Eric The Blue

Live blogging Minnesota at Maryland, 30 Oct 2020

Just turned it on, 14-7 Maryland a little more than half through the first quarter. Maybe the problem last week wasn't Michigan's "explosive" offense. I guess Maryland scored three points in their first game and now they just scored their third touchdown of the first quarter. If that 80-yard catch-and-run was representative of what preceded, you can't blame bad tackling: no Gopher close enough to try. 

P.J. sprinting down the sideline at end of first quarter and I had the thought that all that row-the-boat jazz is going to wear thin if the team stops winning. 

SECOND QUARTER
They can't stop us either. Maryland, 21-14 now. How did scoreboard get on the 1-ahead, 2-ahead rotation rather than 1-ahead, tied? 

Oh boy, we're on defense again. If they would hold the camera still, I'd count to make sure we have 11 guys out there. Seems impossible.

While I wasn't paying attention, Maryland somehow got to fourth down. Wish Bud Grant was their coach: they'd punt. Quarterback keeps it for easy first down. 

Wow, screen pass tipped, then intercepted by a lineman: big number 99 coming down the track! It's okay if it takes us a few downs to jam it in from the 1-yard line: keep our defense off the field.

Ibrahim scores his third touchdown of game. Tied score, 21 all. Row the boat!

Maryland fourth-and-2 on our side of the field. Neither the color guy nor I can believe that they're punting. We have to keep the ball and score a touchdown with two seconds before halftime. See, that's too big a gain: we'll score too soon. Still four minutes left. There we go, just a 6-yard run. Go clock! 

Our go-ahead touchdown comes 2:46 before halftime. Ibrahim in the first half (assuming no more carries): 21 carries, 130 yards, 4 touchdowns. Maryland guys thinking: hard to tackle a good back while being blocked by a guy 50 pounds heavier than me. 

Maryland tries 51-yard field goal before half but it hits the left upright and drops straight down. Play-by-play guy pronounces it "wide." Minnesota leads 28-21 at half. 

THIRD QUARTER
We get it first. Kid tries to catch kick right at goal line, drops it, doesn't know whether he can surrender or not so returns it to the 10-yard line. Two plays later we're out to the 44.

Just realized that the announcers, play-by-play and color commentator, are calling the game from their respective homes. I thought maybe from the booth on the 50-yard line you couldn't see that field goal try hit the upright. 

Oh man, Maryland just killing themselves with stupid penalties. If I was their fan, I'd be in snarky despair. 

They commit to stopping the run so we throw over the top for a touchdown and a 35-21 lead. Our qb, Tanner Morgan, will deliver the ball on target if he can just stand back there and throw. Like a shooter who never misses against a zone if he can just catch and shoot.

Uh oh, 50-yard run from their own 15. Would have been a touchdown but their back not as fast as our d-back. But now they fumble into the end zone and we recover! Maryland probably not going to a bowl game. 

In this game, Ibrahim always falls forward and gains 2 more yards than looks possible. Third-and-3: all the Maryland guys think we'll give it to Ibrahim, we do, and he gains two yards. Seth Green in for fourth-and-1. Good, he's okay: took a helmet in the arm earlier and looked like it numbed him. Direct snap to Ibrahim out of the wild card wildcat formation and he runs for the first down. Our line is killing them. The third quarter has just melted away. We had a long drive, scored a touchdown; they had a long drive, fumbled into the end zone; now we're on their 5-yard-line and the quarter is almost over.

Kicking the field goal is the right call. Get ahead by 17 points. Takes three scores for them to catch up. Keep the ball for seven minutes, score 3 points at the end of it: will protect a lead.

FOURTH QUARTER
Maryland marches right down the field and scores a touchdown. Seems like a miracle that they scored no points in the middle two quarters. How many yards have they gained? Looks like 278 passing, 237 rushing—more total yards than us. They should try an onside kick now, before we're expecting it. Nope, we fair catch it. Here we go. One more long drive will clinch a win.

Unbelievable, but on first down Ibrahim runs behind the left side of the line and gains 4 yards. Now it's third-and-5: wide receiver screen, well defended, 3-and-out. This could get too interesting.

Was just going to say it's ridiculous how easily their qb escapes our rush, when there is one, and either completes passes or runs for long gains, then we blitz and get him for a huge loss on third-and-6. Another long field goal attempt for them, same distance as the last I think: 51 yards. This one's good. The three score game I was talking about is down to one. 

Second-and-5 might have been a good passing down for us. Now third-and-6. Morgan not as good at escaping the rush as their guy and now they are right in the game. Short punt. They should go for two if they score a touchdown. We need them to turn it over again. Man, that was sure easy. Our defense is porous; they have more than 600 yards of offense now. They kick the point, not taking my advice, and the score is tied at 38. Three-and-a-half to go. We better keep the ball for at least three minutes. 

Really needed that completion. First down at the 40. Second-and-3, good down to pass. Nope. Third-and-2. They stuff us. I'd go for it! We faked a punt last week (unsuccessful). Okay, here we go. It's known that their kicker can make it from 50 yards. 

Short gain, clock runs, but now a long gain. They're almost in range and there's still 40 seconds. Oh man, 15 yards for offensive pass interference. Back on their side of the 50 now. Pressure, incomplete on plausible intentional grounding: not called. Incomplete again. Whew, he was open!

I can't believe Maryland lets the clock run out. Could have reached the end zone with a pass on fourth down.

OVERTIME
Coin toss is big. Obviously you want to be on defense first. And we win it with tails. We're at a disadvantage because of our kicking game though. 

Here we go: huge play. Third-and-9 from the 13. Our turn for a crucial penalty. First-and-goal at the 2, touchdown. A Gopher melt down in this fourth quarter. Well, we know we have four downs. 

First down, complete to Bateman to the 12. Ibrahim runs to the 7. Incomplete. Third-and-5. Interference in the end zone. Just daring the referee to call it. If he does, at least it's not a touchdown. Seth Green runs it in. Go for two! 

Oh god. Well, Maryland had 675 yards of offense—394 passing, 281 rushing—and wins, 45-44, after our extra point sails wide right. 

Paul Thissen on the back of the ballot

Now that Bobby Orr and Jack Nicklaus have endorsed Trump, I began recalibrating my deliberations, but then I remembered that I voted for Biden around a month ago. The horse is out of the barn! If Jay Cutler says he's for Trump, I'll have to look into recalling my ballot. 

Seriously, though, having marked a ballot, I’ve got a voting tip for you if, like me, you're a Minnesotan, perhaps especially if you reside in Hennepin County. The whole back side of my ballot was judicial races, mostly for the Hennepin County District Court—lots of them, and if memory serves, not a single one was contested. I can imagine people, after voting on the front side in every race they know about, turning the ballot over, scanning all the unfamiliar names in one-person judicial "races," and deciding that instead of filling in a lot of ovals they'll just turn their ballot in and get the hell out of the crowded polling place. Fine. But there's one race back there that is contested, it's for the State Supreme Court, and it's between the incumbent, Paul Thissen, and a crackpot named Michelle MacDonald. I wrote about MacDonald the last time she was on the ballot. Or maybe it wasn't the last time. She's a perennial candidate: all you need is a law license and the candidate filing fee and you can run for the State Supreme Court.

