Daily Archives: January 3, 2022

This article is part of The Week's 20th anniversary section, looking back at how the world has changed since our first issue was published in April 2001.

Saint Paul considered himself an "apostle to the Gentiles" though he did not number among them, and it's in this sense I've joked that, as a journalist, I'm an apostle to the American right.

That is, I don't call myself a conservative, except temperamentally. I'm certainly not a Republican. Though I've recently had a few people dub me a centrist, my own label of choice is libertarian, and I make all the usual protests to my progressive friends that we libertarians are not properly located on the right wing of American politics.

But I did grow up there. I remember thinking it was vital George W. Bush win the 2000 election, and the presidential campaign where I interned eight years later was not within the Libertarian Party but a vehemently rebuffed libertarian incursion into the GOP. Much of my writing today is for or about the right. It's still familiar territory but it seems to grow less recognizable by the day.

Over the past two decades, which correspond almost exactly to the post-9/11 era, the American right has changed remarkably. In 2001, Bush was president, the literal heir of the political heir of Ronald Reagan. He'd been elected talking about free markets and free trade, "compassionate conservatism," and a "humble" foreign policy. Coming off the sexual scandals of the Clinton era, Republicans cast themselves as the party of virtue. The party of artless patriotism and family values. The party of principle, of grown-ups, of Mayberry and small farmers and Wall Street capitalists and country clubs. The party seated squarely on Reagan's three-legged stool of fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, and defense hawks.

That is not the American right of 2021. Each leg of the stool has been thoroughly reshaped.

Perhaps most visible are the changes to the first leg, fiscal conservatism a category I'll broaden to include meta-level ideas about the size and scope of government; the legitimacy and value of state regulation and social welfare programs; and attitudes toward large corporations, international trade, and the market economy. Two decades ago, the right was still in thrall to the fusionist consensus, the partnership between conservatives and libertarians built on a then-shared vision of small government, at least where economic matters were concerned. To borrow the memorable phrasing of Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform in 2001, the fusionist goal was not "to abolish government," but to "reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

The right no longer wants a drownable government. Republicans and libertarians are no longer, as Reagan argued in 1975, "traveling the same path," because the median Republican is now more an economic populist than a fiscal conservative.

I'm painting in broad strokes here, I know, and there's no denying that tax cuts still thrill the GOP heart or that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is still trying "to get as right-of-center an outcome as possible." Nevertheless, the differences are stark. A YouGov survey of Republican voters earlier this year found nothing like the free-market orthodoxy of the past. Instead, these voters expressed wariness of foreign trade, with four in 10 saying they think it hurts the American economy and six in 10 affirming it harms our job market.

Gone as well is deep skepticism of "entitlements," at least for certain favored demographics; now, two in three say "it's more important to keep Social Security benefits at current levels even if it means raising payroll taxes." A 2020 Public Agenda/USA TODAY/Ipsos poll found similar trends, reporting majority Republican support for state and federal job creation via infrastructure projects, incentives for domestic industry, and reduction of educational costs. Most Republican voterswant to raise the minimum wage and increase regulation of tech companies.

"All the things that defined economic thinking before [former President Donald] Trump are now a complete split," said Ethics and Public Policy Center senior fellow Henry Olsen, who managed the YouGov study. The late Rush Limbaugh agreed: "Nobody is a fiscal conservative anymore," the radio host told a caller in 2019. "All this talk about concern for the deficit and the budget has been bogus for as long as it's been around." Spend away, Limbaugh argued, because "the great jaws of the deficit have not bitten off our heads and chewed them up and spit them out," and perhaps they never will.

Even capitalism has lost its seat of honor, particularly as large corporations learn that touting progressive platitudes in glossy ads is a good way to get money or boycotts by right-wing pundits and the Twitter trends and headlines they bring. "If the right wants [to push back on this 'woke capitalism']," contended a reader letter The American Conservative's Rod Dreher featured on his popular blog in May, "then it has to be prepared to inflict economic costs on big business, including antitrust action, regulation, support for big labor, ending tax breaks, and a whole host of issues. This is a complete anathema to the fusionist, business, and donor class of the party, but, if implemented, it would be highly effective."

