Well, then I googled, and sure enough, the atlantic, the wp, and a dozen others are debating this.

I think the best way to handle it is with a knowing, "Really, he's more like Adlai Stevenson." Then walk away.

I just really love the name Spiro T. Agnew.

Unfortunately, once you include the middle initial, it no longer anagrams to "Grow a Penis."

Do young people genuinely believe that the aged, the halt and the terminally uncool survived the '80s and '90s without being periodically informed of the Jeremiah of Burlington? I recall a pretty regular schedule of "the only socialist..." stories.

For the actual topic of the post: maybe the myriad links in 1 already address this, but the present doesn't have much to do with 1972, because so many states are solidly either Democratic or Republican. I think Sanders will put on a better campaign than McGovern did, assuming he doesn't keel over from another heart attack. But this will be a difficult election to win.

5: Honestly, I forgot all about him after I left graduate school until 2015.

Turfing out an incumbent executive is difficult. Perhaps we ought to have had a plan other than re-enacting all our old grudges and bad habits for 4 years.

One finds oneself violently cynical this season.

8.2 is a comment for all seasons.

Based on the The Atlantic piece it is hard to argue that Bernie Sanders isn't George McGovern personally. However there are many differences between now and 48 years ago.
- The demographics of the country and the parties are very different
- Americans in general hate Trump, whereas Nixon was popular
- No George Wallace faction in the Democratic party
- Extreme polarization now, so any differences are at the margins (e.g. if Obama had dropped out in mid-2012 and been replaced by Biden, or in fact some guy no one had ever heard of, the results might have been maybe 2% different)
- Democrats embarrassing themselves with infighting in public at the 1968 and 1972 conventions and many prominent Democrats, even outside the George Wallace faction, refusing to back McGovern at any point (we'll see! e.g. the establishment Democrats decided to not support the Democratic candidate in the 2018 Maryland governor race, albeit that would have been tough for anyone to win)
- The average person hates Trump and the Republican Party in general, but this is balanced by every part of the election structure being biased toward the Republicans. The rest of their strategy to win is to finding people who would either vote "Democratic", or throw their vote away, and getting them to be demoralized enough to throw their vote away. This worked in 2016. It's hard to know who it would work best against here, probably Joe Biden for the same reasons it worked against Hillary, and maybe also Warren unfortunately with all the mostly-fraudulent anecdotes about playing into unfortunate stereotypes. I don't see all the suburbanite Hillary fans who hate Trump, but also want to maintain every element of the status quo, choosing to vote for Trump, and they aren't in the habit of staying home. Sanders seems to be a fantastic communicator and certainly a good contrast with Trump. But maybe they will vote for the heroic centrist third party candidacy of Michael Bloomberg or Mitt Romney on the Connecticut For Lieberman ticket. Even McGovern didn't have to face that, although Carter did in 1980.

10.next-to-last: Yes, that could happen again if it comes down to a contested convention. I hope like hell it doesn't.

10.last: A general election between Sanders and Trump seems likely to provoke a third-party candidacy. Once again, I hope like hell it doesn't.

Except for the abuse of power, the Republican Party is so far to the right that Nixon doesn't share much in common with it.

In 1972, I was politically ineffective because I was only 1 year old. In 2020, I no longer have that excuse.

the Republican Party is so far to the right that Nixon doesn't share much in common with it.

We should really use Bloomberg for Nixon, when we stage our reënactment.

I think Sanders can win if he will just see sense and promise to kill whole bunches of people in Asia. Or even just promise to be open to the idea.

Do you want to write that scene?

I left it as a exercise for the reader.

He could just point out that the Philippines are getting too close to China and threaten to bomb them to prevent them from becoming too capitalist in the socialism.

I get to be in charge of costumes. The leisure suits will be deafening.

One of my favorite things is that modern business suits are actually lounge suits.

Okay, we'll ask set design to have chaises on hand for lounging.

I like that Sanders dresses like a Canadian with a big puffy coat over a suit instead of wearing a topcoat like somebody who wasn't raised in the tundra

In Nevada?

He shot a man in Reno just to watch his tie.

He shot the 1%, just to split their pie.

Now that Warren has come out with her plan to Legalize It, Bernie needs to come out for Free Weed.

Ed Burmila: "People who appear to live in abject terror of doing McGovern again seem strangely unconcerned about doing Kerry or Dukakis again."

See, Kerry could do you in French.

McGovern killed fascists. Bernie hasn't.

27 is great

The exit polling suggests that in Nevada Sanders came in 4th -- 4th! -- among voter 65 and older. Good thing old folks don't vote in this country.

Neither Kerry nor Dukakis built movements dedicated to the proposition that the Democratic Party must be destroyed. Neither was even mildly running against the Establishment of the party.

The Nevada caucus was, finally, some proof of concept for the Sanders movement. We'll know in 10 days whether this is an artifact of the caucus structure, or whether he really can swamp the polls with young people.

I think Sanders can definitely win.

And I don't think, from where we stand now, that any of the other candidates -- except maybe Warren -- can beat Trump. Certainly not if it looks like there's some sort of concerted effort among the non-Sanders candidates to consolidate around one of their number.

31: at least it wasn't 5th.

It helps if you don't blow off the vetting procedure for your running mate.

Agree w 30.

Agree w 30.

stupid phone

Alhamdulillah. I think the establishment hadn't been seen to fail so much in McGovern's time. Poorly conducted war is one thing but Wall Street ripping off the whole country taking people's houses away from the mud big scale I'm getting getting bailed out is another

25: Heh.

The main difference is that Hunter S. Thompson isn't around to chronicle the campaign.

I think the establishment hadn't been seen to fail so much in McGovern's time.

The Vietnam War killed an average of more than one hundred Americans per week. I think you need to make a distinction between "the political establishment" and "big business" because the 2008 crash was, rightly, seen as a failure of the latter primarily.

|| Barry, hope your application package is going OK. |>

Thanks ydnew, I'm under the gun here but I left directly after work to a cafe and I'm just settling back into it now.

You're under the gun so you take it on the run.

I will comment REO Speedwagon lyrics until you finish.

Because the blog is based in North Korea, international law against collective punishment does not apply.

45 Good lord man, I'm writing!

I don't believe it. Not for a minute.

That whole song is nuts. I heard a rumour that you are cheating on me and I don't believe it so much I'm going to write a whole song about how I will break up with you if you are cheating on me.

The exit polling suggests that in Nevada Sanders came in 4th -- 4th! -- among voter 65 and older. Good thing old folks don't vote in this country.

I can't tell if this is pro-Sanders - "if he's getting this kind of turnout with the kids, then he's in good shape because the olds can be counted on to turn out" - or anti-Sanders - "You can't win if you lose your most dependable 65+ voters".

The former.

I don't know that Fleetwood Mac song.

49:. You're failing to grasp the nuances of the lyrics. He's in the denial stage, but in the course of the song is moving towards the anger stage.

Don't Stop Thinking about the Apocalypse

Yeah, on the one hand winning going away without old folks is a step in the right direction. On the other, this shows a pretty reliable set of voters to whom the sale really has not (yet) been made.

You'd think there would be some real mileage with seniors in explaining how much better what he is calling "Medicare" is than the actual Medicare that exists. It's there, but a couple of ads with him surrounded by a crowd of olds explaining about how different it is might move the ball downfield.

53: I guess that makes sense.

I feel like it's pretty normal for Wall Street 2 rip the population off periodically but in many prior cases the establishment prosecuted and jailed the worst offenders for example during the savings-and-loan crisis of the 80s

I think Bernie needs to play up the endorsement from Dick Van Dyke more. Everyone loves Dick Van Dyke.

https://consequenceofsound.net/2020/02/dick-van-dyke-endorses-bernie-sanders/

|| So, you may ask yourself, 'what did the US Supreme Court do to wreck democracy today?' Nothing really, but the case decided today is a decent procedural. It's about the failure of the pension plan for certain Catholic institutions in Puerto Rico, and who can be ordered to pay up. Which in turn is about the legal nature of the Catholic Church -- is it all one big legal person, are each of the institutions legal persons, does the 1898 treaty by which PR came to the US from Spain control this, does the US Constitution require courts to defer to what the Catholic Church thinks its legal structure is. But wait, the PR trial court rulings on appeal were made during a time that the case had been removed to federal court, although the jurisdictional predicate for removal had ended, so does the remand nunc pro tunc to the date federal jurisdiction ended save them? Answer: no. Back to square one. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-921_2cp3.pdf |>

Explain in English?

YOU KILL THAT MOTHERFUCKER DEAD BARRY! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRGH!

Also why did you annex Guam and Puerto Rico and Philippines(ish) but not(ish) Cuba.

That whole song is nuts. I heard a rumour that you are cheating on me and I don't believe it so much I'm going to write a whole song about how I will break up with you if you are cheating on me.

Maybe REO Speedwagon is like Oasis where the only priority for the lyrics is they have to rhyme and be the right meter. They can be total nonsense, directly contradict each other, etc.

62: Because protecting Cuban Independence was the reason for the war and they had white people in charge.

I definitely think that Sanders is McGovern, so I'm not a good person ask this question. The country is too polarized and Trump is too unpopular for it to be a 1968-level blowout, but he's going to lose. I plan on spending the next month mourning the fact that the US no longer has a future, and then I'm going to relentlessly lie to myself from April until November 3rd that it will all be fine. But not yet.

I am already lying to others, though. Somebody asked me today what I thought if Sanders won, and I said "It's fine!" and changed the subject.

65: Do you think there is any Democratic candidate who wouldn't lose?

So does that mean we can tax the church now?

If you think about it a plea bargain is just a very inefficient sale of indulgences.

MC: certain cases filed in state (or territorial) courts of first instance can be removed to a federal court of first instance. (My rule of thumb has long been that if a case can be removed, it must be removed -- every time someone talks me out of removal, it turns out that their representations about the relative advantages/disadvantages were deeply flawed. I nonetheless let myself get talked out of it wrt a case pending in Idaho state court right now.) Removal is effective upon the filing of the requisite papers in federal court -- you don't need the permission or some kind of order from either the federal court you are removing to or the state court you are removing from. If the removal was improper -- untimely, predicates not met (eg no unanimity of defendants), or there's no federal jurisdiction -- the folks who oppose removal can move to remand to the state court. But, and this is the point today, between the time of removal and the time of the remand, nothing the state court does counts for anything at all. And the federal court cannot fix this by making its remand order 'as of' some earlier date.

I think Sanders might win if he adopts Roll With The Changes as his campaign theme song.

The only thing that matters in US elections is economic climate, in particular unemployment. That predicts almost all of the vote.

Based on the economy alone (not strong), Clinton should have lost the popular vote by 3%. But she was an outstanding candidate, going against a terrible candidate, so she actually won it by 3% instead. This time around, the economy is good and unemployment is low - I admit this is a surprise to me; I had forecast a recession by now - and Trump has the advantage of being an incumbent with a fairly competent first-term record, or at least one which has not actually seen any major disasters or policy screwups. The constant dribble of Trump "scandals" are largely irrelevant to most people in the US; half of them are court squabbles and the other half are minor corruption and self-dealing.

Even if a US economic slowdown starts now (because of coronavirus, for example) it probably won't have dramatic effects on unemployment or pocketbook issues by November.

Conclusion: Trump is very likely to win re-election, probably with more EC votes than in 2016.

So the Archepiscopal court of San Juan or whatever has been issuing rulings for 112 years and now SCOTUS is like "Ha! Psych!"

I hesitate to predict any specific event, especially not the results of the upcoming presidential election. Too many variables at this point, smarter people than me have been wrong about this, etc. As a matter of general trends, I'm sure we're all doomed, regardless of who wins.

