Tag: hit&run

If New York City moves ahead with a proposal to landmark the home of the Strand Book Store, it would be putting a “bureaucratic noose” around the business, says owner Nancy Bass Wyden. “The Strand survived through my dad and grandfather’s very hard work,” Wyden says, and now the city wants to “take a piece of it.”

Opened by her grandfather, Benjamin Bass, in 1927, the Strand is New York City’s last great bookstore—a four-story literary emporium crammed with 18 miles of merchandise stuffed into towering bookcases arranged along narrow passageways. It’s the last survivor of the world-famous Booksellers Row, a commercial district comprised of about 40 secondhand dealers along Fourth Avenue below Union Square.

On December 4, 2018, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission held a public hearing on a proposal to designate the building that’s home to the Strand as a historic site. If the structure is landmarked, Wyden would need to get permission from the city before renovating the interior or altering the facade.

“It would be very difficult to be commercially nimble if we’re landmarked,” Wyden tells Reason. “We’d have to get approvals through a whole committee and bureaucracy that do not know how to run a bookstore.”

Wyden’s outrage derives in part from her family’s decades of struggle to keep the business alive.

The Strand survived, she says, because of “my grandfather and my dad’s very hard work and their passion…Both worked most of their lives six days a week” and they “hardly took vacations.”

Why can 11 unelected individuals of the Landmarks Commission curtail Wyden’s property rights? Signed into law in 1965, New York’s Landmarks Act was challenged as unconstitutional 13 years later by the owner of Grand Central Terminal, which sued the city for preventing it from building a skyscraper on top of the train station.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law in a 6–3 decision, setting a precedent that in the dissenting opinion of Justice William Rehnquist undermined constitutional protections. As Rehnquist wrote, the city had “in a literal sense, ‘taken’ substantial property rights” from the company without offering just compensation, as required by the Fifth Amendment.

Since that ruling, the number of landmarked properties in New York has more than doubled to about 36,000, encompassing more than a quarter of all the buildings in Manhattan.

Wyden (who is married to Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden) has a big platform, as the owner of a literary landmark in the media capital of the world; The New York Times, The Guardian, Fortune, and the New York Post have all written about her fight with the Landmarks Commission. “I think that there are other business owners like me that ended up just kind of getting trapped in this situation without much of a voice,” Wyden says.

In her simple message to the city—”leave me alone”—Wyden is unwittingly echoing the line of retired public school librarian Ella Suydam, owner of a Brooklyn farmhouse built by her Dutch ancestor, which the city first tried to landmark in 1980. “Who the hell are you to tell me what I can do with my house,” Suydam told the Commission in 1980, intimidating its members into backing off.

The city waited until 1989, when Suydam was dead, to landmark the house.

Most building owners are less successful in their dealings with the Landmarks Commission. When the city proposed designating Manhattan’s former meatpacking district—a neighborhood comprised of 104 buildings—one property-owning family opposed the plan, testifying at a March 13, 2003, public hearing.

“If the buildings become part of a landmark district, this will essentially eliminate new construction,” said Richard Meilman, whose grandfather, a Russian-born butcher, had purchased multiple properties in the area in the 1940s.

The Landmarks Commission designated the properties later that year.

Wyden is committed to preserving the Strand. “I want to continue the Strand forever,” she says. “That’s my legacy and my goal in life.” She just objects to the loss of control.

“Our family’s been a great steward to the building,” Wyden tells Reason. “Two years ago there was a massive sewer fire. It blew out two stories of our windows and rocked the foundation. We restored the windows to the prior look and we restored the pillars to the way they originally had been even before we bought the building.”

The Landmarks Commission will vote on designating Wyden’s building next month. She’s not optimistic.

“I’ve been told that nobody wins with Landmarks, but I want to fight them because it’s just so wrong, and so unjust, and so unfair, and we can’t let them keep running over everybody in their way.”

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If there is one bright star in the bleak congressional landscape, it is Justin Amash, the Republican congressman from my home state of Michigan, who was just re-elected for his fifth term. At a time when almost every other GOP politico has flipped and flopped on Trump, depending on whether his/her political ambitions are served by cheerleading or resisting him, Amash has been a lonely voice of sweet reason. He has unwaveringly stood up to Trump not to score points or advance his career—or his stock among liberals—but for the sake of a principled libertarianism anchored in limited government, markets, fiscal responsibility, pluralism, tolerance, and a humane and pro-growth immigration policy.