I highlighted MacDonald's own brushes with Minnesota's criminal statutes and the bizarre scene at our State Fair one year when she was forcibly removed from the Republican party's tent despite being the party's endorsed candidate. How crazy do you have to be for Republicans to notice, though too late, that you're crazy? But I could as well have discussed some of her antics, as a family law attorney, that have attracted the attention of the bar association's Office of Professional Responsibility. You can bone up on her "various acts of professional misconduct" here. 

Meanwhile, Thissen, the incumbent, is sober and smart, a mensch in possession of all the recommended qualifications, has the overwhelming support of law groups, and, besides, is a near neighbor of mine: our kids go to the same schools—back when kids went to school—and we have even enriched the same orthodontist. You should vote for him, because he's great and his opponent is a nut. 

FiveThirtyEight's graphic

Of the various ways of representing the state of the presidential horse race, I think I like best the above "winding tail to victory," from FiveThirtyEight. A few observations:

1. The state that intersects the 270 electoral vote line is referred to as the "tipping point" state. According to the FiveThirtyEight model, Biden's likeliest route to a narrow victory would be to win Pennsylvania and all the states down the tail from it, while Trump's likeliest path would be to win Pennsylvania and all the states farther up the tail. At the site itself, you can click anywhere on the tail and get taken to a page full of metrics relating to the selected state, including the model's calculation of the win percentage for each candidate. Right now (Thursday afternoon), the model thinks Biden has an 86 percent chance of winning Pennsylvania and an 89 percent chance of winning the election. 

2. The color of a tail segment, red or blue, indicates which candidate the model thinks is more likely to win, and the shade is for degree of confidence or, if you prefer, predicted margin. The small difference between Biden's chance in Pennsylvania (86%) and his chance of winning the election (89%) should be attributed to the pale blue states farther up the tail from Pennsylvania. That is, should Trump win Pennsylvania, it's plausible that Biden's substitute tipping point state could be Florida, or North Carolina, or Georgia—or, as I mentioned yesterday, Arizona plus Nebraska's second congressional district (which is represented on the tail by the tiny unlabeled segment between Arizona and Pennsylvania). For Trump, plausible substitutes aren't in sight. A weakness of the graphic is perhaps that it doesn't allow you to judge whether, for example, Nevada could be a substitute tipping point state for Trump. But the answer is that the states up to the 270 line, including Pennsylvania but excepting Nevada, would get Biden across (he'd have 272 electoral votes). Pennsylvania is indispensable for Trump. That's why court filings indicate he's very concerned they might count too many mailed ballots in the keystone state, as well as in Wisconsin, though he seems oblivious to the same issue as it relates to California's practice.

By the way, regarding those GOP lawsuits: it seems to me that mailing a ballot postmarked on or before election day (if that's what the rules allow), which then arrives after election day, should be regarded as the equivalent of being in line at the polling place at the poll closing time. Of course you should be allowed to vote! Of course your ballot should be counted! It's shocking that this is controversial and tells you all you need to know about Team Trump, though of course there's oceans more. 

3. With just a little clicking, FiveThirtyEight allows you to gauge what I'll call "the electoral college effect." The model projects Biden to win the popular vote by 8 points but Pennsylvania, the tipping point state, by only 5 points. The electoral college effect is therefore R +3—because, if there was a uniform shift toward Trump of 5 points, he'd still trail by 3 but the forecast would project him to win Pennsylvania and the electoral college. It happens that this is just about exactly where the electoral college effect stood in 2016, when Clinton lost Wisconsin, that election's tipping point state, by 0.8 percent but won the popular vote by 2.1 percent. To win the electoral college, she would have needed to win the national vote by 2.9 percent. 

The Rs already have the electoral college in their corner. Must they suppress the vote, too? 

4. Speaking of the electoral college, the winding tail suggests that, while around 150 million Americans will vote in the election, the range of possible outcomes extends from Trump eking out another victory to Biden winning more than 400 electoral votes, and where we end up on that spectrum will be determined by just a fraction of 1 million ballots cast in only the most lightly shaded states. 

5. The same details indicating the wide range of possible outcomes, from Trump victory to Biden landslide, make me wonder whether the electoral college might be thinking about switching teams. It favors two things in a candidate. One is an ability to win a lot of small states. Since their electoral votes have fewer actual voters behind them, small states are over represented in the electoral college count, just as they are in the deliberations of the US Senate. That's a good deal for Republicans, because states with small populations tend to be rural in character, and rural people tend to prefer the Republicans, so it's Republican voters who are punching above their weight and there's no reason to suspect this is going to change anytime soon.

But the other thing the electoral college favors is an efficient distribution of votes. It's nice to win small states, by a little or a lot, but it's really nice to win big states by a little. You get full credit! If you look at the above picture, the dark red states at the Trump end of the tail are almost all quite small, but the dark blue ones include California, New York, and Illinois. No efficiency! Many hundreds of thousands of your voters don't help you win a single additional electoral vote and meanwhile, in Florida, you lose 29 electoral votes and the election by a few thousand ballots. It's this factor, which for years has favored Republicans, that might be changing. Look at the pale blue states and, for good measure, one that's pale red, Texas. They're all big states, all are projected to be narrowly decided, and, if the forecast is correct, Biden will win most of them. Much more efficiency!

Except for Ohio, these states are all within the Sun Belt and growing. As they've grown, they've gone from dark red to pink and now, perhaps, light blue. If this trend doesn't reverse—and the cases of Colorado and Virginia suggest that it won't—then Republicans are either going to have to try to appeal to people who don't have the soul of Kansans or else risk a continuing series of blue traffic jams in the tipping point area.

Maybe they're counting on all the judges Trump has appointed to figure something out for them!

Poll watching

Poll watching, as usual these days. Cook Political Report moves Texas from "lean Trump" to "tossup." Biden appears to be very competitive in Georgia and continues to hold, at least in the polls, a small lead in Florida. Ditto for North Carolina and Arizona. Trump desperately needs all five of these states and, if the polls are right, he'd be fortunate if in the end two fell into his column.

If the polls are right. 

The FiveThirtyEight blog has this addictive gizmo that allows you to make combinations of states either blue or red, and then see what effect your choices have on the model's estimate of the odds one or the other candidate ultimately wins. For example, the forecast currently gives Biden an 88 percent chance of winning. If, however, you tell it that Arizona goes for Trump, Biden's win percentage dips precipitously—to 68 percent. But suppose that, Trump having won Arizona, Biden nevertheless prevails in Georgia: according to the FiveThirtyEight model, there is then a 95 percent chance Trump loses, and it rises past 99 percent if Biden also wins North Carolina. I have proven today that a person can play all afternoon with this tool. 

I've tended to obsess most over the Sun Belt "battlegrounds" since this coming Tuesday evening it's likely the networks will be able to call most of them for either Biden or Trump. It's the hotly contested northern tier states that tend to have rules prohibiting the processing of mailed ballots until election day, or just before, with the result that their outcomes won't be known till Wednesday at the earliest. (The New York Times has, here, a table showing when results from each of the fifty states might be expected.) Thus it is the Sun Belt states that could knock Trump out in the first round, which is of course what I'm hoping for.