The country is too polarized and Trump is too unpopular for it to be a 1968-level blowout

1968 was an extremely close election! Of course you meant 1972, but I'm pointing this out, because it's an easy way to "prove" your whole argument is invalid.

Honestly, my gut tells me there's no way Sanders can win, but my brain tells me my gut doesn't have a clue.

(To be clear, I wasn't actually talked out of removal in that case; I was talked out of destroying my laptop with blows of impotent rage at a co-defendant who refused to consent to removal.)

66: I think all of the other mainstream candidates would win. I may be understimating how much being gay would hurt Buttigieg in the GE, though.

Sam Wang had a thing about how it doesn't matter who the Democratic candidate is, and how it's just a referendum on Trump.

It left me feeling uncomfortable, because it allowed a path to a Trump victory - ie his claim is that the encumbent typically gets within 4 points of their national job approval. If he's at 44%, then +4 in the key states will get him re-elected.

I am having trouble managing my anxiety on this topic.

65: I think 27 has it right. Anybody complaining about Bernie's electability needs to take into account the fact that people keep voting for him, and not for the more "electable" candidates.

It isn't terribly meaningful at this stage to say that Bernie outpolls the other Democrats against Trump, but it's not meaningless.

And if you look at Nevada, it seems to me that we're seeing Bernie as a more popular second choice than the other candidates. The desire to divide the Dems into Bernie and anti-Bernie doesn't seem to reflect reality.

Is Bernie uniquely vulnerable to the barrage of bullshit that lies in store? Maybe! But also: Maybe not! People have had a lot of time to reflect on the known 100% true fact that he's a communist, and it doesn't seem to have had much impact so far.

63.2 doesn't seem to me to be an accurate description oF REO Speedwagon lyrics. They are banal and cliched, but almost always coherent and emotionally consistent.

Honestly, my gut tells me there's no way Sanders can win, but my brain tells me my gut doesn't have a clue.

Part of my anxiety is just that Sanders is such wildly uncharted territory. But clearly centrism is stale, stale, stale, and we're in a period of structural reorganization of political parties, so there's no good reason to look backwards for clues for how to play this particular moment in time.

I disagree with 76, because I don't think it takes adequate account of the Sanders movement, including the very widespread but totally bogus belief in that movement that he was robbed in 2016 of his rightful nomination. If Sanders hadn't gotten into the 2020 race, and gotten more votes than anyone else in the first three contests, then maybe a mainstream candidate could hope to put together a winning coalition. As it stands now, I don't see that any mainstream candidate has a prayer of getting the 95% of the Sanders movement he or she will need to win the general.

his claim is that the incumbent typically gets within 4 points of their national job approval.

That claim is based on only seven data points, one of which is an exception.

Can we just cast entrails from geese or something instead. That polar thingy subthread has left me wanting foie gras.

I may be understimating how much being gay would hurt Buttigieg in the GE, though.

This is an interesting question. I wonder if anyone's done any research on how much being black hurt Obama? Conceivably, I suppose, it might even have helped him, on the basis that the voters who couldn't stand the thought of a black president were never going to vote Democrat anyway, and having a black candidate pushed record turnout among black voters. OTOH there aren't nearly as many gay voters as there are black ones, and their turnout is probably pretty high because there hasn't been such a huge push to suppress the gay vote. On the third hand, there are probably a lot more gay Republicans who might switch sides than there were black Republicans.

As above, I think Sanders can win. But he's going to have to try to get people the people now backing other candidates to vote for him. Assuming they just will is probably right as to, what, 80 or 90% of them, but that's not enough to win.

I think one underaccounted factor is people who voted for Trump because they wanted politics to be more entertaining. I bet they would mostly flip this year.

So, I saw Bloomberg's NRA/Bernie ad this morning. Is he trying to boost Warren's numbers?

Flip to Sanders, that is.

Heartening vintage 2008 post:

With senator Barack Obama poised this week to clinch his party's nomination for President, there are growing fears in some quarters that the Democratic party may not be choosing its strongest candidate to beat Republican John McCain.

research on how much being black hurt Obama

Yes, there were studies of that. I think they claimed that being black cost him about two points.

86 Hey, there's still plenty of Reality Show drama to be had: will he really send Schiff to prison? Will he declare term limits ineffective? What will he do to immigrants (beyond cages, holding against applicants for green cards that they are applying for green cards, etc)?

84: Someone looked at precinct level data in 2008, and the place it really hurt Obama was Appalachia. It seems to be the event that drove West Virginia into the arms of the GOP. It seemed to help him relative to Hilary, since if she had gotten Obama levels of turnout among black voters she would have won.

I wonder if anyone's done any research on how much being black hurt Obama?

My memory was that in homogeneous white places, it didn't hurt him much, and in integrated tense places, it hurt him a bit.

(Hurt him a bit with white voters, I should say.)

Bernie does have the straight white male thing going for him. There are plenty of independents out there for whom that is an extremely salient issue.

And for the folks who would prefer a president from some other demographic? Too bad! You're just going to have to get used to being ruled by old white guys, who are finally coming into their own in this country!

I think one underaccounted factor is people who voted for Trump because they wanted politics to be more entertaining. I bet they would mostly flip this year.

Not sure that follows at all. In a reality-TV sense, US politics has been incredibly entertaining since 2016.

86: I would guess the opposite---namely, that those people will vote to make sure the Donald Trump Show doesn't get cancelled. The most "entertaining" parts were the Republican primary debates, though, and there won't be any more of those. Unless he loses this time and runs in 2024.

88 I remain convinced that if McCain had chosen Romney instead of Palin, his campaign's response to the financial crisis in the fall of 2008 would have been completely different, and probably enough to overcome the third term curse. Having Romney go with McCain to those White House meetings on what to do would have been replayed countless times in films about our time. The visual would have been compelling, even if the substance of what Bush/Paulson did was the same. Instead, McCain threw away his strongest argument against a first term senator, and then was a deer in the headlights when the moment to step up actually arrived.

97: The media really turned on McCain then, which was surprising. The only times I've seen the media treat the news as something actually serious and with stakes was right after 9/11 and at the height of the financial crisis. As opposed to now, where the disintegration of the basic norms of our system is greeted with "Whee!!!"

On the third hand, there are probably a lot more gay Republicans who might switch sides than there were black Republicans.

I don't know what work "might switch sides is doing" but in absolute numbers there are more black Republicans than gay Republicans. Random math she's not particularly invested in brought to you by Tia's procrastination. Anyway, here's a source with source on numbers of black and LGBTQ Republicans. 4.5% of the U.S. population is LGBTQ; 12.1% is black.

I've been speculating on COVID-19.

Does it

1. kill mostly old voters?
b. discourage old voters from going to the polls in November, when it arrives in force here?
iii. provide Trump with an excuse to cancel the election?

95, 96: I think the argument is that after 4 years of the Trump Show, a good number of those people are ready for a boring President.

99: ah, OK, I stand corrected. Thank you.
So black Republicans are 9% of 12.1% =1.089% of the population, and LGBTQ Republicans are 17% of 4.5%=0.765% of the population.

I'm not worried about (1) and (b), because I think it will be handled with massive wipe-down-surfaces-constantly and wear masks campaigns.

(iii) frightens me because Republicans will roll over and show their tummies for scratchies if Trump does that.

101 Have you *met* people?

I'm wondering about COVID-19 and the economy, and the shutdown of Chinese factories, and whether Wall Street blitheness about Trump and fear of Bernie will prop the economy up until December or not.

105 Dow isn't exactly playing along just right now.

But why would he want to cancel the election? He really enjoyed winning the last election. There was a big party and thousands of people cheered him. It is almost certainly the most fun he has had in years.
And I can't imagine him worrying that he might lose this one.

discourage old voters from going to the polls in November, when it arrives in force here?

I am doubtful that this will happen. Either the epidemic is brought under control well before that, or it will arrive in force in the US well before that.

104: Well, I have met a few, but I've never met anyone that said they voted for Trump because they wanted to be entertained. When it comes to that group of people I might as well be talking about Martians.

Ok, a nearly final draft of my library service philosophy (really a final one but I feel it needs something more), some work done on the cover letter which is starting to gel) and some other stuff towards updating the CV. Heading home now.

I suppose it's unlikely to kill all of us, solving all our problems, once and for all.

109: Good work, Barry! Did you put in the part about knowledge being a dangerous thing, and the important role of librarians in preventing people from acquiring it?

it will arrive in force in the US well before that

I was counting on the warm summer months to slow it down. Then with the return of the cold weather in fall, it'll be off and running.

About that fall....

following up on 111, did you include a bit about your Necronomicon policy?

The coronavirus could definitely take down Trump and the economy, and it's the kind of thing that Trump could definitely fuck up extra bad, but I'm not quite nihilist enough to count on it come election time.

A mass of stories about "I didn't get my coronavirus symptoms checked out because of my $12K deductible" might well grease the skids on the Medicare for All pitch.

mass of stories -- I think you might just be missing something. Is there a Stormcrow bat signal?

115 was me.

116 assumes that things still make sense.

This time around, the economy is good and unemployment is low

But the economy isn't good for huge numbers of people, which is why Sanders and Warren have so gotten so much traction, and underemployment is high. I know that isn't really news to anyone here, but I think it's important to resist the media drumbeat that the economy is good because GDP and the stock market are high and a single, oversimplified unemployment statistic is low.

The underemployment rate (incl. people working part-time because they can't get full-time and those who have given up) is 7-8%. And then there are millions of people who are working two jobs, working shitty jobs with no benefits, working jobs that pay much less than the jobs they got laid off from, or working bullshit gig economy jobs. And un- and underemployment aren't spread out evenly. Black unemployment is twice as high as white unemployment (6% vs. 3.1%) and there are major regional variations.

119 is pretty much symptomatic of increasingly divergent wealth distribution, no? I imagine the people invested in continuing that trend aren't really interested in analysis of these underlying symptoms, so you won't see much mass media coverage of same (at least in current media landscape).

Oh, yeah, I'm not holding my breath that coverage will change.

... which makes fact checking the "economy is doing great" message hard for most people.

My household just became part of the Census "Current Population Survey" for the next several months. This is the survey that employment metrics are generated from. The sample set turns out to be relatively small at any given moment. It occured to me to wonder if I could meaningfully throw the results somehow.

Here is the example I was reaching for in 116.

111 I closed with that because I wanted to make a really strong impression.

114 You mean the one where the patron has to wear a ball gag while reading it and only allow the librarian to turn the pages? I thought I'd best leave that out.

123: Herbert, NO! don't fuck with public data - more harm than good would come from this...

SA!

That's what you delurk over?

But right. Don't lie about it. Quit your job for real.

128: hey, everyone has a passion. Now we find out the sanctity of public data is SA's.

Objectively, the economy is good. This has nothing to do with Trump, and certainly it's becoming highly unequal, but the economy is good. The black unemployment rate is at a record low. U-6 unemployment is also the lowest it's been in a long time (FRED only goes back to the 90s for some reason). It's better than it was at the previous peak in 2005, and arguably better than it was in the 90s.

One way in which consensus reality is breaking down is that we no longer even have consensus reality over the state of the economy. As soon as Trump became President immediately the Republicans switched from thinking the economy was shitty to thinking it was great. And now even the Democrats are beginning to develop a partisan view of the economy.

In my heart of hearts, I believe that the only reason the stock markets are still strong is because the 1% believes that while Trump is in office, the goose is fat, end of story.

I have no idea why people keep trying to give me money to do things for them. If it's because of Trump, I'm willing to give it up to get rid of him.

125.2 worst part of the job: cleaning the ball gag.