So it is very disappointing that he commented this week to the Ionia Sentinel-Standard that he does not have an “inherent” problem with a border wall to control illegal immigration. This shows just how much Trump’s presidency has moved the Overton Window on immigration in general and the wall in particular.

That Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.), who called Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” who “doesn’t represent my party” after Trump proposed his Muslim ban, should now be four square behind the wall is one thing. Graham pulled a Trump Tower–sized switcheroo last year when his poll numbers in South Carolina tanked and it became clear that his #NeverTrump stance might cost him his re-election bid. At that point, he started shooting little Twitter valentines to Trump declaring that the Donald is “just what America needs” because he “relishes being the Law and Order president and a strong Commander in Chief.”

Mitt Romney, the incoming freshman senator from Utah, has pulled another switcheroo of his own. After accepting Trump’s endorsement twice—once before his failed presidential run and then for his Senate bid in the fall—Romney penned a scathing op-ed this week denouncing Trump as “divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions.” No doubt, Romney is trying to replace outgoing Sen. Jeff Flake as the Senate GOP’s leading anti-Trumper (which would be a worthy goal, except that Romney is no Flake). He too has said he’d vote for Trump’s wall, a position that represents a small glimmer of consistency in Romney, actually, given that he was way ahead of the curve in staking a harsh restrictionist position: Running for president in 2012, he declared that he wanted to push illegal aliens to “self deport”—a position that Trump at the time called “maniacal” and blamed for Romney’s loss.

In contrast to Graham and Romney’s opportunism, Amash has been a sincere and steadfast voice of opposition, a man who consults not his political interests but his bedrock commitments when he opines on Trump’s policies and antics. He has supported Trump’s criminal justice reforms and the few other good things the president has done. But he has also gone after Trump in no uncertain terms for bad-mouthing minorities and immigrants, for proposing to get rid of birthright citizenship by executive order, and for waxing rhapsodic about his “easy to win” trade wars, and for mocking Rep. Mark Sanford for losing the election.

Amash has also called out other Republicans—including fellow members of the misnamed Freedom Caucus—as they’ve drifted toward Trumpism, trading their commitment to limited government and fiscal responsibility for a protectionist, reactionary nationalism. Amash was the only Republican who opposed the House GOP’s resolution last summer “supporting the officers and personnel” of ICE, a bill whose sole purpose was to embarrass the anti-ICE left. In a tweet, Amash denounced as “dubious” the resolution’s claim that ending ICE would allow gangs to roam free. He asked why his party would “treat a federal agency as though it’s beyond reproach and reform.”

So again, it’s troubling that Amash of all people would now be saying that if the wall is “done thoughtfully,” after taking into “consideration private property at the border and environmental concerns,” he’d be “OK with it.”

Walls are the specialty of Communist regimes that regard the outside world as a threat to their control. A wall with Mexico, a friendly neighbor, would be particularly terrible, because it would cut across an area that has historically been integrated around geographic, economic, cultural, and even ethnic lines. Indeed, the border in towns like Laredo, Texas, literally runs through families, with one half living in America and the other half in Mexico. Even mortal enemies like India and Pakistan have not erected artificial physical barriers between them, holding out hope that one day they will bury the hatchet and be united in trade and friendship.

Setting that aside, there are also many practical reasons why the wall would be “inherently” bad and not “OK.”

For starters, as Nick Gillespie and I (and numerous other Reason writers) have pointed out repeatedly, notwithstanding the hysteria about migrant caravans, border apprehensions are at a historic low; the number of Mexicans entering the country without authorization has plummeted, due to entirely natural causes. And it is unlikely to pick up again, because Mexico, like the rest of the world outside Sub-Saharan Africa, has completed its “demographic transition”—meaning its fertility rate has dropped as more infants survive to adulthood—so it no longer has surplus young men to send our way. Indeed, right now there are more Mexicans leaving America than entering. Even if you see immigration as a battle, building a wall would be fighting the last war.