It would not be highly palatable to the conservative movement that was, but that movement is fading now. Fusionism is over, at least among those with real power. McConnell is labeling corporate political statements "economic blackmail" by a "woke parallel government." The "libertarian moment" has passed in the GOP, some folk libertarian impulses notwithstanding, and I don't expect the clock to tick toward it again in the foreseeable future. The right of today is entirely comfortable with a spendy, activist government, an indebted and mercantilist Washington that wields regulatory power for ideological ends.

Trump's success with hardline immigration policies is symptomatic of this shift. In the early 2000s, there was a real diversity of opinions on immigration in the GOP. There were hardliners, yes, but also Republicans who took a more open approach, casting immigration reform as a matter of expanding the labor pool for American businesses, simplifying federal bureaucracy, and welcoming newcomers many fleeing tyranny or persecution to pursue their free-market dreams. The tenure of former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), who wanted to pause even legal immigration "until we no longer have to press one for English and two for any other language," coincided with the Senate passage of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006, which included a path to citizenship for immigrants who had been in the country illegally for five years or longer. Though it never became law, the bill had Republican sponsors and strong bipartisan support.

When Elin Gonzlez was taken from his family for deportation to Cuba in the final days of the Clinton administration, Rudy Giuliani (then the Republican mayor of New York City, since a close Trump ally) slammedtheborder control agents responsible. He called them "storm troopers using guns" to "rip a boy away from a family that is caring for him, and a boy who has at least indicated an interest in growing up in democracy and freedom." And as recently as 2013, the "gang of eight" immigration reform effort, which also outlineda path to citizenship, counted Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) among its numbers. Rubio has since repudiated the project and taken a more restrictive stance, and Graham made a similar move.

It no longer makes sense to speak of immigration as part of this first, fiscal leg of the stool. The modern GOP wants to dramatically expand the federal government where border security is concerned, and anyway, immigration policy is mostly culture war now. Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a skilled navigator of the flow of right-wing opinion, this past spring claimed "the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate ... [with] more obedient voters from the Third World." He denied he was speaking of "a racial issue" or "white replacement theory" while yet decrying "change[s to] the population" which "dilute the political power" of people like him. Immigration in a discourse like that is better located in the second leg, where we turn to social issues.

The culture war didn't begin in the last 20 years, of course, but its terms of engagement have changed. (Those changes aren't exclusively attributable to the right far from it but given the focus of this article, that's where my attention will be.) So much analysis of the right's approach to social issues in the past five years has focused on white evangelicals and their relationship to Trump. That's understandable, and I've written plenty on evangelicals myself, but it can also obscure another key phenomenon: the rise of the post-religious right.

Going to church didn't stop people from voting for Trump. On the contrary, among professing Christian voters, higher church attendance generally correlated with more Trump votes in 2020. But fewer and fewer people are involved in houses of worship. Membership rates for churches, synagogues, and mosques held roughly steady, between 70 and 75 percent, from before World War II until the new millennium began. Over these past two decades, it plummeted and is now below half for the first time on record.

And here's the thing: Going to church may make a Trump vote more likely, but it's a vote that comes from a different set of beliefs than a Trump vote cast by a member of the irreligious right. Polling has found the "more often a Trump voter attended church, the less white-identitarian they appeared, the more they expressed favorable views of racial minorities, and the less they agreed with populist arguments on trade and immigration," wrote The New York Times' conservative columnist, Ross Douthat, in 2018. The differences were particularly sharp on matters of race and racism, Douthat observed, with "[s]ecularized Trump voters" pairing "an inchoate economic populism with strong racial resentments." Unchurched Republicans were nearly three times as likely as churchgoers to say their whiteness is "very important" to their identity.

It may be tempting for those outside the right to dismiss this evolution as irrelevant if the presidential votes are the same regardless. That would be a mistake. As French conservative Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry wrote for The Week in 2017, "[i]f you didn't like the Christian right, you'll really hate the post-Christian right," because "the Christian gospel's relentless focus on the intrinsic dignity of every human being, and on Christ's focus on the outcast and the outsider, at least can put a brake" on racism and other types of identitarianism.