Actually that's wrong, the worst part of the job is "terminating the library card" of the reader who refused to wear the ball gag and cleaning and sanitizing the reading room in the aftermath.

I think 131 and 119 can both be true.

131: Not to be all "Nuh uh, our side really isn't part of the problem," but the left have been concerned about inequality as a separate issue from poverty or overall economic performance since roughly the Occupy Wall Street days. It was a big issue for Sanders in 2016, for one thing. If the Democratic Party collectively and/or their leadership is now more concerned about the issue too, I'd say that's good. I'd also say it has more to do with the fact that traditional indicators don't make Trump look bad enough than with any fundamental shifts in their priorities, but any port in a storm.

Objectively, the economy is good. This has nothing to do with Trump, and certainly it's becoming highly unequal, but the economy is good.

Look below the surface and you might notice its being propped up by huge deficits and quantitative easing.

I've given up trying to define electability in the US. Nobody knows what will happen. Any of them could win or lose. But I do know that Killer Mike's Sanders ad is dope.

Josh Marshall has really gone an an anti-Bernie kick lately. I'm not liking it.

136: Right, inequality is bad, and we should do something about it. I'm glad it's finally become a salient issue. But there's no chance that we're going to break through with the message "the economy is bad", because the economy is not actually bad.

137: The fact that the we can run such a huge deficit and not have any inflation is good for the left, because it means we have more capacity to expand government spending than we thought. The Fed stopped QE a while ago.

The economy will crash about two weeks after the election, so that will be irrelevant.

140.first : I think it's most an issue that too much weight is given to "hey the economy is doing pretty well" according to A,B,C metrics... for example wage stagnation gets very little focus relative to its real-world importance, and U-3 too much, i suspect. Likewise short-medium economic indicators vs. long term impacts.

On substance, Walt is plainly right, but since when is politics about substance? I say: Complain away! Politicians who mischaracterize a strong economy sometimes become president.

As of 2011, Nate Silver says that ISM manufacturing index, change in non-farm payrolls, and change in unemployment rate are the economic indicators that correlate most strongly with presidential election outcomes.

He ends the article by saying:

So does this mean you should all go out and use the ISM manufacturing index in your forecasting models? Actually, maybe not. It is certainly worth looking at. But when you're testing 43 different economic indicators over a sample of just 16 elections, the best-performing ones are likely to have been a little lucky.

In fact, the relative rank of the economic indicators has historically been very inconsistent: those that perform best over one set of elections do not do much better over the long-term. We will discuss this problem at more length in a follow-up to this article.

We have freedom but not degrees of freedom.

For the ways that the economic situation sucks for a lot of people (underemployment, general precariousness & etc.) my impression is that it has sucked for a long time now, and it's not clear that it has sucked any worse during Trump's time in office. For it to effect the election, people have to blame the situation on Trump, don't they?

It's derivatives all the way down.

Health insurance and health care costs have gotten worse during Trump's time in office. This is also one of the aspects of "the economy" that Republicans are not trusted with.

My favorite:

When campaigning for a second term in office, U.S. President Richard Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing, which has been noted as "the first time a sitting president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection."

I've quoted that many times, but probably never quite as on topic as this time.

147. Hasn't what is often called "wage stagnation" been pretty much monotonically increasing since the early 70s?

147: Maybe. On the other hand, compound suckage builds over time.

Also, despite positive statistics regarding whether someone has a job or does not have a job, I think people feel more and more powerless within their jobs, which is directly related to conservative judges decreasing labor unions' rights, deciding to never penalize employers for anti-union retaliation, deciding to never enforce antitrust mechanisms, replacing the ability to file class-action lawsuits with "arbitration", assuring employers that they can run out the clock infinitely on things that have a clock that can run out, etc.

in 152 i said a garbled thing. Obviously it's not the "stagnation" that is increasing, but the underlying delta between productivity increases and wage increases. Or I guess what 153 said.

154: iow "we have more, worse, jobs" ?

109: yay Barry!

115. Trump would be a prime candidate to stick his spoon in the wall if he caught it, too. That would put the cat among the viral particles.

And well done, Barry. Now don't forget to mail it.

137: The Fed stopped QE a while ago.

But they quietly started again a few months ago. They've renamed it though. The new name is "Not QE."

That way everyone understands that printing money to purchase a bunch of bonds it isn't really QE, because of the name.

I keep trying my Sanders20 = RFK68 narrative on people, and keep not getting any real pushback. Why, smart people, is the comparison invalid?

Because it sounds like you are wishing for an assassination?

Like, on the politics its not a bad analogy, but its tough to separate that from what happened in the actual timeline.

I tried to fix it.

Picking up the banner carried by a fallen hero and going forward to (a) get out of dumb wars; (b) expand Great Society programs; and (c) make real progress on the environment.

That just seems like a way better thing to be talking about than Nicaragua, Denmark, or whatever else Revolution! branding leads to.

Picking up the banner carried by a fallen hero and going forward to (a) get out of dumb wars; (b) expand Great Society programs; and (c) make real progress on the environment.

That's not a bad case, but its only going to appeal to a select group of boomers. And there is a case for not turning every political argument of today into a rehash of the sixties.

159: OMG, meme economics has taken over the world. Words have meanings. It's not QE. By definition, QE is buying longer-term securities. It's the actual definition. The Fed buying short term debt has another name. It's called "monetary policy". Repos have been one of the primary instruments for control the money supply since long before the financial crisis.

The Fed is targeting the overnight rate, keeping it below the 30-day rate. It's providing liquidity. It's the everyday job of the central bank.

159: I'm not really steeped in the details these days, but that's a pretty dumb column. One clue is his credentialing of Booth as "a critic of Fed policies since the central bank pushed fed funds down to near zero and launched its three rounds of QE after the financial crisis." So Gold is qualifying Booth as an expert by saying she got the biggest economic issues of our time wrong.

And oops. The columnist later says never mind, this isn't really QE:

Booth acknowledges there's a qualitative difference between current operations and the Fed's QE policy of buying longer-dated securities, particularly mortgage-backed bonds, which also helped boost the housing market. And the current efforts to stabilize the overnight money markets may run through at least April, after tax season.

So, you know, not actually QE, even according to the author's key source. (This really gets over my head, but the current operations have to do with stabilizing overnight funding. The fact that this is necessary seems ominous to me, but I'm sure the wise old heads that run our economy won't let things get out of hand.)

Then Gold approvingly cites Bernanke bragging about how well QE worked, and what a great thing it was. Then seemingly downplays the success of QE by saying it only succeeded by changing perceptions. So it didn't really succeed. Or something. It's really incoherent.

160: I can think of one big reason I really hope it's invalid.

165 It doesn't have to appeal to everyone, just scared boomers. Because Sanders needs to get every single living boomer who voted for Clinton, in addition to the youth and the non-voters, along with the misfits/malcontents he's already got.

I AM NOT A MISFIT!

Sir, you have me at an advantage.

That just seems like a way better thing to be talking about than Nicaragua, Denmark, or whatever else Revolution! branding leads to.

Yes. Don't mention Cuba, don't even mention Canada. Expansion of the great American tradition of Great Society programs, etc. etc.

Canada is going to get inevitably pulled into health care discussions, you need a good way to talk about it.

I'm not really steeped in the details these days, but that's a pretty dumb column.

I'm not endorsing the article, its just what I could find on a quick google search.

What I am pointing out is that - whether you call it QE or not QE - the Fed being pretty aggressive with monetary policy right now and that is one reason the economy seems good. What was advertised back in October as a short-term intervention to keep money markets stable appears to be turning into a long-term thing.

Add to that the aggressive fiscal policy, in the form of huge deficits, and one has to consider that we might well be in recession if not for these factors. So I don't see that we are in a healthy economy so much as a coked-up economy.

|| It's not really a thing that the Supreme Court did today, but Justice Thomas' dissent from the denial of cert in Baldwin is quite a read: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/19-402_o75p.pdf God help me, I think he has a point about Chevron: just what is the constitutional basis for judicial deference to executive interpretation of statutory language? What would John Marshall say? As for Brand X, the idea that the executive could overrule a statutory interpretation by the judiciary, man that's just the kind of Article II fanboy stuff that goes down all the wrong roads.

Thomas was also interesting today on the question whether the Supreme Court could just summarily reject Arizona's effort to sue California. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/150orig_3e04.pdf

|>

174: This is the Fed doing its job. Maybe the world would be better off in the long run if the Fed were to let the US overnight markets freeze up and induce a global economic collapse. Hey - It would get Trump the fuck out of office and would reduce global warming, right? Maybe the US government, instead of bailing out insolvent institutions, could just buy them instead. Socialism, baby!

But the Fed's efforts to keep the economy on an even keel are simply what the Fed does -- there's nothing "coked-up" about it. The fact that Trump benefits is an unfortunate side effect of a good economy. Nobody is cheating here (except, as you point out, by running unproductive fiscal deficits). Only rightwing douchebags like Gold would argue that the Fed shouldn't work to smooth out economic bumps. Deficits, at some point, become unsustainable. Smart Fed policy is just smart. Fed policy is actually a rare case where Trump's self-interest, for the moment, aligns with the country's best interests.

Anyway, with any kind of luck, the Centers for Disease Control can fail to do its job, and coronavirus will put us all out of our misery.

This is the Fed doing its job.

Sure, the Fed is doing its job to prop up the economy. I'm glad they are.

That it is the case that the economy needs propping up, that is my concern.

, Dude.

IIRC the polsci thing is that elections are affected not by the strength of the economy but by the perceived direction of change in the ~6 months before the election. So, wait and see.
I agree with Spike there are reasons to think the US may have a slowdown.
There's still a possibility Covid-19 blows up worldwide and causes recessions all over.
Covid-19 is doing very serious damage in E Asia, industrial orders in particular fell off a cliff in January, on top of a gradual slowdown in PRC that was happening anyway. As it stands now probably most of E Asia will have a weak Q1. If the PRC doesn't get back to BAU by the end of March there'll be much more serious disruption there, and that will ripple back through Asia and eventually North America too.
The trade war also isn't over, and the PRC may use Covid as an excuse to renege on some of their purchase commitments in the phase 1 agreement (they were always going to renege anyway, most of the purchases weren't possible, but now they may break sooner and more noisily) and Trump may feel it necessary to re-escalate.

There's still a possibility Covid-19 blows up worldwide and causes recessions all over.

Already happening - Moody's just said that Italy is going into recession because of the virus.

They also said mortgage-backed securities were really safe.

Do we have to stop saying "Corona Virus" now. The new name is boring.

AB InBev already had the rights.

It's still a Coronavirus. Technically it is SARS Coronavirus 2.

We have to stop saying "Wuhan" though.

Truth or Consequences, Hubei.

But the economy isn't good for huge numbers of people, which is why Sanders and Warren have so gotten so much traction, and underemployment is high. I know that isn't really news to anyone here, but I think it's important to resist the media drumbeat that the economy is good because GDP and the stock market are high and a single, oversimplified unemployment statistic is low

The trouble with this argument is that the polls show optimism about the economy at a record high. Most people think they're well off and think they'll be better off in a year.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/284264/record-high-optimism-personal-finances.aspx
https://www.investors.com/news/economy/ibdtipp-poll-economic-optimism-index/

Now, 179 is all true - there have been bad signs in China since well before the outbreak. But it is a question of timing. If China falls off a cliff in Q1, how long does it take for that to translate into job losses in the US? And don't forget that the tariffs put in place since 2017 can be revoked at will, and that might counterbalance the effect of a Chinese crash for long enough.

Looked at from that point of view, the tariffs make a lot of sense; get yourself some headroom by imposing an artificial brake on the economy in good times that you can take off in order to give it a bit of a boost in an election year. A bit like the evil variant of raising interest rates during an expansion so you can drop them during a downturn.

