Eric The Blue

No one is above the law, lol

Before, Trump couldn't be indicted because he was the president. Now we're being told the Senate can't try him because he isn't the president. It's always something!  Whatevs, but please just quit with the pieties, "no one is above the law" and so on, blah, blah, blah, it's obviously b.s.

Trump's fixer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to a crime he was directed to commit by "Individual-1." Cohen served time in prison but Individual-1 went on with his life, playing golf, watching cable "news" on Fox, committing more crimes and impeachable offenses. He's referred to as "Individual-1" in court documents because law enforcement officials have a practice of protecting the reputations of persons who haven't been indicted. But in this case, Individual-1 hadn't been indicted because he was the president, and the president can't be indicted, on the theory that the need to defend himself would distract from the performance of official duties—in this case, playing golf, watching tv, criming. 

Senator Rubio said the other day that only third world countries imprison their former leaders. Assuming we don't want to be stained with third worldliness, this is a straightforward endorsement of the notion that Trump is beyond the law's reach, when he was president and forever after. 

2022

Regarding the Senate, is it too early to peek ahead to 2022? Unlike in the House, where every even-numbered year there's an election for every seat, the six-year Senate terms are staggered so that a third of them are up for election in each even year. This means that, by chance, the calendar might favor one or the other party. For example, in 2018, a good year for the Dems—picked up 41 House seats to wrest control from the Rs—they nevertheless went backwards by two in the Senate. Trump attributed this to his popularity, perspicuity, and puissance, naturally, but really it was just a bad map for Democrats, who had to defend seats in such deep red states as Indiana, North Dakota, and Missouri. General rule: a party that enjoys unusual success in the Senate elections of a given year should gird up its loins six years hence. 

Above—thanks Wikipedia!—is the 2022 Senate map, which plainly favors the Dems. For one thing, of the 34 seats up for election, 20 are held by Republicans. The extra exposure wouldn't mean a lot if the Republican seats were in Trumpy states while the Democrats, as in 2018, were trying to hang on in some Republican-friendly territory. But that's not how it is. Of the 14 seats Democrats have to defend, not a single one is in a state carried by Trump. Republicans, however, are defending seats in two Biden states, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In Wisconsin, the incumbent, Ron Johnson, is a Trump water boy; in Pennsylvania, the race will be for an open seat as the Republican incumbent, Pat Toomey, is retiring. The retirement of Richard Burr means that there will likewise be no incumbent in North Carolina, which Trump carried very narrowly. Ditto for Ohio, where Rob Portman announced his retirement earlier this week. So far as I know, every Democrat whose term is expiring will seek reelection. 

I read somewhere recently that not since 2002, when Norm Coleman defeated Walter Mondale after Paul Wellstone suddenly died a few days before the election, has a Senate challenger won a seat in a midterm election in a state that two years earlier had voted for the presidential candidate of the opposite party. That last sentence is a bit of a thicket. It only means that in 2000 Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore won Minnesota; then, in the midterm election two years later, a challenger from the opposite party (Republican Norm Coleman) won a Senate seat in Minnesota; and that's the last time that happened, in either direction, in any state. I point this out only because, assuming no unforeseen event whereby a new senator takes a seat via appointment, Democrats will retain their Senate majority unless some Republican can pull off in 2022 something that hasn't happened since 2002—and only then in very unusual circumstances. 

Scanning the map, it might seem that the Republicans best chances for pickups are in Georgia and Arizona. Biden won them both, barely, and both states also had special Senate elections to fill vacancies that were won by the Democrat in competitive races. The natural term for those seats is expiring in 2022 so the Democratic winners, Kelly in Arizona and Warnock in Georgia, have to face the voters again in two years. I suppose the question is whether these states will be like Virginia and Colorado, which in twenty years have gone from deep red to navy blue, or more like North Carolina, where Obama won in 2008 in what now looks like kind of a one-off. For what it's worth, here are the results of the last several presidential elections in Arizona and Georgia:

2004:  Arizona R+11; Georgia R+17
2008:  Arizona R+8; Georgia R+5
2012:  Arizona R+9; Georgia R+8
2016:  Arizona R+3; Georgia R+5
2020:  Arizona D+<1; Georgia D+<1

This looks more like the progression of Colorado and Virginia than the doddering of North Carolina but I guess we'll see. 

The Senate

Back in the olden days, when Trump had been impeached only once and the disposition of Georgia's senate seats had not been settled, I noted that, putting the Peach State temporarily aside, there were 22 states with two Republican senators, 21 states with two Democratic senators, and six others with one senator from each party. I noted, too, that the population of the 21 states with two Democratic senators was about 157 million, compared to 126 million in the 22 states with two Republican senators. So 44 Republican senators representing 126 million people and 42 Democratic senators representing 157 million people.

We can now include Georgia, with its population of just over 10 million, in our calculations. It joins the states with two Democratic senators, and there are now 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans in the Senate. The Democrats, however, represent 41 million more Americans. The difference in the number of people represented by the same number of senators is equal to about one-eighth of the country's population, which would be 12.5%. In terms of citizens, it's 56-44 for the Dems, but in terms of representation in the Senate it's 50-50. Such facts and figures may account for why Republicans appear less interested in converting Aunt Betty than in appeasing manifest lunatics. Our arrangements do not punish them for having failed to appeal to a majority, with the predictable result that they no longer even try. They're doing just fine. Hell, Trump was outvoted, twice, but has appointed a third of the Supreme Court justices and a quarter of the entire federal judiciary.

Staggering (updated)

To satisfy myself that this really happened, I'm going to type out what I think I saw. Let me know if I'm missing something.

Packers trailing Buccaneers 31-23 with 2:10, give or take a few seconds, left in the game. Packers have the ball on Bucs 8-yard-line, fourth down and goal to go. They kick a field goal to make the score 31-26. Right? That describes the situation they were in and the decision they made.

In the manner of a scientist, I'm trying to understand what could be said in favor of the view I disagree with. Before, the Packers needed a touchdown and a 2-point conversion to tie. Now, because they kicked a field goal, a touchdown puts them into the lead. Instead of needing a touchdown and 2-point conversion to tie, they need only a touchdown to win. 

But, to get this "deal," Green Bay has to kick the ball off to Tampa Bay with around 125 seconds left, and—the crucial point—they still need to score a touchdown. They had been eight yards away from what could have been a tying touchdown. Now about the best they can hope for is getting the ball back on their own 30 with maybe 100 seconds left, no timeouts, and 70 yards to cover. That's if Tampa Bay doesn't get a first down. A first down clinches it for Tampa (which is what happened).

