Eric The Blue

Election Day in Israel

Today is Election Day in Israel. It's a "do-over" necessitated by the inconclusive outcome of their last election held only last spring. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party got the most votes, but not a majority, and Likud then failed to strike an agreement with any of the minor parties that would have allowed Netanyahu to forge a governing coalition in the Knesset. Without any such coalition, the Knesset dissolved itself, and Netanyahu had to call for a new election.

Does that sound odd? I do not know what happens in the event of another inconclusive outcome. It seems as if Israel could have a Groundhog's Day election season with Bill Murray as Bibi Netanyahu. Who has changed their mind since April?

A good preview of today's election, and of the political climate generally in Israel, is "Why Bibi fears Arab voters," by Yardena Schwartz, in The New York Review. One of her main points is that, while people may not have changed their minds, they may be changing their voting strategies, especially the non Jewish part of the population that has in the past voted for minor Arab parties—or, more frequently, just not voted at all. In this way, they have succeeded at making themselves politically irrelevant, a significant achievement considering that there are close to 2 million of them in a country of less than 9 million. 

But that may be changing, the principal factors being:

• The policies pursued by Netanyahu and Likud—preeminently, the drive to annex all the territory on which a second state might plausibly be established, thereby foreclosing the possibility of a two-state solution—are detested by Israel's Arab citizens
• Netanyahu and Likud could be ousted, with relative ease, if Arab voters marked their ballots for the centrist Blue and White party, the main Jewish opposition to Likud

I guess we'll see whether anything like this happens. There are obstacles that will remove from possibility the "relative ease" part. One is that Arab Israelis don't particularly like Blue and White, either. Another is that the very prospect of a coalition of Arabs and Jewish moderates permits Netanyahu to stoke the fire on the right. It's rather like Trump huffing and puffing at his MAGA rallies. Even the subject matter is similar. Netanyahu's Jewish political foes are unpatriotic and are making common cause with the debased Arabs, whose polling stations should be monitored by cameras in order to detect their cheating. Et cetera. There is no evidence of Arab cheating, however—only of their nonparticipation, which, if Likud is to prevail, must persist. In his personal affairs, Netanyahu is possibly as corrupt as Trump, and has in fact been indicted for bribery.

Schwartz's article—I'll link to it again—has the strength of bringing into view an essential fact, or dilemma. Israel is meant to be a democratic, Jewish state. But these two characteristics exist together in tension. If it is truly democratic, it loses its Jewish character, for non-Jews are then free to exert their due influence. The two-state solution is a way out of the box. But Likud doesn't want that, either. To achieve the dream of a "Greater Israel," it wants to annex all the disputed lands on which another state could be established. It's not hard to see why Arab Israelis should conclude there is no place for them in the Likud scheme of things.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Being older, I am slow to realize what the Internet offers. Yes, I've heard there's porn, but did you know you can watch all the episodes of "The Mary Tyler Moore" show on YouTube? Its run on CBS, from 1970 to 1977, coincided almost exactly with my teenaged years. I didn't know about it at first. As near as I can remember, the show crossed into my consciousness for the first time when a Sports Illustrated article about the suddenly competitive Gopher basketball team made a somewhat lame joke about how Minnesotans would even give up watching Mary Tyler Moore in order to go to the games on Saturday evenings. That was the 1971-72 basketball season. It wasn't long before SI ran another article about the team, "An Ugly Affair in Minneapolis," that made no mention of plucky, decent, lovable Mary.

So it was probably in its second or third season that I started watching MTM. The hook was just the knowledge that a popular network sit com was set in Minneapolis. This, I now understand, was almost accidental, as Minneapolis was settled on when one of the writers went on a long jag about the strengths and weaknesses of the Vikings football team. The show's creators, in other words, seem to have been quite indifferent about the geographic locale. If so, I think it was a happy accident that a Vikings fan was among the writers. The show doesn't make a point of developing the back stories of the various characters, but in Season 1 it does make plain that Moore's character, Mary Richards, is a native Minnesotan. She moves to Minneapolis from an unnamed smaller Minnesota town after breaking off an engagement. In one of the earliest episodes, the fellow tries to edge back into her life, and she is interested enough to meet him—whereupon she remembers what she didn't like. The purpose of this seems related to the original idea that Mary would be starting a new life after a divorce. But there was some fear that viewers would then be confused and think that Mary Richards, played by an actress most famous for having played Laura Petrie, had divorced Dick Van Dyke, and would dislike her for it! Thus the effort to establish that she's a native Minnesotan, never married.