Furthermore, at least half of the unauthorized population consists not of border jumpers but visa overstays (a non-trivial number of who at any given time are illegal because America’s Kafkaesque immigration bureaucracy failed to renew their visas in a timely fashion). A wall will do nothing about that. And the profits for drug smugglers are too huge to be deterred by a wall, as the Bipartisan Institute’s Theresa Brown has argued. Nor will it thwart motivated terrorists. The best way to enhance border security is not a silly wall; it’s to give those who mean no harm legal avenues, such as guest worker visas, to come to America. This will reduce cross-border illegal flows even more, handing America far more operational control over the border far more cheaply.

There is an argument, as I said last week, for paying Trump some ransom money for his wall in exchange for legalizing DREAMers (those who were brought to the country without authorization as minors) and Temporary Protected Status holders (those trying to escape turmoil or violence in their native countries). This is especially true since he has dropped his asking price considerably since the last shutdown. At that time he was demanding $25 billion and a 40 percent cut in legal immigration. This time, he wants “only” $5 billion.

But just because it is sometimes necessary to pay ransom to avoid a bigger catastrophe doesn’t mean it is “inherently” OK, no matter how small the amount.

That Amash, the man with the strongest moral compass in the GOP, should be signing off on a wall rather than calling for a guest worker program shows just how much the conversation about immigration policy has deteriorated in the GOP, compared to the 1980s when such sentiment was conventional wisdom in the party and the country.

Indeed, watch this 1980 debate between George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and weep.

When asked whether kids of illegal aliens should he allowed a free education in public schools, Bush argues “yes.” It would do no good to anyone to deny them an education, he says. Then he goes on to point out that the only reason that substantial illegal immigration even exists is because America has made certain forms of labor that should be “legal” “illegal,” turning a whole bunch of “honorable, decent, family-loving people” who are “good” and “decent” and “part of my family” into law breakers.

Reagan one-ups Bush and says that “barriers” are not the answer to dealing with all the unemployed youth in Mexico at that time who wanted to come to America to work. “Open the border both ways,” he declares, calling specifically for “work permits” so that Mexicans can “come and go” legally from America. He points out that the fact that Mexicans can come to America to work is a “safety valve” that “prevents the lid from blowing off down there” and calls for working with Mexico in a “mutual recognition” of our common problems. No idiotic demands that Mexico pay for a wall. No denouncing it for sending “rapists” and “criminals” and not its “best people.”

Sad!

If you’re concerned about the ever-expanding federal budget deficit, you probably think the government needs to, you know, spend less. Right? Maybe not.

Most Americans believe addressing the budget deficit should be one of the new Congress’ top priorities, according to a Harvard-Politico poll released yesterday. But a majority of respondents also want Congress to increase spending in a variety of areas, including infrastructure, education, and the military.

Eighty percent of respondents say it’s “extremely important” that Congress take “steps to substantially reduce the federal budget deficit.” This seems to be a bipartisan issue, with 81 percent of Republicans and 76 percent of Democrats in agreement. This concern over the budget deficit isn’t new. A Gallup poll from last March showed that 77 percent of Americans “personally worry about federal spending and the budget deficit” either a “great deal” (51 percent) or a “fair amount” (26 percent).

And there is plenty of cause for concern. It’s hard to believe that as recently as 2001, the federal government posted a budget surplus (albeit a small one). In 2002, we were back in the red, with a $158 billion deficit. Now the Congressional Budget Office has projected a $981 billion deficit for the 2019 fiscal year. By 2020, that number will likely surpass $1 trillion. And the deficits from recent years have piled up, with the national debt reaching an astounding $21.974 trillion at the end of 2018.

So it’s not a shock that people are worried. The problem is that Americans—both Republicans and Democrats—seem to want to keep spending anyway. Seventy-nine percent of respondents, including 82 percent of Democrats and 81 percent of Republicans, believe “increasing spending on the nation’s infrastructure” is “an extremely important priority.” Bipartisan support for this issue may explain why White House counselor Kellyanne Conway suggested recently that even with Democrats in control of the House, both parties could work together on an infrastructure bill. It’s not exactly clear what that legislation would look like, though President Donald Trump promised $1.5 trillion in infrastructure spending during his campaign.

Infrastructure isn’t the only area where most Americans want to see more spending. Seventy-three percent of respondents—including 84 percent of Democrats and 65 percent of Republicans—want Congress to raise federal spending on K–12 education. This would likely mean an increase over the $40.1 billion appropriated by the federal government for elementary and secondary education in 2019.

