In Charlottesville and around the globe, we stand firmly in stating there are not very fine people on both sides of this issue.
- Charlottesville, VA Police Chief RaShall Brackney
announcing the arrest of a teen who threatened an "ethnic cleansing"
at Charlottesville High School
This week's featured posts are "A Very Early Response to the Mueller Report" and "Confronting Season-Change Denial".
This week everybody was talking about the Mueller Report
It's done, but you don't get to read any of it yet, beyond Attorney General Barr's four-page summary. It's easy to get caught up in speculation, which I tried to keep to a minimum in the featured post.
and the 2020 Democrats
Remember: At this point four years ago, the Republican front-runners were Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, and people argued over whether dark horses like Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz might overtake them. Trump wouldn't come down the escalator talking about Mexican rapists until June, and most self-appointed prognosticators weren't taking his candidacy seriously until he won New Hampshire the next February. (I've got nothing to brag about in that regard.) There was even a Ben Carson boom in November, 2015 (a point still 8 months in the future for this cycle) when he briefly passed Trump in the polling averages.
So take all this with a grain of salt, but right now polls say Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are the front-runners, with Biden maybe a nose ahead. There's also buzz about Kamala Harris and Beto O'Rourke. Maybe that's meaningful, but maybe it isn't. Most of the candidates are people that the public has barely heard of. And even if you do know about Cory Booker or Elizabeth Warren or Amy Klobuchar, you may not have put much serious thought yet into imagining any of them as president.
My personal guess, for what it's worth, is that both Biden and Sanders are vulnerable. I don't have any idea who comes out of this scrum, but if you offered me the Field against Biden and Sanders, I'd take the Field.
Biden's support is largely nostalgia for Obama, and Biden isn't Obama. That will quickly become clear when his official campaign starts. And Bernie's popularity has long been exaggerated, first by his underdog status against Clinton, and then by regret after Clinton lost. Campaigning as a co-frontrunner will be a completely different experience for him. That fact is already showing up in his favorable/unfavorable numbers, which are starting to look like any other candidate's.
One theme I see developing in the early stump speeches is the contrast between values and policies. Elizabeth Warren has been very policy-heavy, with proposals like breaking up the big tech companies and changing the way capitalism works in this country. Bernie Sanders also has a very specific list of policies -- Medicare for All and free college being the foremost -- and his followers are using them to test whether other candidates are progressive or not. (Since the policies come from Bernie's list, ultimately he's going to be the only candidate who qualifies as a progressive.)
But it's an interesting question how many voters care about such specific proposals, and how many write them off as undeliverable promises. At the other extreme, Beto O'Rourke talks mainly about progressive values -- like taking care of sick people and helping young people get the education they need -- while dodging questions on specific proposals. Talking about values can be more inspiring than explaining the details of your legislation, but I think voters also need some assurance that the values aren't empty: Maybe you don't go deeply into the details, but we need some assurance that you have done your wonkish homework and could get into that if anybody wanted to hear it.
538 pours cold water over those what-voters-want-in-a-candidate surveys.
The reality is that what voters say they value doesn’t appear to match which candidates they support. ... Indeed, what voters say they value can change depending on which way the political winds are blowing. To see this, we need only go back to the last presidential primary. In March 2015 — the same point in the 2016 cycle as we are in now for the 2020 cycle — 57 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters told the Pew Research Center that it was more important for a candidate to have experience and a proven record than new ideas and a different approach. Only 36 percent preferred a candidate with a fresh approach. But when Pew asked the same question just six months later, the results were reversed: 65 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners preferred new ideas and a different approach, while 29 percent said experience and a proven record were more important.
I have to admit: When first I heard that a 37-year-old gay mayor of a medium-sized city (South Bend, Indiana) wanted to run for president, I decided this news was not worth my further attention.
But maybe it is. There seems to be a minor (so far) Pete Buttigieg boomlet underway. He's made some well-received appearances on TV, and this interview in Esquire hits all the right notes. Suddenly he's polling in double digits in Iowa.
By coincidence, I've just finished reading Jim and Deb Fallows' book Our Towns, where they visit a bunch of small and medium-sized American cities that are doing something right. One of their underlying themes is that while national politics is polarized and log-jammed, local politics actually works in a lot of places. They suggest that mayor may be the best job in politics right now, because you have a chance to carry out your vision and do things that produce positive change in your constituents' lives. So it makes sense that a mayor would project a nice balance of principles and practicality.
One of the impressive things in this clip from The View is how easily and naturally he talks about his Christian religion. Unlike Trump, he clearly knows something about that religion. He lays claim to the Bible's progressive views on helping the poor, while neither pandering to fellow Christians nor casting non-Christians as the enemy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laSUhvHZMLI
and the electoral college
One of Elizabeth Warren's many policy proposals is to get rid of the Electoral College, as she suggested at her recent CNN townhall meeting in Jackson, Mississippi.
My view is that every vote matters. And the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting. And that means: Get rid of the Electoral College.
When you consider that two of the last five presidential elections have been won by the popular-vote loser, and that those presidents (George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016) have been pretty horrible, the Electoral College is hard to defend.
But it's been interesting to watch Republicans try. The EC gives small states disproportionate weight, which in general shifts power in the direction of rural areas, which tend to be more white and more Republican than the country as a whole. (All of those statements are generalities that have specific exceptions. Texas is a big conservative state, while Vermont is a small liberal state. Rhode Island is a small state whose electorate is overwhelmingly urban.)
