Eric The Blue

Time begins on Opening Day

Whew!  If I had cared very much about who won that college game between Purdue and Virginia, I'd still be too shaky to type.  A great game, except for the officiating.  The players are better at playing than the referees are at their job, but whatevs.  Probably stands to reason as I'm sure the refs don't work at it as hard.  

Lots of really fantastic games in this year's tournament.  Had my 11-year-old, who usually disdains "sportzing," yelling along with me the other night when Purdue beat Tennessee in another overtime thriller.  She likes it when a long 3-pointer is answered by another, and then a thundering dunk at the other end, like heavyweights exchanging body blows.  But I have some work to do before she appreciates a team that will lock you down, like Texas Tech.

Today's region finals were both between a #1 seed (Gonzaga, Virginia) and a 3-seed (Texas Tech, Purdue).  One of tomorrow's is between a 5-seed (Auburn) and a 2-seed (Kentucky) and the other matches a 1-seed (Duke) against a 2-seed (Michigan State).  Not a lot of upsets in the tournament, as usual.

Didn't the major league baseball season formerly start after the college basketball season was over?  I love baseball, but it would be okay with me if the Twins did not have home games in March.  The game is meant for hot weather, which is why St Louis is arguably the best baseball town in America.  The game's different when it's cold, not what it's meant to be.  As a lad, I read Ted Williams's My Turn At Bat, his as-told-to sports hero autobiography, an above average representative of the genre, and I remember him saying that he probably wouldn't have hit .400 in 1941 if it weren't for an injury that kept him out of the lineup for most of April.  

The Twins' and Indians' hitters appear to feel similarly, as they've played two games against each other now, both won by the team that managed to score twice.  The Tigers have it worse.  They won their first game, 2-0 in ten innings, and have since suffered back-to-back shutouts.  After today's game, their manager, the quotable Ron Gardenhire, was asked when he would start worrying about the team's lack of run production.  "When you guys leave the room," he said.  "I'm gonna cry and tear the pictures off the wall. I'm gonna drink heavily."

I complain about games in March but having six months of this ahead of us is a prospect to relish.  Checking my memory about Ted Williams's 1941 season, I see now that he did indeed have hardly any at-bats in April.  I also learn that back then an RBI sacrifice fly counted against your batting average, like any other fly out.  Today, it's not a charged at-bat, and, applying the current rule to Williams's 1941 season, his batting average rises from .406 to .419.  The summer of '41 is also the one in which DiMaggio hit in 56 consecutive games, compiling a batting average of .408 during his streak, which lasted from May 15 to July 16.  Over the same stretch of calendar days, Williams batted .412.  DiMaggio won the MVP Award even though Williams led the league in (besides batting average) home runs, runs scored, walks, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage.  DiMaggio's Yankees won the pennant, which probably helped him, and, as the MVP is determined by ballot of baseball writers, Williams's combative relationship with the Boston beat reporters played a role, too.  In two other seasons, 1942 and 1947, Williams finished second in the MVP balloting despite having won the Triple Crown.  Wtf, right?  Here are Williams's numbers for those seasons compared to the MVP winner--Joe Gordon in '42 and DiMaggio in '47 (MVP winner/Williams): 

1942: Runs (88/141); home runs (18/36); RBI (103/137); batting average (.352/.356); hits (173/186); doubles (29/34); on-base percentage (.409/.499)

1947: Runs (97/125); home runs (20/32); RBI (97/114); batting average (.315/.343); hits (168/181); doubles (31/40); on-base percentage (.391/.499)

Michael Avenatti and happiness hunting

A possibly overlooked detail in the latest installment to the sad saga of Michael Avenatti concerns the likelihood that his attempt to shake down Nike, for a payment to him of a sum north of $20 million, was based on his knowledge of genuine perfidy on the part of the company.  For his criminal scheme was a suicide mission if Nike was pure.  He had to calculate that the company, facing a choice between

(a) paying him more than $20 million and persisting with its profitable cheating; or

(b) inviting scrutiny of itself by calling the FBI

would choose (a).  But it seems he miscalculated.  Nike placed a call to Johnny Law, because possibly $20-some million was too much?  The company employs squads of lawyers who, like Avenatti, graduated at the top of their class, and it plausibly can defend itself for less while at the same time closing a "business line" that was proving to be more trouble than it was worth.  I feel more sure about how Avenatti calculated than how Nike calculated, but what I'm most sure about is that there is no one to cheer for.  

Since, however, Avenatti is Avenatti, an individual who isn't hiding out within a corporation, he's a more inviting target for us moralists.  Why'd he do it?  To me, demanding more than $20 million seems, as a criminal strategy, excessive and rash--desperate, actually.  For just a single million, Nike might well have knuckled under, and it still would have been a helluva payday.  Suppose you earn $500,000 per year, on average, over a 40-year career.  From here down below, that sounds like a pretty good living, but, over your whole working life, you still wouldn't make as much as Avenatti was telling Nike to transfer to him if it didn't want him talking about its business practices in press conferences.

I suppose Avenatti might have asked for the amount he needed, considering his habits and "lifestyle."  In that case, however, the problem is still to account for excess.  My question, I guess, is the one from Wall Street, "How much is enough?"  What does Michael Avenatti need?  What would make him happy?  His chosen line of work is celebrity lawyer, a group that no doubt self-selects for being motivated by wealth and fame.  But he had attained these things and was still shouting at Nike's top officers, f-you this, f-you that, pay me $22 million or else--something like that.  One forms the idea that if they had paid he would have taken a day off to celebrate and then continued with the same desperate life until he either died or, as appears to have happened earlier this week, suffered a ruinous event.

