Better in their words…

Good borders make good protests; bank failure season starts; inflation, interest rates, and dumb policies dog Biden; alleged conservative judge frets over Supremes; another terrific Tenn. law; more.

Source: BORDERS ☙ Sunday, April 28, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

🔥🔥 Behold this very telling handwritten sign circulating on social media this week, observed at one of the new pup tent-protest summer camps at a chic New England college:

In other words, the very first thing activist organizers of the “liberated zone” did after setting up camp was enforce the camp’s borders. Sadly, the irony is completely lost on these “best and brightest” Ivy League students.

They’ve made themselves a proper little East German Stazi checkpoint. Maybe we should send them all to setup more checkpoints in South Texas, since they seem to have got the idea.

Meanwhile, the New York Post ran this perfectly predictable headline on Friday:

The Post even included a helpful infographic geographically locating Soros’s summer camp investments:

I don’t mean to aggravate anyone, but I am having trouble believing the billionaire leftist really wants to help Palestinians in Gaza. If Soros wants to help Gazans, one can imagine many less complicated, less expensive, and less sketchy ways.

Make it make sense.

Anyway, student campers are enjoying more than free tents. In fact, they are living large. I would go so far as to call them “glampers.” According to the Post, at Columbia University’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” students sleep in brand-new tents — apparently ordered from Amazon — and enjoy delivery pizza, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, free Pret a Manger sandwiches ($12.50 retail), organic tortilla chips, and rotisserie chickens ($10 value).

According to my local sources, the largest single group of protestors at the University of Florida (no camping allowed) were found queuing at the ice cream truck.

Hey, it beats studying for finals.

📉📉 In the latest bad sign for the Biden re-election effort — it’s the economy, stupid — ABC News ran an economic bellwether story yesterday under the headline, “Regulators close Philadelphia-based Republic First Bank, first US bank failure this year.”

You have to start somewhere.

Yesterday, state and federal regulators seized Republic First Bancorp and promptly sold it to Fulton Bank, in a hastily prearranged deal. Republic Bank was relatively small, with about $6 billion in total assets and $4 billion in total deposits. Back in August, the struggling bank’s stock was delisted from NASDAQ and then traded over the counter at the bargain share price of one cent.

You might recall that around the same time last year (May 2023), three boutique California banks failed: Signature, Silicon Valley, and First Republic (no relation). And now it’s banking failure Spring Season again.

The problem seems to be interest rates. The swelling rates, annoying to everyone, are especially pressuring some banks. On example of how is a phenomenon called the ‘net interest margin.’ Most banks still hold lots of older residential and commercial mortgages earning low interest rates. But because the Fed quickly raised interest rates recently, banks must now pay higher rates on their customer deposits. Between the two rates — interest  income from loans versus interest expense paid out on deposits — bank profits are getting squeezed in the middle.

📉📉 As recently as last month, financial analysts were yammering optimistically about expecting the Fed to lower interest rates, what with the economy performing so well and it being an election year. But inflation, having broken out of its financial pen, is still racing down the track, with regulators huffing and puffing trying to catch up.

So this month arrived the depressing realization that interest rates are not going down. They are likely to go up.

From Forbes, yesterday:

The Wall Street Journal went further this morning, running a snippy headline advising investors to just forget about ever getting back to 3% or 4% rates:

The biggest, earliest problem caused by anti-inflationary interest rates is that it’s forcing home prices down from their easy-credit peaks. From Thursday’s New York Post:

We’ve binged on this Netflix series before, back during the ‘real estate collapse’ in 2008. Drawing on my economics background (Bachelor of Arts), this is probably a good thing, a market adjustment long needing to be made.

Real estate prices were overheated, driven by an extended period of super-low interest rates and easy credit. But now things are normalizing, and individual homeowners are probably about to experience a sudden and unexpected drop in our personal balance sheets.

Things might’ve been very different had Biden not blown out the budget and fired the first shot in his sanctions war against Russia. Oh well. At least the media seems unable to avoid reporting on Biden’s woeful economic decline this time. Here’s Bloomberg’s headline from last Wednesday:

But don’t worry! We’ll have that budget fixed up in no time. This week Joe unveiled his brilliant new plan to tax unearned capital gains at historically-high rates. But now Joe’s playing with real fire, since Congressmen earn all their real money making insider stock trades that would be subject to Joe’s new capital gains taxes.

Good luck passing that one.

🔥🔥 The New Republic ran an anxious, hand-wringing jeremiad flaming the Supreme Court yesterday headlined, “Shocker From Top Conservative Judge: Trump Likely To Skate Completely.” The sub-headline warned darkly, “J. Michael Luttig sees two potential outcomes from Thursday’s Supreme Court arguments. Both are grim for our democracy.”

Top conservative judge? Please.

The “judge” quoted in the headline is J. Michael Luttig, a retired United States Circuit Judge who cut his teeth in President Reagan’s DOJ. Later, Herbert Bush appointed him to the Fourth Circuit, but Luttig unexpectedly retired from the bench in 2006. He took a high-paid job at Boeing.

Since then, Luttig has become a minor celebrity, often trotted out in corporate media as a token “good conservative.” Luttig suffers from a severe, probably fatal, case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, and he calls the January 6th protests an “insurrection” way worse than any insurrection ever. Not only that, but as early as December 2020, Luttig began calling claims about election fraud “the biggest farce in American history.”