As the right secularizes, that constraint is fading. A post-religious right has no reason to attempt to see inherent worth in its political opponents. It needn't have "opponents," in fact, just enemies. It can shrug at "s--thole countries"and "grab 'em by the pussy" and anything cruel or foul or even illegal as long as the other side is on the receiving end, because winning is what matters. All is transactional. All is consequentialist. Own the libs. Claim the power. Revel in the thrill. (A headline at American Greatness, entirely sincere: "I won't take the [COVID-19] vaccine because it makes liberals mad.")

The trend I'm describing here is not universalized on the right, and it doesn't necessarily alter Republican policy preferences (immigration is a notable exception), just as it didn't necessarily alter voters' decisions about Trump. On familiar culture war fronts, like abortion, LGBTQ issues, and religious liberty, the right-wing position since 2001 has stayed fairly consistent or on gay marriage moved left. But the tenor is different. It's more tribal, less principled. Less about deeply held religious conviction and more about cosseting fears, indulging anger, and punishing the out-group. "Recent party polling indicates that, more than any issue, Republican voters crave candidates who 'won't back down in a fight with the Democrats,'" The New York Times reportedthis year.

It turns out "secularization isn't easing political conflict," The Atlantic's Peter Beinart has written. "It's making American politics even more convulsive and zero-sum." As religiosity declines, the American right is growing more utilitarian, more openly rude, reactionary, and racist.

Last, we come to foreign policy, the stool's third leg. After the 9/11 attacks, Bush promptly dropped all that humility stuff and decided it actually was "the role of the United States is to go around the world and say, 'this is the way it's got to be.'"Neoconservatism was ascendant, and the United States invaded Afghanistan, then Iraq, and embarked on doomed projects of regime change, nation building, and regional transformation.

Many of those military misadventures are still underway in some form, but the most recent Republican president won, in part, because of his explicit condemnation of their beginning. Trump's supporters cast him as a foreign policy renegade, a strong innovator who could end endless wars and achieve new diplomatic triumphs through his unparalleled deal-making prowess. They touted "his ability to identify America's national interest clearly and pursue it without regard to outdated ideological investments."

It's true Trump wasn't concerned with outdated ideological investments, but only because he and so much of the American right today has little in the way of ideological investments in foreign policy at all. Neoconservative foreign policy was horrific, but it had an internal logic. The Jacksonian mood of GOP foreign policy today, by contrast, is impulsive and incoherent. It decries permanent warfare but is not opposed to war in any principled sense.

Indeed, Trump never actually ended a war, and he blew up more major diplomatic accords than he engineered. Once-promising overtures to North Korea were wasted. The Iran nuclear deal withdrawal was borne of ridiculous hubris. Perhaps the most important pact of Trump's presidency, the U.S.-brokered deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, does not directly concern the United States. His foreign policy decisions sometimes seemed to be determined by whether he'd had more fun golfing with the Republican lawmaker arguing for military action or the one arguing against it.

Here's the crux of the matter: Suppose another 9/11-style attack happened in the United States and, in the aftermath, we learned the perpetrators had a host country arrangement like that of al Qaeda with the Taliban in Afghanistan. We have 20 years of hindsight. We know how costly, counterproductive, and tragic the war in Afghanistan was. We know it was the start of a whole slate of regional wars and smaller military interventions in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere. We know the futility displayed in its conclusion.

Yet for all that knowledge, my belief is that if another GOP president pushed for war in the wake of our hypothetical terrorist attack, most of the right would be raring to go. That includes many Trump supporters who liked his criticism of Bush-era foreign policy. They're not antiwar so much as tired of these wars and eager to redirect attention and resources to economic populism and culture wars at home.

Likewise inconsistent is the new right's attitude toward the intelligence establishment and law enforcement more generally. On the one hand, the GOP that passed the Patriot Act is not the GOP of today, in which conspiracy theories about the "deep state" cast suspicion on the CIA, NSA, FBI even the FDA. Trump's rhetoric toward these agencies was often antagonistic, and when the former president's fans stormed the Capitol Building in January, they attacked police defending the complex, seriously injuring many officersand possibly contributing to one's death.

