Required reading from around the web of the best, most interesting, or most though provoking things we’ve read:
McLean: UK Catholic doctor: Are we witnessing ‘Vatican revolution’ against family?
“An English family doctor has suggested that recent developments in the war against the family coming from the highest levels within the Catholic Church indicate the arrival of the final battle between God and Satan. ‘Is this the final greatest historical confrontation between the Church and the anti-church, the Gospel and the anti-gospel,’ said Dr Thomas Ward at a family conference this week running concurrent to the Vatican’s LGBT-affirming World Meeting of Families (WMOF) in Dublin, Ireland. […] ‘Frankly, are we at this moment seeing an intent at a Vatican revolution which would be a culmination and fulfillment of all three previous revolutions [French (1789), Communist (1848), and sexual (1968)]?’ he added.”
Copland: The Four Horsemen of the Regulatory State
“The central challenge in reforming the modern regulatory state is that it has been built by, and is sustained by, multiple forces. What I call the four forces of the regulatory state—regulation by administration, prosecution, and litigation; and progressive anti-federalism—operate mostly independently of Congress, notwithstanding the legislative branch’s constitutional power to ‘regulate Commerce . . . among the several States.’ To a significant degree, each force operates independently of oversight by the elected president as well. These forces both complement and interact with one another, frustrating ambitious reformers.[…] This modern state of affairs is antithetical to the system of government established by the Constitution. […] The delegation of congressional lawmaking power to politically insulated agencies reached its apotheosis in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a regulatory body set into motion by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which was enacted in the wake of the financial crisis. . . . . The Dodd-Frank statute made the CFPB fundable through the Federal Reserve System—thus outside congressional appropriation authority. Its director was removable only for ‘good cause’—thus outside presidential oversight. […] As Justice Scalia predicted in his Mistretta dissent, it is easier for legislators to take credit for open-ended laws that leave the executive branch to fill in the details—and assume at least some share of the blame for unintended consequences.”
Sperry: Despite Comey Assurances, Vast Bulk of Weiner Laptop Emails Were Never Examined
“When then-FBI Director James Comey announced he was closing the Hillary Clinton email investigation for a second time just days before the 2016 election, he certified to Congress that his agency had ‘reviewed all of the communications’ discovered on a personal laptop used by Clinton’s closest aide, Huma Abedin, and her husband, Anthony Weiner. At the time, many wondered how investigators managed over the course of one week to read the ‘hundreds of thousands’ of emails residing on the machine, . . . […] . . . virtually none of his account was true, a growing body of evidence reveals.”