Eric The Blue

Chump, change

The Times's “On Politics” newsletter reported yesterday:

Musk has promised to cut $1 trillion from the next year's fiscal budget by Sept. 30 . . . . Then last week, he seemed to revise that goal down to $150 billion, which is where DOGE puts its estimated savings on its website.

These sentences are below a headline that refers to “moving goal posts.” It would help, I think, to pursue the metaphor by explaining where on the field the goal posts are going. If they started on the goal line, they'd have to move to the 15-yard-line—the one 85 yards away, at the other end of the field. 

I mean, if a car dealership advertised that they'd sell you a new car for $1000 off the MSRP, and then when you showed up they said that they'd sell it to you but only for $150 off the MSRP, I think the sane response would be, "You, sir, are a fraud and I'll bet dollars to donuts that the $150 is bogus, too."

And you'd be right. From farther on in the article:

My colleagues David Fahrenthold and Jeremy Singer-Vine report, though, that even the $150 billion figure may be more savings than the group can actually deliver. As they analyzed the group's math, they noticed billion-dollar errors and claims of cutting spending that wasn't actually planned for the next fiscal year—including the cancellation of a $318 million contract that did not exist. Phantom spending, if you will.

As far as I know, the last time Musk opened his mouth and said something true was when he called Peter Navarro "a moron." But who cares? All the above is change under the cushions. The country's in a crisis unrelated to its finances. A couple weeks ago Chuck Schumer said it would be time to raise his voice when the Trump administration started defying court orders. Maybe he thought this would be an excuse for never having to raise his voice, but we're there now: the courts have directed the return of the Maryland man who, with no due process of law, was shipped off to a super max El Salvadoran prison, and the Trump administration's response has been, "Pound sand, judges." Just open, brazen lawlessness.

Democrats like the Senate minority leader need a new excuse for their politeness.

Tolja

What some people call “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is responsible for my powers of prophecy. For example, last fall, in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election, I wrote, here:

If Trump were smart, he’d do nothing but play golf, wait for the public’s perception of the economy to catch up with reality, and then declare that he’d fixed it. Instead, he’ll likely eff it up by keeping his promises—setting off a trade war with tariffs, rounding up low-wage workers (aka essential workers) and deporting them, tax breaks for the rich, all the Trumpean slop.

Quibbling with myself now as there was no reason to hedge with that “likely.” Also, to be fair, he hasn’t yet slashed taxes on the rich, but that might be on account of playing more golf than I’d anticipated. In the days since the Obama presidency, wingers have made their peace with presidents enjoying themselves on the links. On Saturday, the day after the markets’ two-day dive, the White House put out this statement:

The President won his second round matchup of the Senior Club Championship today in Jupiter, FL, and advances to the Championship Round tomorrow. 

Next day, the White House announced that he’d won the Championship match, too. So senior champion of the Jupiter club! Don’t forget that while contemplating your new 201k account. No doubt he won the trophy outright, but some resourceful reporter should find the rich suntan Trump defeated and ask whether he conceded any putts that were, strictly speaking, outside the normal friendship zone.

Respite

I mentioned the other day the coming election, in Wisconsin, for a seat on their State Supreme Court. Yesterday was Election Day, and the Trump-Musk backed candidate lost by 45 to 55 percent.

Wet snow outside was sticking to my dish, making TV reception sketchy, so I followed the results on the internet. When it was clear who was going to win in Wisconsin, I surfed over to the National Review website, because . . . Schadenfreude. The top headline there was "GOP Wins Two Crucial House Seats in Florida." Indeed—by an average margin of just under 15 percent, compared to the 30-plus percent margins for the Republican candidates in these districts last November. 

On Election Eve, at the equally absurd Power Line blog, winger Scott Johnson wrote, before repeating himself on Election Day:

It looks like conservatives face long odds against winning tomorrow's Wisconsin Supreme Court election. We have no chance if Trump voters, Republicans, conservatives, and opponents of the coming gerrymander don't get out and vote for Judge Brad Schimel tomorrow.

He makes it sound like a partisan gerrymander would be a new phenomenon in Wisconsin when actually its recent history in the state is a long tale. Here’s the Reader’s Digest version. 2010 was a census year, therefore a redistricting year as well, and, at the polls, it was also a very good year for Republican cheeseheads, who having won a majority immediately withdrew behind closed doors to redraw state election boundaries. With the aid of sophisticated mapping software and granular election-return data—and taxpayer funded consultants, since they weren't smart enough to do it themselves—they made it impossible for Democrats to win a legislative majority in the state. In 2012, the first election conducted with the new legislative maps, Democratic candidates for the State Assembly actually outpolled Republicans statewide, yet Republicans captured 60 of the 99 seats—almost a veto-proof majority for the side that got fewer votes. 

Some might say that such a result is a perversion of democracy, but apparently not Scott Johnson. I'm not sure what to make of him highlighting the gerrymander issue in Wisconsin. Is he worried that Democrats will do to Republicans what Republicans already did to Democrats? It seems the other possibility is that he thinks Republicans have what they might call a "natural right" to rigged elections—politicians choosing their voters instead of the other way around. It’s a lot like affirmative action for well fed old white guys from the hinterlands.

They don't need it. Yesterday wasn't good for them, but generally it seems they’re getting their way. Online subscribers to The New York Times receive each morning an e-mailed newsletter in which the day's main stories are summarized in bullet points containing links to the article in the paper. Consecutive bullets in this morning's newsletter were as follows:

• The Trump administration told a court that it had mistakenly deported a legal Maryland resident to El Salvador, but that it could not bring him back.
• A British Gambian student who participated in pro-Palestinian protests at Cornell said that ICE officials had come to his home and revoked his visa, and that he had left the U.S.
• Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered diplomats to scrutinize the social media accounts of student visa applicants to keep out those who criticized the U.S. or Israel.
• Some conservative voices, including Joe Rogan and Ann Coulter, have expressed concern over the government's immigration tactics.

Not sure whether to be worried about the Constitution being under assault from the executive branch, or heartened by the "concern" of squishes like Rogan and  Coulter. 

On reflection, going with “worried.”

Relatable?

Political strategist/consultant/image-maker: these are among the gazillion things in which I lack expertise, but how hard should it be to make the general public pronounce "BLECK!" whenever "Republican party" is mentioned? I mean, pass over Trump, who's a PoS human, and the eye settles next--sorry J.D., though you also are repulsive--on top lieutenant Elon Musk, who

• is the richest man in the world
• has had either 13 or 14 children
• with either three or four different women
• said children bearing such names as Exa Dark Sideræl, Techno Mechanicus, and X Æ A-12 (a boy, whose name was later changed to X Æ A-Xii, perhaps because the state he was born in does not allow numerals in names: pronunciation indeterminate.)

There are a lot of words for this, though I trust "relatable" doesn't make the cut.

The ambiguity about number of children and mothers arises from the fact that, while Musk has acknowledged 13 offspring, the "conservative influencer" Ashley St. Clair says he's the father of her son born last fall. St. Clair has filed suit seeking full custody and requiring Musk to take a paternity test. His response was a tweet:

I don’t know if the child is mine or not, but am not against finding out. No court order is needed. 

Despite not knowing for sure, I have given Ashley $2.5M and am sending her $500k/year.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 31, 2025

He's so far gone that he thinks the above places him in a favorable light. Lately he's spent a lot of time in Wisconsin bribing people to vote for the right-winger in a state supreme court race. By chance, one of his million-dollar prize winners is the head of the Wisconsin Young Republicans. BLECK! Another described what she did to win a million of Elon's dollars:

My name is Ekaterina Deistler. . . . I did exactly what Elon Musk told everyone to do: sign the petition, refer friends and family, vote, and now I have a million dollars.

Yes, yes, "election integrity" is a big issue with their side. BLECK!

Can’t help laughing

A responsible person would be concerned about national security because, considering that Team Trump is texting war plans to journalists by mistake, our geopolitical foes probably know more of our “secrets” than Trump himself: after all, China and Russia (and probably Canada) aren’t just reading their incoming texts—they’re actively trying to find stuff out. Nevertheless, I have to laugh. My favorite part of the published text string relates to the discussion about whether to attack now or in a few weeks. Hegseth votes for now, not later, but, being a trooper, assures everyone in the string, including the editor of The Atlantic, that if the decision is to wait “I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC.” (OPSEC stands for operations security, LOL.)

The bro-boy emojis are awesome too. Bam! Fist! USA! Such children. I liked Batman in the second grade, but then they passed me up to third.

In a meme, Sarah Jessica Parker, playing Carrie Bradshaw, is deep in thought over her laptop. Caption: “But then I wondered, why would Pete Hegseth text state secrets to me?”

Hard to top the day’s news, but I have been contemplating the arc of Elon Musk’s business “strategy” for Tesla. Why, starting a few months ago, would he do everything in his power to antagonize political liberals, the only domestic market for his cars? Of course it’s to the point now that Trump is turning the White House lawn into a Tesla showroom, and it can’t be long before MAGA bros start buying Teslas to prop up Elon. As Scott Shapiro, my favorite social media follow, has observed: “For fascists worried about climate change, there’s never been a better time to buy a new car.”

On this date, based on current trends

Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 19, 2020

 

Today’s the the 5-year anniversary of the above tweet by the polymath Elon Musk. There were 7175 Covid deaths in the US that March. It would be two years until there were fewer than 7175 deaths in a month.  More than 1.2 million Americans have died of Covid, and more than 99 percent of the deaths occurred after Musk posted this tweet. 

He probably should have been put in charge of public health instead of “government efficiency,” but of course Trump already had an anti-vaxxer for health.

Trump slump?

Please accept my congratulations if, on the election of Trump, you sold all your stock and invested the proceeds in certificates of deposit yielding an interest rate of, say, 4.25%. Hell, congratulations if you deposited the proceeds in a mattress. Markets are said to abhor uncertainty and, along this line, someone recently observed that Trump's next move might be to impose a 50% tariff on all imported goods, but only for 45 minutes. Then, after 45 minutes . . . something else.

