Photo by Gage Skidmore
Hillary Clinton has a serious problem. No, not just her email scandal and the FBI. Hillary has a serious problem with her party’s base. “She’s being soundly rejected by millennials, a core element of Barack Obama’s coalition, while generating only middling enthusiasm from Hispanics and African-Americans,” writes Josh Kraushaar in NationalJournal.
The numbers don’t lie. … 71 percent of Democratic voters under the age of 30 have flocked to Sanders—even though it’s been clear for a month that he faces near-impossible odds of winning the nomination. For the second straight election, Clinton has allowed an insurgent to capture a historic share of the Democratic Party’s primary votes. She is now staggering to the Democratic nomination with a shrinking 1-point lead over Sanders in the latest RealClearPolitics average of national primary polls.
Even with Hillary’s touting Obama’s agenda and coopting parts of Bernie Sander’s stump speeches, she seems incapable of rallying the troops. What’s going to change? Read more from Mr. Kraushaar here.
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 The National Interest asks if Iceland will fall to pirates:
Probably one of the most interesting items to emerge from the Panama Papers is the rise of the Pirates. Sadly we are not talking about a gang of hirsute, garishly dressed and rum-soaked privateers looking for Spanish gold along the sun-dotted shipping lanes of the Caribbean. In this case, those sailing under the black flag are a relatively well-dressed and non-rum-stinking group of legislators whose zone of action is Iceland’s sixty-one-member parliament. Indeed, with elections looming on the horizon sometime in autumn, the Pirates of Iceland may become the government.
Why do we care about the Pirates? Although Iceland is small country (with fewer than one million people) and what happens there is not necessarily going to move markets, the rise of the Pirates fits a larger pattern of politics observed throughout much of Europe, the United States and Brazil: public discontent with the political establishment and a still deep suspicion of the links between bankers and politicians. As Wolfgang Piccoli, co-president of Teneo Intelligence in London observed: “The Panama papers are yet another symptom, rather than root cause, of a growing disconnect between elites and their voters. . . Even if the Panama story were not to drag on for too long, the fundamental crisis of diminishing trust in the political establishment is likely to continue.”
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The following excerpt is taken from My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme.
We began our lunch with a half-dozen oysters on the half-shell. I was used to bland oysters from Washington and Massachusetts, which I had never cared much for. But this platter of portugaises had a sensational briny flavor and a smooth texture that was entirely new and surprising. The oysters were served with rounds of pain de seigle, a pale rye bread, with a spread of unsalted butter. Paul explained that, as with wine, the French have “crus” of butter, special regions that produce individually flavored butters. Beurre de Charentes is a full-bodied butter, usually recommended for pastry dough or general cooking; beurre d’Isigny is a fine, light table butter. It was that delicious Isigny that we spread on our rounds of rye.
Rouen is famous for its duck dishes, but after consulting the waiter Paul had decided to order sole meunière. It arrived whole: a large, flat Dover sole that was perfectly browned in a sputtering butter sauce with a sprinkling of chopped parsley on top. The waiter carefully placed the platter in front of us, stepped back, and said: “Bon appétit!”
I closed my eyes and inhaled the rising perfume. Then I lifted a forkful of fish to my mouth, took a bite, and chewed slowly. The flesh of the sole was delicate, with a light but distinct taste of the ocean that blended marvelously with the browned butter. I chewed slowly and swallowed. It was a morsel of perfection.
Read more here about Why Butter is Better.
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Happy April 15th. Another dreadful tax filing is behind us. What an an energy sapping, demoralizing process. You’re literally penalized for your success. “[F]ederal tax-code compliance overall consumes more than 6 billion hours of time each year, which is like having a “tax army” of 3 million people just filling out tax returns year-round,” writes my friend Chris Edwards, the director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute. Edwards continues:
The problem is getting worse. Federal tax rules span about 75,000 pages today, which is three times more than when President Jimmy Carter called the code “a disgrace to the human race.” The problem is that Congress micromanages us with ever more tax credits, deductions and exemptions for education, energy, health care, saving, working and other activities.
The latest layer of complexity was added by the Affordable Care Act, which manipulates our health choices through the tax system. If you don’t have health insurance, you calculate how much you get penalized. If you do have individual insurance, you calculate the tax credits you receive. If you get advance credits during the year, then you recalculate your benefits when you file. And so on.