Or the Packers could have tried to score a touchdown from the 8-yard-line. Even if they fail on fourth down, they're playing defense at the 8-yard-line, with a chance to get the ball back at about midfield. If they get a touchdown but fail on the 2-point conversion, they're kicking off, just as they are after a field goal, but now they're behind by two points instead of five and no longer need a touchdown. The third possibility is best for them: they get a touchdown, add the 2-point conversion, and tie the score. Some in-game decisions are hard but not this one. It's one of those times when I hear in my head the voice of an old colleague, now deceased, who one day around 35 years ago was amused by my surprise at something dumb one of our customers had done. "Oh, Eric," he chided me, "eventually you'll learn that the amount of incompetence in the world is truly staggering." 

UPDATE
An ESPN article taking up this question includes the following paragraphs:

According to ESPN's Win Probability model, the Packers had a 10% chance of winning by going for it on fourth down and a 9.5% chance of winning by kicking a field goal.

The model also suggested the Packers needed a 21% chance of converting to justify going for a touchdown there, with a league-average conversion rate in that spot at 23%. The Packers were the No. 1 scoring offense this season.

It seems, then, that the Win Probability model says I am right about a field goal being a bad call but wrong about it being obviously a bad call—the chance of winning after kicking a field goal is almost the same as the chance of winning after trying for a touchdown on fourth down. I agree with something the article suggests without stating explicitly: what by the model is true generally for all teams is more true for the Packers, since the strength of their team is their offense, especially their play-making quarterback. By kicking a field goal, they raised the chance that they'd lose without Aaron Rodgers taking another snap. 

The Win Probability model intrigues me. I assume it's based on what has in fact happened in past NFL games? In that case, it seems the sample size relating to the situation the Packers faced must be relatively small, and that the model therefore would be relatively unreliable. 

Henry Aaron, 1934-2021

Hank Aaron, who died today at age 86, has as strong a claim as anyone to being baseball's GOAT (greatest of all time). Let's run through some statistics, indicating his place on the all-time list:

Games played—3298—3rd (behind Pete Rose and Carl Yastrzemski)
At bats—12364—2nd (behind Rose)
Runs—2174—4th (behind Rickey Henderson, Ty Cobb, and Barry Bonds)
Hits—3771—3rd (behind Rose and Cobb)
Home runs—755—2nd (behind Bonds)
Runs batted in—2297—1st
Total bases—6856—1st
Extra base hits—1477—1st

His lifetime batting average was .305. While in his 20s, he won three gold glove awards. His cumulative career statistics were compiled without benefit of any eye-popping season. He never won the Triple Crown. He was league MVP just once. He played for one World Series champion, the 1957 Milwaukee Braves, and in his career played in only 17 post-season games—he batted .362 in those games, 25-for-69 with 6 homers and 16 RBI. He never hit more than 47 homers in a season (but hit at least 30 fifteen times). His biggest RBI year was 132 (but he averaged 100 per season over his entire 23-year career). Compared to his National League contemporaries Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente, he seemed almost determinedly unflashy. He wasn't at all physically imposing—6 feet tall, 180 pounds—and, in my memory, was so relaxed in the batter's box as to appear almost sleepy. He'd wait longer than most hitters and then flick his quick hands: in keeping with everything else, no tape measure shots, just one vanilla home run after another, about 35 a year for more than 20 years. 

I think I've talked myself into it: he's the GOAT. Look over those eight pretty fundamental statistical categories again. He's no farther down the list than fourth, all-time, on any of them, and he's at the top of the list for RBIs, total bases, and extra base hits. Of the players whose names appear ahead of his in more than one of the categories, two, Rose and Cobb, were compared to him just banjo hitters, and another, Bonds, used steroids. Mays was better than Aaron in the field and on the bases. Ted Williams walked more, had an even higher slugging percentage, and, were it not for time lost to military service, might have had career numbers to rival Aaron's. Everyone's case for being the GOAT requires some special pleading, but the case for Aaron seems to me the most straightforward. The guy with the third most hits had the second most homers, the most total bases, and the most RBIs. 

Inaugural jottings

America, to Bald Eagle: Thanks, but where ya been for four years? Also, send your friends for Hawley and Cruz.

Only women journalists can talk about what Kamala and Jill and Michelle are wearing. No one of any gender cares what any man wears. Poor Doug Emhoff, the second gentleman, looking immaculate to no effect. I had to look up how to spell his name, and his kids are too old  to be cute.

Wait, I'm forgetting Bernie Sanders. Everyone noticed his attire! He had a big manila envelope in his hand, too. Looked like maybe he'd been standing in line outside at the post office for so long that finally he thought, "Hell with it, I'll go to the inauguration."

I get a kick out of all the Republicans blowing a gasket because Biden condemned white supremacy. They are against it too, right? If yes, what's not to like? 

Trump's been pretty quiet down in Florida. Probably telling anyone who'll listen about the lingerie model he would have bedded but for the Secret Service. Moved on her like a bitch! 

He's in Twitter detention, so that might account for the silence, too. Thirty seven thousand more blown gaskets over that outrage. The media bandwidth is clogged with nut jobs bleating about being cancelled, silenced, deplatformed. Maybe these private companies should say it's their Christian values, not their terms of service agreements, that Trumpy crackpots are violating. It works for bakers too pious to take money from gay couples. 

Georgia

I was watching TV this afternoon when Biden's plane landed at Joint Base Andrews. They pull the steps out to where the plane sits on the tarmac. When all is in place, the cameras zoom in on the door, and the world waits for the president-elect to appear and descend to earth. I realize now that I must have been expecting Biden to be wearing a cape, with a big S on his chest, because I was mildly disappointed when it was only him holding his wife's hand and looking like he always does, a little old. 

Let's hope Biden is Clark Kent, because he's inheriting a worse mess from Trump than Obama did from Geo W Bush, which was in turn a worse mess than Clinton had inherited from W's father. The calamity associated with Republican administrations is deepening. Long ago I made an A in Calculus I, then a B in Calculus II, then a C in Calculus III, the last math class I ever took as I was not curious about whether the progression would continue, and for the same reason you might want to consider voting Democratic in 2024, should fortune still be favoring you with life. My early voting guide.

Though lost in the swell of news, the Democratic victories in the Georgia senate races were certified today. Since first Trump and then 10 weeks later two Republican incumbent senators were all defeated by similar margins, one might conclude that Georgians went a little sour on Republicans this election season. Occam's Razor, holding that simple explanations are generally superior to those with a lot of moving parts, recommends "Democrats got more votes" over "Democrats cheated to win in all three races, notwithstanding that Georgia's top election officials are all Republicans and there is no credible evidence of fraud." 

