The Weekly Sift: 2020

Monday, December 28, 2020

The Long December

It's been a long December
And there's reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last.

This week's featured posts are my end-of-the-year summaries: "The Yearly Sift 2020: State of the Sift" and "The Yearly Sift 2020: Themes of the Year".

But it's 2020, so the news didn't slow down for the holiday week. Here's what's been happening.

This week everybody was talking about vetoes

Trump threatened to veto the $2.3 trillion package that includes $900 billion of Covid relief and money to keep the government open past today. Then he did nothing for several days. Then yesterday he finally signed it. The enhanced unemployment benefits included in the CARES Act ended Saturday, so his delay means that states won't be able to restart the benefits until the first week of January.

The announcement that he had signed the bill was quickly followed by a bizarre statement that makes the signing sound like something other than a capitulation. Trump's statement invoked the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, as if he believes this law does the opposite of what it really does.

Congress passed the ICA in response to President Nixon’s executive overreach – his Administration refused to release Congressionally appropriated funds for certain programs he opposed. While the U.S. Constitution broadly grants Congress the power of the purse, the President – through the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and executive agencies – is responsible for the actual spending of funds. The ICA created a process the President must follow if he or she seeks to delay or cancel funding that Congress has provided.

The process is for the President to make a list of the desired cuts and then send it back to Congress, which can just ignore the criticism -- as it certainly will in this case. The President then must spend the money appropriated in the original bill. So the list of rescissions Trump announced (which may or may not ever appear; remember all the times he has said that a health care plan was coming) is just symbolic. Even Fox News says

with only a few days left in this Congress, such a request is nearly out of the question

In addition to "demanding" and "insisting on" changes in the bill he signed, Trump's statement falsely claims Congress has agreed to change Section 230 of Communications Decency Act of 1996, which protects social media companies from certain lawsuits. (Trump would like to sue Twitter for continuing to flag his lying tweets about the election as "disputed".) Congress has also, the statement falsely asserts, "agreed to focus strongly on the very substantial voter fraud which took place in the November 3 Presidential election".

It is unclear whether Trump issued this toothless statement to fool his supporters, or if his staff fooled him into thinking the statement somehow continues the fight. It does not. He surrendered.

On Wednesday, he did veto the National Defense Authorization Act, which is one of those must-pass bills that allows the government to do things like buy weapons and pay the troops. A vote to override is scheduled for this afternoon in the House, though Senate procedures may delay their vote until Sunday. The ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee sent out a carefully phrased note to his colleagues.

Your decision should be based on what is actually in the bill rather than distortions or misrepresentations. ... Your decision should be based upon the oath we all took, which was to the Constitution rather than any person or organization

You mean, some "person" is demanding loyalty to himself rather than to the Constitution, and is spreading "distortions or misrepresentations" about the contents of the NDAA? Whoever could that be?

Trump's stated objections to the bill are tangential, to say the least.

Trump vetoed the bill after Democrats and Republicans refused to include his last-minute demand to repeal legal protections for social media companies [Section 230 again], which is unrelated to the defense legislation. He also objected to provisions that would remove the names of Confederate leaders from Army bases and place limits on his plans to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and Europe.

Trump describes the bill as "a gift to Beijing", which might be one of the "misrepresentations" Rep. Thornberry had in mind. The bill also funds a new cybersecurity effort, which probably is not going down well with Trump's handler in Moscow.

Amanda Marcotte has an interesting theory: Trump's vetoes and veto threats are intended to pressure Mitch McConnell into helping him steal the election.

To be clear, this isn't 11th level chess. It's actually Trump employing junior high school bully logic: McConnell wants a thing (this paltry coronavirus relief bill), and so Trump is threatening to take it away unless Trump gets what he wants (a successful coup). Trump, being very dumb, has not considered the possibility that McConnell couldn't give in to the extortion if he tried because there's actually no secret file in McConnell's office labeled "How To Steal Any Election."

and pardons

Three weeks ago in "Pardons and Their Limits" I talked in general about the issues involved in the pardons Trump might issue. Now we have some actual pardons to discuss.

The Washington Post sums up what's wrong with them:

Larry Kupers, the former acting head of the Justice Department Office of the Pardon Attorney, who served in the Trump administration until he left in mid-2019, said in an interview that the president has been abusive in failing to go through the normal channels to review requests for clemency.
Normally, such requests go through his former office and recommendations are eventually sent to the White House. Most of Trump’s actions have been made on requests that did not go through the office. “It is abusive in the sense that very few of his grants, commutations or pardons really went to any legitimate purpose,” Kupers said.
“The purpose of the pardon power set out by Alexander Hamilton — that is mercy and reconciliation and I would add to that forgiveness. I can’t think about any of his grants that come under those categories. They are all grants to cronies or are partisan in the sense that he wants to excite and please his base.”

One striking thing that you might miss or misunderstand: Writers trying to be fair to Trump are sure to mention the dubious pardons of previous presidents -- Ford pardoned Nixon; Clinton pardoned Marc Rich; Bush the First pardoned the Iran-Contra conspirators; and so on. What's important to notice is that the worst examples from America's past are the run of the mill now. Just about all of Trump's pardons are self-serving, corrupt, or otherwise damaging to America.

The latest batch included the pardon everyone expected: Paul Manafort, who gets his reward for keeping quiet about the collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. His pardon ties a nice bow on Trump's obstruction of the Mueller investigation.

Among the partisan pardons are three corrupt Republican congressmen: Duncan Hunter, who was convicted of stealing campaign funds for personal use; Chris Collins (insider trading); and Steve Stockman (charity fraud). All three were clearly guilty of money crimes that served no political purpose; they were just greedy, and grabbed the money because they could. They all deserved their punishment, and could be poster boys for the swamp that Trump promised to drain. It is impossible to imagine a corrupt Democratic congressman -- or even a never-Trump Republican -- getting a similar pardon. The message this sends to corrupt Republican politicians everywhere is: Go for it. Even if you're caught, eventually a Republican president will pardon you.

