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Last week, President Donald Trump tweeted that the “boneheads” at the Federal Reserve should reduce the federal funds interest rate that the Fed tries to control to zero, or even less, in an attempt to goose the economy.

Today, in what is surely a complete coincidence, given the Federal Reserve’s much-vaunted political independence, the Federal Reserve Board announced a quarter percentage point cut in their target interest rate, getting it down to the 1.75-2 percent range. This is the second cut since July and they hint there might be another one before the year is over.

There better be, in the opinion of the president, who reacted to the news with another tweet that Federal Reserve Chief Jerome Powell (a Trump appointee!) and his institution “Fail Again. No “guts,” no sense, no vision!”

Scott Sumner, a monetary economist of the “market monetarism” school, reacted via email last week to Trump’s original tweet with the observation that “President Trump needs to be careful what he asks for,” given that, from Sumner’s perspective, “Near-zero interest rates can reflect an expansionary monetary policy, but more often they reflect very weak growth in nominal spending, caused by an inappropriately tight policy over a number of years. That has certainly been the case in Japan and the Eurozone.”

“Trump presumably favors low rates created by easy money, but he’d be better off in stating his policy preferences in terms of inflation or nominal GDP growth,” Sumner believes. Nonetheless, for his own reasons, Sumner declared on his blog today both that he considers Fed actions like this a feckless “yawn” (he thinks Fed moves have less influence than they used to in the current environment) and that they’d have been better off cutting a half a percent.

CNBC muses on a sign in the markets of Federal Reserve powerlessness over the interest rate it tries to control even as this move is announced:

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Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski confirmed a bizarre episode described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s March report on Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election. On June 17, 2017, according to the report, Lewandowski had a one-on-one meeting with Trump in which the president dictated a message for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, asking him to publicly state that the Russia investigation was “very unfair” to Trump, who had done nothing wrong. The message also asked Sessions to tell Mueller that his investigation should focus on the threat of Russian meddling in “future elections.”

One reading of that encounter is that Trump was trying to obstruct an investigation of his own attempts at obstruction, since such allegations were part of Mueller’s charge. Another interpretation—the one endorsed by Attorney General William Barr before he took office and by Lewandowski yesterday—is that there was nothing inappropriate or illegal about Trump’s arm’s-length overture to Sessions, since the president is ultimately in charge of the Justice Department and can tell it to start, expand, narrow, or end investigations whenever he likes. But that take on the president’s powers, which Mueller explicitly rejected, is hard to reconcile with Trump’s furtive behavior.

“Didn’t you think it was a little strange that the president would sit down with you, one on one, and ask you to do something that you knew was against the law?” Rep. Steve Cohen (D–Tenn.) asked Lewandowski.

“I disagree with the premise of your question, Congressman,” Lewandowski replied. “I didn’t think the president asked me to do anything illegal.”

That much is consistent with the view that the president, regardless of his motives, cannot commit obstruction of justice by exercising his constitutional authority over executive-branch agencies. In an unsolicited memo that he sent the Justice Department before Trump picked him to replace Sessions, Barr conceded that the president can commit obstruction through “bad acts” such as destroying evidence or encouraging witnesses to lie. But he argued that the federal obstruction statutes do not reach “facially lawful actions taken by the President in exercising the discretion vested in him by the Constitution.”

But if that is what Trump believed, why didn’t he talk directly to Sessions? Why enlist a crony with no official role in the administration to deliver a message that Trump could have delivered on his own?

It’s possible that Trump did not think there was “anything illegal” about trying to limit Mueller’s investigation but recognized that such interference would look bad. Yet it looks bad for the same reasons it looks like obstruction, even if (accepting  Barr’s theory) it does not satisfy the elements of that crime.

Trump has publicly acknowledged that presidents, by longstanding practice, strive to respect the Justice Department’s autonomy in investigating and prosecuting people. “The saddest thing is that because I’m the president of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department,” Trump said in a November 2017 radio interview. “I am not supposed to be involved with the FBI.”

That norm is aimed at avoiding the appearance that the president is meddling in law enforcement matters for personal or political reasons, a danger that is especially acute when the president himself is the subject of an investigation. Such abuses of power, even if they are technically legal, nevertheless might qualify as “high crimes or misdemeanors” justifying impeachment.

