Filling a high court vacancy
Ruth
Bader Ginsburg’s announcement that she is being treated for a recurrence of
cancer raises a major question. What will happen if the 87-year-old justice is
forced to leave the Supreme Court before January? President Trump and Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would surely “insist on filling any vacancy.”
McConnell has already stated he will ignore the precedent he set when he
refused to allow hearings on President Obama’s nominee to fill Antonin Scalia’s
seat, Merrick Garland, for 10 months in 2016. Trump, meanwhile, would love a
confirmation fight before Election Day “to rouse the Republican base.” The
GOP’s elimination of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees means Democrats
couldn’t stop confirmation of a new, Federalist Society–approved justice, but
“it would be holy war for both sides.” And what if the vacancy occurred after
Joe Biden was elected president, but in the lame-duck session between November
and January? Conservatives “would howl at Trump and McConnell to ram through a
confirmation.” But if Democrats hold a Senate majority in January, they will
react by expanding and packing the court with liberal justices. For the sake of
our already divided country, Justice Ginsburg needs to hold on.
--Ed
Kilgore, NYMag.com
Biden shouldn’t duck out of debate
Should Joe Biden skip the presidential debates? Many Democrats
are suggesting he do so, on the ground that debates serve as a poor test of who
would make a better president. What a terrible year to make this argument. The
pandemic has severely limited in-person appearances by the candidates, and both
parties’ conventions will be mostly virtual. Biden has ignored interview
requests by Chris Wallace of Fox News and is keeping a low profile. He’d take
office at age 78, becoming the oldest president ever on Day 1, and needs to
prove that President Trump’s claims that he’s all but senile are false.
During the
primaries, Biden had numerous memory lapses, including referring to Britain’s
prime minister as Margaret Thatcher, who left office 30 years ago. If he ducks
debates, voters will have every right to conclude that his handlers are trying
to protect him from doubts about his cognitive capacity. In addition, Biden
needs to explain and defend his leftist policy proposals for tax increases and
rapidly reducing the use of fossil fuels. Biden can’t ask Americans to elect
him president unless he’s willing to take on Trump face-to-face.
--Wall St. Journal
editorial
The meaning of
baseball
Baseball
is never just about baseball. It is called our national pastime for a reason.
The virus has dealt a serious blow not just to the league’s operation but, in
some sense, to the nation itself: Our confidence has been shaken, our
helplessness reinforced, our anxiety and caution ramped up yet again. Baseball
was entering the war against the pandemic. The league, armed to the teeth with
power and privilege, access to testing, cash flow, precision data collection,
and high-powered, lower-risk athletes playing outdoors, was supposed to
prevail. Baseball’s success, then, will be our success; its failure, our
failure.”
--Former
major leaguer Doug Glanville, New York Times
The Pentagon’s secret UFO
study
*****Are aliens real?.
Believe it or not, the Pentagon has a shadowy unit that is still studying this
question by examining a series of unexplained UFO sightings, The New
York Times recently reported. In a story buried on page 17, the Times said
earlier claims that the Pentagon had completed its study were not true. One
former contractor, astrophysicist Eric Davis, said he briefed officials in
March on “retrievals from ‘off-world vehicles not made on this earth,’”
suggesting “the possibility of little green men” might, in fact, be real. And
all of this comes on the heels of the Pentagon declassifying in April three
videos of Navy pilots encountering strange objects capable of flying at huge
speeds, stopping on a dime, and banking at seemingly impossible angles.
--Matt Novak, Gizmodo.com
*****Many UFO enthusiasts,
understandably, see these new developments as a sign that we are on the brink
of full disclosure about visitors from outer space. The Times reported
that the Senate is requiring the Pentagon to release a public report on its UFO
findings within three months. But I think the believers are in for a big
disappointment. The Pentagon group is focused on threats to national security, rather
than on spacecraft or possible alien visitors, and questions have been raised
about Davis’ legitimacy, honesty, and close ties to UFO crusaders. One of
the Times story’s authors, Ralph Blumenthal, has since backed
away from the supposed extraterrestrial origin of recovered materials. “He
didn’t say aliens,” Blumenthal said, “and neither do we.”