You can try to figure all this out by looking at the IRS’s 24-page Affordable Care Act overview, its 19-page guide for penalties and its 71-page guide for credits. Or you can go to a tax practitioner who is familiar with the thousands of pages of related regulations.
The Affordable Care Act has become a tax-filing nightmare, but so have other parts of the code, such as the earned income tax credit. The IRS guide for the earned income tax credit is 37 pages long, and the rules are so complicated that the credit’s error rate is 27%, according to the IRS. That amounts to $18 billion of mistakes every year for just for this one credit.
These days, most people get their returns done by tax-preparation firms, but that doesn’t solve the complexity problem—indeed, the pros make many errors as well. A 2014 investigation by the Government Accountability Office of 19 paid tax preparers found that most of them calculated incorrect refund amounts on sample returns. Furthermore, expert tax preparation costs money—last year the average charge for 1040 return prep was $273.
In addition to the monetary costs, the tax code’s complexity:
- Increases avoidance and evasion.The earned income tax credit’s complexity has spawned an industry of fraudulent return filing, which costs billions of dollars a year. There is a similar problem with large corporations. We have the highest-rate and most complex corporate tax code in the world, which has created a breeding ground for widespread tax avoidance.
- Undermines financial planning.For families, the tax code complicates decisions about retirement savings, paying for education and other life events. For businesses, the tax effects of hiring workers, investing in capital equipment, and other decisions are constantly changing as new laws and regulations are imposed. The IRS Taxpayer Advocate counted 4,428 federal tax rule changesover a 10-year period.
- Creates “horizontal inequity.”People with similar incomes pay different amounts of tax because of all the special breaks. Homeowners, for example, can have a tax advantage of thousands of dollars a year over renters. Such inequities violate the principle of equality under the law.
Here Edwards talks about what the government is spending all that money on.
FLASHBACK VIDEO: Chris Edwards discusses taxes on Tax Day back in 2012
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“As I get older, I find that my demands for weapons have started to change. Earlier in life, I would only ask a single job of a single weapon (deer gun, home protection, etc.). Today, I want a more versatile weapon; one that can do multiple things well,” writes Robert McCartney at Loadout Room.
McCartney is writing about the Taurus Judge: Named because of the number of judges who carry it into the courtroom for their protection. It is capable of chambering both .410 3″ shotshell and .45 Colt Ammunition, ideal for short distances – where most altercations occur, or longer distances with the .45 Colt ammo.
I have yet to shoot a Taurus Judge, but I have friends who own it and love it. What caught my eye is their new disaster/attack kit called “The First 24 Judge Kit”. You may not want to go out and drop $1,500 on a kit like this. But with a little research you could easily build one of your own. At the bare minimum, this gets you thinking about “The First 24”.
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 W. Patrick Lang, former U.S Military Intelligence officer, explains to readers:
The post colonial construct called “Iraq” had been held together since its creation by force and coercion while it festered or fermented (take your pick) in its progress of evolving towards something like internal coherence. We destroyed that and believed that the artificialities of western political institutions could reconcile the mutually hostile elements.
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I just checked the political news from Baghdad. This mess has not improved in the last couple of days. As H. Rap Brown would have “sayed” in the sixties, “the chickens has come home to roost.”
The rot in Iraq has been exposed for some time by insurgency, now it appears the population is taking a stand.
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The Hill’s Bernie Quigley is on the money regarding NATO and Trumps view on NATO:
Is anyone at all in the professional realm with him on this? Possibly Dwight Eisenhower would have been, who might be considered the greatest general since Julius Caesar. In 1951, he became the supreme commander of NATO, the intergovernmental military alliance based on the North Atlantic Treaty signed on April 4, 1949. He had this to say about it: “If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project [NATO] will have failed.”
Why does it still then exist, 70 years later? Because both political parties have thought of little else but expanding NATO from then to now.
Trump might even have said this: “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.” That was from George Washington’s “Farewell Address” to America.
Say what you like about Trump, but today it appears that only he speaks to this.
More here from Cato Institute scholar Ted Galen Carpenter on whether or not America should quit NATO.
