Politico: Last rites for Spitzenkandidat

Since then, the power-sharing agreement has collapsed, and the heads of government on the European Council have said they will not be bound by the Spitzenkandidat process. Meanwhile, parties other than the EPP have turned against the system, recognizing that it overwhelmingly benefits the conservatives, who are once again virtually guaranteed to win the most seats in Parliament in next year’s election. [...]

Some of the strongest resistance is coming from the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), which has only the fourth-largest faction in Parliament but has made strong gains in national elections and is soon expected to hold eight seats on the European Council — the same number as the EPP. [...]

For now, Merkel has backed Weber’s candidacy, but her endorsement is largely a necessity of national allegiance, and in announcing her support she made clear that merely winning the party’s nomination would not guarantee that Weber becomes Commission president — an implicit renunciation of the Spitzenkandidat system. [...]

But unlike national parliaments, the European Parliament is co-legislator along with the European Council, and members of the Council have made clear that they are not willing to relinquish their legal authority over nominating the Commission president in favor of an unwritten process that gives Parliament overwhelming control.

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The Atlantic: He’s Going to Get Reelected, Isn’t He?

But if you live in the reality that mainlines Fox News, you saw something else—a strong president. You heard Trump assert America’s resurging greatness: Steel mills are being built, farmers will thrive, and the economy is doing better than even he predicted. Trump suggested that he was wheeling and dealing on trade with everyone from South Korea to Mexico, and showing everyone who’s boss. World leaders at the UN were laughing with him, not at him. He was too busy chairing the Security Council to pay attention to Kavanaugh’s latest accuser. And his genuine solidarity with the accused reinforced the narrative taking hold in conservative circles: Don’t fear that your daughters’ lives will be ruined by assault; fear that your sons’ lives will be ruined by false accusations. [...]

Trump hasn’t done many of these solo press conferences. (My former boss President Barack Obama used to get heat for not doing more, but Trump has famously avoided them without much criticism.) And yet, in his few appearances, he has completely upended the medium. Gone are the predictable if tense affairs where reporters asked questions and presidents would either answer them or give the appearance of answering them. They have been replaced with a reality show where the president pits reporters, nations, his staff, and even his own controversies (Kavanaugh v. Rosenstein) against one another, all to demonstrate that he alone hands out roses. [...]

A poll released on the day of Trump’s press conference showed that Kavanaugh’s support among Republican women had dropped by 18 points. But 2020 is still far away. If the Democrats do, as some predict, take back Congress and start investigating the administration, Republicans will surely close ranks around their threatened leader. If Kavanaugh isn’t confirmed and Democrats are able to spend the next two years blocking the confirmation of another right-wing justice, the conservative base will rally around Trump.

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The Atlantic: Boys Don’t Read Enough

Developed countries like the United States have seen a remarkable transformation in education over the last century: Girls and young women—once subjected to discrimination in, and even exclusion from, schools and colleges—have “conquered” those very institutions, as a report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) put it. Today, for example, women comprise a growing majority of students on college campuses in the U.S., up from around 40 percent in the 1970s. [...]

But it’s not just a phenomenon in the U.K.: These trends in girls’ dominance in reading can be found pretty much anywhere in the developed world. In 2009, a global study of the academic performance of 15-year-olds found that, in all but one of the 65 participating countries, more girls than boys said they read for pleasure. On average across the countries, only about half of boys said they read for enjoyment, compared to roughly three-quarters of girls. (The list generally excludes less-developed countries where girls and women tend to have lower rates of literacy than boys and men.) [...]

Understanding why girls are so much more inclined to read might help eradicate what is proving to be a stubborn gender gap both in the U.S. and around the world: the lagging educational outcomes of boys and men. Reading for pleasure is, as the OECD has concluded, a habit that can prove integral to performing well in the classroom. “Any cognitive skill can be improved with practice,” Reilly says. “If girls are reading more outside of school”—if they’re doing so out of an intrinsic motivation rather than because they have to—“this provides them with thousands of hours of additional reading over the course of their development.”