But probably the least deserving beneficiaries of Trump's largesse are the four Blackwater mercenaries convicted of the Nisour Square Massacre. They killed 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians, including two children. There is no doubt they are guilty, or that their crime is heinous. I reconstruct Trump's thinking like this: They're Americans and they killed non-white foreigners, so who cares?

This is reminiscent of Trump's pardon in 2019 of convicted murderer Major Matt Golsteyn, of whom Trump tweeted:

We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!

It is hard to overstate how much damage these pardons (and Trump's overall attitude towards murderers in uniform) do to the reputation of the United States and the morale of our armed forces. What must our soldiers think, when they hear their Commander in Chief call them "killing machines"? Former head of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey tweeted in response to the first talk of such pardons:

Absent evidence of innocence or injustice the wholesale pardon of US servicemembers accused of war crimes signals our troops and allies that we don’t take the Law of Armed Conflict seriously. Bad message. Bad precedent. Abdication of moral responsibility. Risk to us.

The Blackwater pardons go beyond simple corruption. They are evil for evil's sake.

Josh Marshall's take on the pardons as obstruction is interesting: He doesn't think they matter that much. More important than sending people to jail is figuring out what happened, and he expects that to come out of the documents that will be available to the Biden administration.

A new President not invested in the cover up changes the equation dramatically. Everything that has been bottled up at the DOJ, in the intelligence services, in the President’s tax returns, in the voluminous records of the US government have been bottled up because of the President’s slow-rolling, mostly spurious claims of executive privilege or simple non-compliance. All that power disappears on January 20th and translates into the hands of Joe Biden. An ex-President has no privileges to claim whatsoever. In the past, incumbent Presidents have deferred to former President’s on claims of privilege. But that is purely a courtesy. All of these documents and records are the property of the United States government and they are under the control of the incumbent President, who will be Joe Biden in 26 days.
What Biden will do with this power, I can’t tell you. But it will be up to him. And there is quite a lot that remained hidden during Trump’s presidency that can now be uncovered.

In general, I'm against a tit-for-tat view of democratic norms. We believe in democracy and Republicans don't, so we have a different obligation to maintain its norms. It's frustrating, but necessary.

In this case, though, I think a exception is called for: Trump has violated so many norms that I think his claims of privilege deserve no deference from his successor. Give him his legal rights and nothing more.

and the Nashville bombing

A car-bomb rocked Nashville at around 6:30 on Christmas morning. It was placed in a touristy area of downtown, but at a time when tourists wouldn't be there. Police have identified the bomber and believe he died in the bombing, possibly intentionally. Officials are being careful not to assign motives before they have clear evidence. The bomber seems to have been a loner who purchased and assembled the bomb components himself.

The bomber clearly was trying to destroy property rather than kill people. Gunfire apparently was intended to draw police to the area, but the bomb-carrying RV warned people away by blaring a recorded warning that counted down to the explosion. He has been described as "a hermit", and there are reports that he had been giving away major possessions, as if he expected to die soon.

The bomb was next to an AT&T hub and knocked out some services, but no one knows yet whether that was the purpose. Unconfirmed speculation says that the bomber was paranoid about 5G. You may have seen a photo purporting to be the bomber wearing a Trump hat, but International Business Times claims the photo is a hoax. A scraggly beard makes the Trump-hat photo hard to compare to the clean-shaven photo released by police.

Trump spent the weekend golfing, with no comment on any of the news. Bryan Tyler Cohen makes a sage observation:

Just so we're clear, Trump is staying silent on Nashville until he finds out whether the person responsible supports him or not.

His concern with "terrorism" and "law and order" never includes violent acts by his supporters.

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Brexit finally got done, more or less.

WaPo's editorial board reviews the state of Trump's wall as he leaves office: $15 billion spent, environmental damage, and no benefit to speak of. Oh, and Mexico never paid a dime.

Here's the New Hampshire I remember:

In Concord on Monday December 21st of 2020 at ten a.m., a group of over one hundred people from across New Hampshire gathered at the now-closed state house steps to invoke their Right of Revolution as specified in Article Ten of the Bill of Rights of the NH Constitution.

The maskless gathering seemed to be motivated by the fairly meager emergency orders of Republican Governor Chris Sununu, who was described as "hiding in his home on Christmas Eve" like that was a strange thing to do.

The Trump claims of electoral fraud all fall apart when looked at in any detail. They rely on their bulk, not on their quality. Here, WaPo's Phillip Bump focuses on one. And Sidney Powell's secret "expert" witness isn't particularly expert.

and let's close with something judgmental

On bad days, I agree with Eileen McGann's "I Think We're Just Too Stupid for Democracy". Unfortunately, as she observes, "All of the alternatives are worse."

Monday, December 21, 2020

Keeping Faith

Nothing good can come of the confrontation between good faith and bad faith engagement. ... Indeed, pursuing good faith engagement with bad faith actors only enables and fuels this corrosive, anti-civic behavior.

- Josh Marshall

This week's featured post is "Beware of Bad Faith". Next week I'll resume the tradition of the Yearly Sift and announce a theme of the year.

This week everybody was talking about the Russian hack

Ars Technica describes the hack like this:

SolarWinds is the maker of a nearly ubiquitous network management tool called Orion. A surprisingly large percentage of the world’s enterprise networks run it. Hackers backed by a nation-state—two US senators who received private briefings say it was Russia—managed to take over SolarWinds’ software build system and push a security update infused with a backdoor. SolarWinds said about 18,000 users downloaded the malicious update.

