Would A Prosecutor Ever Misuse His Powers To Remove A Political Opponent?

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Unlike many political commenters, I'm mostly steering clear of commenting on what Robert Mueller might be up to.  Most of the facts in Mueller's possession are not publicly known.  Maybe he is actually on to something real.  I doubt it, but for a member of the public, there's no way of knowing for sure at this point.  

However, there are certainly some very good reasons to be dubious.  For starters, is it even conceivable that the recent raids on the home, office and hotel room of Trump personal counsel Michael Cohen have something to do with "Russian collusion" related to the 2016 election?  And if the raids don't have anything to do with that subject, what business is this of Mueller?  It seems that we have empowered a federal prosecutor with an unlimited budget, and 5000+ federal crimes to choose from, and a staff of committed Hillary partisans, not to investigate some specific crime (like the Watergate burglary), but rather to investigate anything and everything he wants going back for years until he comes up with something -- anything -- to "get" the President.  Is this now our idea of good public policy?  Isn't this whole process fundamentally inconsistent with honoring the results of the election that chose Trump as the President?

But for today, let's discuss an even better reason to be dubious about what is going on.  And that is the very powerful incentives operating upon prosecutors that lead them to misuse their prosecutorial powers for political purposes, particularly in the cause of taking down political opponents and rivals, and thereby trying to swing the levers of power back to their own party or faction.  Republicans are by no means pure on this subject; but when you look at the last decade or so it is completely extraordinary how many weak to fake and phony prosecutions have been brought by Democrat prosecutors against Republicans, particularly Republicans in marginal or swing seats that have a good chance of getting flipped to a Democrat if the Republican office-holder can be taken down.  Not so many instances of this come to mind for you?  Let's consider a some examples:

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    How To Solve The Problem Of "Staggering" Income Inequality

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    Do you think that income inequality in the United States is a major problem?  How about a "staggering" problem?  Recall that our ex-President Obama in 2014 famously called income inequality the "defining challenge of our time."  Or there was New York's Mayor de Blasio, who one-upped Obama by raising income inequality to a "crisis," -- one that, moreover, is "quiet" and "persistent" and "urgent."  From de Blasio's January 2014 inaugural address:

    New York has faced fiscal collapse, a crime epidemic, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters. But now, in our time, we face a different crisis – an inequality crisis. . . .  It’s a quiet crisis, but one no less pernicious than those that have come before.  Its urgency is read on the faces of our neighbors and their children, as families struggle to make it against increasingly long odds. 

    For me, I say it all depends on how you look at the world.  If you want to look at the world as providing the occasion for anger, resentment, and victimhood, then by all means declare income inequality to be a crisis.  Are you not one of the 400 wealthiest people in the United States?  Well boo-hoo!  Let's all sit around and feel sorry for ourselves and plot our revenge!  

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    Orthodoxy Enforcement Watch: Wage And Hiring Gaps

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    There's an easy way to know when your team will be on the losing side of some political debate.  It's when you and your compadres feel an overwhelming need to silence the opposition.  Do you notice any strong movement to silence flat earthers, or creationists, or even white supremacists?  I don't.  Their views may range from the crazy to the reprehensible -- but who cares?  Let them talk!  Nobody's paying any attention to them anyway.  It's only when your opponents start getting some traction in the debate and you start to get that nagging feeling that they just might be right that you will feel the urgent need to take action to shut them up.  

    Unfortunately shutting up your opponents will not work forever.  For the archetype of this genre, think of the extraordinary dissent-suppression machine of Soviet communism:  seven decades of slaughtering millions of dissenters and sending millions more to the gulag, yet somehow the dissenters triumphed, and it was the Soviet Union itself that ended up on the scrapheap of history.  Plenty more countries are headed down the same path today.  

    Here in the U.S., we do have the First Amendment, but it is always under attack; and there are numerous examples of dissent suppression and orthodoxy enforcement out there in various fields where those in power sense that they may be at risk of losing their grip.  The Manhattan Contrarian does its best to expose and ridicule these soon-to-be losers.  . . .