One aspect of the hydra-headed case for fraud in Georgia related to the Dominion voting machines, which were said to be arranged, with the assistance of Venezuelan communists and the deceased Hugo Chavez, to switch votes from Republican to Democratic. You can perhaps see why, if true, this would be a stain upon Occam's method. As time has worn on, however, he appears to have been vindicated again. The Democrats' victories in the senate races have been accepted by the losing candidates. In the presidential race, the fraud allegation has been raised loudly by Trumpy lawyers when talking to the press, but then in court, where there are Rules of Evidence and penalties for lying, they suddenly become introverts and the butt of jokes made by exasperated judges. Nevertheless, their case continues to be pressed by their friends in the right-wing media, including an online magazine called American Thinker, which prosecuted the claim against Dominion in a series of articles. It develops, however, that manufacturers of voting machines have extroverted lawyers, with the result that subscribers to American Thinker earlier this week got a reprieve from the bilge they signed up for. The following article by Thomas Lifson, the magazine's publisher and editor, ran beneath the headline "Statement":

We received a lengthy letter from Dominion's defamation lawyers explaining why they believe that their client has been the victim of defamatory statements. Having considered the full import of the letter, we have agreed to their request that we publish the following statement:

American Thinker and contributors Andrea Widburg, R.D. Wedge, Brian Tomlinson, and Peggy Ryan have published pieces on www.AmericanThinker.com that falsely accuse US Dominion Inc., Dominion Voting Systems, Inc., and Dominion Voting Systems Corporation (collectively "Dominion") of conspiring to steal the November 2020 election from Donald Trump. These pieces rely on discredited sources who have peddled debunked theories about Dominion's supposed ties to Venezuela, fraud on Dominion's machines that resulted in massive vote switching or weighted votes, and other claims falsely stating that there is credible evidence Dominion acted fraudulently.

These statements are completely false and have no basis in fact. Industry experts and public officials alike have confirmed that Dominion conducted itself appropriately and that there is simply no evidence to support these claims. 

It was wrong for us to publish these false statements. We apologize to Dominion for all of the harm this caused them and their employees. We also apologize to our readers for abandoning 9 journalistic principles and misrepresenting Dominion's track record and its limited role in tabulating votes for the November 2020 election. We regret this grave error.

Even in these polarized times, perhaps we can agree about who won that contest.

Martin Luther King day

 

Martin Luther King Day: I'm for honoring him, but I spend too much of the the day rolling my eyes. As a Norwegian, I suspect that Americans with ethnic roots closer to the Equator must be even more put off by the ritual displays of piety. Try to throw out the votes of Black Americans at 7 o'clock, tweet about MLK at 8 o'clock. I'm thinking of you, Lindsey Graham and Ronna McDaniel and, I'm sure, scores I'm unaware of because I was playing board games with kids.

King wasn't so loved when he was alive. A Harris poll from early 1968 found that three-in-four Americans viewed him unfavorably. This article, a welcome antidote to all the artificial sweetener, doesn't come right out and say people thought he was "uppity," out of his lane, but that's what the author, James Cobb, a historian at the University of Georgia, is saying. The previous year, 1967, King had condemned the Vietnam War from the pulpit, and his tone was bitter: he said it was hypocritical to send young Americans thousands of miles "to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia." The above is a video of a speech, "The Other America," he delivered on March 10, 1968, less than a month before he was killed. He says racism is "deeply rooted" in America; he takes up the subject of "white backlash" and calls into question the good will of white Americans; he makes the subtle point that some white liberals recognize that Bull Connor is wicked and regard their criticism of him as a substitute for being committed to racial justice; he calls a riot "the language of the unheard" and says the conditions that lead to them must be condemned as strongly as the riots themselves; he's critical of the "bootstraps" argument (it only occurs to people who have boots); his economic program, which includes a call for "a guaranteed annual income," is that of the left wing of the Democratic party—it's a lot easier to understand why three-fourths disapproved in 1968 than it is to explain the universal approbation he enjoys today. I see now that Mike Pence and Ivanka Trump were among those tweeting about him during this year's festival. 

In the 1970s, when Andrei Sakharov and others were calling attention to human rights violations in the Soviet Union, the official Kremlin response often called out the names of "dissidents" who were tolerated or even honored. There were government-approved "dissidents," in other words, who functioned to deflect the criticism of dissidents. I feel like something similar has befallen King. The country's racial past is ugly, a stain that won't wash out, but, no need to look too closely, we all love Martin Luther King. It has required some scrubbing to make him anodyne, however.

Some philosophers

I follow on Twitter Agnes Callard, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago with a lively  feed. The other day she retweeted someone who had reproduced the following paragraphs, by the philosopher Jerry Fodor (pictured), with the comment, "I wish I could write like Jerry Fodor." The passage looks to me like a footnote in an actual academic paper Fodor wrote:

⁴I am reading, "What makes Wheaties the breakfast of champions?" as asking "What about Wheaties makes champions of (some, many, so many) Wheaties eaters?" rather than "What about Wheaties makes (some, many, so many) champions eat them?" The latter question invites the reasons that champions give for eating Wheaties; and though these may include reference to properties Wheaties have by virtue of which its eaters become champions, they need not do so. Thus, a plausible answer to the second question which is not plausibly an answer to the first might be: "They taste good."

I am uncertain which of these questions the Wheaties people have in mind when they ask "What makes Wheaties the breakfast of champions?" rhetorically, as, I believe, they are wont to do. Much of their advertising consists of publicizing statements by champions to the effect that they (the champions) do, in fact, eat Wheaties. If, as may be the case, such statements are offered as arguments for the truth of the presupposition of the question on its first reading (viz., that there is something about Wheaties that makes champions of those who eat them), then it would appear that General Mills has either misused the method of differences or committed the fallacy of affirmation of the consequent. 

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less. 

With Wheaties I'm familiar, and I've now googled "Jerry Fodor," "method of differences," and "affirmation of the consequent." Fodor was a philosophy professor, or philosopher, whose specialty was "philosophy of mind," including "philosophy of language" and "cognition." I take it he was interested in questions like, "What is going on in your mind (or brain) when you are engaged in what we call 'thinking'?" Sometimes it seems like you are saying words to yourself:

Boy, I really hope the team that plays its home games in the city in which I live wins the tournament.

