Eric The Blue

The FBI talks to Dennis Hastert

I wasn't too surprised to hear that J. Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Republican Speaker of the House, is under a federal indictment.  Politicians get in trouble, like athletes and clergymen and the fellow down the block.  But now I've read the indictment and--my Lord, what a putz!  It's the lack of adult sophistication that is sort of breathtaking.

According to the indictment, Hastert agreed to pay an unnamed person a 7-figure sum to compensate him (or her) for some unspecified behavior, and to keep his misconduct secret.  (It sounds a lot like he was blackmailed.)  The payments were on an installment plan, which at first caused Hastert to make regular $50,000 withdrawals from accounts he held in various Illinois banks.  Since federal law requires banks to track and report withdrawals of more than $10,000, Hastert was eventually interviewed by bank representatives.  This was in the spring of 2012, after he had made fifteen $50,000 withdrawals in about two years.  The regular, $50,000 withdrawals then ceased.  Instead, beginning in July of 2012, he began making more frequent withdrawals of just under $10,000--that is, amounts just below the reporting threshold.  Around this time the FBI began investigating.  When agents interviewed Hastert, he told them that he didn't trust the banking system and that he made the withdrawals so that his money would be safe.  The indictment quotes Hastert's answer to a question about what he used the money for: "Yeah . . . I kept the cash.  That's what I'm doing."

To me, it seems odd--or shocking--that someone who served in the House of Representatives for  twenty years, eight of those as Speaker, would be ignorant of a well-known federal law related to bank practices.  Or maybe he wasn't ignorant of the law but just thought that for some unknown reason it would not result in his unusual financial behavior attracting attention?  The real kicker, though, is the way in which, once he had to know he was being watched, he picked up the pace at which he made the withdrawals, but now limited them to amounts that would not require the banks to report.  He might just as well have taken out a full page ad in the Chicago Tribune announcing he was up to nothing good.  (Structuring withdrawals to avoid the reporting statute is itself a federal crime; so, of course, ls lying to federal agents.)

Hastert has been a Washington lobbyist since retiring from Congress in 2009.  It's evidently as lucrative as everyone says it is, for the former high-school teacher and wrestling coach had millions of dollars on deposit in different banks.  I wonder whether the federal agents asked him what happened in 2010 to make him lose his confidence in the American banking system.  Up until then, he seems to have been reasonably sure that his money was safe.

 

George Packer on America's recent war literature

George Packer reviews the literature produced by veterans of America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan here.  I think it's fair to say that there is some distance between the sentiments expressed in Memorial Day speeches and what our enlisted men and women actually experience in war.  For example, in a story called "Bodies," by Phil Klay, an Iraq veteran who worked in Mortuary Affairs returns home and, visiting a former girlfriend, finds he is unable to talk to her about his work--essentially, "processing" the corpses of the dead.  Later in the evening, a little drunk at a bar, he tells the fellow on the next stool about "the worst burn case" he ever worked on.  Not knowing what to say, the fellow tells the narrator, "I respect your experience" and the story proceeds:

I took a sip of my beer.  "I don't want you to respect what I've been through," I said.

That confused him.  "What do you want?" he said.

I didn't know.  We sat and drank beer for a bit.

"I want you to be disgusted," I said.

The story is from the collection Redeployment, which Packer thinks is the best book yet written by a veteran of one of our recent wars.

The Irish referendum

"Marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex."

The vote count on that question, put to the citizens of Ireland in yesterday's referendum, is currently being live-blogged at The Guardian's Website, here.  According to the most recent post, with more than half the vote counted, Yes is ahead, 62 to 38 per cent.  So it's not even close.  A leader of the No campaign admitted, almost soon as the first results were made public, that the only question was the final margin.  In Dublin, Yes is receiving close to 75 per cent of the vote.  In parts of the country where No was expected to win easily, Yes and No are running neck-and-neck.  A few random observations about this surprising result (surprising, I think, not on account of which side won but on account of by how much):

1. Every Irish political party endorsed Yes.  In Ireland, apparently, "conservative" means conservative, not divorced from reality.