On the other hand, that same rioting crowd at the Capitol had "Blue Lives Matter" flags. Respect for the military and law enforcement remains strong in a milieu where patriotic correctness flourishes. For the patriotically correct, "[b]elieving in American exceptionalism means that anything less than chest-thumping jingoism is capitulation," wrote the Cato Institute's Alex Nowrasteh at The Washington Post. In this perspective, Nowrasteh continued, "[u]nionized public employees who can't be fired are bad at their jobs and are more interested in increasing their own power than fulfilling their public duties, except if they are police or Border Patrol officers, who are unselfishly devoted to their jobs." (Giuliani's "storm troopers" line would never publicly pass Republican lips today, and not only because of swings on immigration.)

To be clear, I'm glad of some of the policy outcomes newly complicated Republican views on law enforcement have produced, like the First Step Act and the permitted lapse of certain features of the Patriot Act in March of 2020. Yet where protection of privacy, in particular, is concerned, I don't seeburgeoning civil libertarianism so much as self-protection. Trump didn't want to rein in the FISA court because it had rubberstamped tens of thousands of surveillance requests, rejecting a mere 11 of nearly 34,000 between 1979 and 2013. No, his objection was its approval of surveillance of his campaign. The broader incongruity of right-wing attitudes here similarly pairs, by some measures, some decline in authoritarianism with a spike intribalism and paranoia.

Beyond all these shifts in policy and philosophy, maybe the biggest evolution of the American right over the past 20 years is the decline of the conservative temperament.

Conservatism, as it was once understood, is "not an ideology or a creed," David Brooks explained at The New York Timesin 2007, "but a disposition, a reverence for tradition, a suspicion of radical change."

In this sense, conservatism is marked by prudence and restraint. It cultivates institutional stability and regard for the wisdom of the past. It preaches a modest patriotism, not the bombast of patriotic correctness, and abhors gaudiness, indecency, and waste. "Temperamental conservatism understands that in order to preserve anything, it must be kept within certain limits," wrote Daniel Larison for The American Conservative. "It recognizes that resources are finite and can be exhausted by current generations at the expense of posterity."

This is a conservatism with which I can identify. It is also a conservatism dangerously dwindled on the American right.

No longer is temperamental conservatism in healthy tension with progressivism's constant forward push. Rather, as Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote of Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) the day after the Jan. 6 Capitol sedition, too much of the right today is "like people who know the value of nothing, who see no frailty around them, who inherited a great deal an estate built by the work and wealth of others and feel no responsibility for maintaining the foundation because pop gave them a strong house, right? They are careless inheritors of a nation, an institution, a party that previous generations built at some cost."

Instead of prudence, profligacy. Instead of serious politics, entertainment. Instead of virtue, victory. The change is so significant I'm rarely willing to use the word "conservative" to talk about the American right, because so little of it is conservative at all.

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2 decades of right turns - The Week Magazine

All the views that are fit to televise. Photo: Lou Rocco/ABC

These are tough times for pundits. Congress is in recess. The major organs of political reporting are understaffed and churning out take fodder at a tepid rate. Other than the rapidly worsening mass-death event thats threatening to capsize the nations hospital system and economy, there isnt much news to report.

So, Im going to branch out a bit here and try my hand at womens-daytime-talk-show analysis.

ABCs The View has long been a dominant player in that space. Originally created by Barbara Walters, the show aims to bring four to five women of divergent backgrounds, generations, and interpersonal styles into lively, intelligent conversation about the news of the day. The shows lineup has never been anywhere near as demographically or ideologically diverse as the American public. But its been especially homogeneous since this past July, when it lost its resident conservative, Meghan McCain. In the months since, The View has cycled through a parade of conservative guest co-hosts including libertarian commentator S.E. Cupp, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, and exhypothetical Ted Cruz presidential running mate Carly Fiorina but has failed to settle on a new, permanent representative of red America.

This week, Politico reported that three of the shows longtime co-hosts Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, and Sunny Hostin issued the producers an ultimatum before their holiday break: Theyre tired of adjusting to the rotating cast of token Republicans, and they want a permanent hire pronto.

But the higher-ups are struggling to find the right candidate. The basic problem is that the producers want a conservative who credibly represents the views of Republican news consumers. But they also want one who is not a denier of the 2020 election results or seen as flirting too heavily with fringe conspiracy theories or the MAGA wing of the GOP. Put differently: They dont want another NeverTrump Republican who will chummily respond to the liberal hosts musings with yes, but qualifications (their focus groups suggest that viewers like clash). But they also dont want an unvaccinated authoritarian whos going to spit venom in Joy Behars face.

