Eric The Blue

Some impeachment math

Back in March, here, I listed the 50 states in order of Trump friendliness as measured by his margin of victory (or defeat) in the 2016 election. Clocking in at #1 was Wyoming, which Trump won by about 46%. At the other end was either the District of Columbia, where Trump lost by 89%, or, if you want to limit it to states, Hawaii, where he lost by 32%. 

I was looking over the list today with an eye on how an impeachment trial in the Senate might turn out. We are often told that "impeachment is a political process," one of those cant expressions of political journalism that means, I think, that the outcome has little to do with the merits of the case and everything to do with the political calculations of the voting members. Of course, the merits of the case might have an impact on public opinion, which in turn could affect political calculations, but it's important to remember that the jury is made of senators who represent states. The polls I've seen relating to impeachment are all national polls. About 1-in-9 Americans live in California, but it has just two senators, same as Wyoming, which has one resident for every 66 Californians. It looks like there will be an impeachment trial, and when the senators from those two states have rendered judgment, it's almost certain that there will be 2 votes for conviction and 2 for acquittal: a winning ratio for the defendant, since a two-thirds supermajority is required for conviction.

Looking over that list I compiled, it's striking how many states Trump won by very wide margins, despite having lost the national vote by almost 3 million. For example, his twentieth best state was South Carolina. His margin in the Palmetto State was 14.2%. Of the 40 senators representing South Carolina and the 19 states Trump won by an even wider margin, 37 are Republicans—the 3 Democratic exceptions, in case you're wondering, are Jon Tester in Montana, Doug Jones in Alabama, and Joe Manchin in West Virginia. The magic number for acquittal in a Senate trial is 34 (since a 66-34 vote for conviction would fall one short of the needed two-thirds supermajority).

The 20 Trumpiest states have 20% of the country's population, 40% of the Senate seats, and 3 more Republican senators than the minimum number of "not guilty"s needed to avoid conviction. Perhaps the good news is that, assuming no principled votes are cast, which seems safe, Pence's chance of assuming the presidency within the next few months owes less to the impeachment process than it does to the incidence of myocardial infarction in overfed American septuagenarians.

Linda Greenhouse on Evan Thomas and Sandra Day O'Connor

The above picture, of Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg waiting to address a group of congressional women in 2001, heads Linda Greenhouse's review, in NYRB, of a new biography of O'Connor by Evan Thomas. It's a poignant photo, I think, since, in the intervening 18 years, one of the two has sunk into dementia and the other, beset by geriatric health complaints, is trying to hang on till there is a Democratic president to fill her position. They were looking hale and alert in 2001, dressed similarly, despite their frequently opposing views, in business attire and sensible shoes. I like how O'Connor was caught with her heel out, airing her foot. Of course she's the one with dementia. One of the details in Greenhouse's review concerns how Thomas, interviewing O'Connor at the start of his project, immediately realized that she would not—could not—be a significant source for his book: too far gone in the disease, which also marred the last 20 years of her husband's life, a grim circumstance that caused her to retire from the Court before she otherwise might have.

I had not known that O'Connor was the author of a memoir about her youth, Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest, which did provide Thomas with a source for information about her early life, summed up by Greenhouse:

Thomas draws on [Lazy B] to describe how formative were the values of self-reliance and attention to duty that her stern father, Harry Day, imparted to his oldest child as he initiated her into the rigors of life on a sprawling, isolated, and nearly barren ranch near Arizona's border with Mexico.

A former president of the Junior League, she played golf and tennis at the Paradise Valley Country Club. There was not a whiff of the counterculture, or even of explicit feminism, about her. 

I am not sure that there isn't in the spaces of the transition between paragraphs the whiff of a contradiction, inasmuch as O'Connor was apparently initiated into the rigors of life on the forbidding ranch, perhaps in the forenoon, before showing up for her evening lessons in golf and tennis at the Paradise Valley Country Club. Well, she was a Republican, privileged but flinty. Barry Goldwater was a family friend. She could make high scores on standardized tests and landed at Stanford Law School, where she was, improbably, the love interest of classmate William Rehnquist. Greenhouse reports that Thomas had access to letters Rehnquist wrote Sandy Day, including one that included a proposal of marriage and the sentence, "I know I can never be happy without you." Sandy turned him down. Years later, when President Reagan appointed her to the Supreme Court, in 1981, Rehnquist was already serving as an associate justice, and the rookie O'Connor, probably hoping for a mentor, was put off by her old boyfriend's "aloofness." Despite similar voting records, their interpersonal relations were ever cool. No one knows where love goes but when it goes it's gone, gone, gone. I'm not sure whether it's sad or reassuring to reflect that even the lives of the high and mighty are evidently blighted by the kinds of disappointments and resentments that, viewed from a disinterested perch, seem trivial and petty.

Greenhouse mentions that O'Connor's appointment came early in Reagan's first term, after he had promised during the campaign to put a woman on the high court. It seems like an odd promise for Reagan to have made, too much like affirmative action. It's a court-watcher's parlor game to speculate on the possible connections between the circumstances of O'Connor's appointment and her centrist jurisprudence on affirmative action, which came to the Supreme Court after it had become somewhat more conservative with the retirements of Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan. By 2003, hers was the swing vote, and, to the bitter disappointment of conservatives in a case involving the University of Michigan's law school, she ruled that in admissions policy race could be considered as one factor among others for a period, she suggested, of roughly 25 more years. I don't credit the suspicion that her appointment as the first female justice had anything to do with her decision. Rather, as Greenhouse suggests, she was simultaneously suspicious of and sympathetic to the view that, if schools and businesses thought there was value in having their student body and work force "look like America," the law should cut them some slack, but not too much, or forever. 

O'Connor is probably most famous, or infamous, for the Court's decision in the Planned Parenthood v Casey case, where she once again had the swing vote and could have taken a long stride toward overturning Roe v Wade. Instead, she wrote, with Justices Anthony Kennedy and David Souter, the majority opinion—it was 5-4—upholding the right to an abortion established in Roe while allowing states to impose restrictions that did not create "an undue burden" to exercising that right. It's probably fair to say that pro-choice activists were unhappy but relieved with the decision and that the other side was unhappy, surprised, and infuriated. Actually, O'Connor's position here might have been predicted by those who had followed her career in the Arizona state legislature, where she was not a reliable vote for either side on policy relating to abortion.

In an earlier case, argued and decided soon after she had joined the Court, O'Connor had first infuriated conservatives by joining the liberals in striking down an Alabama law establishing "a moment of silence" at the start of the public school day. In a separate concurring opinion, she wrote it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that Alabama was attempting to endorse prayer in public schools. Greenhouse relates here a couple of interesting sidelights gleaned from Thomas's book. One of O'Connor's law clerks, during the period that the Court was deliberating, urged her to assume the "good faith and proper motives" of state legislators. O'Connor, who had served in Arizona's state legislature, told him that she would not, and that state legislators were among "the most venal, self-important people you can imagine." The other detail is interesting mainly on account of her calculations regarding her career. She had been mentioned as a possible candidate for Chief Justice and realized that her decision in this case burned bridges to the powers that had landed her on the high court in the first place. Sure enough, a year later Chief Justice Burger retired and Reagan had to elevate someone. He chose Sandy Day's old boyfriend, William Rehnquist.