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Vox: Poll: 48% of white evangelicals would support Kavanaugh even if the allegations against him were true

Aside from the 48 percent who said they would support Kavanaugh’s appointment to the court, 36 percent of white evangelicals say they would not support it, and 16 percent did not have an answer. Mirroring the poll results, many prominent white evangelicals have spoken out in Kavanaugh’s defense, characterizing the allegations against him as part of a liberal plot to waylay his nomination. Jerry Falwell Jr., president of the evangelical Liberty University, sent 300 women Liberty students to Washington, DC, to support Kavanaugh during this week’s Senate confirmation hearings. [...]

Such a perspective fits neatly within the context of evangelical sexual culture, which in recent months has been characterized by a wider suspicion of the #MeToo movement. Within evangelical culture, as I’ve written previously, the idea that women are “supposed” to be the gatekeepers of male sexuality, that male sexual urges are inherently uncontrollable, and the idea that forgiveness is automatically “owed” to any alleged abuser, converge to create a climate in which allegations of sexual harassment and abuse tend to be seen as minor or, at least, forgivable.

Certainly, the evangelical community is already redeeming its own people accused of sexual misconduct during the #MeToo movement. Earlier this month, former Southern Baptist Convention president Paige Patterson — who left his position as president of the Southwestern Baptist Seminary in disgrace after accusations of sexism — returned to public ministry with a pair of sermons that denigrated the #MeToo movement and focused on the problem of false rape allegations.

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The Spectator: All by herself: Theresa May and the politics of isolation Inbox x

Her current policy — to threaten to walk away from talks if the EU doesn’t accept her Chequers plan — is not taken seriously in Brussels. EU leaders can see that the UK is hopelessly unprepared for no deal, and reason that she’d be stopped by her cabinet, parliament or both if she tried it. May’s colleagues worry that she is in denial, and so they are making their own plans. One of those intimately involved in the government’s contingency planning tells me, ‘No deal cannot be our only Plan B.’ [...]

Even the handful who still defend Chequers in private, as well as in public, admit that things are now more difficult. One cabinet minister concedes that the EU’s approach at Salzburg was a ‘very successful negotiating tactic’. Another cabinet member says the Chequers plan has done its job: to show the government had made an effort, in good faith, to negotiate as close an economic relationship with the EU as possible. ‘You’ve got to be able to say to the Remainers that we tried.’

There are some in the cabinet who still loathe Brexit and regard Chequers as the UK’s opening offer. Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, is expected to push to stay in the customs union and makes no attempt to disguise his concerns about Brexit. In cabinet meetings this week, he complained that a restaurant in his Surrey constituency can’t hire enough staff to wait all the tables — proof, he said, that the UK needed low-skilled immigration. But as one exasperated cabinet minister put it to me afterwards, it didn’t seem to have occurred to the Chancellor that maybe the restaurant should just pay its staff more. And that the balance of power between workers and low-wage businesses might be precisely why so many voted for Brexit in the first place.

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UnHerd: Beware keep fit totalitarianism

It should be stressed that the company is not forcing anyone to take part or share their fitness data. Furthermore, they are rewarding healthy habits not punishing unhealthy ones; and if you hate the idea anyway, other life insurance providers are available.  [...]

But what if a special feature of one life insurance provider’s products becomes a general feature of all health insurance provision? Being without health insurance in America isn’t much fun – so anything generally required of policy holders is pretty much compulsory. [...]

Is this dystopia for Americans only? Perhaps not. Countries with socialised models of healthcare might also be vulnerable to the hi-tech enforcement of healthy lifestyles. Instead of the profit motive, the driver would be the need to keep public spending under control. One could imagine hard-up governments offering discounts on social insurance contributions or rebates on taxes in return for verifiable evidence of responsible behaviour.  