But that doesn't explain all "thoughts." For example, if someone asked, in something I was reading,

What does a carburetor look like?

I would "think the words"

I have no idea

but someone else, who actually knows what a carburetor looks like, would have some kind of brain activity more accurately represented by a phrase like "formed a mental image" of, in this case, a carburetor: no words, in other words, but a picture instead. These are the kinds of things, it seems, that Fodor thought about, including while reading the panel of a Wheaties box at the breakfast table. 

The "method of differences" refers to a reasoning process sometimes illustrated by a family meal gone bad. If everyone eats everything and everyone gets sick, the culprit is a mystery; but, if one person refrains from eating salad, and she's the only one who doesn't get sick, then logic dictates that suspicion falls upon the salad. But be careful!

Carl Lewis, Lindsey Vonn, and Michael Phelps eat Wheaties for breakfast, whereas Eric Jorgenson prefers frosted miniwheats. Therefore, eating Wheaties for breakfast makes Olympic champions.

The fallacy of affirmation of the consequent is another instance of the slipperiness associated with assigning causes to events. From the truth of a conditional statement 

If there's a power outage after a storm, then the houses will be dark

one should not conclude that the following switcheroo results in more truth:

If the houses are dark, then there's been a storm and the power is out. 

While clicking here and there, from the starting point of "Jerry Fodor," I ended up reading this obituary of the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin. It's quite long, and I'd bet 97 readers out of a hundred will remember only the anecdote pertaining to an incident from Dworkin's courtship of his eventual wife. He'd been an ace law student and so as a young man got a job clerking for the famous federal appeals court judge Learned Hand. At the start of one of their first dates, Dworkin explained that he had to drop off a document at the home of his boss. Hand, who was then in his 80s, met the young couple at the door and insisted that they step inside. He then spent the next two hours mixing dry martinis and talking brilliantly. As they were leaving, Dworkin's future wife said to him, "If I see more of you, do I get to see more of him?"

Enjoyable, though arguably a better fit in Hand's obituary.

Homework

Whew! This morning's effort at "snow" removal was like using a shovel to empty a swimming pool. I feel like my aged cat, who used to entertain himself by jumping from the floor to the top of the refrigerator but who I now lift onto the bathroom vanity so that he can drink from the running faucet while I brush my teeth.

With steady application, however, I can still help my 7th-grader work through to the solution of a vexing math problem. Word problems in particular cause her to throw her arms in the air and yell, with her expressive face, because I would frown if she used her larynx, "WTF!?"

A man receives income from two investments at simple interest rates of 6½% and 8%, respectively. He has twice as much invested at 6½% as at 8%. If his annual interest from the two investments is $698.25, find how much is invested at each rate.

First, since this is the Minneapolis Public Schools, I think the problem should commence, "A person of unspecified gender mired in end-stage capitalism . . ."—but let's accept it on its own unwoke terms. "Calm down," I say to her, since in my experience that works with women of all ages, "and give thanks that it's simple interest. You just need to change the words into equations."

Look of expressive despair converted to blank disdain, but, with coaxing, she writes down, after a couple false starts:

0.065x + 0.08y = 698.25

And what else do you know? "There's twice as much at 6½%,"  she says. A little light in her eyes now. That look must be why some people stay in education despite the low pay. She writes down

x = 2y

and now knows just what to do:

0.065(2y) + 0.08y = 698.25
0.13y + 0.08y = 698.25
0.21y = 698.25
y = 698.25 ÷ 0.21 = 3325

She's really happy when she punches the last button on her calculator and sees the nice round figure, "3325." That's when you know you're right. If it was fractions of a cent, or even of a dollar, back to the drawing board. But this is math class, not real life, and I remember that moment of tension followed immediately by either despair [3325.4148629713] or satisfaction [3325]. Homework help almost makes me feel young again. I remind her that she needs to say how much is invested at each rate.

y  = 3325 and x = 2y so x = 3325 x 2 = 6650⇒the dude had $6650 at 6½% and $3325 at 8%. 

I make a joke about how "the dude" needs a different financial advisor, but she saved the hardest problem for last and is already on her phone, calling her bff, whom she never sees anymore except on Facetime—for the same reason that school is in her bedroom. I had a little fun with the details of the problem but am impressed that school kids in Minneapolis are learning this stuff in 7th grade. I mean, I'd be surprised if the people Hollywood stars and hedge fund managers hire to take college entrance exams for their kids couldn't do problems like this, but presumably they're not  7th graders. At this rate, she's on her own within a year or two. 

Funniest thing I read today: Women on a dating app switch their political filter to "conservative" in order to find men who offer to send them pics of themselves inside the Capitol on January 6. The women then forward the pics along with their correspondent's dating profile to the FBI. I wonder if the FBI is embarrassed not to have thought to do this itself. More women should work in law enforcement. For some reason, they seem to have a better handle on how stupid these losers are apt to be. 

A squirming dog who's just had his day

I've had one thought about the Trump impeachment that, so far as I know, hasn't been noted by any of the professional commentators. I doubt it's because I don't watch Fox, except occasionally out of curiosity to see what they're talking about after Trump has once again shat the bed. (Violent mob of Trump supporters invades Capitol, killing cop, but there is this English professor at a liberal arts college in Middletown whose views on gender identity are considered odd by many Southern Baptists!)

Anyway, here is my hot analysis:

I'm sure Trump was saving up his newsiest pardons for the last hour, like the grand finale to a fireworks show: Giuliani, his own family members, his own self—the explosion in the night sky was to spell out UNDER MY THUMB! But Mitch McConnell has signaled that conviction in the Senate is possible and he is not himself sure how he'll vote. Trump can still issue the pardons, of course, but now doing so places a few more grams on one side of a nearly balanced scale. Trump's on probation. He can't act with impunity anymore and McConnell is humming, just loud enough for everyone to hear:

It's down to me
The way he talks when he's spoken to
Down to me, the change has come
He's under my thumb.

Delicious, even if you despise McConnell. Like if the Badgers beat Norte Dame: you wish it could have been someone else, but, good enough.

Honor roll

Ten out of 207 Republicans? Maybe if Trump's mob had found Pence and hanged him, like they were chanting about, there would have been a full dozen. 

Well, it does make you curious about the ten, and it's a small enough number to read up on in one night.

Liz Cheney, of Wyoming, has by far the highest profile. She of course is the daughter of Dick Cheney, W's vice president, and is behind only Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise in the House Republican pecking order. She represents the entire state of Wyoming, whose population is less than that of almost all other congressional districts. Trump won Wyoming by 70 to 27 percent. Her statement explaining her vote reads in part:

The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the President. The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution. 

