Eric The Blue

On the stump

Wasn’t able to watch The Interview but I bet an astute observer was able to detect how flustered Harris must be by Trump’s nimbleness on the campaign trail.

—“My administration will be great for women’s reproductive rights!”

—Free IVF for everyone who wants it!

—Harris is a phony, no core beliefs!

—Not my fault if the videographer I hired was there!

—Why won’t the fake news report that Walz was just the assistant coach?

—I’m not weird, you are!

You can tell my mind is closed cuz as of now I’m nevertheless leaning to Harris. Just need to hear more about if she’s actually black.

Schools and vaccines

Yesterday, en route to the first event of the new school year, I heard this interview (“As school nears, doctors worry about Minnesota’s undervaccinated kids”) on the radio. My reasonably accurate transcription of the depressing conclusion:

Interviewer: As a physician, how worried are you about the rising rate of measles cases in our state?

Pediatrician: That is a growing cloud storm. We’ve seen the rate of measles immunizations decrease over the past few years, and we’ve already had 34 cases this year, almost all of them in unvaccinated kids. We worry about the start of the school year, when people are coming together, and this very infectious airborne disease . . . .

Interviewer: Vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella have been around since the 1960s. What do you tell parents who might be hesitant to have their kids vaccinated?

Pediatrician: You know, before the measles vaccine came out, the disease killed 2 to 3 million people per year worldwide. That number has gone down significantly and in many countries measles has been eliminated, including in this country until recently. The measles vaccine is very effective . . . . When you see one child with measles, you never want to see it again—high fever, often requiring hospitalization, horrible rash . . . . They’re really sick.

Waning support for mandatory school vaccinations among Republicans has been documented by, for example, the Gallup organization, here. After the Covid vaccines became available, public health researchers documented an increased risk of Covid mortality among Republicans: death rates were highest in counties Trump carried by the widest margins, and lowest in Biden’s best counties. The results of a study focusing on Covid mortality and political affiliation in Florida and Ohio, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, is here; an NPR summary of that study is here; and the same conclusions have been reached for other locales, in different studies: see, for example, here and here and here. 

It’s not too much to say that voting Republican is literally bad for your health. It’s also bad for your kids and for neighbors who try to cancel your vote. 

Trump has promised to defund school districts that require vaccinations. Now that the country’s most prominent vaccine opponent has endorsed him, I hope the two of them will campaign together on this issue in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Phoenix. I trust it’s a loser for them, and if it isn’t, we’re screwed anyway.

(Corollary: my debate advice for Harris would be to try not to talk too much. No one can make the case against Trump better than Trump.)

Small note on the DNC

I missed a lot, as it played opposite some close Twins games, but, of what I saw, my favorite DNC moment came when President Obama was enumerating some of his successor’s peculiarities. He mentioned Trump’s obsession with “crowd size,” and as he pronounced the word “size” he looked down at his hands, which he’d been holding in front of himself about a half foot apart, then chuckled as he slowly drew them almost together.

Maybe would’ve been even better if his wife had done it, but of course she’s a famous advocate for riding only on the high road. Not me. I’m the kind of bad person who enjoys ridiculous people suffering ridicule. Hope it’s not as bad if you admit it.

I was also watching when Harris, in her speech, said that “in many ways Donald Trump is a deeply unserious person.” As if to prove her point, he quickly posted the following to Truth Social:

The Senate

Regarding this fall’s Senate elections, it’s often said that “the calendar” favors Republicans since “by chance” the Dems this year are defending seats in West Virginia, Montana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and maybe one or two other red to purplish states I’ve repressed for the sake of my cheerfulness. Meanwhile, there are really no prospects for Democratic pickups. Texas (Ted Cruz)? That would be delicious, but as a Minnesota Viking once said, there ain’t no Santa Claus and there ain’t no red nosed reindeer either. 

Democrats currently have a 51-49 Senate majority. West Virginia is gone for sure, which means that Dems, to hold the majority, probably need to win the White House again AND run the table in Montana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and (I now remember) Arizona and Nevada. A tall order, even allowing for the normal allotment of crazed Republican candidates.