There is a possibility that Trump will be sunk by a Trump slump, but what would sink him immediately, were it not for the national malaise that elected him, is the vanishing of a pro-Palestinian student protester. The Times's columnist Michelle Goldberg summarizes the case here. Money quote:

But the fact that it was easy to see this ideological crackdown coming shouldn't obscure how serious Khalil's detention is. If someone legally in the United States can be grabbed from his home for engaging in constitutionally protected political activity, we are in a drastically different country from the one we inhabited before Trump's inauguration.

That Goldberg's conclusion is apt may be seen in the way the phrase "ideological crackdown" seems to have been tapped out on her keyboard in the manner of a mere prepositional phrase. When the First Amendment was operative, we didn't have "ideological crackdowns" in the United States. No one has said Khalil committed a crime. The Department of Homeland Security says he "led activities aligned to Hamas." Take note of that weaselly formulation. What does it even mean? Only that the detainee opposes the policies of the Israeli government. So does Hamas, therefore this Columbia grad student is a terrorist. That's the logic. I mean "logic." 

Officials who crow about being "free speech absolutists" are rounding up for deportation people whose expressed views they don't like. You could not say they're trying to hide anything. Trump, on his Truth Social account:

This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it. 

The first amendment has a Formerly Respected Opinion about Who and What is Un-American. 

 

Puff the magic tariff lived in a dream

Trump says his magic tariffs—are they on or off as of 11:33 p.m. central time, 6 March 2025?—will raise enough money to replace the income tax. Yet he will forgo this bonanza if a foreign leader is willing to kiss his ass for twenty minutes over the phone. On its face, seems more like Trump first than America first. You’d think the MAGA bros would rather keep all their income and not have to file a 1040, but the preferences and impulses of these nuts is a topic for abnormal psychology. Not my jam.

Weekend update

You can tell Trump is lying about his desire to “bring peace” to Ukraine because

1) his lips are moving; and

2) he’s only pressuring one side—the one that suffered an unprovoked invasion by a dictatorial power.

It would be impossible to pressure Russia now, since we’ve already said Ukraine can’t join NATO and will have to give up territory captured by its invader. The leverage that could have been wielded against Russia was thus junked before there were any negotiations. I haven’t read The Art of the Deal so can’t cite chapter and verse for the lineage of this hard-nosed tactic. It makes sense, however, if the goal is not “peace” but rather a deal selling out Ukraine in order to cozy up to Putin, a tyrant. We’re on Russia’s side now.

Other than grovel before Trump and Vance, what is Ukraine supposed to do? Accede. Quit defending itself against a murderous aggressor. 

Lying groggily in bed this morning, I heard John Bolton, one of Trump’s National Security Advisors from his first term, interviewed on NPR. The questions and answers were competing with my whining dog, who had either an empty stomach or a full bladder, probably both. But I’ve now looked it up online. The interview is here. The whole thing is of interest. Bolton says yesterday’s Oval Office meltdown was “a disaster for the United States.” He says Secretary of State Rubio and National Security Advisor Waltz should resign. He says the Taiwanese should be worried. He expresses disgust with Trump for mouthing Russian propaganda. The last question was about whether there’s any prospect of Trump reversing course. He answered:

No, I don’t think so. Look, to Trump everything is personal. He thinks he’s friends with Vladimir Putin. I happen to believe, having first met Putin in October of 2001, that Putin is extremely cold-blooded, thinks he can manipulate Trump—and he is. The other thing is Trump doesn’t like Zelenskyy. He hasn’t liked him since the so-called perfect phone call. He doesn’t like him now. That’s what you’re seeing play out. That’s the level of Trump’s understanding of international affairs.

Reaping the whirlwind

Trump 2.0’s motto could be “move fast and break things,” which seems apt: it’s the motto of lots of other robbers, too. One risk, that of thoughtlessness, generally applies only  to those capable of the power of thought, but it does appear that Team Trump is sometimes paying a price for moving too fast. From a Feb. 21 NPR story:

Last week wrought days of chaos at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a civilian agency within the Department of Energy that oversees the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.

After being told that they would not get an exemption for national security purposes, officials were given hours to fire more than 100 employees. Workers were abruptly shut out of their government email accounts and told to clear out their desks on the spot. . . .

Those who were fired spent Friday worrying about what to do next. “That mental game was horrible,” says one NNSA employee who received a termination notice.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers were incensed by the firings, given the sensitive nature of the agency’s work, which includes making safety and security upgrades to nuclear warheads, overseeing emergency response plans at nuclear storage facilities and trying to prevent terrorists from acquiring weapons-grade plutonium and uranium. 

Behind the scenes, pressure built on Energy Secretary Chris Wright to reverse the terminations. By Saturday, many employees were rehired, without explanation.

”I think they were, like, ‘Oopsie, let’s just say you didn’t work Friday,’” said another NNSA employee who watched the firing process unfold.

Meanwhile, the military’s new transgender ban is being challenged in court, and the judge appears unimpressed with the government’s argument:

“[President Trump’s executive order] calls an entire category of people dishonest, dishonorable, undisciplined, immodest, who lack integrity,” [Judge] Reyes said. “People who have taken an oath to defend this country. People who have been under fire. People who have received medals for taking fire for this country. I want to know from the government, does that express animus?”

”I don’t have an answer, your honor,” Jason Lynch, an attorney with the DOJ’s Federal Programs Branch, said. . . .

Over more than five hours, Reyes pressed Lynch to provide any data or analysis Trump relied on in making his decision or any expert opinions about the effects of transgender service members on military readiness. Over and over again, Lynch was forced to say he had no answers to give.

“I’m really loathe to speculate what the president had in mind when he signed this order,” Lynch said.

“It’s not like I randomly picked you off the street. You’re the government’s representative here,” Reyes said.

The energy department employees were fired by mistake, then rehired, at least the ones who could be found. Great place to work! Transgender service members are also out although, as the judge’s questions revealed, the administration has yet to work up any reasons that can be articulated in court. I feel kind of sorry for Mr. Lynch, the lawyer in the transgender lawsuit: you can look like a dope while representing one.

People are afraid of Trump, because he has power and is a vindictive a-hole. But he’s also an incompetent idiot. He gives more proof, as it were casually, every day. Was this yesterday, or the day before?

Trump: "I did ask Elon because he knows more about computers than anybody I know. I said, what do you think of the voting system? He said, computers are not meant for voting. It's too many transactions taking place too quickly." pic.twitter.com/9h9LXxDQZ5

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 21, 2025

Yes, as everyone knows, computers can’t cope with “too many transactions taking place too quickly.” Lol, what a moron.

Trump &c cave to Putin before Putin even asks

A clip of our defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s statement on the war in Ukraine is embedded within this AP story. He says it would be “unrealistic” for Ukraine to join NATO and, in another tip of the hat to what realism requires, adds that Kyiv must give up hope of retaining territory annexed by Russia. When our European allies objected that the US was unilaterally ceding to Russia everything it wants before negotiations even begin, Hegseth walked back what he’d said. But it’s like when an objection is sustained in court: too late, the jury heard it. Hegseth’s remarks are an instance of what journalist Michael Kinsley called a Washington gaffe, defined roughly as screwing up by revealing your actual beliefs and intentions.

Our allies’ mistake was to assume that we’re still on Ukraine’s side. Trump himself dispelled any question on this point when, answering questions in the Oval Office, he appeared flummoxed when asked whether Ukraine would be “an equal partner” in negotiations about ending the war. “That’s an interesting question,” he managed to stammer, before saying it was a war “they should never have gotten into.”  You can see the exchange here.

What a demented response! For one thing, he blames the guy who was sucker punched for getting into a fight. And to call the question “interesting” indicates there is much to be said on every side of it. Maybe Ukraine should have a say in negotiations about its fate. But then again, maybe it shouldn’t. Since Trump appears poised to give Putin what he wants in talks between just Moscow and Washington, the question wasn’t “interesting”—it was an obvious and entirely predictable one.

In his only debate with Kamala Harris, Trump boasted that he’d end the war on his first day in office. Harris retorted that this was a promise he might keep, considering that it would be quick and easy to sell out Ukraine. But it turns out that Trump couldn’t do it in a day. More like three weeks.

The 51st state

I’m not going to comment on every bit of bullshit with which the Trump Administration is “flooding the zone” (not that this would even be possible with two kids, a part-time job, and a pretty serious NBA addiction), but I do find myself wondering whether Gross Orange Blob has considered the electoral consequences of annexing Canada, a country with the population of California, as the 51st state—or, as I think he has put it, “OUR 51st State.” The political culture of our northerly neighbor is somewhat to the left of what prevails in our benighted land, and Canadians’ distaste for MAGA would not be diminished by whatever coercive techniques are involved in ushering them into our union. Thus 50-plus more electoral votes for the Blues, and an additional 50 or so congressional districts tilting mainly toward the Dems. (Actually, the Reapportionment Act of 1929 sets the size of the House at 435 seats, so the effect of bringing in Canada would be to take seats away from the current states in order to give them to present-day Canadians.)

What about the Senate? My first thought was that the Democrats could expect to get two more seats. But how plausible would it be for Canada to enter as a single state stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific and northward to above the Arctic Circle? If there’s a North and South Dakota, it seems there should be, at the least, an East, Central, and West Canada. It might be more natural for the separate Provinces to enter as states, and in that scenario the GOP could probably kiss the Senate good-bye into the foreseeable future. (Plus, winning the electoral college would become for them an even heavier lift.)

Democrats, citing the undemocratic essence of the Senate, have occasionally murmured about statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Republicans scoff at such a “naked power grab”—equal representation for Americans, ridiculous!—but Trump, unprompted, has put on the table a prospect considerably more in the Dems’ interest than statehood for two comparatively small unrepresented constituencies would be. The population of Canada is roughly ten times that of D.C. and P.R. combined.