Nothing would have satisfied Avenatti.  He started out wanting to be rich and famous and, having attained it, discovered he wanted more.  Psychologists have developed a vocabulary to account for this kind of behavior, the key concepts being what they call "hedonic adaptation" and "the hedonic treadmill": instead of enjoying the weather on the mountaintop, people become immediately acclimated, and adjust their expectations ever upward.  The result is all this feverish activity, a desperate chase after contented bliss, which, notwithstanding many repeated successes, keeps retreating beyond their grasp.  Though they lacked the lingo of modern psychology, the stoic philosophers, whom I described briefly here, had the same idea.  They urged their auditors to withdraw from the mad chase.  Happiness can be attained only by indirection. It might settle on you if you could only stop striving to attain it.  One recognizes an affinity with much religious teaching, especially those of the East. 

On the other hand, it's not as if Socrates or Jesus or Spinoza or Henry David Thoreau disagree with the Buddha about the undesirability of a life devoted to cupidity and the acquisition of fame.  That their supposedly revered teachings are, as we say, "more honored in the breach" must be attributed to some fairly potent force, like maybe our biological selves: going back in time, discontent and unhappiness correlate with promiscuity, so those are the genes we're stuck with.  Have to tamp them down with philosophy!

At the movies: The Favourite

The Riverview Theater, still going strong about 38 years after I first darkened its door, for a showing of Ordinary People, must be working the Oscar buzz because, walking out with my favorite teenager after last night's 7:00 screening of The Favourite, the line had formed for Bohemian Rhapsody at 9:15.  Said favorite teen was fortunate to be accompanied by a mature adult as, from what I saw in The Favourite and what I've heard about Bohemian Rhapsody, there's somewhat more gay sex in the early 18th-century costume drama than in the film featuring Freddie Mercury.  

And they're girl gay!  Including the queen of England!  The ridiculous fellows are all in the background as the power girls work the sides of their triangle of love, power, and influence, betraying one another and evoking the cliché "not an ounce of pity."  It's plenty funny, however.  The horny queen (played by the Oscar-winner, Olivia Colman) has decisions of state to make but her bigger problem is the gout.  One of the bits of repartee I can remember occurs when one of the ridiculous fellows accosts one of the other anti-heroines, the one played by Emma Stone, in her chambers:

Her: Are you here to seduce me or rape me?

Him: I'm a gentleman!

Her: [Sighing as she reclines, adjusting her dress] Rape then.

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster), with Rachel Weisz in the third starring role.  Highly recommended.  I noticed that Jonathan Swift is dropped into a line of dialog--it was his time, but, more than that, the movie recalls his pitiless laughter:

This Maxim more than all the rest
Is thought too base for human Breast:
In all Distresses of our Friends
We first consult our private Ends. . . .

Dear honest Ned is in the Gout,
Lies rack'd with Pain, and you without:
How patiently you hear him groan!
How glad the Case is not your own! . . .

Vain human Kind! Fantastick Race!
Thy various Follies, who can trace?
Self-love, Ambition, Envy, Pride,
Their Empire in our Hearts divide:
Give others Riches, Power, Station,
'Tis all on me an Usurpation.

"Better than expected"

I think my favorite reaction to the Barr gloss of the Mueller Report goes to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who said: "It's better than I expected."

It's better than I expected, too.  My expectations were based not on what I knew happened, but on my supposition that Trump and his team must know what happened, and Team Trump was not waiting serenely for Mueller to reach the conclusion that they are now saying he reached.  It's not surprising that I'm surprised but it is surprising that Rudy is surprised--that the news is so good.   Is he:

1. Revealing himself to be an inept P.R. spinner? 

2. Letting drop that Mueller didn't get to the bottom of it?

3. Tacitly acknowledging that Barr's summary of Mueller's Report is as friendly to the president as is possible without leaving him (Barr) open to the charge of lying--in the event we eventually get to see the Report ourselves?

Only (1) is true for sure, but all three could be.  If (2) isn't true, the likeliest explanation relates to the distinction between (a lack of) criminal behavior and (a surfeit of) terrible behavior.  No. 3 suggests a deliberate strategy of "defining the narrative" before the public knows the facts, and is also consistent with the goal of blurring the aforementioned distinction in order to skate away, shouting, "Witch hunt!"

Two investigations

Journalistic accounts of the Mueller investigation, and discussion of the degree to which the final report will be made public, has reminded me of another investigation--the one into the conduct of John Nienstedt, the former archbishop of the Twin Cities Archdiocese of the Catholic Church.  With regard to Mueller, a lot of people are saying that the good news is that the system worked, he was able without interference to pursue his investigation to its conclusion, and has now issued a report on his findings that will eventually be made public.  I hope that all turns out to be true.  It's now in the hands of the attorney general, who was selected by Trump himself, so perhaps the appropriate attitude to take is inscribed on the license plates of Missourians.

Possibly Nienstedt is a better operator than Trump, or Rome more corrupt than Washington, D.C., because what Trump might have wished for was achieved by Nienstedt: when the investigation got hot, it was called off.  The best summaries of which I'm aware, this one from MPR News, augmented here by National Catholic Reporter, are damning, months or years old, and up-to-date.  The investigation was not completed, what had been discovered before it was terminated has not been made public, and it appears there will be no further developments.  To all my boyhood friends who fascinated me with descriptions of what you'd tell priests inside the confessional: if you're still practicing, the contents of your offering envelopes hard at work!

On the other hand, you could argue that, for the cover up to succeed, at least Nienstedt had to resign.  I think I could accept similar terms for the investigation into Trump.

Rich Lowry on the Electoral College

Scientists, when reporting on the results of their inquiries and the conclusions to be drawn therefrom, are required by the norms of scientific discourse to give an account of the strongest argument that could be advanced against the view they are espousing.  That's pretty clearly not the case regarding political discourse!  But suppose it were.  If the topic is the Electoral College, and I favor abolition, so that the president is elected instead by direct popular ballot, where might I find the strongest case for retaining the College in its current form?  Maybe in an article in Politico from the pen of the editor of National Review, by its own admission the "leading conservative magazine and website covering news, politics, current events, and culture with detailed analysis and commentary"?  Well, that would be this.  Let's see what Mr Rich Lowry has to say.