Mark Thiessen writes:
The purpose of the electoral college is to protect us from what James Madison called the “tyranny of the majority.” Each state gets to cast electoral votes equal to the combined number of its U.S. representatives (determined by population) and its senators (two regardless of population). The goal was to make sure even the smallest states have a say in electing the president and prevent those with large, big-city populations from dictating to the less populous rural ones.
This is totally fake history. Madison and the Founders did worry about the tyranny of the majority, but their solution was to put limits on what government could do, by precisely enumerating the government's powers and by adding a Bill of Rights that protects individuals. Also, the largest state at the time was Virginia, which was dominated by its rural plantations rather than its big cities.
The Electoral College was about something else entirely, and doesn't work anything like the way the Founders envisioned. They intended electors to run on their own reputations as men (yes, men) of wisdom, not on their prior support of specific candidates. The EC would then make a judgment entirely separate from the voters. And since the Founders didn't believe in political parties, probably the electors wouldn't be organized enough to give anyone a majority vote (except in cases where the choice was obvious, like George Washington). So in most cycles they'd end up being a nominating body for the House of Representatives, which would make the final choice. In short, the Founder's fear wasn't about the tyranny of the majority, it was about the ignorance of the rabble -- a point present-day Trumpists should probably stay away from.
So the present effect of the EC has little to do with the Founders' vision, and has instead evolved into a simple boost for rural white voters, whose votes have more weight than those of urban people of color. Defending that system involves arguing that rural whites deserve a weightier vote. Thiessen does that like this:
Thanks to the electoral college, Democrats have no choice but to try to win at least some of those voters back if they want to win the presidency. But if we got rid of the electoral college, Democrats could write off voters in “fly-over” country and focus on turning out large numbers of their supporters in big cities and populous liberal states such as New York and California. Unburdened by the need to moderate their platform to appeal to centrist voters, they would be free to pursue full socialism without constraint.
In other words, rural white voters deserve a weightier vote because they are more sensible than urban people of color, who might get hoodwinked into electing socialists. That's what this argument boils down to.
and you also might be interested in ...
In the wake of the Christchurch mosque shooting, it took New Zealand less than a week to ban military-style weapons.
“In short, every semi-automatic weapon used in the terrorist attack on Friday will be banned in this country,” said [Prime Minister Jacinda] Ardern.
Wednesday an anonymous post on 4chan (a favorite discussion site for white supremacists) "threatened an ethnic cleansing in the form of a shooting at the poster’s school, telling white students at CHS to stay home". By Friday, Charlottesville, VA police had arrested a 17-year-old who isn't a Charlottesville High student. Charlottesville schools had been shut down for two days.
An arrest was also made Friday in response to a threat against nearby Albemarle High School. That threat appeared on Thursday. The two arrested teens don't seem to have conspired, but whether or not the Albemarle threat was inspired by the Charlottesville threat is still being investigated.
From Associated Press:
The Alabama Senate has approved a bill to abolish judge-signed marriage licenses as some conservative probate judges continue to object to giving marriage licenses to same-sex couples. ... A few Alabama probate judges for years have refused to issue marriage licenses to anyone so they do not have to give them to gay couples.
To me, this issue underlines the fact that "conscience" is a special right reserved for Christians. Any government officials who imposed their sincerely held non-Christian beliefs on the public would soon find themselves unemployed.
Picture it: Your county's chief health inspector believes that his Jain religion forbids his participation in the killing of animals. So he refuses to approve any meat-serving restaurants. How long does he keep his job?
We're #19! We're #19!
The new World Happiness Report is out. The happiest country in the world is still Finland, followed by Denmark, Norway, and Iceland. (I detect a correlation between socialism and happiness. MAHA!) The US is 19th, between Belgium and the Czech Republic. According to the FAQ:
The rankings are based on answers to the main life evaluation question asked in the [Gallup World Poll]. This is called the Cantril ladder: it asks respondents to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10, and the worst possible life being a 0. They are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale.
The report then interprets the extent to which a country's happiness depends on six factors (which the report calls "sub-bars"): "GDP, life expectancy, generosity, social support, freedom, and corruption". Some news sources (the Washington Post, for example) erroneously report that the rankings are "based" on these factors, but the FAQ explicitly says that's not true.
The sub-bars have no impact on the total score reported for each country, but instead are just a way of explaining for each country the implications of the model estimated in Table 2.1. People often ask why some countries rank higher than others - the sub-bars (including the residuals, which show what is not explained) are an attempt to provide an answer to that question.
As I've said many times, when you rant at length about whatever dumb or crazy or offensive thing President Class Clown just said, you're playing his game. So I'll just briefly note something that got a lot of attention this week: He can't seem to stop dissing John McCain, whose death prevents him from responding.
People are talking about this as a bad-taste or low-character thing, but it strikes me as a sign of mental instability. I think lots of us occasionally find ourselves arguing with the dead people who live on in our heads. But when you start defending your side of that argument out loud, in front of living people who don't hear those voices, it's a sign you need help.
I'm not just making a cute jibe; I'm serious. Stuff like this is why I think even Republicans should be worried about Trump continuing in office. He's been lucky so far, in that he hasn't faced a challenge on the scale of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But if something like that comes up, are you really confident he won't snap completely?
and let's close with something illuminating
A fascinating presentation of population data -- historical and projected -- about the world's largest cities. from 1950-2035. A similar video goes from 1500 to the present.