If Biden wins Florida, FiveThirtyEight's tool says the cake is baked. Dave Wasserman, of Cook Political Report, reports that he's going to be watching in particular Sumter County in Florida. This is a mid sized county just to the north and west of Orlando best known, probably, as the home of The Villages, one of the largest retirement communities in the county. The average age in Sumter County is 69, and in 2016 Trump carried it by 68 to 29 percent while prevailing statewide by 1.2 percent. Biden, however, has been polling much better with affluent retirees than Clinton did, and you might have seen that The Villages has been the site of some arguably comical confrontations between Trump and Biden supporters participating in dueling golf cart parades.  Florida reports its early votes first and most of Sumter County's retirees vote early by mail. Wasserman thinks Trump, if he is to have a chance of holding Florida, needs twice as many votes as Biden out of Sumter County. We'll probably know quite early in the evening whether he got it. 

Suppose Trump survives the election night count in the southern part of the country. Biden's polling leads in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are wider, and if he has won any of the contested Sun Belt states he's not likely to need all three. Wisconsin and Michigan, in particular, are looking like longshots for Trump, which brings up a scenario that perhaps only sounds outlandish. Biden's best state in the Sun Belt appears to be Arizona. Let's say he wins there, loses every other contested race in the warm weather states, holds all the Clinton states, and adds Wisconsin and Michigan. That would leave him with 269 electoral votes, one less than is needed to win. You might think that it would then all come down to Pennsylvania, where Biden's polling edge is smaller than in Wisconsin and Michigan. But there's another way for Biden to get one more electoral vote. Nebraska is one of two states—the other is Maine—that awards its electoral votes not in winner-take-all fashion but, rather, by congressional district. And Biden's chances in the state's second congressional district, centered on the city of Omaha, might be even better than they are in Pennsylvania. This explains, I think, Trump's rally in frigid Omaha the other night, which resulted in hospitalizations for several attendees when the buses that were to bring them back to their cars after the event didn't show up. Add hypothermia to the list of health hazards associated with rallying for Trump. 

Maybe it won't be close.

David Copperfield: the social and legislative background, very condensed

Reading David Copperfield, it seems natural to wonder about child labor laws in 19th-century England. David is 10 when he goes to work at the counting-house. I have a 10-year-old, or will in a few weeks. She's in the fourth grade and learning her "math facts" (I call them "multiplication tables"). That someone her age should go off by himself to work for wages seems incredible. But it wouldn't have to the people who first read David Copperfield, which was published serially over the period May 1849 to November 1850. When you type into Google "child labor laws England" and click on the first thing that looks promising, you soon read:

The campaign against child labour culminated in two important pieces of legislation—the Factory Act (1833) and the Mines Act (1842). The Factory Act prohibited the employment of children younger than nine years of age and limited the hours that children between nine and 13 could work. The Mines Act raised the starting age of colliery workers to 10.

A colliery is a coal mine. Just want to call attention to the verb in that first sentence, culminated, as if outlawing the employment of 9-year-olds in factories was the crown jewel of progressive legislation. Imagine the "moderates" during the debate in the House of Commons: "Well, I can live with the prohibition against 9-year-olds, but, once you're 10, big government should not be telling you or your employer how many hours you can work." 

The hateful Mr Murdstone wasn't breaking any laws by sending David away to the counting-house.

Between the passage of the Mines Act and the first installment of David Copperfield, Marx's literary partner Friedrich Engels had published The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). Of course we all know his criticisms went too far. Quite an unfavorable portrait of the capitalists! Not really sure why Marx and Engels are blackguards and Dickens is loved. 

Maps and elections

 

For those interested in data and electoral politics, the above map is a bright, shiny object capable of holding the attention for hours. It shows, at the county level, the result of the 2016 presidential election, but rather than reddish hues meaning Trump won and bluish ones meaning Clinton did, the colors are linked to which candidate did better compared to the previous (2012) presidential election result. That is why, for example, Utah is almost entirely blue: Trump won Utah, but in 2012 the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, outperformed him in all but one of the state's counties.

The map tends to confirm the conventional wisdom about how Trump was able to win. Maybe I've been helping with too much seventh grade math, but it seems easy to make out a "Trump parabola" extending northwesterly to the Dakotas and northeasterly to Maine from an inflection point in western Tennessee. That curve encloses a huge area, almost all of it red—and a significant portion dark red, indicating Trump did far better than Romney had. The so called "blue wall" states flipped by Trump—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin—are, except for a sliver of the most easterly portion of Pennsylvania, embraced entirely within the parabola. 

Polling suggests Biden is on the cusp of making the updated version of this map look very different. We tend to focus on the polls of "battleground states," but maybe one of Trump's worst recent results came from South Dakota, where the Argus Leader/KELO TV poll found him leading Biden by 51 to 40 percent. That's a safe lead, but in 2016 Trump carried South Dakota by 62 to 32 percent. Even if the final result is somewhat more favorable to Trump, much of South Dakota will likely be shades of blue, like Utah above, in the updated map. The state's most populous county, Minnehaha, which is home to Sioux Falls, might well be pretty dark blue: Trump carried it last time by 14 points, but, in the Argus/KELO poll, Biden is actually ahead, though narrowly, in the Sioux Falls metro. 

The above map is a dismal sight for Democrats, but at least across the Sun Belt, North Carolina to southern California by way of Texas, there isn't much dark red. Moreover, if you have a sharp geographical eye, the prevailing light pink of the Sun Belt is interrupted by splotches of blue at the locations of big cities. Arizona doesn't have a lot of counties, but several are blue, including Maricopa, which is the one shaped like an L rotated 90 degrees clockwise. It's home to the Phoenix metro, where well over half of the votes in a statewide election are cast. Romney won Maricopa County by 12 points and the state by 10; Trump won Maricopa by 3 points and the state by 3.5; Biden is currently leading in polls of Arizona, mainly because he's ahead in Maricopa. Look at Georgia: almost entirely pink and red except for a substantial cluster of blue around Atlanta. I'm surprised by the blue in the Texas panhandle, but go southeast from there through some red and you get to a group of five contiguous counties, two light blue, three pretty dark blue—that's the Dallas-Fort Worth metro, a comparative treasure trove of voters. The blue blob of counties on the Gulf of Mexico is Houston and Galveston. From there, go west across the pink till you hit the middle of a kind of walkway of blue counties, northeast to southwest: you're on the interstate connecting Austin to San Antonio. 

That the Sun Belt looks so different from the Trump parabola suggests two basic strategies for the 2020 Democratic nominee. One would be to recapture Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by turning the interior of the parabola blue. The second would be to accelerate the existing trend in the Sun Belt by exciting the region's younger and browner voters, and by juicing turnout in the growing metros. There's no rule against both, but different candidates were better suited for one task or the other, and the Dems chose the guy best fit to win in the parabola. Biden's campaign has focused on that task, to the point of frustrating the likes of Beto O'Rourke and Julian Castro, who think the Democrats might be leaving 54 electoral votes on the table in Georgia and Texas, not to mention three Senate seats on the ballot in those two states. On the other side of the argument, Biden's northern tier strategy has put even Ohio and Iowa in play.