Her Republican colleagues are already moving to strip her of her leadership role in the House of Representatives.

Adam Kinzinger represents Illinois' 16th congressional district—western exurbs of Chicago and the city of Rockford. The district twice voted for Trump by double-digit margins. He was first elected in 2010 with 57 percent of the vote, and has never received less than that in any of his reelections. He's a former Air Force pilot. Reading through the summary of his political views in Wikipedia, it appears I agree with him about precisely one thing: Trump. On the day after the attack on the Capitol, he called for the president's removal via the 25th Amendment. He was interviewed about his impeachment vote on this evening's PBS News Hour. Judy Woodruff asked whether it had been a hard decision. He answered that it had not. 

John Katko represents New York's 24th congressional district, which stretches along the southern shore of Lake Ontario and includes the city of Syracuse. Biden carried the district, as did Hillary Clinton. The Cook Political Report's PVI for the district is D+3. Katco, a lawyer, was first elected in 2014 after having served as an Assistant US Attorney in Syracuse, where he headed the organized crime division. His reelection race in 2018, which he won by 5 points, was his closest. In 2020 he had a rematch against the same Democratic challenger, Dana Balter, a professor at Syracuse University, and this time he beat her by 10 points. His political views are moderate and, apparently, a good fit for the district: he's opposed to abortion but has been critical of efforts to repeal Obamacare, and he's co-sponsored a bill extending the protections of the Civil Rights Act to LGBT people. He was the first Republican to announce he'd vote to impeach. One of his former interns now works as a Capitol Hill police officer and was admitted to hospital after being severely beaten by the mob on January 6.

Fred Upton's district is Michigan's 6th. It's in the southwest corner of the state, bordered by Lake Michigan on the west and Indiana on the south, biggest town is Kalamazoo. Trump carried the district twice, by 8 points in 2016 and by 4 points in 2020. Upton probably qualifies as a "career politician." He's been in the Congress for almost 30 years and before that worked in the Office of Management and Budget during the Reagan administration. He announced his intention to vote for impeachment on Twitter this morning:

Today the President characterized his inflammatory rhetoric at last Wednesday's rally as "totally appropriate," and he expressed no regrets for last week's violent insurrection at the US Capitol. . . . I would have preferred a bipartisan, formal censure rather than a drawn-out impeachment process. I fear this will now interfere with important legislative business and a new Biden Administration. But it is time to say: Enough is enough. . . . I will vote to impeach.

Upton is now the first US representative to have voted for the impeachment of two presidents, Clinton and Trump. 

Jaime Herrera Beutler, 42, is beginning her sixth term representing Washington's 3rd congressional district, which runs along the border with Oregon from the Pacific Ocean to the central part of the state. Trump carried the district twice, by seven points against Clinton and then by four against Biden. She was first elected, with 53 percent of the vote, in 2010 when the seat became open after the Democratic incumbent retired. Redistricting after the 2010 census extended the district somewhat farther east and made it more Republican: in all but one of her reelections (2018), she's won by a double-digit margin, most recently by 13 points. Her statement supporting impeachment may be read here. Although Democrats and the impeachment article itself stress Trump's "incitement" of his supporters at the rally preceding the assault on the Capitol, Herrera Beutler is plainly more distressed by his actions (or inaction) while the attack was in progress and the statement he recorded afterwards in which he said the rioters were "special" and "we love you." 

Funny, when you type the first few letters of these names into Google, the wizards in the ether immediately guess who you're looking for. I bet it was different yesterday. You do have to get to the "d" in "Fred" before getting a list headed by Fred Upton, just ahead of Freddie Mercury, which would probably amuse Fred Upton, unless he doesn't know about Freddie Mercury, a distinct possibility. The remaining five are Dan Newhouse of Washington, Peter Meijer of Michigan, Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio (a former Buckeye football player and Indianapolis Colt), Tom Rice of South Carolina, and David Valadao of California. I'm aborting this mission. You can read about them in Wikipedia, or wherever, as well as here: the links are to their Wikipedia bios. Tom Rice is second to Tom Brady among Google's favorite Toms, but I think he could move up were he to say that the Earth is warming and the greenhouse effect is to blame. 

 

Notes on a Chinese curse

The Chinese curse is, "May you live in interesting times."

1. The Twenty-fifth Amendment isn't going to work. It would require Pence to act in concert with a majority of cabinet secretaries—in other words, big dogs, and there are only puppies. This morning, House Democrats tried to introduce a unanimous consent motion calling on Pence to begin implementing Remedy 25, but of course one objection cancels "unanimous," and there are around 200 Republicans, so, mixing metaphors, that plane was never headed to the start of the runway.

2. Impeachment: not enough time to get Trump out early, but conviction, even after his term is up, could carry the enticing penalty of disqualification from ever again holding federal office. From what I can tell, reading hither and thither, mostly here, this involves a two-step verdict in the Senate. First, Trump would have to be convicted on the impeachment article, which requires a two-thirds vote. Only after a conviction could the senators then turn to the question of whether Trump should be disqualified from holding office. The wrinkle is that imposing this penalty requires only a simple majority of voting senators, though it must be preceded by the two-thirds vote to convict. The thing to notice in this regard is that a Republican senator who wanted to stop Trump from being a candidate would have to first vote for conviction. I'm inclined to think, considering the craven instincts on display for four years, that this makes conviction less likely, notwithstanding the crime: the president incited a riot to try and stop the constitutional process of confirming the winner of the election he lost. 

3. Employing a fire extinguisher, the mob bludgeoned to death a police officer inside the United States Capitol—and Republicans are complaining, for example, about the number of followers they've lost on social media sites. Simon and Schuster canceled a book deal with Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator who, with Ted Cruz, has led the effort to throw out the certified election result. This elicited from Hawley a hysterical statement asserting that the First Amendment is in abeyance, as if a private company is obliged to publish his manuscript. By Hawley's logic, if I were to submit this blog post to the editorial page of the New York Times, which then declined to publish it, I'd have a cause for action against the Gray Lady on First Amendment grounds. He's a poor advertisement for whatever law school he attended—Yale, I understand. He knows better? So much the worse for him. Better to be stupid than a preening, self-seeking, manipulative, straight-A reprobate.  

4. It's weird how Democrats have been unable to make government hold Trump to account, but Republicans can't stop the private sector from expressing distaste. I wonder whether our president is more upset about being banned from Twitter or having the PGA pull a big tournament from his Bedminster course. These are the things he cares about. The body count from the public health debacle is going to hit 400,000 before he's out. When did he last allude to it? 

