Monday Open Thread

13 thoughts on “Monday Open Thread”

1. Gov. Polis is debating for Prop. HH tonight on the same side as Arthur Laffer, the economist whose "Laffer Curve" was used by Reagan to justify Reaganomics. I know politics make strange bedfellows, but I'm a little stranged out with this pairing.

   They're debating against Michael Fields and Rose Pugliese.

   https://www.9news.com/article/entertainment/events/sponsored-by-9news/prop-hh-debate-jared-polis-arthur-laffer-jose-pugliese-michael-fields/73-324d52f2-8089-463f-9a93-025c894bb68f

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   1. Glad to see the Gov debating the winning argument over HH.  Maybe Laffer has gotten smarter since FDFQ gave him a pretty necklace? 

      Trump is giving Arthur Laffer the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Economists aren’t smiling.

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      1. I'll probably tune in, and maybe Laffer will be good. I don't want to completely judge him on what he thought or said in 1980. But why couldn't the Guv'nor have chosen someone from Colorado, a Colorado economist, a Colorado legislator, a Colorado policy analyst? Tying himself to Laffer is stranging me out – why not Sam Brownback if we're going out of state?

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      2. I did watch the debate, and it took the Guv about 15 minutes before he pitched the Laffer Curve. Turns out Laffer is a friend of the Polis family, so now I sort of get why he was there, and he sure as heck talked a lot about the magic of tax cuts for an economy just like it was 1980 once more!

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2. NIMBYism: The Courts vs Government. NoahSmith

   Good article about why projects like wind & solar farms, fast train lines, housing projects are stymied, NOT by bureaucracy rather by lawsuits. The whole article is well worth reading.

   Environmental regulation doesn’t threaten America’s economy via a sea of red tape enforced by an army of punctilious bureaucrats. It threatens America’s economy via a plague of lawsuits and pointless paperwork that we implemented as an alternative to hiring an army of punctilious bureaucrats. If we scrapped this legalistic permitting regime and replaced it with an army of bureaucrats, we would still be able to protect the environment just fine, but we would be able to do it without causing insane multi-year delays and driving costs to the moon.

   …

   Instead, we have laws like NEPA and its stronger state-level equivalents like CEQA, which farm out the job of environmental regulation to citizens and the courts. The way it works is this: A developer starts work on a project, like a solar plant or an apartment complex. Then private citizens who don’t want that project in their backyards — because of concern over scenic views, or property values, or “neighborhood character”, or whatever — sue the developer in court. Even if the project satisfies all relevant environmental laws from day 1, citizens can sue the developer under NEPA or CEQA to force it to stop the project and complete a cumbersome environmental review — basically, a ton of paperwork. This often delays the project for years, and drives up costs immensely — which of course discourages many developers from even trying to build anything in the first place.

   Enforcing environmental regulation via judicialized procedural review has had devastating consequences on America’s ability to build the thing we need. Housing projects are routinely held up by NIMBYs using environmental review laws to sue developers, often under the most ridiculous of pretexts (such as labeling human noise from apartment complexes a form of pollution). The solar plants and battery factories and transmission lines that we need to decarbonize our economy aren’t getting built nearly as fast as they should, because they’re getting held up by these review laws. And remember that most of these projects aren’t violating any environmental review laws in the first place — the NIMBYs have the right to sue and hold up development regardless of whether any regulation is actually being violated!

   Which raises an obvious question: How can we know if no environmental regulation is being violated, other than waiting for a lawsuit and a multi-year environmental review? The answer is: bureaucrats. The answer is that you have a bunch of government workers examine the project and make sure it checks all the relevant regulatory boxes, and then if it does, you simply allow the project to go ahead, without lawsuits or multi-year studies. This is called “ministerial approval” or “ministerial review”. This is how Japan does things, which is why they’ve been able to build enough housing to keep rent affordable.

   NIMBYs are absolutely terrified of ministerial review. I strongly encourage you to read this thread by Jordan Grimes, detailing the dismay of a NIMBY pressure group at a raft of new pro-housing laws in California. The most terrifying prospect, for the opponents of new housing, turns out to be “as-of-right” development, which means a bureaucrat gets to decide whether to allow a housing project rather than a lawsuit and a judge.

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3. Nine candidates for Speaker of the House.

   It's sort of a Ranked Choice mechanism… Last Man (of course) Standing.

   Only Two Speaker Candidates Voted To Certify The 2020 Election. Those are Emmer and Scott. The rest voted no.