But it’s misleading to attribute such a state of affairs to “this year’s tough calendar.” For the Dems, it’s always a tough calendar, because the Senate for some time now has naturally favored Republicans. Here’s a rough-and-ready gauge of how hard it is for Democrats to win a Senate majority:

In two presidential races to date, Trump has never won the popular vote. Yet there are 25 states that he’s carried both times (compared to just 20 that he’s lost both times). Multiplying by two senators for each state yields a 50-40 Republican advantage as a rough base line. The Rs need only one of the other ten seats, or the presidency, to be the majority party in the Senate—when the country as a whole modestly favors the other side.

To have fewer than 50 seats, Republicans have to be under performing badly, and right now they have 49. Of course “the calendar looks tough for Democrats”!

That’s the view from 30,000 feet. Descending to Earth, the situation appears to me positively outlandish. Using these state population figures and the current partisan state-by-state lineup in the Senate, I worked out yesterday afternoon, with one eye on the disappointing Twins game, that the 51 Senate Democrats represent just over 58 percent of Americans. In other words, if representation was in line with population, there would be 58 Democratic senators, not 51.

According to polling data compiled at RealClearPolitics.com, Democrats are somewhat improbably leading in all the races for Senate seats in the above named states except for West Virginia and Montana. If that turns out to be the result on Election Day, control of the Senate will flip to Republicans, 51-49, but the 49 Senate Democrats will represent about 57.6 percent of the country’s population (and the 51 Republicans will represent the remaining 42.4 percent). The majority (of Republican senators) will be representing a minority (of all the American people). It’s no great mystery how this can be. The population of, for example, Los Angeles County is somewhat more than twice that of the combined populations of North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Yet the people of these four states are represented by eight senators while the people of Los Angeles County share two senators with 30 million other Californians. The imbalance is grotesque. Once again, the redoubtable Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 22:

Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Delaware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts that fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third.

One “theoretical” result of an arrangement such as was decried by Hamilton might be: a president, having won in the electoral college despite receiving fewer votes than his main rival, serves a term during which there are several vacancies on the Supreme Court; he is able to appoint to the Court a slate of ideologues sympathetic to his goals because in the Senate, which is the theoretical check on his power, there is a majority of his own party, even though this majority also owes its status to a minority of the people in the country; the Senate confirms the president’s nominees, and the Court then delivers for the president and his party decisions and judgments that could never be attained in a popularly elected legislature. 

If anyone dare raise a voice in complaint, their reward is likely a lecture on our majestic constitutional system.

Who is Royce White?

Royce White is the Republican candidate for US Senate from Minnesota. His qualifications for the position aren’t the usual ones. He’s never held elective office, graduated from college, or served in the military. The Wikipedia article about him devotes the most space to his basketball career. He led his high school team to the state championship in 2009 and was named Minnesota’s Mr. Basketball that same season. He then accepted a scholarship from the University of Minnesota but left school before playing in a single game. The problem was brushes with the criminal law: some shoplifting and disorderly conduct at the Mall of America, a laptop theft in a dormitory that his lawyer negotiated down to trespassing. White transferred to Iowa State, where he played one season and was named to the All Big 12 first team. He entered the NBA draft and was selected in the first round by the Houston Rockets.

White only ever played in a few NBA games. The main culprit was unrelated to basketball skills—he has mental health challenges, preeminently acute anxiety, including an intense fear of flying, which is how NBA teams get from city to city. His career flamed out rapidly, unless you count some productive seasons playing for the Reno Bighorns and the Rio Grande Valley Vipers. He was in 2018 the NBL scoring champion as a member of the London Lightning—London, as in London, Ontario, Canada. He’s also fought in UFC mixed martial arts bouts and played in the 3-on-3 basketball league co-founded by the rapper Ice Cube.

Sometime around in here White started piping up on political questions. He’d shave his head and write messages on his bare scalp denigrating the World Bank and, on another occasion, declaring “Alex Jones was right.” (Alex Jones is the conspiracy theorist best known for arguing that the mass shooting of kindergartners at the Sandy Hook school was a staged operation set up by the government to defame supporters of gun rights.) On social media, some of his favorite targets have been homosexuals, Jews, and women who are “too mouthy.” Predictably, this kind of slop attracted the attention of Trump’s friend Steve Bannon. White has been a guest on Bannon’s podcast and, now that Bannon is in prison, has served as a guest host. His connection to the upper echelon of the MAGA brigade has raised his profile in Minnesota. A couple years ago, he ran for US House, but was defeated in the Republican primary by someone moderately less nutty than he. One upshot of that race: a watchdog group lodged a complaint alleging that White had misappropriated more than $150,000 in campaign funds for personal use, including $1200 at a strip club in Miami. The candidate did not exactly deny the charge. He says he paid back the money and that he liked the food at the strip club.

