"PHOENIX (AP) -- Sen. John McCain's death in office has handed Arizona's governor an empty Senate seat to give out -- and a difficult political puzzle to solve before he does.

"Arizona law requires only that Gov. Doug Ducey name a replacement who is a member of McCain's Republican Party and who will fill the seat until the next general election in 2020. But in a state with a deeply divided Republican Party, where McCain was a towering but divisive figure, the choice is far more complicated.

"Ducey is balancing the demands of the many conservative Arizona Republicans who have soured on McCain due to his dovish immigration stance, criticism of President Donald Trump and vote against a rollback of President Barack Obama's health care law. They are wary of Ducey appointing a moderate. But naming someone with dramatically different views from McCain could be viewed as disrespectful to McCain's legacy, carrying its own risks. In either case, Ducey wants to set the party up to hold the seat two years from now, no easy task given the turmoil in his party."

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"There's an old cliche that the Federal Reserve likes to take away the punch bowl just when the party is getting going. That's what President Trump suspects that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is doing now by raising interest rates at a time of a booming economy.

"Last week Mr. Trump took a shot at the Fed when he complained to Reuters that 'I'm not thrilled with them raising interest rates.' When asked if he believed that the Fed should be 'independent,' Mr. Trump said, 'I believe in the Fed doing what's good for the country.'

"In response to these comments, many in the media and on Wall Street have been suffering heart palpitations. The president is trying to bully the Fed into keeping interest rates low, they protested. Others claim that Mr. Trump is trying to politicize the Fed. Of course, we don't want the Fed's monetary decisions to be based on politics or the election cycle.

"But why should it be taboo for this or any president, who effectively serves as the nation's CEO, to weigh in on financial and monetary decisions that fundamentally affect the economic success of the nation? The Fed independently makes its own decisions on the direction of monetary policy, but seemingly every pundit in America has an opinion on what it should do. Why not the president -- especially a man who has already proven he knows more than a thing or two about business and the economy? ...

"The Fed's job is not to stall growth or to prevent economic 'overheating,' whatever that means. It is to keep prices stable and the dollar a strong and reliable currency. Rapid GDP growth and rising wages are not the enemy -- they are the goal. This is what Trumponomics is all about, and if the Fed isn't with that program then Mr. Trump is right to attack them for trying to block America's grand economic comeback."

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"Special Counsel Robert Mueller's proxy prosecutor in New York City has obtained a plea agreement with Michael Cohen on some pretty slimy personal-business issues, and in the process, obtained pleas to two federal campaign-finance-law violations ... that, from my experience as an attorney in the field, do not appear to violate federal campaign-finance law. That aside, maybe this means that Mueller might step out of his snipe hunt of an investigation of Russian 'collusion' in 2016 to take an actual interest in whether there was compliance with federal campaign-finance law by both 2016 presidential campaigns, not just President Trump's. If Mueller is actually concerned, as his designated prosecutor in the Cohen case apparently is, about compliance with the federal statutes setting limits on contributions and reporting of expenditures by campaigns, parties, and candidates, his interest is long overdue. There are several serious enforcement and prosecutorial undertakings awaiting his attention -- none involving President Trump or his campaign.

"Let's start with the payments from the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to Fusion GPS for the infamous dossier that triggered the entire Mueller investigation of 'Russian collusion.' It is still not known how much the Democrats paid to Fusion GPS because that information has not been released, even though it was revealed almost a year ago that the source of payment was the Democrats. We should know the exact amount paid to Fusion GPS by the DNC and the Clinton campaign because all expenditures over $200 by parties and campaigns are required to be reported to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). However, the Democrats' payments for the discredited dossier were falsely reported as 'legal fees' paid to Perkins Coie, and not disclosed as to the actual vendor, amount, or purpose -- as required by federal law. It is a federal offense to falsify an FEC report, which was obviously done in this case. Perhaps there is a conflict of interest for Mueller to investigate this matter, since it involves several of his own agents as potential witnesses, thus suggesting that the investigation of the Fusion GPS payments from Perkins Coie should be referred to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, in the same manner that Mueller transferred the Cohen case to the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. ...

"These co-conspirators collectively engaged in the greatest campaign-finance scandal in history. Mueller has the opportunity to prove that his investigation is not a partisan witch hunt, as millions of Americans now believe. It will be interesting to see if he applies the same fervor to the Democrats' 2016 campaign-finance violations and activities that he has applied to those of President Trump and his associates."

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"Here we go, from Russia with love, to campaign finance with love.

"Why was Michael Cohen investigated? Because the 'Steele dossier' had him making secret trips to meet with Russians that never happened, so his business dealings got a thorough scrubbing and, in the process, he fell into the Paul Manafort bin reserved by the special counsel for squeezing until the juice comes out. We are back to 1998 all over again, with presidents and candidates covering up their alleged marital misdeeds and prosecutors trying to turn legal acts into illegal ones by inventing new crimes.

"The plot to get President Trump out of office thickens, as Cohen obviously was his own mini crime syndicate and decided that his betrayals meant he would be better served turning on his old boss to cut the best deal with prosecutors he could rather than holding out and getting the full Manafort treatment. That was clear the minute he hired attorney Lanny Davis, who does not try cases and did past work for Hillary Clinton. Cohen had recorded his client, trying to entrap him, sold information about Trump to corporations for millions of dollars while acting as his lawyer, and did not pay taxes on millions.

"The sweetener for the prosecutors, of course, was getting Cohen to plead guilty to campaign violations that were not campaign violations. Money paid to people who come out of the woodwork and shake down people under threat of revealing bad sexual stories are not legitimate campaign expenditures. They are personal expenditures. That is true for both candidates we like and candidates we do not. Just imagine if candidates used campaign funds instead of their own money to pay folks like Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about affairs. They would get indicted for misuse of campaign funds for personal purposes and for tax evasion."