Also, we need to get away from the idea that there is natural "good" economic growth and artificial "coked-up" growth. This is the kind of bullshit folk economics that leads to people saying "we need a recession to clear out the dead wood".

Why isn't debt-funded growth that doesn't boost wages bad growth?

So, Paul Krugman is arguing that Bernie Sanders is hurting his candidacy, and he's not really a socialist anyway.

I would prefer the term social democrat, but does it really matter anyway? The Republicans will say that any policy Democrats advocate is Socialist anyway. Isn't it kind of disarming to say? "Yes, that's right, and here's why that's good for you."

I think Krugman is a bit beside-the-point here. Sanders has been engaged in a branding exercise for something approaching 40 years now. He doesn't have the option to change his brand now, and of course, there's no evidence he'd like to.

But sure, yeah, if I were a political consultant, I'd wish Bernie could brand himself more the way Elizabeth Warren has. This may explain why I'm not a political consultant.

This is the kind of bullshit folk economics that leads to people saying "we need a recession to clear out the dead wood".

Yeah. Also the kind of bullshit that leads people to talk about abolishing the Fed -- or to protest government interventions designed to facilitate smooth and fair operation of markets.

The answer to Moby's 187 is that there can be such a thing as bad economic growth, but it doesn't come from the proper regulation of markets, and the discussion of "coked-up" markets plays into a rightwing trope that would have the US abstain from absolutely essential market regulation. Heck, Trump's deficits aren't such a bad thing -- if the money were being spent properly.

At this point its fucking obvious that Bernie's brand was much better for winning the Democratic primary than Warren's, and based on those head-to-head polls and whatever, no real evidence that hers would be better in the general.

(Says someone who is still planning to vote for Warren if there's any point by the time the IL primary rolls around).

I agree with 191/2

But you don't even own an television.

Some guy on Twitter was saying that he has absolutely no idea why the Youngs are flocking to an old man with a socialist message and I thought, it is perfectly obvious. A top virtue for the social media generation is authenticity, and no one can say that Bernie is not 100% consistent and authentic, and has been for decades. From what I've seen, their complaint against Warren is 1. capitalist, 2. bad past (of being a republican and cultural appropriation). That makes her Not As Authentic when the other choice is Bernie.

Expropriate the appropriaters.

At this point its fucking obvious that Bernie's brand was much better for winning the Democratic primary than Warren's, and based on those head-to-head polls and whatever, no real evidence that hers would be better in the general.

In the past I was saying "Look, if Warren wins the primary, it's the best proof available she can overcome the same kind of difficulties faced in the general. Elections are hard to win, especially when the field is so crowded." Now that Bernie is winning, I'm thinking the same thing - although I'm still volunteering for Warren because if it's going to turn around on Super Tuesday we have to actually work for it.

188 It does not matter what Republicans say. I'll say it again, it does not matter what Republicans say. What matters is what voters believe. Especially 51st percentile voters in swing states. What Republicans say is going to be one of the elements making that up, sure, but it's not the only one. Conceding points of narrative because Republican are going to say X anyway is, imo, political malpractice.

191 I think the branding is a small (but important) part of the package here; Warren's lack of success doesn't tell us that if Sanders adopted some of her ideas he wouldn't be doing even better. If Super Tuesday looks like Nevada, Sanders has no course correction to make until he's lock in a majority. If it looks more like New Hampshire, he's going to have to try to figure out how to get from the mid-30s to the mid-50s.

I'll say it again, it does not matter what Republicans say.

To play the game is to lose before you start.

198: Sorry, if that wasn't explicit. The Republicans will call him a Socialist no matter how he self describes. Would voters prefer they he describe himself or do they prefer the authenticity as Megan says.

Man, if COVID-19 really takes off in the fall (or now), it is going to make campaigning weird. Trump rallies? Any campaign crowd?

201: little red facemasks ?

White, pointed hoods.

Too much to hope for that Trump is so committed to "coronavirus would make me look bad" he keeps rallying and contracts it.

||

And what did the Supreme Court do today? Four cases. 5-4 (Alito/Ginsburg) against allowing the survivors of the Mexican kid murdered by a US officer firing into Mexico from the US to sue the officer. 5-4 (Kavanaugh/Ginsburg) allowing a circuit court to do the mitigation analysis for death sentences found to be flawed on collateral review. 9-0 (Ginsburg) that you use federal law to decide which entity gets the tax refund when a corporate family filed a consolidated return. 9-0 (Ginsburg) on how to decide a child's habitual residence for applying the Hague Convention on which country gets to decide custody etc.

|>

197: I think one underappreciated aspect of this primary is that the Sanders campaign has done a really good job tactically. Solid messaging on their own policy ideas, subtle but effective moves to undermine the other candidates, well-informed prioritization of states to invest resources in, that sort of thing. They've been quiet about it so it hasn't attracted much media attention, but it's clearly a well-run campaign.

205: I'm no lawyer but that first one seems to set up some really problematic precedence.

The Court isn't walking away from allowing suits against federal officers, they're running. It's been going on for a long time, and this is just one more step in that direction. Every time you hear someone say that other than judicial appointments, there's no difference between the parties, kick them in the knee.

Be interesting to see what wins out: Trump's germophobia vs Trump's need for adulation. If he weren't a known germophobe, I'd be confident that he'd continue holding rallies against all medical advice.

OT: Don't have sex with the monkeys in Florida.

also OT: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/484496-trump-doctor-hid-cauliflower-in-mashed-potatoes-to-improve-diet

Not sure how it cuts, but a big difference in 1972 (and genrally thenabouts) was the relative decoupling of the presidency and congressional races. In '72 the Dems wwent down 13 seats (to 242), but actually gained two Senate seats (to 56). I'm sure many attribute that in part to the down ballot cutting McGovern loose (especially after the Eagleton fiasco).

Every time you hear someone say that other than judicial appointments, there's no difference between the parties

Do people actually say that with the meaning of downplaying the difference? Sounds pretty strongly "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln" to me.

116, 117: Not sure what exactly I am supposed to opine on re:coronavirus stories, but that kind of thing generally works much better against Dems than Repubs such as the utterly dreadful coverage of Ebol leading up to the 2014 election (after which it was dropped). CNN led the way in hysteric overreach (well other than usual Fox bigotry).

I think it is a combo of Murc's Law: only Dems have agency,
and Brandolini's law: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

So it really has to be seriously fucked (like the GFC) for it redound to Republicans.

The answer to that is, "It was a great play."

||

NMM to Hosni Mubarak.

|>

If that means the monkeys stop masturbating, they might spread herpes to each other.

No! Not Hosni!
||
Barry! How goes it?
|>

Yesterday was a wash because busy at work and then had to attend a function but I'm heading to a cafe straight after work to kill this thing dead. Hopefully have an opportunity to work on it at work too.

About a thousand of the area's monkeys were trapped and sold for biomedical research over the next several decades, they write, as people grew concerned they might be plundering birds' nests and could pass their virus on to humans.

Now that the monkeys have learned to write, plundered birds' nests are the least of your problems.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

191 et seq.: If by "Bernie's brand" you mean "coming in second in the previous set of open Democratic primaries" then yes. Worked for HRC in 2016, too.

Not sure what it portends for the general, though obviously I hope it works.

America is all about second chances.

Even if your daddy wasn't president.

The monkey article seems to really underplay how very bad that virus is for humans. Maybe my training sessions were overly scary, but I feel like the phrases "fatal without treatment" and "immediate antiviral prophylaxis" were used. Then again, researchers are in much closer proximity than I'd hope the general public would ever be.

Shhh.

I wanted to elaborate on the Fed thing, since every time I hear the "Fed secretly doing QE4" makes me want to stroke out.

The main job of the Fed is to meet the demand for cash in circulation. Too many cash, and we get inflation. Too little cash, and we get recessions, war, and revolution. In the second half of the 19th century, when we didn't have a central bank, you would get seasonal inflation and deflation as the supply and demand for circulating cash would fluctuate. This is why a bimetallic standard could become a populist rallying cry, to increase the supply of actual cash that could circulate.

The demand for cash is very unpredictable -- this is why monetarism failed immediately when it was tried. To understand the demand for cash would probably require continuous real-time monitoring for the entire economy. Instead, the Fed just targets an interest rate, and then supplies enough cash to hit that interest rate.

Before the financial crisis, the Fed supplied cash through repos, which are basically just overnight collateralized loans -- the collateral is a short-term bond like a 30-day US government bond. Banks don't care about how much cash they have on hand, because they can just borrow it. They usually borrow it from other banks, but the Fed could step in to smooth out any spikes in demand.

After the financial crisis, the Fed switch to a different system where it would pay interest on money deposited at the Fed. The repo market seemed to work fine without the Fed in it, but we ended up with a system where basically four banks were supplying all of the overnight loans. All of a sudden, they started demanding very high interest rates, and the Fed stepped back in. Why is not completely clear. The Fed's post-crisis system is considered weird by the standards of central banks, so it's possible that it's a purely technical problem in how the Fed chooses to manage the money supply. It could also be a sign of some other problem. From the point of view of the Fed, either the demand for cash spiked suddenly, or the supply dropped suddenly, and the Fed is doing its job to smooth out the spike/drop.

So we have a situation where a bank has a 30-day bond, and they say to the market "I would like to borrow some cash until tomorrow. Here is a risk-free 30-day bond as collateral." This is like the lowest possible risk loan -- the bank would have to fail overnight, and tomorrow the US government would have to become insolvent. JP Morgan said, "I will loan to you but I want an annualized interest rate of 50 billion percent". There's no reason for the rate to be higher than the 30-day interest rate unless literally there's too little cash to make the loan, i.e. the Fed hasn't done its job.

As a matter of public policy, it's not even clear to me that we just shouldn't have the Fed be the whole repo market from now on. What do we gain by letting JP Morgan make money lending overnight?

There's a long tradition of exaggerating the risks of sexual activity to scare the kids.

Before the financial crisis, the Fed supplied cash through repos

Thanks, Walt. This was the missing piece for me. I didn't know how routine this sort of thing was.

I think Sanders has the wrong diagnosis of what's wrong with the country. The problem is not some nebulous "establishment". It's the Republicans. Because of the structure of the US system, the Democrats can't stay in power for more than 2 years at a time -- they simultaneously controlled Congress and the Presidency for 4 years out of the last 40. You basically need the stars to align for the Democrats to get anything done. And then time ticks forward and the Republicans are back, to wreck everything. Unless Sanders is as popular as first-term FDR, this isn't going to change.

It blows my mind that the Republicans have probably been suborned by a foreign power, and it's not going to be an issue in the upcoming election. Sanders supporters have run away from this just as aggressively as the media -- they vigorously deny it because it interferes with their attacks on the real enemy, the Democratic establishment. I can't even begin to imagine the psychology of it. You have probable fascists, working for a right-wing dictator! We rehearsed this! Fascism and right-wing dictators are our enemy!

||

I've heard of taking the definite articles off of countries' names like we now call it "Ukraine" and "Sudan" and not "The Ukraine" or "The Sudan" but today I learned that one says "The Gambia"

|>

It's small, but well-defined.

"The Florida". But only for the part that is on the actual peninsula.

Basically the country is the banks of the Gambia river. It must be a leading candidate for the narrowest country in proportion to its length in the world. So it's named for the river itself, which takes up an appreciable proportion of its area. That it has avoided being assimilated by Senegal is a minor political miracle.

Pffft.

231. We have always said "The Gambia." My understanding is it's named after and is more or less the banks of the Gambia River, hence the name. (We called "Ukraine" "The Ukraine" because the word means "borderlands." So "The Ukraine" made sense.