The argument, if that's what you want to call it, begins in the ad hominem vein.

Elizabeth Warren, the pointy end of the spear of Democratic radicalism, has called for the end of the Electoral College.

If Warren is accurately described here, then Lowry is the barrel of an assault rifle that only a reactionary wingnut worried about size would purchase.  Actually, it's not "radical" to think that the winner of a presidential election should be the candidate who, from sea to shining sea, and including Hawaii and Alaska, gets the most votes.  That's why polling shows that strong majorities of Americans favor the direct popular election of the president.  This would be impossible without Republican support.  Here is an editorial, "Delaware Republicans Should Support National Popular Vote," co-authored by the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and the former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party.  Bob Dole has spoken on the floor of the Senate in favor of the direct popular election of the president.  Though it looks as if the Republican party now belongs to Trump, it's not only former chairmen and former party leaders who can add two and two and get something pretty near four:  in my home state, for example, several Republican legislators have signed on to bills that would enroll Minnesota in the National Popular Vote interstate compact.  Here is an editorial co-authored by one of them, Pat Garofalo.

Lowry continues:

Her statement elicited the support of other 2020 candidates.  The same people who complain daily about Donald Trump violating norms are now openly advocating eliminating the Electoral College and packing the Supreme Court.

I'm going to go out on a limb and postulate that Lowry thinks increasing the number of justices on the Supreme Court, and then nominating judges of your own tribe to fill the new slots, is even more problematic than the Electoral College.  Borrow some of the taint, therefore, and smear it around.  The topic at hand, however, is the Electoral College.  I think I hear Lowry saying that someone who believes, for example, that Trump should have released his tax returns, and placed his financial assets in a blind trust, and not lied about having business interests in Russia, is barred from simultaneously believing that the Electoral College is a rickety old Rube Goldberg machine that should be retired from active duty.  But there's no reason those propositions can't all be true, and, if you think they are, why not say so?  Lowry continues:

The Constitution, where the workings of the Electoral College are set out at length, is impossible to change on a partisan basis.  So the Electoral College isn't going anywhere soon, although opponents are attempting an end run through a compact of states.

I may or may not understand what the first sentence means, and it may or may not be true, but it surely is irrelevant, since a political liberal who thinks the Electoral College is an undemocratic and superannuated mechanism that currently favors the conservative party could very well be correct on all counts, the former reasons being sufficient to call for the "end run" mentioned in the second sentence.  The mildly pejorative "end run" permits Lowry to suggest, without stating, that the interstate compact is unconstitutional, which spares him the trouble of explaining why it's unconstitutional. 

He drones on:

The disproportion of this effort is notable.  In 2016, Democrats rigged their nominating process in favor of a radioactive candidate who was uninterested in appealing to white working-class voters and operated on a deeply flawed view of the electoral map--and yet they blame her loss on a mechanism for electing presidents that has existed, with slight modification, since the adoption of the Constitution.

The Electoral College may be "impossible to change on a partisan basis," but that is the only basis, evidently, on which Lowry will defend it.  Hillary's strategy for winning the Electoral College was flawed, therefore the Electoral College is good.  Is it possible to imagine that Lowry is saying something more, or different, than that?  

Democrats want to beat Donald Trump and win the presidency going forward.  There are simpler, less far-reaching expedients within their grasp before trying to dump the Electoral College:  Nominate a more appealing candidate.  Find a way to pick up a little more support in the Rust Belt and Upper Midwest.  Moderate on culture issues.  Drive up African American turnout.

Search these sentences in vain for any account of why the Electoral College is a good way of electing the president.  The first sentence is roughly analogous to, "My sister is a girl."  The rest is just amplification of the Democrats' alleged deficiencies.  Their candidate was not appealing.  (And Trump?)  They should moderate on culture issues. (Like the Republicans?)  It is not enough to win more votes in the land, they must win more votes of Americans on whom the Electoral College bestows the most power.  (He is unconsciously making my case.)  For some reason, Republicans are not exhorted to "pick up a little more support" from African Americans--no, it's Democrats who must "pick up a little more support" from whites while at the same time driving up African American turnout.  Lowry's tactics are like Trump's--full of holes and, what is worse, off point.

What else does Lowry have?

The case against the Electoral College is, first, as Elizabeth Warren said, that it supposedly ensures that some votes don't matter: In heavily blue or red states, voters on the other side are effectively disenfranchised.  

This isn't true, though.  All votes are counted toward the outcome in every state.  Voters from Republican, rural areas in California, for instance, aren't disregarded; they are simply outnumbered.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.  Voters "on the other side" are effectively disenfranchised, because it's electoral votes that elect the president, and their ballot did not help their preferred candidate win a single one.  Moreover, they knew, if they reside in a "heavily blue or red state," that their ballot for the inevitable state loser would prove worthless before they marked it.  And it's not just voters "on the other side" whose ballot is devalued.  You're a Californian who voted for Hillary?  That's nice, but she would have won 55 electoral votes without you and a million others.  Give your ballot some heft by relocating to Wisconsin!  I guess we're supposed to esteem a system that makes large scale migration a viable electoral strategy.  Instead of paying people to vote, pay voters to move.  

Yes, Rich, Republican voters in California are outnumbered.  That's why it has a Democratic governor and a Democratic state legislature.  The problem is that Trump voters were outnumbered in the country and he's president anyway.  You are avoiding the question about the wisdom of a system that makes such a result possible.

But keep at it!