--Greg Eghigian, Slate.com
*****It’s not likely the many
unexplainable UFO sightings—including the ones recorded by Navy
pilots—represent alien visitations, But this is “a global phenomenon,” and UFOs
deserve a serious and transparent “interdisciplinary scientific investigation,”
not just a questionable study by the Pentagon. In the past, mainstream
scientists have shied away from the study of UFOs out of fear of being
considered kooks, but we should all approach this topic with open minds.
--Ravi
Kopparapu and Jacob Haqq-Misra, ScientificAmerican.com
*****If extraterrestrials
really are visiting us, this year would bethe perfect year” to find out. After
the pandemic, the murder hornets, and other bizarre events, humanity is finally
psychologically ready to handle alien contact. In 2020, an alien invasion just
feels right, somehow.
--Glenn Harlan Reynolds, USAToday.com
Hunting
for life on the Red Planet
NASA’s biggest
and most sophisticated rover blasted off from Cape Canaveral for Mars recently,
the first stage in a decade-long mission to search for traces of ancient life
on the Red Planet. After traveling through space for seven months, the car-size
Perseverance rover should descend to the Martian surface on Feb. 18, 2021—Mars
probes launched earlier in July by China and the United Arab Emirates are
expected to reach the planet at the same time. NASA is aiming to land
Perseverance on the floor of the 28-mile wide Jezero Crater, which some 3.5
billion years ago was the site of a lake and river delta. Using a suite of
advanced instruments, the plutonium-powered Perseverance will scour the basin
for rocks that might bear chemical signatures showing that microbes inhabited
the long-gone waters. It will store those samples in titanium tubes that will
later be collected by a European rover and flown to Earth.
“I’m optimistic
that when those samples come back, we will find compelling evidence for ancient
life,” NASA’s Katie Stack Morgan tells National Geographic. And if
we don’t, “that says something really interesting about the conditions in which
life can actually exist.” Perseverance will also launch a 4-pound experimental
helicopter named Ingenuity. If the craft can fly in the thin Martian
atmosphere, similar featherweight helicopters could be used as scouts on future
missions.
--The Week
Can
a bike shop ride out the recession?
To understand
how the pandemic is really affecting small businesses, I went to the guy who
sells bikes to my family. Jon Hughes runs the Downtown Ferndale Bike Shop and
Downtown Detroit Bike Shop. These days, his stores are packed with beat-up
Schwinns, Treks and Bianchis in need of repairs. The fix-it jobs are helping
his enterprise survive, but they are a Band-Aid for a broken business model. It
can take a mechanic a full day’s work to earn as much as a single high-end bike
sale, but the pandemic has made new bikes almost impossible to find.
Supply-chain kinks and production delays in China, where most new inventory is
made, have held up deliveries until 2021. One day recently, Hughes even
discovered his store had exhausted its supply of 26-inch tire tubes, a popular
size that has never been out of stock since he opened in 2010. “I’m running out
of stuff to sell,” said Hughes, who received a $20,000 loan from the Paycheck
Protection Program that quickly proved to be a drop in the bucket. He’s
actually hired more mechanics. But shipping rates have gone up, margins on new
products have gone down, and a busy bike shop without bikes to sell can only
pay the bills for so long.
--John Stoll,
Wall St. Journal
The 401(k)
needs a big overhaul
We’ve reached
point where 401(k)s no longer make sense for savers, The advantages of the
tax-deferred, defined-contribution plan rested on factors that have changed
dramatically since the 401(k) was created in 1978. Forty years ago, the tax
deferral for a worker with 30 years to retirement—when the marginal federal
income tax rate was 43 percent and interest rates about 15 percent—was
equivalent to an additional investment return of 9.2 percent per year.
Today, for a
median-income married couple with two children, the tax rate on income is the
same as it’s likely to be in retirement, and the benefit a meager 0.6
percent—or worse, given the reasonable fear that today’s low tax rates will
rise before participants retire. Meanwhile, investment fees in ordinary
accounts have declined much faster than those for 401(k)s. Typical managed
accounts now charge just 0.5 percent; 401(k)s are stuck at three times that.
One fix for these accounts is to make withdrawals in retirement tax-free for
households with below-median incomes. Another idea: Eliminate payroll taxes on
contributions. Nobody wants to discourage workers from using 401(k)s and
exacerbate the middle-class savings problem. But 401(k)s need some major
changes before savers notice that they no longer offer much benefit and abandon
them.
--Aaron Brown,
Bloomberg.com