Not exactly OT on the coronavirus thing: WBZ (local Boston station that does traffic reports) was "reporting" on the virus, with various people-in-the-street. One of them said "I hadn't heard of it until this morning." Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your electorate.

Darn. Pwned by 234 as I typed.

232. You could have said "small but perfectly formed." Ah, well.

236 And we used to say "The Sudan" because it's name in Arabic has the definite article. But I've always thought it was just "Gambia"

its

238: It's called riffing.

Barry, stop being entertaining and get back to work.

And we used to say "The Sudan" because its name in Arabic has the definite article.

Isn't that true for a lot of placenames in Arabic? Al-Basrah, as-Samarrah, Al-Kut, Al-Amarah, an-Nasiriyah come to mind from recent history (and by "recent" I mean "17 years ago).

The Qaeda.

The Qaeda isn't a place. It's a state of mind.

Just like Florida.

My understanding is it's named after and is more or less the banks of the Gambia River, hence the name.

Yes. Its full name is "The Republic of the Gambia". Similarly DRC is "the Democratic Republic of the Congo".
But that isn't true for all states named after geographical features. It is not correct to talk about "the Ukraine" - the correct name is simply "Ukraine". Similarly the US state is "Mississippi" rather than "the Mississippi".
"The Ohio State University", we can therefore deduce, is named after the Ohio River rather than the state of Ohio.

244: The Capone, the Pacino, the Gonquin Round Table.

239: Are you sure it's not because it was conflated with the much larger geographical area, the Sudan?

249: it is the Republic of the Sudan. (See also Philippines).

The Ohio State University is on the banks of the Olentangy River.

And the shores of Mirror Lake.

And not far from where Larry's used to be.

||

Most of them mix Hindi hate speech with electronic beats. Some are so popular that they are requested at weddings and played in clubs. "Hindu Blood Hit," for example, has been viewed more than 3.8 million times.

Are they calling for Hindu blood or Hindus calling for blood?

The latter.

||

we demonstrate a synthetic mangrove that mimics the main features of the natural mangrove: capillary pumping (leaves), stable water conduction in highly metastable states (stem), and membrane desalination (root). When using nanoporous membranes as leaves, the maximum osmotic pressures of saline feeds (10 to 30 bar) allowing pure water uptake precisely correspond to expected capillary pressures based on the Young-Laplace equation. Hydrogel-based leaves allow for stable operation and desalination of hypersaline solutions with osmotic pressures approaching 400 bar, fivefold greater than the pressure limits of conventional reverse osmosis.

I think that is slighting the wonder that is photosynthesis.

You try drinking chlorophyll.

225 is correct. My training on laboratory animals made it sound like Herpes B virus is the number one most dangerous virus to humans that could ever be caught from an animal. This must be an exaggeration because humans coexist with monkeys in many places without being wiped out by Herpes B virus, but it is definitely the number one risk of working with research monkeys.

The media coverage as if Herpes B was a joke or an STD because it happens to have "herpes" in the name is a total embarrassment and factually incorrect.

260.2: Moby! You should be ashamed of yourself!

230 is correct and it's completely nuts. Sanders has to be the nominee because it looks like no one else can win all of his movement's votes, but the idea that he can actually staff a government, much less get legislation passed, with this mindset is pretty deeply problematic.

ISTR he actually has a not-bad record getting stuff done in the Senate? And after 4 years of this shit surely technocrats will line up to lick his boots.

The lefties in government (AOC et al) appear to have a pretty solid sense of how to get to practical achievements as well as setting big goals.

261: From the banks of the Olentangy, straight to the world, I deliver the news that matters as long as what matters implies bestiality.

"Someone must have been telling lies about Snow W.; she knew she had done no wrong, but, one morning, she was banished from the palace and sent into the forest..."

"For a long time, Winnie the Pooh had been going to bed early, bump-bump-bump up the stairs..."

"People do not give it credence that a small boy in a wolf costume can go off alone to a jungle inhabited by wild things, but it did happen..."

"From my grandfather, Grandpa Pig, I learned the lessons of noble character and even temper. From Rebecca Rabbit, not to become a partisan of the Green jacket or the Blue in the races, nor of Thracian or Samnite gladiators; to bear pain and be content with little; to work with my own hands, to mind my own business, and to be slow to listen to slander..."

263: I'm sure one could quarrel with this metric, but judged by who obtains co sponsorship for their bills, he has one of the lowest "leadership" scores in the Senate. There are four other Democratic senators with comparably low leadership scores and three are first term senators and one entered his second term in 2018.

Maybe his committee work or amendments he's offered makes up for it, dunno.

The presidency is a completely different animal -- obviously, no one comes to it with experience of the whole scope -- but filling the government is a big job, and its what 'the Establishment' basically is for. The Trump Purge stories making the rounds right now are about this. Journalists keep omitting the critical context, because most of what is going on is not getting rid of holdover Obama appointees, or career civil servants (except those serving in appointee slots), but instead it's about getting rid of Trump appointees that came through the Republican establishment, and are 'loyal' to the mandates of the job to which they were appointed by Trump, rather than to Trump himself.

The only Revolution Sanders can realistically offer is of the same kind that Trump has led and is leading. A lot of Sanders' followers will be very happy to see Tom Perez' head on a pike, because they believe that his position actually matters. Filling that position won't be difficult. And there will be plenty of people looking for appointed positions in the agencies, the question is whether, to any extent, the distrust of the Establishment is going to enter into the selection process.

I am hoping that a Sanders or Warren govt would open the door for me. I don't have the management experience, but I can point to decades of blogging that rails against billionaires.

268: instead it's about getting rid of Trump appointees that came through the Republican establishment, and are 'loyal' to the mandates of the job to which they were appointed by Trump, rather than to Trump himself.

The words you are looking for here are Führerprinzip and Gleichschaltung.

270 Exactly.

269 How about this guy's job? https://departmentofinfluence.org/person/alan-mikkelsen/

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Struggling with the awful formatting of my CV which made new text spillover into the side column until I discovered that miraculous tool called 'clear formatting.' Yes, I'm a big dummy.

|>

And 270 is on point.

272: I just copy the text into a text file then paste into a new document.

If you took the regional director at BuRec position, could you commute to work by bike?

271: That type of thing. It would be a shocking reversal to have people with my belief system be in that office.

I don't know about staffing up the whole government; I know that's huge. But if the criterion switched from "proven track record/worked his way up" to "loathes wealth concentration", it would flush out more people. It would be almost "revolutionary".

Honestly, I'd rather be at Mid-Pacific, so I can focus on my home geography.

Ha!

Whoa. It is like you read my mind.

Yeah. I've worked at Cottage Way and did ride there when I did. It is a lovely ride for two/thirds and a remarkably awful ride for the last third.

This is the guy with it now, as I'm sure you know. https://www.usbr.gov/newsroom/presskit/bios/detail.cfm?recordid=120

You'd be better.

I would be different, that's for sure.

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JFC I can't believe it's actually come together.

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I got to say you in response to 268 that if Perez's job didn't matter then why didn't Obama intervene on his behalf and against Keith Ellison?

Hasn't Sanders come out in support of keeping the filibuster? If so this is one of the few things that I'm disappointed in. Warren has it right here.

Barry! Yay!

OT: get your Covid-19 face masks early, folks. I bought a couple of packs of 50 on Amazon two days ago to send to my ex-inlaws (outlaws?) because they can't get hold of them in Japan any more (and they're a vital social signal there; last week a man without a mask was coughing on a subway train in Fukuoka and another passenger was so freaked out he pressed the Emergency Stop button) and just checked the price again. Up from £25 then, which was already exorbitant, to £39 now.

I won't be getting face masks because I don't believe in them, but my conspiratorial co-worker talked me into stocking up on flu medicine now, while it is on sale (which is was). So I did that and filled my freezer with Trader Joe's stuff in case I have to be home bored for a week. And now I am done with my pandemic preparation.

There is not a single drop of alcohol in our house. There's no way I get trapped at home.

Thanks sb, this sucker's getting sent before the damned deadline.

285: My husband is a chemist. He had some expired N-95 masks that he should have thrown out, so he gave them to his co-worker from China. She wanted to send them to her parents.

But why the fuck do I do this to myself every single time.

290: one of life's great mysteries, isn't it?

287: A friend in Kyushu posted pictures of her home-made hand sanitizer (something else that's completely sold out) made from aloe vera gel, essential oils, and a big bottle of vodka. Personally I'd have kept at least half the vodka for internal use.

I don't usually drink clear liquors, but in a crisis anything goes.

292 Thank the gods I've got plenty of vodka on hand (went to it when they doubled the prices of my bourbons, Irish whiskeys, and Scotch). But I've got to lay in more before Ramadan.

Weird thing is that the blockade seems to be working in, uh, Arrakis' favor. Something like 31 cases in Bahrain and 13 in the UAE but none here, yet.

The masks seem awkward. If you need to spit on the sidewalk, you need to lift them up anyway.

Ajay, in his otherwise comprehensive survey of the relevant literature left off the historic observation that I can call you Betty, and, Betty, you can call me the"

leaving for the Bernie rally as soon as my wife gets home.

Antimalarial chloroquine definitely helps in vitro, and it helps in vivo against closely related viruses. Clinical trials underway now in China.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41422-020-0282-0

294.2: Once it gets out, it's a pain. You need to only eat at restaurants that wash silverware between customers.

I have discovered a wonderful way of varying my procrastination routine: post a factual correction to an obsessive fanatic on twitter, and then stay off the site for 24 hours because the results will be so dispiriting and predictable. I have been baking, instead.

In other news, my mother is no longer dying. Last Tuesday the doctor, the nurses, and I all thought she was on her way out. Today, at lunchtime, she demanded that I bring her some sauerkraut with sausage from home, along with a honey sandwich in hazelnut bread. She ate all of the admittedly tiny portions, and I left her demanding to be wheeled downstairs to meet the therapy Shetland pony who was due this afternoon. I know the pony exists, because I met it on the road on Saturday. It is no longer necessary to assume a spherical pony for your calculations. Just borrow this one.

Great news. I should see if my mom's place can get a pony. They only have dogs.

282 -- Well, it matters to Perez, obviously, and to the people he hires. And Perez' friends. And I suppose that places vying to be the convention venue might care who is in that job, although it's not clear how different leadership would have made any difference in that. Individual vendors might care, if they have a relationship with Perez.

What it doesn't matter to is who the nominee is going to be, or what sort of positions the nominee -- and nominees for Congress etc -- are going to take on various issues.

It's a figurehead position, mostly, and so his head on a pike will (a) satisfy a bunch of people and (b) do no harm to the Republic. Purge away!

The one nurse is so afraid of dogs that she won't go in the room if my sister's dog (a literally toothless Chihuahua) is present and not physically restrained.

300.last I always thought the canonical one was kept in Paris.

300/301: when my uncle was doped up due to his own treatment for illnesses, he was spending money unchecked, online, and among other things, ordered this therapeutic seal robot (~$6k) for my grandmother's nursing home. I think it was a hit.

305:. Awwww. I think I need a therapeutic seal robot.

I have the idea that there are a few positions like that I heard that Perez was during something how to put anti Bernie folks on the committee controlling the convention rules. I'm suspicious of our arguments that figurehead positions are somehow unimportant. I guess the ultimate example of that is how Obama somehow didn't have the power to do anything.
Barry
Yeah I've heard something about that regarding the filibuster rule Bernie seems to think that if he chooses the right vice president it doesn't matter if the rule is an effect or not I hope that's right.

I need anything that would help me survive the next 10 months of politics.