Now we're a week from the last day of voting, when everyone tries to gauge where the two campaigns think they are based on where they go in the last days. The Biden campaign announced over the weekend that this week he'll be traveling to Georgia, and that Kamala Harris will be in Texas for the last day of early voting. The public polls indicate that the likely explanation for their travel itinerary is that they're safely ahead in Pennsylvania-Michigan-Wisconsin and that Georgia and Texas are within reach. Three other big Sun Belt states seem to be occupying a space between these two groupings: in North Carolina, Florida, and Arizona, Biden leads, narrowly but consistently. 

The one thing that's virtually certain is that more Americans will vote for Biden. That assures us of exactly nothing, of course. In another week, after the Senate has confirmed Barrett and Biden has won the national vote by several million, Republican presidents will have made five of the last seven appointments to the Supreme Court even though the Democratic candidate for president won more votes in five of the six presidential elections conducted over the same period. 

Receiving medical care

I've had a couple skin cancers—the most common, least serious variety, but still, the whitecoats  are interested in me, so Friday I found myself sitting alone in one of those rooms, wearing only one of those "robes" and enjoying the sensation of the examination table's crinkly paper runner against my exposed backside. How long did I sit there before the dermatologist, a woman perhaps half my age, rapped unshyly at the door and entered? Impossible to say, on account of psychological aspects relating to judgment about the passage of time, but I can say with certainty that it was long enough so that before I got company the room's energy-saving motion detector had shut off the lights. In the dark, I maneuvered gingerly on the table in order to wave my hand in front of the switch, thereby reilluminating the room in antiseptic brightness. If they measured your blood pressure on these visits, pretty sure I'd have been hustled over to the ER. 

The doctor was covered up like you see in news spots aired from the hospital's coronavirus ward—a mask and a plastic shield and goggles. I could be off about her age, for the same reason you might misjudge an astronaut's weight. She had short sleeves, however, and her skin was very white and smooth. It seems that if dermatology is your specialty, you stay in the shade. Her first question related to my own habits in this regard, and my answer, shall we say, massaged the truth.  It's like a game, I think: she expects to be lied to, and asks only to make her point, so, since she'd made her point, I lied to her. It was somewhat of a relief when she began to look me over. At least I had something to do, following instructions: stand here, face that way, lay back, take your arm out of the sleeve, etc., etc. To stay out of the barbershop, I've given myself a military haircut, which she said made her job easier. One's groin does not typically suffer damage from the sun but I believe she copped a look anyway. Rather too frequently, it seemed, she would pause to study, under magnification, a square centimeter of blemished skin. Her thoroughness suggested she was determined to find cancer and I hated her for that. When finally admitting she'd failed, she spoke clinically, but I heard relievedly, and my hatred dissolved. Suddenly her thoroughness was a virtue. "Come back and see us in a year," she said, exiting.

I dressed with efficiency and, pitying the people looking serious behind their masks in the waiting room, got the hell out of there.

Minnesota races

The above depicts Cook Political Report's most recent "rating changes" in this year's roster of US House races. Of the twelve, eleven move in the Democrats' direction, and there is some local interest since two of the twelve are here in Minnesota.

Our first congressional district runs along the Iowa border from Wisconsin to South Dakota. It was represented for years by Tim Walz, who in 2018 retired to run for governor. No doubt there were some career calculations involved in Walz's decision: his reelection margins in the first district kept shrinking, and indeed a Republican, Jim Hagedorn, won the open seat in 2018 even as Democrats were gaining 40 seats from coast to coast. The district is older, white, and rural—just the kind of place that has been getting more and more Republican. In 2016, Trump carried the district by fifteen points and Walz by 50.4 to 49.6 over Hagedorn, who then won the race for the open seat two years later. Cook moves Hagedorn's reelection race from "lean Republican" to "tossup." 

The second congressional district is suburban and exurban territory to the south of Minneapolis/St. Paul: Burnsville, Eagan, Apple Valley, Lakeville, Farmington, and, at its southern extremity, Northfield. When the rural first district went for Hagedorn in 2018, the suburban second district gave the boot to radio talker Jason Lewis (who's now the Republicans' challenger to Tina Smith in our US Senate race) and elected Democrat Angie Craig. Cook moves Craig's reelection race from "lean Democrat" to "likely Democrat." 

Trump was supposedly targeting Minnesota—he lost here by less than two percent of the vote in 2016—but neither he nor Pence has visited for awhile and I haven't seen a Trump TV ad in weeks. Maybe I watch the wrong channels, or they can't transmit their ads into the People's Republic of South Minneapolis.  But Cook's analysis of these congressional races suggests another possibility: Trump has no chance in Minnesota and his campaign knows it. I'm a little suspicious of this conclusion, because I want it to be true, but, seriously, if Trump was going to have a chance here then Craig's race, not Hagedorn's, would be the tight one. The incumbent Republican congressman is struggling to be reelected in a district Trump carried by 15 points—unless he's been having an affair with a farm animal, that's a bad sign for your side, MAGA bros. And it seems broadly consistent with other measurements of public opinion. Minnesota's first congressional district is culturally and demographically indistinguishable from much of Iowa, where in 2016 Trump won by 9.4 percent. Of the eight most recent polls of Iowa listed at FiveThirtyEight's 2020 Election Forecast, Biden leads in four, Trump in one, and the other three show a dead heat. I don't know when Trump was last in Minnesota but he had a rally in Des Moines last week. 

October: nonsurprises, surprise

One October nonsurprise would be the recent news that lawyers say they can't find the parents of 545 migrant children separated from their families at our southern border. The kids are still here, but the whereabouts of their parents is unknown. In most of the cases, the parents were likely deported while the kids, having been taken from them, remained in US custody.

Is it incompetence or indifference? The lawyers who can't find the parents are in no way responsible. They were appointed by a federal judge to help clean up the mess. But it seems the mess is too great. 

That the lawyers can't perform the task assigned them by the judge should be attributed to the indifference of the Trump administration. The administration is also incompetent, but when cruelty is the point, as with the family separation policy at the border, there was no reason to keep track of who belonged to whom and who went where. Of course the court-appointed lawyers can't find the parents. The administration never intended for the families to be reunited. That only became the goal after courts to some degree wrested the problem from Trump and his people. 

Another nonsurprise is that the coronavirus did not disappear by Easter, or by Memorial Day, or when the weather got hot, and, now that it's October and cold again, still has not "lifted like a miracle" as we were promised. For the past month, it's been killing on average about 750 Americans per day—see the 7-day moving average of daily deaths at Worldometer, here. That's seven 9/11 body counts in the last month as the president, campaigning Monday in Arizona, castigated CNN for covering it as if it were a problem or something. He speaks openly of his boredom with the subject. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose he has no ideas.

"It is what it is." "Don't let it dominate you." "Fauci is a disaster!" 

The pope is in favor of civil unions for same-sex couples? I didn't think that would happen till gay people were marrying in Saudi Arabia. An actual October surprise!

Distance learning in snow

Yesterday, I ran the lawn mower over my yard just to pick up leaves. Today, I shoveled maybe two tons of wet snow off my driveway and walk. To every neighbor who approached for small talk, I'd say, "Apparently raking season is over." They'd laugh, which gave me courage to repeat the line to the next one. A dog walker observed that if you don't like the weather in Minnesota, wait an hour. He was in Garrison Keillor's demographic group, age and race, but it wasn't him. 

