Eric The Blue

After a hard weekend of nothing much at all

 

I've spent most of the long weekend verifying Paul Westerberg's maxim about how it's possible "to work up a mean mean thirst after a hard day of nothing much at all." That's him, above, performing solo "Here Comes a Regular"; the studio version, from the Replacements' Tim, is here.

I felt most alive while watching the Gopher football game. It might be Wisconsin's new thing to be just a little worse than us each year. Took some doing in 2022. Soon as the exhilaration of winning a close game against a hated rival had worn off, I asked myself: What's the best team we've beaten this season? In the nonconference schedule, we won games against New Mexico State (which finished the year 5-6), Western Illinois (0-11), and Colorado (1-11). Our wins in conference games, with the opponent's final conference record indicated, were against Michigan State (3-6), Rutgers (1-8), Nebraska (3-6), Northwestern (1-8), and Wisconsin (4-5). We had the good fortune not to have either Michigan or Ohio State on our schedule. We did play Penn State, the third best team in the league. They beat us 45-7.

In other competitions, I had the radio on this morning and heard the show's host ask Mara Liasson, NPR's Washington correspondent, what her biggest takeaway from the midterm election was. She said it was that the country, besides being bitterly divided, is also evenly divided. She noted that four states generally regarded as "swingy" moved definitively toward either the Republicans (Florida, Ohio) or the Democrats (Pennsylvania, Michigan). By her estimate, that leaves only four true "swing states," which are not on the whole particularly big ones: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin. 

My takeaways from her takeaway are, first, it's absurd that, thanks to the electoral college, the voters in well over 40 states are going to be ignored in the next presidential campaign. Get rid of the electoral college: most votes, from sea to shining sea, wins! Second, since we're stuck with the Rube Goldberg machine into the foreseeable future, trading the electoral votes of Florida and Ohio for those of Pennsylvania and Michigan is a decent deal for the Dems. Then, of the 46 states that Liasson thinks pretty clearly lean one way or the other, 22 (including D.C.), with 260 electoral votes, are blue, and 25, with 235 electoral votes, are red. You need 270 to win and the electoral vote counts of the four swing states are Arizona (11), Georgia (16), Nevada (6), and Wisconsin (10). You can see that, in this scenario, Nevada hardly matters, either: to win, the Republican would have to run the table in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin—Nevada plus the two biggest of the other three isn't enough, though at that point the outcome in two congressional districts in the states (Maine and Nebraska) that don't award all their electoral votes to the statewide winner could become determinative. 

Do such calculations seem bizarre? Put yet another tally mark in the electoral college's crowded debit column. 

A picture and fewer than a thousand words

I've looked into the question before of where the Polo Grounds, for many years baseball home of the New York Giants, was located: answer is Coogan's Hollow in upper Manhattan, adjoining the Harlem River just north of 155th Street. But I'd never realized how close it was to Yankee Stadium till I saw this cool photo from the Facebook group Baseball in Pics.

Yankee Stadium is in the foreground. Looking very much smaller, I assume because of some kind of distortion relating to camera angle, is the cavernous Polo Grounds, just across the Harlem River. Before Yankee Stadium opened in 1923, the Yankees and Giants both played at the Polo Grounds, which was owned by the Giants. The Yankees became more popular after they acquired Babe Ruth and so didn't want to be a mere tenant of the Giants anymore. It's said they chose a stadium site close to the Polo Grounds in order to taunt their former landlord with what they predicted, accurately, was an approaching era of hegemony. It was about a 10-minute walk over the Macombs Dam Bridge between ballparks. 

In the FB comments, someone points out that it would have been highly unusual for both the Giants and Yankees to be playing home games on the same night. Someone else hypothesizes that the picture was taken on the evening of September 17, 1954, when the Giants lost a home game to the Phillies and Ezzard Charles fought Rocky Marciano in a heavyweight championship match at Yankee Stadium. Maybe, but someone else observes that, farther in the background, the George Washington Bridge appears to be under construction, which would place the date somewhat later—the bridge opened in 1931 but construction on a new, lower deck began in June of 1959. In that case, it wasn't a baseball game at the Polo Grounds, because the Giants left for San Francisco after the 1957 season.

Probably the full story behind the photo is known to someone, but it's sort of fun to be forced by ignorance to speculate. The heavyweight fight at Yankee Stadium was one of the most famous in boxing history. In the sixth round, Charles opened a gash in Marciano's face and appeared headed toward victory by TKO before Marciano, covered in his own blood, rallied to knock him out in the eighth round.