If it is the considered progressive view that this is tantamount to disenfranchisement, California could immediately mitigate the problem by splitting its electoral votes by congressional district the way Nebraska and Maine do.  This would require no change to the U.S. Constitution, or elaborate schemes.  Of course, California is loath to give up any of its solidly Democratic electoral votes.

Suppose it's your "considered view" that, as a Californian, you have been "disenfranchised," since basic math shows your presidential ballot weighs less than one marked in Michigan, Rhode Island, or Wyoming.  The obvious remedy is the direct popular election of the president.  Lowry, however, proposes to tinker with the design of the Rube Goldberg machine, bypass a ramp but insert a new pulley.  He says that if Californians don't like being disenfranchised they should apportion their electoral votes by congressional district, as Maine and Nebraska do.  But this is no remedy at all.  In the 2016 election, Trump, though he was outpolled in the country by almost 3 million, carried 230 congressional districts to Clinton's 205.  It's bad enough that Republicans have gerrymandered the congressional map in order to boost their representation in the House.  Should they be further rewarded for this chicanery in a presidential election?  No, California should join the National Popular Vote movement's interstate compact.  (It has.)  

I could go on.  Lowry sure does.  I think I'm only about half through quoting his dopey essay, but the rest just makes it longer, not better, and I have basketball games to watch.  Sayonara.

Three more states join popular vote compact

 

There's been news lately relating to the National Popular Vote (NPV) movement.  This is the interstate compact that would ensure that the winner of a presidential election is the candidate receiving the most popular votes across the whole country.  There is a misconception that the compact abolishes the electoral college.  It would be more accurate to say that it involves individual states reforming the manner in which they distribute their electoral votes.  The Constitution establishes the electoral college but is silent on the question of how the individual electors within the states should vote.  There has rarely been uniformity among the states on this matter.  Currently, 48 states give all their electoral votes to the statewide winner.  The other two--Maine and Nebraska--award them by congressional district.  So, for example, in the last presidential election there was a different result in Maine's two congressional districts--Trump carried one, Clinton carried the other, and Clinton won more votes statewide.  Trump thus netted one electoral vote, for the district he carried, while Clinton added three, one for the district she won and two more for winning more votes across the whole state.  In the first presidential election, only three of the states awarded their electoral votes according to the winner-take-all arrangement currently employed in 48 states.

Under the terms of NPV, states simply agree to amend, as they sometimes have in the past, how their electors will vote.  Specifically, the states within the compact agree that they will award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, but only once the states within the compact possess at least 270 electoral votes, the minimum needed to win.  You see that the electoral college isn't "abolished."  The winner of a presidential election is still the candidate who wins at least 270 electoral votes.  But, under the terms of the compact, the electoral college winner will necessarily be the winner of the national vote.  It's not "illegal" or "unconstitutional"--states are simply exercising their authority to work out the details relating to their slate of electors.  

The recent news is that three more states are poised to join the compact.  Indeed one already has: Colorado.  In Delaware and New Mexico, legislation to join the compact has now passed both houses of the state legislature and is headed to the governor's desk for signature.  Both governors have indicated their support.  Once the respective bills have been signed, the alphabetical roster of compact states, with the number of their electoral votes, will be as represented in the below table.  Keep in mind that the compact takes effect when the electoral vote tally of its members reaches 270.

STATE	EVs	EV TOTAL
California	55	55
Colorado	9	64
Connecticut	7	71
Delaware	3	74
D.C.	3	77
Hawaii	4	81
Illinois	20	101
Maryland	10	111
Massachusetts	11	122
New Jersey	14	136
New Mexico	5	141
New York	29	170
Rhode Island	4	174
Vermont	3	177
Washington	12	189

So, fifteen states (counting D.C.), with 189 electoral votes, meaning there are 81 more needed.  Scanning the list, it isn't hard to detect a partisan slant: the compact members are all blue or bluish purple states, and they are all within the same Venn circle as the Clinton states.  There are six Clinton states, with 44 electoral votes, still outside the compact: Maine (4), Nevada (6), New Hampshire (4), Oregon (7), Virginia (13), and Minnesota (10).  Three of these--Maine, Nevada, and Oregon--have a Democratic governor and Democratic majorities in both houses of the state legislature.  It seems these are the likeliest candidates to join, and, if all six of them did, there would be only 37 more electoral votes needed to activate the compact.  It's a hard slog but you can see how it could happen.  Texas alone has 38 electoral votes, as do Pennsylvania and Ohio together.  Florida and Wisconsin together have 39.

The main bar to activation of the compact is the difficulty of adding to its membership any Republican-leaning states.  In two of the last five presidential elections, the current system has delivered the White House to a Republican candidate who was outpolled in the country by the Democrat.  Calculations of partisan advantage therefore dictate opposition to the compact from red states.  Of course, they find other high-minded sounding reasons to oppose it.  That these reasons are so easily refuted is more evidence, if any was needed, that the real reason pertains to partisan advantage.  See the above video for a methodical takedown of perhaps the most commonly advanced objection to awarding the presidency to the winner of the national popular vote.  

I've written before about the swing-state phenomenon, the most poisonous fruit of the electoral college tree.  Unless you live in one of these "battlegrounds," you have, practically speaking, no voice in a presidential election*, which is why the candidates never visit your state--they're too busy courting swing-state voters, the only ones who matter.  Were the NPV compact activated, there'd be no swing states, and a vote would be a vote would be a vote would be a vote, no matter the state in which it was cast.  Ballots would all weigh the same, and if your preferred presidential candidate received 65,845,063 votes you could gaze reverently on that terminal 3 and consider that, but for you, it would have been a 2 instead.  Your vote counted. 

Maybe you tell yourself that story now, but you'd be deceiving yourself.

_________________

*Assuming you can't afford to donate large sums of cash.