Just for shits and giggles, here is a math problem I helped the seventh grader with today. I don't think I had to work on problems like this till I was in at least eighth grade, maybe ninth or even tenth—too long ago to remember for sure. 

Easy mistake: forgetting to change the direction of the inequality when multiplying both sides by a negative number. Gave her the tip of checking her work with an easy point, like (0, 0), to make sure she had identified the correct side of her graph. She said the teacher had already suggested that. I asked why in that case she hadn't done it. She said, "There's twelve more problems!"

Sunday evening coming down

Sitting here watching the seventh game of the NLCS on TV. Wasn't expecting to care who wins but find myself now rooting for the Dodgers. Is that the Senior Circuit equivalent of being a Yankees fan? Well, I remember in my youth trying, but failing, to dislike the Yankee teams featuring Bernie Williams, Paul O'Neill, Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, the leftfielder from Japan . . . who am I missing? All the starting pitchers, but you get the idea: workaday professionals doing their job, every game, every season for years, excellence. 

I don't know the Dodgers but I've always liked Justin Turner, their third baseman. Part of it is that he's a dumpy looking stump of a guy. In a track & field meet, what would be his event? Nothing. But he can play ball. In that crazy play, fourth inning, runners at second and third, nobody out, batter hits him a sharp grounder, he throws home starting a rundown that ends with him diving to tag the runner out, then he immediately twists around and, from his butt, throws out the guy from second trying to advance to third. Double play. Thinking about it now, I have no idea why the Atlanta guy waited so long before breaking for third base. If the runner on third is going right away, the guy on second has to go too: not soon, now. Turner can't run fast but I'm pretty sure that's the kind of baserunning sin he'd never commit. 

Maybe the World Series, which begins Tuesday, will keep me from obsessing over the election. Here's the kind of thing that is for me like a heaping plate of french fries while high:

There is a suburban GOP-held House seat that Romney won by 15%+ and Trump won by 10%+. Today, at least two private surveys I've seen have Trump *down* 10%+ there.

In the past few weeks, I've heard the word "bloodbath" uttered in multiple convos w/ GOP pollsters/ad makers.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) October 18, 2020

I’ve also started reading David Copperfield: 826 pages, which should distract me till the votes are all counted. I'm about 80 in. David's mother has remarried, he's bitten his stepfather, been sent away to school. Details of David's first-person narration make it evident that his mother abandons him to pursue her own love life and that he, idealizing her, can't admit this to himself. The situation has a parallel in Dickens's own life. When he was 12, his father was incarcerated in a debtor's prison, and he was removed from school to work in a factory. A few months later, his paternal grandmother died and the family inherited £450. This got his father out of prison but his mother did not want to recall young Charles from the factory. He never forgave her. 

Dodgers win, 4-3. Braves probably ran themselves out of the World Series in the top of the fourth inning. 

Tall Black guy checks into a hotel

When I was a kid, I devoured biographies of sports stars, and as-told-to autobiographies, one of which was Bill Russell's Go Up for Glory. You can see from the book's cover photograph why he blocked so many shots, as back in those days there were a lot of Caucasians in the NBA and by rule they were not permitted to leave their feet. Today, almost the only thing I remember of the contents was a conversation the young Russell had with a hotelier in, I believe, South Carolina. This would have been in the mid 1950s. Russell had been invited to play in some kind of collegiate all-star game and was going to arrive before most of the other players. He called the hotel to make sure this wasn't going to be a problem—South Carolina, mid 50s, he's Black (but a rising athletic star), he wasn't sure of the drill. "Oh, no, no problem at all, Mr. Russell," he's assured. 

He decides to push the envelope. "Can I use the swimming pool?" he says. A pause and then, "Well, yes, but we'd appreciate it if you could be inconspicuous." In the next sentence, Russell considers how he, a 6-foot 10-inch Black guy, is going to be "inconspicuous" at the hotel swimming pool in Carolina. 

The other thing I remember is that Russell's high school basketball teammates in Oakland, California, included future baseball Hall of Famer Frank Robinson. Kids used to play all the sports. Russell was a champion high jumper in track and field. 

The history of segregated swimming pools enjoyed a renaissance on social media this week after top Trump staffer Mercedes Schlapp compared, contemptuously, Joe Biden to PBS kids' show icon Mr. Rogers (Schlapp, in her tweet, misspelled his name "Rodgers"). Biden supporters embraced the resemblance and the implied contrast with Trump. Soon #MrRogers was trending on Twitter. Kind and calm: what's wrong with that? One contributor to the hashtag appended the below clip from a 1969 episode of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood." At the time, many public swimming pools, and especially kiddie wading pools, were still segregated, no longer by law but by longstanding practice—de facto as opposed to de jure, as the scholars say. 

 

 

 

Reader's Digest version

                  Been watching the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing re the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. In case you missed it, here is my executive summary.

Democratic senator: From where you sit, does the sky appear to be blue?

Barrett: It would be inappropriate for me to comment.

Republican senator: Amazing! You speak without notes! 

Books of the Bible: Nahum

The deserved obscurity of the Book of Nahum within the Old Testament canon may be attributed in part to the fact that it is a poem, in Hebrew, and, as has been said, "poetry is what gets lost in translation." Nevertheless it is possible to detect, in the English of the Revised Standard Version, an unrestrained force that might put an American in mind of Walt Whitman:

Desolate! Desolation and ruin!
Hearts faint and knees tremble,
anguish is on all loins, all faces grow pale!
Where is the lions' den, the cave of the young lions,
where the lion brought his prey, where his cubs were, with none to disturb?
The lion tore enough for his whelps and strangled prey for his lionesses;
he filled his caves with prey and his dens with torn flesh.

Maybe you can agree that an exclamatory yawp is here joined to dusky meaning. I’m tempted to say it’s “vivid” despite being in the fog concerning what it might be about. The whole book is only three pages long, so the above lines represent a consequential part of the whole, but the fore and aft don't do much to lighten the shade. A general reader, falling back upon the commentaries, soon learns more about the history of the ancient Near East than she perhaps was curious about. 

The city of Nineveh, on the east bank of the Tigris River across from present-day Mosul in northern Iraq, was in the middle of the 7th century B.C. the world's largest city and the thriving center of the Assyrian Empire. In 612 B.C., however, the city was sacked by a rainbow coalition of Persians and Babylonians, former subjects of the empire. This ended a long period of Assyrian hegemony in the region and was cause for celebration among peoples, including Israel, who had suffered under  Assyrian domination. The book of Nahum is about the fall of Nineveh. The prophet revels, or luxuriates, in the defeat of the hated Assyrians, who were known for pitiless cruelty. The above passage, featuring lions, is part of the mocking celebration—lions having figured prominently in Assyrian art. The idea is that the marauding beast (the Assyrian Empire), returning to its den (Nineveh), discovers only desolation and waste. That the beast is a lion sharpens the barb, as it would if the target were America and a bald eagle deployed.

