Eric The Blue

Tuesday night TV

The dogs and cats of Springfield, Ohio, are getting a lot of attention, but if I had to pick a favorite moment, I think it would be Trump’s crash landing on the topic of Obamacare. He’d been ranting about it being a disaster when the moderator interrupted, “Do you have a plan to replace it, yes or no?”

Trump: “I have the concepts of a plan.”

I always thought it odd that he could in 2016 run on repealing Obamacare and replacing it only with “something better.” This was a matter of vital importance to millions of Americans with insurance through Obamacare, but never a hint about what “something better” might entail. Then he won, was president for four years, and kept perfectly mum about the replacement component of what came to be called “repeal and replace.”

But no more! Eight years into it and he has “the concepts of a plan.”

I suppose it’s of a piece with his answer to the (entirely predictable) question about whether he regretted any of his actions or inactions on J6. He said the bad stuff was all Nancy Pelosi’s fault—“they” asked him to give a speech, he gave a speech, that was his only connection to the events of the day. After 3.5 years all he’s managed to work up is “Pelosi’s fault!” And it’s taken a full eight years to develop the as yet undivulged “concepts of a plan.”

Probably he has no choice but to talk about Hannibal Lecter and the pet-eating immigrants of Springfield, Ohio. He’s got nothing else. Well, insults. “Kamala Harris is dumb as a rock,” he says.  The intellectual abilities of others is one of his regular themes—all the talk about IQ, for instance, as in, “So-and-so is an extremely low IQ individual.” He’s barely smart enough to feel insecure. Pathetic!

Old white Nebraskans with German surname like Trump

My favorite current campaign kerfuffle is the one concerning the Nebraska Walzes who are voting for Trump. They posed for a viral pic wearing their personalized MAGA gear and got a favorable notice from the unintentionally hilarious Power Line Blog, here. 

When Walz’s sister saw the photo, she said she didn’t recognize a single person. It turns out that the Walz Family Trumpers are the children, and the children’s children, of Walz’s paternal grandfather’s brother. So think of your dad’s dad’s brother. It’s his kids, and the kids of those kids, who are “The Walz’s for Trump” (as their tees say). I don’t doubt that Walz’s sister didn’t recognize them. I’m pretty sure I’ve never met the analogous Jorgensons. 

You might as well just say that there are some old white people in Nebraska who are going to vote for Trump. 

Apparently Walz has a brother who also likes Trump. Oh the stories he could tell, he says, about his brother. But he isn’t telling them. Maybe Tim smoked a cigarette after football practice or something. 

It’s been pointed out that some of the Trumps have quite a dim view of Donald—and they actually know him. More weighty, perhaps, is the fact that his chief of staff, his defense secretary, his national security advisor, and his vice president have all pointedly declined to endorse him. I guess voters will just have to weigh these things—what the Nebraska Walzes don’t like about Tim Walz, what top members of the Trump administration don’t like about Trump. Easy to see why everyone thinks it’s going to be close!

 

Back to school

In a couple of weeks we’ll be back to the following at 3:25 in the afternoon—

Me: How was school?

Them: Fine. 

Me: Did your lawyer tell you to keep your answers brief?

Them: Wasn’t funny in 2019 either.

—but right now, first week of school, I’m getting a lot of unsolicited info. Want to know about the new cell phone policy in the Minneapolis Public Schools? No one at our house likes it, though for different reasons:

Them: But, like, if there’s a code red active shooter situation, wouldn’t you like me to be able to call you?

Me: Call me? You’d be checking TikTok. Just like in math class.

My high-school junior said she overheard a freshman boy ask his buddy, “Did you have any idea there’d be no recess?”

Walking toward the front door on my first day back at school, I passed a lot of parents headed the other direction. One, a 30ish mom, pushed a baby stroller with one hand while using the other to dab her eyes with a Kleenex. I’m guessing she has, in addition to the baby, a nervous kindergartner. They are so cute plodding along the sidewalk, kind of serious looking, backpack where it should be up on their shoulders and still scraping the ground behind them.

On the stump

Wasn’t able to watch The Interview but I bet an astute observer was able to detect how flustered Harris must be by Trump’s nimbleness on the campaign trail.

—“My administration will be great for women’s reproductive rights!”

—Free IVF for everyone who wants it!

—Harris is a phony, no core beliefs!

—Not my fault if the videographer I hired was there!

—Why won’t the fake news report that Walz was just the assistant coach?

—I’m not weird, you are!

You can tell my mind is closed cuz as of now I’m nevertheless leaning to Harris. Just need to hear more about if she’s actually black.