Bernie's actual record of accomplishment in Congress is kind of middling given the length of his career there, but he certainly does understand how the government works and what it takes to actually get things done, despite the implications some people seem to take from his rhetoric and that of his supporters. This is one of the main parts of Yglesias's neoliberal sellout's case for Bernie, along with the potential that he'll be meaningfully better than his rivals on foreign and monetary policy.

Yglesias lays out the case in more detail here.

The coronavirus might impact travel plans. We've had a trip to Japan in April planned for a long time. It would be my and Atossa's first trip to Asia ever. We'd be visiting friends who've been in Japan for almost two years now, so they could show up around while enjoying a little tourism themselves. But now, who knows. The only good news is, everything we've spent on it so far is refundable - it might be a pain getting it back, but we can, in theory. Thanks for being the responsible one, Cassandane.

Also, one questionable silver lining is, if we cancel the trip it would mean I wouldn't be taking a long vacation right around when I start a new job. Start date not set yet but it's likely to be before the trip would be.

congrats!

307 I know a guy who was a Sanders appointee to the convention rules committee in 2016 -- there was a formula for that. I don't know whether it followed the delegate count, or some other basis.

309 I kind of feel like 'pay no attention to the rhetoric, there will be plenty of institutionalists around to keep things in check' just doesn't have the same ring in 2020 that it had in 2016. Yes, obviously, Sanders himself is not mentally ill in the way that the President clearly is, and there's no real comparison. On the other hand, the idea that partisans ought to be extrapolating excuses for past, present, and future acts and omissions has become less persuasive with time.

311: We might have crossed with you there - our big trip has long been planned for late March/early April. But yes, who knows. Unless all transport links to Japan are cut I have to go anyway to sort out visa-related stuff (and see Hitsuji, who's in high school there now), but if we have to self-isolate on our return and NW's mother is still in a bad way, that could really mess things up for him. (Not to mention potentially killing off all the residents of her care home if we brought the virus back with us.) All the cancellations mean I've been able to rebook the skiing part of the holiday from a budget hotel in Tohoku to a swanky Hokkaido resort at a knock-down price, but as Hokkaido is also where the virus is spreading most rapidly we may need to rethink that as well. For myself, I'm tempted to take lots of hand sanitizer and risk it just for the queue-free ski lifts, but it's a much more difficult decision for NW.

That said, I have every confidence that Sanders will grow out of the views in 230, somewhere in his first term, and will end of stocking his administration, below the cabinet level anyway, with people who could as well have served in a Hillary Clinton administration. That is, I think he'll deliver no Revolution at all. Which will be a huge problem in the 2022 midterms, but still unimaginably better than the cancellation of those elections that is more or less inevitable under Trump.

312: For me? Heh, thanks, I guess, but it feels premature if not simply unjustified. All I've been aiming for is for things to change as little as possible. At this point it's likely but not certain I've achieved that. "Congratulations on getting a new job" doesn't feel right, because I don't think that's what I have, nor "congratulations on weathering that messy transition period", because it's still messy...

314: Yeah, we'd miss each other. Our trip is currently scheduled for 4/8-4/18. I'm kind of assuming things will get better between now and then, because as bad as this virus is it's not the black plague, but we'll definitely have to think a lot harder about it soon.

Also, anyone planning Japan travel should be aware that the government's reluctance to authorize testing, which is causing a lot of domestic concern, means that the true number of cases has to be much higher than the official figures.

317 crossed with 316. My guess is that it will be pretty dire there by the end of March, and that in the UK we're probably about 4 weeks behind.

313.2 - strong endorsement, boy howdy a strong endorsement.

r: our new viral friends, when i suggested last night at dinner a mild stock-up of various dry goods in case we are housebound i was very surprised at the lack of resistance, usually both my guys are heavy on the "nothing to see here, why is everyone getting themselves all worked up?." am trying to get the office to install motion activated paper towel dispensers, bc currently you can wash your hands all you like, but cannot dig out a paper towel without contacting surfaces recently touched by others.

re: masks, to my mind a good bit of the benefit is that anyone wearing a mask is prevented from touching their own nose or mouth. it isn't so much that the mask prevents the virus from being launched into the air, deposited on surfaces, or inhaled, but rather it prevents transmission via the bus pole/doorknob route via fingers/hands to nose/mouth.

319.last in that case a surgical mask is just as good, but a proper N95 should at least do a decent job of filtering (hence the designation, at least 95% under certain conditions)

Looking at the Rules, the DNC Executive committee gets to approve 24 members of the convention rules committee who are Elected Officials or Party Leaders (in consultation with the state chairs from the states they come from) and then the state parties select the other 162 members, using the same math as for regular delegates: as in 2016, campaigns pick their members. I suppose a different chair might be able to get different folks selected, but you'd probably need to do more than just change the DNC chair (eg you need to change state chairs and state DNC delegates. Those elections were last summer).

In the spring of 2017, Our Revolution made a half-assed effort to change the composition of the DNC by changing the composition of the ultimate building blocks, the county committees. In my county, the effort was a flop, mostly because it was done so poorly, and I'm pretty sure it was a flop at the state level as well. It's not surprising: doing it well would have required a whole lot more effort than simply sending out the same email to everyone in their list, regardless of state, county, precinct, and it makes a whole lot more sense to apply the money and effort to getting people elected to public office.

It is definitely true that it would be way better for Sen. Sanders to come to the convention with 60% of the delegates, and not 38%. We'll know in a week if this is in the cards.

I'd buy masks if they also work with wildfire smoke. Any opinions, smart people?

From 305:

PARO can learn to behave in a way that the user prefers, and to respond to its new name. For example, if you ... hit it, PARO remembers its previous action and tries not to do that action."

:(

Unendowed with wealth or pity
Little bird with scarlet legs
Sitting on their speckled eggs
Eye each flu-infected city.

+s

On the "bird" or the "eye"?

That's super-woke of you, Moby. Props.

Bigger props to Barry, but not for the vodka.

322: you really need a respirator for that. You can get one that will do both fine though, it's just not a "mask"

322.cont (can look a bit like one though, with better/snugger coverage and fit)

Mike Pence is in charge of the virus so I'm sure we'll all be fine.

I feel like the fact that Bernie is doing well should give you (Hebee) the sense that maybe good things are possible. I wish Elizabeth are doing better actually but Bernie is still my first choice I think his chances are better on a run off with Bloomberg but but I hope Bloomberg couldn't get that much traction.

What does revolution mean to you anyway?

Didn't Reagan have a revolution?

About c19 I think everybody who's been paying attention has been expecting super germ for a while that doesn't mean this is the big one but obviously we're asking for it.

And after all the effort to cut way back on beer and fries.

||

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214140520300359

Science!

|>

I often wonder why I see smart people expressing contempt for Jon Chait. He's dumb about charter schools, and he should block all interaction with Ta-Nehisi Coates, lest he subject himself to further public humiliation. But otherwise, he's a solid writer and thinker, and gets things right way more often than not. (Yglesias is also in this category, and is really quite good as long as he stays away from guns and the merits of sweatshop labor.)

But Jesus, this is some tendentious crap from a guy who pretty clearly has never thought seriously about what Bernie is up to.

Chait gives away his game here:

If you truly, deeply object to the idea of billionaires exerting disproportionate influence over political campaigns to the point that you'd rather lose than let one of them help you, then Sanders deserves credit for ideological consistency. But Democrats should consider the possibility that Sanders is not merely pretending to be a fanatic.

Read literally -- and I have no reason to believe Chait intended it otherwise -- he is not merely saying that Bernie cannot win without Bloomberg's money. He is saying that Bernie knows this and has chosen to lose.

Chait doesn't even bother to ponder the alternative: That Bernie's popularity is rooted in the fact that he is not beholden to billionaires, and that Bloomberg's money is toxic to a big chunk of the electorate. (Bloomberg himself will be finding this out shortly.)

Note also that Bloomberg here (via Wolfson) demonstrates the conditional nature of his support for the Democratic nominee: If Bernie won't publicly reverse himself, grovel and ask for the money, Bloomberg won't spend a nickel to support the ticket.

(It is literally written into the law that Bloomberg must not coordinate with the candidate on spending that kind of money, and it is routine for candidates to disavow the activities of PACs.)

It would really help if Bernie would stop praising the Cuban 'literacy programme.' Yeah, I get that he was asked a "gotcha!" question about some ill-informed/intemperate comment that he had made in the past; but when you're running for US President, you need to know how to pivot, and how to gracefully disavow an earlier position...Instead, he doubles down, and sounds like that annoying, leftier-than-thou, know-it-all dude that we all remember from college... This is not how to win Florida, I'm pretty sure.

You win Florida by taking steps against roaming gangs of infected monkeys.

So, my half-assed preparations for COVID 19? Apparently the first no-direct-ties-to-China infection in the US is here in Sacramento. That feels a little fast to me, but it isn't like I would do more or better with more time to prepare.

Edibles and Bugles.

Or not. I'm now on two blood pressure medicines and a statin.

It would really help if Bernie would stop praising the Cuban 'literacy programme.'

Nah, he's going to be red-baited for the entirety of the campaign so he might as well roll with it.

338: I wouldn't be surprised if Bernie has said some false things about Nicaragua and/or Cuba -- but nobody has yet cited those things in this campaign. Castro really did initiate literacy programs, and nobody seems prepared to argue that Cuban healthcare is anything but a model for countries of its kind. It has been official US policy to praise dictators specifically for their torture and repression. Bernie instead criticizes dictators for that, and allows that some of them have also created literacy programs and whatnot. Other times, he has noticed that violent, criminal insurgents have been fighting against genuinely awful dictators.

Yes, it won't win Florida. But let us not be too quick to mock people for telling the plain truth. Someday it might work, and if it can't work -- if that's just the structure of the world -- then we're all fucked regardless.

he might as well roll with it

Or laugh it off and change the subject to something of contemporary relevance to voters.

343, 344: This is some weird personality quirk of liberals (I have it too). It's the idea that I'm so great at arguing that I can always play a weak hand into a winning argument. There's basically no upside for Sanders argue about Cuba. It's like that old Reagan quote, "If you're explaining, you're losing."

Castro really did initiate literacy programs

Hence, the cry "Cuba Library!"

Applause for 347

SSSSHHHH

I wonder if the new virus is going to make masks a thing for Americans? I've only ever seen it used by students from Asia and surgeons.

Are they like socks where you have to change then every week regardless or like shirts where you can wear them until you spill soup?

344. "Castro really did initiate literacy programs, and nobody seems prepared to argue that Cuban healthcare is anything but a model for countries of its kind."

I don't know about the literacy programs, but that "a model for countries of its kind" is a big fat target. If Bernie ever mentions Cuban healthcare it will bring out all the reports about how awful their healthcare actually is by our standards, and produce responses like "It's healthcare that's a model for any country that's already been ruined by 60 years of communism, and what about his prisons, and his homophobia, and so on and so on?" Trump would love to run against Castro.

Bernie should just shut up, or to put it another way: 346 is right: "There's basically no upside for Sanders argue about Cuba."

Maybe he could make the analogy that Batista was basically Trump without the stupid grooming.

At least they both loved graft, casinos, serial adultery, and having people shot.

Also on the economic risk side Johnson is promising to march off a cliff in June.

The best thing I learned about the fall of Batista is that some random guy from Toledo was one of the rebel commanders. He was later shot by Castro after Castro went communist.

Or maybe he just didn't like Ohio.

346, 352 (and 338) etc.: I didn't mean to conflate what is true on merit and what is wise political messaging (though I see that I did). I agree that Bernie does better on both counts when he uses these questions to say that he won't be writing any love letters to Kim Jong Un. Charley has the right answer in 345, as JPJ does in 338.