But it seems odd that such fare should survive the cut for inclusion in the canon. The Old Testament is the story of God's dealings with the people of Israel, who are here only a geopolitical beneficiary of the action of Babylonians and Persians. In the book of Joshua, one is repelled by the coarse notion that our God is truer and stronger than yours, which justifies our savagery, our strut and swagger. But it is at least part of Israel's story. Israel was in that fight. The fall of Nineveh wasn't Israel's fight, and Nahum's ebullience, instead of being morally dubious, just seems peculiar. It's certainly difficult to locate the religious significance. The book has the form and vocabulary of other works of Old Testament prophecy. The prophet, speaking for God, decries the wickedness of the Assyrians and predicts the destruction of their principal city. All this, however, is to one side of the ongoing story relating to God and his chosen people. 

Perhaps the way to illustrate this point is to recall the opening to the book of Amos. The first chapter is made entirely of the prophet's denunciation of Israel's neighbors. One after the other, they are condemned: Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, the Ammonites, Moab. The same formulaic phrases are used:

For three transgressions of [place name],
and for four, I will not revoke the punishment. . . .

You grow familiar with the drill, are almost lulled to sleep, and then:

For three transgressions of Israel,
and for four, I will not revoke the punishment;
because they sell the righteous for silver,
and the needy for a pair of shoes. . . .

The denunciation being introduced with the same formulaic expressions emphasizes that Israel is held to the same standard as its neighbors—and is found deficient. The details are interesting, too. The named offenses of Israel's neighbors are largely geopolitical in nature, or they are charged with excessive ruthlessness in the pursuit of geopolitical goals. But Israel: you have sold out the needy for a pair of shoes. As the indictment is developed, it's clear what repels Amos (and God) about the behavior of the people of Israel: lax morality and cheating put to the service of money-making, no care for social justice, all coated over with shallow, self-satisfied religious observance. It's another installation in the story of God's dealings with his wayward people.

The book of Nahum is the first chapter of the book of Amos. You other people are bad! Our God will punish you! And that is the end of it.

The scholarly commentary devoted to Nahum sometimes seems to me almost humorous. For example, the date of composition must belong to the early 7th century B.C., since Nineveh fell in 612 B.C. But was it written before or after 612 B.C.? There is much discussion of the meaning of Hebrew verb tenses to illuminate whether the "prophecy" of Nineveh's fall came before or after Nineveh fell. The problem of dating the book is complicated by evidence indicating that, notwithstanding its brevity, parts were written after other parts. For example, the first of its three chapters appears to be a poem, inserted by Nahum or an editor at a later date, that introduces the main poem. The text of this introductory poem is a mess. There is enough of it for scholars to tell that it’s supposed to be an alphabetic acrostic: that is, each line begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet (such as in a 26-line English poem in which the first word of the first line began with "A," the first word of the second line with "B," and so on). But in the text that has come down to us not all the Hebrew letters are used, and, of those that are, the order is garbled. You can see why a 21st-century general reader of the Revised Standard Version, trying to make sense of it, might feel at sea. Apparently the Hebrew is bad enough. 

Notes on the Senate campaigns

 

I. Having plugged, here, M J Hegar, Democratic candidate for US Senate in Texas, I should follow up by noting that she debated her opponent, incumbent Republican John Cornyn, a couple nights ago. The entire 1-hour debate may be viewed above (from YouTube). Cornyn wasn't as disgusting as Trump in the presidential "debate," but not making an ass of himself allowed Hegar to perform the feat. That, anyway, is my assessment: you can watch for yourself. Perhaps she could cut back on the "y'alls." To my midwestern ear (which could be "off"), it sounds like someone not from Texas trying to sound like someone from Texas, which in her case shouldn't be necessary as she's been a Texan since she was 7. Whatevs. The debate is between a genuine, earnest, informed person and a mannequin. So much complicated biology just to hold up a suit of clothes!

II. I hope Hegar helped herself, but she's still a pronounced underdog. I'm beginning to think that Jaime Harrison is no longer an underdog against Lindsey Graham in South Carolina. Cook Political Report, after moving the race from "Likely Republican" to "Lean Republican" several weeks ago, has now moved it again—to "Toss Up." Graham has gone on Fox News to whine about being "slaughtered" in fund raising. What's up with that?—a Republican who's been in Congress for 25 years and doesn't have enough rich donors to counteract the contributions of some movie stars? In the last five polls of the state, all conducted since mid September, Graham led in two (both by a single point), Harrison led in two (one by one point and by two in the other), and the fifth was a tie. Toss up seems apt.

III. The North Carolina senate race is fun. Thom Tillis, the Republican incumbent, has Covid, and Cal Cunningham, his Democratic challenger, has been busted for sexting with a woman to whom he is not married—he's married to someone else, as is his co-sexter. John Hinderaker, of the unintentionally hilarious Power Line blog, thinks evidence of the "torrid affair" will doom Cunningham. I'm not so sure. For one thing, I've read the sexts and can report that at least one Norwegian in the world thinks they do not come up to the level of "torrid." If evangelical Republicans vote for the pussy-grabber, it seems at least possible that the famously godless Dems of North Carolina will stick with Cunningham, who for now still appears to be ahead.

IV. The arithmetic of the fight for control of the Senate begins with the Dems at 47. Subtracting one, since Democratic incumbent Doug Jones is not likely to be reelected in Alabama, means that they need to gain four (if Biden wins) or five in the unmentionable alternative. Two Republican incumbents appear irretrievably behind—Cory Gardner in Colorado and Martha McSally in Arizona. Tillis for now trails narrowly, as does Susan Collins in Maine. That would make four. Then there are the toss ups: Graham in South Carolina and Joni Ernst in Iowa. And then there are several races in which Republicans appear to be ahead but by surprisingly narrow margins—in Montana, Kansas, maybe Texas, both seats in Georgia. The logic is open to objection, but, just to get the lay of the land, let us suppose that in these five red-state races the Democrat has in each instance a 20 percent chance of winning, and that the outcomes are independent events. The chance of the Republicans sweeping all five races is then given by four-fifths to the fifth power, which is 0.327, or a titch below 1-in-3. 

V. McSally's troubles in Arizona could become fodder for Ripley's believe-it-or-not. Two years ago, she was the Republican candidate for the seat vacated by retiring Republican Senator Jeff Flake (who has endorsed Biden for president). She lost that race to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema. Then John McCain died and Arizona's Republican governor appointed McSally to fill his seat. She now is facing the voters again and appears poised to lose again. I wonder whether anyone has ever lost both US Senate seats in their home state, let alone within a two-year period. 

Well, she's had a vote in the Senate for a couple of years despite never having been picked by the voters.

VI. I get a kick out of Republican senators, out on the campaign trail, acting all horrified at the prospect of Democrats "packing" the Supreme Court. As if that isn't the project they've been ruthlessly pursuing for years—and not just the Supreme Court! The Republican governor of Texas has ordered that every county in the state have no more than one drop box in which voters in this fall's election can return their ballots. The population of Harris County (Houston) is about 4.75 million. Five other Texas counties have more than a million residents. Nineteen others have a population of less than 2,000. All get one drop box. I'm not even going to get into the question of area, and how far you might have to drive. A judge invalidated the governor's order, on the ground that it raised a barrier to voting in some venues. On appeal, a three judge panel ruled, 2-1, that the lower court's order be stayed and the governor's directive reinstated. All three judges on the appeals panel are Trump appointees. The openings for the positions they hold occurred in 2012, 2013, and 2016, all when Obama was president. The vacancies were held open, in two of the cases not for months but years, until there was a Republican president. Now Amy Coney Barrett is going to be jammed through to a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court in a matter of . . . how many days since RBG died? 