Perhaps such considerations would make Trump realize that he doesn’t want Canada as a 51st state—rather, as another D.C. or P.R., without full representation or voting rights. But the aforementioned “coercive techniques” are then going to have to be somewhat more coercive, and he promised during the campaign “no more foreign entanglements” (which is why he also wants to annex Greenland, wrest away from Panama the Panama Canal, and convert Gaza into a Riviera East administered by the US, though we might subcontract to Israel the necessity of vanishing the Gazans).

Or maybe all the above is a giant distraction that diverts our attention from the fact that Elon Musk has apparently purchased our government for just $275 million. 

If laughter were the best medicine

Trump’s presser today reminded me of one of my favorite comedy bits ever. It’s from the stand-up act of Sarah Silverman. She says, “Lots of people say the Jews killed Christ, but the Jews say the Romans did it,” before adding, completely deadpan: “I’m one of the few who thinks it was probably the Blacks.”

Culture war contribution

Here’s my contribution to “the culture wars” (it’s less familiar than the apparently controversial notion that commonly required school vaccines prevent disease and curtail human suffering): gender dysphoria is an actual thing. I mean, to the point that doctors know about it. Employing their usual methods, the white coats have gone so far as to develop recommended treatments. The culture warriors at the American Medical Association have tried to explain this to skeptics, though without success. Devotees of limited government are sure that they know best and are determined to override the judgment of patients, parents, and doctors. If not for the heroism of these politicians, kids would be mutilated continuously, their parents the accessories of their doctors.

Also, women’s athletics are being degraded. (They are suddenly very keen on women’s athletics.) The schools and the high-school leagues and the NCAA and all the other governing organizations cannot deal with the issues, which is why the limited government champions must step into the breach. Only they can save the day.

But first there are some middle school librarians they need to hassle.

 

 

Chess or checkers?

Sometimes, I can almost see my way clear to crediting one of the things MAGA nuts say about our old-new President: “He plays chess, not checkers.” For example, it doesn’t seem completely bonkers to think Trump might have nominated Gaetz in order to get all the other ding-a-lings. It would be like when a basketball coach challenges his team to be so aggressive that the refs’ conception of a foul is constantly tested. They can’t whistle them all, and the Senate can’t say No to every dullard. In order for the game to end, the meaning of “foul” has to change, and the aggressor gains an advantage. 

But, no, simple explanations account for more reality than complicated ones. Trump only nominated a bunch of craven puppets, and by chance it turned out that one of them was generally viewed as even more absurd than the others. 

It would have been sort of amusing if Hegseth had gone 49-for-53 with Republican senators instead of 50-for-53. Trump would then have felt obliged to troll the legislative branch by nominating someone even less qualified. But who might that have been? Patel, Kennedy, Gabbard, Noem, his daughter’s father-in-law, his son-in-law’s daddy—all had already been tapped for other positions. Maybe Putin could have floated him a name. It’s possible he already gave him Gabbard’s.

Professor pipes up for Pete

I understand there was political news out of Washington, D.C., yesterday, but my niche is the sports-politics nexus, with a sidelight in handsy drunks, which accounts for my interest in Pete Hegseth. And there's minor news on that beat, too. Patrick Deneen, a political scientist at Notre Dame and proud member of Academics for Trump, took to Xwitter recently with the following defense of the Fox News weekend anchor whom Trump has nominated for Secretary of Defense:

I didn’t watch today’s hearings, but I’ve now watched many of the highlights (and lowlights) that have been posted here. Many questions about @PeteHegseth’s character have been raised by his opponents, and one counter that I saw by one Republican Senator was to charge the other…

— Patrick Deneen (@PatrickDeneen) January 15, 2025

 

It's amusing to note that you can look stuff up on The Internet. Hegseth played two seasons for Princeton, 2001-02 and 2002-03. The legendary Pete Carril—one "l"—was not Hegseth's coach. According to his website, Deneen started teaching at Princeton in 1997, by which time Carril had taken a job as an NBA assistant coach. And Hegseth didn't come along till a few years after that.

It's amusing to note, too, that Hegseth's career stats do not tend to redeem Dr. Deneen's memory. In Hegseth's two seasons on the varsity, the Tigers played 55 games. Hegseth entered less than half of them. In his career, he logged about 85 minutes of playing time—just over 3 minutes per game in the 25 games he entered. He scored a total of 31 points, 21 of them on 3-pointers, for an average of 1.2 points per game. Let’s assume that the games Dr. Deneen took his kids to were representative of those contested while Hegseth was on the team. If the Deneens went to a dozen games, they then would have been lucky to see “Microwave” Pete Hegseth make two 3-pointers—because, on average, he made one every eight games.  In his Princeton career, he was 7-for-23 from behind the arc. 

I’m persuaded that Hegseth's “clutch” 3-point “daggers” were mainly a highlight of mop-up time. Since I would never accuse a distinguished professor of being a liar, I’m going to attribute the glaze in Dr. Deneen’s memory to a wingnut’s desire to associate himself with a MAGA celeb. Pete Hegseth, the future “Mr. Secretary,” was one of the budding scholars under his tutelage!

But poor Pete. It seems his defenders have no recourse but to take a deep dive into irrelevancies—and then it turns out that even those "credentials" are bullshit.

Walk the line, a play in 3 acts

Republicans when the Mideast ceasefire agreement was announced: Wtf Biden, there are still 27 Gazan civilians left to kill!

[Trump takes credit for the agreement.]

Republicans: [Quizzical gestures and the sound of a light breeze tickling the leaves of an aspen tree.]

Election notes

I usually love poring over election results, but this year it seems the outcome was too distressing for the pastime to be indulged. Avoidance has been my strategy. Yet a few morsels have leaked through my defenses, and this weekend, laid low by a GI bug, I've searched up enough of the details to make a report.

(1) The Republican advantage in the electoral college disappeared.

I think the way to measure this is just to observe that Harris lost the national vote by 1.5%, and, had she done 2% better everywhere, her electoral vote total would have come in at 270, the minimum needed to win. So a minimal popular vote victory (half of 1%) would have yielded a minimal electoral college victory (270-268).  If you're interested in the details, her three narrowest losses were by less than 2%, in Pennsylvania (1.8%), Michigan (1.4%), and Wisconsin (0.9%). These three states have 44 electoral votes, which, added to the 226 that she won, make 270.

Four years earlier, the same kind of analysis yielded quite a different result. Biden won the national popular vote by 4.5%, yet Trump, by doing just 1% better everywhere—losing by 3.5% instead of by 4.5%—would have flipped the result in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin. The electoral votes of these states would have lifted him into a 269-269 electoral college tie and, eventually, the White House after the provisions of the 12th Amendment provided a final boost. 

So the Republican "tilt" to the electoral college went from 3.5% in 2020 to essentially zero in 2024. This tends to support my view that our system for electing the president requires us to insert the actual election result into one end of a rickety, 18th-century machine, turn a wobbly crank connected to its side with duct tape, then wait for something different and unpredictable to be ejected from the other end. 

(2) There were four states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada—carried by Trump that nevertheless elected a Democrat to the US Senate. No Republican won a Senate race in a state Harris won, but 4 "split decisions" is still, by recent standards, a lot. In 2020, there had been only one such state, Maine, where Republican Susan Collins was reelected to the Senate even though Biden prevailed in the presidential contest. Two years later, only Wisconsin elected a senator (Republican Ron Johnson) from a party that had lost the statewide presidential race two years earlier. And then, this year, 4.

Maybe this is just happenstance, the random results of a random walk through electoral history. But suppose you deeply resent Biden's inner circle of advisors indulging his wish to seek reelection and hiding, kind of, his cognitive decline from the public. The high number of split decisions—all in the same direction, R for President, D for Senate— suggests to me that an open Democratic primary might have spared the country four more years of Trump. The Biden Administration was unpopular. Democrats in general did okay.

You do have to wonder about, for example, the Arizonans who voted for both Trump and Kari Lake's Democratic opponent. Are they just randomly filling in ovals?

(3) Of Minnesota's 87 counties, Harris carried just 9--the three in the Arrowhead above Lake Superior, the county where Moorhead is, the county where Rochester is, and then four counties in the Twin Cities metro, including the Goliaths of Hennepin and Ramsey by more than 2-to-1 margins. She won the state by fewer than 140,000 votes but Hennepin County alone by more than 300,000 votes. Her statewide margin was roughly half way between Clinton's narrow one in 2016 and Biden's relatively easy win in 2020.

In our Senate race, Amy Klobuchar got 56% of the vote, down from 60% in her last race, and 64% in the one before that. Does the quality of the Republican opponent account for the slide? Uh-uh. Unless, for a Republican, the more outlandish, the better. I don't know what's going on. 

I had guessed, based on the volume of TV advertising, that the race in the 2nd congressional district, between incumbent Democrat Angie Craig and Republican Joe Teirab, might be close. It wasn't: Craig won by 17 points. But that was the closest of the eight congressional races. Though the state as a whole leans Dem, it appears unlikely that our 4-4 delegation to the House of Representatives is going to change anytime soon. James Carville once said that, politically, Pennsylvania is three states named  "Philadelphia," "Pittsburgh," and "Alabama." Since Minneapolis and St. Paul are so close together, we really only have "the Twin Cities" and "Alabama." Apologies to a few college towns. 

 

More of all the best people

Pete Hegseth is the Fox News personality Trump has nominated to lead the Pentagon. I wrote about his criminal law problems, here. Turns out that, according to contemporaneous complaints of people who worked with Hegseth, the man’s entire adult biography is basically outtakes from Animal House. Were you to undertake his defense, you might have resort to such rhetorical questions as: Who among us has not been hammered at a strip club with some of the gals from the office? A senator willing to cast the first stone would be in line behind Hegseth’s own mother, who in 2005 e-mailed her adult son: 

You are an abuser of women—that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth. .  . .

I don’t want an answer to this … I don’t want to debate you. You twist and abuse everything I say anyway. But … On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself …

Mom

Hegseth’s only management experience is some brief stints running small veterans’ advocacy organizations. He left these positions after mismanaged finances came to light. Or maybe it was the gross character deficiencies that did him in. He’s definitely failing upward. The Pentagon has about 26,000 employees and a budget of about $850 billion. It would be bad to turn it over to some DEI darling. Luckily, Hegseth is available.