Finally, the poll shows that 53 percent of Americans want Congress to increase spending on the military. This idea is more popular among Republicans, 68 percent of whom agree ith it, though nearly half of Democrats (46 percent) support it as well. Of course, the nation already spends on astronomical amount—$686 billion in 2019—on the Pentagon. But sure, let’s throw more money its way!

Federal spending on infrastructure and education is not the main reason the government is nearly $22 trillion in debt. Military spending is a major factor, but the biggest culprits are entitlements, including more than $1 trillion for Social Security and roughly $625 billion for Medicare in 2019. This sort of spending is not sustainable. If no major changes are made, both programs will be insolvent within the next 15 years.

Now in this particular poll, those who said Congress should address the budget deficit came from a different sample from those who said they want Congress to increase spending in the areas described above. Still, the results suggest there’s probably significant overlap. But you can’t have it both ways. Either politicians take real steps to cut spending and balance the budget, or they keep on spending wildly. There’s really no in-between.

The results of the poll make sense. In theory, everyone wants to fix the budget deficit. But the best way to do so is by cutting spending, which no one wants to do, rather than increasing it, which a lot of people seem to like.

And the attitudes of the public reflect the approaches taken by the leaders they elect. Take Trump. Back in 2016, he told The Washington Post he could eliminate the national debt in eight years. Still, he explicitly promised during his campaign not to cut Social Security or Medicare spending. And in case his lack of interest in addressing the deficit/debt wasn’t apparent, The Daily Beast reported last month that Trump has said of the looming debt crisis: “Yeah, but I won’t be here.”

Trump was really just saying aloud what other politicians are no doubt thinking. Even former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R–Wisc.), a supposed budget hawk, was a complete failure when it came to balancing the budget.

So here’s the biggest takeaway from the Politico-Harvard poll: Plenty of people want Congress to tackle the budget deficit crisis, unless that means reigning the government’s wild spending. It probably won’t be long before we see how that works out.

A grocery store in West Philadelphia will close in March, and the store’s owner says the city’s soda tax is to blame.

Jeff Brown, who owns several Shoprite stores in the Philadelphia area, says his location in Haverford has seen a 23 percent decline in sales since the soda tax was implemented in 2016. The tax adds about $1 to a two-liter bottle of soda, and more than $2 to a six-pack of cans. It applies not just to sodas but to sports drinks, juices, and other sweetened beverages.

The store’s impending closure means that residents of the area will have one fewer option for buying soda, yes, but also milk, eggs, vegetables, and other essentials.

“I built these stores to help people live healthier, longer lives,” Brown tells Philly.com. “This is taking a success and destroying it.”

The location of Brown’s grocery store is a significant part of the story—and demonstrates an important problem with the city’s soda tax. On the map below, I’ve highlighted the location of the soon-to-be-closed Shoprite within the city limits of Philadelphia, which is shaded red.

As you can see, customers with cars who might have previously shopped at Brown’s store could easily dodge the soda tax by driving to the west or south and leaving the city. Or if they already lived across city lines, they may have stopped coming into Philadelphia and found an alternative grocery store.

This isn’t just a hypothetical. A report published last year by Catalina, a market research firm, found that soda sales inside Philadelphia city limits have fallen by 55 percent since January 1, when the tax took effect; sales outside the city have grown by 38 percent.

The city seems to have little sympathy for Brown’s plight—or for that of his employees or customers. In a statement to Philadelphia’s CBS affiliate, a spokesman for Mayor Jim Kenny (who championed the soda tax’s passage) said Brown was trying to “scapegoat” the tax as a justification for closing his doors, and argued that “the tax has not had any impact on sales.” To bolster that second point, the mayor’s office also pointed to a Harvard study released last year that he said showed the soda tax did not reduce overall sales at Philadelphia-based chain stores.

But that’s a little misleading. For one thing, what the Harvard study actually found was that beverage sales at Philadelphia grocery stores had fallen by 57 percent since the soda tax was imposed, but that stores’ bottom lines were not hurt because most were passing 100 percent of the higher costs on to consumers.

