A couple of statistics for your consideration: Delaware had 63 murders in 2016. It had 306 deaths by overdose. You don’t need me to tell you which one got more coverage. Virtually all those deaths were the result of people not knowing what they were injecting. One idea for reducing that death rate is safe injection sites, an idea that was raised in Delaware yesterday. The odds are slim, but it’s a more worthy subject of debate than transsexual students’ rights, don’t you think?
A federal case is ready to disrupt Delaware’s method for choosing judges. The state Constitution says the bench must be balanced with equal numbers of judges from the two political parties. U.S. District Court Judge Mary Pat Thynge wrote current state law “violates the First Amendment by placing a restriction on governmental employment based on political affiliation in the Delaware judiciary.” Time for some politically unaffiliated jurisprudence, don’t you think?
Lots of sober “it hurts, but it had to be done” pieces today about Al Franken’s resignation from the Senate. I think it’s an unforced error on Democrats’ part, but I could be wrong. Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times takes the consensus approach, but points out that a lot of the “we’re not gonna take it” anger sprang from Trump’s Access Hollywood tape, and ultimately it must be directed back at Trump if it’s going to do any lasting good.
I knew I didn’t understand women, but now I’m going to have to admit I don’t understand men, either. I thought I understood the impetus for many of these sexual harassment complaints, but the one that caused Republican Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona to announce his resignation from Congress yesterday befuddles me: He asked two of his staffers if they would serve as surrogate mothers for Franks and his wife. Seriously, who does that? If Franken’s resignation helped prompt this result, maybe it’s already paying for itself.
The longer people examine the tax bills passed by Congress, the worse they look. By pushing lots more people to file short-form, charities in particular can expect to see plummeting donations, because if you don’t itemize you can’t deduct them.
Thomas B. Edsall has some interesting historical observations about our widening political divide. He quotes Karen Stenner, author of “The Authoritarian Dynamic,” to the effect that liberalism always produces this backlash against it. “Not only are the values that the left takes for granted heatedly disputed in many sections of the country, the way many Democratic partisans assert that their values supplant or transcend traditional beliefs serves to mobilize the right,” Edsall says.
Have at it.