Though allowing for disparate tastes in these matters, I don’t think Hegseth’s nomination for defense secretary is as outlandish as, say, that of Charles Kushner, father-in-law to Trump’s daughter Ivanka, to be our ambassador to France. (Matt Gaetz for attorney general is out of the running since he withdrew.) Kushner is, like the man who nominated him, a felon: in 2005, he pleaded guilty to filing false tax returns (thereby saving about $300,000 in taxes owed), retaliating against one of the government’s witnesses, and lying to the FEC. The tax evasion and other miscellaneous lying was vanilla pudding compared to the details surrounding Kushner’s retaliation against a government witness, which was described in the following manner by a Justice Department press release:

Kushner further admitted at his plea hearing that he devised a scheme to retaliate against a cooperating witness—his sister—and her husband by having a prostitute seduce the husband and covertly filming them having sex. Kushner admitted that he paid a private investigator $25,000 to arrange for the seduction and videotaping of the cooperating witness’ husband. Kushner admitted to personally recruiting the prostitute and instructing that the videotape be mailed to the cooperating witness. 

This is the Joe Friday-Dragnet version of events. The case was prosecuted by the US Attorney for the District of New Jersey—at the time, Chris Christie, who of course would later become the Republican governor of New Jersey and a presidential aspirant himself. But by the time Christie was competing in Republican presidential politics, the party had gone full-on MAGA, and the prosecution of a Trump family member, albeit through marriage, required justification. Thus Christie once elaborated on his office’s press release, telling an interviewer:

Mr. Kushner pled guilty. He admitted the crimes. And so what am I supposed to do as a prosecutor? I mean, if a guy hires a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, and videotapes it, and then sends the videotape to his sister to attempt to intimidate her from testifying before a grand jury, do I really need any more justification than that? I mean, it’s one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes that I prosecuted when I was U.S. attorney.

Kushner’s “rehabilitation” began when Trump, at the end of his first term, pardoned his daughter’s father-in-law for these “loathsome, disgusting” crimes. Now he’s nominated him to be ambassador to France! I get a kick out of the outrage over Biden granting his son a pardon. It’s an ass move, sure, but if Hunter was MAGA he might be next up for secretary of defense.

(I’ve learned from my daughters to use “ass” as an adjective expressing generalized disapproval.)

Trump’s cabinet: all the best people

Back in the day, when I was young and first perusing the paper’s editorial pages, the leading conservative columnist might have been George Will, and I vaguely remember him harping about “the coarsening of American culture,” a regrettable trend that he attributed to liberal political values. If there were specifics, I’ve forgotten—maybe bad language in Hollywood movies, stuff like that.

Will is still alive, and assuming he’s able to follow the news, I hope he loosened his bow tie before reading about the doings of Trump’s nominees for attorney general and secretary of defense. I see that Gaetz, the attorney general nominee, has given up, either because he concluded the Senate wouldn’t confirm him or because he wanted to keep the lid on investigations into his pastimes, which evidently include sex parties with underaged girls to whom he regularly Venmoed large sums. I’m a poor judge, but his picture is on TV a lot, and my first reaction was: not surprised he has to pay for it.

Anyway, Trump has swapped Gaetz out for a woman, Pam Bondi. Maybe  all the men he knows are, like himself, sexual predators. At least she’s corrupt. As Florida’s AG, she talked a big game about prosecuting Trump “University” for fraud … until she received a $25,000 political contribution from the Trump organization. It later developed that the source for the $25k was Trump’s “charitable” foundation, so he was using his fraudulent “charity” to protect his fraudulent “university,” a scam in which his current nominee for attorney general appears to have been a willing participant insofar as she took money to ignore crime.

On the interpretation most favorable to her, there was no quid pro quo—she merely accepted a large donation from the subject of a criminal investigation conducted by her office.

Regarding Pete Hegseth, the host of a Fox News weekend show and Trump’s nominee to lead the Pentagon, I’m not going through the details of the police report compiled after a hospital nurse alerted the cops about a patient who had likely been raped by Hegseth at a conservative political conference in California. You can read it, here (click the link in the story), if you’re not worried about the coarsening effect. Again, on the interpretation most favorable to Trump’s choice for a top Cabinet position, Hegseth is in the “scumbag” portion of a Venn Diagram close to its intersection with the circle labeled “rapists.” The sex that he says was consensual probably shouldn’t count as cheating on his then-current wife since she was in the process of divorcing him after finding out he had just become the father of a child with a Fox News colleague. Close to a run-on sentence, that last one, but it seems apt considering the idea being conveyed: Hegseth wasn’t cheating on his wife, he was cheating on the woman he had cheated on his wife with. But most likely it was a rape, too. It’s easy to understand why he would lie. Why would she?

i worship at the Church of the Brunch and so am open to the charge of invoking the Ten Commandments only when the sins of MAGA mega-men are up for consideration. But the guy plainly can’t manage his personal life. If he was only half as bad at managing the Pentagon, it would be a disaster. 

For reality

Sometimes, like when reading political journalism, I wonder whether the meanings of words changed while I slept one night. I’m thinking of how I’ve seen Trump’s victory described in print as “sweeping,” “decisive,” “resounding,” and so “broad” and “convincing” as to constitute a “clear mandate.” Right-wing rags have been joined by The New York Times in this exercise in lexical revisionism. I’d just like to point out that, as of now (time to start cooking supper on Monday, November 18), Trump has received 49.96% of the tabulated votes for President, compared to 48.24% for Harris.

There are a lot of ways to express how, in the real world, the scale of such a victory doesn’t deserve such sonorous adjectives. But the one that occurs immediately to me is that when in 2016 Hillary Clinton lost to Trump, she outpolled him by 2.1% of the popular vote. So Trump’s margin over Harris (currently 1.72%, and trending downward) is somewhat less than Clinton’s margin over Trump eight years ago.

No one said that Hillary had won a clear mandate!

On another matter, also relating to facts and figures, those eternal pests, I remember the recent effusions of MAGA fan boys when stocks soared on news of Trump’s win. And it’s true, stock prices rose sharply: for example, the NASDAQ Composite Index closed at 18,439 on Election Day, then rose to 18,983 at close of trading the next day, and to 19,269 on the day after that. There’s a decent chance that’s the last you heard of it, because last Friday the Index closed at 18,680, and the fan boys are now enthusing on other topics. They remind me a little of grandma who reported winning $80 at the casino when actually she lost $120 (but had once been down $200). It sounds like you’re doing great when you only talk about the wins.

I’m just trying to put in a good word for reality. If you’re interested in how the stock market has performed historically during Republican and Democratic administrations, I took up that topic, here.

Bobby Jr and the measles

You can click on the above graphic and zoom in and out to make it more legible. It shows the incidence of measles by state beginning in the late 1920s up to current times. The palest blues indicate less than one case per 100,000 population. As the incidence of measles rises, the blue at first darkens before turning yellow, orange, and, finally, red when there get to be more than 2000 cases per 100,000 people. The black vertical line marks the introduction of the measles vaccine in 1963. Lots of light blue to the right of the black line!  It didn’t occur to people to resist life-saving advances in the days before the Internet made it easy to “conduct your own research.”

For the reality-based community, the graphic tells the story of a public health triumph. But we all now live in Trumplandia, where, according to the president-elect, Robert F Kennedy Jr is about to “go wild on health.” Kennedy is one of those people whose only apparent gift is for taking himself seriously, a recognizable syndrome among the mediocre high-born. He and Trump deserve each other and, considering that the election was free and fair, you could say that we all deserve them both. 

Anyway, here is an article, “Fact-checking Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on Vaccines, Autism, and Covid-19,” from back when he was a vanity presidential candidate not yet on Team Trump. MAGAites hate the fact checking function of journalism, for pretty much the same reason that felons hate prosecutors. I’d forgotten about the part Kennedy played in a measles outbreak a few years ago:

In 2018, two infants in American Samoa died when nurses accidentally prepared the combined measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine with expired muscle relaxant rather than water. The Samoan government temporarily suspended the vaccination program, and anti-vaccine advocates—including Kennedy and his nonprofit—flooded the area with misinformation. The vaccination rate dropped to a dangerously low level. The next year, when a traveler brought measles to the islands, the disease tore through the population, sickening more than 5700 people and killing 83, most of them young children.

Maybe Kennedy can “go wild” and do for the whole country what he did for American Samoa. That’s where the anti-vax bus drops you off. Make America great again, bring back measles! The whole article is interesting in a discouraging sort of way. Kennedy’s public health expertise has been exhausted if it’s true that he told Trump to eat less Wendy’s. Of course he should be in charge!

And the guy from Fox & Friends to head up the Pentagon, perfect.

Autopsy

Republicans when they lose an election: WTF?! The libz stole it from us. Deceased Latin American commies put little genies in the machines that switched Trump votes to Biden. It’s obvious to all who can see! We must storm the Capitol, stop the steal, and kill the traitorous vice president. Or at least take a dump in the corner.

Democrats when they lose an election: Oh, my. This is perfectly terrible. I am disconsolate. Can it really be true that black- and brown-skinned men under the age of 30 do not love us anymore? Whatever are we to do, oh woe, woe, woe, &c.

NPR’s political guy said on the radio this morning that Democrats used to be the party of the working class but now they’re the party of the faculty lounge. Seems to me a slur on the faculty insofar as it does nothing to show that the professors are wrong on the merits.

A journalist who interviewed a lot of Trump voting Latinos reports that it was all versions of, “The economy sucked for me under Biden. Covid shutdowns, inflation, housing costs going up. Entonces—he’s fired. Time for something new.” Entonces must be Spanish for thus and therefore. I demur on the substance of the complaint. If Trump were smart, he’d do nothing but play golf, wait for the public’s perception of the economy to catch up with reality, and then declare that he’d fixed it. Instead, he’ll likely eff it up by keeping his promises—setting off a trade war with tariffs, rounding up low-wage workers (aka essential workers) and deporting them, tax breaks for the rich, all the Trumpean slop.

