The Glittering Eye

Time 2020-07-23 02:05:06

Web Name: The Glittering Eye

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In his regular Wall Street Journal column William Galston muses about the profile of the individual whom Joe Biden should pick as a running mate:The woman Mr. Biden chooses—yes, it will be a woman, as he has pledged—must be perceived as having the experience to step into his shoes at a moment’s notice. Those with limited records in national politics are unlikely to meet this standard of credibility, as are those who have never held elective office.In addition, Mr. Biden should give priority to African-American candidates. He owes his nomination to unwavering African-American support at the campaign’s critical juncture. The disproportionate effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and the demonstrations sparked by the killing of George Floyd moved issues facing this community to the center of national politics.The selection of an African-American running mate would guarantee the unity and enthusiasm of the Democratic Party, while the failure to do so would be dispiriting for a crucial portion of Mr. Biden’s coalition. Although religious conservatives were likely to support the eventual Republican nominee in 2016, Donald Trump’s selection of Mike Pence was a powerful signal that he didn’t take their support for granted. In this one respect, Mr. Biden should follow Mr. Trump’s example.Mr. Biden is an effective congressional negotiator, but his presidential schedule, much of which would likely be dominated by foreign policy, would force him to delegate much of this job to others. A vice president who could work with Congress on Mr. Biden’s behalf as he did for President Obama would be a force multiplier. The vice president should also have the capacity to manage specific portfolios for the president, as Al Gore did with the National Partnership for Reinventing Government and Mr. Biden did with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.Summarizing the qualifications:WomanBlackNational statureYounger and more vigorous than Mr. BidenHeld elective officeExperience in dealing with the CongressFirst do no harm.Try as I might I can t think of anyone who meets all of those qualifications. If you re willing to accept someone older than Mr. Biden, Eleanor Holmes Norton would fit. Not only is Maxine Waters older than Joe Biden, she would violate the first do no harm requirement as well. Condoleezza Rice has the fatal flaw of being a Republican. Additionally, she has never held elective office.Kamala Harris is too inexperienced (she has additional issues as well). Tammy Duckworth isn t black and is too inexperienced. Stacy Abrams is not sufficiently experienced. Elizabeth Warren isn t black. Cory Booker isn t a woman. Donna Brazile has never held elective office.My attention was captured today by two very different op-eds with one thing in common. Both reminded me of the definition of golf as a game in which an elusive ball is inserted into an obscure hole with implements singularly unsuited to the purpose. The first op-ed was by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and appears in the New York Times:Wearing a mask is not a political statement; it is about protecting our loved ones from the spread of this deadly virus. I know the president has begun to understand that — he wore a mask on his visit to the Walter Reed military hospital this month. And on Monday, he tweeted that “it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance.”I applaud his statement, and urge him to back it up by issuing a nationwide mask mandate like Michigan’s, requiring masks on public transport, indoors, or outdoors when a distance of six feet cannot be maintained. It allows exemptions for small children, when eating or drinking, communicating with a hearing-impaired person, officiating at a religious service and for those engaged in a public safety role. The president has the chance to save tens of thousands of lives. I am hopeful that he will seize this opportunity.In the meantime, be smart, be safe and mask up, America.Enforced how? My view is that laws or directives without even a good faith attempt at enforcing them weakens the law more generally, casting it into disrepute. Many states and local governments have declared their unwillingness to enforce federal law? I can see some jurisdictions declaring an inalienable right to bare faces. There are some things that the federal government and federal laws are good for. I don t think that ensuring people wear facemasks is one of them.In an otherwise unrelated op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Texas Sen. Ted Cruz pitches a law he has drafted:Local leaders who allow rioters to destroy lives and businesses need to be held accountable. That’s why I’m introducing the Restitution for Economic losses Caused by Leaders who Allow Insurrection and Mayhem Act—Reclaim for short. The bill would hold state and local officials liable when they abdicate their legal duty to protect the public in cases where death, serious bodily harm or significant property damage have occurred.Specifically, my bill would allow for treble damages, meaning a plaintiff could be awarded triple the amount of the damage done to his property. It would also establish a federal cause of action, which would empower victims of violence in autonomous zones to take legal action against senior local or state lawmakers who have tolerated or encouraged radicals to take over the area. Finally, when politicians refuse to defend innocent Americans, this bill would remove or limit federal funding under grant programs that supply important law-enforcement and crime-prevention programs for local governments.Here in Illinois we do not have the power to remove elected officials at will. Barring some unforeseen accident Mayor Lightfoot will continue to serve until the next election, several years hence. How does punishing the taxpayers of Chicago protect property or business owners? If his law ensured personal liability I would support it wholeheartedly but that does not seem to be the case.Under the common law a lawful assembly consisted of three or more people assembled together for lawful purposes. A lawful assembly could become unlawful if it became violent and tumultuous . As noted in Blackstone s Commentaries:Riots, routs, and unlawful assemblies must have three persons at least to constitute them. An unlawful assembly is when three, or more, do