She's also the smartest, most decent and psychologically fit character on the show, a foil to the often buffoonish men and oddly (considering their buffoonery) man-crazy women. That this "together" character is the only one who clearly hails from Minnesota plays into a popular mythology, unless it helped to create the myth that we denizens of the most frozen part of the Midwest are among the best specimens the country has to offer. The Coen brothers' Marge Gunderson is a younger cousin of Mary Richards, and I bet Garrison Keillor was a fan, too. I shouldn't say it, because it's what lawyers call a "statement against interest," but one uniting trait of these various women characters is that they are smarter and abler than the men in their lives, and undertake themselves to disguise this fact in order to keep everyone happy. It's wrong that they should feel they have to do it, but we'd be very thankful if only we were smart enough to notice what's going on. 

Final note: it's an enjoyable fact that the show's fans connect Mary to the city of Minneapolis so intensely that the people who lived in "her house"—the one at 2104 Kenwood Parkway shown in the opening sequence—were beset by tourists and, to discourage picture taking and filming, though also I hope because it was the right thing to do, hung an IMPEACH NIXON sign below Mary's big upstairs window during the height of the show's popularity.

While watching tv

The Republican, Dan Bishop, won the Special Election for the seat from the 9th congressional district in North Carolina that I wrote about the other day, here. It was close, 51 to 49 percent, in a district Trump had carried by more than 11 points.

I get a kick out of the things cable news "analysts" say as the returns come in. When it looked like the Democrat might win, narrowly, there was talk about "alarm bells" and "hair on fire" at the White House. Then the Republican ekes it out and "a win is a win is a win." The idea is that the Special Election is an early test of Trump's strength in one-thirteenth of "the battleground state of North Carolina," and apparently a decline of 12 points warrants an F, whereas if the downturn is only 10—passing grade and nothing to fear! That Trump won North Carolina by only about three-and-a-half points seems like a relevant fact. Consequently, if you accept the premise that the Special Election result foreshadows the 2020 outcome in North Carolina, and your "hair is on fire" at -12, perhaps it should still be smoldering at -10.

Trump tweeted that his rally in North Carolina earlier in the week saved the day for Bishop. It's more likely, however, that he's a narcissistic dope.

Of course the same cable news "analysts" have opinions on the contest for the Democratic nomination. I was watching last night when one of them said the race hadn't changed for weeks: Biden still in first, Warren still surging. I wonder how long a candidate can "surge" and remain in second place? Considering that she's been "surging" for weeks, you'd think that by now Warren might have "surged into the lead." Maybe more modest verbs don't deliver as many eyeballs to the advertisements. 

And maybe I shouldn't channel skim between innings of the Twins' game. They beat the Nationals last night, 5-0, to remain five games ahead of Cleveland. Speaking of advertisements, Bob Eubanks, looking like a display in a wax museum, is on every channel. Do you owe Uncle Sam more than $10,000?  Call this number to convert it into a refund! We won't stop running this ad till we've heard from everyone who was ever enrolled at Trump University.

North Carolina's Special Congressional Election

Tomorrow is the Special Election to fill the congressional seat from North Carolina's 9th district, which has been vacant since the apparent winner, Republican Mark Harris, was never seated. A bipartisan commission directed that a new election be held after investigating allegations of absentee vote fraud on the part of the Harris campaign. I wrote about the scheme here. In North Carolina, lists of voters who have requested an absentee ballot is public information, and, during the absentee voting period, the names of voters who have not yet returned their ballot is public as well. Harris had hired an operative, Leslie McCrae Dowless, Jr., who, according to testimony before the commission, paid associates of his to visit the homes of people with unreturned absentee ballots and offer to collect them. This violated a state election law concerning who may handle an absentee ballot. The pay rate was $125 for every 50 ballots illegally collected, a detail that reminded me of what James Carville once said can be drudged up by dragging a 20-dollar bill through a trailer court. Dowless is pictured above, along with some of his "campaign workers," including those who did the "leg work." They look like the last thing you saw before waking up in a bloody bath tub with one kidney.