Schools and vaccines

Yesterday, en route to the first event of the new school year, I heard this interview (“As school nears, doctors worry about Minnesota’s undervaccinated kids”) on the radio. My reasonably accurate transcription of the depressing conclusion:

Interviewer: As a physician, how worried are you about the rising rate of measles cases in our state?

Pediatrician: That is a growing cloud storm. We’ve seen the rate of measles immunizations decrease over the past few years, and we’ve already had 34 cases this year, almost all of them in unvaccinated kids. We worry about the start of the school year, when people are coming together, and this very infectious airborne disease . . . .

Interviewer: Vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella have been around since the 1960s. What do you tell parents who might be hesitant to have their kids vaccinated?

Pediatrician: You know, before the measles vaccine came out, the disease killed 2 to 3 million people per year worldwide. That number has gone down significantly and in many countries measles has been eliminated, including in this country until recently. The measles vaccine is very effective . . . . When you see one child with measles, you never want to see it again—high fever, often requiring hospitalization, horrible rash . . . . They’re really sick.

Waning support for mandatory school vaccinations among Republicans has been documented by, for example, the Gallup organization, here. After the Covid vaccines became available, public health researchers documented an increased risk of Covid mortality among Republicans: death rates were highest in counties Trump carried by the widest margins, and lowest in Biden’s best counties. The results of a study focusing on Covid mortality and political affiliation in Florida and Ohio, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, is here; an NPR summary of that study is here; and the same conclusions have been reached for other locales, in different studies: see, for example, here and here and here. 

It’s not too much to say that voting Republican is literally bad for your health. It’s also bad for your kids and for neighbors who try to cancel your vote. 

Trump has promised to defund school districts that require vaccinations. Now that the country’s most prominent vaccine opponent has endorsed him, I hope the two of them will campaign together on this issue in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Phoenix. I trust it’s a loser for them, and if it isn’t, we’re screwed anyway.

(Corollary: my debate advice for Harris would be to try not to talk too much. No one can make the case against Trump better than Trump.)

Small note on the DNC

I missed a lot, as it played opposite some close Twins games, but, of what I saw, my favorite DNC moment came when President Obama was enumerating some of his successor’s peculiarities. He mentioned Trump’s obsession with “crowd size,” and as he pronounced the word “size” he looked down at his hands, which he’d been holding in front of himself about a half foot apart, then chuckled as he slowly drew them almost together.

Maybe would’ve been even better if his wife had done it, but of course she’s a famous advocate for riding only on the high road. Not me. I’m the kind of bad person who enjoys ridiculous people suffering ridicule. Hope it’s not as bad if you admit it.

I was also watching when Harris, in her speech, said that “in many ways Donald Trump is a deeply unserious person.” As if to prove her point, he quickly posted the following to Truth Social:

The Senate

Regarding this fall’s Senate elections, it’s often said that “the calendar” favors Republicans since “by chance” the Dems this year are defending seats in West Virginia, Montana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and maybe one or two other red to purplish states I’ve repressed for the sake of my cheerfulness. Meanwhile, there are really no prospects for Democratic pickups. Texas (Ted Cruz)? That would be delicious, but as a Minnesota Viking once said, there ain’t no Santa Claus and there ain’t no red nosed reindeer either. 

Democrats currently have a 51-49 Senate majority. West Virginia is gone for sure, which means that Dems, to hold the majority, probably need to win the White House again AND run the table in Montana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and (I now remember) Arizona and Nevada. A tall order, even allowing for the normal allotment of crazed Republican candidates.

But it’s misleading to attribute such a state of affairs to “this year’s tough calendar.” For the Dems, it’s always a tough calendar, because the Senate for some time now has naturally favored Republicans. Here’s a rough-and-ready gauge of how hard it is for Democrats to win a Senate majority:

In two presidential races to date, Trump has never won the popular vote. Yet there are 25 states that he’s carried both times (compared to just 20 that he’s lost both times). Multiplying by two senators for each state yields a 50-40 Republican advantage as a rough base line. The Rs need only one of the other ten seats, or the presidency, to be the majority party in the Senate—when the country as a whole modestly favors the other side.

To have fewer than 50 seats, Republicans have to be under performing badly, and right now they have 49. Of course “the calendar looks tough for Democrats”!

That’s the view from 30,000 feet. Descending to Earth, the situation appears to me positively outlandish. Using these state population figures and the current partisan state-by-state lineup in the Senate, I worked out yesterday afternoon, with one eye on the disappointing Twins game, that the 51 Senate Democrats represent just over 58 percent of Americans. In other words, if representation was in line with population, there would be 58 Democratic senators, not 51.

