HE'S WHY DONALD WON'T BE THE WORST PRESIDENT EVER:

Even a weakened League of Nations could have led to something like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Beyond that core group of Western nations, it could have spun off a larger body to represent all of the world's nations, like the United Nations, to address issues like colonialism, the environment, trade, and natural resources. Perhaps another body could set international standards for trade and finance, like the World Trade Organization.

Wilson's fatal flaw was his unwillingness to see his vision as an experiment. Prideful and reluctant to negotiate, he considered the League a complete solution to global problems. But what if Wilson had been willing to accept a flawed League? What if he had been willing to bargain and compromise? What if he saw the League as an opportunity to experiment with different tools to prevent war and promote global cooperation?

YEAH, BUT OTHER THAN BEING AN UNCONSTITUTIONAL FAILURE....:

Even those sympathetic to the spirit of a wealth tax acknowledge that there are considerable pragmatic obstacles to its implementation. Even if there were sufficient political will to pass it, it could face a constitutional challenge. Megan McArdle, a libertarian Washington Post columnist, writes:

The big problem is Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution, which forbids "direct taxes" on people or property unless they're "apportioned" -- doled out among the states by population. Instituting an income tax required a constitutional amendment to override that clause, and Warren's plan might well require another.

Both Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren have cited numerous legal experts who say a wealth tax would be constitutional. But with the Supreme Court's composition being what it is, the question is far from settled.

There's also the matter of enforcement. As Paul Krugman notes, the wealthy are quite good at avoiding taxes and evading them illegally. And because many assets owned by the ultra-wealthy -- like artwork and diamonds -- aren't always traded on the market, Ms. McArdle writes, taxing them would mean "creating a lot of administrative capacity to track and price the assets, with the wealthy and their lawyers fighting every step of the way."

"If these difficulties prove insurmountable," writes Noah Smith, a left-leaning economist, in Bloomberg, "Warren and other egalitarian tax crusaders might consider an alternative -- an inheritance tax, which would close many of the loopholes that now riddle the U.S. estate tax." He adds:

Taxing all income from inheritances -- including trusts, foundations, gifts, estates, and any other kind of family transfers -- at a very high rate would yield a result similar to a small annual wealth tax, only its constitutionality would be less in doubt. And it would focus the tax on the rich people whose fortunes Americans are most likely to think of as being undeserved.

Skeptics of the idea of a wealth tax argue that it has a bumpy track record. While 12 European countries had a wealth tax in 1990, Greg Rosalsky writes in NPR, only three (Norway, Spain and Switzerland) still do. He writes:

According to reports by the OECD and others, there were some clear themes with the policy: it was expensive to administer, it was hard on people with lots of assets but little cash, it distorted saving and investment decisions, it pushed the rich and their money out of the taxing countries -- and, perhaps worst of all, it didn't raise much revenue.

MICROMAX:

The benefits of big metro areas for new businesses are well-known, but so are the costs in money, time, and health. In the era of remote work, you can get a lot of the benefits of the city anywhere with an Internet connection, except one - being physically around other new business-owners.

With that in mind, I decided to look at the Census Bureau's data on cities to see if there were any places in America that hit a sweet spot between being small & self-contained and being a popular place to start a new business.

Micropolitan areas are populated areas that have too much population to qualify as a rural area, and too few commuting ties to a larger city to qualify as part of a larger metropolitan area. They are between 10,000 to 50,000 people and quite a distance from a large city.

In other words - micropolitan areas are true small cities.

There are 536 micropolitan areas in America with a core city of between 10,000 and 50,000 people plus the population of the surrounding area.

Here are the Top 20 Most Popular Micropolitan Areas for New Small Businesses in America based on US Census data from 2015-2016 (most recently available). [...]

2. Claremont-Lebanon, NH-VT Micro Area

New Businesses: 437

The Lebanon area has a population of 217,215, and lies in the Connecticut River Valley. It is home to the Dartmouth Medical School and Dartmouth Medical Center. It also has strong transport links to the Boston area, which influences its business community.

IT'S A RICO CASE:

PURITAN NATION:

Cornerstone is one of a growing number of new evangelical churches in Vermont seeking to reach the state's spiritually homeless multitudes. "Evangelical" stems from the Greek word euangelion, meaning "good news" -- a reference to the belief that the death of Jesus Christ offered humanity a means of salvation from sin. Evangelicals are by no means a monolithic group, but those who profess to be evangelical -- about a quarter of the U.S. population, according to the Pew Research Center's 2014 Religious Landscape Study -- tend to believe that the Bible is the literal word of God, and that only those who follow Jesus can be saved from eternal punishment.

That same Pew study found that 11 percent of Vermonters attend evangelical churches, a category that includes more than 10 Protestant denominations. Of these sects, Southern Baptists, in particular, have been quietly establishing, or "planting," new churches throughout Vermont -- a practice that exists at the peculiar intersection of analytics-driven entrepreneurship and low-tech disciple-making.