Dowless, who was subsequently indicted, pleaded the Fifth Amendment before the commission, and the details of what happened to the illegally collected ballots aren't certain. However,  Dowless only operated in two counties—the only two counties in the district in which Harris won a majority of the absentee ballots cast. Moreover, those same two counties had an unusually high percentage of unreturned absentee ballots. It seems likely that the illegally collected ballots that were marked for Harris were witnessed and mailed in from a post office near the voter's home, and that those marked for Dan McCready, the Democrat, were ashcanned. In the election night count, Harris won by 905 votes.

In tomorrow's Special Election, McCready, an Iraq war veteran, is again the Democratic candidate. Harris is obviously damaged goods and has been replaced by Dan Bishop, who, if the Wikipedia article on him is half true, qualifies as a recognizable type of right-wing nut job: LGBT activists are the American Taliban, Black Lives Matters is a neo Nazi movement, etc. Trump carried the district by a double-digit margin, but his statewide margin was less than 4 points, so another close outcome in the 9th district tomorrow would suggest that both he and incumbent Republican senator Thom Tillis are in for tough fights in the state in 2020. According to civiqs, 47% of North Carolinians currently approve of Trump's performance as president, compared to 51% who say they disapprove.

Homework

In case you're wondering what kinds of math problems sixth graders in the Minneapolis public schools are working on these days, I recently heard Lydia FaceTiming a friend about what turned out to be:

A farmer is taking her eggs to the market in a cart, but she hits a pothole, which knocked over all the containers of eggs. Though she is unhurt, every egg is broken. So she goes to her insurance agent, who asks her how many eggs she had. She says she doesn't know, but she remembers some things from various ways she tried packing the eggs.  

When she put the eggs in groups of two, three, four, five, and six there was one egg left over, but when she put them in groups of seven they ended up in complete groups with no eggs left over.

How many eggs were in her cart?

First, let me put my Old Fogeyism on hold and admit I think it's cute when kids use their smart phones to put their heads together about math homework. It's when they spend hours playing Roblox that I get pissed off, except for when it allows me to watch Twins games on tv without interruption. Lydia and her friend didn't have a better idea than to "horse it": that is, work through all the multiples of 7 until they came to one that satisfied all the other described properties. This was proving tedious, and leading to "Eurekas" that were then discovered to be mirages, and ultimately there was frustration and despair. Their worksheet more or less predicted this process, for another instruction stated: "Describe what you did in attempting to solve the problem. . . .  Include things that didn't work out or gave you unexpected results."

The "trick" is to use the supplied information to proceed with efficiency, instead of "horsing it" and just hoping you will soon hit on the answer. If there's one egg left when they're placed in groups of five, then the answer must end with 1 or 6 (since multiples of 5 are 5, 10, 15, 20, &c). But it can't end in 6, because when placed in groups of two there is also one left over. So the answer ends with 1 and is divisible by 7. The first possibility is 21, which doesn't work. The next possibility is 21 + x, where x is a multiple of 7 (so that the number is still divisible by 7) and a multiple of 10 (so that the number still ends with 1)—in other words, x is 70 and the next possibility is 91, which fails the test since 91/4 yields a remainder of 3. What about 161? No, divide it by 3 and you have 2 left over, not 1. We're still "horsing it," sort of, but considering only one out of every ten multiples of 7 is way more efficient. The next possibility, 231, doesn't work on account of being divisible by 3—no remainder at all. But 301: ding! ding! ding! ding! Sixth grade gonna be fun for dad!

I think Lydia is okay with the help and simultaneously a little exasperated about   the old man being such a dweeb. I tried to explain that I come by it honestly. When as a kid I asked her grandpa for math help, he would peruse my book, to get the lay of the land, and then begin grousing about how he had half a mind to call school since it was obvious the author of the textbook "knows nothing of mathematics." Good grief, I just want help with this one problem, don't make it an issue in the next school board election, for God's sake. He would regale my sister and me at supper with math anecdotes, like the one about the child prodigy who, during an elementary school arithmetic lesson, was disrupting the class by tapping his pencil loudly on his desk. The teacher told him to stop several times before finally admonishing him, "I don't want to hear another peep from you until you've summed the first hundred integers." He stared at the teacher defiantly, still tapping his pencil. "I mean it!" the teacher said. "Five thousand fifty!" he said.