So that was 2022. This year, he won the Republican party’s endorsement for US Senate at their convention last spring. On Tuesday, he won the Republican primary by 10 points over his nearest rival. His campaign website is here. It’s an eyeful. I see that he emphasizes being a dad, and I understand he has four kids, though as far as I know he’s never married. That might be bad if he was a Democrat, especially considering that his name turns up in searches of family law records in at least two Minnesota counties—he’s been behind in court-ordered child support payments in both venues. 

I understand that Republicans don’t like being called “weird,” but this is their endorsed candidate for US Senate. Delegates to their state party convention plucked him from the field and the choice was then ratified by GOP primary voters. They should be thankful if the normies planning to vote for Amy Klobuchar have settled upon calling them only “weird.”

Summer school

I saw the above on my 16-year-old’s desk while putting away some laundry the other day. Behind it were seven sheets filled with math problems, 102 of them in all, and, despite the teacher’s admonition not to put it off till the week before school starts, every page was pristine. I asked her about it and she said, yeah, she hadn’t worked on a single problem. When I read aloud to her the part where the teacher says to work a problem or two a day beginning in June, she said what my golf buddy says about those ubiquitous signs near the clubhouse, ABSOLUTELY NO CARRY-ON BEVERAGES ALLOWED:

”It’s only a suggestion,” according to both of them.

Of course nerdy dad took the packet to the dining room table and perused the problems. I knew how to do some of them, and others I didn’t even understand the vocabulary in the instruction. Maybe once I knew the difference between an even and an odd function. If so, no longer. No doubt the Venn Diagram of “problems I can solve” and “problems Lydia might ask about if she ever gets down to business” are circles basically tangent to each other.

Here’s one I could do even if the vocab was a little cloudy to me:

Solve the following inequality by factoring and making a sign chart: x^2 - 16 > 0.

Well, factoring the expression yields (x + 4)(x - 4). So it equals 0 when x is 4 or -4. My substitute for whatever a “sign chart” might signify is just to test values that fall within three segments of a number line: left of -4, right of 4, and between 4 and -4. Negative 5 and positive 5, for example, both yield 9, a number that satisfies the inequality. But zero yields -16: thumbs down on that. So the inequality is satisfied for x < -4 or x > 4. Pretty sure she’ll know how to do that one.

I remember when I first had to do problems like these in math class. I passionately hated it. This business of factoring seemed abstruse agony until, having one day consulted my dad about homework I couldn’t do, he happened to say something like, “Algebra is just arithmetic generalized.” This for me put a different light on, say, “the difference between squares is the product of the sum and the difference of their respective bases.” Just shoot me! But, my dad illustrated, suppose you are in a meeting and someone needs to know what 63 x 57 is. It’s nice that this happens to be (60 + 3) x (60 - 3), because that means the product is 60 squared minus 3 squared, and you can supply the answer about 3 seconds before someone with a calculator confirms that, yes, it’s 3591. People, including maybe your boss, will look at you as if you’re some kind of prodigy, and you can if you want stare mystically into the distance in the manner of Albert Einstein. But it’s just basic algebra. 

Despite what the wingnuts say, I’m really pleased by what I can tell about the education my kids are receiving in the Minneapolis public schools. Lydia, who will be in eleventh grade, knows as much math now as I did when I graduated high school. And what about a teacher who gives out a packet of work over summer vacation and encourages the kids to email her if they have any questions? 

Tim Walz’s electoral record in Minnesota

Don’t get me wrong, I like the governor of my state, Tim Walz, and have happily voted for him, twice, against the weirdos—see what I did there?—with whom the GOP reliably counters. But some of the stuff being said about him on National Shows is the kind of hooey he occasionally falls into himself, like when after supplying the best answer to a question he proceeds to append the second best, the third best, and eventually the fourth worst answer before the need to inhale functions tardily as a period.