So basically, major corporations and government agencies were hacked via an organization that they trusted to keep them safe from hackers. Wired summed up:

Any customer that installed an Orion patch released between March and June inadvertently planted a Russian backdoor on their own network.

So, ironically, IT departments that fell months behind on installing patches -- a lot of them, according to Wired -- escaped. Not all of the 18K users who installed the back door were the targets, though. Ars Technica:

the tiniest of slivers—possibly as small as 0.2 percent—received a follow-on hack that used the backdoor to install a second-stage payload. The largest populations receiving stage two were, in order, tech companies, government agencies, and think tanks/NGOs. The vast majority—80 percent—of these 40 chosen ones were located in the US.

Again, Wired puts this in simple terms:

This means there are really three subgroups within the potential victims of these attacks: Orion users who installed the backdoor but were never otherwise exploited; victims who had some malicious activity on their networks, but who ultimately weren't appealing targets for attackers; and victims who were actually deeply compromised because they held valuable data.
"If they didn't exfiltrate data, it’s because they didn’t want it," says Jake Williams, a former NSA hacker and founder of the security firm Rendition Infosec.

So the obvious question is: What did they want?

Identifying exactly what was taken is challenging and time consuming. For example, some reports have indicated that hackers breached critical systems of the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, which is responsible for the US nuclear weapons arsenal. But DOE spokesperson Shaylyn Hynes said in a statement late Thursday that while attackers did access DOE "business networks," they did not breach "the mission-essential national security functions of the Department."

Let me make a layman's guess about what that means: They didn't steal our nuclear secrets, but they got a lot personal information about people who could steal our nuclear secrets.

One thing the hackers wanted was an opportunity to hide their malware inside of other software companies' products. Josephine Wolff writes in Slate:

Even more worrisome is the fact that the attackers apparently made use of their initial access to targeted organizations, such as FireEye and Microsoft, to steal tools and code that would then enable them to compromise even more targets. After Microsoft realized it was breached via the SolarWinds compromise, it then discovered its own products were then used “to further the attacks on others,” according to Reuters.
This means that the set of potential victims is not just (just!) the 18,000 SolarWinds customers who may have downloaded the compromised updates, but also all of those 18,000 organizations’ customers, and potentially the clients of those second-order organizations as well—and so on. So when I say the SolarWinds cyberespionage campaign will last years, I don’t just mean, as I usually do, that figuring out liability and settling costs and carrying out investigations will take years (though that is certainly true here). The actual, active theft of information from protected networks due to this breach will last years.

Ominously, the government's Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warns that we might not know the full extent of the attack yet.

CISA has evidence that there are initial access vectors other than the SolarWinds Orion platform. ... CISA will update this Alert as new information becomes available.

As for who did it, anonymous sources of The Washington Post blame the hack on:

Russian hackers, known by the nicknames APT29 or Cozy Bear, are part of that nation’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR

Predictably, Trump downplayed the hack and said that we don't know it was Russia. In other words, he once again said exactly what Putin wants him to say. Incidents like this are why so many people believe Putin has something on Trump. There may or may not be a pee tape, but there's clearly something. Ben Rhodes comments:

Trump stands down on hacking, says nothing about Navalny poisoning, downsizes US military presence in Germany, embraces Russian conspiracy theory about Ukraine and 2016 election, and debases US democracy into a corrupt grift for cronies. Those are Putin's returns just this year.

Trump also incorporated the hack into a new conspiracy theory to deny that he lost the election by seven million votes: Maybe it was China. Maybe they also hit the voting machines.

An aside: On social media, I am now refusing to get into the details of Trump's election conspiracy theories. Instead I simply say this: "There are numerous legitimate venues in which Trump made or could have made his claims: state and local election boards, secretaries of state, state and federal courts. In every case, those officials and judges -- including Republican officials and Trump-appointed judges -- found no reason to challenge Biden's win. It's time for Trump and his followers to accept the reality that he lost legitimately and by a wide margin."

In a discussion of what Microsoft has discovered about the attack, Microsoft President Brad Smith made a oblique criticism of Trump's "America First" foreign policy.

The new year creates an opportunity to turn a page on recent American unilateralism and focus on the collective action that is indispensable to cybersecurity protection.

Mike Pompeo, in contrast to his boss, said this:

This was a very significant effort, and I think it's the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity.

In the middle of all this, the Pentagon has shut down transition briefings for Biden's people. Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller claimed it was a mutually agreed upon holiday break, but Biden transition director Yohannes Abraham denies that.

and the transition

The effort to keep Trump in power in spite of the voters gets more and more radical as its more legitimate efforts fail. Recounts didn't work. There was no evidence of massive fraud to show to election boards or state or federal courts. Republican legislatures in swing states couldn't be persuaded to back a Trump power grab. So what does that leave? Violence.

The latest buzz in MAGAland is that Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act to take over the swing states by military force and hold new elections. (In other words: to start an insurrection rather than put one down.) Two criminal allies who benefited from Trump's pardon power, Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, have both suggested this.

It's not going to happen. The military doesn't want that job, and I don't think our generals have some deep personal loyalty to Trump that they're looking for a way to express.

“When you're talking about a group of conspiracy theorists, and others who lack any kind of legal knowledge, they'll just pull that arrow out of their quiver when the rest don’t work,” said Brian Levin, executive director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

Once you eliminate military violence, the remaining option is yahoos with guns.

“What is the heart of the Second Amendment, pro-militia, anti-government patriot movement? It's the insurrectionist theory of the Second Amendment,” [Levin] said. “It says people can rise up against a tyrannical government. To me, this looks like the last exit on the Jersey Turnpike before we get to that spot.”

We're still waiting on what might be Biden's most important appointment: attorney general. That person is going to have to decide which of the Trump-era corruption cases is worth pursing and how to pursue them. What's in the national interest? What can states like New York handle on their own? Stuff like that.