And my dad explained that rather than thinking "one plus two is three and three is six and four is ten"—"horsing  it," and soon having to sharpen your pencil while risking confusion and error—the "prodigy" thought of it as:

(1+100) + (2+99) + (3+98) + … + (50+51). 

That is, 50 paired sums of 101, so that the solution is 50 x 101 = 5050. And my sister and I, forebears of Lydia: "Great, what's for dessert?"

Twins. Grammar.

I knocked some sense into the Twins with that rant the other day. Since then, they've hit just one more home run while winning two games. Not that it's safe to conclude that a team is just fine because they won a couple of games against the Tigers (whose record stands at 40-95).

The Twins' only homer in the last two games came today, from Ehire Adrianza (pictured), whom I took a cheap shot at for his poor play in right field three games back. Gonzalez is injured, Buxton is injured, the manager inserts Adrianza in right field because he's a versatile player, and then, playing out of position, he kicks it around and of course some smart ass with a blog notices. Adrianza is an able, solid, hustling player, and I like him a lot. But I'm not going to apologize for what I said about Cron, even though I see his fielding percentage is .991, which sounds pretty good—less than one error every hundred chances! But first basemen have high fielding percentages because they get a lot of chances, most of them easy. They hardly ever have to throw the ball very far. The other infielders throw it to them, and they just catch it. If the throw is low, and they can't come up with it, the error belongs to the guy who bounced it to them. Pretty sure Polanco has more throwing errors than he would if, say, Hrbek or Mauer were the first baseman. Plus, Cron doesn't get to balls it seems to me he should get to. Today a foul pop over his head landed on the warning track—my daughter calls it "the worry trail"—at just about the same moment he looked down to see whether he was running out of room.

Well, he's got 20-some homers, so whatevs, I guess. I will apologize if he gets hot and finishes the season with 30 homers and 100 RBI, which would be a lot of production from a guy who only plays about three-fourths of the time and usually bats toward the bottom of the order.

Did you notice my use of whom above? Pretty sure it's right, though it sounds a little unnatural. This business of grammar and how things sound is somewhat mysterious to me. Got asked by someone at Lake Harriet recently if I would take a picture of "my friends and I." That's wrong, right? You should ask whether someone will take a picture of "my friends and me." You can tell what's right by taking out "my friends." You would never ask someone (if English is your first language), "Will you take a picture of I?" It's, "Will you take a picture of me?" So it's also, "Will you take a picture of my friends and me?" My question is: Why does the ear of a native speaker protect against error in the one case but not in the other? Why does one mistake sound ridiculous but not the other?

It's a holiday, so the second-stringers are on the cable news channels, and I obsessively notice their language tics, too. A meteorologist reported,

The storm is moving slowly toward Florida's Atlantic coast

and, a minute later, under cross examination from the anchor, repeated herself (nearly):

The storm is moving painfully slow toward Florida.

Is there any error here? If we're just talking about what sounds wrong and what sounds right, I'd say

The storm is moving slow toward Florida

sounds wrong. You should definitely say "slowly." But the following also sounds wrong (though more modestly):

The storm is moving painfully slowly toward Florida.

But where is the logic? If you only care about rate, it's "slowly," but, add an interest in the emotional response caused by the rate, and now "slow" is suddenly correct? How about this:

The storm is moving—painfully, slowly—toward Florida. 

Can the form of the word you choose be right or wrong depending on how fast you talk, the inflection you give it? I also would like to know which of the following is correct:

She's smarter than me

or

She's smarter than I.

(Don't say both are correct no matter who she is!) The former sounds better to me. But for sure you could also say, correctly, "She's smarter than I am." So it seems maybe you should say

She's smarter than I

(since you can't say)

She's smarter than me am.