5. To inject a note of bipartisanship, a few Republicans have comported themselves well. Mitt Romney, take a bow:

We gather today due to a selfish man's injured pride and the outrage of his supporters whom he has deliberately misinformed for the past two months and stirred to action this very morning. What happened here today was an insurrection, incited by the President of the United States. 

Farther down the food chain, where the inhabitants are not obliged to estimate political fallout, the incidence of conservatives getting 4 from twice 2 rises modestly. Ed Whelan, the lawyer and conservative operative who last attracted my attention when beclowning himself in the effort to get Kavanaugh confirmed, has contributed to National Review a concise brief for the prosecution:

i. The MAGA attack on the Capitol was an outrage that ought to have every patriotic American seething with anger.

ii. Donald Trump bears grave moral and political responsibility for inciting the attack.

iii. Impeachment and conviction of Trump is an appropriate, and probably necessary, response.

iv. As I have repeatedly observed since the election, Trump's claims of outcome-altering fraud rest on an ever-changing series of ludicrous assertions. It has been sad to see so many people duped by his claims.

6. Attention has been lavished on Trump's hour-long pep talk to his supporters before they were dispatched to march on the Capitol, but how about what he said after they'd erected a gallows on the Capitol grounds, broken into the building, desecrated it, plundered it, shat on the carpets, killed a cop?

This was a fraudulent election, but we can't play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You're very special. You've seen what happens. You see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home and go home in peace.

"We love you. You're very special." Wish I could say it's "unbelievable" he'd talk like this. Is it hilarious, or sickening, that he has just enough religious sensibility to imitate a priest giving a benediction? "Go in peace." 

7. It's becoming pretty clear that, while bad, the attack on the Capitol might easily have been far worse. There is footage, shot by a journalist with his cell phone, of a cop luring the mob away from the unguarded corridor leading to the Senate chamber where senators and staff had not yet been evacuated.  According to witnesses, some in the mob were chanting, "Where's Nancy?" while others shouted, "Hang Mike Pence!" They had zip ties and (of course) guns. Hostage taking or a blood bath, or both—averted, but narrowly, and by luck. 

8. Yet there is to it all a large element of buffoonery as well. The guy carrying Pelosi's lectern as he strolled toward a Capitol exit, grinning like a gargoyle at someone taking his picture, turns out to be a stay-at-home dad from the Tampa area. His wife is a medical doctor. So more like what the guys with zip ties would call a "pajama boy" than one of these despairing members of the white working class who will vote for Trump unless he ODs first. A rioter from rural Alabama (pictured above) died of a heart attack during the melee. His family put out a statement describing him as a devoted husband and father, a Trump supporter who loved motorcycles but abjured violence. His Parler posts, however, tell quite a different story: they're ugly, profane, despicable, and at the same time kind of amusingly subliterate. (Maybe the impulse to copy edit his idiocy identifies an "elitist.") The same AP story from which I gleaned the details relating to the deceased Alabama man has an inspired passage that captures, in its inventory of another MAGA guy's possessions and his interrupted itinerary, the odd mixture of depravity and farce:

Also facing federal charges is Cleveland Grover Meredith Jr., a Georgia man who in the wake of the election had protested outside the home of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, whom Trump had publicly blamed for his loss in the state. Meredith drove to Washington last week for the "Save America" rally but arrived late because of a problem with the lights on his trailer, according to court filings that include expletive-laden texts.

[Snip: samples of expletive-laden texts omitted to spare your gentle eyes; the hyperlink to the whole story is above.]

Meredith, who is white, then texted a photo of himself in blackface. "I'm gonna walk around DC FKG with people by yelling 'Allahu ak Bar' randomly."

A participant in the text exchange provided screenshots to the FBI, who tracked Meredith to a Holiday Inn a short walk from the Capitol. They found a compact Tavor X95 assault rifle, a 9 mm Glock 19 handgun and about 100 rounds of ammunition, according to court filings. The agents also seized a stash of THC edibles and a vial of injectable testosterone.

These are the fellahs who get a chubby when Trump complains about "shithole countries" and Mexico "not sending their best." 

Gerrymandering begets political extremism

When the Congress was able to reconvene after Wednesday's insurrection at the Capitol, more than half the Republicans voted to challenge the Electoral College results as certified by the states. But this "more than half" included only 8 of the 52 Republican senators:

Josh Hawley, Missouri
Ted Cruz, Texas
John Kennedy, Louisiana
Cindy Hyde-Smith, Mississippi
Roger Marshall, Kansas
Tommy Tuberville, Alabama
Cynthia Lummis, Wyoming
Rick Scott, Florida

I'm not going to list the House Republicans opposed to democracy, because there are 138 of them—138 of their 211-member caucus. But this does raise the question: why are the House Republicans even nuttier than their colleagues in the Senate? A clue to the answer is to be found in the 8 states represented by the above 8 senators. Trump carried all of them, of course, and he won 6 of the 8 by more than 15 percent of the vote. His average margin in all 8 exceeded 17 percent. Cruz and Scott, from Texas and Florida, where the presidential election was relatively close, both won their seats in 2018 and will not face voters again until 2024. Cruz (and Hawley) plainly have presidential ambitions and are maneuvering for favor with Trump-loving Republican primary voters.

While these 8 states aren't competitive, they are, so to speak, accidentally uncompetitive: their borders were set long ago and are unchanging. Congressional districts, however, are redrawn every 10 years and are designed to be uncompetitive. In a manner of speaking, not just some but most Republican House members are from Alabama. In Ohio, for example, there are 16 congressional districts, 5 of which are represented by Republicans who voted to challenge the certified presidential result. Here, courtesy of the ACLU, are maps of those five districts:

Ohio is not huge in area and has several big and mid-sized cities, in different parts of the state, that are home to lots of Democratic voters: Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Akron, Dayton, Toledo. This makes it an especial challenge to draw as many safely Republican districts as possible, but obviously they are trying! Several of these maps have "cutouts," which raises the question: what's in the carefully excluded areas? The answer to that question is: Democrats. The map of the first district calls attention to the meticulous excision of Cincinnati, but that's not the only instance. It's about 50 miles from Canton to North Ridgeville, both within the seventh district, but, to travel from one town to the other without leaving the district, you have to drive about 130 miles. What if you  take the direct route? Well, that takes you to Akron and then through the suburbs south of Cleveland—Democratic territory. The eighth district carefully excludes Dayton. Etc.