assemble themselves together to do an unlawful act, as to pull down inclosures, to destroy a warren or the game therein; and part without doing it, or making any motion towards it. A rout is where three or more meet to do an unlawful act upon a common quarrel, as forcibly breaking down fences upon a right claimed of common, or of way; and make some advances towards it. A riot is where three or more actually do an unlawful act of violence, either with or without a common cause or quarrel: as if they beat a man; or hunt and kill game in another s park, chase, warren, or liberty; or do any other unlawful act with force and violence; or even do a lawful act, as removing a nusance, in a violent and tumultuous manner. The punishment of unlawful assemblies, if to the number of twelve, we have just now seen may be capital, according to the circumstances that attend it; but, from the number of three to eleven, is by fine and imprisonment only. The same is the case in riots and routs by the common law; to which the pillory in very enormous cases has been sometimes superadded. And by the statute 13 Hen. IV. c. 7. any two justices, together with the sheriff or under-sheriff of the county, may come with the posse comitatus, if need be, and suppress any such riot, assembly, or rout, arrest the rioters, and record upon the spot the nature and circumstances of the whole transaction; which record alone shall be a sufficient conviction of the offenders. In the interpretation of which statute it hath been holden, that all persons, noblemen and others, except women, clergymen, persons decrepit, and infants under fifteen, are bound to attend the justices in suppressing a riot, upon pain of fine and imprisonment; and that any battery, wounding, or killing the rioters, that may happen in suppressing the riot, is justifiable. So that our antient law, previous to the modern riot act, seems pretty well to have guarded against any violent breach of the public peace; especially as any riotous assembly on a public or general account, as to redress grievances or pull down all inclosures, and also resisting the king s forces if sent to keep the peace, may amount to overt acts of high treason, by levying war against the king.The provision for freedom of assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution:Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.should be considered in that light. The emphasis above is mine. There is no constitutionally-guaranteed right to riot or even to assemble unlawfully. The purpose of the freedom of assembly provision is to ensure that the Congress does not make otherwise legal assemblies illegal not to render all assemblies legal.What constitutes violent and tumultuous ? Generally, shouting, marching, and carrying signs are all lawful. Throwing rocks is not. When rocks are thrown by those in the assembly, the assembly changes from a lawful one to an unlawful one.This will vary somewhat from state to state. In some states the common law understanding continues to prevail; in others unlawful assembly and mob action may be defined more narrowly.I think that the big social media sites have sown the seeds of their own destruction by editing content. The problem is that they are presently being used as organizing tools for violent protests. I would suspect that editing content opens them up to liability suits for damages caused by the protests or even suits by cities and states to recover the costs they incur. They can no longer argue that they had no idea of what was happening.The Chicago story being report in the national news is that of a shooting at a funeral on the South Side. From ABC 7 Chicago:CHICAGO (WLS) Chicago police said 15 people were shot at a funeral in the city s Auburn Gresham neighborhood Tuesday evening.The shooting took place around 6:30 p.m. in the 1000-block of West 79th Street. Rhodes Funeral Services is located on that block.Police said a black car was driving westbound on 79th Street when occupants inside began firing at the attendees of a funeral. People at the funeral returned gunfire.There is speculation that the funeral was of an individual affiliated with a gang. Shoot-ups at such funerals are not unheard of here.As of yesterday the number of homicides in Chicago has exceeded that of 2017, the most violent year of recent memory and, by my calculation, the most violent ever adjusted to population. The Auburn Gresham neighborhood in which the shootings occurred is one of the half dozen or so neighborhoods in which most of the homicides have taken place.Did the U. S. lockdown policy close too late, open too early, or otherwise? That s the issue considered by Phillip Magness at American Institute for Economic Research (basically a libertarian thinktank). Using a stringency index published by the University of Oxford Blavatsky Blavatnik School of Government, he arrives at the following:Any number of factors explain the development of the U.S. pandemic at the moment, with little connection to the timing of the lockdowns back in March or the tepid and bureaucratically managed reopening process. Notably, severe COVID outbreaks appear to be overwhelmingly concentrated in nursing homes – a problem that is not meaningfully addressed by lockdowns, and which did not even figure into the considerations of the Imperial College model on which they were premised. We are also seeing the clear geographic dimensions of the pandemic’s spread. After ravaging the Northeast while it was under full lockdown, viral hotspots have now moved to previously unaffected areas – and irrespective of their remaining or reinstated lockdown policies, as California shows.My own view is that local policies (whether national, state, or city) and practices have had relatively little effect on outcomes or the progress of the disease. What have really mattered are demographics and plain, dumb luck. If I had to pick one consequential behavioral factor, it would probably be social cohesion.At Bloomberg Peter Orszag, David Gluckman, and Stephen H. Sands point out that a recent survey of biopharmaceutical executives found them much less sanguine about the prospects for a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 than politicians or, I presume, the public at large:Most health care leaders also believe it may very well be more than a year or two before there is an effective Covid-19 treatment — if one ever materializes. Indeed, only 49% of health care industry leaders put the likelihood of such a therapeutic at better than even.Consequently, two-thirds of industry leaders expect the pandemic to continue into the second half of 2021 or beyond — a notably longer time frame than that envisioned by many people in government. The danger is that federal fiscal support will be withdrawn before the pandemic is actually over, and then the underlying economic damage will become more visible.The emphasis is mine. Also note the pie chart above. 