Twins in August

In today's game against the Tigers (who are on a pace to lose about 115 games this season), the Twins hit six home runs, numbers 263 through 268 for the year, and broke the major league record for homers by a team in a single season—the Yankees hit 267 last year.

Oh, and the Twins lost the game, 10-7. All their runs scored on the homers, five of which came with no one on base. The Twins have been playing baseball in Minnesota since 1961 and today was the first time they'd ever lost a game in which they homered six times. One of today's homers was clubbed by Polanco, his twentieth of the season. The Twins can now hand the umpire a lineup card in which every slot in the batting order is filled by someone with at least twenty homers: Cruz the designated batter (34), Garver catching (26), Cron at first (24), Schoop at second (21), the aforementioned Polanco at shortstop (20), Sano at third (26), Rosario in left (27), Kepler in center (36), and . . . I lied, Marwin Gonzalez has only 15. But I believe no team has ever had eight different players with at least 20 homers in one season.

Here is a bit of home run trivia: in 1965, when the Twins won 102 games and played in their first World Series, they were—notwithstanding Killebrew and Allison and Oliva and Jimmie Hall and 19 round trippers from their shortstop, Zoilo Versalles—out-homered by their opponents, 150-166. You have to pitch it and catch it, too. Maybe I'm just a little sour from today's game, but I'm not necessarily a fan of all the home runs. So many are hit partly because no one ever bunts (despite the ridiculous shifts), the hit-and-run is practically extinct, and no one changes their approach when behind in the count. I was watching a game in the recently completed series in Chicago against the Sox, and there was an inning in which our pitcher—it was Pineda—faced four batters, striking out the side while walking one. The Twins then came to bat and sent five guys to the plate. Two homered. The other three struck out. Nine batters, six outs, two runs scored, no base running, no fielding, not a single ball in play. Could have just had the pitcher and catcher out there. Seems the whole game is just to see if the batter can hit it over the fence before strike three. Insert a second baseman after the walk to prevent the steal. Not that it'd matter. Who cares what base someone's standing on if the batter hits a home run (or strikes out)?

Anyway, the Twins went 17-11 in August and finished up the month in first place, 4.5 games ahead of the Indians. Their overall record is 83-52, so if they could win 17 of their last 27 games they would

• almost certainly win their division; and
• finish the regular season with 100 wins.

They'll probably have to hit another 40 homers to do that. It was Perez who got knocked around today by the heavy-hitting Tigers, but is there anything more agonizing than watching Kyle Gibson pitch? I think color commentator Roy Smalley said it best a week or so ago: your stuff doesn't get better when the count is 2-0, so why not throw it over the plate and see if the guy can hit it right away? Our fielding is loose, too. Why would a baserunner ever try to steal a base when he  can just wait for our catcher to stab ineffectually at a near strike? Polanco throws like my daughter, who's 11. Sometimes the ball finds its way to Cron's glove, for the same reason I sometimes did well on true-false tests. Watching Eddie Rosario play left field, you have to wonder whether Spanish has a phrase for "throw to the right base, dammit." Today, Ehire Adrianza played right field—at least, he did until the ball was hit that way. 83-52! Apparently you can cover a multitude of sins by hitting it over the fence a lot.

Two day games coming up in Detroit. The Twins then have 12 games in 13 days  against good teams fighting to make the playoffs: the Red Sox, the Indians, the Nationals, the Indians again. Beat the Tigers tomorrow.

Politicking: State Fair Edition

It's almost the end of the month, when I'm tradition-bound to assess "the Twins in August," but first, a look at the political scoreboard in late summer 2019.

Even if you pad Trump's numbers by a few percent, in order to compensate for my TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome; or, Tired of the Dumb Shit), things aren't looking too good for him right now. Polls of the most plausible individual matchups look dire. For example, here, from a single polling organization (Quinnipiac), released day before yesterday:

Biden 54, Trump 38
Sanders 53, Trump 39
Warren 52, Trump 40
Harris 51, Trump 40
Buttigieg 49, Trump 40

Allowing for noise, a fair summary might be that Trump gets 39% and the Democrat gets 10 to 15 points more, depending upon name recognition. In that interpretation, the really bad news for Trump is not the gap between him and the various Democrats but the fact that he's stuck right where his approval rating has been since time immemorial: 40%.