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Military historian and best-selling author Bing West offers readers a concise look at how America plans and fights wars. Bing concludes that we are performing poorly and offers several policy lessons that may be learned. On balance, he writes, the results in Iraq or Afghanistan were not worth the costs in American casualties, money, and global influence.
Our enemies do not fear us and our friends do not trust us. Sensible steps can turn that around, but that depends upon the next commander in chief. So far in the twenty-first century, due to our vast wealth and technologies, we have not been sorely tested. Our beloved nation does not have a martial spirit, and perhaps does not need one. It does need a military inculcated with a warrior spirit.
President Bush rashly overstepped in extending war to include nation-building. President Obama ideologically retreated by imposing restraints that encouraged our enemies. Congress proved irrelevant, lacking the cohesion to play its constitutional role in declaring for—or against—war.
In summary, a leaderless America is drifting. That should scare us all.
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 NPR tells readers that at least 28 have been killed and over 320 wounded, including women and children.
BBC reports: “The Taliban has over the past year enjoyed a resurgence, buoyed by the withdrawal of most NATO and U.S. forces at the end of 2014, and a flood of foreign fighters joining their ranks. It now controls sizable parts of Afghanistan.”
And the purpose of U.S. troops being there for over 14 years was what?
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In Washington, there is a lot of pretense about who does politics and who does not. Frequently, politics is seen as icky–Ted Cruz! Hillary Clinton! Eww!–whereas lawyers, judges, think tankers, civil servants, journalists and an array of other trades see themselves as doing something other than politics. Being a policy wonk, or even an ideologue, is seen as better than being a politico.
Libertarians, in particular, blanche at the idea of doing politics, and tell themselves that although they are trying to positively affect public policy, they are doing so in a way that is not doing politics.
But there is no way to do public policy work effectively without doing politics. In his critique of liberalism, the conservative German (and later in life, Nazi) political theorist Carl Schmitt observed that liberalism:
never produces on its own a positive theory of state, government, and politics. As a result, there exists a liberal policy in the form of a polemical antithesis against the state, church, or other institutions that restrict individual freedom. There exists a liberal policy of trade, church, and education, but absolutely no liberal politics, only a liberal critique of politics.
For Schmitt, politics was all about the distinction between friend and enemy, and liberalism’s rejection of that framework made liberalism into his greatest enemy.
In the midst of a presidential election where it seems easy to staple the friend-enemy motif onto the Trump-Clinton-whoever race, it is important not to. Even Schmitt would have found this extreme. But as a question about mass politics, it does point to the question: What is liberalism, or libertarianism, against?
It is easy to figure out what the Democratic Party is against: rival institutions to the state, white Southern Christians and guns. Similarly, it is easy to figure out what the Republicans are against: cities, abortion, climate scientists, most foreigners, and at times, the federal government.
As Schmitt points out, liberals/libertarians are against the state, but not entirely against it. They are against it in a wonky way, in a way that accepts its existence as vital and legitimate, but wants it to be more restrained.
But what would this mean as a mass political force? One of libertarianism’s strengths is its limits. One can be a Catholic, or a wiccan, or a Jew, or an atheist and be a libertarian. Libertarianism is a theory of man’s relationship to the state, which leaves many questions unanswered.
But that strength also poses problems: Such a diverse array of people who might be drawn to libertarianism’s policy views rarely coalesce into a mass political coalition. They do not share a vision of the good life, of what it means to be a good, or a bad, person. Some, like authors at Reason
magazine, have tried to reduce efforts to measure libertarianism’s success or failure to the direction of the cultural zeitgeist, insisting that political outcomes do not bear strongly on the movement’s success or failure. While this would make political setbacks more palatable, it reduces libertarianism to an idiosyncratic left-wing position in the culture war.
I ask these questions not as a knock on libertarianism. I don’t have great answers myself. But if libertarianism is a movement whose success can be measured, it seems that political outcomes should be a big, if not the main, yardstick with which to measure it. There have been clear political victories for libertarianism in the form of the legalization of marijuana in many states and municipalities, the breaking down of onerous licensing regulations, and of the government’s ability to seize private property. But there have been a good number of setbacks as well.
The broader question remains: What symbols, what heroes, and yes, what enemies could pull together such a fractious and diverse group as libertarians and make it into a relevant force in politics?
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