Alas, the shows producers arent having an easy time finding a conservative whos so much as willing to abide by New Yorks public-health laws. As the Daily Beast reports, The View was in talks with Fox News contributor Lisa Marie Boothe earlier this year. But their discussions came to halt when Boothe made it clear that she would not, under any circumstances, vaccinate herself against COVID-19.

The basic challenge currently confronting The View has been flummoxing other mainstream-media enterprises since Donald Trumps election. During the Reagan-Bush era, when country-club Republicans enjoyed pride of place in red America, it was not difficult to find conservative commentators who evangelized for the partys animating objectives and honored the norms of cosmopolitan media elites. There is no irreconcilable conflict between advocating for regressive tax cuts and treating your liberal colleagues with basic courtesy while everyone respects the bedrock conventions of a liberal democracy. But today, owning liberal cultural elites and denying the legitimacy of elections that Democrats win are more central to Republican politics than supply-side economics or neoconservative foreign policy.

Even before Trumps ascent, the voting base for old-style respectable Republicanism was steadily declining. But the demagogues conquest of the GOP accelerated the preexisting movement of (predominately) college-educated, pro-Establishment voters into the Democratic coalition and working-class, low-trust, illiberal voters into the Republican one. Trump also made this realignment more conspicuous by ending the Bushites dominance of the partys commanding heights. Before Trumps election, the New York Times could reserve column inches for David Brooks and Ross Douthat and tell itself its Opinion page gave voice to all of the nations dominant ideological tendencies. Afterward, the paper was forced to confront the choice between mainstream editorial standards and ideological inclusion. Ultimately, a combination of institutional norms and financial incentives principally, the need to retain the good graces of an overwhelmingly liberal subscriber base has kept the Times from adding an unabashed Trumpist to its stable of columnists. (Meanwhile, education polarization has transformed Brooks into a de facto Biden Democrat.)

To be sure, the discontinuities between the pre- and post-Trump GOPs are often exaggerated; the Brooks Brothers riot was nearly as audacious an assault on democracy as January 6 and much more effective. Nevertheless, it remains the case that the bow-tied libertarian Tucker Carlson of yesteryear was easier to integrate into a mainstream cable networks panel discussion or liberal newspapers op-ed page than the red-faced proto-white nationalist Tucker who now owns Fox Newss eight-oclock hour.

To a large extent, conservative media drove the GOPs illiberal transformation. But this was not an entirely top-down affair, in which reactionary propagandists dictated the desires of the Republican faithful. Rather, conservative media and its audience mutually radicalized each other in a feedback loop. Just as problem drinkers provide the alcohol industry with the majority of its sales, so the most ideologically extreme Republicans provide right-wing media with the bulk of their everyday viewers and listeners.Most Republican voters will be more engaged by paranoid conspiracy theories and unhinged grievance-mongering than by lectures on the (dubious) disemployment effects of minimum-wage hikes. This is especially true of the subset thats most interested in watching political talk shows.

Thus right-wing media has reflected and amplified the illiberal impulses of the conservative base back to it, undermining trust in the Republican Establishment and cultivating an appetite for a more vicious and authoritarian style of conservative politics. In 2016, Fox News briefly tried to domesticate the monster it had created, assuming an unabashedly adversarial posture toward Trump at the first 2016 GOP primary debate. It found that it could not herd its viewers.

After the 2020 election, the network relearned this lesson. Initially, Fox News resisted a full embrace of Trumps attacks on the legitimacy of Bidens victory and suddenly found itself bleeding audience share to Newsmax, One America News Network, and other conservative channels willing to affirm Trumps big lie.

All of which is to say: The View cant greatly expand its appealamong conservative political-infotainment junkies while shunning fringe conspiracists or the MAGA wing of the GOP. Nearly two-thirds of Republican voters believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. The partys most highly engaged supporters are so distrustful of established expertise and credulous of conspiracy theories that theyve led conservative state governments and media outlets to become objectively pro-COVID. In 2021, to be a true Republican is to broadcast contempt for cosmopolitan elites and the formal political process. Thats mainly a problem for our democracy. But its also a challenge for producers of some womens daytime talk shows.

Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.

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Why The View Is Struggling to Find a New Token Conservative - New York Magazine

The city is confident that the court will side with us once again as they have previously, a city spokesman said in a statement regarding the appeal.

Jeffrey Thornton, Janice Craig, Hilda Brucker and Byron Billingsley were all cited between 2015 and 2017 for various incidents in Doraville. Thornton and Brucker were charged with code enforcement violations, while Craig and Billingsley received traffic citations.

All four eventually pleaded no contest or guilty and were ordered to pay fines varying from $100 to $300.

In 2018, they filed a lawsuit claiming the citys fining habits were out of control. In December 2020, U.S. District Judge Richard Story ruled in the citys favor. (Story continues below timeline.)

Jeffrey Thornton was cited for having a trailer parked on his grass and logs in his backyard. He was found guilty and received a $300 fine, which was later dropped since Thornton was not able to pay the fine.

Janice Craig received a traffic ticket after being accused of improperly changing lanes and holding up traffic. Craig, who isnt a Doraville resident, pleaded guilty and received a $215 fine.

Hilda Brucker received citations for rotted wood and chipped paint on her house, weeds and overgrown vegetation in her yard and a crumbling driveway. She ultimately pleaded no contest to a charge and received a $100 fine and six months of probation.

Byron Billingsley received a traffic ticket after being accused of improperly changing lanes to get around a large truck. Billingsley, who worked in Doraville at the time, pleaded guilty to a $100 fine.

Plaintiffs filed their two-count complaint for declaratory injunctive relief and for nominal damages.

A federal judge denied Doravilles motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

The district court granted the citys motion for summary judgment and denied the plaintiffs motion.

Plaintiffs filed their notice of appeal.

They appeared in court to argue their case. Their attorney Joshua House said he expects the court to release their ruling next spring.

House said Storys ruling doesnt match legal precedent, and no one needs to lose a job to prove his case.

Doraville says, Well look, theres no evidence that we ever fired a judge because he didnt bring in enough money, House said in a phone interview. And our argument is that you dont have to wait for Doraville to actually do that horrible thing... House said in a phone interview.

Harvey Gray, the attorney representing Doraville, said the case should never have gotten this far, let alone to the appeal stage.

He said the four plaintiffs should have appealed their individual cases if they felt they werent being given due process.

The only irreparable injury that the two traffic court case plaintiffs (Craig and Billingsley) said is we might drive through Doraville again, and were scared were going to get a ticket, Gray said Dec. 16 in court. Well, the answer is dont violate the law.

House argued in court that municipal fees are crucial for Doraville to balance its budget.

In 2010, about 35% of the citys general revenue came from municipal fees. Since 2015, that figure has steadily decreased, and it has dropped below 10% since 2020. House said fines and fees comprise just 1.4% of the average American citys revenue.

Doraville funding from traffic tickets

Doraville gets an unusually large percentage of revenue from traffic tickets, but that number has declined as it has fended off lawsuits. The 2021 budget figure is a budget estimate, while the other figures consist of actual revenue generated by fines and fees.

SOURCE: City of Doraville

Both House and the city said the COVID-19 pandemic likely played a factor in the recent dip, but House added the decline could be a result from the lawsuit. The citys statement primarily attributed the decline to an increase in population.

Over the last four years, fines and fees have made up a decreasing portion of our budget thanks to explosive growth throughout the city and improved compliance with our laws, the citys statement said. Our population has shot up 27% since 2010 and new businesses are moving in every month.

House said the city can resolve its alleged conflict of interest by either relying less on fees to balance its budget or providing judges with more job security, such as lifetime tenure or making them elected officials.

Councilman Andy Yeoman told the AJC in an email that the City Council is not dictating how judges rule on their cases.

The issue this libertarian organization is trying to resolve in the federal court is: are municipal judges agents of city councils, Yeomans email said. This issue as it relates to Doraville is absurd, as the prior judge served for 28 years through nearly three decades of different councils. Two of the current judges Ive never met or spoken to.

He added that this lawsuit wont lead to any meaningful code enforcement reform, which he said is needed in many cities.

This lawsuit is a distraction to genuine reforms and progressive changes, Yeoman said.