For another, it’s disingenuous for the mayor’s office to claim that the tax had no impact on sales when the very point of the tax is to impact sales—under the premise that people in the city will be healthier if they purchase and consume fewer sugary drinks. This is a little bit like President Donald Trump’s advisers claiming that consumers aren’t noticing the higher prices created by tariffs. If that’s true, then the underlying policy has already failed. Both tariffs and soda taxes are meant to alter consumers’ behavior, and they cannot do that if consumers don’t notice the costs.

It’s also worth noting that the Harvard study was bankrolled by Bloomberg Philanthropies, a nonprofit connected to former New York City mayor (and first ballot entrant into the Nanny State Hall of Shame) Michael Bloomberg that has advocated for the Philadelphia soda tax and similar taxes in other cities.

There are, of course, myriad reasons why a particular business might fail. Maybe Brown’s store was already on the rocks before the tax came along. But it seems reasonable to think that the combination of the tax itself and his store’s location, so close to the tax-free suburbs, was a significant blow. For the mayor’s office to suggest otherwise adds insult to injury—and demonstrates, yet again, that Kenney is committed to blaming the victims for his own failed policy.

Herb Kelleher, the larger-than-life Southwest Airlines impresario who taught the world that air travel did not have to be the exclusive plaything of the rich, died yesterday at 87.

“Our basic thinking [was that] Southwest would democratize the skies,” Kelleher told me in 2010. “Which we did. I mean, a couple of years ago 85 percent of [Americans] had flown at least one commercial flight as opposed to 15 percent in 1966.”

Kelleher was not the founder of Southwest, but rather the founding lawyer—which came in handy, since the Texas-based upstarts spent five years in court before getting its first plane off the ground in 1971. Why so much litigation? Because back then, as in pretty much all the world, America’s airline industry was a heavily regulated cartel, with the federal Civil Aeronautics Board effectively letting the country’s four main incumbent airlines veto the routes, prices, and even existence of any would-be competitor. Southwest’s investors blew through their $500,000 seed money in legal fees, so Kelleher legendarily vowed to pay out of his own pocket if they lost their appeal to the Texas Supreme Court. They won, and he became CEO.

“One of the [government’s] fundamental purposes was to throttle competition,” Kelleher told me. “Their thesis was that if a new airline was gonna take one passenger—one, that’s what they said—one passenger away from an existing airline, it can’t be certificated….The fact that the existing airlines had 90 percent of all the revenue passenger miles in 1938, and also had 90 percent of all the revenue passenger miles in 1978, at the time of deregulation, would give you somewhat of a hint.”

In our book The Declaration of Independents, Nick Gillespie and I argue that many of the modern world’s best developments came through the combined efforts of three types of people: the theoreticians, who provided intellectual frameworks and persuasion for allowing a good thing to flourish; the deregulators, politicians who got the government out of the way; and the practitioners, who used this marvelous freedom—oftentimes forcing the deregulators’ hands—to democratize a technology, setting off a chain reaction of productivity, wealth, and happiness. Kelleher was emphatically a member of that latter category. As we wrote:

Southwest Airlines exists because Texas is big. Like the now-forgotten Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) in California, Southwest was not subject to all those onerous interstate regulations and could [after finally winning its in-state legal battles] fly multiple routes in a large and populous state. The two airlines served as a field experiment to test—and demolish—the federal government’s half-century-old theory that the airline industry, in the absence of tight regulation, would jack up prices, abandon small-town routes, and hinder the development of the industry itself.

That demonstration project proved critical in the federal deregulation of the airline industry. Once allowed to escape the confines of Texas airspace, Kelleher’s airline became the most profitable on the planet, showing the entire world the joys of being free to move about the country.

Southwest [ushered] five key innovations into a sclerotic air-travel industry that had changed little in a half century: (1) unheard-of speed in turning around airplanes for their next flight, (2) a preference for unloved regional airports, (3) variable pricing between flights on the same route, (4) getting out of the meal-serving business, and (5) a conscious puncturing of jet age cool with corny, down-home friendliness.

That combination—minus #5, depending on the airline—can now be found all over the world, though not nearly often enough in the United States, due to lingering government controls on ownership, airports, air traffic, and more.