In the picture, we're looking northwesterly across first the southwestern end of the Bronx, then northern Manhattan, then New Jersey. Not far out of the frame, at the upper right, is where the Harlem splits off from the Hudson River, forming Manhattan's northern tip. 

Tournament of Champions

When I issue directives or make pronouncements, my daughters have begun augmenting their eye rolls with "Ok Boomer." It's adorable! I fight back by cheering for Sam, the old guy to the right, in the just concluded Jeopardy Tournament of Champions. But then I saw the below clip of Amy Schneider testifying before the Ohio legislature about some dumb law the state was considering in order to make trouble for trans kids.

She's such a mensch that I'm okay with her beating out my demographic colleague for the $250,000 grand prize. Who is the comedian—Beth Stelling?—who says, "I'm from Ohio. A lot of people who live there don't realize that you can pack a bag and . . . leave forever." JD Vance would be one more reason to relocate.

On the other hand, considering our goofy electoral system, the migration should probably be in the other direction. There's more of us but we don't live in the right places. Poor distribution. Colonize the red states!

I wonder what Amy thinks about the shooting at the LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs. Compared to a few hundred cops at Uvalde, the club patrons made pretty quick work of the active shooter. Trying to think of a new slogan. Best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a few unarmed queers who've had a couple?

By the way, it is Beth Stelling. Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Reading the Times

Today's New York Times story concerning another Supreme Court leak is in some ways quite an odd linguistic performance. The story is here. It begins:

As the Supreme Court investigates the extraordinary leak this spring of a draft opinion of the decision overturning Roe v. Wade, a former anti-abortion leader has come forward claiming that another breach occurred in a 2014 landmark case involving contraception and religious rights. 

In a letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and in interviews with the New York Times, the Rev. Rob Schenck said he was told the outcome of the 2014 case weeks before it was announced. He used that information to prepare a public relations push, records show, and he said that at the last minute he tipped off the president of Hobby Lobby, the craft store chain owned by Christian evangelicals that was the winning party in the case.

It's the passive voice in the first sentence of the second paragraph that seems awkward and unusual. The passive voice is what linguists call a construction that uses a form of the verb "to be" in order to leave out the sentence subject or agent—you might say, for example, that "the ball was hit" instead of "John hit the ball." In this case, the second paragraph informs us only that Schenck "was told" of the outcome. Maybe in his interviews with the Times Schenck didn't say who told him?

No, that's not it, but it seems like it's really hard for the Times to get to the point. Here's the fourth paragraph:

Mr. Schenck's allegation creates an unusual, contentious situation: a minister who spent years at the center of the anti-abortion movement, now turned whistle-blower; a denial by a sitting justice; and an institution that shows little outward sign of getting to the bottom of the recent leak of the abortion ruling or of following up on Mr. Schenck's allegation.

I was at first confused by the phrase "a denial by a sitting justice," though if I'd stopped to consider I suppose I might have hit on the conclusion that Schenck must have told the Times that a sitting justice was the source of the leak. It would be odd, however, that the identity of a Supreme Court leaker was held back until after his denial had been clumsily mentioned. Anyway, I plunged unthinkingly ahead, and eventually got to the story's ninth and tenth paragraphs:

In early June 2014, an Ohio couple who were Mr. Schenck's star donors shared a meal with Justice Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann. A day later, Gayle Wright, one of the pair, contacted Mr. Schenck, according to an email reviewed by the Times. "Rob, if you want some interesting news please call. No emails," she wrote.

Mr. Schenck said Mrs. Wright told him that the decision would be favorable to Hobby Lobby, and that Justice Alito had written the majority opinion. Three weeks later, that's exactly what happened. . . .

Why so much wheel spinning in the mud before divulging that Justice Alito goes out to dinner with Christian evangelical activists and lets them know that he's authored the opinion that will make them and their friends at Hobby Lobby happy? "You can get your PR releases ready because Sam Alito's come through again!" Seems like you shouldn't have to turn inside the paper from page 1 to receive this information. 

I'm coming toward the view that Alito is the likely source of the leak in the abortion case as well. If his lips were loose in 2014, there's no reason to think they'd be sealed in 2022. The probable motive in the abortion case would have been to lock in the decision before anyone squishy defected. Imagine the abuse that, say, Kavanaugh would suffer if it was known that his late change of heart or mind allowed Roe to stand. I'm tempted to think, too, that once you've admitted Alito as a young man must have done well on standardized tests measuring academic potential, you've exhausted his store of attractive human traits. 