I just get triggered (if I may use that word) by suggestions that there is something wrong with telling the plain truth in public. But I mean, I really do get that there is something wrong with telling the plain truth in public.

Also on the economic risk side Johnson is promising to march off a cliff in June.

Ah, right. Just like he promised he definitely wouldn't ask for an extension to the exit date, right? He'd rather be dead in a ditch?

He's lying, Mossy. He's telling a fib.

I mean, don't make me go Socratic on you all again. http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_16964.html#2047290

The ditch probably turned out to be too damp.

Right. That was funny (except the part where your country got destroyed). Carry on.

"There's a chance it could get worse. There's a chance it could get fairly, substantially worse," Trump said. "But nothing's inevitable."

There'll be peace when you are done.

363: It's good to know he's committed to making things worse.

He's delegated that to Pence, apparently.

The difference, I think, is that this time he has no one left to fool who matters. He has won the election. And, in a sense, a no-deal Brexit makes strategic sense. It is a bet that the EU will collapse; that we'll got back to a world of nakedly competing nations states; and that the most flexible, ambitious and least principled of these will be a winner.

But while you can't fault Johnson on flexibility, ambition, and lack of principle, the whole scheme relies on the kind of economic and political clout that Britain no longer has, and on a state apparatus that is effective, flexible, etc, which the conservatives have been busy destroying since about 1979. Cummings's attacks on the civil service are the rage of a toddler who is kicking the toy he has already broken.

367 to 360

An ever-shrinking circle.

||

Fixed the formatting on my CV and updated same. The cover letter is in the hands of a good friend being copy edited. I'll have it back tonight, look over everything tomorrow afternoon* and send it all in. I'm feeling a little relief.

*Because it won't be for some hours and I'm heading off to the Rugby Club to get hammered. And then a desert expedition in the morning with my ecologist friend to the place where I discovered some Hellenistic pottery shards.

|>

In (ironic) fairness, AIUI some core competencies were outsourced to the Commission.

The cool kids say "potsherds".

Also, do people actually play rugby in Arrakis, or just sit inside and look out at the shimmering pitch?

The difference, I think, is that this time he has no one left to fool who matters.

He's always going to be vulnerable to a leadership challenge, even if it is almost five years to the next election. The big question is

whether he is sincerely trying to fool the EU by threatening a no-deal that he has no intention of carrying out - because he sincerely believes that he bluffed them into concessions last year by threatening a no-deal that he had no intention of carrying out -

or whether he is trying to fool his own supporters in the Party in order that they will support whatever deal he comes up with (including further extensions). The important thing for them is not the details of the deal; the important thing is that the deal should be a Triumph for Britain and therefore include a climbdown for the enemy. If he makes ludicrous threats and then quietly compromises, the EU will quietly compromise as well: they did last year. Then he can sell that as "I was tough! And threatening! And they compromised! What a great deal this is, and what a great man I am!"

And, in a sense, a no-deal Brexit makes strategic sense. It is a bet that the EU will collapse; that we'll got back to a world of nakedly competing nations states; and that the most flexible, ambitious and least principled of these will be a winner

You can maybe make an argument that a no-deal Brexit makes strategic sense for Britain but that is, in a way, irrelevant. Johnson is not doing what he is doing for Britain. He is doing it for himself. He's not a fanatic like Rees-Mogg, who wants to tear down most of the 20th century so that the ruthless and intelligent can finally prosper to the full extent of their potential and deserts. He just wants to be powerful and famous.

It's nice to see somebody achieving their goals.

372 I usually do too.

373 they do, they have leagues and everything but I'm just there for the pub and to play some pool. It's a dive bar and the only real place here to drink, everything else is hotel bars.

Arrakis has no hotels which are also dives?! Forget the CV, Barry. The market is wide open.

Further to 374, Stephen Bush notes that if Johnson was serious about a no-deal exit he would be preparing for it now, in the sense of building infrastructure at the border, and he isn't.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2020/02/boris-johnson-s-brexit-threat-has-theresa-may-shaped-problem

It does, one of my favorite bars is in one but this is different. The hotel one is just shabby and worn down.
At the hotel one there are Fremen who drink in thobes but at Rugby Club they are in mufti (I don't know the hotel guys though they are generally affable and amusing when drunk but the RC guys are friends)

Thobes = "throes of people in robes" is how I am reading that.

A thobe is a thobe is a thobe is a dishdasha.

347 made me laugh out loud.

Re: Bernie, it's been interesting how rarely his being Jewish has come up so far. IIRC, it was a total non-issue with Lieberman, but he was only the VP nominee. I don't think Bernie will lose votes, but I'm somewhat concerned that the specter of A Jew In The White House will give extra motivation to fundamentalists to vote Trump even if they've become somewhat disenchanted with him. I'm certain it will mean more violent anti-Semitic attacks.

358. "I just get triggered (if I may use that word) by suggestions that there is something wrong with telling the plain truth in public."

Yeah, me too. There's a reason there's the word "impolitic", though. I sometimes do the same sort of thing Bernie does, and I get ... ummm ... feedback about it from my wife. So.

383: But I want a Jewish president so badly I can feel it in my bones: It is the hope for an end to deracination, a hope for some final approval, proof that we do belong in this country and always will.

That's from a pretty interesting article by Talia Levin on the possibility of Bernie being the first Jewish President.

It's odd how completely alien to me this sentiment is -- I feel about as home in the US as I could imagine feeling anywhere, and the prospect of a Jewish President mostly just makes me anxious about more anti-Semitic attacks.

https://newrepublic.com/article/156552/dream-jewish-president

How did having a black president work for them?

385: Can I ask where you grew up and where you live now? Doesn't need to be where particularly, but what kind of place. Urban/rural, etc. I have a theory about how place of origin feeds into attitudes about precisely this kind of thing (it probably isn't an obvious theory).

387: Suburbs, I guess, is the easiest description. Huntington Woods, Michigan and Bethesda, Maryland to be specific. I may be different than a typical U.S Jew, because my mom is Israeli and I spent a couple of years in Israel.

I'm curious to know your theory, Tia.

Living in Ohio is really hard on your faith in humanity.

Hm, I don't know if that fits with my theory.

My theory would predict that Talia Lavin was raised in NYC or its suburbs or somewhere similar. Somewhere with a big Jewish population where experienced anti-Semitism, at least against non-visibly orthodox Jews, was pretty abstract and so actually doesn't have a real felt sense that actually, she lives in a world historical paradise for Jewish acceptance. I notice that some internet complaining about Christian cultural dominance that seems to me to fail to disambiguate between being a minority and being an oppressed minority tends to come from Jews who did not grow up around intense anti-Semitism. These seem to me to be the people hungriest for representation, although Ashkenazi Jews are probably overrepresented in media; I don't know about in politics.

I notice that people who did grow up around anti-Semitism tend to have more anxiety about things getting worse, as they have already in the past few years, than hunger for representation.

Was there much expressed antisemitism in the 70s-90s anywhere? I felt like I didn't fit in, certainly, and that my family was strange and quirky in a way that made people ill-at-ease at times. But it wasn't overt enough to call it anti-Semitism exactly.

So I wonder if it's not a thing about having a longer memory for overt anti-Semitism, and how salient that feels to a given person.

Culturally, there could not be someone more on-the-nose for me than Sanders. He's exactly my family of origin. I don't yet know exactly how I feel about the potential for intense spotlight on my sliver of the culture.

Something something a member of a club that would have me.

I mean, I experienced a lot of intense Christian supremacy growing up. It wasn't targeted at Jews specifically, but it included them.

(and I've definitely heard about intense anti-Semitism from people who grew up in the suburban/rural Midwest)

Jewish people are much easier to deal with on religion that the more shouty kinds of Christians even for a Christian.

I was called a "kike" a few times in elementary school. I would often get in fights with my friends and we would insult each other, and that was just a way to try to get me a little deeper than the usual insults making fun of my name.

The rural Midwest is anti-Semitic, possibly because they aren't aware of anyone Jewish who isn't on the TV.

At least it was 20 years ago.

I'm thinking Israelis have non-abstract experience of anti-Semitism, what with anti-Semites* mortaring their houses and all.
*Which is not to say Palestinian & c beliefs and reasons for action are limited to anti-Semitism.

I experienced a lot of intense Christian supremacy growing up.

This is a really good way to describe my experience.

It's probably Paul Riser's fault, because of trying to get the alien to nest in Ripley.

And, uh, my current life.

It's probably Paul Riser's fault, because of trying to get the alien to nest in Ripley.

400: then all the more reason that peep does fit my theory. I just wasn't sure how to map it.

I'm dimly remembering a paper I read about the interaction of Jewish identity with politics in the Jewish communists etc of the early 20C. I'd hazard it's consistent with Tia's theory.

Someone needs to work out an interpretation of Revelation that suggests that the US having a Jewish president will hasten Armageddon.

385: Sorry about the misspelling - her name is Talia Lavin.

This is a really good way to describe my experience.

Mine too! But I grew up Catholic, so I was okay with it.

||
NMM to Freeman Dyson
\>

I had no idea he was still alive recently.

Anyway, I got hit by a car, but not very hard. Didn't have a mark. It messed up my lunch and now I can't see because my glasses, which were already broken, lost a lens.

412. Damn. Glad you are ok.

I can't find my old glasses.

In other unrelated sort-of news, I think I can mark today as the day that what ever last wispy remnant of my blue collar credibility exists, died.

You bought a Tesla?

I almost hit a jogger the other day. It would have totally been my fault. But come on, the guy could tell I didn't see him and I wasn't stopping. He literally ran in front of my (slowly) moving car.

So my question for Moby is: What did you do to deserve this?

Wow! That sounds scary! Glad you're mostly ok.

I was sprinting through the intersection. With the light, more or less. It had just switched to the flashing numbers. The guy who hit me got pulled over because the university police were right there. I don't know what will happen to him. Probably nothing but a citation if he was sober. At least that's what I hope because he seemed nice enough.

414 is frustrating, I've been there.

416 - worse, I'm seriously considering accepting a job that will partially (i.e. not every day) involve commute by helicopter.

416 - worse, I'm seriously considering accepting a job that will partially (i.e. not every day) involve commute by helicopter.

That doesn't, by itself, exclude blue collar cred. You could be working on an oil well.

A professor was trying to recruit me to go talk to city council about the intersection. This was while I was talking to the police. I asked him, nicely, to go away.

422: I wouldn't count that as a commute though.

One time, I read that essay that said that the only thing that breaks an authoritarian's hold over his followers is if he can't keep them safe. (The followers are trading their autonomy and critical thinking for safety and will keep doing it, to almost any extreme, so long as they think the leader is keeping them safe. If they don't feel that the leaders is keeping them safe, the deal is off.) That sounded right to me, so I immediately believed it and want to keep believing it.

Today I saw some article say that Trump's approval is finally going below its steady floor and I totally want to cram it into the authoritarian theory. I mean, it could obviously be about the stock market crash. But I wonder if this epidemic will be the thing that makes authoritarians abandon Trump.

Stock market crashing is also about safety.

Stock market crashing is also about safety.

425.last I think will hold iff there is a significant outbreak in the US.

Dammit

Those who would trade liberty for security are assholes.

Charleycarp's 407 is genius and someone should work on it at once.

I'm glad Moby survived.

425 last. We can pray. It's kind of awful to want enough deaths and economic destruction from the virus to destroy Trump's chances of re-election, but consequentialists should reflect that the virus would have to be something like the Black Death to be objectively worse (in megamouse orgasms) than four more years of Trump.

423: Glad you're mostly okay. So many intersections in the neighborhood you work in are bad (the one on Forbes with the gas station is supposedly the most fatal in the county), and you'd think people would drive carefully given the large number of students. I dunno if the free-flowing traffic lulls drivers or what.