Kelleher was an outspoken critic, and frequent legal opponent, of the governnment’s ham-handed interventions into the industry, including being the only major airline CEO to come out against the post–9/11 bailout money. But for all his contributions to the deregulation story, and vast riches in business, he will likely be remembered just as much for being a swashbuckling, chain-smoking, only-in-America kind of entrepreneur who would settle legal claims with armwrestling contests and advertise air travel like this:

America is war-weary, and so President Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria was the right call, no matter what the foreign policy hawks say. But that doesn’t mean that America can simply walk away, I argue in my morning column at The Week: We don’t want to leave the Syrian Kurds, who aided our efforts against ISIS, more vulnerable than when we intervened. The best way of arranging their security, I suggest, is by letting all those who want to flee to come to America.

Go here to read the piece.

“Does anyone have any doubt that we’re not doing a wall?” Votes in the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday cleared the way for Nancy Pelosi to resume her leadership role on Capitol Hill, for headscarves to be worn on the House floor, and for the creation of a select committee on climate change.

As expected, Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) was crowned speaker in the newly Democrat-controlled House. According to the White House, she and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) will meet with President Donald Trump again today to plot an end to the partial shutdown of the federal government that’s been going on for the past two weeks. But how any agreement will come about is unclear.

Trump reiterated yesterday that he won’t approve any funding deal that doesn’t include $5 billion for his border wall.

Pelosi, meanwhile, told reporters yesterday that “we’re not doing a wall. Does anyone have any doubt that we’re not doing a wall?”

The House yesterday did pass a temporary funding package. It “includes a bill to temporarily fund the Department of Homeland Security at current levels—with $1.3 billion for border security, far less than Trump has said he wants—through Feb. 8 as bipartisan talks would continue,” reports Business Insider. It was approved along with a measure to continue funding the Agriculture, Interior, and Housing and Urban Development departments through September.

But not all Democrats dug the package—Reps. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, (D–N.Y.), and Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii) all voted against it out of opposition to “PAYGO” rules requiring spending increases to be deficit-neutral. And the White House has promised to reject the agreement, while Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refuses to put it up for a vote there.

Despite this delayed dealmaking, many Democrats rejoiced yesterday as new members of the 116th Congress were sworn in. This Congress features a record number of women lawmakers (127, including 25 in the Senate and 102 in the House), as well as an array of identity-category firsts. The House will see its first Native American female members—Deb Haaland (D–N.M.) and Sharice Davids (D–Kansas)—along with a new youngest member (Ocasio-Cortez) and the first Muslim women (Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota). Tlaib was sworn in yesterday on Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the Quran.

Some are saying that Tlaib is also the first Palestinian member of Congress, but Michigan Republican Justin Amash points out that this isn’t so:

My father is Palestinian, and I’ve been in Congress since 2011.

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) January 4, 2019

FREE MARKETS

What killed The Weekly Standard? Following last month’s shuttering of the influential neocon magazine founded by Bill Kristol, The New Yorker offers an autopsy. “In the press, the magazine’s demise was a media story, confined to the inside pages and told in a tone of half-sympathetic reminiscence,” notes Benjamin Wallace-Wells. “But the death of the major intellectual journal of conservatism, at a time of profound transition for the right, is about more than the strategic calculations of a media holding company in Denver.” More:

The decisive turn in conservatism during the half decade when the Standard shed subscribers and, eventually, its owners’ faith, was toward Trumpism, an evolution that the Standard opposed so vociferously that for a long time it has been hard to separate Bill Kristol’s public persona from the anti-Trump cause. (As the 2016 Republican Convention neared, Kristol had frantically tried to recruit a challenger to Trump, a somewhat quixotic effort in which he was turned down by James Mattis, Mitt Romney, and eventually a National Review columnist named David French.) The division over the President among conservative élites has been especially sharp of late, as Mattis and Nikki Haley, favorites among Washington conservatives, left the administration, and Romney published an op-ed attacking the President two days before assuming his Senate seat. The Standard’s sources, friends, and sensibility were on one side of this divide. Many of its subscribers, fatally, were on the other….