Reading the story is like wallowing in stinky mire but there is one moment of unintended comic relief:

In the interview, Mrs. Wright said that while she did not have her calendars from those days, she believed the night in question involved a dinner at the Alitos' home during which she fell ill. She said that the justice drove her and her husband back to their hotel, and that this might have been the news she wanted to share with Mr. Schenck.

I'm trying to imagine Mr. Schenck's disappointment when, having been warned against email as a vehicle of communication for Mrs. Wright's portentous news, he placed a phone call and was told only that she'd left the party early feeling ill. She's a high-toned old Christian lady and also a liar. For a recent Times story that's sickening through and through, no comic relief, try this one.

 

Fox news lands a blow against drug abuse

Sean Hannity plays dumb, says he doesn’t know where the predictions of a red wave came from. So the Washington Post lets him have it with a supercut of his own Fox News predicting a red wave. pic.twitter.com/Uq2J3PMdlw

— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) November 12, 2022

 

Now that this video clip exists in the world, there will never again be a reason for me to shoot heroin into my veins.

Burying the lede

The opening to an Associated Press story on Tuesday’s elections for Wisconsin State Assembly:

Wisconsin Democrats scored a major victory in Tuesday's election when they staved off Republican hopes to win supermajorities that would have allowed them to legislate without fear of vetoes by a Democratic governor.

The Democrats remain a feeble minority in heavily gerrymandered Wisconsin. But they just managed to retain enough seats to prevent Republicans from the two-thirds majorities that could have overridden the vetoes that Gov. Tony Evers used frequently in his first term. 

Republicans needed to flip five Assembly seats and one in the Senate. They got the Senate seat when Romaine Quinn defeated Kelly Westlund for an open seat in far northwestern Wisconsin. 

But Democrats defended three of the six seats Republicans had targeted in the Assembly. . . .

Evers vetoed nearly 150 GOP bills during his first term. With enough votes to override Evers, the GOP could have dramatically reworked state politics over the next two-year legislative session—including reshaping election administration to their advantage in a key battleground state.

Um, pardon me AP, but you've buried the lede with that fleeting allusion in the second graf to "heavily gerrymandered Wisconsin." The statewide vote tally for the Assembly is incomplete, but Wisconsin Democrats won the races for governor, secretary of state, and attorney general. It's a 50-50 state, unless it's 51-49 in favor of the Dems. Yet on account of gerrymandering the Dems are reduced to celebrating the "major victory" of having "staved off" the prospect of a Republican supermajority in both houses of the state legislature: We got as many votes as they did, probably a few more, and as a result the expert map drawers will have a veto-proof majority in only the Senate! In the Assembly, our deficit will be no worse than 35-64! Whew!

I love how the story says that Republicans, had they done only a little better on Tuesday, would then have been in position to "reshape election administration to their advantage." LOL! 

What's the opposite of doom scrolling?

Maybe logging on to enjoy Republican explanations of "what went wrong"? Steve Hayward, of the Power Line blog, begins his recap

There is no way to sugar coat this pitiful Republican performance.

and then proceeds to sugar coat the pitiful performance. According to Hayward, it all has to do with parallels to the midterm election of 44 years ago:

We remember what happened two years after that dismal 1978 midterm. And while Joe Biden has to be reckoned a big winner yesterday, it means that in due course the big loser was . . . the Democratic party. . . .

I can guaranty you that there are many old-line Democrats who secretly hoped Democrats would get crushed, so they could ease Biden out and clean out the crazy progressives who have hijacked the party. Instead Democrats are certain to take their relative success as evidence that there is nothing wrong with their message or their policies. Let them persist in this view. 

The Democrats have bad policies and a messaging problem? Let them persist in this view.

I love a good morning-after quip, and my favorite of this morning goes, predictably, to James Carville. Jon Ralston, whose name when it appears in print is generally followed by the phrase "dean of Nevada political reporters," has predicted that the state's Democratic incumbent US senator, Catherine Cortez Masto, who narrowly trails in her re-election bid, will pull through on the strength of untallied mail-in ballots from the Las Vegas area. When Carville in a TV interview this morning predicted the same thing, he was asked why he felt sure Cortez Masto would win, and he immediately replied: "When Jon Ralston says it's Easter, I dye my eggs."