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   1. And of course both Emmer and Scott have already seen "Hell, no!" responses from the Chaos Gang. There is no Republican way forward when those loonies hold out for their demands.

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      1. "DearWayward Colleagues". via TPM:

         McClintock vented his spleen in a letter to his “wayward colleagues” over the weekend.

         My personal favorite bit is: “You have succeeded in replacing the outdated concept of majority rule with an exciting new standard that a Speaker must be elected by 98.2 percent of the Republican conference. Someday, a messiah will be born unto us who can achieve this miraculous threshold, and on that day your judgment will be vindicated and you will be hailed as the geniuses that you are.”

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   2. I'm kinda hoping they pick this babbling moron for next loser who's not named speaker of the house. 

       

       

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   3. "Last Man (of course) Standing"

      None of the Republican women in the House – including Bimbobert and Taylor Green – are stupid enough to run. 

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4. Jennifer Rubin on Why Chesebro cut a deal and what it means for Trump

   The Powell and Chesebro pleas should have Trump quaking in his boots. “Trump’s illegitimate assault on the outcome of the 2020 election stood on two legs: the factual assertion that he had actually won and the legal claim that he had the right to use false electoral certificates to have Vice President Pence change the outcome in Congress on Jan. 6,” Norm Eisen, counsel for the writers of the amicus brief described above, told me. “With the guilty plea of Sidney Powell, the first [former lawyer] was knocked out from under the former president. Now, with the guilty plea of Kenneth Chesebro, the second has also fallen away.” In short, Eisen thinks, “Trump is toast.”

   Chesebro likely will not be the last defendant to take a plea deal. Other Trump lawyers, including Jenna Ellis, Rudy Giuliani and Eastman, will feel pressure to make their own deals or face a jury that will hear former co-counsels Powell’s and Chesebro’s testimonies.

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5. "On the Brink" Josh Marshall at TPM.

   Already battered by his ongoing criminal prosecution and attempted judicial coup, Benjamin Netanyahu’s standing with the Israeli public appears to have been shattered by the October 7th massacres in southern Israel. In such a perilous position, Netanyahu’s allies in and out of government have been spreading various stab-in-the-back type storylines seeking to evade responsibility for the events of October 7th.

   The best way I can describe this is that Israel has its own version of the Fox News-rooted right wing big lie machine that Americans are familiar with here. That has been in overdrive for the last three weeks. It has included the government briefing reporters against the country’s security establishment, placing the blame for the massacres squarely on the IDF and Shin Bet, the country’s domestic intelligence and security service.

   This is just one example of how Netanyahu’s continued tenure in office has genuinely existential stakes for Israel. Netanyahu has always been known as a conniving and manipulative figure. Lots of successful politicians have been. But in a moment of profound national crisis it is a huge liability for a country to be led by a man who faces dire risks to his reputation, power and liberty that have nothing to do with solving the crisis at hand.

   …

   There is a huge fear in U.S. military and defense policy circles today that the Israel-Hamas war will skid out of control into a regional war that will bring Iran and the U.S. directly into the conflict. For a taste of this, read Tom Friedman’s column from late last week. It’s a genuinely frightening read. The U.S. is presently rushing lots of resources into the region both to deter attacks on U.S. forces by Iranian proxy militias in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and other countries and if necessary retaliate against them. It’s become more clear to me in recent days that those two carrier groups sent to the region aren’t there just to deter Hezbollah and Iran from attacking Israel but to deter attacks on U.S. military forces throughout the region.

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6. The journey to put an end to the massive failure known as the War on Drugs People of Color began here in Colorado, 2012, Amendment 64.  

   Well played, Colorado citizens (and it’s a bonus to have the leadership of Governor Polis behind the movement). 

   Colorado Dispensaries Have Sold More Than $15 Billion Worth of Marijuana Since Legalization, Generating $2.5 Billion in Tax Revenue, State Reports

   The tax revenue from the last nine years of legalization stands at $2,554,160,551 as of September, the Colorado Department of Revenue (CDOR) said in a press release on Wednesday.

   A spokesperson for Gov. Jared Polis (D) told Marijuana Moment that under the governor’s “pro-freedom plans, we have seen Colorado’s marijuana industry grow stronger, create more jobs and support our thriving economy across the state.”

   “Governor Polis is glad to see Colorado’s cannabis industry thrive, generate tax revenue for local governments and school construction and is hopeful that these sales will responsibly get higher and higher and surpass $15 billion,” he said.

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