In addition to the Lewandowski gambit, the Mueller report describes several episodes in which Trump tried to influence, limit, or stop the Russia investigation, including his repeated attempts to have Mueller fired and to have Sessions, who had recused himself, take control. Those maneuvers were generally unsuccessful, mainly because Trump’s subordinates defied his wishes. They clearly thought there was something wrong with his efforts to curtail Mueller’s investigation. White House Counsel Don McGahn threatened to resign if Trump insisted on firing Mueller, saying he did not want to participate in a repeat of Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre.

Trump himself seemed to understand he was doing something wrong, judging from his roundabout approach. If he was merely exercising his lawful powers in a perfectly appropriate way, for example, he could have directly instructed Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to fire Mueller, rather than complaining to his aides about the special counsel’s supposed conflicts of interest and asking McGahn to tell Rosenstein that Mueller had to go. As with the message for Sessions that he dictated to Lewandowski, Trump’s sneakiness suggests consciousness of guilt—not necessarily legal guilt (again, if you accept Barr’s theory) but certainly an awareness that there was something unseemly about all of this.

Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.), who was briefly the only Republican member of Congress to publicly say that Trump’s was guilty of “impeachable conduct” (“briefly” because Amash left the party, not because he changed his mind), correctly noted that “high crimes and misdemeanors” extend beyond provable statutory violations to abuses of power that betray the public trust. Trump’s own lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, last year conceded that it “would just be unthinkable” for Trump to pardon himself, which “would lead to probably an immediate impeachment,” even though the Constitution imposes no limits on the pardon power. The question of whether the president did “anything illegal,” while relevant, is only part of the debate about whether he abused his powers egregiously enough to justify impeachment.

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Recently fired national security advisor John Bolton is spending his first days of forced retirement complaining about how he was thisclose to finally starting a war with Iran—if only President Donald Trump hadn’t stopped him.

Politico reports that Bolton, during a private lunch on Wednesday hosted by a neoconservative think tank, openly stewed about his inability to convince Trump to bomb Iran. In particular, Bolton claimed the United States should have attacked Iran in June, after the Islamic Republic was blamed for shooting down a U.S. drone.

“During Wednesday’s luncheon, Bolton said the planned response had gone through the full process and everybody in the White House had agreed on the retaliatory strike,” Politico‘s Daniel Lippman writes. “But ‘a high authority, at the very last minute,’ without telling anyone, decided not to do it, Bolton complained.”

That high authority, of course, was the president himself—who may have been convinced to change course, somewhat incredibly, by Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Regardless of how weirdly Trump may have come to the decision, his willingness to pull back from a planned military strike is undeniably one of the strongest moments of his presidency. As I wrote at the time, Trump was absolutely right to conclude that killing an estimated 150 Iranians was “not proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone.”

Unsurprisingly, Bolton felt differently. That difference of opinion may have eventually led to Bolton’s dismissal on September 10. Another key point of disagreement seems to have been the Trump administration’s policy in Afghanistan. Trump has ordered Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to conduct peace negotiations with the Taliban in advance of a possible withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Central Asian nation, where we’ve been at war for nearly 18 years.

The possibility of ending a conflict that seems to accomplish nothing positive for American national security was reportedly anathema to Bolton. During Wednesday’s lunch, Politico reports, Bolton said the U.S. should keep 8,600 troops in Afghanistan and said it “doesn’t make any sense” to enter into peace negotiations with the Taliban.

But what really doesn’t make any sense is Bolton’s neoconservative foreign policy, which has been repudiated by nearly two decades of expensive, bloody, and futile military engagements across the Middle East and Central Asia that have left chaos and new breeding grounds for terrorism in their wake.

Similarly, Bolton reportedly attempted to undermine the president’s halting attempts to make peace with America’s other enemies.

As Reason’s Christian Britschgi noted last week:

In April 2018, for example, Bolton seemingly attempted to sabotage his boss’s peace overtures to North Korea by suggesting that the U.S. would pursue the “Libyan model” of disarming the country. (The U.S. helped to overthrow Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi after he had agreed to give up his country’s nuclear program.)

Bolton also helped to stall a U.S. exit from Syria. In December 2018, Trump announced that the U.S. would be withdrawing military forces from the country, only to have Bolton condition that withdrawal on a Turkish agreement to not attack Kurdish forces in Syria.

Whatever disagreements libertarians may have with Trump’s foreign policy—and, indeed, there is plenty of room to criticize the president in that arena—his resistance to Bolton’s warmongering ways and his eventual decision to cast off failed Bush-era “nation-building” policies should be applauded.