A corollary of the effort to create Republican districts is that Democrats are sequestered, and concentrated, in the remaining ones: political apartheid, which has the effect of amplifying the most extreme voices. Having meticulously assembled this arrangement Republicans, when it's convenient, bemoan the "rise of partisanship" and piously insist that "all sides must turn down the volume." Last year, a 3-judge panel of the US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio held that Ohio's congressional map was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander and ordered that a new one be drawn before this year's election. Ohio Republicans appealed, and five Republican appointees to the Supreme Court held that Congress, but not federal courts, could limit partisan gerrymanders. In other words, the corrupt practice may only be outlawed by its beneficiaries. Just infuriating. 

The Ohio districts that exist for the purpose of holding as many Democratic voters as possible, so that Republicans can represent all the others, are even more outlandish. Here's one that squeezes parts of suburban Cleveland into a district with Toledo, which is a hundred miles from Cleveland; about half way between the cities, the "district" is wide as a road:

PSA

Friends! Give your social media posts more authority than they may deserve by correctly discriminating between "capital" and "capitol." The former refers to a city. The latter refers to a building in that city. So, for example: "The MAGA dude caught a flight to the capital in order to vandalize the Capitol."

I've also been, for around a half hour now, a self-professed expert on the twenty-fifth amendment. It sounds like getting rid of Trump under its section 4 provisions would require Pence to agree with at least half the cabinet heads that their boss is a menace. Call me cynical, but I think this might explain the resignations today of Elaine Chao, the Secretary of Transportation (and Mitch McConnell's wife), and Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education. They had less than two weeks to go anyway, and by quitting now they remove the possibility of having to make a call about whether the risk of limping to January 20 with Trump as president is acceptably low. 

The strongest argument against this view is that it would require Chao and DeVos to have concluded that Pence might have the gumption to do what needs to be done. 

 

At the Capitol (and in it)

I rely on the Power Line blog for my window on the right-wing mindset. Today, one of their bloggers, Scott Johnson, somewhat mildly condemned the insurrectionists at the Capitol. The first sentence of his post reads

President Trump seems determined to leave office in a manner that vindicates the vile accusations hurled at him by his opponents over the past four years

which raises the question: Vile? Or proven true? Anyway, I scrolled down to the Comments section. A sampling:

Mr. Johnson, you should be ashamed of yourself. Did you forget, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants"? Apparently you did. I was hoping they'd blow up the capital building, and some of the Congress-critters that populate it, so that maybe, finally, those who would dictate to us might learn that we won't accept being dictated to.

We tried the soapbox, then the ballot box. It was stolen from us. There's one remedy left and if you're squeamish about it then shut your coward mouth. . . .

Gentlemen, what do you think is going on exactly? A little spat among patriots? This is an existential threat to the Republic. Behaving like nice little drones and "accepting" the rape of Lady Liberty, is unconscionable. And if you don't see it in those terms, you are more addicted to the status quo, than you are to freedom.

Antifa has been destroying cities for months. Why this reaction to a few Patriots?

What is stunning is that so-called conservatives are caterwauling about ONE FREAKING EVENT on a SINGLE DAY where some of our own finally made a stand.

After 6 months off Biden's Brownshirts doing worse—furthermore toward the neighbors and private property of poor people and immigrants—I'm a little light on tears to shed for Congresscritters scurrying a la cockroach. It's just a building. It's insured.

Fuck you, Scott . . . .

I have some friends there who texted that they believe it's antifa agitating.

This is just the beginning. Stolen elections have consequences.

And on and on and on and on it goes. It's much more than a basketful, Hillary. 

On MSNBC, Nicole Wallace just said that what happened at the Capitol today "borders on sedition." Biden had deployed the same phrase in his remarks. Here is the applicable federal law (18 USC § 2384):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Responsible" Republicans are telling the seditionists to go home peacefully. Go home? How about arresting them and prosecuting the shit out of them? (Apologies for the legal jargon.)

Georgia

Today is Walter Mondale’s 93rd birthday.
On day after his 53rd birthday - Jan. 6, 1981 - he announced his defeat in the electoral college:
“Walter F. Mondale has received 49 votes."
Ovation
Mondale to Tip O'Neill: "A landslide"
O'Neill: "Very impressive"
pic.twitter.com/fSbyuRy9YI

— Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) January 5, 2021

Everyone is wondering what Pence is going to do tomorrow, when he opens the envelope containing the electoral college results before a joint session of Congress. The above is a clip of Walter Mondale, Carter's vice president, performing the pro forma task in 1981. Pray on it, Mike, and take the cue. 

Can't believe I'm sitting here watching the returns for two US Senate races out of the state of Georgia, that the Democratic candidates are a Jew and a Black guy, and that everyone agrees the races are going to be close. Indeed, so far, according to Steve Kornacki, it appears that the Democratic candidates are "hitting their numbers," meaning that in county after county they are getting no less than Biden's share of the vote. Turnout, especially in the Atlanta metro, is the outstanding wild card.

My plan is to update this post as the night wears on. If I don't, you can conclude that the box of wine is empty and my motor skills impaired to the point that typing isn’t recommended.

UPDATE: With two-thirds of the expected vote counted, the two Republican candidates have for the first time pulled into the lead. Many of the metro Atlanta counties, however, are still under half in. Some relatively large counties in exurban Atlanta are finished, and the Democratic candidates, overall, appear to have lost them by less than Biden did—and of course Biden won statewide. In Paulding County, for example, Trump defeated Biden by 63.9-34.8, but tonight, in the same county, Republican Kelly Loeffler has defeated Democrat Raphael Warnock by just 63.1-36.9. In a couple other counties, the Republicans are running a point or so ahead of Trump. So it's very close.

The two races are not "twins"—Warnock has been consistently running about a half point ahead of his Democratic peer, Jon Ossoff. This raises the possibility of a split decision—Warnock narrowly wins, Ossoff narrowly loses—in which case of course Republicans would hold on, barely, to their Senate majority. 

UPDATE 2: Fwiw, right now, 9:00 p.m. central time, the New York Times election needle indicates that, when it's all done, the Democrats will have won both races: Warnock by 1.7% and Ossoff by 1.0%. The Times's linguistic characterizations of the races are currently "probably Warnock" and "leaning Ossoff." If that holds, Mitch McConnell is looking at a demotion. Fingers crossed. 

UPDATE 3: The "Decision Desks" are conservative. Dave Wasserman, of Cook Political Report, says, 9:40 p.m., that he's seen enough: Warnock defeats Loeffler. The other race is still leaning to Ossoff. 

