Supporting “farmland preservation” has become a routine position for Delaware politicians, and with good reason: Farmers love it because they get lots of money and don’t have to give up their land, only delay developing it while they live off the “preservation” cash. Add to that Tom Gordon’s Trump-like treatment of every issue as one he could “win” and you get the mess New Castle County has in Port Penn, where greedy, hands-out farmland owners have sued in Chancery Court to force the county to extend sewer service to their land. There’s only one way to properly “preserve” land: Buy it.
That stupid, poorly considered Trump meeting with Kim Jong Un is already being walked back because there are still adults at work somewhere in the White House. But maybe not for long. Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman reports Trump is “red hot” and preparing to clean house, with Kelly, McMaster and Javanka all on the chopping block.
Whoever runs the place would do well to knock out the TV cable, because Trump apparently gets all his bad ideas from Fox News. In fact, that widely known fact helped a sailor accused of breaching security secure a presidential pardon, because his lawyer figured if he made his case on Fox, Trump would see it.
Philly.com’s Will Bunch looks at the West Virginia teachers’ strike and finds a connection between #metoo and revitalized unions.
Walter Shapiro makes an interesting point about the politics of gun control: Politicians have little reason to take electoral risks for small incremental measures. His conclusion: Go big:
The biggest problem that gun control advocates face — and have faced for more than two decades — is that any specific reform they pump for is likely to work only at the margins.nstead of going small to the point of near-invisibility, a strong case can be made that it is time to go large. … The idea would be to put every practical gun-control measure that could save lives (and could pass Supreme Court muster) in a single piece of legislation. For example, limits on the types of guns that can be sold, the types of ammunition available, age restrictions, enhanced background checks and rigorous federally funded research on further ways to reduce gun violence. Then, and only then, could you make a credible case that thousands of lives each year are hanging in the balance. That would present Congress with the stark choice between dramatically reducing gun violence or continuing to cater to the extremist whims of the NRA.
Will the Stormy Daniels scandal do what every other Trump scandal has failed to do? I tend to doubt it, but I must admit that Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen, is almost as incompetent as his boss, as demonstrated by the fact that he negotiated her payout on Trump Organization letterhead.
Trump’s imitators are everywhere, but they never seem to skate away as easily as he does. Consider, for example, “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli. He put on an impressive display of contrition, complete with tears, but was nevertheless sentenced to seven years in prison for securities fraud.