Okay, let's attribute those bad polls to "fake news," which is how Trump pronounces "bad news," and proceed, in deference to the handiwork of some 18th-century slave owners, to his state-by-state approval ratings. More fake news, apparently, because here is a list of states he carried last time in which his approval rating is currently underwater (the depth of the water is noted):

Arizona -7
Florida -1
Georgia -1
Iowa -8
Michigan -11
North Carolina -5
Pennsylvania -9
Utah -3
Wisconsin -10

I'm not sure whether the news from Utah is the worst or the best for Trump. It must register the collective arched eyebrow with which Mormons regard, for example, the payment of hush money to pornographic film actresses and Playboy models with whom the married Trump, er, cavorted, rather than gauging how they will finally vote in 2020. Anyway, he can leak a little in Utah and still win. One of his problems, though, is that he's leaking also in states where his margin was small but, for the overall outcome, determinative: I mean the Great Lakes triumvirate of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, all of which he won by less than 1%.

Since the Clinton states plus those three Great Lakes states have 278 electoral votes, eight more than is needed to win, there has been brave talk from some MAGA spinners about "expanding the map." But to where? Here are the corresponding approval figures from the five states Trump lost most narrowly:

New Hampshire -25
Minnesota -15
Nevada -27
Maine -17
Colorado -16

It's the Democrats who appear better positioned to "expand the map"—see, in the first above list of states, Georgia, Iowa (home to lots of pissed off farmers), and Arizona, along with some other big states where Trump is barely above water, preeminently Texas, where he's +3, and Ohio, where he's +1.

I used to think the election would be close and that Trump might win again in the Electoral College. That's still possible, I suppose, but the chance of Trump taking a drubbing has come into plain view. The above state results, the most recent I know of, are from Civiqs. They are broadly consistent with data from the other organization, Morning Consult, that regularly takes the temperature of 50 states.

We Democrats like to warn ourselves against thinking only of the presidential election. A theme to the worrying is that some of our presidential candidates who are polling at 1% should withdraw from the marquee race and run for Senate. John Hickenlooper looks like he's poised to do that, and Trump's -16 in Colorado suggests that Cory Gardner, the incumbent Republican, could likely be defeated by the proverbial ham sandwich, let alone by a popular ex-governor. A useful exercise might be to call the roll of other 2020 Senate races featuring a plausible pickup for one side or the other and note where Trump's approval stands. Republican Susan Collins will be facing the voters in Maine, where Trump is at -17. In North Carolina (-5), incumbent Republican Thom Tillis is up for reelection. In Arizona (-7), Republican Martha McSally, who was appointed to John McCain's seat by the Republican governor, will try again to win on her own: she lost to Krysten Sinema two years ago, after Jeff Flake retired to purse his lips and sigh on his own time. Republican Joni Ernst, of Iowa (-8), is up for reelection. On the other side of the ledger, Democratic incumbent Doug Jones, who won a special election over mall rat Judge Roy Moore, will try to defend his seat in Alabama, where Trump is at +15. The Dems need to gain four seats, or three and the presidency, to win a majority.

Perhaps more intriguing than any of these states is the case of Georgia. It currently has two Republican senators. One, Dave Perdue, is coming to the end of his first term. The other, Johnny Isakson, just announced that he is retiring as of the end of this year due to poor health. So in November, 2020, there will be two US Senate races on the ballot in Georgia, one without an elected incumbent, both possible pickups for the Dems. Georgia is one of those southern states, like Texas, that is slowly moving the Democrats' way. Romney won it by nine points. Then Trump won it by five. It had a hot governor's race in 2018 in which the Republican, Brian Kemp, defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams by about 1.4%. According to Civiqs, 48% of Georgians currently approve of Trump's performance, and 49% disapprove. The history of double Senate races is that the same party wins both of them—and, in the event that it's a presidential year, look for a trifecta. A Republican trifecta would be like holding serve; a Democratic one would be game, set, and match. Kemp, the current governor, was at the time of his race against Abrams the Georgia Secretary of State, in charge of elections, and was credibly accused of suppressing the vote in Democratic precincts. Tighten your chin straps!