Eric The Blue

The electoral college: my bete noire

I indicated, here, that people who think the electoral college should be preserved, but reformed so that electoral votes are won by carrying congressional districts, are either daft or eager to turn the country over to the Republicans.  (Not that these choices are mutually exclusive.)  What these "reformers" propose is that, within each state, a presidential candidate should get one electoral vote for each congressional district won and two electoral votes for winning the statewide tally. 

What would that have meant in 2012?  According to the Cook Political Report, Romney carried 222 congressional districts to Obama's 206, with an additional seven undetermined.  For the sake of argument, let's give those seven to Obama, who also won 26 states (and D.C.).  That gives Obama 213 electoral votes from congressional districts plus 55 more for the states he carried, for a total of 268.  Romney gets 222 from congressional districts plus 48 from states.  That's 270 for Romney, who would be president despite having lost the national popular vote by almost four percentage points.

I will never understand why, in a so-called national election, we feel bound to draw lines around people before counting their votes.  Support National Popular Vote.

Jonah

Perhaps no biblical book has suffered more than Jonah from the depredations of fundamentalists.  (I acknowledge the competition is fierce.)  The whole question has become whether Jonah was "a literal man in the belly of a literal whale," and the answer--"Yes"--has been augmented by zany disquistions on topics tending toward the zoological.  Granted, it would be impossible to live nowadays even for a few hours, let alone three days, in the belly of a great whale, but back in the days of Jonah the seas were populated with species of monsters unknown to modern science, and--it turns out that the whole story is the literal truth.  Fundamentalism self selects the crazies.

Jonah is a story about a recalcitrant, sulky prophet.  Since it is very brief, let us just lay out what happens.  Jonah is called by God to travel to Nineveh and prophesy against the wicked, heathenish ways of that city's residents.  Jonah doesn't want to do it, so boards a ship bound for Tarshish, which is in the opposite direction from Nineveh.  God, however, pursues Jonah with a violent storm.  There is on the ship a somewhat cosmopolitan crew of mariners, and they regard the storm as the judgment of the angry god of one of their number.  A game of lots determines, correctly, that it's Jonah who has given offense to his God.  (I said it's a story but maybe "tall tale" would be better.) Jonah goes overboard, the storm leaves off, and the heathen mariners are impressed: They "feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows" (1:16).

Meanwhile, Jonah is swallowed by a great whale.  Incongruosly, he sings a psalm of thanksgiving from the whale's belly.  After three days, the whale vomits him up on dry land, which has the effect of making the psalm of thanksgiving retroactively appropriate. God reissues the directive regarding Nineveh, and this time Jonah obeys.  It requires one speech act on his part for all in the city, "from the greatest of them to the least," to repent and turn to God, Who in turn determines to spare the city from what He otherwise had planned.  Jonah sulks over his success, explaining to God in a prayer that he had wanted the city to be destroyed.  He sits broodingly on the edge of town, the sun beating down on him, and God raises a plant over his head for shade.  But the next day God kills the plant and Jonah's anger is rekindled.  The story ends with God's admonition: "You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night, and perished in a night.  And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?"

It's an artful story, in many ways.  Despite his intentions, Jonah is twice successful as a missionary to people he sees as outside God's care.  Trying to avoid the commission to Nineveh, he unwittingly converts the foreign mariners, who begin worshiping the God from whom he is himself fleeing.  Having been saved at sea, he finally does travel, however reluctantly, to Nineveh, where he is disappointed at his success: he thought the city should be razed.  The author hits the reader in the head, hard, twice, with his theme, but all they want to talk about is the whale.

It's easy to scoff at the notion that the Jews are God's chosen people.  What would  be surprising, I suppose, is if having thought it over from every angle the Jews had come to the conclusion that God had chosen some other people to call His own.  One's satiric impulse is checked by the way in which claims of Israel's exclusiveness are treated in the Jewish Bible.  Jonah makes the same  point, though with more humor, that is made repeatedly in the Pentateuch, perhaps most memorably in Leviticus, where it is written, after homosexuals have been duly cursed: "When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong.  The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God" (19:33-34).