Church planting is as old as Christianity itself; in the first century AD, the Apostle Paul traveled from city to city, preaching in public squares and assembling makeshift congregations in people's homes. In the two millennia since, evangelical church planting, especially in the Southern Baptist world, has evolved into a sophisticated apparatus, with a well-heeled bureaucracy and a vast network of spiritual and financial support in the form of the Southern Baptist Convention, which includes some 47,000 churches worldwide.

Over the past two decades, Southern evangelicals have become increasingly freaked out by the godlessness of New England, spawning a movement so big that parallel organizations have sprung up along its periphery. Phil Waldrep Ministries, a nonprofit based in Decatur, Ala., holds two all-expenses-paid retreats each year for pastors and their wives at luxury hotels around New England. Thomas Schwindling, the nonprofit's creative director, told me that the retreats are designed as vacations from the hardships of ministering in a gospel-resistant region: "We want to put them in hotels they dream of going to," he said. The most recent retreat, in early September, took place at the Equinox in Manchester; the program included a game show with a $5,000 jackpot. At one of last year's retreats, every attendee received a pair of L.L.Bean boots.

If New England as a whole needs religious defibrillation, Vermont would seem to represent the extreme case. The state has earned the distinction of being the least religious in the country almost every year since Gallup began conducting its annual religious attitudes survey in 2008. (The one exception was 2015, when New Hampshire claimed victory by two points.) A 2018 article in the Biblical Recorder, a North Carolina evangelical newspaper, offered this bleak synopsis of Vermont's Jesus situation: "The state has proportionately fewer Bible-believing churches and Christians than any other state. Scores of villages in Vermont have had no Bible-believing [evangelical or fundamentalist] church for decades. Thousands of families have had no Christian members in five generations. Vermont is not just lost; it is hardcore lost and gospel-resistant."

Through a plexus of national and regional organizations, mission-minded evangelicals have been coming to Vermont to search for the chinks in its gospel-proof armor. According to the Baptist Convention of New England, one of the major evangelical Christian networks in the region, at least 28 Baptist-affiliated churches have launched in Vermont since 2011, more than double the number of churches planted in New Hampshire over that same period.

WHICH MORNING DOES MITCH DECIDE THEY'RE BETTER OFF WITHOUT HIM?:

Voter support for impeachment matched its highest point of Donald Trump's presidency as he faced a whistleblower allegation that he pressured Ukraine's president to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, with more impeachment supporters than ever before saying he committed an impeachable offense, according to Morning Consult/Politico polling. 

The new Sept. 24-26 poll of 1,640 registered voters -- conducted as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) endorsed an impeachment inquiry and details emerged about the president's pressure on Ukraine -- found the public divided at 43 percent on the question of whether Congress should begin proceedings to remove Trump from office, a net swing of 13 percentage points in favor of impeachment since a poll conducted over the weekend. The figure for support rose 7 points, while opposition dropped 6 points.

This swift change in public opinion -- which is likely to accelerate rapidly -- might look abrupt, but it shouldn't have been unexpected.

Throughout his time in office, President Trump has demonstrated a unique gift: Whatever policy or idea he gets behind is subsequently opposed by the public, often decisively. His only legislative achievement to date, for instance, the December 2017 tax reform, was still under water the last time Gallup checked. By roughly 60 percent to 40 percent, Americans oppose construction of a wall along the southern border, a plan the president seems to care about more than anything else in the world. Sixty percent of Americans also want immigration levels to stay the same or increase, as opposed to 35 percent who want them decreased.

But the data trends are generally even worse for Trump. Since the beginning of his term, there has been a significant increase in Americans saying they want increased immigration levels, a once fringe position that has been bolstered over the past few years by the president's relentless nativism and immigrant scapegoating. It's not just that President Trump is incapable of bringing all but his diehards along with him on most issues, it's that he's so actively repellent to most ordinary human beings that he boosts the polar opposite position.

The second reason that support for impeachment might be jumping is that the president has been nabbed with his pasty hands in the Big Mac jar in a way that might shock even rank-and-file Republicans. The Ukraine scandal is, from start to finish, unspinnably terrible for President Trump. Even if you believe that his call with Zelensky lacked an explicit quid pro quo, one of those Law & Order, "I never told you the victim had a thigh tattoo so how did you know it was there?" moments, you might still wonder why the president of the United States felt the need to ask a newly elected foreign leader for help in investigating the leading Democratic contender for president and his son. There is no ongoing U.S. investigation into the Bidens. There is no reasonable explanation for the president's behavior other than open and shameless contempt for U.S. law.

The reaction from the right on this point has thus far been pitiful, because there's really nothing to spin.