But what I really dislike is this idea that all a voter need consider is whether he’s better off financially than he was four years ago. It’s as if you could hear the guy in the famous Norman Rockwell painting and he’s saying, “Man, I can’t afford some of the crap I’d like to buy.” It seems  then that we have no chance of addressing, for example, the climate crisis. (Trump thinks it’s a “hoax” and Harris hardly mentioned it, unless you count reversing her former opposition to fracking, presumably in order to win Pennsylvania, which she lost.) The inability to address our most pressing problems is a persistent theme. Circa 1850 in the southern part of the U.S., white men perceived that the abolition of slavery would sink their economic boat. It doesn’t follow that abolishing slavery was a poor idea and they were right to seek its preservation and expansion.

In the faculty lounge, they’re familiar with the argument advanced against democracy in Plato’s Republic: the rabble, who care for nothing but their own ease, tomorrow and the day after that, will be easy marks for unvirtuous con men seeking power. What’s needed, therefore, is a statesman who’s devoted his life to the study of philosophy—a “philosopher king.” A self-serving argument for a philosopher to make, and anyway good luck with that in the real world. (Plato, it has been argued, cared so little for the real world that he substituted for it a fanciful one made up by himself.)  But the degree to which experience tends to bear out Plato’s criticism of democracy is one way to account for how a fourth-rate entertainer, third-rate businessman, and first-rate scoundrel could also be the twice-elected POTUS.

Closing arguments

I see the Trump campaign is closing by promising to get the fluoride out of our drinking water. Smart, because not all swing voters hate Puerto Ricans.

The polls

As a pretty avid consumer of political journalism, I’ve been reading the polls for weeks now—who’s up and who’s down, where and why, among what demographic groups, how confident we can be in their accuracy, whether there might be a systematic bias in one direction or another, and so on, and so forth, and on and on and on. One thing I haven’t seen in Politico or the Post or the Times or anywhere, really, is a decent discussion of how polls are conducted, and what problems are encountered and either overcome or not overcome. 

Until now, here, in of all places a philosophy professor’s blog. 

If you aren’t inclined to click, one of the author’s many interesting points sheds a lot of light on how difficult it is to define a representative sample. Let’s say that people are contacted by telephone—Internet polls, in which “respondents” self-select for being online, at particular sites, and are therefore interested and likely partisan, must be impossible to untangle, not that the pollster even tries. But for telephone polls: assuming good faith and a level of professional sophistication, how do you deal with (for example) the fact that lots of people rarely pick up a call from an unrecognized number? The author (Neil Sinhababu) makes the point that perhaps one percent of the population always picks up and is eager to talk with anyone about anything, possibly on account of mental health challenges and a desire to hold forth and make striking points to someone who will listen. If, say, 80 percent of calls from an unrecognized number aren’t picked up, then 5 percent of the people who do answer are essentially agents of chaos—they’re off their rocker, or amusing themselves by messing with you. They can’t be trusted to act in accordance with their “responses.”

Then there is the big chunk who don’t answer. It’s obviously a considerable problem if they self-select for possessing traits that attract them to—or repel them from—candidates of a particular stripe. During the Republican primary season,  pollsters seemed to contact Trump voters more easily than those who preferred Nikki Haley. Time to let the philosophy professor speak for himself. After summarizing double-digit misses that understated Haley’s support in Republican primaries in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Tennessee, he writes:

These races weren’t heavily polled around the voting …. There is no similar excuse in New Hampshire, which was heavily polled right before its election. The poll aggregators’ average had Trump winning by 19.2%, and he actually won by 11.1%. South Carolina was also heavily polled, and the aggregators had Trump winning by 26% where he actually won by 20.3%….

People didn’t complain because the polls said Trump would win and he won.  But missing the margin by 6-8% in a heavily polled race is severe. Moreover, all these errors were overestimates of Trump, and underestimates of Haley.

Well, you can guess what my real purpose is here. I’m just trying to buck myself up again. The polls give Trump at least a 50-50 shot of winning, which depresses me, but, if the philosophy professor is correct, and the polls are missing anti-Trump Republicans, then ….

There are undeniably a lot of anti-Trump Republicans. After Haley withdrew from the race, on March 6, the day after Trump won every state but Vermont on “Super Tuesday,” she continued to win a significant share of the vote in remaining contests:

Washington        March 12     19.3%
Arizona.            March 19    17.8%
Florida               March 19     13.9%
Illinois                March 19     14.5%
Kansas               March 19      16.1%
Ohio                  March 19      14.4%
Connecticut       April 2          14.0%
Wisconsin         April 2         12.7%
Pennsylvania    April 23       16.5%
Indiana              May 7            21.7%
Maryland           May 14          21.3%
Nebraska           May 14          18.1%

Now, you might wonder whether Democrats were “crossing over” to vote against Trump in Republican primaries. Possibly, but not in, for example, Pennsylvania, which has a “closed primary”: to vote in the Republican race, you must have registered as a Republican, and this year, on April 23, about seven weeks after Haley had quit the race, 16.5% of them voted for her. By that time, it seems their leading motivation could only have been to register dissatisfaction with their party’s nominee. If as the philosophy professor thinks these voters are under represented in polling models, then the polling averages that everyone is obsessed with are overstating Trump’s support, and understating Harris’s. 

I like that story and am hugging it till Tuesday.

Grousing with sis

Grousing with my similarly minded sister about the grim prospect of another Trump administration, I mentioned my theory about why he has done better on Election Day than in the polls leading up to it: a segment of the population comprehends that voting for him is shameful, so won’t tell a stranger on the phone that they’re going to do it, but for damn sure they are going to do it. (This is a corollary to the Bradley effect, unless it’s more like the same thing.) My sister, more optimistic than I, replied that quiet Trump voters might be out numbered by quiet Harris voters who, she speculated, are women weary of their husbands’ voluble bullshit, and know its source. I hope she’s right. When we disagree, she usually is right, but this is political “science,” not actual science, or family history, or the names of all the kids in the Catholic family who lived in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, around the corner and down the street from us, circa 1970.

Speaking of our hometown, I read recently, in The New York Times,

In a dead-heat race, both Trump and Harris have made direct appeals to [Eastern European ethnic groups], which happen to be well represented in the so-called blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. While Polish Americans are often seen as fairly conservative because of their Catholic roots, Democrats are hoping to gain the support of those who are concerned about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and apprehensive about Trump’s ties to the Russian president. Harris’s campaign is working to reach to those voters on the ground, while her allies say they have spent $1 million on digital advertisements micro-targeted at Polish and Ukrainian Americans in Pennsylvania.

Five percent of Pennsylvanians have Polish ancestry, and they are concentrated most densely in parts of northeastern Pennsylvania like Lucerne County, where Polish immigrants were drawn to jobs in coal mines and steel mills in the late 19th century and the early 20th century.

which made me think of the Columbia Heights phone book of 55 years ago—the longest alphabetical section might have been “K,” and each listing included, in parentheses, the names of the family’s kids together with the year they were born, an exercise that frequently required a few lines of text. No sawmills, no coal mines, but lots of Slavs and Catholics and kids and modest houses. In their debate—the one that pretty clearly persuaded Trump not to subject himself to another one—the former president said if elected he’d end the war in Ukraine in a day. Harris said he’d be able to do that because a day is how long it would take him to sell out Ukraine.

The neighborhoods have changed, but driving home through northeast Minneapolis from the school I work at in Columbia Heights, I see what seems like a disproportionate number of Ukrainian flags and yard signs imploring “Stand with Ukraine.” So maybe the issue does have some electoral potency. On the other hand, maybe I’m just trying to cheer myself up. It would be odd if Ukraine made a difference, considering what hasn’t disqualified Trump in the minds of more than half the voters: the attempted coup and J6 insurrection, the opinion of his own top military advisors that he’s a fascist, his interest in Arnold Palmer’s junk, his felony convictions, his manifest narcissism, his sexual assaults, his riffs on the life and times of Hannibal Lecter (a fictional character, one of many facts about the world that have not dented the impressive facade of his ignorance), etc., etc., etc.

Keystone kops and the electoral college, 2024 edition

Articles like this one in The New York Times, about how both presidential campaigns are lavishing attention and dollars on Pennsylvania, this year’s favorite child of the electoral college, only make me crabby again about the crazy way we elect the President. If the winner of the national popular vote had a better chance of becoming President than the winner of Pennsylvania, maybe Harris would still be opposed to fracking. But being interested in getting elected, she has to take account of the likely effect of running the national election result through a Rube Goldberg machine. The machine weighs the ballots differently, depending upon where they’re cast, with the result that we are all obliged to pay obeisance to the whims, idiosyncrasies, and pet issues of those residing in a few evenly divided states. 

They’ll decide! The rest of us can read in the paper about what’s on the minds of the voters who matter.

Smooth operator swings, misses

As a voting drudge, I must be unusually interested in healthcare policy—when it comes up in these candidate debates my attention is out of all proportion to the journalistic commentary afterwards. I wrote, here, that Trump’s “concepts of a plan” for replacing Obamacare, eight years after running on rescinding it and giving us “something better,” showed how bankrupt he and his party are on this matter. 

Smooth-talking J D Vance did nothing to change my mind the other night. 

When Walz brought up “concepts of a plan” and said that really there was no plan, unless you count throwing sick people off their affordable insurance, Vance parried with a flow of words that included: “We currently have laws and regulations in place, in place right now, that protect people with pre-existing conditions. We want to keep those regulations in place, but we also want to make the health insurance marketplace function a little better.”

