Estimation

Never underestimate a public school teacher.

- Tim Walz

This week's featured post is "The Convention That Ate Republicans' Lunch".

This week everybody was talking about the Democratic Convention

The featured post focuses on how the DNC reclaimed Reagan-era values that Republicans have stopped taking seriously or have let drift away from American reality: freedom, family, marriage, tradition, masculinity, and what makes someone American.

I know I mentioned this in that post, but it deserves a second plug: One standard element of a political convention is the roll call of the states as the delegates announce their votes. The DNC did it a little differently from the RNC.

The DNC turned roll call into a dance party, with each state choosing music appropriate to itself, like Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" or Illinois choosing Alan Parson's "Sirius", the walk-on music the Chicago Bulls use when they play in that same arena. My own state, Massachusetts, picked the Dropkick Murphy's "I’m Shipping Up to Boston". But Georgia stole the show by getting Atlanta's Lil Jon to perform his own "Turn Down for What".

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One difference between the conventions the featured post didn't cover: The RNC's message centered on hero-worship: America is in terrible shape, but if we elect Donald Trump again, he will save us. The DNC was more of a pep rally for activists. Speaker after speaker urged the delegates (and by extension those watching at home) to "do something": volunteer for the campaign, send money, make sure your friends are registered to vote. Kamala Harris will not save us by herself; her campaign is the vehicle through which We the People will save ourselves and each other.

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I've never seen condoms used for political advertising before.

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Major media fact-checking during the conventions was somewhere between comical and infuriating.

If you're a person actually interested in the truth, the main thing you need to know about the Democratic Convention speakers is that they were far and away more truthful than the Republican speakers. Nothing at the DNC rivaled the big lies that form the scaffolding for MAGA policies: the "migrant crime wave", or that illegal immigrants are voting, or that other countries are emptying their jails and insane asylums to send their unwanted people to the US.

None of that is even remotely close to being true.

But both-sides-ism decrees that fact-checkers had to flag Democrats for something. So when Tim Walz said that "IVF and fertility treatments" are "personal for Gwen and I", USA Today had to point out that the Walzes' daughter Hope resulted from a different fertility treatment than IVF, as if IVF hadn't been the next option, and as if succeeding before reaching that point would give the Walzes less empathy with infertile couples who do need IVF. In short: Nothing Tim said was wrong or needed correction.

Or when Pete Buttigieg said that "crime was higher on [Trump's] watch", USA Today found it important to point out that not all crime rates were higher all the time. So the murder rate (which rose under Trump) continued rising for Biden's first year before falling to a level below where it was at the end of Trump's term.

And when Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker said "Donald told us to inject bleach" as a Covid treatment, that was "misleading", because Trump only made that ridiculous suggestion as something scientists should waste their time investigating.

Bill Clinton said that since the end of the Cold War, 50 million American jobs have been created under Democratic administrations and only 1 million under Republican administrations. PBS rated that only "mostly true", because even though what Clinton said was exactly right, 1989 was a particularly fortuitous time to measure from. Starting the clock running somewhere else might give less lop-sided results.

Summing up: While Republicans told big whopping lies that they can't justify their policies without, Democrats sometimes failed to include all the footnotes a journal article would require.

It seems like a conscientious fact-checker would want to note that distinction. But AP's headlines looked like this:

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Good lines from the convention that I haven't found another place for. D. L. Hughley:

Republicans for Kamala? I guess Donald Trump will finally know what it's like when you get left for a younger woman.

Ted Lieu:

As a computer science major, I am so impressed by how large this AI-generated crowd looks tonight.

Hakeem Jeffries:

Donald Trump is like an old boyfriend who you broke up with, but he just won't go away. Bro, we broke up with you for a reason.

Pete Buttigieg:

JD Vance said 'if you don't have kids you have no physical commitment to the future of this country.' When I deployed to Afghanistan, I didn't have kids then. Many of the men and women with me didn't either. But let me tell you, our commitment to the future of this country was pretty damn physical.

Raphael Warnock:

We believe that a patient's room is too small and cramped for space for a woman, her doctor, and the United States government. That's too many people in the room.

and RFK Jr. endorsing Trump

Friday, Robert Kennedy Jr. announced that he was suspending his campaign and supporting Donald Trump.

No one should be surprised by this, because RFK Jr.'s campaign was a Trump operation from the start. The Kennedy name was supposed to divide the Democratic vote, which is why RFK Jr.'s campaign was funded by pro-Trump donors and pushed by pro-Trump media. But recent polls had begun to show Kennedy pulling more votes from Trump than from Harris, so it was time to pull the plug.

On paper, this looks to favor Trump, but it also ratifies Harris/Walz framing: Trump, Vance, and Kennedy are all weird, so of course they would wind up together.