2. On the other side, the Catholic Church was opposed, naturally.  But, from a distance, the Church's opposition seems to have been muted, even perfunctory.  Of course those at the top of the hierarchy had to be against.  But I didn't hear of any videocassettes being sent to parishioners urging, on behalf of all that is Good and Holy, a No vote.  I did hear that plenty of parish priests, instead of preaching against the referendum, only told worshipers to "vote your conscience."  Which is what they would have done anyway.  The Catholic Church was largely irrelevant and seems to know it.  Diarmuid Martin, archbishop of Dublin, told a television news reporter that the result was "a wake-up call" and that "the church needs to do a reality check."

3. It's been said so often that one almost hates to repeat it for fear of being labeled a purveyor of the CW.  Still, it is almost unbelievable how quickly public opinion on this question has changed.  Homosexuality was decriminalized in Ireland in 1993.  Maybe Mississippi is next for gay weddings!

3.5 The Nebraska state legislature voted last week to abolish capital punishment.  So, within a few days, capital punishment ended in Nebraska and same-sex marriage begun in Ireland.  I'm serious, maybe Mississippi is next!

4. My Irish wife is proud of her people.  For as long as we've been married, I've been listening to her say, "Let 'em marry!  See if they like it!"  Best wishes to all of them.  I was in Ireland once and my most vivid memory is of walking around in Dublin, sometimes stopping to look down at my tourist's street guide, but never for more than about seven seconds before I'd hear a friendly Irish voice saying, "Can I help you find your way?" I'm favorably disposed towards the Irish and they didn't make it harder to like them today.

5.  The last votes have been counted and the final result is: Yes, 1,201,607; No, 734,300.  In terms of per cent, that's 62.1 to 37.9. 

The end of Mad Men

Mad Men is over, and there is a hole in my life, at least the Sunday evenings.  Here is a collection of all my Mad Men musings.

First notice, from the middle of season two, here.

The vantage point from late in season three, here.

The view from season 4, here.

Concerning the double-length opener to season 5, here.

A few weeks into season five, here.

Anticipating season seven, part one, here.

Last week, before the finale, here.

And the last thing I have to say about it: 

Some of the happy endings seemed sort of weak, especially the one concerning Peggy and Stan, Joan's not far behind, and even Betty's looming death bringing out the best in her children.  Oh, and Pete Campbell acting decent!  The more I think about it, the more implausible it seems.  People don't generally change much after they're around three, and Pete was irredeemable at 30, so I regard with skepticism the transformation evidenced in, for example, his menschy good-bye to Peggy.

But it's all redeemed by the artful intimation that Don, having reached a point where Peggy fears he might off himself, has the idea that becomes an iconic Coca-Cola ad.  I was wrong to think he had walked away from advertising forever and that "the arc of the show is going to be from the Lucky Strike account to death from lung cancer."  At the end, lung cancer is pushed out by the World Choir of the Enlightened Young urging the consumption of sugary water.  I choose to believe Don's ad is Matthew Weiner's wry comment on all the other sweet endings.

Jeb Bush and "hypotheticals"

The phrase "sense of entitlement" is often heard when conservative politicians are discussing the moral failings of the poor.  But it might apply more aptly to the politicians themselves, who, as Jeb Bush recently demonstrated, sometimes seem to be under the impression that their desire to become president should not oblige them to answer "hypothetical" questions, like whether knowing what is now known he still thinks it was a good idea to invade Iraq.  I put the adjective "hypothetical" in quotes because it's Bush's word.  I think other choices might have been more accurate: "predictable," "lollipop."  Yet Bush didn't have a ready answer--on the first, second, third, or fourth try. 

Sometimes, I look back on my days as a teenager, and am alarmed to recall the high regard in which I held some people--certain teachers in school, for example--who now appear to me to have been manifest dolts.  But at least they were only schoolteachers, not top-tier candidates for the Presidency. 

And one more thing about "hypothetical": it's one of those words, like "rhetoric," that has for some reason gotten a bad reputation.  I guess maybe their meanings have changed without anyone having given me notice?  It seems a person practicing the art of rhetoric is now necessarily a pomaded liar, and a hypothetical question is necessarily an unfair one.  If, however, I am behind the curve on the shifting meanings of words, it still seems that, hypothetically, Bush is going to be president, and that voters might therefore wonder what that hypothetically would be like, causing them to ask some hypotheticals and, hypothetically, coming to the proper conclusion when he flubs them badly.