UPDATE: Just saw this Law Boy tweet, which sums things up nicely:

 

sorry electoral college haters, but if we get rid of longstanding American institutions just because they're dumb as shit, make no sense, and were created to preserve slavery, then we're not going to have any longstanding American institutions left

— Law Boy, Esq. (@The_Law_Boy) March 19, 2019

Four for Sunday

1. No doubt I'm touchy, but those signs displayed prominently on grocery store shelves announcing, for example, "3 for $10!" annoy the shit out of me.  You can regard this as a very modest public service announcement if you don't know that by the unpromulgated terms of this "deal" the first item costs $3.33, as does the second, and that the third, if you choose to buy it, costs $3.34.  Let me say, in order to justify being upset over a penny, that people generally agree that it's bad "deliberately to mislead others," occasionally called "lying" by the unmannered, but for some reason you get a pass if you lie in order to advance the business interests of your employer.  Call me a bad word, "socialist" or "Marxist" or whatever, but it seems the purpose of the corporation is largely to dissipate responsibility of the moral-legal variety, as evidenced by the fact that no Wells Fargo executives are in prison, since "technically speaking" they probably didn't break any laws, just as, I suppose, 3-for-$10 isn't "technically speaking" a lie, since if you buy three it really does cost ten dollars.  But these kinds of evasions and equivocations don't work if you're getting high in north Minneapolis.

2. I don't think Instagram users get enough credit for being attractive, affluent, and kind to cute animals.  Kudos!

3. I see that Rush Limbaugh thinks the massacre in New Zealand might be a false flag operation.  Is he too far gone himself to realize that's nuts?  Or does he just know the mind of his audience of millions?  In a similar vein, our president is this morning by tweet urging Fox to reinstate Jeanine Pirro, their house nut-job who thinks hijabs (pronounced heeeeeee-JOB) are antithetical to our Constitution. You know you're "out there" when Fox bumps your Saturday night show in order to rerun "Scandalous: The Trial of William Kennedy Smith"--an evergreen of the documentary genus, admittedly.  "Bring her back!" tweets President Trump, the day after his vanilla tweet expressing sorrow &c over the massacre of Muslims in New Zealand.  He should go to church if only to inhibit his tweeting for an hour or so.  

4. I think at this point I support the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, for president. I won't learn to spell his last name till he wins a primary, but his first name is Pete, and I believe his last name is pronounced "Buddha-judge."  My enthusiasm was kindled when I read that he had taught himself Norwegian--because he'd been impressed by the only work of a certain Norwegian author that's been translated into English and wanted to read more of his stuff.  I'm Norwegian, and it's my dad's first language, so maybe my regard is explained by "identity politics," but seriously, if you're looking for the-opposite-of-Trump isn't an interest in books and ideas and languages a more compelling credential even than being a sentient, sane woman with some melanin in her skin?  Pete B is moreover a gay former Rhodes Scholar who served a tour of duty in Afghanistan.  There might not be a white guy in America more unlike Trump.

Some election metrics

In case either of my readers was wondering how I happened to know that Trump carried Iowa by more than he carried Texas, it's because I had just compiled the below table, which lists the states--strictly speaking, electoral vote possessing entities--in order of their Trump friendliness, as measured by the percentage of the popular vote margin in the 2016 election, from the state he won by the most (Wyoming) down to the District of Columbia, which he lost by almost as much as is arithmetically possible.  I've also noted the electoral vote allotment of each state as well as a running total of the winner's tally, starting with the most lopsided result and accruing as the list converges from above and below on the narrowest outcomes.  If you're interested in this kind of stuff, I think you'll enjoy scanning the table.  I have a few comments below. 

State	Trump's % Margin	EV	Running Total EV
Wyoming	46.3	3	3
West Virginia	41.7	5	8
Oklahoma	36.4	7	15
North Dakota	35.8	3	18
Idaho	31.7	4	22
Kentucky	29.8	8	30
South Dakota	29.8	3	33
Alabama	27.7	9	42
Arkansas	26.9	6	48
Tennessee	26.0	11	59
Nebraska	25.0	5	64
Kansas	20.5	6	70
Montana	20.2	3	73
Louisiana	19.7	8	81
Indiana	19.0	11	92
Missouri	18.5	10	102
Utah	17.9	6	108
Mississippi	17.8	6	114
Alaska	14.7	3	117
South Carolina	14.2	9	126
Maine 2nd cong. dist.	10.0	1	127
Iowa	9.4	6	133
Texas	9.0	38	171
Ohio	8.1	18	189
Georgia	5.1	16	205
North Carolina	3.6	15	220
Arizona	3.5	11	231
Florida	1.2	29	260
Wisconsin	0.8	10	270
Pennsylvania	0.7	20	290
Michigan	0.3	16	306
New Hampshire	-0.3	4	232
Minnesota	-1.5	10	228
Nevada	-2.4	6	218
Maine	-2.7	3	212
Colorado	-4.9	9	209
Virginia	-5.4	13	200
New Mexico	-8.3	5	187
Oregon	-11.0	7	182
Delaware	-11.3	3	175
Connecticut	-13.7	7	172
New Jersey	-14.0	14	165
Rhode Island	-15.5	4	151
Washington	-15.7	12	147
Illinois	-16.8	20	135
New York	-22.5	29	115
Vermont	-26.4	3	86
Maryland	-26.4	10	83
Massachusetts	-27.2	11	73
California	-30.0	55	62
Hawaii	-32.2	4	7
District of Columbia	-88.7	3	3

I highlighted the Wisconsin row because it's where Trump reached 270 electoral votes, the number needed to win in the electoral college.  One way of measuring the bias of the electoral college is to compare the result in the "tipping point state"--Wisconsin, in 2016--to the national result.  Trump lost the national popular vote by 2.1% (45.9 to 48.0).  He won the tipping point state by 0.8%.  Trump therefore would have prevailed in the electoral college, and been elected president, even if there had been a uniform 0.75% shift toward his Democratic opponent.  The electoral college, then, favored Trump by

2.1 + 0.75 = 2.85%

in the 2016 election.