A magazine like the Standard depends upon social currency of at least two kinds. One is inside Washington, a prestige that guarantees both its influence in Republican administrations and congressional offices and its access to important sources. The Standard never really lost this currency, despite its rift with the President. The final issue’s cover story was a friendly interview with Haley, who seems as likely as anyone to lead the Republican Party after Trump. But, for the magazine to thrive, it required a broader brand, too. For years, to name-check the Standard was to project a certain image: that you were conservative without being brutish or anti-modern, that you had some ecumenicism and intellectual style. That kind of currency filtered back to Colorado, where some of Anschutz’s executives at Clarity Media moved in Republican donor circles. “Whenever Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan or Cory Gardner would go through Colorado and have an event, they would say, ‘Oh, you guys own the Standard! It’s great,’ and they liked being part of that,” the senior Standard editor told me. The aura it cast was not unlike the one supplied by The Economist—name-drop it in a mundane setting and it suggested that you had access to a broader and more imaginative world.

QUICK HITS

• A preview of state abortion battles in 2019.

• Defeated drug warriors are getting desperate.

• What the new movie Vice gets wrong about Dick Cheney.

• If you legalize it, will they come? New York faces challenges prying weed sales out of the black market.

• New on Netflix and celebrated at the Golden Globes, Girl “sounds like a film that transgender moviegoers might rally around.” And yet…

• Ohio is raising its marriage age age for girls to the same age it is for boys.

• Yikes: “The cost of living has risen faster in Seattle than in any other American city.”

• What’s in a white-sounding name?

• Power versus power:

Conservatives and the left are increasingly polarizing around completely different notions of power, with conservatives attempting to lap up many outraged by hierarchies of cultural and social capital. “AOC can’t speak for the oppressed because she is POPULAR & PRETTY!1!”

— William Gillis

As California Gov. Jerry Brown heads into the sunset (or at least to his Colusa County ranch), many political writers in California are trying to assess his recent legacy. It’s not hard to tally up some of his wins and losses, think about his good policies and bad ones and analyze the latter Brown years as one would analyze the legacy of any politician.

Brown is likely to be remembered as the last adult in Sacramento—the guy who made sure the books were in balance. Some of his parting words echo that theme. In a Dec. 11 exit interview with National Public Radio, Brown touted a $14 billion budget surplus. “Now, what did I do or didn’t do?” he asked. “I did rein in spending. I did—and then that took fortitude against the tendency of the Democratic Party to spend on almost anything that somebody comes up with that, you know, that satisfies all of the key constituencies.”

That’s the kind of accomplishment that any Republican might tout, albeit Brown achieved it with multiple, unnecessary tax increases—and he signed budgets that set records for spending. But there’s little doubt that Brown owned the Legislature these past eight years. He got his way on everything from budget negotiations to some of his more controversial priorities (such as a $100 billion bullet train and his climate-change activism).

A little fiscal responsibility isn’t really transformative. Balancing the books and building up a rainy day fund is arguably the fundamental job of the governor. Beyond that, two of his most significant accomplishments often are overlooked, writes Stephen Greenhut.

View this article.

In recounting the story of Laurel and Hardy, whose Hollywood career spanned 24 years and more than a hundred films, a good place to begin turns out to be the end. Stan & Ollie dispenses with origin stories—Stan Laurel’s in the British music-hall business with Charlie Chaplin, Oliver Hardy’s in the remote Florida film industry of a century ago—and after making a brief stop at the Hal Roach Studios near Los Angeles in 1937, during the duo’s years of worldwide glory, moves on to 1953, when the movie work has dried up and we find the two troupers on a theatrical tour of Britain and Ireland, parading their old comedy bits across provincial stages for adoring but meager audiences.

Director Jon S. Baird and writer Jeff Pope have made a movie of gratifying simplicity, writes Kurt Loder.

View this article.

One of Nancy Pelosi’s first projects as the new speaker of the House will be passing a government overhaul of campaign finance rules. One of the new bills reportedly would allocate a pool of taxpayer money to match small-dollar donations 6-to-1, as a way of encouraging “grass-roots campaigning.”

That bill, fortunately, wouldn’t pass the Senate, writes David Harsanyi. But creating government-financed campaigns—empowering the state to allocate money to preferred donors and dissuading non-preferred donors—has been something of a hobbyhorse in progressive circles. Setting aside the many constitutional concerns, the recent abuses by the IRS when tasked with regulating political speech demonstrate just how easy it is for bureaucrats to manipulate rules meant to govern speech. These are rules that shouldn’t exist, period.

View this article.