This is loftier than the dead fall that brings the book of Jonah to a close.  But in a curious way the mention of the cattle of Nineveh may count as a sharper barb aimed at those who, confident of their own place in His affection, stand ever ready to condemn the foreigner and the stranger.

George Packer and Walmart Americans

I like the stable of writers at The New Yorker magazine, but every so often one of them lets fly a linguistic fart that smells just the way described by right-wing critics of the "media elite. " Yesterday, for instance, in a post about "two Americas"--Apple Americans and Walmart Americans--George Packer was in the middle of making a good point about how the higher payroll taxes now in place are killing Walmart's bottom line when he plucked out of thin air what seems to him like the kind of low salary earned by a Walmart shopper.  Here's the passage:

Last week, Bloomberg News reported that Walmart's sales in the first days of February were abysmal.  In intermal e-mails that were leaked, one corporate vice-president described the situation as "a total disaster," while another asked, "Where are all the customers?  And where is their money?" 

The executives answered their own question. Their customers’ money—some of it—has gone back to the government, in the form of the two-per-cent increase in payroll taxes that took effect with the new budget deal on New Year’s Day. That deal supposedly allowed the economy to avoid going over the “fiscal cliff,” and its aversion was a source of much relief in Washington and on Wall Street. But there turned out to be, if not a cliff, at least a gulch still embedded in the deal. It’s amazing how little attention the payroll-tax increase got at the time—maybe because so few of the players and observers involved could imagine how much difference fifteen dollars out of the weekly paycheck of someone earning forty thousand dollars a year could make.

Forty thousand dollars?  I think Apple Americans are uninformed about the facts of life in Walmart land.  Half--half!--of all American jobs pay less than $34,000 per year, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and a quarter pay less than $23,000.  Where do the people working these jobs buy clothes, food, household goods, and firearms?  Meanwhile, the people atop the income pyramid are drowning in their own money. 

If you wanted to make fun of Packer, you'd say that he considers what Walmart shoppers consider a pretty decent income to be pretty pathetic--so low you are condemned to Walmart.  There's another interpretation.  Some liberals are so out of touch that they don't comprehend how strong their case is.

Octogenarian retires

I haven't relieved myself on the subject of the pope's early retirement.  What's surprising to me is that so many people seem to care.  It reminds me of a conversation I had with my dad on the occasion of John Lennon's death.  I thought it was "important," he did not, and, sensing that he was getting the better of the argument, I resorted to a dubious strategy: the querulous appeal to public opinion.  I said that if enough people think it's an important event, then it is necessarily an important event.  He's a physicist and his answer to that was that you cannot decide the truth of a question by putting it to a vote.

Anyway.  Octogenarian calls it a career!  Big deal.  Apparently he has stacked the college of cardinals, or whatever you call that school of elderly bachelors who dress up in robes and funny hats and use smoke signals to alert the waiting world that they've selected the next pope, with like-minded reactionaries, so there is little chance of anything changing. 

I find, however, that I agree with some people who appear to care rather a lot.  Here is Jane Kramer, an evident Catholic, on "what the pope can pray for."  (In retirement, he plans to live a life of prayer.)  She hopes he will gain enlightenment on the meaning of "deviant," a word that he seems to have become fond of in his former role as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a part of the Church bureaucracy for which Kramer provides this helpful gloss:  "formerly known as the Inquisition."  The pope has applied the term to nuns who want to serve the poor and a liberation theologian who declared himself "Marxist as Luke."  Kramer suggests the term should be reserved for Holocaust-denying cardinals and bishops who don't call the cops when priests are buggering young children. 

I only wish she had worked into her essay how his artificial pacemaker has permitted him, in the ninth decade of life, to carry on about the evils of technology.