I believe that, as of lunch time on the morning after, only one US Senate seat has switched hands. That's in Pennsylvania, where, as one would expect, the Republicans nominated for an open seat a horrible candidate: Mehmet Oz, a quaky TV doctor endorsed by Trump. It's not the biggest reason he's unfit to represent Pennsylvania, but Dr Oz lives in New Jersey. When last Saturday he was urging his supporters to get out the vote, he told them to talk to their neighbors—"Do it before the Steelers game tomorrow," he said.

The Steelers weren't playing. It was their bye week. 

If only Dr Oz, who came to national prominence telling Oprah what poo should look like, was their absolute worst. They could still slip into the Senate majority by winning either Arizona or Nevada and then a run-off in Georgia. Not sure they should even hope for that, however, as it would raise the profile of their Senate candidate in the Peach State. Trump usually endorses people who are even more damaged than he is, which somewhat limits the pool, but in the person of Herschel Walker this box was checked. 

I see that the House projection right now is that Republicans will win 220 seats, "plus or minus ten." Since 218 makes a majority, their chances are better than 50-50. For this, they can probably thank the Supreme Court of the Republican party: 

Since January, judges in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Ohio have found that Republican legislators illegally drew those states' congressional maps along racial or partisan lines, or that a trial very likely would conclude that they did. In years past, judges who have reached similar findings have ordered new maps, or had an expert draw them, to ensure that coming elections were fair. 

But a shift in election law philosophy at the Supreme Court, combined with a new aggressiveness among Republicans who drew the maps, has upended that model for the elections in November. This time, all four states are using the rejected maps, and questions about their legality for future elections will be hashed out in court later. 

The immediate upshot, election experts say, is that Republicans will almost certainly gain more seats. . . .

David Wasserman, who follows congressional redistricting for the Cook Political Report, said that using rejected maps in the four states, which make up nearly 10 percent of the seats in the House, was likely to hand Republicans five to seven House seats that they otherwise would not have won.

So, if any Republican is thinking this morning that it could have been worse . . . yeah, sure, it could have been fair. To give credit where it's due, I haven't heard (yet) any defeated Republican blame the Communistic genies known to reside inside voting equipment. 

Man on the street speaks

About 1-in-4 Americans die of heart disease.

American: I'll have a cheeseburger with fries!

The chance of winning the Powerball jackpot is less than 1-in-292 million.

American: You can't win if you don't buy a ticket!

Here is journalist Elizabeth Kolbert reviewing the literature on "Why Facts Don't Change Our Mind." I was put in mind of this general topic of irrationality while growing depressed by "voter interviews" on TV news. One guy says he could fill his tank for $50 when Trump was president and now it costs $200. Let's see, gas today costs about $3.70 per gallon, so x is to $3.70 as $50 is to $200: x is then 93¢.

You could not buy gas for 93¢ a gallon when Trump was president. In fact you couldn't buy it for twice that. It did cost less: Covid was raging, demand was down, and meanwhile the president was carrying on about the wonders of Ivermectin, to say nothing of the possible curative properties of ingesting bleach or shining an ultraviolet light up your arse ("through the skin," to be precise, "or by some other method"). Alas, he was then diverted by the need to overturn an election.

If his side does well on Tuesday, at least it will prove elections are free, fair, and secure again.

Table talk

I took the above pic of my school lunch one day last week. As my 4th-grade charges and I proceeded toward a classroom, we passed in the hall the school nurse, who clucked disapprovingly. Maybe she didn't see the apple and frozen fruit cup. Plus, those are red peppers beneath my "turkey dog." 

You know what happens when grade school kids get an apple for lunch? A thousand apples in the garbage, a single tiny bite out one side. Good apples, too. At least the french fries aren't wasted. The mini donuts were terrible.

There's no sense trying to teach my mentees anything while they eat, so usually I hurry them through their meal, though sometimes I enjoy just listening.

BOY: What's that you wear on your head?

GIRL: It's my hijab.

BOY: I see a lot of girls wearing those around here.

GIRL: It's our Muslim culture.

BOY: You wear it to bed?

GIRL: [Laughs.] I never wear it at home. Only in public.

BOY: Why?

GIRL: In our culture, you're not supposed to see my hair.

BOY: [After a pause, looking at her intently.] I want to see your hair.

GIRL: [Another pause, as if for moral reflection. Then with a perceptible flourish she pushes back her hijab, which falls to her shoulders, revealing her bare head. She nods, tilting her scalp toward the boy.] There! Look!

BOY: [Sounding disappointed, but with a smile.] Your hair's just reg'lar. 

[They laugh. She pulls her hijab back into place.]

ME: Yesterday, we worked on some subtraction problems that did not require us to borrow and regroup. Today . . . .