I think a better debater than Walz would then have said something like:

Well, I’m happy to say I agree with one thing the senator said there. It’s true that there’s a law right now protecting people with pre-existing conditions. The name of that law is Obamacare. It’s the law Trump says he wants to repeal. And in fact, when he was president, he came within one Senate vote of succeeding. I doubt anything could show better than what you just heard how vacant Republicans are on this question of vital importance to millions of Americans. These guys tout the provisions of a law they hate and want to scrap in order to argue that everything would be just fine if they succeeded and that very law was repealed!

I don’t know how Vance would have responded—some anodyne nonsense, no doubt—but any talk of “the healthcare marketplace” or “market solutions” would have given Walz a chance to explain that, actually, the vaunted market is the problem. Insurers figure out how much you’re apt to cost them before deciding what policy to offer, at what price. If for example it’s auto insurance, they want to know about your car, how far you drive it, your age and gender, the number of moving violations you’ve had, etc. The analogous questions, transferred to the realm of health insurance, cause unhealthy people not to be able to afford it.  

As a society we’ve decided it’s okay if people with poor driving records pay more for auto insurance. But we haven’t decided it’s okay if people with poor health prospects can’t afford medical insurance. Only Republicans have decided that.

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.)

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.”

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.

 

State of the new race, same as the old race?

No one knows who’s going to win the presidential election, so it’s recreational to contemplate the effusions of confident pontificators. For example:

Rasmussen issued a Trump v. Harris likely voter poll today that should be as reputable as any:

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that, in a two-way matchup, 50% of Likely US Voters would vote for Trump, while 43% would vote for Harris …..

So, a seven-point lead, which tends to confirm past data suggesting that Harris is not an improvement upon Biden, at least not before his final collapse.

This is John Hinderaker of the loony Power Line blog. He probably knows that the poll aggregate site RealClearPolitics currently shows the results of 15 surveys. Of these, eight are based on interviews conducted entirely after Biden dropped out. Hinderaker highlights Rasmussen’s result, which, of the eight, is by far Trump’s best: his second best, from CNN, is +3. The average of the eight is Trump +1.6. If you throw out the Rasmussen result and average the other seven, Trump’s lead drops below a single point. (Harris is ahead in two of the polls.)

According to Hinderaker, the Rasmussen survey “should be as reputable as any.” Why? Because it’s an outlier? I’ve sometimes wondered why Republicans, when they lose, leap to the conclusion that they were cheated—and actually appear convinced. One factor might be the way in which they spend their lives lying to one another and end by believing their own b.s. 

The New York Times’s take on the current state of the unsettled race is in line with the evidence and still pretty sobering for us Democrats:

In the Times’s national polling average, Trump is ahead of Harris by one point, 47 percent to 46 percent. That’s narrower than Trump’s recent lead over Biden, but similar to Trump’s lead over Biden before last month’s debate…. The race has in some ways reset to where it was. 

There are also a couple of important differences. Harris is a far stronger campaigner than Biden. She’s a fiery, skilled speaker who can describe her own agenda and make the case against Trump in ways that Biden could not. She has more potential to make gains than Biden did.

That said, polls point to a potential weakness, too: Harris appears to be a worse fit for the Electoral College than Biden. She is stronger among younger voters and voters of color but weaker with older voters and white working-class voters. Because swing states are disproportionately old, white and working class, Harris is likelier to win the popular vote and lose the election than Biden was.

Think of it this way: It’s a bad trade for a Democrat to win more votes in California and fewer in Pennsylvania. As a result, Trump’s narrow national lead is probably a bit stronger than it looks.

Though not “a bit stronger than it looks” on John Hinderaker’s Earth-2. That would be almost impossible.

I part ways with the Times’s take only with respect to what isn’t said. They’re essentially saying that Harris appeals to the wrong type of voter—young brown ones instead of the old white ones she needs to win. Weird that you can say that without commenting on how weird—undemocratic—it is.

Mountains of praise when a molehill would do

It must be a symptom of rightfully diminished expectations, or something worse, but it seems that people in public life who make the obviously correct choice—Pence declining to participate in his boss's coup, Biden quitting a race he wouldn't win against Pence's former boss—are treated as if they were George Washington not lying about the cherry tree. 

What of the fact that a problem with the foregoing is that Pence is regarded as moral royalty only by his political opponents? His own side thinks that making the obviously correct choice identifies a scoundrel.  As long as we're collecting symptoms, that one recommends a diagnosis of terminal moral rot. It appears the unfurling of scrolls of poor polling data persuaded Biden to "stand down," which distinguishes the motive for his retirement from George Washington's. But Trump would never tamp down his own aspirations, vanities, ambitions, feverish fantasies out of fealty to a principle higher than the wish to wield power, line his pockets, and avoid prison.

I see that a New York Times columnist, the high-minded David French (link is to an article behind a paywall), urges us to criticize but not demonize Trump. If by this he means Trump isn't a demon, I have counterarguments. Has he ever even laughed? Cartoon villains seem more human. In cases like his you have to wonder about the family of origin—by all accounts, it was rich and negligent. Too bad, but some people are able to overcome these disadvantages. 

Basketsful convene

I have received the information about the voting preferences of Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan but, to be frank, am still leaning in a contrary direction. Something about Donald Trump makes me think he might prove to be untrustworthy. 

It's the all-star break or else I would never have been watching when the author of Hillbilly Elegy told the assembled Republican delegates:

And while we're on the topic of grandparents, let me tell you another Mamaw story. Now, my Mamaw died shortly before I left for Iraq, in 2005. And when we went through her things, we found 19 loaded handguns. They were—[his momentum is interrupted by laughter and applause].

Now, the thing is, they were stashed all over the house. Under her bed. In her closet. In the silverware drawer. And we wondered what was going on, and it occurred to us that towards the end of her life, Mamaw couldn't get around very well. And so this frail old woman made sure that no matter where she was, she was within arms' length of whatever she needed to protect her family. That's who we fight for. That's American spirit. 

Kid Rock. Hulk Hogan. Loaded handguns in the silverware drawer. (Because you never know when granny will need to "protect her family" that doesn't live with her.)

Well, in the world according to them, they're putting their best foot forward.  Their nominee would soon have some thoughts on "the late great Hannibal Lecter." 

Reality bytes

Conservative jurists who have been nominated to be on the Supreme Court: We're just umpires calling balls and strikes.

Once they've been confirmed and have their lifetime appointment: We are writing a decision for the ages!

                                            ***********************

Mitch McConnell: I will not be voting to convict Donald Trump in this impeachment trial. We have the criminal law to deal with his behavior.

Supreme Court: Sucka!

                                                *******************

Sonia Sotomayor: If the president decides that his political rival is a corrupt person, and he orders the military to assassinate him, is that an official act for which he has immunity?

Trump Lawyer: It would depend upon the hypothetical, but we can see that that could well be an official act.

Six Supreme Court Justices (three appointed by Trump, two others with crazy wives they might not want to disappoint, and the boss of them all): Yeah, I agree with that. 

                                           ***************

Supreme Court: There's no constitutional right to abortion, because the Constitution is silent on the question.

Also the Supreme Court: The Constitution is silent on the question of presidential immunity, so if we want to get to our preferred conclusion, we're just going to have to make some stuff up. 

[They make some stuff up.]

 

The Supremes (not the ones who can carry a tune)

Lots of news, and my favorite nugget, possibly because it has nothing to do with the presidential campaign, concerns the Supreme Court of the Republican party. It took the Court a New York minute to rule that the 14th amendment's clause barring insurrectionists from holding elected office did not permit Colorado to keep Trump off its ballot. Meanwhile, it is dallying, and dallying and dallying, over the question of whether it's possible for a president to commit crimes. So hard! It should be safe to stop dallying now since Trump won’t be tried for attempting to reverse the result of the last presidential election until after the next presidential election occurs—and never, if Trump wins. The Court can rule anything now, because the goal of delaying the trial, and the airing of the evidence in the case, has been achieved.

Okay, all that does pertain to the campaign. I had in mind a couple other recent decisions. In Ohio v EPA, the Court allowed a "good neighbor" provision of the Clean Air Act to be put on hold while the suit of Ohio and some other "upwind states" is litigated. The details are varied and interesting, including the fact that the case came to the Court on the "shadow docket," an emergency application of parties that want to continue to pollute. Granted, and quickly decided in favor of the applicants! The detail that caught the attention of Chemistry 101 alums is that the 5-4 decision (boys against girls since Justice Barrett joined the liberals in dissent), written by Justice Gorsuch, refers repeatedly to "nitrous oxide," commonly known as laughing gas, a tool of dentists and anesthesiologists. Gorsuch meant to refer to "nitrogen oxide," a family of air pollutants under EPA control. 

I know, so what, you'd have to take an uber from science class to the part of the school curriculum where Gorsuch and his team of law clerks likely made their straight-A grades in the Ivy League. You might think these haughty nerds would do some proofreading and googling, but, whatever, the words are similar even if they refer to different things. The Court has now corrected the error in its official decision. Before the error was corrected, however, the Court issued another decision, in a case called Loper Bright v Raimondo, that had the effect of reversing a longstanding legal principle (the "Chevron doctrine") that gave federal regulatory agencies the power to interpret laws affecting their work. The Court now says, no, henceforth judges, not regulators, will decide what Congress meant. This will have the intended effect of making it a lot harder for government regulators to do their work. Scientists at the EPA, for example, will have to worry about the opinions of their overlords in the judiciary who don't know the difference between laughing gas and smog. 

Scylla and Charybdis

Luckily, one of my kids has a 6:30 piano lesson on Thursdays, after which we go out for hamburgers, so I turned on the debate just a few minutes before the protagonists began arguing about their golf games. Trump probably cheated his way to the recent "club championship" he bragged about, and Biden presumably was confusing his "6 handicap" with a 36 handicap. Perhaps a somewhat apt summary: the Lying Narcissist versus the Old Confused Guy. How hard would it have been for a half-wit, responding to Trump's "club championship," to say something like, "Ya, I guess you're a good golfer, and I've heard you have a lot of money, but it's weird how you think these are an adequate compensation for being a crook, an ignoramus, a blowhard, and an all-around piece-o'-shit human."