The preponderance of one-sided results is striking.  Although the national vote was close, in 33 of the 50 states the winner prevailed by a double-digit margin.  In 6 of the other 17, the margin was greater than 5%.  Since the whole game is to get to 270, the electoral college makes 40 or more states irrelevant.  Trump won 6 states by 3.6% or less, and those 6 states have 101 electoral votes.  If you live in one of them, you're going to know in the fall of 2020 that there's an election campaign going on!  If you live in one of the other 44, your vote, if you vote, will have little or no effect on the result.  

In the table, our country's rural-urban political divide is evident in the escalating manner in which Trump's electoral vote tally mounts.  He won 30 states, 20 of them by a double-digit margin, and a total of 306 electoral votes.  But he netted only 127 electoral votes from those 20 double-digit victories.  Well over half of his electoral votes came from his 10 single-digit wins.  States with large areas and small populations are overwhelmingly Republican.  If I had to gauge from a single yes-no question whether someone voted for Trump or Clinton, I think I'd ask whether the population of the county they live in is more than 100,000.  (Assuming I had to ask by, say, email, so that I had no idea of the respondent's race or gender, and assuming also that such questions as "Did you vote for Trump?" are out of bounds.)  The map at the top of this post, depicting the result of the election by congressional district, is a similarly dramatic illustration of the divide.  Since the districts all have about the same population, the rural ones are large in area, and the urban ones barely more than a dot.  The map is perhaps 80% red by area, but, ballot-by-ballot, the result was more blue than red.  Look at Minnesota, for instance.  Clinton won the state.

Downtown

When I was working, I spoke almost every day with clients who talked as if traveling to downtown Minneapolis was an odyssey that they'd ruminated over for hours, if not days, before bravely setting out to execute their meticulous plan, navigating the most propitious roadways, parking their car some place  they'd settled on in advance, and prosecuting a second errand before its time in order to delay their next parlous journey into the city.   I suspected they might have made inquiries about whether a resident of Wayzata, or wherever, needed to present a valid passport somewhere along the downtown exit ramp from I-394. 

I'm laughing at myself now, because this morning I had to meet with a guy in his downtown office, and I wasn't too pleased about it.  What a hassle!  I took the bus--I knew not to drive--and was in the flow of the latter part of rush hour.  Nothing impresses on you that superannuated sensation like a bus load of people who are plainly on their way to work.  I imagined them thinking to themselves that they're paying into the social security trust fund for the likes of me.  Once disembarked, I wandered aimlessly like the rube I now am, marveling to myself at how "downtown has sure changed!"  Of course I'd expected transportation complications, and, since there hadn't been any, I had time to kill.  The weather was too wretched to keep walking around in so I entered the public library.

I've been a nerdy bookworm for about 55 years and the downtown public library is very familiar to me.  It's always been a hang out for people who have no particular place to be, and that's still so.  I rode the elevator with an older man who had one of those wheeled walkers, quite an elaborate one with wire shelves in the vertical space between the grips and wheels.  These shelves were loaded with what appeared to be his worldly possessions.  A duffel bag, half unzipped because overstuffed, revealed articles of clothing.  When I asked what floor he wanted, he answered with more volume and force than I'd been expecting: Two!  I don't know what the attractions of level two are but the overall attraction is clearly the long rows of computer stations in the big open areas in the middle of all the floors.  Internet access!  A half hour after the library had opened, there were so few unoccupied stations that I guessed the computers at the empty ones might be broken.  

I went to the philosophy section on level four.  I've gotten interested in the Roman Stoic philosophers--Seneca, Epictetus, Musonius, and Marcus Aurelius--and I thought I'd see whether any of their works were checked in.  Nope.  The Stoics held that people would be happier, more content, if they could learn to want only things they already had.  They would have approved of your mom if, like mine, she told you that your own troubles might not seem like much if you once in awhile bothered to consider what other people have to endure.  Killing time at the public library before meeting with your financial guy is an invitation to take mom's advice.  It occurs to me now that maybe that's why I thought to look on the open shelves for The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius or a selection of Seneca's letters.

The financial guy--I bet he doesn't go to the public library.  Lots of graphs and smooth chit-chat.  After three minutes I could hardly hear him over the AM radio of my youth playing in my head.

Money, get away.
Get a good job with more pay and you're okay.
Money, it's a gas.
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.
New car, caviar, four-star daydream:
Think I'll buy me a football team.

Money, get back.
I'm all right, Jack, keep your hands off of my stack.
Money, it's a hit.
Don't give me that do-goody good bullshit.
I'm in the high-fidelity, first-class traveling set,
And I think I need a Learjet.

I made it home, turned on the TV, and listened from the kitchen as Katy Tur and her guests discussed the college admissions cheating scandal.  I guess it's about fifty grand to have someone else take the test for your kid?  Seems like a lot, but there are a lot of people to pay off, and the "businessman" needs to turn a profit, too.  The customers have about twenty million more dollars than the guy on the elevator at the library, and their profit on it is that they can buy alternative facts for their offspring.  Well, what did we expect?  They're in the top 1%, but not the top 0.1%, so buying a résumé with a new wing for the university library isn't an option.