It's getting lost in this Trump-centered moment, but the new AG is also going to be in the middle of efforts to redefine and reform American policing. There is going to be another George Floyd somewhere, and when there is, will the local community believe in the Biden Justice Department or not? Violence happens when the non-violent avenues for seeking justice seem closed.

and the virus

A second vaccine, this one from Moderna, has been OK'd for use.

We've already hit a glitch in distribution of the Pfizer vaccine. States suddenly heard from the federal government, without explanation, that their expected allocation of doses would drop by 1/3 or more. It seems to be a bureaucratic issue and not a manufacturing problem.

The UK is reporting a new strain of Covid-19 that spreads even faster. It doesn't seem to be any deadlier, though, and so far the belief is that the same vaccines will work.

It looks like a $900 billion Covid relief package will pass soon. I thank the voters of Georgia for forcing the two Senate runoffs on January 5. Mitch McConnell wants to sabotage the country as Biden takes office, but he needs to be able to argue that his Senate is not completely dysfunctional. So we'll get a too-small package rather than none at all.

As we passed 300,000 deaths this week, the US continues to set records for cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. The Thanksgiving holiday gatherings proved to be every bit as dangerous as public-health officials predicted, and Christmas is shaping up to be even worse.

My best guess: The pandemic will peak in mid-January, and then fall off fairly quickly as spring arrives and the vaccines start to take hold. Some really horrible stuff will happen between then and now, though, because many communities' hospital systems won't be able to handle the strain. In the spring, when the outbreak was centered in New York City, help could be pulled in from elsewhere. This time, there is no "elsewhere".

Whatever stories you have of bad behavior by covidiots, Texas wedding photographers can top you.

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Believe it or not, Brexit is still a thing. Britain's exit from the EU became official back in January, but there were still details to work out. Those details are still not worked out, and bad things start happening January 1 if they're not.

New reasons to doubt trickle-down economics:

[A] new paper, by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King's College London, examines 18 developed countries — from Australia to the United States — over a 50-year period from 1965 to 2015. The study compared countries that passed tax cuts in a specific year, such as the U.S. in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes on the wealthy, with those that didn't, and then examined their economic outcomes.

The conclusion: The tax cuts had virtually no effect on economic growth, but they did increase the incomes of the rich.

An announcement from the United States Space Force:

Today, after a yearlong process that produced hundreds of submissions and research involving space professionals and members of the general public, we can finally share with you the name by which we will be known: Guardians.

Three words sum up everything that needs to be said about our space-faring guardians: I am Groot.

Benjamin Wittes' look back on the Flynn pardon is worth reading. He puts the whole affair in context, notes the judge's skepticism about the government's actions since Barr became attorney general, and concludes:

I doubt, for reasons I won’t detail here, that it could be proved beyond a reasonable doubt to be an obstruction of justice. But I also have little doubt that it was one—that the whole story, taken together, describes a protracted pattern of conduct by the president that was specifically intended to influence the interactions of a key witness with both prosecutors and the courts. ...

He notes Flynn's subsequent airing of the notion that Trump could declare martial law in swing states so that the military could re-do the election, and comments:

The president, in other words, bought not merely Flynn’s non-cooperation with prosecutors. He appears to have bought as well the former intelligence officer’s vociferous and public support for his attempts to undermine the election he lost.
As we look toward the next rounds of pardons, this latter trade may be the fundamental one Trump is seeking to replicate.

I talked about the Dr. Jill controversy in the featured post, but I didn't get around to mentioning this speculation: I'm sure that if she continues teaching English in a community college, it is only a matter of time before Project Veritas puts a student/provocatuer in her class to tape lectures that they can deceptively edit into something scandalous.

Trump's takeover of conservative Christianity has not been completely unopposed. In this post, Pentacostals and Charismatics for Peace and Justice collect 12 Trump-Christian leaders prophesying that Trump would win the election and serve a second term. These were not humble prayers that God might aid their favorite candidate, but proclamations that God had showed them the future.

Since Trump did not win the election and will not serve a second term, it's worth considering the possibilities here.

God tricked them. Believing this would challenge standard Christian beliefs about God's character and God's relationship with humanity.
They fooled themselves. Maybe they interpreted their own wishful thinking as the voice of God, although the theory that some demon pretended to be God and told them what they wanted to hear is also consistent with many branches of Christian theology. Either way, followers should be leery of any future pronouncements these 12 might make.
They lied. In my opinion, this is the most likely option. But I'm cynical.

Most likely, though, these pastors' sheep will not hold them accountable for their error in any way. The preachers will go on speaking in God's name, the gullible will believe them, and the money will keep rolling in. Later, the followers of these charlatans will complain that people like me treat them like they're stupid.

and let's close with something adorable

As we deal with the pandemic and wait for the end of the Trump administration, it's impossible to have too much cuteness in our lives. With that in mind, I offer a new species of greater gliders, who are related to koalas. They live in the Australian bush.

I think that if the new greater gliders handle their marketing rights wisely, they should never lack for eucalyptus again.

Monday, December 14, 2020

Shared Understanding

He leaves behind a society in which the bonds of trust are degraded, in which his example licenses everyone to cheat on taxes and mock affliction. Many of his policies can be reversed or mitigated. It will be much harder to clear our minds of his lies and restore the shared understanding of reality—the agreement, however inconvenient, that A is A and not B—on which a democracy depends.

- George Packer "A Political Obituary for Donald Trump"

This week's featured posts are "Opening Thoughts About the Trump Voter" and "This Week in the Trump Coup".

This week everybody was talking about the virus and the vaccines

The Pfizer vaccine got approval and is being administered starting today.

