boon for US motorists, but it comes at the expense of bankrupting more oil companies and punishing lenders like pension funds that invested in shale securities in the desperate search for “yield.” Shale never was a rational business model despite its fabulous production surge in a very short span of years. Don’t be surprised if there’s an attempt to nationalize it, which will induce new problems of capital allocation and sheer incompetence in a world where central planning of anything is more and more a bad bet.
Looming and converging multiple crises are also behind the gross disorder in US politics, though the connections may not be so discernably visible. President Trump foolishly took credit for financial markets that he had correctly described as being “one big, fat, ugly bubble,” back in the febrile days of the last election. Now it threatens to leave him holding a big fat ugly bag of trouble. That booby trap is surely more hazardous to his reelection chances than the frenetic efforts of pissants like Adam Schiff running Wile E. Coyote ambuscades in the DC Swamp. Mr. Trump spent three years working, jawboning, and bluffing over global trade arrangements that are now suddenly falling apart. How much of that will turn out to be a temporary effect of the Coronavirus, nobody knows. Or maybe it’s an inflection point in the workings of our over-hyper-complexified human ecosystem.
These shifting quandaries leave the Democratic Party between that ol’ rock and a hard place. All of their bad faith ploys against Mr. Trump have failed so far. I speak to supposedly educated people every day upon whom the failure of the Mueller Investigation, the fiasco of impeachment, and the revelations of IG Michael Horowitz have made no impression at all. The Golden Golem of Greatness is still Putin’s Puppet to them. It’s a wonder of the age that they can’t cut their losses. And now Bernie Sanders suddenly looks poised to win the Iowa caucus and inflame the not-quite-so-socialist factions of the party, who appear to be ratcheting up some Wile E. Coyote traps against him.
If that works, it’ll blow the party apart, 1860 style, into rump factions. But if Bernie somehow perseveres and gets the nomination… and the Potemkin financial markets tank… and Coronavirus turns out to be a very big deal for upsetting global trade… then, America may get its first zealous socialist president.
Yes, history repeats and rhymes and all that, but I don’t see Bernie replicating the triumphs of Franklin D. Roosevelt in Great Depression 2.0. Rather, by attempting to overlay command-and-control policies on a zeitgeist that wants to take us smaller and local, Bernie Sanders will only be bucking reality.
The net effect of Bernie Sanders in the White House will be to finish off the economy… and imagine where that will take us.