    For today's subject, let us consider the question of the causes of wage and hiring gaps in the American workforce.  

     

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    What's Really Happening In The World Of CO2 Emissions?

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    What's Really Happening In The World Of CO2 Emissions?

    In the field of energy and climate, the U.S. "mainstream" media are so devoted to the official narrative that it is very difficult to find out what is actually going on.  To take just a few relatively recent examples of what you might have learned from reading the New York Times: you might have learned that producing energy from the wind or sun is now cheaper than producing it from coal (with no mention of the problems or costs of intermittency); or that New York (along with many other jurisdictions including most of the EU) has banned "fracking"; or that "climate change is real" and the Paris climate accord is essential to solving the impending crisis.  But try to find out from the New York Times (or any other U.S. "mainstream" source) if the world is actually reducing production and use of fossil fuels or the resulting emissions.  Good luck.

    For information on those things, you might try the invaluable Global Warming Policy Foundation.  Their daily email from yesterday (April 5) contains plenty of information to leave you shaking your head at the idiocy of those who claim to be our moral betters.

    First up: the U.S. Energy Information Agency is just out with an update of world "tight" oil and gas reserves.  The update comes with this map the currently-known locations of oil and gas shale formations:

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    Another Small Dose Of Realism On The Prospects For A 100% Renewable Grid

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    As official Manhattan Contrarian April Fool Germany -- not to mention U.S. states like New York and California -- careen toward 100% renewable energy utopia, few stop to ask the question of how this is supposed to work from an engineering perspective.  Is it as simple as just building a bunch more wind turbines and solar panels and assuming that everything will be just fine?  A youngish Stanford professor, Mark Jacobson, puts out a couple of papers saying that he's made a computer model, and all it will take to make a 100% renewable system (solar, wind, water) will be maybe a little new-fangled storage (not yet invented), plus a few extra transmission lines (no costs provided).  Suddenly this guy has a celebrity following ranging from Mark Ruffalo to Leonardo DiCaprio to Governor Jerry Brown of California.  But before we go down the road of covering the landscape with these devices, will anyone address what it will take to make this work as a reliable 24/7 electricity system, and how much that project will cost?

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    A Nomination For The Biggest April Fool: Germany!

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    I know it's Easter Sunday, and I don't mean to be sacrilegious, but I can't help noticing that it's also April Fool's Day.  Unfortunately, human foolishness is much more of a topic for the Manhattan Contrarian than religion.  Can we come up with a nomination for the biggest April Fool of 2018?  I nominate the country of Germany!

    Regular readers will notice that I have returned repeatedly to the subject of Germany's futile and delusional efforts to "save the planet" by replacing energy that works with energy that does not work ("renewables"), while in the process roughly tripling the cost of electricity for German consumers.  A recent post on February 10 was titled "How Self-Delusional Can We Be About The Cost Of Electricity From 'Renewables'?"   Attempting to understand how electricity coming from the seemingly free wind and sun could lead to a tripling of electricity prices, that post noted that Germany -- with peak electricity demand of about 83 GW -- had rushed in recent years to build "renewable" capacity that had reached about 84 GW, theoretically enough to supply all the electricity they would ever need.  But somehow, Germany still had retained fossil fuel generating capacity of about 108 GW, which is about the same fossil fuel capacity you would want to have to supply 83 GW of peak demand if you had no renewable capacity at all.  Despite spending hundreds of billions of euros on the renewable capacity, they had not been able to get rid of any fossil fuel capacity at all!  They still need all the fossil fuel capacity for backup when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine.  (The data came from this report from German think tank Agora Energiewende.)

    That post inspired a comment from reader BrianE, who asked:

    I would be interested in knowing how much less CO2 Germany . . . [is] producing for their 30 cent/kW electricity.

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