House said he expects a ruling on the appeal sometime in spring 2022.

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Doraville back in court over allegedly padding budget with fines, fees - The Atlanta Journal Constitution

In mid-December, US Senate Democrats cried uncle, at least temporarily, pulling President Bidens $2 trillion Build Back Better agenda out from under the Christmas Tree. If the bill makes it to the Senate floor for an up or down vote, it wont be this year.

Im a big fan of gridlock, and not a fan at all of Bidens Big Basket of Boondoggles, so I cant say Im terribly unhappy about this. Thanks, Joe Manchin!

On the other hand, it seems to me that Democrats are missing a chance to save themselves a savage beating in next Novembers midterms. Which, as much as I dislike the Republicans too, might not be a bad thing from the gridlock is good standpoint, but lets look at it as a nuts-and-bolts problem.

Build Back Better is whats commonly called an omnibus bill. Put simply, Democrats threw in the kitchen sink and plunked down 2,000+ pages of everything any Democrat might want.

The point of an omnibus bill is that it lets the members of the majority party bring pressure on each other to get unanimity.

Congresswoman X wants, say, a child tax credit, but doesnt want to expand Medicare to cover hearing aids (both of these are in Build Back Better).

Congressman Y wants the hearing aids but not the child tax credit.

If both things go in the omnibus bill, Congresswoman X and Congressman Y must both support what they dont want to get what they do.

But that pressure can run in both directions. If Congresswoman X hates the hearing aid provision so much that shell give up the child tax credit to avoid supporting it (and Congressman Y vice versa), the bill dies.

Democrats are looking at two plausible plays for support next year.

One is to get Build Back Better passed so that they can brag on how much they got done, and ask voters to expand their mandate.

The other is to blame those darn Republican obstructionists (or Joe Manchin) for the fact that they got nothing done, and ask voters to give them more seats. That approach frankly doesnt work too often or well.

There is, however, a third option.

There are probably a few reasonably popular even bipartisan things in Build Back Better. Why not break these popular items out into single-issue bills that can actually pass? I dont support the child tax credit, but I bet some Republican votes could be found for some version of it.

Theres a good argument to be made that this is how Congress should handle EVERYTHING. One subject per bill would substantially reduce gridlock.

It would also give congressional Democrats a third, better campaign pitch for midterm voters: We got some stuff you like DONE reward us!

If Democrats step off the omnibus and walk those individual bills up Capitol Hill, they might staunch their bleeding campaign wounds and do reasonably well next November. That might or might not be good for the country, but it would be good for them.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org).

He lives and works in north central Florida.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Thomas Knapp: Gridlock cure: Democrats should get off the (omni)bus and walk - Today's News-Herald

Key facts:

Technical robustness and public legitimacy are essential elements in an anti-censorship cryptocurrency.

According to Buterin, second-layer solutions still have many limitations.

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, published a thread on the social network Twitter in which he reflects on some of his opinions in previous years and took the opportunity to talk about Bitcoin and its decentralization.

According to Buterin, the decentralization of Bitcoin would not be enough for this network to emerge successfully in the face of extreme regulatory systems imposed by governments. While he did not cite examples or mention specific scenarios, the Ethereum co-founder acknowledged that Bitcoin technology is, in essence, censorship-proof.

The decentralization of Bitcoin would allow it to survive in an extremely hostile regulatory climate, but it could not prosper. A successful strategy to resist censorship requires a combination of technical robustness and public legitimacy.

Vitalik Buterin, Co-founder of Ethereum

In the quoted tweet, Buterin notes that Bitcoin could barely survive in a very rigorous regulatory environment. However, the properties that he considers necessary to successfully overcome censorship are two of Bitcoins strengths. While it is fair to admit that the original cryptocurrency still has a long way to go in terms of technical robustness and public legitimacy, bitcoin is clearly far ahead of altcoins.

In fact, the 2021 was a key year for decentralization in Bitcoin. The Chinese veto on Bitcoin forced miners to emigrate to other latitudes, and thus distribute half of the total hashrate of this network among several countries, which remained concentrated in the Asian giant.

Regarding technological development, recently CriptoNoticias reported that Bitcoin was one of the cryptocurrency projects that has the greatest progress, despite not having extraordinary financing.