Greenhouse, the former Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times who now teaches at Yale Law School, is a woman not at all sympathetic toward the high court's rightward turn, and though I may be wrong I think it's possible to detect in her review a certain determination to celebrate the first female justice as the kind of old-fashioned conservative that liberals may regard these days with nostalgic fondness. Thus she lingers on the admittedly high-profile cases in which O'Connor deviated, by a foot or several yards, from conservative orthodoxy. Or possibly it just seems that O'Connor was less doctrinaire than she was, because she stayed about where she'd always been while the Court lurched to the right, placing her eventually in the middle and endowing her with an ersatz aura of reasonableness. The truth is that she voted with the bloc of conservative justices—Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas—roughly eighty percent of the time. I don't think Greenhouse conveys this fact, but she does take up the abomination of the Court's decision in Bush v Gore, and is as engaging and informative on this topic as she is on others. I remember that whatever network I was watching on Election Night, 2000, called Florida for Gore relatively early in the evening and then of course retracted, but I guess the whole election had been called for Gore by at least one network—the one O'Connor was watching at a party that, upon Gore being named the winner, she stomped out of after announcing that this was a "terrible" result. Her husband had to explain to the other party attendees that she had been hoping to retire but did not want a Democratic president to appoint her successor. Wouldn't you know, the Florida recount on which everything depended then came to the Supreme Court, and O'Connor cast the crucial vote handing the election to Bush. She also inserted into Justice Kennedy's draft decision the weaselly phrase essentially admitting that the Court's "reasoning" was ad hoc and should not be regarded as precedent in any subsequent election dispute: the unsigned decision was, she wrote, "limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities."

In this one case, then, O'Connor and her fellow conservatives were all in favor of the big bad federal government telling a state how to resolve its disputed election. Given that O'Connor's rooting at the election night party had been reported in the press, including the degree to which her preference was dictated by personal desires, she could not very easily retire to Arizona now that she'd gotten Bush into the presidency. So she labored on till 2006, steadfastly avoiding the president and all White House events as her husband sank deeper into dementia. He is, by the way, a somewhat pitiable and forgotten figure. He'd been a highly successful Arizona lawyer, but seems never to have adjusted to different circumstances in Washington, D.C., and then, eclipsed by his wife the Supreme Court justice, he starts noticing his own declining mental abilities, which he heartbreakingly documented in a journal that Thomas got access to for his biography. Mr O'Connor probably wasn't consoled by the consideration that he'd prevailed over a future chief justice in the wooing contest for the hand of Sandra Day, girl ranch hand, country club athlete, Episcopalian, Republican state legislator, conservative jurist, and first woman to serve as a justice on our Supreme Court.

At the movies: "Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins"

 

A documentary about "the life and times of Molly Ivins," Texan, female, white, liberal, born 1944, sharp-tongued (but not "shrill"), recipient of innumerable death threats from fellow Texans and a political columnist responsible for such sentences as:

Among that year's crop of Republican freshmen, Sonny Bono qualified as an intellectual giant, and he was killed when he skied into the side of a tree.

That line did not make it into the movie. Here is one that did. In a Q and A after a talk, someone asked her opinion of Newt Gingrich. "Oh," she replied, feigning puzzlement, and then: "Do you speak of the draft-dodging, dope-smoking deadbeat dad who divorced his wife while she was dying?"

Her dad was an oil company executive and a right winger, big shot, big money, an authoritarian and an alcoholic. It would be easy to say that her politics were explained by youthful rebellion that became a kind of long habit, but she herself credited the issue of race, and made the point, which I realize is true though I'd never thought of it, that Texas seems to have been left behind in the civil rights movement: Martin Luther King never went there, Stokely Carmichael never went there, CBS News never went there. It was as racially segregated as South Africa while she was growing up in the 1950s and early 60s, and she detested it.

Of local interest, her second job in journalism, after graduating from Smith in 1965, was the cop beat at the Minneapolis Tribune. The movie has a technique of illustrating the development of her youthful resume with a map of the US on which her travels are lined in, and the move from Houston to Minneapolis placed a star for Minneapolis at the approximate location of Fergus Falls. 

Well, even Homer nodded, and she didn’t stay long.

Back in Texas, she reported on the state legislature. She once noted that of the first seven House speakers she covered, five were eventually indicted for criminal offenses, and, of the two that weren't, one was murdered by his wife, so she was indicted, though not convicted—perhaps, Ivins said, because the jury wanted to recognize her service to humanity. When the Texas legislature took up the issue of sodomy, the Republican majority made a point of their high-minded egalitarianism by banning anal intercourse no matter the gender of the participants:  husbands and wives were constrained as surely as gay men. The carefully crafted legislation had to use certain words, which Ivins merrily quoted while noting that it might now be problematic for one legislator to shake the hand of another, "since in Texas it is illegal for a prick to touch an asshole."

The title of her first collection of political commentary was "Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?"

She moved on to The New York Times, also known as "the grey lady." What were they thinking? And what was she thinking? She was assigned to "the Denver bureau." She was the whole bureau and entertained herself by submitting copy that she knew violated her employer's style sheet. In one piece, about the activities of a chicken-raising family on slaughter day, she deployed the phrase "gang pluck" and soon found herself being interviewed by the paper's famed editor, Abe Rosenthal.

Rosenthal: You submitted a story with the phrase "gang pluck."

Ivins: Yes.

Rosenthal: Why did you do that? What does it mean?

Ivins: It's a play on words.

Rosenthal [after a long pause]: You were trying to make readers of our paper think of the expression "gang fuck."

Ivins: Abe, you are a hard man to fool.

I enjoyed these moments, arguably to my discredit, though judging by the reactions in the St Anthony Main Cinema today I'm not the only reprobate.  Perhaps the film can be criticized for serving up what her liberal admirers want and are expecting—after all, no one else is going to see it. Nevertheless it isn't hard to detect countervailing themes. In the film's first image, she's at a podium, looking very much like the cancer patient she was. As her story unwinds, you notice in how many images she's holding either a cigarette or a beer, sometimes both, and the mandatory pictures of her at the keyboard often include to the side a beer can or half-empty glass of wine. For almost her entire adult life she was, like her wingnut dad, a high functioning alcoholic. She might have been self-medicating. "I'm a natural liberal," she explained to an interviewer, "fish gotta swim, and my heart bleeds." One of her favorite sayings, another wellspring of her politics, was that "shit flows downhill and people at the bottom are drowning in it." Those who knew her best described her as "shy." Her private life seems to have been more evidence for the maxim concerning how most people lead lives of quiet desperation. She never married. When asked about her love life, she humorously deflected, observing that it would be unethical for her to screw—her word—a colleague, a source, or a subject, and these were the only people she knew, except for her plumber, whom she sized up whenever her sink clogged. Of her cancer, she wrote that people always say that it alerts you to what is important, makes you a better person, but that, for herself, she found this to be more of the surfeit of bullshit in the world. Her brother moved in with her toward the end, and in one of the last scenes he describes, on camera, how he leaned over her as she lay in bed and kept kissing her forehead while she murmured, "That's so nice, that's so nice, that's so nice" and then, breaking down, he sobs that he should have done it more and sooner. She died in 2007, age 62.