Reagan campaigns in Neshoba County: a tale old as time

Noodling around on the Internet yesterday, I spent some time gazing, mouth agape, at the results of the 1980 presidential election.  This was the one in which the incumbent Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan.  One controversy of that election season concerned Reagan's campaign stop, on August 3, 1980, in Neshoba County, Mississippi.  Neshoba is a rural county, population about 29,000, in east central Mississippi, and is known, if it is known, to nonnatives only because it was the site of a famous crime--in the summer of 1964, three civil rights workers were murdered outside the county seat of Philadelphia.  That the crime was not prosecuted or even actively investigated by the local authorities may be attributed to the fact that many of the perpetrators worked in local law enforcement for either the county sheriff or in Philadelphia's police department.  The would-be "investigators," in other words, were themselves the conspiring murderers.  In his speech that day, Reagan did not mention these events, which were then just sixteen years in the past.  He did, however, offer his full-throated endorsement of "states' rights," the perennial rallying cry of segregationists who resented the federal government's civil rights program.  

There has been for almost forty years now a simmering debate about the degree to which Reagan may have been deliberately exploiting ugly racial views for electoral advantage in the south.  It was within the context of this debate that I was looking at that year's election results, because it seemed odd to me that Reagan should have been wasting his time anywhere in Mississippi.  Did he think its modest store of electoral votes might not be his?

Well, stupid me for being stuck in the present!  Turns out that the political world of the summer I turned 22 does not resemble the one in the year I'll turn 61.  Reagan did carry Mississippi in 1980--by 49-48 percent.  He won 43 other states, too.  He won the national popular vote by ten points, 51-41.  (Independent John Anderson got most of the remaining 8 percent.)  Since Reagan won Mississippi by one point and the country by ten, you could say that Mississippi was in 1980 about nine points more Democratic than the country as a whole.  Amazing!--to me, anyway.

Now that I know, I can think of one factor that might help explain away some of my amazement: Carter, Reagan's opponent, was a southerner himself, from Georgia, and had in 1976 carried all the states of the Confederacy except Virginia.  Ford, the Republican, won California and Illinois in 1976; Carter won Alabama and Mississippi.  Things change.  West Virginia was one of the six states Carter carried in 1980. Trump carried West Virginia by 42 points, his second biggest margin behind only Wyoming.

It's being reported today that the Democrats will hold their 2020 nominating convention in Milwaukee, a decision that signals their intent to win back Wisconsin and its fellow Great Lakes states Michigan and Pennsylvania.  I'm cool with that but I hope the party's strategists aren't overlearning the lessons of the recent past because . . . things change.  The Great Lakes region has been moving toward the Republicans in a manner that resembles how some people fall into bankruptcy--at first, imperceptibly, and then at the end all of a sudden.  Meanwhile, the Sun Belt is headed the other direction.  The three aforementioned Great Lakes states were Trump's three narrowest victories.  His next four narrowest wins, in order, were Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia.  It's symptomatic, I think, of the general trend that a fun and surprising factoid from the last election is that Trump's margin of victory, in terms of percent of the statewide vote, was wider in Iowa than it was in Texas.  (And the difference between his margins in Ohio and Texas was less than one percent.)

Of course, a "Great Lakes strategy" and a "Sun Belt strategy" are not mutually exclusive.  The Democratic candidate, whoever she or he is, can fight on all fronts.  Ron Brownstein, however, points out that many of the announced or probable Democratic candidates are better fitted for one strategy or the other.  Trump's support among whites in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania is slipping and someone like Joe Biden or Amy Klobuchar might be the best bet to close the deal.  But in the Sun Belt states Trump's support among whites is holding pretty steady, so to break through a Democrat has to excite their growing populations of younger, browner Americans--a harder task for Biden and Klobuchar, probably, than for, say, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, or Beto O'Rourke.

It's been said that as original sin is to Christian theology so also is slavery to American life--the source of our redemptive need, where things went wrong at the start.  In defense of such a view it might be pointed out that, while the electoral competition keeps changing shape, the preeminent change agent, and therefore an abiding constant of any national political strategy going back not to Reagan or Nixon or Lincoln but, rather, to the debate over the Constitution, relates to the views and attitudes that different sets of Americans have in every era possessed on the topic of race.  

Is it worse to foul out than to lose?

I've written here and here about how I think major league baseball managers pretty routinely follow bad in-game strategies with respect to bunting and relief pitching, and I've written here about how in my view NFL coaches punt way too much.  I might as well go for the trifecta by describing how college basketball coaches screw up.  After all, it's their season!

The substitution pattern followed by almost all college coaches when fouls begin to mount suggests to me that protecting players from fouling out is for them a higher priority than winning the game.  Sounds ridiculous, I know, but has it not occurred to them that when you take a good player out of the game, not because he's winded or playing poorly but because he just picked up his second foul eight minutes before halftime, he's not playing and contributing for the next eight minutes in just the same way that he can't play or contribute after fouling out?  You are in effect fouling him out of the game yourself in order to diminish the possibility that the rules will disqualify him later.  It's as if a healthy person should commit suicide in order never to get a bad diagnosis.  

The illogic seems to me the cousin of major league baseball managers determining never to use their best relief pitcher except to get the last three outs of the game, a practice so common that this best relief pitcher is always referred to as "the closer."  But it's a mistake to suppose that the outcome of the last at-bats of the game will have the greatest impact on who wins.  Bottom of the seventh, visitors ahead 4 to 2, bases loaded, one out, home team's three-hole hitter at the bat.  Bring in your best relief pitcher, now.  It doesn't make sense to save him for the ninth inning, because it's much more likely that who wins the game will be determined by what happens in the rest of the seventh inning than by what happens in the bottom of the ninth.  If the three-hole hitter drives one into the gap, or over the fence, there likely won't even be a bottom of the ninth.