The largest chunk of hooey concerns how in Congress Walz represented a red district and is a proven vote-getter in the rural and small-town Midwest. Here’s a little electoral history [rolling up my sleeves in the manner of Kornacki]:

Before Walz defeated the Republican incumbent 53 to 47 percent in 2006, Minnesota’s first congressional district had been represented for six terms in the 1980s and 1990s by Democrat Tim Penny. After easily winning re-election in 2008, Walz’s races became progressively closer until, in 2016, the year of Trump’s presidential victory, he won his sixth term by 50 to 49 percent. He then announced his intention not to seek a seventh term in order to run for governor.

His district wasn’t actually red. It was purplish, and then became red, partly on account of redistricting, while he represented it. He’s ambitious and can tell which way the wind is blowing seems more accurate than He won over a lot of rural and small-town white Americans to the Blue Team.

Walz’s statewide races for governor tend to confirm this view. For example, the contours of his 2022 gubernatorial re-election are almost a perfect match for Biden’s win over Trump in our state two years earlier. Both men won by between 7 and 8 percent of the statewide vote. Both won 14 of Minnesota’s 87 counties, and the rosters of their counties won overlap by 13. Both owe their victories to winning between 70 and 72 percent of the votes cast in the counties of Hennepin (Minneapolis and most of its suburbs) and Ramsey (St. Paul and many of its suburbs).

My parents both grew up in rural Minnesota and so I’m inclined to use their old stomping grounds as benchmarks. My mom was raised on a farm in Watonwan County (biggest town is St. James). Walz lost Watonwan County by 37 to 60 percent. Biden had lost it by 38 to 60 percent. My dad grew up in a town of fewer than 200 people in Kandiyohi County (biggest town is Willmar). Walz lost Kandiyohi County by 32 to 65 percent. Biden had lost it by 36 to 62 percent. 

It’s just not the case that Walz has a record of out performing other Democrats in rural areas of the Midwest. Compared to Biden, he’s performed, if anything, slightly worse in rural Minnesota. 

Of the things I’ve learned about him in recent days, my favorite relates to the gay kid in his social studies class who felt comfortable approaching a guardsman and football coach about starting a “gay-straight alliance” at their high school. Walz offered to be the new club’s faculty advisor. This would have been at least 20 years ago. Probably seemed “weird” to a lot of people in Mankato, Minnesota, but thanks in part to Walz, that adjective is now being applied to more deserving subjects.

 

Role models for aging

In the summer of 1963, when he was 68, Edmund Wilson wrote in his Journal:

The knowledge that death is not far away, that I shall soon disappear like a puff of smoke, has the effect of making earthly affairs seem unimportant and human beings more and more ignoble. It is harder to take human life seriously, including one’s own passions and achievements and efforts. In my tendency toward this state of mind, I have found Pope John fortifying. When over 80 and knowing he is doomed [by cancer], he gives all the energy left him to his council which will modernize the Church, and then dies with the greatest dignity. 

A notable passage considering that Wilson’s impatience with  all churches and religious creeds is frequently on display; for example, a bit farther on in this Journal he reports stalking the Catholic writer Wilfrid Sheed at a cocktail party in order to confront him with the opinion that the Christian doctrine of the atonement is wholly incoherent:

Got Wilfrid Sheed sitting in a corner and had a conversation with him, spoke of religion for the first time. I said I couldn’t even understand the idea about Christ: sent down by the Father to suffer and redeem the human race. If you believe this, you will be forgiven. What sense does this make? Wilfrid modestly replied that this doctrine had the advantage of providing a Christian intercessor.

I get the impression poor Sheed just wanted to enjoy a few drinks—“mumble, mumble, Christian intercesor, mumble, excuse me I need to refill.”  

Being on the precipice of one of the last notches before 68, I feel I get too Wilson’s sense of the time ahead narrowing and the need to take one’s fortifications wherever they can be found. It’s cool he admires the pope for pursuing his pope work right to the end; here is one of my faves, Lucinda Williams, doing what she does, four different times of her life, the wear of the years evident, especially now that a stroke has rendered her unable to play guitar, but she keeps on keeping on. Minneapolis residents might like too the local angle to the last performance: “Hum’s Liquor” has stood for as long as I’ve been a legal drinker on Lyndale Avenue a block south of Franklin, near where Replacements guitarist Bob Stinson lived in what is now known as the Let it Be house at 2215 Bryant Ave. The song’s about Bob.

Williams also has some history with Minneapolis, not all of it, judging by her song “Minneapolis,” real happy.