Mad Men: Turn on, tune in, and drop out with Don Draper

Or, at least, drop out: Sunday night's show, the last before next week's series finale, ended with Don giving away his car, and in the land of the free, you can hardly be more out of step than that.  In the prior episode, looking out a window while in a work meeting listening to a younger version of himself fill the room with bullshit, he saw a plane flying near a skyscraper.  For some reason, I guess either the plane or the bullshit, he pushed back his chair and left abruptly, never to return.  So, no job, no car, and, as far as I can tell, not much of a plan, either.  First he drove to Cleveland, to find out about his latest love interest, the waitress with the Dos Passos paperback in her apron, but when that turned into a dead end the new plan was to go wherever the next hitchhiker liked.  St. Paul!  I was kind of hoping there'd be a show set in a Ramsey County motor lodge, but instead his adventures occurred in Kansas.

The leading theme of these last few episodes seems to be the opposing outlooks of zen-like Don and the career-chasers, like Peggy and Pete. A few episodes back, Peggy came to Don for some career advice, and he asked her what she wanted.  When she named some conventional move up the ladder, he asked: "And what if you got it?"  She named something more audacious but still conventional--the first female creative director, something like that.  "And what if you get that, too?" he said, with the suggestion of a smirk.  She got mad, said she hadn't come to have him crap on her hopes and dreams, and most viewers probably were with her.  But what if she would become the first  woman creative director, or whatever?  She's still had a kid she doesn't know with Pete Campbell, whose career maneuverings make him if anything even more repugnant to everyone except his ex-wife. 

Meanwhile, Betty, having received a bleak medical diagnosis, is cool as Socrates.  She's got what you'd expect.  The arc of the show is going to be from the Lucky Strike account to death from lung cancer.

Muskets gone; Fugitive Slave Act gone; electoral college lives

With a handful of candidates having made it official, and many others touring the pancake houses of Iowa and New Hampshire, it's only a matter of time now till a certain crazed subset of the population begins hanging on every word as Wolf Blitzer quizzes John King about "the latest raft of polls from the battleground states," while, over on one of the rival channels, a couple of other know-it-alls carry on professorially about the views of "Mormons in Nevada" and "auto workers in northwestern Ohio," or whatever group of boutique voters will be holding in their hands the fate of the republic come November, 2016.

Boy, I can hardly wait.

Abolishing the Rube Goldberg machine known as the electoral college might give Wolf & Co. less to talk about.  Could it happen?  Here is the ingenious plan that offers the most hope.  My sense, however, is that as usual our friends on the right are deeply suspicious of the light.  When the topic at hand is the electoral college, and what a load of petrified lizard shit it is, the elephant in the room is the election of 2000.  Would admitting that the electoral college should suffer in the twenty-first century the same fate suffered in the nineteenth by muskets and the Fugitive Slave Act be tantamount to confessing that it would have been better for everyone if Gore had gotten the Presidency in addition to the most votes?  Then they must defend the electoral college!

I think Republicans are wrong, however, if they think that the electoral college gives them an edge.  Sometimes it might.  Obviously in 2000 a vote for Bush, on average, counted more than a vote for Gore.  If you work out the math, there are in Wyoming usually about 240,000 voters who determine the outcome of 3 electoral votes--80,000 voters per electoral vote.  Meanwhile, in California, about 12.6 million voters determine the outcome of 55 electoral votes, which comes to around 229,000 voters per electoral vote awarded.  A ballot cast in Wyoming therefore weighs almost three times as much as one cast in California, and we all know which state is the Democratic one and which favors the Republicans.  Generally speaking, Democratic voters live in and around big cities, which are necessarily in populous states, and the electoral college therefore dilutes their power.  Advantage Republicans.