The gas station on Forbes is closed now. Not sure if permanently or not. I got hit at Fifth and Bellefield, which is always where I used to never cross the street because I didn't want to get hit by a car.

I guess I have to say I don't believe that essay I think George W bush demonstrated that he didn't care about people safety in actually as a matter of fact didn't keep people safe in the clearest possible manner and yet people were saying he kept us safe people have a lot of capacity to turn off their critical thinking

Trump is actually taking a huge risk by claiming that the coronavirus outbreak is being overhyped to get him personally. If things do settle down, he'll probably be okay, but if they get a lot worse it will be seen as totally his fault. (Some people are saying that already, of course, just on general principles.)

The article in 385 is really good and resonates a lot with me, even though my own background is slightly different from hers and my reaction to Bernie isn't exactly the same either.

Culturally, there could not be someone more on-the-nose for me than Sanders. He's exactly my family of origin. I don't yet know exactly how I feel about the potential for intense spotlight on my sliver of the culture.

Oh man, me too. There's something hard to pin down in how to feel about a potentially successful presidential candidate who is not only Jewish but so recognizably our kind of Jew.

And as if on cue I just got a text from the Bernie campaign asking if I'm "in for Bernie." I don't know! It's complicated!

"worse, I'm seriously considering accepting a job that will partially (i.e. not every day) involve commute by helicopter."

Been there...

One time, I read that essay that said that the only thing that breaks an authoritarian's hold over his followers is if he can't keep them safe.

I don't think that's correct.

The followers are trading their autonomy and critical thinking for safety

They are surrendering autonomy and critical thinking because they find them to be burdens. They need nothing in return. Whether it's Jim Jones or Adolph Hitler, authoritarians retain their grip even as they endanger their followers.

Today I saw some article say that Trump's approval is finally going below its steady floor

FiveThirtyEight has him reasonably close to his highs, though still clearly in the very narrow range he has always inhabited. I still kind of boggle over the amazing consistency of Trump's approval ratings.

404 to 402.

FiveThirtyEight has him reasonably close to his highs, though still clearly in the very narrow range he has always inhabited.

I'm a little worried that coronavirus will help Trump politically (because I'm not clear that Katrina hurt GWB much in 2004, and that seemed like a worse performance than Trump's response to coronavirus).

Unpacking my reaction I think that even if somebody is incompetent there are political advantages to being the center of attention and making decisions and looking authoritative.

I wonder if there's any benefit to people making various snide comments about how Pence is really handling the whole thing.

I think anything that keeps people thinking about disease and other countries helps Trump regardless of content or Pence actively spreading germs.

Honestly I don't see how it could hurt him at all additionally it's a very it's a very good excuse to cancel elections

There's no excuse to cancel elections that won't start what amounts to a civil war. The problem is if it keeps the right people from voting in some disproportionate way.

You're promising to take up arms and join us on the barricades then?

I'm not clear that Katrina hurt GWB much in 2004

I can tell you with 100% scientific certainty that it had absolutely zero impact.

What's the overlap between people screwed by Katrina (and followup) and Republican voters? It's not zero, but...

447:. Because it was in 2005?

Anyway, re that article, I am somewhat the opposite of her in that I can feel some attraction to the idea of a Jewish president, the identity "woman" is far more salient for me, I associate the online culture around this particular potential Jewish president with irrationally intense deprecation of nearby women, and when I do this "look into my family and see Bernie reflected" exercise, the atheist, stridently lefty, loud male Jew I can most easily picture did not treat women well. It really interferes with my sense of identification with the project. So I support Warren. Also I think she'd be a better president, but it's overdetermined for me.

"I'm seriously considering accepting a job that will partially (i.e. not every day) involve commute by helicopter."

I so need to know more about this.

391: You nailed it, more or less. Talia Lavin's upbringing:

As I learned during my Modern Orthodox upbringing, the path of Orthodoxy is strict. It requires, at minimum, a life compatible with weekly observation of the Sabbath, twenty-five hours in which cooking, the use of electronics, writing, and other ritually determined forms of labor are forbidden; observing ten holidays; seven annual days of fasting; marriage to an Orthodox spouse; having enough children to fulfill the Biblical commandment to be fruitful and multiply; and participating in an Orthodox community established enough to satisfy the requirements of communal prayer, strictly kosher food, and collective celebrations of the milestones of Jewish life, from circumcision to burial.

I grew up in this milieu, on the leafy streets of Teaneck, New Jersey, a suburb-turned-shtetl dotted with bagel stores and schnitzel shops.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/off-the-path-of-orthodoxy

And her adult experience with anti-semitism:

"I think conservative media sunk their teeth into the story because it was everything they hate," [Talia] Lavin said, when asked why she thinks she was specifically targeted even though the rumor didn't originate with her. "A lot of the articles about me are like 'smug New Yorker fact-checker,' a lot of them mention my Harvard education, certainly a lot of the comments are about me being fat. The Daily Stormer was all about me being Jewish. I'm a pretty richly compound-identitied person, and all of them are fodder for this war from the right against the left."

https://www.thecut.com/2018/06/new-yorker-fact-checker-ice-tweet-resignation.html

There was a real dip post-Katrina in GWB approval from the high-40s/low-50s to low-40s/high-30s that he never really came back from (though it was concurrent with Iraq turning into more and more of a cluster, then the housing market collapse). He had the ability to piss off his base a lot more than Trump does, though. I had forgotten just how unpopular he was after losing Congress.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/116500/presidential-approval-ratings-george-bush.aspx

Actually, that trend looks pretty continuous. But Katrina certainly didn't help him.

451: Not very exciting, I'm afraid. Anyway I'm not really looking, they found me - but it is pretty much in my wheelhouse. Office is too far in time from where I'm living, for logistical reasons, and I told them I wasn't willing to move to that city and it was impractical to commute. They countered that I could split time and it's less than 30 min by helicopter, which is true and very easy. I guess that flipped my thinking on it a bit, as I haven't said no.

446: I have a neighbor who wants to start a militia.

446: I have a neighbor who wants to start a militia.

Statistically speaking, I probably have two.

not much of a militia if there were only one.

455: Go for it!

I feel so happy somebody did 460 before I lost my will to not do it myself.

hell, i typed out a variant and deleted it

Maybe Katrina didn't help him but 911 definitely did. I suspect that Katrina didn't hurt but losing Congress did.

And yeah clearly they're even farther gone over forTrump than they were for GWB.

More than 40% of manufacturers across a swath of America's heartland reported negative effects from the coronavirus, adding to growing concerns about the economic impact of the disease globally, according to a survey released Thursday by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

I'm so glad that Iowa isn't in the Heartland anymore. They can't even count.

462: Me too.

I have a total metaphysical certainty that 425 is correct, and that if the coronavirus is at all bad Trump is screwed come November. Especially since there's no way he doesn't insert himself into the center of it at all times, and there's no way the administration won't mishandle it.

467.last well, they are making a good start

449: yes.

Let's not assume strict linearity for time.

I'm watching "Knives Out." I'm going to assume Don Johnson did it because his character looks like a tool.

And more of a tool than Crocket.

Daniel Craig really sounds like a British person who does a great American accent if you assume all Americans are assholes.

A reasonable assumption, to be fair.

It turns out that Christopher Plummer is a very good actor. Who knew?

I'm trying to figure out what Captain America is doing here, but I was right about Don Johnson paying a tool.

Playing a tool.

I figured out who the murderer is.

The butler?

There is no butler. Only the murderer and the guy who was in "Not Another Teen Movie" know.

It's really hard not to Google the ending.

"Not Another Teen Movie" was pretty good.

This is like Cracker Columbo.

Donuts within donuts.

455: Just make sure that that office is not considered your office. If you work 3 days a week from a home office or other office that is closer to you, then they can expense the cost of the trip. Otherwise the value of the helicopter flight is taxable income to you. There was a CEO who wanted to live in Florida who took the company jet to work everyday in some other state. He got hit with a big tax bill, because that was commuting.

This is better than Not Another Teen Movie.

I think he coffee mug is symbolic.

485: I'm in the exact same situation because my employer pays for my bus pass.

455. You own a helicopter and have a landing zone at home? They have a helicopter for routine commutes between points A and B? They're going to pay you enough to routinely buy time on a helicopter? I have so many inappropriate questions about this job and circumstances. No need for answering; it's more fun to spin off hypotheticals.

485 yes would have to work those details out .

485: Bus pass is much lower value and I think there might be an exemption for public transportation, because I get a subsidy and pay for my T pass with pretax dollars.

$265/month of employer provided transportation subsidy is tax exempt (public or private including parking subsidy.) So sb just needs to use a low budget helicopter service.

Fifth and Bellefield used to be absolutely awful. Now, with all the traffic calming and pro-pedestrian features, it is merely somewhat awful. Which, like the coronavirus, maybe makes it more likely to lead to incidents.

The subsidized bus passes were nice.

That's what the guy who gave me his card said.

||

Besides the illegal trading that went on, the colonists also formed alliances with the indigenous people and recruited them as support groups. These native support groups tracked down runaway Africans, preventing them from forming their own communities, as happened in the rainforest of Suriname. They were also used to quash potential revolts by the slaves. 'Without these native support groups, there would probably have been a lot more uprisings against the appalling regime of slavery. These groups helped keep the colonial authorities firmly in place,' according to Hoonhout.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating. Support groups are the worst.

It's best to not be supportive at all, lest two others join you in your support and you automatically become a group.

Our local bus system figured out that a huge percentage of income was from employer purchased bus passes, so they got the employers to pay in, found some grant money, did some other alchemy, and voila, buses are free for everyone all the time.

Ridership increased. Who could have guessed?

Speaking of transportation and divides within the Democratic party and being hit by cars, the NextDoor for my neighborhood is in a heated fight about speed bumps that were installed. The blocks were they were installed have very nice houses for the area and somebody said the speed bumps were another perk for the 1%. The houses on the street go for maybe $750,000.

498: wow. That's wonderful. My godmother went on once about how she didn't need the discounted Senior pass and younger lower income people needed. I said the cost of means tested passes was crazy and humiliating to apply for as well as challenging for people in the gig economy to document. Much easier to pay for with progressive income tax.

I just tried avocado toast at a restaurant. It's really good.

That'll do, Millennials. That'll do.

498 is really smart.

I don't think any of the subsidies will help in this case. The real answer is probably a salary bump to cover it, but some accountant will be looking at ways they can expense without passing on a taxable benefit. Luckily not my problem, but a weird place to be in.

501 is true.

the new director of the sfmta had a great take on this in an interview he did with a techie-libertarianish type, the kind of person super into congestion pricing and autonomous vehicles as solving all city traffic woes. he kept on calmly pointing out the geometric fact that a person in a car takes up many multiples of road-spacevis a vis a person on a bus, leading up to him spinning out the congestion pricing line well enough that the interviewer had her little mind blown once she realized that he'd gotten her to agree that people who want to ride around in cars should *pay* other people to ride the bus. was delicious.

bike on market street up 25% post-ban of private cars!!!

501: all the passion (for and agin) avocado toast is v v odd to those who grew up as children of hippies in n cal - avocado on toast or a (lundberg wild) rice cake is just ... an after school snack, quick lunch, etc. surreal to be around everyone getting so worked up about it.

I was probably thirty-five before I even tried guacamole.

even when you live near avocado's, it's objectively yummy. Not going to pay anyone $18 for it, but it's tasty.

It was only $9, which still seemed expensive.

yeah, there was some story floating around with the $18 amount, i've never actually seen it

I don't know what people who contemplate commuting by helicopter pay for their brunch.

I bet they can slice the avocados very efficiently.

me neither