Lincoln, the movie

For our sixth wedding anniversary, Amanda and I saw Lincoln, more my idea than hers but it's really her fault, because after the decision was made to "go to the movies" she had nothing at the front of her mind or the tip of her tongue when the necessary specifics came to the fore.  I've been wanting to see Lincoln for months and so was able to buzz in first.

You know the way with a movie you see after having heard from everyone how fabulous it is.  Only, in my case, I've been disappointed so many times that I've learned to recalibrate my expectations, which gives the film a chance.  So I'm not sure whether Lincoln is really good, or it maybe just benefitted from my reverse expectation psychology, but I liked it quite a lot.  If it wins Best Picture, I will believe that it really was the best picture, and that it wasn't necessarily a thin year.

I know what I'd say if I was determined to be a contrarian.  The movie purports to be historical and yet shows things that I'm pretty sure never happened.  For example, I do not believe that debate in the House of Representatives in 1865 featured such colorful put-downs and all-around sportive language.  I also doubt that, when the roll was called, the mediocrities upon whom the outcome depended  paused cinematically before saying Aye or Nay.  It's not a good sign, is it, when you notice the flourishes?  The worst ones come with a large dollop of piety, as when the Confederate diplomats come north to negotiate for peace and are met by a regiment of black soldiers standing at dignified attention.  Probably didn't happen, and, anyway, here in the blue states we already knew which side occupied the high ground.

On the other side of the ledger, Lincoln does not make the mistake of putting its titular subject on the pedestal where he usually sits in judgment on all us mortals.  I'll mention just one small aspect of the plot's unwinding.  I think I would have noticed, even if I hadn't been marking a marital anniversary, that the Lincolns' marriage is depicted in a manner that is uninspiring and probably realistic.  The marriages of "great men" is an interesting topic.  If their successes frequently do not extend to their careers as husbands, maybe that is because achieving what we call "greatness" is sometimes abetted by a certain one-sidedness that, viewed daily from close range, wears poorly.  The movie indicates that, while Mary Todd was indeed a piece of work, the man who married  her was not immune to this general rule.

The universal praise for the performances--Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln, Sally Field as Mary Todd, Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens--will not be contradicted by me.

Not necessarily an impossible task

The CW regarding the opposition party's response to the State of the Union address concerns what a hopeless task it is.  There you are, in some deserted D.C. building, speaking into a camera and making the case against the President, who, having been grandiloquently introduced, more than once by different dignitaries, to tumultuous applause, has just finished addressing, in the House chamber, all the members of the Congress, together with the Supreme Court and the top generals, the Vice President and Speaker of the House seated directly behind him, and a prime-time network television audience delivered and invisibly but palpably impressed by the theatrics.  What can anyone do?  Poor, poor Marco Rubio.  He  had an impossible task.

Not necessarily.

 

 

 

State of the opposition

With the republic recently spared from Republicans for at least another two years, I've turned my attention to other things, like Jane Austen and whether or not my wife will appreciate my Valentines' gift of a dust buster, but I did watch the State of the Union address last night.  And the Republican response.  Uff duh.  You always hear about the Republican bench, these up-and-coming stars who will save the party from oblivion.  We deserve a Ryan-Rubio ticket! 

Really?  That's the best they got?  A marathon fibber, a thirsty third-base coach, and the same old palpably memorized pablum. Get government off our back!  It's not true that my neighbors are rich!  President Obama says mean stuff about us!  Sweat, sweat; gulp, gulp. 

All ambitious Democrats are rethinking 2016.  It's clear the Republican juggernaut is ready to roll!

Michael Gerson's long words: a short interpretation

In a column published in the Star Tribune last Tuesday, Michael Gerson describes the controversy regarding the Affordable Care Act and "religious freedom" in the following terms:

At issue is whether Obamacare's broad mandate of insurance coverage for contraceptives, sterilization and abortifacients should apply to institutions with moral objections.  For more than a year, the administration has struggled to clarify a set of regulations, while provoking 44 legal challenges.