But the electoral college has another terrible feature, one that aids Democrats: the state-by-state, all-or-nothing allocation of electoral votes.  Republicans in California and New York and Democrats in Idaho and Utah really have no voice at all in presidential elections (unless they are rich and give large sums of cash).  Since their vote doesn't help their candidate win a single electoral vote, they might as well not vote at all.  And since there are a lot more Republicans in California and New York than Democrats in Idaho and Utah, the electoral college disproportionately disenfranchises Republicans.  Advantage Democrats.

That the second terrible feature helps Democrats more than the first terrible feature helps Republicans may be seen in the election models created by Nate Silver and others. For example, Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog placed the probability of a "split outcome" in the most recent presidential race--one candidate wins the national popular vote while the other prevails in the electoral college--at just over 7%.  The chance of Obama winning more votes but "losing" the election was, according to Silver, 2.5%, while for Romney the corresponding figure was 4.8%.  Thus the Republican was almost twice as likely to get screwed by the electoral college. 

Here's another way to analyze the partisan advantage bestowed by the electoral college.  List the states Obama  won, and their number of electoral votes, in descending order of margin of victory: that is, the District (3), followed by Hawaii (4), Vermont (3), and New York (29), through such large prizes as California (55), Illinois (20), and Pennsylvania (20), and ending with Virginia (13), Ohio (18), and Florida, where Obama eked out a win by less than1%, (29).  Now, starting at the top, sum the electoral votes, and note where Obama crossed the 270 finish line.  It's at Colorado, fourth from the bottom, which he carried by 5.4%.  Since Obama defeated Romney by four per cent of the national  vote (51.1 to 47.1), this suggests that a uniform shift toward Romney of from between 4 and 5 per cent of the vote would have put him over the top in the popular vote while leaving Obama as the electoral college victor.

It is odd, then, that the list of states to have joined the National Popular Vote pact, which would guaranty that the winner of the popular vote becomes President, includes only those of the deepest hue of blue.  Here they are: Vermont, Maryland, Washington, Illinois, New Jersey, the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, California, Hawaii, Rhode Island, and New York.  Eleven electoral-vote-owning entities, and on that list of Obama states I described above every single one of them is within the top fourteen.  It is as if no one has figured out which party benefits from the electoral college.  Democrats are in favor of a reform that  would place them at a small though measurable disadvantage.  Meanwhile, Republicans are missing a chance to support a high-minded reform--one man, one vote!--that would also, by the way, give them a slightly better chance of winning the Presidency.  (Instead, they devote their energy to figuring out how to keep younger, poorer, darker-skinned citizens from voting, thereby confirming everyones' worst suspicions about them.)

The graphic at the top of this post shows, state-by-state, the number of general-election campaign events hosted in 2012 wherein at least one of the top-of-the-ticket candidates--Obama, Romney, Biden, Ryan--spoke.  Note that California, by far the most populous state in the country, wasn't visited.  Neither was the second biggest, Texas.  But they weren't alone.  The voters in 38 of the 50 states would have had to cross a state line to see, in person, one of the candidates making his case.  If you live in, say, Montana, you'd have to travel many hundreds of miles to see one of the candidates.  But, then, if you live anywhere in Montana, you'd be wasting your time, because it didn't really matter how you decided to vote, or if you voted at all.  It mattered in Ohio, Virginia, and Florida, which is why those three states hosted well over half of all the events that occurred.  Your vote mattered if you live in New Hampshire or Iowa but not if you live in California or Texas.  You can tell by the itineraries of the candidates which voters chose the President and which ones were participating in an empty ritual.

The map also suggests that a remedy is at hand.  It shouldn't surprise anyone that the eleven states to have signed the National Popular Vote compact received a sum total of zero visits during the last campaign.  These eleven possess 165 electoral votes, which means states with 105 more are needed to give everyone a meaningful presidential ballot.  And it's not as if there aren't good candidates--there are 27 more states that neither campaign deemed worthy of a visit that have not joined.  Among those 27: Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Missouri, Arizona, and Indiana.  If the mainly Republican state legislators in those states could catch a whiff of the coffee, we'd just about be there.  Add Minnesota, which hosted a single "rally"  when Paul Ryan spoke at an airport hangar while his plane was refueling on its way to a real "battleground," and the task would be achieved.  There'd still be more than twenty completely ignored states outside the pact.