In a similar way, it doesn't make sense to deprive yourself of the services of a good basketball player for long stretches of the game in order to preserve his eligibility for "crunch time."  It's not "crunch time" if the score is 62 to 50.  Everything that happens from the start of the game onward contributes to the final tally.  Consequently, your substitution pattern shouldn't be dictated by considerations about fouls.  No need to go overboard.  Like, if you're playing defense at the end of the first half, and one of your guys kicks a loose ball with twenty seconds left, make use of the dead clock to take out of the game your star point guard who has two fouls (or one foul, or zero fouls, or three fouls).  I think it's crazy, however, if you don't have to do this because he's been sitting next to you since he got his second foul six minutes ago.  The goal isn't to preserve anyone's eligibility.  The goal is to win the game.

For some reason, there's a mythology about the end of games.  It's fans in addition to coaches.  For example, if a player who makes 80% of his foul shots misses one in the middle of the first half, it's just one of the 20% that he misses, though his team has one less point than if he'd made it.  But supposing he goes to the line for a one-and-one with 30 seconds left in a tie game.  Now if he misses it's because he "choked."  Suddenly, it's a moral thing: he missed because he's a bad, unreliable person.  It goes the other direction, too--if he makes the free throw he's a hero with "ice water in his veins."  This reminds me that I also think it's a waste to burn timeouts in order to "ice the shooter."  Almost all coaches do it but is there any evidence it works?  I have a modest example about this one, from a game I was in--didn't happen to be in the Final Four but still.  I can't remember the exact details, but the score was close, there wasn't much time  left, and a guy on our team, Steve Strand by name, had just been fouled.  The other team called time out.  In the huddle, Coach Margo says, "Steve, they're just trying to make you nervous."  Steve replies, "Well, it's working."  Everyone laughs, and a minute later Steve makes two foul shots and we win the big jayvee game by a point or two.  Maybe this doesn't prove my point, but if Steve had missed, it wouldn't prove that innumerable college coaches with 7-digit incomes are right.  Some you make, some you miss, and sometimes, with five seconds left, you better not have burned all your timeouts.

People face death

I've always been attracted, I don't know why, to stories of people facing their own end with a calm demeanor and in accordance with their life-long habits and values.  I suppose philosophers are the leading source, and Socrates the great original, but I have a possibly carping complaint about the Platonic dialogues describing his death.  Didn't Socrates say that "a wisdom full of pranks" describes "the best state of man"?  Yet at his end all is grave and somber and "philosophical," at least in Plato's telling.  I prefer the example of David Hume, the British philosopher known in his day as "The Great Infidel," who while dying of cancer in 1776 received a social call from the pious James Boswell.  It seems to have been Boswell's plan to discover Hume's views altered by the prospect of death, in which case he (Boswell) would then produce a work of journalism describing the "conversion" of a notorious heretic, a popular genre.  But instead he discovered Hume composed, sanguine, witty as ever, and merrily unrepentant of his skeptical views.  You can if you want read of the interview here.  As George Sherburn observed, "the calm cheerfulness of [Hume's] demise . . . greatly annoyed the orthodox."

But there are also the examples of people who will never make it into Wikipedia.  Back in my working days, there once came across my desk the "probate package" of a recent decedent.  His Last Will & Testament was handwritten on lined paper that had been torn out of a spiral notebook, and I could see from his death certificate that it had been drafted and notarized about a week before he died.  One of the provisions read, "I leave to my ex-wife, Karen, the sum of $5 (five dollars) in recognition of how much love and assistance she gave me over the years."  If memory serves, his estate was not negligible--he owned a paid-for house in northeast Minneapolis and had a total of about a half million cash on deposit in different banks.  Another provision set aside the sum of $400 "for booze at my wake."  Maybe Karen has a different story but I like him.

I've also enjoyed the recent steady trickle of reports from palliative care centers, emergency rooms, etc., describing scenes like the one in this tweet from Benjamin Wittes.  For those not inclined to click on the link, a World War II vet, well into his 90s, is rushed to the hospital, where, after being examined, he's told there is nothing that can be done for him and his demise is imminent. "Shit," he replies, "I'm not gonna see the Mueller report, am I?"

Conservatives get bad diagnosis, switch doctors

Imagine a guy who goes to the doctor about some complaint and is told, after being subjected to all the recommended diagnostic procedures, that he has a serious, chronic disease that will progress steadily with dire consequences for his quality of life unless he takes aggressive steps to manage the condition now.  He seeks a second opinion, because the prescribed changes represent for him an overhaul of his whole way of life, and he can't imagine himself living under the strict new regimen.  When the second opinion matches the first he makes more and more appointments, but the whitecoats all concur.  Then finally he finds one guy, the twentieth to whom he's submitted himself, who says his condition isn't serious and if he takes two aspirin with a shot of whiskey each morning he'll be fine.  So that's the advice he takes.  He'd always taken a shot of whiskey in the morning anyway but now he adds two aspirin.  One thing the first nineteen doctors agreed on was that he must stop drinking whiskey.

In the US, this patient's approach models the position of the "conservative" political party on climate change.  It's as if the gravity of the diagnosis were a reason to dismiss it: false, because unpleasant.  I don't know when this attitude began qualifying as "conservative."  At some time in the remote past, like maybe when Edmund Burke was alive, the conservative attitude in politics was distinguished by a determination to face facts and do what needs to be done, no histrionics.  Now it's all histrionics.  For example, a US senator, Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, has argued that the earth isn't actually warming by playing with a snowball on the Senate floor.  He was at the time the chairman of the Senate Committee on the Environment.  Whatevs!

The theory of anthropogenic climate change, like the practice of medicine, is grounded in science.  The physical processes are understood and implacable.  It's magical thinking to suppose there is a connection between them and human wishes.  If the doctor says you're sick, you probably are, and your idea of a "realistic" treatment plan might not make you better--because nature doesn't care about your preferences.  To me, this seems like the kind of hardheaded good sense that conservatives once championed, but nowadays, in our country, they just shout stupid stuff.  I will continue to drink whiskey!  They say the earth is warming but it's cold out today!