 

Bill Barr takes the cake

In this article, the New Yorker's religion correspondent describes the efforts of a "Christian left" pastor to teach Democrats how to speak a foreign language known as "Evangelical." Their bumbling past efforts are humorously described: it doesn't work, for example, to memorize a few Bible verses on the day of the pitch and then, when it comes time to impress and make new friends, say something like, "And God so loved the world that he gave his only forgotten son. . . ."  

But it's a fool's errand, anyway. The speakers of "Evangelical" voted for Trump, who is obviously the biggest phony of all. After declaring that the Bible was his favorite book, he was asked which Bible verse he esteemed most. His answer was that he didn't like to talk about it—"too personal." Asked whether he preferred the Old or the New Testament, he replied that "both are great." Not sure whether this was before or after he paid Stormy Daniels $130k to keep her mouth shut.

The sorry funny sight of politicians acting like idiots in an effort to impress upon us their Christian bona fides doesn't fit very well with the claim, elaborately developed by Attorney General William Barr in a recent speech at the Notre Dame law school, that unnamed "militant secularists" have driven religion from American life. In that case, why do presidential candidates, who are essentially vying in a popularity contest, try to quote Scripture instead of the witticisms of "the new atheists," who after all are ascendant? How come, whenever Cory Booker is asked about "the partisan divide in Washington," he commences yammering about how he attends Bible study with some of his Republican colleagues in the Senate? It isn't true that religion in America is in decline. Compared to almost everywhere else in what is called the advanced world, it's positively thriving. It's possible that at this very moment my older daughter is being taught algebra in a public school recently renamed "Justice Page Middle School" (in order not to honor Governor Ramsey), while just down the street, at Annunciation School, one of her best friends is being harangued by a nun about the Virgin Mary. All as it should be, all perfectly legal. Autumn's school does not run on tax dollars because that would violate the Constitution's establishment clause. Duh!

But I'm only pretending to be confused about what Bill Barr could possibly be carping about. He's a combatant in the culture war featuring, for example, aggrieved Christian bakers who don't want to take the money of homosexual people. It's so unfair! Their complaint is the Attorney General's too, and I'm a little surprised that so many think they might have a point—"it's a hard case," we are gravely informed. No, it's not. I take it the bakers think their freedom of expression is being abridged or coerced and their religious liberty violated because they do calligraphy with cake icing. Give me a break! If they want to write a newspaper editorial—or a play or a poem or a novel or an opera—wherein they express their disapproval of homosexuals, they can. If they can't get it published, they can start a new business that promulgates such views—that's permitted, too. But I'm afraid that the logic of their argument would require my former employer to endure an employee who, on religious grounds, declined to perform the keystrokes necessary to make the public record show that by a duly recorded deed Adam and Eve had conveyed fee title in a parcel of real estate to Adam and Steve, as joint tenants, homesteaded. I have a hunch that Barr and other champions of religious liberty, if asked whether such an employee should be cashiered or receive an accommodation, would secretly like to know whether said employee is a Christian evangelical or perhaps a recent Muslim immigrant from Africa. Lady Justice trying to peek through her blindfold. 

Just bake the cake, squeeze out through that papery funnel thing the nice message the gentlemen (or women) chose, write a bigger number on your nightly deposit slip, go to your weird church on Sunday—but quit the bit about how persecuted you are (I think it's called being a "snowflake," and is disrespectful to St. Stephen, shown kneeling in the above painting by the 19-year-old Rembrandt: the face peering out from between the armpits of the two men about to stone Stephen is the artist's earliest surviving self-portrait).

Gophers! More 6th-grade math!

Sunday of what is now in the modern era the 5-day MEA weekend. Hell, why not just give them the whole week off? I am a half inch away from being that parent who regales the kids with tales of having walked miles to school in winter weather unmitigated by global warming—and only two days off for MEA!

Since the end of the long weekend was coming into view, Lydia finally glanced at the math problem she'd been assigned over the break. Take a guess who was looking at it next. Right when Illinois was driving for the winning field goal against the Badgers, too. If next Saturday the Gophers were to beat Maryland, while Ohio State wins at home against Wisconsin—by no means certainties but both events more likely than not to occur—then the Gophers would be in first place of the Big Ten West by two games with four to play. Our schedule gets tough after that, I know. But on the last Saturday of the regular season, we have a home game against Wisconsin, and it's beginning to look like it's not a pipe dream to think that the championship of the Big Ten West could be on the line. How much fun would that be? When I was 9, the Gophers beat Wisconsin on the last weekend of the season to claim a share of the Big Ten title. That was the last time. Fifty-two years.

I am clearly setting myself up to be crushed. Here is Lydia's math problem:

King Arthur was the ruler in Camelot who had all those knights and a round table. He loved inviting the knights over for parties around his round table. If there was something pleasant that the king could give to only one knight—an extra dessert, a dragon to chase, etc.—he had them play a game to determine who would get it.

The game went like this. First, King Arthur put numbers on the chairs beginning with 1 and continuing around the table, one chair for each knight. He had the knights sit down so that every chair was occupied. Then he stood behind the knight in chair 1 and said, "You're in." Next, he moved to the knight in chair 2 and said, "You're out," and the knight left his seat and went off to stand at the side of the room to watch the rest of the game. Next, he moved to the knight in chair 3 and said, "You're in." Then he said "You're out" to the knight in chair 4, and that knight left his seat to stand at the side of the room.

The king continued around the table in this manner. When he came back around to the knight in chair 1, he said either "You're in" or "You're out," depending on what he had said to the previous knight. (If the previous knight was "in," then the knight in chair 1 was now "out," and vice versa.)

The king kept moving around the table, alternately saying, "You're in" or "You're out" to the knights who remained at the table. If a chair was now empty, he simply skipped it. He continued until only one knight was left sitting at the table. That knight was the winner. 

YOUR TASK: Of course, the number of knights varied from day to day, depending on who was sick, who was away chasing dragons, and so on. Sometimes there were only a handful of knights present, but other times there could be a hundred or more. The question for you is: If you knew how many knights were going to be at the table, how could you quickly determine which chair to sit in to win the game?