It is crucial to keep in mind that the bitcoiner community includes three groups that are primarily responsible for its growth and success: its developers, its miners, and its users.

Bitcoin developers have a duty to improve the efficiency with which the network works while maintaining the libertarian philosophy that gave rise to it. The miners are the power of the network, allowing it to remain safe and active thanks to the energy provided by its hardware. Meanwhile, the users of this cryptocurrency are in charge of promoting its use and adoption, as well as ensuring that the work of the developers favors the majority and not just themselves.

It is also important to note that most of the mechanisms used by governments to regulate and even prohibit the use of Bitcoin arrive at the crossroads between this cryptocurrency and the traditional financial system. That is, in exchange houses, stock exchanges, banks, etc. Bitcoin, as Buterin himself says, has a native system resistant to censorship.

Regarding the promotion of the use of Bitcoin, the co-founder of Ethereum commented something interesting that he himself corroborated in his recent trip to Argentina. Although the adoption of cryptocurrencies is great in this country, stablecoins have a high commercial acceptance. This suggests that many people still trust traditional financial systems, even if they come disguised as blockchain.

Buterin, logically, is someone who is in favor of the coexistence of Bitcoin with other cryptocurrencies, or altcoins, as they are known in the bitcoiner ecosystem. This idea was reinforced in her recent tweet thread.

According to the Ethereum co-founder, there are three arguments that he already estimated in 2013 and with which he still agrees, which defend the coexistence of various blockchains and cryptocurrencies that are not necessarily related to each other.

The first of these is that different blockchains optimize the scope of different goals. Second, the costs of having many blockchains are low. By this, the Ethereum co-founder meant that maintaining different blockchains that can interact with each other is not as expensive as it may seem. Although he later admits that it is much more cumbersome than he believed. Finally, according to Buterin, it is important that there is another alternative to Bitcoin, in the event that the work of the main developers is negatively affecting the network.

Despite presenting such pro-altcoin cases, Buterin acknowledges that These arguments have much less force today. However, for him, although the development of second layer solutions (such as Bitcoins Lightning network) may be a more efficient response than a collective of cryptocurrencies and blockchains, in his opinion, there are limitations in this type of technology than a chain main would not face.

Originally posted here:

Bitcoin decentralization would help it survive, but not prosper - Central Valley Business Journal

If you have voted in Pennsylvania, anyone can view your personal information including your name, gender, date of birth, and date you registered to vote. It tells if you are an active or inactive voter, and when you last changed voter status or party affiliation. Also, your residential and mailing addresses, and your polling place are included.

It details the last date you voted, your school, state legislature, and congressional district. It contains your voter history, and the date that record was last changed. Anyone can read this. It just costs $20 on the Pennsylvania Department of States website.

Recently the state Senates Intergovernmental Operations Committees presented arguments for their subpoena to the Commonwealth Court for election processes as well as additional personal information about you. The committee seeks details including guidance issued by the Department of State to county election officials, including training materials and directives. That sounds reasonable.

But in addition, it demands the release to the Committee of voter data including some things that are already publicly available and some that are not. They want your drivers license and the last four digits of your social security number. This is supposedly in the cause of election integrity. But not to worry. The politicians assure us that this additional personal data will be kept secret by them.

How many times will we need to receive apologies from companies and institutions because they suffered a data break-in containing our personal information? In 2021 alone, millions of secure data files were stolen and sold on the dark web. It is becoming clear that the only sure way of protecting personal data is to not provide it.

Given the challenges of data security faced by even the most sophisticated data protection firms, why would we create the tempting target for identity thieves of a single store of personal data? This database would contain your name, address, date of birth, drivers license number and partial social security numbers all in one convenient-to-download file. Drivers license numbers and partial social security numbers, I would argue, are unnecessary for the Committees stated purpose of auditing the election. There is already significant individual voter data available publicly.

This committee demand is an unreasonable waste of resources and a dangerous exposure of voters personal information. Hopefully, the court will see the problems inherent in this plan and act to protect the public from yet another exposure of personal information.

Liz Terwilliger resides in Warren Center. She plans to run for congress in 2022 on the Libertarian ticket.

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Another threat to personal data | Opinion | dailyitem.com - Sunbury Daily Item