July 14, 2024

What's The Story With The Secret Service?

July 14, 2024/ Francis Menton

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump is not the kind of event that I would normally write about at Manhattan Contrarian. Like many other newsworthy events, it’s not that it’s not important; it’s that I don’t have any special expertise or insights to offer.
But there is one aspect of this attempted assassination that cries out for comment. That is the truly incredible failure of the Secret Service that enabled the shooter to gain access to the vantage point to shoot.

July 11, 2024

Big Tech On The Path To Net Zero

July 11, 2024/ Francis Menton

Among the adherents to the cult of climate change, nobody can claim a higher level of sanctimony than the Big Tech behemoths — the likes of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple.
These new economic titans fancy themselves to be totally unlike the dirty and grubby industrial companies of the past, like the steel, automobile or oil producers with their belching smokestacks. Each of these new tech powerhouses loudly proclaims its sacred and unwavering commitment to “net zero” emissions by some early date, typically 2030.
And each of them puts out an annual report documenting its progress toward the rapidly arriving nirvana. Here is Google’s 2024 “Environmental Report”; Microsoft’s “2024 Environmental Sustainability Report”; Meta’s “2023 Sustainability Report”; and Apple’s latest “Environmental Progress Report” (issued October 2023 covering 2022).
But don’t these companies use vast quantities of energy in their operations, not the least for rapidly expanding data centers? Surely, their “emissions” must be increasing.

July 08, 2024

July 08, 2024/ Francis Menton

A reader has reported that he tried to share my July 5 post, “Who Is The Greater ‘Threat To Democracy’?” on Facebook, and Facebook took it down. If any other readers have had a comparable experience with Facebook or other social media entities, I would appreciate it if you would share the experience with me. Use the “CONTACT” link at the top of the blog page.
Meanwhile, as I have thought about that post, I have realized that I barely scratched the surface as to both candidates, and therefore a second post with further elaboration would be appropriate.
Bottom line: the deeper you go into this, the more it is definitive that Biden is by far the worse “threat to democracy.”

July 05, 2024

July 05, 2024/ Francis Menton

If the imploding Biden campaign, such as it is, has a main theme right now, that theme would appear to be that Donald Trump is a “threat to our democracy.” Or maybe it’s that Trump is “the greatest threat to our democracy.”
Joe seems to repeat that line every time he comes out of the basement to speak. Here’s a short Instagram video issued by the Biden campaign about a week ago with the text “Democracy is on the ballot,” and “Donald Trump is the greatest threat to our democracy.”
But then, Trump served a full four year term as President. He has a record of four years in the office from which we can compile evidence of actions that he took while holding the powers of the presidency that might be viewed as threats to democracy. Biden also has a record as President, now approaching the same length, so we can do the same thing for him.
So which of the two is the greater threat to democracy?

July 02, 2024

July 02, 2024/ Francis Menton

In the 235 or so years since our Republic was founded, until now, no ex-President has ever been prosecuted for allegedly criminal acts committed while in office.
This has been a political norm of great consequence. Any such prosecution of an ex-President cannot avoid being inherently problematical, inevitably bringing to a head the conflict between, on the one hand, constraining the President in the exercise of his constitutional duties and, on the other hand, declaring him “above the law.” By far preferable would be for this conflict never to arise, and for the applicable legal rules never to get defined and to remain ambiguous.
You might think that people abrogating a political norm like this, so central to the proper functioning of the Republic, would only do so in the face of the most clear-cut circumstances of obvious and significant statutory violations, crying out for criminal redress. But of course that is not the MO of our current garbage political powers-that-be. Instead, we see broadly-worded criminal statutes that would never be so used against anyone else, twisted out of context in the effort to take down a hated political foe. Now, the Supreme Court has been forced to rule on several issues in these cases, and has come out in unsurprising ways.
During the past week, the lawfare campaign against Trump suffered three major blows from Supreme Court decisions.

June 28, 2024

June 28, 2024/ Francis Menton

The rush of end-of-term decisions from the Supreme Court, not to mention last night’s presidential debate, gives me many more potential topics to write about than I could ever get to.
How to choose? On the subject of the presidential debate, I doubt that I have anything to say that a hundred others have not said in the past 24 hours. So then, which of the latest crop of Supreme Court decisions is the most important?
On that last question, my vote goes to Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. This is the case that has rather emphatically overruled the 1984 case of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.