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"Before the election, you'd be hard pressed to find a group of media and political commentators willing to talk about Russia the way they do today.

"In fact, pooh-poohing concerns about Moscow's obvious hostility to the U.S. was all the rage as recently as 2012. It was a great punchline during the presidential debate between then-President Barack Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney.

"Similarly, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who gave a good damn about Manafort before the 2016 election. That guy has been running scams and engaging in clearly unethical and illegal behavior for years. And it's not like he was a non-entity in political and media circles. Most just didn't care. But now that Trump is president, it's a very serious matter.

"I'm all for getting the crooks. I'm all for rooting them out, one by one. I just wish it didn't take Democrats losing a presidential election for it to happen."

"Liberalism has always struggled to balance the protection of minority rights against majoritarian institutions and -- less often appreciated -- the protection of individual rights. The American Left has liberated itself from such considerations by abandoning liberalism for identity politics and a might-makes-right ethic. Why compel Jack Phillips to knuckle under? Because you can, and because you hate him. Hate is an inescapable part of tribalism, and hate is now the single most important organizing principle of the American Left.

"T. H. White understood this ethic, which he described as the constitution of an ant colony: 'Everything which is not forbidden is compulsory.' To the cranky dissidents such as Jack Phillips, and to the likewise unassimilated nonconformists of our time, we owe a debt of gratitude. If the human ethic survives the ant ethic, it will be in no small part because of them."

"A Gallup survey three years ago found that 40 percent trusted the media; two years ago, the trust meter declined by 8 points, to 32 percent. Now even that low bar looks like the good old days.

"Yet instead of soberly examining their conduct, most in the media ratchet up the vitriol, apparently believing that screaming louder and longer will lead the public to hate Trump as much as they do.

"But as the surveys show, their bias is a boomerang. With media behavior undermining public trust more than anything Trump says or does, a return to traditional standards of fairness and a separation of news from opinion are essential."

"Every now and then, I'll read some news that makes my eyes bug out and my jaw drop to the floor because I can't believe how stupid it is.

"This week, it was the news that fired FBI agent Peter Strzok has raised over $400,000 for his legal costs and lost income via a GoFundMe campaign.

"Let me rephrase: Actual people with actual brains actually decided that the best use of their hard-earned cash was to just give it away to this dude. I really can't believe it. I mean, I thought I was bad with money until I saw people were giving theirs to Peter f***ing Strzok. I can spend my money much more wisely than that, and I'm saying that as someone who once spent $20 to have a single Slurpee delivered to her apartment so she didn't have to go outside.

"Personally, I am someone who believes that Strzok should have been fired sooner. His job demanded that he remain unbiased, and we have text-message proof that he was not. We have text-message proof of him literally saying he wanted to take Donald Trump down. It's also not like Strzok has lived his life in a way that would make him a particularly sympathetic figure. After all, on top of him being bad at his job, it seems that he was also pretty bad at being a husband. Like, I may not know a ton about marriage (I am single and live alone with a cat), but I do know that the people we call 'good husbands' are generally ones that don't cheat on their wives. I do know that much!"

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"Recep Tayyip Erdogan is learning a lesson that history has taught, sometimes harshly, to many men of his kind in the past: Tyrants have power, but markets have more power.

"If you are a tyrant, you can declare a 'state of emergency' to give yourself special powers. Indira Gandhi did it to crack down on political opponents in 1975, and Pervez Musharraf did it for the same reason in 2007. At the close of the Cold War, KGB boss Vladimir Kryuchkov tried to do it to reverse perestroika. And President Erdogan did it to consolidate his political power. What he did with his expanded powers was predictable: He dismissed more than 100,000 public officials who did not support him politically; he shut down critical newspapers and media outlets, along with troublesome schools, charities, and civil-society groups, seizing their assets without compensation. He arrested 50,000 people on trumped-up terrorism charges and held many without trial. He seized the passports of dissidents and froze their bank accounts.

"But capital in the 21st century is slippery. It is restless, and it will not sit still for abuse. It is difficult to seize. The iron fist of tyranny is no good against 21st-century capital, which slips between the tyrant's grubby little fingers like water. Turkey's currency, the lira, lost half its value as the world's investors discovered themselves having second thoughts about exposing themselves to the caprices of a vicious autocrat. Erdogan, for all his sultanic pretense, is nearly defenseless against the power of simple preference. ...

"Erdogan can lock up dissidents and shut down newspapers. But he can't lock up the markets, and the markets are no longer buying what he's selling."

"West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Robin Jean Davis announced her resignation early Tuesday, just hours after the state House of Delegates adopted articles of impeachment against every justice serving on the court. ...

"Davis and three of her colleagues were impeached in the state legislature late Monday. Chief Justice Margaret Workman and Justices Allen Loughry and Elizabeth Walker will now stand trial in the state senate. The fifth member of the court, Menis Ketchum, resigned on July 27. He is expected to plead guilty to two corruption charges in federal court on Aug. 29.

"The impeachment articles allege the justices failed to effectively administer the state courts, approved compensation for senior judges in excess of statutory limits, and abused state resources through lavish renovations to their chambers and unauthorized use of state vehicles for personal travel.

"GOP Gov. Jim Justice will appoint successors to any justice removed from office following the Senate trial.

"Local media and state auditors discovered the justices cumulatively spent over $1 million on furniture and aesthetic upgrades for their state offices -- Davis spent some $500,000, according to the impeachment articles, including $23,000 for design services and $20,000 for a sectional carpet."

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