Meanwhile, we're seeing the predicted effects of the traveling and gathering Americans did over Thanksgiving. Friday, we set a record with 237,000 new cases. More than 17,000 Americans died in the last week. That's like a Vietnam War every month.

The new worry is that people won't take the vaccine. It isn't just the usual anti-vax folks, it's also a Catholic thing and anti-abortion Protestant thing, because the vaccines were developed using stem cells retrieved from aborted fetuses in the 1960s. The Pope doesn't seem to have this scruple, but he's not Catholic enough for some folks.

And then there are the wackos, like this Florida megachurch pastor, who

has advised his congregants not to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, urging them to “believe in divine immunity” instead.

After all, divine immunity worked so well during the Black Death.

and the GOP becoming the Autocratic Party

This got covered in one of the featured posts. One thing I left out of that post: the racist nature of much of this weekend's violence. Black churches were targets, including a historic D.C. church whose Black Lives Matter banner was torn down and burned.

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One thing Trump's effort to overturn the election he lost (by over seven million votes) has pointed out is how the minority-rule bugs in our democracy can cascade.

The Electoral College allows a candidate to lose by millions of votes and still become president, as Trump did in 2016. If Biden's win in 2020 had been only 1% narrower across the board -- if he'd won by 5.5 million votes rather than 7 million -- the Electoral College would have flipped the victory to Trump.
Gerrymandering allows a party to control the state legislature even if a majority of the voters supports the other party. This is the case in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
If the state legislature can ignore the vote totals and choose electors on its own -- as Trump is trying to get them to do -- then a candidate can lose the popular vote not just nationally, but also in states that represent a majority of electors, and still become president.
If no candidate gets a majority of electoral votes, the election is decided by the House, with each state delegation getting one vote. If the minority-rule party controls -- or manages to gerrymander majorities in -- 26 state delegations, its candidate wins.

Currently, all these factors favor Republicans. So if they are put together, Republicans could hold the presidency with considerably less than the 46% of the vote Trump got in 2016. A Democrat could win a resounding landslide of votes, but lose the presidency.

John Le Carré, the author who rescued the spy genre from James Bond, died this weekend at 89. Critics are arguing over his greatest novel, and I admit to never having read A Perfect Spy, which tops many lists. But The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is a novel writers (of fiction and nonfiction alike) should study as they learn their craft, because it is so perfectly tight. You couldn't edit out a single sentence without losing something.

Le Carré's most influential insight was that intelligence work requires intelligence more than derring-do, and is more about organizations than lone-wolf operatives. First and foremost, George Smiley was a guy who read the files better than you would.

The opening chapters of The Honorable Schoolboy are about picking up the pieces after catching the mole in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The process involves finding patterns in what the mole had prevented British intelligence from doing or discovering -- assembling the gaps in the Circus' knowledge into a story of its own. James Bond would have been useless.

and let's close with something awesome

Prize-winning photos of the aurora.

Monday, December 7, 2020

Complicity

All of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this.

- Gabriel Sterling, calling out his fellow Republicans
about threats of violence against Georgia election officials

This week's featured posts are "Republicans Start Reaping the Whirlwind" and "Pardons and Their Limits".

This week everybody was talking about the virus and the vaccines

We're at a significant point here. On the one hand, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are higher than they've ever been. The Thanksgiving holiday almost certainly spread the virus further, but that shouldn't fully show up in the numbers until next week. Winter is just getting started, a significant portion of the population is as resistant to good sense as ever, and Christmas is coming. So over the next month or two, things look pretty grim.

Personally, I'm noticing the pandemic hitting closer to home. For a long time, I knew people who knew people who had the virus, but my inner circle was largely unaffected. Just in this last week, though, I've heard about infections in two households connected only by the fact that I know them.

On the sunny side of the street, there are at least two viable vaccines, one of which is already approved in the UK. Both should start getting distributed here fairly soon.

The NYT posted a gadget to estimate where you stand in the line to get vaccinated. I thought being 64 would give me some advantages, but lacking any complicating morbidities or an essential job, I fall pretty close to the middle of the pack: About 185.6 Americans are in line ahead of me. My wild guess is that I'll be able to emerge from my hole sometime this summer.

Presidential adviser Scott Atlas has resigned. I have little to add to what Dick Polman wrote in the Pennsylvania Capital-Star:

Atlas, the White House pandemic adviser, was the ultimate MAGA appointee: ill-qualified for the job he got, woefully over his head while doing it, and people died because he did it.

He will not be missed.

and conspiracy theories about the election

Trump's increasingly desperate lawsuits continue to get tossed out of court, often by Republican judges, and sometimes even by Trump appointees. Conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote:

At stake, in some measure, is faith in our system of free and fair elections, a feature central to the enduring strength of our constitutional republic. It can be easy to blithely move on to the next case with a petition so obviously lacking, but this is sobering. The relief being sought by the petitioners is the most dramatic invocation of judicial power I have ever seen. Judicial acquiescence to such entreaties built on so flimsy a foundation would do indelible damage to every future election. Once the door is opened to judicial invalidation of presidential election results, it will be awfully hard to close that door again. This is a dangerous path we are being asked to tread. The loss of public trust in our constitutional order resulting from the exercise of this kind of judicial power would be incalculable.

I mentioned Gabriel Sterling's rant in one of the featured posts. But if you haven't seen it, you really should.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH9FnY0qvNI

The straw that broke Sterling's back was a video circulating among QAnon supporters. Claiming to be a "smoking gun" demonstrating manipulation of vote totals, it shows Sterling's 20-something tech "using a computer and thumb drive".

The video is one of several that is going around on social media and being promoted by people like Rudy Giuliani as "evidence" that Biden stole the election from Trump. It's a great example of the advantage lies have over truth. By the time you debunk one such claim, five others have sprung up. And as soon as you deal with them, somebody will repeat the first one again.