UPDATE 4: 10:10 p.m.: The Times's election needle, hyperlinked above, shows both an expected specific result and a range of what is possible. The specific expected result has barely budged—Warnock by 1.8% and Ossoff by 1.0%—but, in the Warnock-Loeffler race, the range of possible outcomes is now all on Warnock's side of the compass. In the Ossoff-Perdue race, there is a tiny sliver of the possible range on Perdue's side. The characterization of that race has shifted from "leans Ossoff" to "quite likely Ossoff."

But what really clinches it: Trump is tweeting about fraud in the elections tonight. It's a reflex. We lose? Fraud!

UPDATE 5 (the last): At 12:30 a.m. Warnock is ahead by about 35,000 votes and Ossoff and Loeffler are essentially tied. The outstanding vote is in heavily Democratic counties. Around a half hour ago, a rural county reported it's last few votes and, though it's a 2-to-1 Republican county, both Democrats actually gained ground—the county reported its mail-in ballots last, and, as in November, the mailed vote is Democratic even in Republican territory. Almost all the remaining vote, besides being in Democratic counties, was cast by mail or in-person during the early voting period. No one thinks it’s anything but navy blue.

Not sure why the "Decision Desks" are reluctant to project winners. 

Someone on Twitter says the upside for Kelly Loeffler is that she bought all those baseball caps and flannel shirts so recently that she might be able to return them for a refund.

REALLY THE LAST UPDATE: Finally, 12:45 a.m., NBC declares Warnock the winner. Ossoff has taken a lead of 3560 votes. His final margin is likely to surpass Biden's, which, as everyone knows, thanks to Trump's recent phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State suborning election fraud, was 11,800 votes. 

Biden will be able to get all his cabinet nominees confirmed. He will also be able to appoint judges, including to the Supreme Court, as the Constitution but not Mitch McConnell envisioned. Reform of the Supreme Court is a possibility—maybe more justices, but with term limits, the terms expiring on a regular schedule so that vacancies are predictable and not a matter of actuarial calculation. Democrats, not Republicans, will determine what legislation is voted on in the Senate. The whole complexion of everything changes. The story of the election season had been that the Democrats were able to beat Trump but that most everything else was a disappointment. The updated version is that they beat Trump, held the House, and won the Senate.

Signing off, 1:25 a.m., with Ossoff's lead up to 9527 votes. It's over.

Gabe Kalscheur and the rogues' gallery

The kid on the Gopher basketball team I pull for hardest—twisting in my chair, trying to alter the arc of his 3-point attempts—is Gabe Kalscheur. His shooting woes get all the attention. Watch him when the Gophers don't have the ball. He will guard you. Also, he's a good rebounder for his size, plays a nice floor game, more assists than turnovers, makes his foul shots: really a solid player. If he started shooting it a little straighter, so that the price for surrounding Marcus Carr wasn't bargain basement—I feel we might already be among the better teams in the country's best league, and that would make us better. 

Listening to Trump's last tape as I type this. It's around the 80th time he's "shot someone on Fifth Avenue." I need 12,000 votes, Brad. What are you gonna do about it, Brad? Why Brad doesn't tell him to stfu and stop criming is beyond me. Obviously it could be worse. The people on both ends of the call could be corrupt. But then there would be no reason for the call. Might be our future. 

Who's the second most despicable person in the country? Josh Hawley coming up on the outside, but Ted Cruz, who won't stand up for his dad or his wife (or America), is holding him off for now. Then there's Marco Rubio, tweeting Bible verses while Trump sprays lighter fluid on everything. Mark Meadows is a flunky. Mike Pence is alternately a national joke and a national emetic. Ron Johnson, the senator from Wisconsin—an up-and-comer, for sure. The president's offspring are repugnant. 

It'll be easier to judge in three years when they're together in one place, campaigning for president. 

Financial

If anyone knows when the stock market is going to head in the other direction, please enlighten me in the Comments.

On second thought, send me a private message. It's not enough that I should prosper. Everyone else must drown in the sea. 

Ordered some bagels for lunch as there is a bagel shop two blocks away. Although the online app allowed me to order my daughters' favorite kind—cinnamon sugar, the sweetest possible option—when I showed up I was told they didn't have any left. So I switched to plain, and the fellow handed me a 10-dollar bill with the bagels & cream cheese! I saw him with my bag knocking around on the cash register and thought I was going to have to explain that I'd paid online (for my preferred flavor). But he said he felt bad about being out of cinnamon sugar.

I've been skeptical, or cynical, about all the upbeat conclusions regarding awful 2020 finally being done and better times coming—as if fortune and the coronavirus gave two shits about our calendars and the position of the Earth on its trip 'round the sun. But free bagels for New Year's lunch! An encouraging omen.

Speaking of the stock market, I see that Trump is crowing about it being at a record high on his watch. Was Herbert Hoover perhaps the last president who could not make the same boast? I remember Trump taking credit for the stock market rising in the period between his election and inauguration, so I checked to see what's happened this time. The Dow closed at 27,480 on November 3. Yesterday it closed at 30,606. It's up more than 11% since Trump was defeated. I'm not saying there's a causal relationship—just that, four years ago, Trump said a rise in the corresponding period was caused by his victory. 

In trying to verify my surmise re Hoover, I see it's probably incorrect. Going back a hundred years, four presidents have overseen a decline in the Dow during their time in office: Nixon, Carter, and George W Bush, in addition to Hoover. The presidents presiding over the four sharpest rises were Coolidge, FDR, Clinton, and Obama. 

It's become almost a cliche to say that "the stock market isn't the economy." In one respect, though, it seems representative: in the stock market, as everywhere else, a very few are striking it rich while everyone else treads water or drowns. For example, in 2020 the S&P 500 rose 16.71%. But the top 24 issues accounted for essentially all the rise. Take them out, so that the index is made of the remaining 476 issues, and the return turns negative for the year (down about a tenth of 1 percent). 

In non financial news, today's New York Times has an article, "Trump's Focus as the Pandemic Raged: What Would It Mean for Him?" Read it and then debate with yourself the detail possessing the largest outrageous plus pitiful sum. For me, I think the winner is:

The debates inside the White House increasingly revolved around Dr Atlas, who had no formal training in infectious diseases but whose views—which Mr Trump saw him deliver on Fox News—appealed to the president's belief that the crisis was overblown.

His arrival at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was itself something of a mystery. Some aides said he was discovered by Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary. Others said John McAntee, the president's personnel chief, had been Googling for a Trump-friendly doctor who would be loyal.