I've seen lots of triumphal posting by Trumpists, claiming that this is a big development that nails down Trump's election. But Nate Silver is unconvinced. His model has Harris up 4% with her convention bounce just starting to show up in the data. Her margin drops about 0.3% when Kennedy is taken out.

and the horse race

I'm not going to pay much attention this week, because if Kamala gets a bounce out of the convention, it won't show up fully in the polls until at least next week. But generally, her slow and steady momentum has continued. 538's polling average has her up by 3.4%, which is close to where she needs to be to overcome the Republican advantage built into the Electoral College.

But there is reason to expect a convention bounce. Here, a CNN reporter is stunned that 6 of the 8 undecided voters he talked to in November have decided for Harris. One has decided for Trump and one still isn't planning to vote.

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Maybe "Communist" and "Marxist" don't mean what Trumpists think they mean.

and let's close with something cold-blooded

OK, I've heard of support dogs, cats, and even monkeys. But a support gator? I'm picturing a bumper sticker: My support animal can eat your support animal.

Strong Leadership

Over the last several years there's been this kind of perversion that has taken place, which is to suggest that the measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you beat down, when what we know is the real and true measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you lift up.

- Kamala Harris

This week's featured post is "Harris, Trump, and Our Broken News Media".

This week everybody was talking about the Democratic Convention

The Democratic National Convention in Chicago has already started, if you count events that don't usually get much coverage, like the delegate breakfasts. Main programming begins at 4 this afternoon, central daylight time. This livestream link begins at 5:30.

Politico has a good article about the convention, including the various ways you can watch it. The major networks are only committed to an hour of coverage 10-11 each night, but CSPAN and various streaming options should cover everything.

Tonight's headliners are President Biden, who I expect to get a heartwarming reception from a party that appreciates what he has sacrificed for the greater good, and Hillary Clinton, who may finally see her dream of a female president realized this year. The Obamas will speak Tuesday. Wednesday's lineup includes Tim Walz, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Clinton, and Pete Buttigieg, while Thursday belongs to Vice President Harris. Jason Carter at some point will appear on behalf of his grandfather Jimmy Carter, who is hoping to hang on long enough to vote for Harris in the general election.

This convention will contrast with the Republican Convention in a number of ways that I think will work in the Democrats' favor. For one thing, the party is not running away from its past, and its nominee has the support of all its major stars. And while the RNC tended to be dour and dystopian, the DNC should be much lighter and joyful.

Also, the Democratic headliners are just better speakers. I expect that Walz on Wednesday and Harris on Thursday will each have a point and make it, in a speech that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. They should contrast well with Trump's 90-minute ramble at the RNC, and whatever it was that J. D. Vance was doing.

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The wild card in the week is how intense and disruptive pro-Palestinian protests will be.

and Ukraine's invasion of Russia

On August 6, Ukraine flipped the script on Russia and sent its troops into Russian territory in the Kursk region, which is famous as the site of the largest tank battle in history. (The Russian victory over Germany at Stalingrad is considered the greatest single turning point in World War II, but Germany's defeat on the Eastern Front didn't become inevitable until after Kursk the next summer.)

It's hard to know what this all means. A substantial fog of war prevents accurate reporting, but it's clear that Russia was surprised and has not been able to repel Ukraine yet. The attack could turn out to be anything from a strategic masterstroke to a modern-day Gettysburg campaign that has early successes but ultimately hastens defeat.

In the meantime, it's a substantial political embarrassment to Putin, whose image of strength is taking damage.

and Gaza

The dying continues in Gaza, and the Palestinian death count has now passed 40,000. The Biden administration continues to push for a ceasefire/hostage release deal, but it's not clear that either side really wants peace.

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It's always hard to decide how much attention to pay to the latest Trump outrage. It's important not to become desensitized to them, but they've been going on for nine years and haven't ended his career yet.

This week he disrespected Medal of Honor winners, who are America's greatest war heroes.

Trump on Thursday, when talking about giving GOP donor Miriam Adelson the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s top civilian honor, said it is “actually, much better” than the Medal of Honor “because everyone (who) gets the congressional medal of honor, that’s soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.”

Trump's former Chief of Staff, former General John Kelly, responded:

No president, member of Congress, judge or political appointee — and certainly no recipient of the Presidential Medal — will ever be asked to give life or limb to protect the Constitution. The two awards cannot be compared in any way. Not even close.

Trump's remarks would be bad enough in the context of a Medal of Freedom winner who saved many lives through peaceful means, like vaccine developer Jonas Salk, or who risked life and limb in a non-military context, like first man on the Moon Neil Armstrong. But it's obscene to say such a thing while giving the award to Miriam Adelson, who essentially bought the honor by (with her late husband) contributing hundreds of millions to Republican candidates, including Trump himself.