One rule of thumb eliminates a large number of such claims: If Trump's lawyers haven't been willing to repeat the claim in one of their 40-some lawsuits, they don't believe it either. Anybody can rent a function room in a hotel and hold a "hearing".

If you're wondering why Trump is doing this when his effort has so little chance of success, all you have to do is follow the money. Trump has raised more than $200 million to "stop the steal" -- money that is mostly going into a leadership PAC he can spend however he likes. The actual cost of his lawsuits is only a fraction of that.

The longer he can keep this show going, the more money he can shake out of his followers. It's that simple.

While the rest of America debates whether to call Trump's attempt to overrule the electorate a coup, Trumpist groups are eliminating all doubt about what they want: An Ohio group called We the People Convention took out a full-page ad in the Washington Times (a flagship conservative newspaper) asking President Trump

to immediately declare a limited form of Martial Law, and temporarily suspend the Constitution and civilian control of these federal elections, for the sole purpose of having the military oversee a national re-vote.

OK, any crazy group can publish an ad in any paper that will take their money. But recently pardoned felon Michael Flynn retweeted the ad with the comment "Freedom never kneels except for God." If Flynn were still on active duty, he would be subject to Article 92 of the Military Code, which states that any service member who

with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of lawful civil authority, creates, in concert with any other person, revolt, violence, or other disturbance against that authority is guilty of sedition

and pardons

Trump won't admit he's on his way out the door, but he's preparing pardons that wouldn't be necessary if he thought he would maintain his control over the Justice Department. The possibilities being discussed raise a lot of constitutional issues, which I discussed in one of the featured posts.

and Trump's future

Depending on who you listen to, on January 21 Trump becomes (1) the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee, or (2) just another crackpot on the internet. I'm leaning towards (2), though his decline may take a few months to become clear.

Here's my thinking: For the last four years, ambitious Republicans hitched their wagons to Trump, figuring that one way or the other he'd be out of the picture by 2024, and his personality cult would need a new leader. Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, Tucker Carlson, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, and rest -- they all saw their Trump loyalty as a path to greater things.

But if Trump isn't going to get out of the way, or if he hopes to hand the GOP off to Don Jr. when he does finally leave, all those people have to recalculate. Maybe they don't want to be seen as disloyal, but they also don't want Trump to stay at the top of the Party. So they're going to be looking for subtle ways to undermine him or upstage him.

Even for his personality cult, the shine might begin to fade. Trump's primary virtue, from his base's point of view, was that he could strike terror into the hearts of the liberals that MAGA-hatters think look down on them. In that sense, the ultimate source of his power has always been people like me (and probably you). But come January 21, I might still be appalled at what Trump is saying, but I'm unlikely to worry too much about him. People looking to "own the libs" will need find somebody more fearsome than a has-been we've already beaten by 7 million votes.

Amanda Marcotte makes a similar observation regarding Trump's pathetic 46-minute Facebook monologue, which he billed as "the most important speech I've ever made".

Trump's self-pitying rant registered as pitiful instead of frightening. The speech barely touched the top headlines at most major news sites. ... The tone of most media coverage was more condescending than fearful. Outrage is quickly being eclipsed by annoyance at Trump for being a pest who doesn't know when to pack it up and go home.

Until now, identifying with Trump has made his cultists feel powerful. But not for much longer. Soon, he will make them feel even more like losers than they already do.

and the economy

Congress seems to be converging on a Covid relief package that is less than $1 trillion. Or maybe it will do nothing.

Meanwhile, the country is in a very bifurcated state: If you can work from home, or if you live off your investments, you're doing quite well. In fact, you're probably building up savings because there is so little to spend your money on.

But if you run or work at a small business that relies on face-to-face interactions with customers, you're hurting.

Nearly 12 million renters will owe an average of $5,850 in back rent and utilities by January, Moody’s Analytics warns.

Friday's jobs report was sobering. The pattern since the beginning of the pandemic has looked like this: Tens of millions of jobs went away in March and April, and they have been coming back since at a rate that would be phenomenal in any other circumstance.

That quick comeback seems to be over, and it ended well before the economy got back to where it was in February.

and you also might be interested in ...

Maybe democracy is making a comeback.

After years of passively watching nationalist governments in Hungary and Poland undermine democratic rule, the European Union finally drew the line this year and declared that disbursements from the E.U. budget and a special coronavirus relief fund would be contingent on each member’s adherence to the rule of law.

What is Bob Dylan's catalog of song rights worth? The exact answer is blowing in the wind, but it might be $300 million. I'm sure his financial people looked at the offer and advised him not to think twice.

According to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, student debt forgiveness is "the truly insidious notion of government gift giving". Free college for lower-income Americans amounts to "a socialist takeover of higher education".

Sadly, we will no longer reap the benefits of such billionaire sagacity after January 20. Living your whole life without ever wondering how you're going to pay for something gives you a deeper wisdom that the rest of us can't fathom.

Further fallout from Brexit: Scottish independence has "never been so certain", says First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.

and let's close with something unintelligible

Back in the 70s, Italian singer Adriano Celentano noted how Italians loved American pop music, even when they couldn't understand the words. So he wrote the catchy song "Prisencolinensinainciusol", which is gibberish that sounds like American-accented English.

The weirdest thing is that his song doesn't just sound like American English to Italians, it sounds like American English to me too. It's gibberish, but it's clearly an American flavor of gibberish. I would love to hear a linguistics expert explain how that works.

Monday, November 23, 2020

Lost Villages

No Sift next week. The next new articles will appear on December 7.

I spent all weekend triple checking that there is *not* a lost, enchanted village in Pennsylvania with 90,000 Trump voters that we forgot to count.

- Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman

This week's featured post is "Can I Get Over Donald Trump?"