LAUGHINGSTOCK:

On today's Bulwark Podcast, Lawfare's Quinta Jurecic joins host Charlie Sykes to break down the just-released whistleblower complaint, and where it fits in Trump's pattern of obstruction.

HE'S NOT WRONG:

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE:

The IC employee wrote that the July 25 call to Ukraine was not the only time documents had been improperly hidden in codeword-level systems.

White House officials moved quickly to keep the contents of President Donald Trump's controversial July phone call with the Ukrainian president under tight wraps, according to a complaint made by an unknown whistleblower that was given to Congress and released publicly on Thursday morning. 

"In the days following the phone call," I learned from multiple U.S. officials that senior White House officials had intervened to 'lock down' all records of the phone call," the whistleblower wrote in his complaint. "This set of actions underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call."

The whistleblower said that multiple White House officials told him that the rough transcript of the president's call was put into a standalone computer system that is reserved for top-level intelligence information, not the computer system in which such transcripts are usually kept and distributed to Cabinet-level officials. 

"Some officials voiced concerns internally that this would be an abuse of the system and was not consistent with the responsibilities of the Directorate for Intelligence Programs," which manages the highly classified system, the complainant wrote. 

The whistleblower also said that he was told by White House officials that the Ukraine call was "'not the first time' under this Administration that a Presidential transcript was placed into this codeword-level system solely for the purpose of protecting politically-sensitive--rather than national security sensitive--information."

ALL THAT JAZZ #56

STAND WITH QEII:

As William Blackstone warned in his famous Commentaries on the Laws of England, first published in the same decade as the Entick case, if every judge were a legislator, it would 'introduce most infinite confusion; as there would then be almost as many different rules of action laid down in our courts, as there are differences of capacity and sentiment in the human mind.'

In the past the remedy for unreasonably long prorogations has been recognised as political, and not for the courts. Richard Ekins, professor of law at Oxford has called the court's action an 'unjustified novelty'. The problem, he said, is 'a willingness to overturn settled law in 'exceptional circumstances' in order to right what the Court thinks is a wrong. But the duty of the courts is to follow the law, not to remake it.'

The Supreme Court claimed to have been upholding parliamentary accountability, but the real problem is their own lack of accountability to anyone but themselves.

THANKFULLY, DONALD HAS MADE HIS SUPPORTERS PRO-RUSSIAN...:

[A]fter weeks of discussions with American officials, Ukrainian officials came to recognize a precondition to any executive correspondence, the former adviser said.

"It was clear that [President Donald] Trump will only have communications if they will discuss the Biden case," said Serhiy Leshchenko, an anti-corruption advocate and former member of Ukraine's Parliament, who had been a former adviser to Zelenskiy but has recently been distanced from the administration. "This issue was raised many times. I know that Ukrainian officials understood."

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

But some Republicans who read the complaint were disquieted, too. "Republicans ought not to be rushing to circle the wagons and say there's no 'there there' when there's obviously a lot that's very troubling there," said Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), adding that "Democrats ought not be using words like 'impeach' before they knew anything about the actual substance."

A GOP congressional source with direct knowledge of the whistleblower complaint told conservative commentator Erik Erickson that it "paints a clear path to impeachment," Erickson writes at The Resurgent. "I wasn't happy with the transcript, but it was Trump. What do you expect? Now we are dealing with something that looks like it could be outside the bounds of acceptable conduct." The whistleblower, the source added, is "someone who does not like the president," but "regardless, the whistleblower is credible." 

...AND CHEAPER...:

A clinical study is now underway at the University of California, Los Angeles. One of the volunteers is Jason Esterhuizen of South Africa, who became blind seven years ago due to injuries sustained in a car accident. For the trial, a device called the Orion was implanted over the visual cortex in Esterhuizen's brain. He wears a pair of sunglasses that are equipped with a small camera, and those images are transmitted to the Orion, which converts them into electrical pulses that stimulate electrodes in Esterhuizen's brain. This lets him see patterns of light, which are used as visual cues, Inside Edition reports.

Esterhuizen said he's able to see "little white dots on a black background. It's like looking up at the stars at night." The study's leader, Dr. Nader Pouratian, told Inside Edition trial participants are able to determine where crosswalks and doorways are, "all extremely meaningful events that can help these people regain some form of independence." 

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

At least 218 members of the House now support at least an impeachment investigation into President Trump's actions regarding Ukraine, according to the tallies of several news organizations. That means a majority of the 435-member chamber is on board with the path House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) embarked on Tuesday evening.

EXCEPT IT SHOULD BE FREDO SPEAKING:

For those who want a visual abridged summary, here's The Godfather IV. All dialogue is from the memo. pic.twitter.com/ZViJvPuLYt

— Larry Noble (@LarryNoble_DC) September 25, 2019