After Justice Scalia died nine months before the last presidential election, the Republican senate refused even to hold hearings on Merrick Garland, Obama's nominee for the vacancy. I guess everyone knows that. It's largely forgotten, however, that several Republican senators announced their intention to hold the seat open for four years in the event Hillary Clinton was elected president. 

Regarding the appointment of judges, the Republican position is: it's our job to fight hard, employing any method that whatever power we hold allows, and it's your job to lay down like lambs. They're shocked—shocked!—that three or four Democrats are whispering about arming themselves with something besides a butter knife in the event voters give them the power. 

The horse race

Putting away groceries, I see that the "best by" date on my daughter's yogurt is farther off than November 3, Election Day. It's coming! Who's gonna win? I grabbed the above pictogram from the FiveThirtyEight blog, where Nate Silver &c construct a model made of aggregated polls and other data, then run it thousands of times to see what happens. Biden's chance of winning, according to their model, now stands at 85 percent—that's how much of the area below the graph is on his side of 270 electoral votes. When I first started checking back in midsummer, FiveThirtyEight pegged the probability of a Biden victory at about 70 percent, so the chance of Trump winning has been halved over the past three months. Turns out that hosting a coronavirus superspreader event on the White House grounds isn't just a public health debacle—it's political malpractice, too. If FiveThirtyEight is right, the chance you have to endure four more years of this shitshow is slightly less than the chance of losing a game of Russian Roulette. 

Typing the word "shitshow" in this context reminds me that I recently overheard my daughter telling a friend, "My mom swears a lot more than my dad—in fact, I've only heard my dad swear when the Twins are losing or Trump is talking on the news." 

Going to pull out a little of my statistics vocab and observe that, in the FiveThirtyEight model, there is quite a distance between the median result and the mode. The former would refer to the point where a vertical line divides the area below the graph into two regions of equal area. Just eyeballing it, this appears to be at a point where Biden wins about 330 electoral votes: if I'm gauging that correctly, it would mean he has a roughly fifty-fifty chance of winning more than 330 electoral votes. Viewed from the other direction, Trump has a roughly fifty-fifty chance of winning more than 210 electoral votes (and a 15 percent chance of winning at least 270).

But the single most likely outcome—the highest point on the graph—occurs where Biden wins around 425 electoral votes, which would be an electoral beheading: it would leave Trump with fewer than 120 electoral votes and would almost certainly mean the Democrats also pick up more than enough seats to win a Senate majority. Why is there such a distance between the "average" result and the single most likely one? I think it must be that Biden is now a clear favorite in most of the states that everyone thought would be the "main battleground": he's ahead in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and, more precariously, in Florida and North Carolina. Winning these states, or maybe all but one of them, is what puts him in the 330 electoral vote area. The states in which the race is closest—where the model indicates no clear favorite—are those representing the next line of Republican defense, ones they didn't think they'd have to defend: Iowa, Ohio, Georgia, Texas. Except for Iowa, these are huge states, and, according to FiveThirtyEight anyway, they are on the proverbial knife's edge. The likelihood that they move together, one way or the other, is what accounts for the trough between the mean result and the single most likely one. 

Lots of people are concerned about the prospect of Trump claiming victory on election night and then raising objections to the methodical counting of mailed ballots. In many states, the processing of mailed ballots cannot by law begin till Election Day—I mean, the envelopes cannot be opened, the ballots smoothed and inspected and prepped for the machine, until November 3. If Trump led on Election Night in several key states and then moved to end the tabulating of mailed ballots, the country could be plunged into a crisis. Luckily, the concern might be exaggerated. It's not that Trump isn't that bad a guy—he is, and has clearly signaled that he plans to challenge the result if mailed ballots put Biden over the top in the days following November 3.  Florida and Texas, however, are two states that allow mailed ballots to be processed and counted as they arrive. This means that by around 9 o'clock on November 3 we will likely know what happened in these states. If Biden wins either one, Trump has no plausible path to victory, and it's hard to see how any extra-curricular shenanigans could obscure that fact. If Biden wins both of them, the route is on.

I guess what I'm saying is that

(a) Trump might not be close enough to execute his plan; and

(b) vote.

 

Piling on

Trump's poll numbers have been so bad lately that criticizing him seems like it could get you flagged for piling on. So here goes!

Like, four days ago, I thought nothing could be a more perfect distillation of his colossal bumbling than the film of him proudly presiding over a coronavirus superspreader event on the White House lawn. There's his Supreme Court nominee, the perfect mother of seven with a "towering intellect" exposing her kids to the contagion! If she's so brilliant why did she not sprint the other way when Trump came calling? Instead, she spruced up her kids to meet him in person. Yuck! 

But then, like two days ago, he went on that slow ride around the hospital block in a hermetically sealed SUV, waving to the assembled cheering dolts through the closed window as the Secret Service men in the front seat presumably tried not to breathe. I trust they're in quarantine now. They're more at risk than ACB and her photogenic family. 

Maybe that trip round the block was the more perfect distillation. Looking backwards, the stiffest competition I can make out is the time he had the protesters peppered to clear a walking path to a church in front of which he then stood to have his picture taken while holding a Bible upside down. That was pretty good, but I think he's o'ertopped himself this week—more than once. Or possibly the fog of time causes me to undervalue last season's hits. I'm sure I've forgotten a lot—I'm just now remembering last night's Mussolini imitation on the White House balcony. Today, workmen dressed in spacesuits deep scrubbed the interior of the White House. That's a competitor, too. If only physical disinfectant worked on moral taint, narcissism, stupidity, and incompetence. 

Plague notes

1. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just a few notes about items relating to the Covid epidemic sweeping through the top ranks of the Republican party. I think some of these might be a pace or two off a well worn reporting path.

I. The Rose Garden event in which Trump announced that Amy Coney Barrett was his Supreme Court nominee appears to have been a super-spreader event: all the intransigent cultists sitting shoulder to shoulder, hardly anyone wearing masks, and then embracing and glad-handing one another after the ceremony. Probably there were other receptions and such, indoors, as well. I don't know how many attendees have now tested positive, but enough so that Father John I. Jenkins, the president of the University of Notre Dame, where Barrett is on the law school faculty, is receiving scant attention. He was among the Rose Garden attendees not wearing a mask and he's now tested positive for Covid. At least the young journalists at Notre Dame are on the case. From an editorial in the student newspaper, titled "Frankly, this is embarrassing":

Notre Dame students are prohibited from gathering in large groups or removing their masks in public regardless of their surveillance test results. Students, faculty and staff are discouraged from leaving campus or gathering in large groups off-campus, which is exactly what Jenkins did Saturday in D.C. Further, students have been threatened with severe disciplinary action for being photographed without masks in groups far smaller than the one gathered in the Rose Garden.

It appears Jenkins made a conscious and deliberate decision to not wear a mask, thereby jeopardizing the health and safety of himself, those at the event and all those in the tri-campus and South Bend communities with whom he interacted after the ceremony. 