This week everybody was still talking about the loser of the presidential election

Today we'll get a reading on how long it's going to take to quell the Trump coup. Michigan's four member election board meets today to certify the election results saying that Biden won. One of the two Republican members says he'll vote against certification until an audit is done, and if the other Republican agrees, the courts will have to step in.

The problem with [the board member's] request, which mirrors that of the RNC and the Michigan Republican Party in their recent letter to the board, is an audit or investigation into election results cannot be done until election results are certified. On top of that, asking for an audit is outside the purview of the board, whose only role is to canvass and certify election results.

So we're waiting to find out if a second board member will use authority the board doesn't have to attempt to overturn an election Biden won by 154,000 votes, without evidence of any wrongdoing whatsoever.

Trump's lawsuits continue to get thrown out of court. This ruling by a federal court in Pennsylvania is about as amusing as judicial rulings ever get. It reads like the comments that a very patient professor writes on a first-year law student's essay that he has given a D.

Again and again, the judge goes back to basic legal definitions (what is "standing", for example), and explains why the Trump complaint falls apart. There is no need to have a hearing on evidence, because the Trump campaign has not stated a case that evidence could prove.

Even Chris Christie is calling Trump's legal team "a national embarrassment". Trump ought to be ashamed of stuff like this, but of course he never is.

The Republican solidarity behind Trump's coup attempt is starting to erode. But the extent to which it still holds together is frightening. We used to have two parties that both supported American democracy. Now we just have one.

Jimmy Fallon's people put together a Trump concession speech.

Chris Hayes points to the longer game Trump might be playing:

Apropos of nothing, the Confederacy's refusal to actually accept defeat and instead embrace a Lost Cause narrative of betrayal was a key aspect of its successful efforts to wrench back one-party totalitarian control of the South, which it did both through violence and propaganda.

and the virus

Covid-19 continues to spread out of control, with new records being set just about every day. Two weeks ago I wrote:

It’s a reasonable guess that by next month we’ll be hitting 2,000 deaths in a day.

That happened Thursday. This week we'll probably see our first 200,000-new-case day.

At The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal and Whet Moser look at the relatively inflexible relationship between cases and deaths: At first, improvements in treatment lowered the percentage of infected people who died, but that progress has just about stopped.

The U.S. health-care system has not reduced the deadliness of the coronavirus since July, according to a new estimate by a prominent COVID-19 researcher, which accounts for the lags in public reporting of cases and deaths. Instead, the virus has, with ruthless regularity, killed at least 1.5 percent of all Americans diagnosed with COVID-19 over the past four months. ...
Because the case-fatality rate has stayed fixed for so long and there are now so many reported cases, predicting the virus’s death toll in the near term has become a matter of brutal arithmetic: 150,000 cases a day, times 1.5 percent, will lead to 2,250 daily deaths. In the spring, the seven-day average of daily deaths rose to its highest point ever on April 21, when it reached 2,116 deaths. With cases rising as fast as they are, the U.S. could cross the threshold of 2,000 daily deaths within a month. Without a miraculous improvement in care, the United States is about to face the darkest period of the pandemic so far.

The researcher estimates the lag between case numbers and death numbers to be about 22 days. So even if cases leveled off today, we can expect deaths to continue going up for at least the next 22 days.

Beating this surge is not rocket science, it's a question of political will. CNN reports:

The [United States] is now in the same situation that France, Belgium and the Czech Republic were last month, when rapidly rising infections put their health care systems within weeks of failure. But these countries have managed to avert, for now, the worst-case scenario, in which people die because hospitals are full and they can't access the care they need to survive. They slowed down the epidemics by imposing lockdowns and strict mask mandates. Despite the clear evidence from Europe, the White House is still opposing new restrictions.

It's easy to believe that Covid can be conquered by authoritarian governments like China. But Stephanie Nolen reports from the not-so-distant, not-so-exotic city of Halifax.

This morning, my children went to school — school, in an old brick building, where they lined up to go in the scuffed front doors. I went to work out at the gym, the real gym, where I huffed and puffed in a sweaty group class. And a few days ago, my partner and I hosted a dinner party, gathering eight friends around the dining room table for a boisterous night that went too late. Remember those?
Where I’m living, we gather without fear. Life is unfolding much as it did a year ago. This magical, virus-free world is just one long day’s drive away from the Empire State Building — in a parallel dimension called Nova Scotia.

How did they manage that?

Our coronavirus lockdown began swiftly in March and was all-encompassing. The provincial borders were slammed shut. In Nova Scotia, even public hiking trails were closed, a big deal for a population used to the freedom to head into the wilderness at will. ...
Public health officials, not politicians, set the policy here about what opens. And people (mostly) follow the rules on closures and gatherings and masks. “The message has been that we need to do it to keep each other safe,” [Nova Scotia's public health chief Robert Strang] told me. “I think there’s something about our culture, our collective ethic, if you will, that means people accept that.”

Collective ethic? Keeping each other safe? It's that damn socialism!

It's also maintaining a long-term view: By accepting some harsh restrictions early, the Nova Scotians achieved far more freedom than we have now.

From the other side of the socialist/capitalist divide, Sarah Jones writes about her grandfather's Covid death.

Sick, in and out of hospitals, and possessed of limited means, my grandfather belonged to a sacrificial category of person in America. This category has always existed, but the pandemic has exposed it and expanded its borders. It has become so difficult to pretend that American free-market capitalism is anything but brutal that conservatives have largely given up trying. ... Some conservatives, including Trump, may consider this an acceptable sacrifice to make on behalf of the economy. But I don’t believe anyone benefits from mass death and suffering, or that the elderly and infirm should be made to feel like detritus while they are still alive, as my grandfather was.

and Thanksgiving

This has gotten truly crazy. I'm used to conservatives refusing to take the virus seriously and responding like spoiled children to any suggestion that they shouldn't do whatever they want. But now the idea is out there that liberals are against Thanksgiving, and you have to "save" Thanksgiving by having as big an indoor, maskless get-together as you can manage.