Develop a general rule, formula, or procedure that will predict the winning seat in terms of the number of knights present. Explain why your rule works.

By the time I'd read all that, the Badgers had lost and the Gopher game was on. It's not like I had an immediate idea about what the answer was, so to put Lydia off—it's her homework, dammit, not mine—I told her to figure out who wins if there's 2 knights, 3, 4, 5, 6 and up to 10. That should keep her busy, I thought, and maybe there will be a pattern. She was gone about a half hour before returning with what I guess she's been taught to call a "t-chart." It looked sort of like this, but with a lot of erasures:

# knights	winning chair
2	1
3	3
4	1
5	3
6	5
7	7
8	1
9	3
10	5

While she was working up her t-chart, I stewed over the problem enough to conclude:

(1) A knight sitting in an even-numbered chair at the start of the game will always be eliminated on the first trip around the table; 

(2) If there are an even number of knights at table, then an even number will be eliminated, and the next round will commence with the knight in chair 1 being "in"; and

(3) Consequently, if the number of knights at table is given by 2ⁿ where n is a positive integer (so the number of knights at the start of the game is 2, 4, 8, 16, etc.), then each successive round always has an even number of knights remaining, and the knight in chair 1 wins.

So that covers a few of the possibilities. What about all the others? Lydia's table suggests that, after the regular "recursions" to chair 1 being the winner, each additional knight at the start of the game just moves the eventual winning chair up to the next odd number. If there are 16 knights to start, sit in chair 1. If there are 17, sit in chair 3. If there are 18, sit in chair 5. Etc.

But that doesn't really satisfy the requirement in the problem concerning a "general rule, formula, or procedure" that allows you to predict the winning chair quickly. Suppose you are told that the game begins with 107 knights sitting around the table. Which chair wins? Quick!

For that, another "t-chart":

Distance from last 2n	Winning chair
0	1
1	3
2	5
3	7
4	9
x	2x + 1

So if there are 107 knights at the start of the game, the winning chair is #87, because 107 is 43 more than 2⁶ = 64, and 1 more than twice 43 is 87.  Lydia will be writing this up at around 9:45 tonight, unless it's at 8:45 tomorrow morning. She leaves for school at 9:10.

Help yourself, Don

John Cassidy, writing in the New Yorker, notes that last month Golf magazine rated the top golf resorts in the country. Taking note of the fact that different people are looking for different experiences, the editors created four categories, and then, for each category, ranked the top five resorts before listing alphabetically 20 others. If you're interested in a golf vacation, here are the magazine's top-rated destinations in each category:

Luxury—Pebble Beach Resorts, Pebble Beach, California

Buddies (an evident euphemism for conducive to boys' weekend debauchs)—Brandon Dunes Golf Resort, Brandon, Oregon

Families—Big Cedar Lodge, Ridgedale, Missouri

General Excellence—The Broadmoor, Colorado Springs, Colorado

That's if you're interested in golf. If you're interested in what President Trump calls "the swamp," the salient point is that his Doral Resort, which recently was "selected" by the federal government as the site for the G-7 summit meeting next June, does not land in the top 25 of any of the four categories. But disabuse yourself of the crazy notion that Trump is helping himself to federal treasure (aka, your tax dollars): he's supplying his resort, he says, "at cost." I have no idea what the phrase means, but the occupancy rate at Miami golf resorts in June is low, so he and his crime family would be considerably ahead if Doral were to "break even" on account of being filled for several weeks during the off season.

Ewwww, I just had a vision in my mind of the pretty picture made by the president after golfing Doral's Blue Monster in June, his sweaty golf shirt sticking to the contours of the presidential physique.

Fact checking the debating Dems

I don't know whether it's true that Mayor Pete drives a Chevy Cruze, but after typing into Google "Pete Buttigieg car" I landed on this article, which includes such information as that his monthly mortgage payment is about $450. Since his is a DINK household—double income, no kids—he could afford more, especially considering that his salary as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is $112,300 annually. What kind of hovel do the mayor and his partner live in? Turns out it might be a fairly grand home in South Bend, where the average home price is about $80,000. If you borrow $80,000 at 4.5 percent over 30 years, the monthly payment is only $405.35. Hmmm. There are things to do in South Bend, thanks mainly to the University of Notre Dame, and affordable housing, too—seems like it could be a below-the-radar magnet for pensioners. Weather isn't worse than Minnesota's.

The mayor's reference to his automobile was no doubt pre-planned—the debate was in Ohio, where GM made Cruzes at its Lordstown assembly plant before idling it last spring, putting more than a thousand people out of work there.

Cory Booker has frequently made a connection between his housing arrangement, a townhome in inner-city Newark, New Jersey, and his views on criminal justice reform and gun control. I didn't hear him say anything along this line the other night, though he did claim to be a vegan. I think he probably is, because it seems doubtful veganism will help him with Rust Belt ham-and-eggers, and therefore the claim has the probative value associated with a statement against interest. Also, he looks kind of thin for a former D-1 football player. (Booker played tight end at Stanford.)

It's similarly hard to verify Elizabeth Warren's claim that if the government collected 2 cents on every dollar of your wealth, with the significant detail that the first $50 million is exempt, it would raise enough money to pay for her ambitious to-do list. For one thing, it's hard to say how many would be subject to her "wealth tax," and how much they'd owe, since if a guy might be worth $50 million you can't just add to the value of his home—minus, of course, the outstanding principal on the mortgage!—the balances of his various accounts. For example, this guy Sondland, who bought an ambassadorship for a million dollars, has quite the art collection. How much is it worth? Who can say?

Nevertheless, the distribution of wealth in our country is so top-heavy as to render Warren's claim plausible. The combined net worth of the bottom half of all Americans is about $250 billion, and the net worth of the three richest Americans (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet) is about $350 billion. Warren's tax, applied only to Jeff Bezos, whose net worth is estimated at $160 billion, would raise $3.2 billion—oh, wait, I forgot that only the portion north of $50 million is subject to the tax, so it would raise a mere $3.199 billion. That $50 million exemption would mean everything to me but not much to Bezos!

[Mis]adventures of Gordon Sondland

One of the minor recreations of the times is contemplating the activities of some of the minor figures filling in the shaded background region of the rogues' gallery that is the Trump administration—for example, Gordon Sondland, our ambassador to the European Union, who tomorrow is being deposed in the House impeachment inquiry. Assuming my own case is representative, no one knew till about a week ago who he was or that he's almost perfectly bald, and I'm pretty sure he'd have preferred that it stay that way even if he's cool with being bald.

Ambassador to the EU is a pretty big job and one might innocently expect that the person in the position might have a background in government and diplomacy. Sondland, however, has no such experience. He's a wealthy hotel magnate from the Pacific Northwest and a big Republican donor. His main qualification for the ambassadorship to the EU appears to have been a 7-figure contribution, funneled through four limited liability companies, to the Trump inaugural committee. Drain the swamp? Lol!