According to polling data compiled at RealClearPolitics.com, Democrats are somewhat improbably leading in all the races for Senate seats in the above named states except for West Virginia and Montana. If that turns out to be the result on Election Day, control of the Senate will flip to Republicans, 51-49, but the 49 Senate Democrats will represent about 57.6 percent of the country’s population (and the 51 Republicans will represent the remaining 42.4 percent). The majority (of Republican senators) will be representing a minority (of all the American people). It’s no great mystery how this can be. The population of, for example, Los Angeles County is somewhat more than twice that of the combined populations of North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Yet the people of these four states are represented by eight senators while the people of Los Angeles County share two senators with 30 million other Californians. The imbalance is grotesque. Once again, the redoubtable Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 22:

Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Delaware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts that fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third.

One “theoretical” result of an arrangement such as was decried by Hamilton might be: a president, having won in the electoral college despite receiving fewer votes than his main rival, serves a term during which there are several vacancies on the Supreme Court; he is able to appoint to the Court a slate of ideologues sympathetic to his goals because in the Senate, which is the theoretical check on his power, there is a majority of his own party, even though this majority also owes its status to a minority of the people in the country; the Senate confirms the president’s nominees, and the Court then delivers for the president and his party decisions and judgments that could never be attained in a popularly elected legislature. 

If anyone dare raise a voice in complaint, their reward is likely a lecture on our majestic constitutional system.

Who is Royce White?

Royce White is the Republican candidate for US Senate from Minnesota. His qualifications for the position aren’t the usual ones. He’s never held elective office, graduated from college, or served in the military. The Wikipedia article about him devotes the most space to his basketball career. He led his high school team to the state championship in 2009 and was named Minnesota’s Mr. Basketball that same season. He then accepted a scholarship from the University of Minnesota but left school before playing in a single game. The problem was brushes with the criminal law: some shoplifting and disorderly conduct at the Mall of America, a laptop theft in a dormitory that his lawyer negotiated down to trespassing. White transferred to Iowa State, where he played one season and was named to the All Big 12 first team. He entered the NBA draft and was selected in the first round by the Houston Rockets.

White only ever played in a few NBA games. The main culprit was unrelated to basketball skills—he has mental health challenges, preeminently acute anxiety, including an intense fear of flying, which is how NBA teams get from city to city. His career flamed out rapidly, unless you count some productive seasons playing for the Reno Bighorns and the Rio Grande Valley Vipers. He was in 2018 the NBL scoring champion as a member of the London Lightning—London, as in London, Ontario, Canada. He’s also fought in UFC mixed martial arts bouts and played in the 3-on-3 basketball league co-founded by the rapper Ice Cube.

Sometime around in here White started piping up on political questions. He’d shave his head and write messages on his bare scalp denigrating the World Bank and, on another occasion, declaring “Alex Jones was right.” (Alex Jones is the conspiracy theorist best known for arguing that the mass shooting of kindergartners at the Sandy Hook school was a staged operation set up by the government to defame supporters of gun rights.) On social media, some of his favorite targets have been homosexuals, Jews, and women who are “too mouthy.” Predictably, this kind of slop attracted the attention of Trump’s friend Steve Bannon. White has been a guest on Bannon’s podcast and, now that Bannon is in prison, has served as a guest host. His connection to the upper echelon of the MAGA brigade has raised his profile in Minnesota. A couple years ago, he ran for US House, but was defeated in the Republican primary by someone moderately less nutty than he. One upshot of that race: a watchdog group lodged a complaint alleging that White had misappropriated more than $150,000 in campaign funds for personal use, including $1200 at a strip club in Miami. The candidate did not exactly deny the charge. He says he paid back the money and that he liked the food at the strip club.

So that was 2022. This year, he won the Republican party’s endorsement for US Senate at their convention last spring. On Tuesday, he won the Republican primary by 10 points over his nearest rival. His campaign website is here. It’s an eyeful. I see that he emphasizes being a dad, and I understand he has four kids, though as far as I know he’s never married. That might be bad if he was a Democrat, especially considering that his name turns up in searches of family law records in at least two Minnesota counties—he’s been behind in court-ordered child support payments in both venues. 

I understand that Republicans don’t like being called “weird,” but this is their endorsed candidate for US Senate. Delegates to their state party convention plucked him from the field and the choice was then ratified by GOP primary voters. They should be thankful if the normies planning to vote for Amy Klobuchar have settled upon calling them only “weird.”