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UnHerd: Why I regret my war on drugs

In 1961, when I was ten years old, Britain signed the United Nations Single Convention on Drugs committing all member states to a global prohibition on production, supply and use of certain drugs for non-medical use. Xenophobia was the foundation of the convention, identifying those who were associated with the use of cannabis, opium and cocaine – namely Hispanics, Chinese and Afro-Americans.

Ten years later, the Labour Party supported the passing of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. It has continued to support drug prohibition ever since – in government and in opposition – although this pernicious policy has brought distress to millions and death to tens of thousands.

Prohibition, though, was a failure. You just have to look at the number of overdose deaths in Britain compared with countries that have moved from punishment to treatment, such as Portugal, to see this approach has been catastrophic. It created a fiercely hostile environment, acted as a barrier to troubled individuals seeking help and, in the process, hugely damaged the criminal justice system. [...]

Relying on prohibition as the main policy tool gifted the drugs trade to criminals, creating a free and uncontrolled black market in which the biggest profits went to the most violent players. Meanwhile, we criminalised generations caught up in drugs, betraying people who should have been able to look to the Labour Party for a way out of their abandoned hell. [...]

For every pound we spend fighting the drug war, we have to spend many more just to clear up the mess. It is a terrible irony that the Home Office is pursuing a policy that creates half of all property crime and channels a vast income stream towards organised criminals. And the war on drugs is also filling our prisons. We currently have the highest prison population in Western Europe. And these prisons are awash with drugs, creating new addicts.

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Politico: Cuba on the Thames

Corbyn’s fate greatly depends on the unfolding Brexit drama, expected to climax in the coming weeks as the U.K. pushes for a deal before its scheduled exit in March 2019. But the impact of a Corbyn government, should he assume the reins of power, could be much more significant.

While the prospect of a Corbyn government would likely make post-Brexit trade relations with Europe more straightforward in the short term, predictions of a socialist London have already set alarm bells ringing in Washington, according to U.S. officials asked to draw up memos for the State Department in case of another snap election this year. [...]

Corbyn promised a Britain in which the rich would be more heavily taxed, utilities and the railways would be nationalized, the government would invest in 400,000 jobs focused on tackling climate change, and large companies would be forced to give workers stakes of up to 10 percent and pay annual dividends to staff. He signaled Labour would end British backing for Saudi Arabia in the war in Yemen, immediately recognize a Palestinian state, and tilt firmly away from the U.S. as a key ally.[...]

In 2015, during Corbyn’s first conference, lobbyists were conspicuously thin on the ground, uncertain of how to influence the most socialist Labour leadership in modern history. This year, BP, Google, Visa, Bombardier and Fujitsu were all represented with stands at the conference floor. PwC, Hitachi, Novartis and Cisco all hosted or co-hosted fringe events, and numerous others sent lobbyists keen to fix up meetings with members of a potential government-in-waiting.

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Politico: Merkel loses key ally in conservative rebellion

Most observers were convinced Kauder, with the support of Merkel and other party leaders, would easily beat Brinkhaus, who has virtually no public profile. Brinkhaus, who witnesses described as surprised by his own victory, received 125 votes to Kauder’s 112. [...]

In Germany’s stability-obsessed political culture such open rebellions, especially within the governing party, are rare. But conservatives in Merkel’s bloc — an alliance of two parties, the Christian Democrats and Bavaria’s Christian Social Union — have long taken issue with her handling of migration and other issues, such as the eurozone bailouts, grumbling that she has taken their party too far to the left. [...]

The turmoil over the botched dismissal of Germany’s domestic spy chief added to growing frustration over her leadership, however. The affair marked the second time since July that the so-called grand coalition of conservatives and Social Democrats came to the brink of collapse, largely due to infighting within Merkel’s camp that she struggled to bring under control.

The fact that Brinkhaus even decided to challenge Kauder was itself considered a small sensation, as it marked only the second time since 1973 that more than one candidate has run for the position. While the parliamentary leadership post is considered a key job within the center-right hierarchy, MPs normally leave the selection to top party officials.

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