His path to the strobe lights began with a call-out in the whistleblower complaint:

On 26 July, a day after the call [in which Trump told President Zelenskyy of Ukraine "I would like you to do us a favor though"], U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations Kurt Volker visited Kyiv and met with President Zelenskyy and a variety of Ukrainian political officials. Ambassador Volker was accompanied in his meetings by U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. Based on multiple readouts of these meetings recounted to me by various U.S. officials, Ambassadors Volker and Sondland reportedly provided advice to the Ukrainian leadership about how to "navigate" the demands that the President had made of Mr. Zelenskyy.

One rotten smelling aspect of this relates to the fact that Ukraine is not a member of the EU. Sondland will no doubt be asked tomorrow why then he, as Ambassador to the EU, was working to help a non-member nation "navigate" Trump's request. Presumably, he'll tell congressional investigators the same thing he told a Ukrainian journalist who asked why he was spending so much time in Ukraine—that Trump, in addition to honoring him with the EU ambassadorship, had also given him some "special assignments." In that case, he can expect some follow-ups, because it's pretty clear by now that this particular "special assignment" involved the operations of a shadow foreign policy designed not to advance American interests abroad but, rather, to enlist the services of a foreign government in Trump's reelection campaign.

Sondland will say he was in the dark about the real intent, and that he thought Trump and Giuliani were interested only in rooting out corruption in Ukraine. But this isn't believable, even if you adopt—cough, ahem, cough—a wildly exaggerated view of the degree to which these hoodlums care about establishing clean government in Ukraine. Bill Taylor, our ambassador to Ukraine, knew what was going on. He exchanged with Sondland the following text messages on September 9: 

Taylor: The message to the Ukrainians (and Russians) we send with the decision on security assistance is key. With the hold, we have already shaken their faith in us. Thus my nightmare scenario.

[3 minutes later] Taylor: Counting on you to be right about this interview, Gordon.

[3 minutes later] Sondland: Bill, I never said I was "right". I said we are where we are and believe we have identified the best pathway forward. Let's hope that it works.

[10 minutes later] Taylor: As I said on the phone, I think it's crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.

[4.5 hours later] Sondland: Bill, I believe you are incorrect about President Trump's intentions. The President has been crystal clear no quid pro quo's of any kind. The President has been trying to evaluate whether Ukraine is truly going to adopt the transparency and reforms that President Zelensky promised during his campaign I suggest we drop the back and forth by text If you still have concerns I recommend you give Lisa Kenna or S a call to discuss them directly. Thanks.

It's fun to imagine what Taylor made of this—the 4.5 hour interlude of silence broken by a false and fantastic claim of pure intentions that is immediately undercut by the request to quit texting about what's actually happening, and then, to make clear that this should be the end of it, "Thanks."

Sondland, probably a bored rich guy, really wanted to be an ambassador, and, his dream purchased for a million dollars, he must now tell a tale in which he appears, implausibly, as an innocent bystander at the crime scene. He got recruited for the Ukrainian "special assignment" because the dreaded deep-state professionals who have made a career of working in the federal government were more apt to blow the whistle on Trump's corruption than to participate in it. The ambassador to Ukraine was mucking things up with text messages, and his predecessor was so straight an arrow that she had to be recalled. Trump can only count on people like Giuliani, who isn't even a part of the government, and Sondland, who paid a ransom for the chance to befoul himself in the swamp. 

Sex in Middlemarch

Since Middlemarch, George Eliot's best novel, was published in 1871-72, its 800-page bulk owes nothing to sex scenes. I trust, however, that I am not the only reader who wonders about the sex life of Dorothea Brooke and her husband, Edward Casaubon. Though the novel is panoramic, many-peopled, and multi-themed, with diverse interlocking plots, Dorothea qualifies as "the central character." As the novel opens, she is 20, not yet a legal adult, and, as her parents are both deceased, she lives with a paternal uncle who is also her guardian. Almost the first thing we learn from the omniscient narrator is that Dorothea was "open, ardent, and not in the least self-admiring." She has a sister, Celia, who is somewhat more conventional: the first chapter reveals that Celia is very much more interested than her sister in what becomes of the jewelry that had belonged to their mother. Sir James Chettam, a neighbor of the same social status as their uncle, is a frequent visitor. It's obvious that he's paying court to Dorothea, who is so revulsed by him as to be in a state of denial about his intentions. The revulsion seems to be mainly physical. When, for example, they are sitting at table, Chettam directing idle but flattering small talk in Dorothea's direction, she notices "his dimpled hands" and finds them "quite disagreeable." On page 37 of my edition, Celia takes Dorothea aside and spells out to her that Chettam wants to marry her, will soon propose, expects to be accepted, and that she'll have to answer. Then:

The revulsion was so strong and painful in Dorothea's mind that the tears welled up and flowed abundantly. All her dear plans were embittered, and she thought with disgust of Sir James's conceiving that she recogonized him as her lover.

This statement is about as close to a frankly sexual passage as you will find in Middlemarch. The phrase "her lover" makes possibly its only appearance in order to register the heroine's aversion to Sir James Chettam, who is soon engaged—to Celia.

Chettam, however, has an acquaintance:

This was the Reverend Edward Casaubon, noted in the county as a man of profound learning, understood for many years to be engaged on a great work concerning religious history. . . .

Dorothea looks forward to his visit with "venerating expectation," for she knows what he's noted for in the county, and she reveres the life of the mind—the more so when applied to religious topics. When he appears in the Brooke household Celia, in a detail probably meant to be considered alongside Chettam's dimpled hands, absents herself: she "did not like the company of Mr Casaubon's moles and sallowness." Dorothea, however, is favorably impressed by the scholar. To each her own! You can see where this is headed. Casaubon proposes in a letter containing such sentences as

I am not, I trust, mistaken in the recognition of some deeper correspondence than that of date in the fact that a consciousness of need in my own life has arisen contemporaneously with the possibility of my becoming acquainted with you

and

In return I can at least offer you an affection hitherto unwasted, and the faithful consecration of a life which, however short in the sequel, has no backward pages whereon, if you choose to turn them, you will find records such as might cause you bitterness or shame

Well, you shall know them by their prose styles, and you can't blame a fellow for taking care with the phrasing in an epistolary proposal. I believe that Casaubon, who's in his mid-40s, is saying in that last specimen that he's a virgin. A perfect match for an "ardent" 20-year-old! But, as the narrator coolly informs, "Dorothea knew of no one who thought as she did about life and its best objects." Her uncle tries to dissuade her, but she believes she'll be a partner, a helpmate, in the achievement of her brilliant husband's great work, to be entitled enticingly Key to All Mythologies.

Are you wondering about the reaction of Sir James Chettam upon hearing the news that Dorothea has accepted a marriage proposal from Casaubon?