Well, it must be a pretty bad policy if it has provoked 44 legal challenges, right?  But what if there are 44 crazy fanatics who can afford lawyers and the court filing fees? 

Then there are "abortifacients" and "sterilization" to consider.  These may be known to you as the morning after pill and vasectomies, respectively.  But calling things by their familiar names will not advance the cause.  People may then notice that what you call "moral objections" is more like nostalgia for the days when the church was preeminent and human life was more plausibly described as nasty, brutish, solitary, and short.

The mortgage mess

It's behind a subscribrer wall, but, if you are interested in "the foreclosure crisis," or "the mortgage meltdown," or whatever you want to call it, you should check out this article, by Tad Friend, in the current New Yorker. 

Millions of Americans--one in five "homeowners," Friend reports--are still underwater on their mortgages.  This would explain why, where I work, in the Hennepin County Recorder's Office, people joke darkly about the ongoing foreclosure "crisis."  Is it really a crisis if it goes on and on and on, year after year, sheriff's sale after sheriff's sale?  People who fell into a health crisis the year the housing bubble burst have by now either gotten well or died.  While the number of foreclosures is down somewhat, we'd still be breaking records if it weren't for last year, and the year before that, and a couple of years before that. 

There are many culprits but near the top of the list is the practice of selling loans on the secondary market, where they are pooled and "securitized."  (When you have to make up verbs to describe what is going on, beware of shenanigans!)   You could get a mortgage from anyone, including an originator who was a half continent away and had no intention of even inspecting the property that was to be collateral for the loan.  Since the loan was headed to Wall Street, the "lender" had no skin in the game, and could make a lot of money just by making a lot of loans.  The mortgages would be pooled and the payments would flow in, unless there were defaults, in which case the source of profit's endless flow would be perpetually rising home prices.

Ingenious!  As it turns out, the best part was that these sharpies couldn't lose. Heads they get rich, tails we bail them out. 

The main exhibit of Friend's article concerns an ingenious scheme to get out from under the dead weight of all these bad loans.  First, however, you have to appreciate how much dead weight we're talking about--enough to crush Adam Smith's dictum concerning the paradisal consequences of sellers and buyers pursuing their self-interest.  When a property is subject to a mortgage of more than twice that property's current value, a foreclosure sale is not really in anyone's interest.  What is?  A loan modification that will permit the borrower to stay in the house and keep making (smaller) payments.  But a loan modification requires two parties, and the mortgage has been sliced and diced to such a degree that it usually isn't possible to figure out who could agree to modify it.  Nothing happens till the distressed owner gives up and walks away.  Then the "securitized mortgage trust" inherits the upside-down state of affairs.  The problem, Friend explains, in the article's most arresting phrase, is "not 'too big to fail' so much as 'too fucked up to fix.'"

The ingenious scheme for a fix, devised by entrepreneur Steven Gluckstern, is for a city beset by foreclosed and underwater properties to exercise its right of eminent domain and seize the mortgage assets of these trusts.  It seems that cities could do so as it really is broadly in the public interest.  The trusts would have to be paid off, and it seems the main factor in determining the price would be the current market value of the property--what the trust could get in the open market after exercising the remedy for default contained in the mortgage.  The city could then arrange a mortgage between the distressed owner and a traditional lender for an amount based on the property's current market value, thereby averting all the disastrous social and financial consequences of waves of foreclosure sales.

Apparently Gluckstern is despised  by those who hate the thought of borrowers who imprudently signed bad mortgages to wriggle out of them.  But who really loses?  The mortgage trust gets about what it could expect at this point in a bad game.  The distressed owners are such clear winners that some Puritans worry about the moral hazard connected with allowing them to escape the consequences of their own folly.  The Wall Street sharpies don't lose.  They've already been bailed out and no one seems too concerned about the moral hazard associated with letting them off the hook for their actions.