[Snip]

Jenkins leaving South Bend to flagrantly disobey his own rules while the community he is supposed to lead is suffering creates a sense of separation between himself and everyone else. A "do as I say, not as I do" mentality is not one a University president should have in a time of crisis. 

Three cheers for the student journalists going after the president of their school! I was an editor on the school paper in college and can't remember us ever daring to criticize the president. In our defense, he never did anything this dumb. 

II. Rose Garden celebrants now in quarantine with Covid include two members of the Senate Judiciary Committee—Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Thom Tillis, R-North Carolina. Two other GOP senators, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, are on record opposing a confirmation vote before the election. Yet another, Wisconsin's Ron Johnson, just tested positive too. There are 53 Republicans in the Senate, 47 Democrats (counting Independents who caucus with the Dems). On the Judiciary Committee, there are 12 Republicans and 10 Democrats. So far as I know, the wussy, mask-wearing Dems are all Covid-free. Five from 53 is 48, which is less than a majority of the full Senate and a number insufficient to form a quorum. Two from 12 is 10, not a majority of the Judiciary Committee, either. 

Is the plan to jam through Barrett to her lifetime appointment by a vote over videoconference? Or perhaps to violate public health recommendations regarding quarantine periods? If Barrett's confirmation is to be achieved before the election, those seem like the options, but I haven't seen or heard much discussion of such questions. I will note that, if the recent past is a guide to the near future, any imminent coronavirus afflictions will most likely strike within the manly Republican caucus. 

It would be a world-historical Karmic victory if Republicans, on account of their absurd and feckless Covid posturing, fail to get Barrett onto the Supreme Court. 

III. The presser around the noon hour today, during which Trump's medical team updated his condition, had a few much discussed lowlights. If, as stated, the president is 72 hours into his Covid fight, it would mean he traveled to Duluth for a mostly maskless rally and then on to Bedminster, New Jersey, for some indoor fund raising with donors after he knew he had Covid. After the presser, we were told "72 hours" was a slip-up—the doctor meant to say Trump was "3 days into it." But this doesn't work either unless day 1 was Thursday, and Trump announced he was ill by a tweet issued around 1 eastern time on Friday morning. When asked whether Trump had received supplemental oxygen, the doctor equivocated: "not today," "not when we were attending yesterday," etc. It's as if everyone in Trump's orbit is afflicted with a thick tongue and a compulsion to lie. The doctor, less experienced than others, wasn't any good at it, so now we know Trump was treated yesterday for low oxygen levels—not because the doctor said so, but because the doctor was such a poor liar.

My favorite part of the presser, though it seems to have received comparatively little attention, came when a reporter asked whether the president had been treated with hydroxychloroquine. This is the drug that Trump and his affiliated numbskulls have touted as a coronavirus killer—sometimes as a prophylactic, sometimes as a treatment for the disease . . . they say anything, just running their mouths. Anyway, the answer was that Trump had brought up the subject of hydroxychloroquine, which was then "discussed" but, in the end, "not administered." That would be because it's been proven ineffective. 

When Trump is himself sick, he gets the best treatment from doctors who know the most about coronavirus. But before he's sick, he for some reason thinks it's the president's job to recommend treatments to the rest of us. Who even knows where he gets his goofy notions? The current chief coronavirus adviser in the administration is Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist who has no expertise in public health or infectious diseases. Atlas, however, was happy to go on Fox News and spout off about his contrarian views on coronavirus, which of course explains why he is now working for the administration. He's good enough to advise Trump about Covid but not good enough to treat Trump for Covid—that would be dangerous! Since he's not an expert, his role must be restricted to advising about what's best for the rest of us. 

IV. First thing I saw this morning was the news about Kellyanne Conway. Fortunately, I'd already abandoned my pathetic effort to resist the siren call of Schadenfreude as one cultist after another shuffles off to quarantine. I think it was WC Fields who said he liked to give in to temptation immediately, thereby saving a lot of time. 

 

Military valor, two instances

Though usually inclined toward pacifism, I'm a sucker for stories of military valor, and yesterday morning I almost leaped from bed after listening to this NPR story about the actions of Dorie Miller, an African-American sailor, on 7 December 1941. From the story:

During the attack on Pearl Harbor, as his battleship, the USS West Virginia, was sinking, the powerfully built Miller, who was the ship's boxing champion, helped move his dying captain to better cover, then jumped behind a machine gun and shot at Japanese planes until his ammunition was gone. 

As a Black sailor in 1941, he wasn't supposed to fire a gun even. This means that when he reached for that weapon, he was taking on two enemies: the Japanese flyers and the pervasive discrimination in his own country. 

"One of the ways in which the Navy discriminated against African Americans was that they limited them to certain types of jobs, or what we call 'ratings' in the Navy," said Regina Akers, a historian with the Naval History and Heritage Command. "So, for African Americans, many were messmen or stewards. Dorie Miller was a messman, which meant that he basically took care of an officer, laid out his clothes, shined his shoes and served meals.”

Akers said much of the attention at the time, and since, has been on Miller firing the anti-aircraft gun, which he wasn't even trained to do. In fact, it's a moment Hollywood briefly portrayed in several movies about the attack.

But Akers said what Miller did afterward is just as important: He began pulling injured sailors out of the burning, oil-covered water of the harbor, and was one of the last men to leave his ship as it sank, and continued getting sailors to safety afterward.

Miller was killed in 1943 when his ship was torpedoed. His body was never recovered. The occasion for the NPR story is a new naval supercarrier, now in the planning stage, which, when it's commissioned, will be christened the USS Doris Miller. Supercarriers are most commonly named after battle sites and presidents. The USS Doris Miller will be the first named for an enlisted man as well as the the first named after an African American. 

By order of President Truman, the US military was fully integrated, with respect to race, in 1948. This put an end to the Navy's "ratings," which limited the positions in which African Americans could serve. Until recently, a similar ratings system limited the positions in which women could serve. But now that's been overturned too, thanks in part to the efforts of M.J. Hegar, this year's Democratic candidate for US Senate in Texas.  She was disgusted that, despite having received a Purple Heart and the Distinguished Flying Cross, she could not qualify for a ground combat unit on account of her gender. This biographical ad, developed for her unsuccessful run for a US House seat in 2018, tells part of that tale. Here is the citation for her Distinguished Flying Cross. She was copilot of a search and rescue helicopter in the Air National Guard. On a mission in Afghanistan in the summer of 2009, her chopper came under fire and crashed while airlifting some wounded soldiers out of a combat zone. Two other helicopters arrived on the scene to rescue Hegar, her copilot, and the wounded soldiers. When the wounded had been loaded in, the rescue aircraft lifted off while under attack. Hegar, who'd already taken a shrapnel wound in her shoulder, was strapped to the ski of one of the helicopters, and from her suspended position outside the chopper, exposed to the enemy, she returned fire as they sped away.

Hegar has elaborate tattoos on her arm that cover the scars. A conservative Texas PAC that supports her opponent, incumbent Republican John Cornyn, who is one of Trump's boot-licking enablers, aired a TV ad highlighting a picture of her in a sleeveless dress and charged that she's "Hard Left Hegar," a real radical since, you know, tattoos I guess. It's Texas, and Cornyn has as much money as God, so he'll probably be reelected, but if justice were to prevail . . . .

I've contributed to her campaign, here.