"Good God! It is horrible! He is no better than a mummy!" (The point of view has to be allowed for, as that of a blooming and disappointed rival.)

Despite her parenthetic instruction, the omniscient narrator drops more than enough details to confirm the justness of Chettam's spontaneous exclamation. We have for example the entire text of the marriage proposal, and she periodically imports a character, Mrs Cadwallader, whose name I suspect is supposed to make you think "caterwauler," to shout observations the narrator is too tactful to make directly, including:

"He has got no red blood in his body," said Sir James.

"No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs Cadwallader.

At about this point, the story of an unusual match is interrupted by a long stretch concerning another of this immense book's plot lines, the one concerning the Vincy and Farebrother families, and we next see Dorothea on her Roman honeymoon looking pensive in a museum and, later the same day, alone in her hotel room, weeping. The explanation is supplied in one of those passages of acute commentary that make you love the author:

Nor can I suppose that when Mrs Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic. Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

The life Dorothea had imagined recedes farther as it slowly dawns on her that her new husband, who has brought her to Rome so that he can collect material for Key to All Mythologies, is just gathering and shuffling notes. The book will never be written. He isn't up to it. (His young relative, Ladislaw, lets drop that one circumstance inhibiting Casaubon's researches is that he can't read German—kind of a fun detail considering that Eliot had taught herself German in order to pursue her theological interests, and that her first book was a translation of Das Leben Jesu, The Life of Jesus, a groundbreaking work of biblical scholarship by the German theologian David Friedrich Strauss.) And so Dorothea allows herself to be led uselessly through museums while her husband toils uselessly in libraries, their mutual disenchantment swelling on their honeymoon. The novel is many things and one of them is a desolating portrait of a bad marriage. 

Meanwhile, back in Warwickshire, Celia and Sir James Chettam are new parents within a year of their marriage. By such plot developments, together with mention of repellent moles and dimples, and wedding journeys infused with disappointment, did George Eliot signal readers regarding the sex lives of Middlemarchers.

Trump in Minneapolis

 

The president's visit to Minneapolis last night was the occasion of 10,000 news spots on the question: Can Trump turn Minnesota red in 2020? I think the chance of that is less than the Twins' chance of winning the World Series was at the start of the playoffs—in words, "nonnegligible" but less than merely "small." The universally poor analysis that's rushed into service to hype the prospect is perhaps the best sign that there is more hype than prospect. In one spot I saw, the question was framed as, on the one hand, the Democrats' 11-game winning streak in Minnesota (Nixon, in his 1972 landslide, was the last Republican to win here), and, on the other, the fact that in the 2018 midterms, when congressional seats were turning from red to blue across the country, Republicans turned two of Minnesota's eight seats from blue to red. I guess this passes for "balanced" reporting, but both points are super lame.

The winning streak argument is like the sports guys who say that college football team A is a big underdog in Saturday's rivalry game because team B has won for the last ten years in a row. The result of last year's game might have some predictive value, but once you're back more than a couple of years, who cares? Different coaches, different players, different programs, all circumstances altered. Those who think of Minnesota as some kind of liberal outpost aren't keeping up with the times. In 2016, Trump lost the national popular vote by a little more than 2%, and he lost Minnesota by a little less than 2%, so Minnesota was a little more Republican than the country as a whole. It doesn't matter at all that 35 years ago Minnesota was the only state carried by Walter Mondale, a Minnesotan, in Reagan's landslide reelection—a somewhat fluky circumstance without which Minnesota would not own "the longest current Democratic winning streak in presidential elections."  (Though it wouldn't matter what happened 35 years ago even if what happened 35 years ago wasn't sort of fluky.)

The argument about a couple of congressional districts flipping from blue to red has the merit at least of relating to recent history, but it studiously avoids the forest in order to contemplate two trees. Yes, Republicans picked up two largely rural districts, one in northeastern Minnesota and one that runs along the entire length of the Iowa border, but, since the Dems gained two suburban seats in the Twin Cities metro, the net result was a wash. I think it's pretty obvious that these outcomes say nothing about who is likely to win a statewide election and a lot about how the partisan divide, in Minnesota as everywhere else, is increasingly geographic, with the Republicans gaining strength in their rural strongholds while losing suburban voters to the Democrats. The above map, which shows the result of the 2016 presidential election in Minnesota by county, is stark visual evidence of this fact. Although Clinton carried the state by around 45,000 votes, Trump outpolled her in 78 of the 87 counties.  Clinton's nine counties, however, included six of the eight largest, and she lapped Trump in the two behemoths, Hennepin (centered on Minneapolis) and Ramsey (centered on St Paul). Close to a quarter of the statewide ballots were cast in Hennepin County, where Clinton defeated Trump by 63-28 percent, amassing a raw vote margin of 237,000. She padded this by another 107,000 in Ramsey County, which she carried by 65-26 percent. If I had to guess whether a Minnesotan voted for Trump or Clinton from their answer to a single yes-no demographic question, I think I'd dispense with race, gender, income, education, and religious affiliation (if any), in order to ask, simply: Does the county in which you live have a population of at least 175,000? (The figure is strategically selected in order to exclude Stearns County, population of about 160,000, in the very conservative central part of the state, while including St Louis County, population of just under 200,000 and home to the city of Duluth.) 

The rather obvious way to gauge how these shifts shake out in a statewide race is to look at the results of recent statewide races. In the 2018 midterms, there were six, and the Democrats won all of them. Amy Klobuchar won reelection to her Senate seat in a landslide. None of the other five were particularly close, and there wasn't much variation, either. The Republican candidate's share of the vote, for example, ranged from a low of 42% to a high of 45%, which, considering that we're looking at five different races (and excluding one in which the Republican was wiped out by a popular Democratic incumbent), suggests quite a low ceiling. Trump received 44.9% of the vote in 2016, so the view that he's some kind of electoral dynamo poised to outperform other Republicans seems doubtful. In the latest poll by Morning Consult, which tracks month-by-month the presidential approval rate within all 50 states, 43% of Minnesotans approved of Trump's job performance, and 54% disapproved. 

Maybe Trump came to Minneapolis because he's privy to super top-secret information indicating impeachment is giving him a boost and he will win Minnesota if he talks enough about Joe Biden kissing Barack Obama's ass. It's also possible that he's a dipshit and this is just wishful thinking. His rallies have to be somewhere, and there are 20,000 dead-enders in every state.

 

The Bidens in China

Has anyone supplied a plausible account of what President Trump thinks the Bidens did that ought to be investigated by the Chinese government? On the White House lawn, when he first urged China to swing into action against an American who coincidentally is the Democratic presidential candidate farthest ahead of him in the polls, Trump said:

Biden's son walks out of China with $1.5 billion in a fund, and the biggest funds in the world can't get money out of China, and he's there for one quick meeting and he flies in on Air Force Two, I think that's a horrible thing. I think it's a horrible thing.