But Biden: "I have a 6 handicap!" Hard to believe that wasn't his worst moment but I defer to the unanimous opinion of people who subjected themselves to all 90 minutes.

The wise counsellors in Biden's inner circle: if they're so smart—and it appears they're smart enough to do a credible job of running the country—why didn't they tell him a few months ago that he had to retire? I suppose it's possible that they did and are just fighting an iron law of human frailty. Ballplayers: "When I lose a step, I'll be the first to know, and that's when I'm done." Justice Ginsburg: "Yes, I'm in my mid-80s, and have cancer in multiple body parts, but I really like my job." Biden: "Only I can beat Trump." All just slightly different flavors of something that should never be on a plate. 

As a somewhat partisan Democrat, I have to say that at least we're upset about our guy's infirmities. The other side seems to have no problem with:

Moderator: What are you going to do about the climate crisis?

Trump: Illegals are ruining America! Biden is the worst president ever!

Moderator: I asked about the climate.

Trump: Illegals are ruining America! By the way, I love the environment. Biden is the worst.

Moderator: Lots of families can't afford childcare. Do you have a plan to help them?

Trump: Did I mention that illegal migrants are ruining America? By the way, I did not have sex with Stormy Daniels.

Moderator: Question was about childcare.

Trump: I won the club championship. The illegals are stealing your social security.

"Flooding the zone with bullshit" is too pale a metaphor for his brand of blustery vacuity. Regarding the question of who he has or hasn't bedded, what even is the point of lying about something when everyone knows what the truth is? He's lied so much that it's now just a reflex. 

Don’t mix me up with this guy

I like to tell myself that I’m long past caring what anyone thinks about me, but yesterday, while playing around on this website, I discovered that someone with the name “Eric Jorgenson” contributes regularly to the political campaigns of such lowlifes as Gym Jordan and that senator-hillbilly guy who’d sell his soul for either ten cents or a job offer from Trump.

That Eric Jorgenson lives in Ohio. He’s a lawyer. Friends, it’s not me!

Vote blue for stocks

 

The above clip is from the last debate of the 2020 presidential campaign, on October 22, 2020. I could do without hearing ever again about how Biden is a ham-and-egger from Scranton, but when was the last time Trump was right about anything? I don't know what Ted Cruz's wife looks like—if she resembles a horse, I guess that would be a candidate. Here Trump predicts that the stock market will crash if Biden is elected. On the day he made the prediction, the Dow closed at 28,211. A couple weeks later, Biden was elected, and yesterday the Dow closed north of 40,000 for the first time. 

Because Republicans are widely regarded as the pro-business party, people tend to assume that the stock market performs better during Republican administrations. It's not true, as this fun interactive graphic from macrotrends shows. Over the 40 months of Biden's presidency, the Dow is up 33 percent. At the same point in their presidencies, it was up 28 percent under Trump, up 55 percent under Obama, up 71 percent under Clinton, and down 6 percent under Geo W Bush. That's going back several presidencies. Of course the picture doesn't change if you go back to the days of Hoover and FDR. Nor is it altered by exchanging the 40-month mark for end-of-term results. Here is the figure for the endpoint of the four most recently concluded two-term presidencies: Clinton, +229%; Obama, +148%; Reagan, +147%; GW Bush, -27%. 

I don't know why this is true. Probably has something to do with The Deep State. 

News consumption

The evidence presented at Trump's criminal trial has not so far raised my estimate of the defendant's moral character.

In other news, I read today that last month was the hottest April in the temperature register, and that it was the eleventh month in a row to set the record: March was the hottest March ever, February was the hottest February ever, and so on, going back to June of 2023, which was the hottest June ever. Meanwhile, the ten hottest years on record are . . . the last ten. 2005 was the first year in the 21st century to be the hottest on record, but it has now fallen to twelfth place.

Said criminal defendant's response to these data points is to yammer on about a climate "hoax" and to invite oil-and-gas execs to Mar-a-Lago, where, according to attendees, he promised to rescind the Biden admin's regulatory rules in exchange for super-sized campaign donations. I don't know why they'd sign up for that deal: he'd already promised to rescind the rules if elected, and any money you give him just makes bigger numbers on the Form 1040s of his lawyers, assuming they're more honest than he is. 

Brownstein on '24

For a while now, the conventional wisdom has been that a Democrat's path to 270 electoral votes in a presidential election would run through the Sun Belt, where the nonwhite part of the electorate is growing rapidly. And this view wasn't just theoretical. Here are the results of the last three presidential elections in Georgia:

2012 Republican +7.8
2016 Republican +5.2
2020 Democrat +0.2

And Arizona:

2012 Republican +9.1
2016 Republican +3.6
2020 Democrat +0.3

And Texas:

2012 Republican +15.8
2016 Republican +9.0
2020 Republican +5.6

You can see how, in a plausible interpretation, Arizona and Georgia are on their way to becoming a fairly dark shade of blue, as has in fact happened with Virginia and Colorado, and that when Texas inevitably joins them it will be game-set-match for the Dems.

But as the political journalist Ron Brownstein argues, here, that isn't what's happening—at least not so far in 2024. Forty-five states either voted for or against Trump in both 2016 and 2020. The other five, which all flipped from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020, are Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona.  Of these five, the heaviest lifts for Biden appear now to be Georgia and Arizona, while his position is strongest in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. According to Brownstein and the political strategists he's interviewed, the reason for this is that Biden is slipping precipitously with nonwhites, upon whose votes Dems rely to compete in the Sun Belt. Meanwhile, however, he is doing better than expected with white voters, including older white voters, who are a much bigger share of the electorate in the Rust Belt. 

If you're interested in this subject of political demographics and voting patterns in America, the whole article is worth reading. The big takeaway, though, is that there's been something like a trade: Hispanics and African Americans (especially men) have drifted away from the Dems, while support from whites (especially more educated and affluent women) has ticked up. There has been evidence of this in recent election results too. I've always thought there was a racial dog whistle in Trump's kvetching, and worse, about election fraud in 2020 in places like Philadelphia and Detroit. Actually, he did about the same in these heavily minority cities in 2020, when he lost both Pennsylvania and Michigan, as he did in 2016, when he won both states. The erosion in his support occurred in suburban counties and those centered on mid-sized cities, like Grand Rapids, Michigan. You can look these things up. Here are the results of the last two elections in Michigan's Wayne County (Detroit), Oakland County (affluent suburbs northwest of Detroit), and Kent County (Grand Rapids):

Wayne
2016 Trump -37.1
2020 Trump -38.0

Oakland
2016 Trump -8.0
2020 Trump -14.0

Kent
2016 Trump +3.0
2020 Trump -6.1

Sorry about your feelings, MAGA-ites, but the evidence does not bear out the claim that "massive fraud" in Detroit swung Michigan to Biden in 2020. Better keep your eye on shifty white election officials this time around!

Brownstein dances a little lightly over the details of the electoral arithmetic, but I think it works pretty much like this:

A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win. The 20 states (plus D.C.) never carried by Trump have 232 electoral votes. Winning Pennsylvania (19) and Wisconsin (10) would put Biden at 261.  The 25 states Trump has never lost plus Georgia and Arizona would give him 262. In this scenario, the outcome in Michigan would be decisive, and it's significant that Michigan's 15 electoral votes would land Biden at 276—because, of the states that have never voted for Trump, Nevada appears alarmingly wobbly, but with Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin Biden wouldn't need its 6 electoral votes to hit 270. I'm not mentioning (till now!) the wild card relating to the fact that, unlike the other 48 states, Maine and Nebraska do not necessarily award all their electoral votes to the statewide winner. Instead, the statewide winner gets two electoral votes (for its senators), while the rest are divvied up according to the outcome within congressional districts. Somewhat by chance, this complication probably results in a wash. Biden is almost certain to win Maine, but almost certain to lose the more inland and rural of its two congressional districts. The 1-vote deficit is likely then recaptured in Nebraska, where, though he's certain to lose statewide, Biden is a strong favorite in the congressional district that's home to Omaha—an especially strong favorite if he's doing well enough to win Wisconsin and Michigan. Biden won the district by 7 points in 2020.

All this is enough to make you jittery if, like me, you think another Trump term would be a catastrophe for our country. Note, for example, that Arizona's 11 electoral votes would not make up for losing Michigan: in this scenario, Biden also needs Nevada to win. It will always seem weird to me to talk this way, as if the opinions of people in more than 40 states mean nothing. Thanks electoral college!

Maybe events will change the cliff-hanger outlook. Like what? Law-and-order Republicans turn on Trump after he's convicted of a felony? Evangelicals head for the hills when he absurdly tries to "rebrand" himself on abortion? Dream on.

Call me an antisemite but . . .

An online subscription to the New York Times—mine, anyway—comes with a daily newsletter that highlights some topic of interest and then summarizes the day's news, with links to the full articles in the paper. Since there was a lot of news made in Gaza earlier this week, Wednesday's newsletter had a small section with bullet points, each one linked to a different article on the war there. The overarching event, of course, was the air strike on the convoy of aid workers from World Central Kitchen. Seven workers were killed in the attack. The second bullet point says:

Biden said he was outraged by the deaths, adding, "Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers."

The fifth bullet point says:

The Biden administration plans to sell F-15 fighter jets, worth billions, to Israel.

[Links in original.] People love a good Bible story, but we have to stop treating Israel like the prodigal son: Yes, you've behaved shamefully, here are some F-15s! What if, instead of privately fuming, Biden did something like cancelled military aid to Israel? They don't need it anyway. To fight Hamas? It's weird how, in discussions of foreign aid, assisting Ukraine is packaged with assisting Israel. Let's make some distinctions, beginning with the identity of the enemy in the respective cases: Russia, an outlaw superpower with the world's eighth largest economy, versus a terrorist organization.  