2% of the industry leaders think the pandemic will never be over. Note that it s in their financial interest to believe that a safe, effective vaccine will be developed. The bottom line is that nearly two-thirds openly believe that the pandemic will continue at least until this time next year. Add ten points for interest. The editors of the Wall Street Journal, commenting on the use of Homeland Security agents to arrest violent protestors in Portland recommend letting cities suffering from violent disorder stew in their own juices:We understand Mr. Trump’s desire to restore order, but he’s also saving Democrats from themselves. State and local Democrats will blame federal intervention for any and all disorder, deflecting attention from their own failures. The media will echo whatever they say. Progressives run Portland, Chicago, New York and other cities now experiencing a surge of violence. If they want to indulge the mayhem, then let them live with the consequences.I ve been warning about this for months. Mayors can t abrogate their responsibilities without providing an opening for the use of federal law enforcement. I honestly don t know what they re thinking. I can only speculate that they believe that if they just ignore the disorder long enough it will go away. In the long term they re probably right ultimately we will all go away. But in the near term? Frankly, I doubt it. And it will provide further impetus from the urban exodus I believe is already under way. There are already lengthy wait times for one-way U-Haul rentals from Chicago. The wait times are likely to become longer.The graphic above was captured from the website if the Illinois Department of Public Health and illustrates ICU bed utilization statewide. As you can see statewide the utilization of ICU beds is less than 50% and the utilization by COVID-19 patients is about 8% of capacity. The breakdown provided does not tell us the utilization by COVID-19 patients in Chicago but based on what is shown it s consistent with other regions of the state.Mayor Lightfoot is talking about tightening the restrictions on various activities in the city again. Her objective does not seem to be to prevent COVID-19 patients from overwhelming Chicago s hospitals. I have no idea what her objective is. If she were to apply the same standards to gunshot victims she is to people with COVID-19, the Englewood, Austin, and Garfield Park neighborhoods would have been locked down a long time ago.There is a bumper crop of plans for ending the COVID-19 pandemic. To my eye they all share one defect: they wouldn t actually end the pandemic. Take, for example, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren s op-ed in the New York Times:Americans stayed at home and sacrificed for months to flatten the curve and prevent the spread of the coronavirus. That gave us time to take the steps needed to address the pandemic — but President Trump squandered it, refusing to issue national stay-at-home guidelines, failing to set up a national testing operation and fumbling production of personal protective equipment. Now, Congress must again act as this continues to spiral out of control.Those who frame the debate as one of health versus economics are missing the point. It is not possible to fix the economy without first containing the virus. We need a bold, ambitious legislative response that does four things: brings the virus under control; gets our schools, child care centers, businesses, and state and local governments the resources they need; addresses the burdens on communities of color; and supports struggling families who don’t know when the next paycheck will come.Here’s what the next federal response must include:Start with funding the robust public health measures we know will work to address this crisis: ramped-up testing, a national contact-tracing program and supply-chain investments to resolve medical supply shortages. Without these measures, we will not be able to adequately reopen safely, more people will die and there will be no economic recovery.I m not opposed to any of those things. I just don t think they ll produce the results the senator thinks they will. For one thing there s too much cargo cult thinking. The line of thinking goes something like this. Because South Korea and Japan did contact tracing and South Korea and Japan have had among the very best results in dealing with their outbreaks, therefore you need contact tracing to have good results. Leaving aside the thousands of differences between South Korea or Japan and the United States a key step is being omitted: mandatory isolation. I don t believe that any form of isolation, voluntary or mandatory, would be effective in the U. S. We can t even get people to wear facemasks voluntarily. I don t believe that even if we paid people to be isolated it would be effective. And mandatory isolation is completely out of the question. If you don t believe it picture this scenario. Thousands or tens of thousands of people in mandatory isolation, the majority of whom are black or Hispanics. The headlines practically write themselves.Testing has a similar problem. There is presently no identifiable relationship between testing per se and getting control over the virus. If you don t believe me, just look at the testing rates per million population compared with the cases per million or deaths per million. If there s a correlation, it s a positive one (you test more people because more people have the virus). The basic question is never asked: testing to what end? I think we re doing far too much diagnostic testing as it is with not nearly enough systematic epidemiological testing in an effort to identify where resources were most needed.My views are so unpopular as to not even be worth airing. I think that we just must assume that no cure or vaccine or even an effective treatment will be developed and shoulder the risks of going on with life, doing what we can to mitigate them as best as we are able.

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