Something is "horrible" and it involves—$1.5 billion? Air Force Two? Something. The charge relating to Ukraine is comparatively coherent. The younger Biden was getting paid $50,000 per month to work at this Ukrainian energy firm. Ivanka's daddy says he wasn't qualified. Investigate! Corruption must be rooted out! But  considering that, in the world according to Trump, Biden fils left China with $1.5 billion, the president's determination to sic the Ukrainians on him betrays a faulty sense of scale. At $50k per month, it would take Biden 2500 years to realize what I guess he air lifted out of China one day on Air Force Two under uncertain circumstances.

"It's called a payoff," said the president, clarifying. 

How the game has changed

I'm sitting here watching an enjoyable baseball game. I can only enjoy them when I don't much care who wins. Anyway, if I were the announcer, I think I'd say that at the start of this game Justin Turner, the Dodgers' third baseman, had a 0.01% chance of hitting for the cycle, but now that he has a single, double, and home run, he has a 0.0101% chance of hitting for the cycle. Maybe, if he lines one toward the gap, and the outfielders collide at full tilt, both getting knocked unconscious. . . .

I just looked at his stats in Baseball Reference. It happens that over the past three seasons Turner has collected exactly 400 hits, and one of them was a triple. He did have two stolen bases this year (and 34 in his career). The Twins were thinking of trading for him, but he runs too fast, and once he had a good game against the Yankees.

When they talk about "how the game has changed," no one ever mentions that nowadays players tap the toe of their shoes with the bat, whereas in my youth they tapped their insteps. I don't know how today's technique is supposed to clear the dirt from the back set of spikes. Maybe that is why Max Kepler hits his toes so hard. Someone should tell him to watch tapes of Harmon at the bat. Just tap the instep. I did it to my Keds a million times and it works.

Live blogging the Twins in the ALDS

This is an experiment brought to you by an empty house and Windsor Canadian.

I'm inclined to think the performance of "The Star Spangled Banner" before sporting events is a tradition that should have been retired when my dad was in junior high, but that was outstanding. 

Bob Costas and John Smoltz: the A-team. I had thought about muting the volume and tuning in WCCO radio, though in the past the difference in the delay has rendered this trick useless. Not even worth trying, however. 

First inning. Polanco goes deep, Twins lead, 1-0. Berrios doesn't look sharp, as I'd feared, but that is really a wonderful play by Sano to get us out of the inning.  Traditionalists who hate the replay reviews: get out of the way of progress!

Second inning. The Yankees drop an infield pop and then turn a double play on Arraez. Not making them pay seems like an ill omen. Berrios walks his second batter of the game in the second inning but gets through it without a run scoring.

Third inning. Garver strikes out again. I hope Polanco does the same thing he did in his first at-bat, too. Nope, nice catch by Judge. Cruz homers just over the fence in right to make it 2-0. Rosario looks sick, striking out for the second time. Too many strike outs. Ugly, ugly, ugly in the home half. Pop fly single that Arraez should have caught. Another walk, the third in as many innings. A double play grounder that results in two runs scoring when Cron doesn't catch the relay throw. Yankees take the lead, 3-2. Ish.

Fourth inning. Twins down in order. Berrios retires the Yankees in order, too. He's one of those pitchers who seems less effective than he ought to be, given his stuff. Yeah, his breaking ball breaks a lot, but so few of them are in the strike zone that it doesn't help. Who's going to chase it when only one in three is in the zone? Some pitchers, you can't wait to bat, they got nothing, but then they get you out: Berrios is like the opposite of that. Good inning, though. He's been inefficient, a million pitches, but the Yankees have only scored in one inning, and that was because our guys did not catch the ball behind him.

Fifth inning. Polanco drives home Arraez, who doubled, after Garver strikes out for the third time: score tied at 3. With Cruz behind in the count, Polanco steals second base. I think that may be the first stolen base by a Twin not named Buxton since before the all-star break. Cruz eventually walks, filling first base, but Rosario flies out for the third out. Littell on in relief of Berrios in the bottom half of the inning. Walk. Hit by pitch. Here we go again. Nothing good can happen till you throw it over the plate. Duffey can't clean up the mess. Yankees lead, 5-3.

Sixth inning. Sano homers leading off the inning. Third round-tripper of the game, all with no one on base, and we're still behind. Staying in it, though. Stashak, somewhat to my surprise, comes on to start the sixth in a 1-run game. Fly out. Home run. Fly out. Home run. Fly out. Yankees, 7-4.

Seventh inning. With two out and Polanco on second, Rosario lines one to right, Judge races toward the line, dives, catches it just above the ground. The kind of play that wins games. I've been forgetting about my drink, the ice has melted, and the dregs are diluted and warm. Plus, I'm out: rookie mistake, as Kyle Gibson is in, and I'm unable to fortify myself artificially. A walk. How many is that? Another walk. A double steal. Why? You get to move up for free on a walk. Sure enough, another walk, the third of the inning and—I'm looking it up cuz Bob Costas ain't saying—eighth (eighth!) of the game. Plus, a hit batter, too. If we escape from this without a run scoring . . . nope, there it goes, bases-clearing double into the left field corner: 10-4. This is reminding me of the wild card game two years ago. Highlight for Twins was top of the first inning. Can't get them out. Jesus! You're in the major leagues, throw it over the effing plate, it's job 1. Well, leave Gibson in now. Don't use up a good pitcher to keep the deficit at 6.

Eighth inning. After Sano whiffs, Kepler walks and Gonzalez singles. Maybe we can at least make them extend their relief pitchers. No, Cron lifts a short fly to right on the first pitch. Now Schoop bats for Arraez. Costas says Rocco "wants to get him an at-bat," but actually, it's not charity:  Schoop is more likely to hit a 3-run homer. Though there's something else he's more likely to do, too. Yup, strike 3, inning over. Graterol on in the bottom half for Twins. Doesn't make sense to me. He's out to mop up, but Stashak and Gibson were pitching when we were still in the game? Graterol overpowers three hitters, with the result that the score is still 10-4.

Ninth inning. Yankees bring in their closer. Why not? He hasn't pitched for at least four days. Garver taps to short, finishing off an 0-for-5 with three strikeouts. You can tell that Polanco's "on," foul balls on aggressive swings and taking close pitches after getting behind in the count. He walks—two hits (one a home run) and two walks in five plate appearances for him tonight. Rosario makes the last out: he was 0-for-5, too. Can't believe I was looking forward to this. Our pitchers threw 193 pitches and we only got them out eight times. A little loose in the field didn't help. Another game tomorrow, however. Forget this one and play better!