As of this week, Mr. Luttig — whose TwitterX handle, despite not being one since 2006, is “judgeluttig” — is still insisting there was no fraud in the 2020 elections. What a ridiculous idea. And here’s how former judge Luttig yesterday described his celebrated testimony before the January 6th Committee:

So. We’re now clear on what type of conservative is Mr. Luttig.

As I type this, Mr. Luttig is madder than a wet Siamese whose catnip mouse just rolled far under the refrigerator. Luttig thinks the conservatives on the Supreme Court are about to let Trump off the hook. In other words, Luttig — himself a former federal judge — disbelieves the judges on the Supreme Court will even try to find the right legal answer.

To Luttig, judging is just pure politics.

“I’m profoundly disturbed about the apparent direction of the court,” J. Michael Luttig breathlessly warned. Why? “I now believe that it is unlikely Trump will ever be tried for the crimes he committed in attempting to overturn the 2020 election.”

Goodness!

Even though I’m not a constitutional scholar or a former judge, I was gratified Luttig and I seem to agree on one thing: the import of this week’s oral arguments in the Trump immunity case:

The justices dwelled on the supposed future consequences of prosecuting presidents for crimes, and seemed to want to place some limits on that eventuality. That suggests the justices will kick the case back to lower courts to determine whether some definition of official presidential acts must be protected (and whether Trump’s specific acts qualify).

If the case does play out like that, Luttig frets it will almost certainly push President Trump’s trial out until after the election. That’s bad enough. But if Trump wins, he can simply cancel the prosecutions. Luttig is also anguished that, even if Trump loses the election, five Supreme Court votes will still side with Trump’s theories of presidential immunity.

Thus, either way, Trump wins.

“I believe it is now likely either that Trump will get elected and instruct his attorney general to drop the charges, or that the Supreme Court will grant him immunity from prosecution,” Luttig told the New Republic with a deep sigh.

Luttig also noted that, during oral arguments, Justice Gorsuch mused that if presidents can be prosecuted, they could just always automatically pardon themselves before leaving office, which Gorsuch suggested might be perfectly Constitutional.

That’s a great point. If the Supremes were to find that the President lackscomplete immunity for his presidential acts, then every future president can be expected, like clockwork, to pardon themselves on their last day on the job. So what’s the point?

“Judge” Luttig’s agitation is good news for President Trump. You might recall similar, and ultimately accurate, predictions following the Supreme Court’s oral argument over Colorado’s banning Trump from its primary ballot because of “insurrection.”

Court watchers expect the Supreme Court to decide quickly on Trump’s presidential immunity, just like they did with the Colorado case. Stay tuned.

🔥🔥  On Thursday, the Hill ran a delightfully encouraging story headlined, “Bill that would fine parents for kids’ crimes passes Tennessee legislature.” This week’s news arrived after Tennessee passed another great bill earlier in the week allowing trained and certified teachers to carry firearms at school.

Tennessee seems to be vying to take Florida’s top spot as the country’s conservative trend-setter.

It’s true that, in some tragic cases, parents have no control over their teens. But these days, even more parents fail to even try to control their teens’ wayward behavior. And in some places, including Tennessee, the kids are rampaging completely out of control. Which doesn’t help anybody.

Memphis Police alone arrested over 4,000 juveniles in 2023, including over 500 just for stealing cars. On Tuesday, Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner said the county’s juvenile jail was nearly full, holding a record-setting gang of 118 juvenile offenders. The youngest of them was only thirteen.

I probably don’t need to tell you this, but letting kids roam around totally unsupervised committing crimes does not help kids. And if we support parent’s rights, we must also support parental responsibility.

Nevertheless, Tennessee democrats nearly unanimously voted against the bill. They saw the withered hand of racism firmly grasping the new law. For example, bowtied Memphis Representative G.A. Hardaway (D-93) called the new law ‘a tax’ on low-income parents designed to punish black families.

I’d say it was racist of G.A. to assume that black kids are the ones committing all these crimes, or to assume that black parents can’t discipline their own children. But nobody listens to me.

The bill says starting with a juvenile’s second offense, the juvenile court mustfine the parents up to $1,000 for every crime. Parents can work fines off through community service if they want. Sheriff Bonner mused, “If I had to pick up trash all day because of something that my child had done and I had to go along the interstate and my friends, loved ones, neighbors saw me picking up trash because of something that my son had done, I think I would pay a little bit more attention.”

Bill sponsor Senator Brent Taylor (R) explained the fines aren’t meant to punish parents, but rather to give them a reason to pay closer attention to how their children are spending their free time. At some previous point in our Nation’s history, if a parent voluntarily made restitution for the bad stuff their kids did, it was called doing the right thing.

If you think about it, the bill also better defines the family’s border, making it clear that parents mainly have responsibility for kids, not the government. It’s too bad it took a law to make parents do the right thing, but Tennessee seems headed in the right direction.

🔥 In the vein of yesterday’s monologue about the insane pace of technological change lately, today let’s blast back to a past technological border. Enjoy watching two alert teenagers struggling to complete their dad’s ingenious challenge: dialing a single phone number on an old-school rotary phone in under four minutes.

CLIP: Dad dares kids to dial a phone (2:20).

The Harry Potter box was a nice touch. Next up, dad can give them a 45” record, an adapter, and an old-school record player. Give them ten minutes this time.

Have a blessed Sunday! And dial back in to Coffee & Covid tomorrow morning for another terrific roundup as we kick off April’s final week and head into May.

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