In another of the newsletter's bullet points, we are told that Israel "took responsibility" for the strike on the aid workers. What can this even mean? I think "took responsibility" means "acknowledge we did it"—as if there was some doubt on that point. Only question is, whether it was intentional.  Israel says, No, it was a "tragic mistake" (and now leave us alone while we proceed as before). I hate how despicable acts immediately get clouded over with vacant exercises in public relations. It's hard to be too cynical about Israel. I used to think the settlement movement in the West Bank was a way to change facts on the ground that would then have to be taken account of when one day a final settlement would be negotiated: a realpolitik means of obtaining favorable terms, in other words. In reality, however, the settlement movement is just illegal annexation of territory, and the coalitions that have governed Israel for a generation now have never had any intention of negotiating anything, ever. 

Outrage machine punches the clock on Easter

The above is sort of fun. Actually, "Trans Visibility Day" is always March 31. It's Easter that moves around on the calendar, and this year, by chance, it falls on March 31. But what does that matter if you are determined to believe that Biden, just to rub his dirty thumb in the eye of his fellow Christians, chose to "proclaim" Easter Sunday Trans Visibility Day?

Blasphemous! He must apologize! (No, you should take a Valium and watch a basketball game on TV.) 

It's tempting to say that the kerfuffle reveals too much about what, in the minds of a lot of American conservatives, Christianity amounts to—not much more than reflexive condemnation of "icky sex stuff I don't understand." There seems to be a lot that Team Trump doesn't understand, including about religion, as evidenced by the earnest claim that Biden has offended "Catholics and Christians across America."

Does a bear shit in the woods? (Yes.) Is the pope Catholic? (Yes.) Are Catholics Christians? (MAGA spokesperson delighted to field a real question.)

Pence joins the heretics

Pence saying he won't be endorsing Trump has resurrected stories about all the other Trump administration officials who aren't supporting him in 2024. An abbreviated list is here. In the news stories I've seen, the emphasis is on how long the list is, and I'm not saying that's not newsworthy. Trump, however, seems to have avoided condemnation from cabinet secretaries and other advisors with responsibility for domestic policy—those high up in the Departments of Labor and Transportation and Treasury and Interior and the like. I guess the Department of Justice is an exception, since former attorney general Barr has said Trump "shouldn't be anywhere near the Oval Office." But the GOP's 2024 nominee and former president has been flatly condemned by both his defense secretaries (Jim Mattis and Mark Esper), one of his Homeland Security secretaries (John Kelly, who was also his longest-serving chief of staff), and two of his national security advisors (HR McMaster and John Bolton.) The most commonly deployed adjective in their adverse judgments is "unfit."

Who else? Mike Flynn, Trump's first national security advisor, is still with him, but you have to consider that he'd probably be in prison but for a Trump-issued pardon. Mike Pompeo, his longest-serving secretary of state, said at the 2023 CPAC convention that it was time to trade in celebrities for serious conservative leadership. This was widely considered a swipe at Trump, and the only thing I've heard about Pompeo since then relates to his probable lying about how he lost 90 pounds. He's not a reliable source for anything, so I'm not claiming him as a Trump critic from within. 

For what it's worth, my theory about why the national security team is overrepresented among the apostates is that, after Trump was elected in 2016, there was a kind of dog-meet-car moment when non-crazy Republicans, aka The Establishment, realized that a reality tv guy was going to be president. They allowed him to have his clowns in domestic policy in exchange for accepting some more serious people in positions where they feared daffiness might more easily trigger a catastrophe. It's these "more serious" ones who first recognized the shit-show for what it was and eventually couldn't tolerate it. The others happily played their part.

I came upon the below video clip when looking up a couple things for this. Credit where it's due to Brett Baier of Fox News. 

 

 

 

Kitchen talk

I was out driving kids to and fro on Thursday and so missed the SOTU address, but we got home in time for the Republican rebuttal from the kitchen of Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama. Uff da, as my mom used to say. I was too mesmerized, or benumbed, to switch channels, a real shame considering that it must have been about the same time as Anthony Edwards's game saving block in Indianapolis.

Now that she's done, and my brain is working again, I have to laugh about some of her "zingers." Too long since Biden pumped his own gas? I had filled my tank that afternoon at Bona Bros. in Fridley, Minnesota, and remember noticing that another customer was vaping while tending the pump. Probably not presidential timber, in my opinion, and, anyway, what's her point? That Biden doesn't pump his own gas, therefore vote for Trump? Lol! It wasn't her intent, but the middle school drama act probably distracted attention from the dopey drivel emanating from the tidy kitchen in which, according to the senator, she and Mr. Britt are obliged to meet regularly in order to worry about their children. That's how bad Biden is. 

Oh, by the way, the serial rape story that she lays at the feet of President Biden occurred about 20 years ago, in Mexico, during the Bush-Cheney administration. Details, details!

In the lol category, Scott Shapiro commented that the great silent majority of Alabamians not embarrassed by Sen. Britt lie frozen in vats of liquid nitrogen. Someone else noted that, in Britt's defense, she is not Alabama's stupidest senator. 

 

 

 

IVF, my 2 cents

Preemptive confession: If you ever see me all emotional over the demise of a frozen embryo, it's an act.

My only contribution to the current debate is that I think controversy might have erupted earlier if those inclined to oppose IVF had thought very deeply about how the semen is collected. It's not as if they suck it out with a syringe while the dad-to-be watches a Prager U video to dull the discomfort. Pretty sure there is very little discomfort. 

Supremes say no to Colorado?

I've gotten used to thinking of the law firm Roberts Thomas Alito Gorsuch Kavanaugh & Barrett as the Supreme Court of the Republican party. It appears, though, that they are poised to overturn the Colorado Supreme Court on the question of Trump's ballot eligibility, and in that event I'll have to admit that they missed a chance to perform a service to the GOP. For if you're up to speed on the daydreams of the party's Big Thinkers, you know they're distressed by the prospect of Trump Again, and are praying for a miracle that the party's unwashed voters are plainly going to deny them.

But Roberts et al could have delivered the miracle. Actually, it wouldn't even have qualified as a miracle, since it would only have required them to be faithful to the school of constitutional interpretation they profess to revere. Words have meaning, the 14th Amendment says what it says, and Trump, having done what he's done, must be disqualified as surely as if he hadn't attained the age of 35. The justices might regret having to say it—hell, no president appointed more of them than Trump—but they're just umpires making the calls. Outside, ball, according to Amendment No. 14, Section 3, retire to a Florida country club and tee off from the red markers if you please. 

Side note: the founders are spoken of as if they resided on Olympus, not Boston or plantations in Virginia, and should probably be represented in print as The Founders, to convey the hushed reverential tones one adopts before pronouncing their names and bowing before their mighty works, yet I detect evidence of their fallibility in the existence of a minimum age (35) for holding the presidency, but no maximum one. 

To me, the most amusing aspect of the oral argument in the Colorado case was this notion that, oh my god, are we really going to say that one state can determine who becomes president? I think 2000 was an election year and that Florida is one state.  I'm also pretty sure that 48 states deliver all their electoral votes to the statewide winner, while two, Maine and Nebraska, divvy it up by congressional district. If every state can decide how it wants to do things, and apparently they can, then why can't Colorado exclude a traitor from its ballot? Besides, the idea that Colorado would then be determining the outcome of the election betrays innocence about how things actually work. Colorado would be depriving Trump of some electoral votes that he isn't going to win anyway. What would count for something is if Colorado didn't put him on the ballot in a national, popular vote election—but that's not what we have.

Our election laws and customs are so bizarre that an innocent observer might debate with himself whether a presidential race is a national election, or 50 state elections, the ambiguity arising from the fact that it's a hybrid with rules invented by judges when the contradictions achieve a certain critical mass. 

Political notes on Long Island &c

Scott Shapiro, one of the great shit-posters on Twitter, I mean X, likes to say on days like this that Trump is now, finally, "toast"—the point of course being just the opposite, else Shapiro would not be saying, for the 20 jillionth time, "Trump is toast." I think I mentioned once before that sociologist Brooke Harrington, whom I also know only as a tweeter, has supplied an explanation for why Trump is never toast. It has to do with the psychology of the mark: when you've been had by an obvious con, it's sort of hard to contact the Better Business Bureau, or whoever, and say, basically, "I fell for it." Turns out that this is the finding, or argument, of a famous paper in social science, "On Cooling the Mark Out," by Erving Goffman. In a weird dance, the sucker, who has an interest in saving face, and the con, who has an interest in keeping his frauds undetected, find themselves in league against the guardians of societal norms, such as the Better Business Bureau, the courts, "the Rule of Law," the state attorney general, and the favored sayings of school principals and Cub Scout den mothers. I'm updating some of the details for the Age of Trump. There has to be some way to account for his resilience. His "university" was a fraud. His "foundation" was a fraud. For a long time now, the only thing he's made money from is a reality TV show aimed at the same demographic from which the enrollees of Trump U were drawn. The presidency was just another hustle. Now he wants to be president again as otherwise he'll go to prison. Yet a sizable minority adore him, none more than his victims, who have on occasion compared his travails to those of Jesus. (Trump's been divorced twice and almost the least of his legal troubles arises from a campaign finance law he ran afoul of while trying to cover his fling with an adult film actress he was boffing while his current wife was home with baby Barron.)  

It seems to me that the psychology of the mark, as set out by Goffman, provides a way of making some sense out of this really pretty crazy fact background.

I was surprised to read that the Long Island congressional district formerly represented by another Republican con, George Santos, is the richest in New York State, and the fourth richest in the country. It contains a portion of eastern Queens, a NYC borough not famous for affluence, and doesn't extend anywhere near as far east as the Hamptons, which in my ignorance is where I thought the real money was. Anyway, another thing that needs explaining is how an election district of more than a half million residents could go for Biden by 8 points, then for Santos by 8 points, then for a Democrat by 8 points in last week's special election to replace Santos. My tentative theory is that when Trump is on their mind, the conforming normies recoil in alarm, but when paying less attention all they know is that they don't like taxes. The district's to-and-fro suggests that the Republican party, having become a wholly owned Trump subsidiary, is no longer the automatic choice of people who mainly want to be left alone to enjoy the stuff advertised on TV during golf tournaments.