George Conway on the narcissist in chief

It's long, but this essay, by George Conway, in The Atlantic, is a tour de force. Conway is the Republican lawyer who is probably most famous for joining an acerbic anti-Trump Twitter feed with a marriage to presidential counsellor Kellyanne Conway, a circumstance that has elicited a lot of speculation about the sleeping arrangements in their McMansion, etc. If this line of inquiry is of interest to you, the essay includes such droplets as:

Those who work closely with him, and who aren't in denial, must deal with Trump's lying about serious matters virtually every day.

The either-or formulation glides over the possibility that one might "deal with it" by diving into the denial bottle and pulling the cap down over one's head, which is what a lot of people have done, possibly including Kellyanne, but for those who accept George's filing system the question remains: where does he put his spouse? She definitely works closely with Trump and it seems he (George) would be in position to perform the apt taxonomic exercise. 

In the main part of the essay, though, Conway develops the idea that Trump is unfit for office on account of being a psychological wreck. Since he's a lawyer, not a shrink, he advances the view that anyone who observes Trump must come to this conclusion, notwithstanding their probable lack of psychiatric credentials, in just the same way that you might know someone has been injured badly when you see a limb bent way too far the wrong way in a football game, even though you probably lack the medical vocabulary needed to name the busted up anatomical parts.

If you want my summary of the most vivid sections, Conway, like a lawyer methodically building up a case, quotes the standard criteria for a diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) as laid out in the DSM, or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a standard reference work of abnormal psychology published by the American Psychiatric Association. Here are the nine criteria:

1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g. exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements).
2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.
3. Believes that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions).
4. Requires excessive admiration.
5. Has a sense of entitlement (i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations).
6. Is interpersonally exploitative (i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends).
7. Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings or needs of others.
8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.
9. Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.

For a diagnosis of NPD, five of the above nine must be present. As you may have guessed, Conway takes them up in turn, supplying from the journalistic/biographic record instances of Trump exhibiting the described criteria. He proceeds with a verve and good cheer one does not usually associate with a conservative corporate lawyer, but the brio of the performance does not blunt an overall chilling effect. For example, while discussing numbers 1, 2, and 3, above, Conway recites the testimonials of administration officials who "have variously considered [the president] to be a 'moron,' an 'idiot,' a 'dope,' 'dumb as shit,' and a person with the intelligence of a 'kindergartner' or a 'fifth or sixth grader' or an '11-year-old child.'" These are the assessments of some of Trump's own hires. We laugh and laugh but finally may wonder what's so funny. The narcissistic personality can tolerate only family members and flatterers, so, to repeat the clichés of journalism, "the grownups have left," "the guardrails are down." He could do anything now. Hilarious.

Wild cards

I didn't have the best day of my life yesterday but am pretty sure that, compared to the Brewers' right fielder, I feel good about myself this morning. Uff da. As a lifelong mediocre athlete, I think I can explain what happens in these situations. The guy is in the major leagues, which means he's had a long history of glittering successes in his baseball life. He's thinking he's going to gun down at the plate the guy trying to score the tying run from second, thereby getting his team off the field still ahead by a run going into the ninth inning. Because that's the kind of thing he's been doing his whole life. But there are two out, so the runners are off with the crack of the bat, plus the guy on second is a pinch runner, so better hurry, and—the ball skips past him, all three runners score, his team loses the big game, and he's the unambiguous goat. Someone like, say, me, worried about making bad plays instead of expecting to make great ones, would have smothered that ball, and the Brewers would have been in a tied game, still a good chance to win. That's what you get for being so good.

No I-94 World Series again this year.

After the ball game, I switched over to Colbert, whom I usually do not watch. (Whom, because I watched him, not he.) The opening monologue had just begun so of course he was going after Trump. Sort of amusing, but it made me think, again, that it requires no great comedic talent to be funny on the subject: just roll the tape of Trump talking, or Giuliani, or Barr, or Pompeo, or Kellyanne, or a segment on Fox "News," and then cut to the face of the comic looking baffled and bemused. The entire reality-based part of the population has the same look on its face so is Colbert really being "funny"?

Of course it was overshadowed by impeachment-related news, but, putting that aside, in the realm of presidential news yesterday was just another brick in the wall of absurdity, the New York Times reporting about Trump riffing to aides about a moat filled with snakes and alligators on the American side of his big beautiful wall:

Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a  cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That's not allowed either, they told him.

I know, I know, the moral/legal subtlety and overall level of mental functioning on display here is arresting, if not necessarily in a humorous way, but I just can't wipe from the humor-detecting part of my brain the idea of presidential aides making earnest inquiries about the price of reptiles for the border moat. Couldn't they just submit the invoice from the Costco of PetSmarts to Mexico? 

Nelson Cruz, late bloomer

During a recent Twins broadcast, Dick Bremer noted that when Miguel Sano was the same age—in years and days—as Nelson Cruz on the day Cruz hit his first home run in the major leagues, Sano had already hit 100 homers (or maybe he said "about 100 homers," I'm not sure). Fact checking Dick, I find that he is, not surprisingly, correct. I don't know the date on which Cruz hit his first big-league homer, but both he and Sano were born during the baseball season—Cruz in July, Sano in May. Cruz hit his first homer in 2006, during the season he turned 26. He finished that season with 6 home runs. Sano just finished the season in which he turned 26 with 118 career homers.

Rooting around just a little, it's pretty clear to me that, with respect to the normal career development of a baseball slugger, Cruz's case is the unusual one. For example, Harmon Killebrew's birthday was June 29, and Harmon finished the 1962 baseball season, the one in which he turned 26, with 178 career home runs. So it's not as if Sano is on track to obliterate records. It's that Cruz is a late bloomer. 

Killebrew's last season, 1975, was the one in which he turned 39. Harmon hit 14 homers that year. Cruz turned 39 last July 1 and finished the season with 41 homers. In the last five years of his career, Harmon hit 86 homers. Over the past five seasons Cruz has hit 204 home runs. If we define "second half of 30s" as the five baseball seasons during which the two men had their 35th through 39th birthdays, then the home run comparison for the second half of their 30s is: Cruz, 204; Killebrew, 86.

The comparison at the front end of their careers is similarly striking. Cruz hit his first 6 big-league homers in the year he turned 26. I've noted that Harmon finished the corresponding season with 178 career homers. It's also true that in the year he turned 26 Harmon led the American League with 48 homers. It was the second time he had led the league in homers. He'd won the home run crown three years earlier, with 42 in 1959, and in the intervening two seasons had hammered out 77 more. 

Cruz's career now extends over 15 seasons, from when he was 25 to 39. If you project his average home run total over the last five seasons across his whole career, he'd have 600 big-league home runs. His actual total is 401. Good luck finding another player who was more productive from ages 35 to 39 than from 25 to 34. Cruz, however, has been way more productive in his late 30s than he was in his late 20s. I think he's probably the most remarkable late bloomer in the history of the game. Ted Williams batted .388 in 1957, the year he turned 39—but, then, he'd batted .406 sixteen years earlier, when he was 23. Cruz was 25 when he played in his first big-league game.