A world in which John Bolton says mean things about the president during lunch is far safer than a world in which John Bolton speaks to the president over lunch.

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It offers a “clear lesson in systemic racism.” It shows “there is no justice.” All in all, it’s too lenient—it’s just “unfair.”

“It” is actress Felicity Huffman’s 14-day prison sentence, along with 250 hours of community service, a $30,000 fine, and one year of supervised release. The Hollywood star is being punished for her involvement in a college admissions scandal in which she pleaded guilty to paying someone $15,000 to rig her daughter’s SAT scores. It’s true the sentence isn’t fair, but not because it isn’t sufficiently punitive. On the contrary: it’s too harsh.

The knee-jerk reaction is understandable. Defendants who are less privileged than Huffman have received harsher sentences for lesser offenses, something not lost on the many disgruntled media pundits and Twitter users who weighed in on the decision. But the desire to inflict maximal suffering on Huffman simply because others have suffered more is pushing in the wrong direction. Folks who have endured worse punishments for lesser crimes are not helped by throwing the book at Huffman. We should try to lessen the disproportionate punishments faced by low-income and non-white defendants; destroying the privileged gets us the wrong kind of equality.

Take the case of Kelley Williams-Bolar, who I wrote about in March after the college admissions scandal first broke. In 2011, the Ohio mom used her father’s address to ensure her kids received a better education in his superior school district. For that offense, she served nine days of a five-year prison sentence, completed 80 hours of community service, and received three years probation—a harsher punishment when considering her less severe crime.

Williams-Bolar is black, and she isn’t a celebrity, but those aren’t the only differences between her and Huffman. The former wanted the basics for her kids; the latter wanted to buy her daughter’s way to prestige.

But because Williams-Bolar was harshly punished, does that mean Huffman should meet a worse fate? To answer in the affirmative is to say our criminal justice system is bad because it screws people disproportionately. But that is not, in fact, the primary problem. The problem is that it screws so many people at all, generally by criminalizing everything under the sun. Throwing Huffman behind bars and tossing away the key would do nothing to address our unenviable distinction of having the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Indeed, the U.S. currently has an approximate 1.3 million people languishing in its state prisons, and that doesn’t account for local jails, federal institutions, or immigrant detention centers. Of that 1.3 million, only 55 percent committed violent crimes. The rest are there for offenses—like drug convictions—where the offender likely poses no threat to the general public.

As Chandra Bozelko points out in the Washington Post, handing down an exceptionally retributive sentence to offenders like Huffman will not help the Williams-Bolars of the world. In fact, it will do the opposite. “When we try to cure disparities by simply incarcerating more white, or wealthier, defendants, the entire population ends up getting punished more severely,” she writes. “A study conducted by the sentencing commission found that a decline in racial disparities in sentencing has been driven not by shorter sentences for everyone but by more people being sentenced to longer periods under mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines.”

Lori Loughlin, of Full and Fuller House fame, is also implicated in the college admissions scandal: She is pleading not guilty for allegedly paying $500,000 to sneak her daughter into the University of Southern California as a fake rowing recruit. Her and her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, are each facing 40 years in prison—more than some serve for murder.

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Former Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge’s extraterrestrial research organization has gained some much-needed credibility following the U.S. government’s confirmation that three videos published by the group in 2017 and 2018 do in fact show unidentified flying objects (UFOs).

“The Navy designates the objects contained in these videos as unidentified aerial phenomena,” Joseph Gradishe, official spokesperson for the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, told the news website The Black Vault in an article dated September 10.

The first two of these videos were published in December 2017 by To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences (TTSA), a group DeLonge helped found in 2015, on the same day The New York Times published them as part of a story on the U.S. Department of Defense’s efforts to track UFOs.

A third video was released by TTSA in March 2018.

The videos show cockpit footage from a Navy F/A 18 Super Hornet crew’s encounter with a small, quickly moving UFO that appears to have no wings or source of exhaust.

TTSA originally claimed that the videos had been declassified. According to Gradishe, they were never cleared for release.

“The Navy has not released the videos to the general public,” he told The Black Vault.

While the authenticity of the videos has been confirmed, what they actually show is still a complete mystery.

Nevertheless, the Navy’s confirmation that the videos are in fact real will no doubt fuel debates about the potential existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life and the continued relevance of pop-punk.

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