The "liberals" in question are mainly at the CDC, which is urging Americans to stay home for the holiday.

The White House, meanwhile, is referring to such Thanksgiving advice as "Orwellian". Scott Atlas, the unqualified doctor who somehow has gotten control of the Coronavirus Task Force,

mocked the idea that older relatives would be put at risk over the holiday weekend, although there is ample medical evidence that seniors are much more likely to become ill if they are exposed to the virus and to die if they become sick.
“This kind of isolation is one of the unspoken tragedies of the elderly, who are now being told, ‘Don’t see your family at Thanksgiving,’” Dr. Atlas said. “For many people, this is their final Thanksgiving, believe it or not.”

Of course, if we do all have big Thanksgiving get-togethers, it will be the final Thanksgiving for a lot more people.

The White House itself announced plans for large in-person Christmas and Hanukkah events.

But the most over-the-top message came from conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk:

The Left has always hated Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving can be interpreted as a religious holiday, if you believe in giving thanks to a Creator. But they hate Thanksgiving because they believe there is nothing you should be thankful for in America. This is an awful place. It is cancerous, rotten to the core. Tear it all down. Burn it from within. And why would you be thankful?

To be fair, there is a discussion among people with a sense of history and justice -- does that necessarily make them liberals? -- about whether the fundamental dishonesty of the "First Thanksgiving" myth (in view of the ensuing Native American genocide) poisons the whole holiday. But I've never heard anybody of any political persuasion find fault with the idea of encouraging gratitude. Whether you believe in a Creator or not, it seems healthy to take a day to reflect on the good things in our lives and acknowledge that we didn't make all of them ourselves.

In fact, the person who I think would be most likely to object to such a holiday is the Great Orange Menace: Why should a Creator get any of the credit for the marvelous life he has built for himself?

which got me thinking about Covid Carols

The thought of Thanksgiving at home without visitors, followed by Christmas at home without visitors, filled me with a resentment that had to be let out somehow. I have Facebook friends who apparently feel the same way, so we've been collaborating on Covid Carols. The group is getting real close to a presentable version of "The 12 Days of Covid".

Sadly, caroling in the ICU will not be possible this year. Maybe we can do one of those Zoom-choir things.

Having worked on a carol, I had to google the idea. It turns out we're not the first the think of it. And while the Center for Congregational Song's completed carols are more polished than the ones we're developing, there's something very satisfying about writing your own, especially in long-distance collaboration. The impropriety of it is a giant fuck-you to the whole situation.

So anyway, I happened to notice that the traditional carol "Do You Hear What I Hear?" traces the spread of information from one person the next. That makes it an ideal vehicle for a Covid carol. Like this:

Have You Caught What I’ve Caught?

Said the tourist to the Uber man:
“Have you caught what I’ve caught?
(Have you caught what I’ve caught?)
In a distant land, Uber man.
Have you caught what I’ve caught?
A wheeze, a sneeze,
symptoms of disease,
And I don’t know quite what it is.
I still don’t know quite what it is.”

Said the Uber man to the CEO:
“Have you caught what I’ve caught?
(Have you caught what I’ve caught?)
I’ve begun to sweat, CEO.
Have you caught what I’ve caught?
I ache, I bake,
no matter what I take.
And I really should head for home.
Yes, I really should be at home.”

Said the CEO to a vendor’s rep:
“Have you caught what I’ve caught?
(Have you caught what I’ve caught?)
Sniff this coffee for me, vendor’s rep.
Have you caught what I’ve caught?
A taste, a smell,
I really cannot tell.
It is all just the same to me.
The whole world smells the same to me.”

Said the vendor’s rep to his mother dear:
“You can’t catch what I’ve caught.
(Cannot catch what I’ve caught.)
I feel just fine, mother dear.
Worry not what I’ve caught.
A test, a test,
says I’m not my best.
But I know that it’s a mistake.
I am sure it’s all a mistake.”

Rasped the old woman in the ICU:
“Please don’t catch what I’ve caught.
(Please don’t catch what I’ve caught.)
Cinch your masks tighter, wear your gloves.
Please don’t catch what I’ve caught.
You serve, you give,
so I want you to live.
And I pray this all ends with me.
Let us pray this all ends with me.

and you also might be interested in ...

This week's discovery: the cartoons of @twisteddoodles.

Josh Marshall describes this as "a harmonic convergence of half the bad things in our society".

Va. AG Mark Herring announces he will fight a lawsuit seeking an exemption to covid-19 restrictions so an indoor gun show with as many as 25,000 attendees can go forward at Dulles Expo Center this weekend. Group claims restrictions violate right to bear arms in Va.

The Atlantic examines the waning of America's global influence and prestige, which Biden will have a hard time reversing.

During a week that Trump spent tweeting election conspiracy theories, 15 Asia-Pacific countries signed on to a regional trade deal spearheaded by China. Not so very long ago, the Obama administration proposed the creation of a U.S.-led transpacific trade partnership that would have bound the region to a different vision. When Trump trashed that agreement, the door was left open for Beijing.

My annual dose of humility: The NYT's 100 notable books of the year. Given how little hanging out at bookstores I got to do this year, my totals are below even my usual anemic standards. I've read only one of the books, the completion of Hillary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light. I'm in the middle of Isabel Wilkerson's Caste, and I'll almost certainly read Barack Obama's A Promised Land and Rick Perlstein's Reaganland eventually.

As for the rest, well, I'm imagining singing "96 Notable Books on the Shelf" to the tune of "99 Bottles of Beer".

and let's close with something racy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gm-x-BY5oU