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I discussed Trump's Mar-a-Lago press conference in detail in the featured post, and barely mentioned his interview with Elon Musk. CNN did a fact check, for what that's worth. But their discussion of climate change is worth paying attention to, because it so clueless. Bill McKibben dubbed this "the dumbest climate conversation of all time".

Trump said the same stupid thing he's said before, which is that rising sea levels aren't worth worrying about because you just wind up with "more seafront property". Not only is this wrongheaded, it's just plain dumb, as McKibben points out:

a rising ocean clearly reduces the amount of oceanfront property. If Florida goes underwater there will be a new stretch of seafront along what’s now the Georgia border—but the amount of oceanfront will be greatly reduced.

But most of the truly idiotic comments come from Musk, while Trump just sits there and seems to agree. Musk is pushing electric cars not because he worries about the climate, but because he worries about running out of oil. Also, he pictures increased CO2 in the atmosphere not causing any real problems until it gets around 1000 ppm (from it's current level of just over 400), because that would cause breathing problems.

McKibben comments:

There is not a serious climate scientist on planet earth who has ever contemplated a thousand parts per million with anything less than panic and horror. ... What Musk’s math implies, of course, is that we have endless time to deal with this crisis. If 1,000 is the danger level, and we’re going up two parts per million per year, that does indeed “give us quite a bit of time.” Three hundred years, roughly. ... This is the point of their conversation, at least when it comes to climate. It is to insist that nothing need be done now, that we should just go on expanding the fossil fuel industry.

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Social media is trolling Musk: "Elon Musk, dead at 52, says there is no need for misinformation laws".

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Sexism is sexism, even if it comes from a woman. I am appalled that the WaPo published a Kathleen Parker column including this:

Without her beauty, Harris might be joining Biden in retirement. All you have to do is imagine her spoken words coming from a less-attractive package. Or put her on radio.

Hillary wasn't attractive enough. Kamala is too attractive to take seriously. There's no winning.

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Tim Walz hasn't forgotten how to speak to a football team. Decades ago, politicians of both parties made these kinds of speeches all the time to promote civic virtues in the rising generations. But it's been a long time since I've heard one.

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The DeSantis takeover of New College in Sarasota hasn't resulted in book burnings, but a lot of gender diversity books that students might have wanted are winding up in the dumpster

and let's close with some resemblances

James Lucas posts a thread on X that celebrates pareidolia, "our brain's tendency to see familiar shapes in random patterns", like the Waterfall of the Bride in Peru.

Denial

No Sift next week. The next batch of new articles will post on August 19.

I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?

- Donald Trump

When prejudice cannot deny the black man’s ability, it denies his race.

- Frederick Douglass

This week's featured posts are "Where Did Inflation Come From?" and "The Unfathomable Mystery of Biracial Americans".

This week everybody was talking about getting prisoners out of Russia

Thursday, President Biden announced a multi-country swap of prisoners that brought home three Americans: WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan, and Radio Free Europe journalist Alsu Kurmasheva. Whelan had been held the longest, since 2018.

The swap relied heavily on US allies. Germany, Slovenia, Estonia, Poland, Norway, and the Maldive Islands released prisoners Russia wanted back. In his announcement, Biden underlined the importance of having allies, a backhanded slap at Trump's anti-NATO sentiments.

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If Trumpers wonder why calling him "weird" is catching on, they should look at his first reaction to the prisoner swap, which he had said could not happen until he was reelected (apparently because he's Putin's pet).

So when are they going to release the details of the prisoner swap with Russia? How many people do we get versus them? Are we also paying them cash?

At some point, questioning the details of the swap is legitimate. But surely the first reaction of any non-weird American was to be happy for fellow Americans who are free now, and for the families who can welcome them home. Trump expressed none of this, but (without knowing any of the details) simply assumed the deal must be bad because it worked against his political interests. He doubled down during his Atlanta rally Saturday.

I would like to congratulate Vladimir Putin for having made yet another great deal.

Didn't every American other than Trump feel at least a little joy in their hearts for their freed countrymen? That's the kind of thing that makes him weird.

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Of course there's speculation about what this means politically in the US. Back in May, Trump posted that he would get Evan Gershkovich released "almost immediately after the election", and that Putin "will do that for me, but not for anyone else". Some people at the time interpreted this as Putin's ransom demand: If you want to get Gershkovich back, elect Trump.

But after this week's deal was announced, Slate's Fred Kaplan speculated:

[L]ike most world leaders, Putin has no doubt been reading the polls, and he may have concluded that Trump is not going to win ... Therefore, Putin might have reasoned, it’s better to take a deal now so it looks as if he’s acting without an eye to our election.

However, I wonder if there's another angle: Maybe our allies were willing to sacrifice more for Biden, in order to make it less likely Trump will ever be restored to power.

and Trump's interview with Black journalists

That's the topic of one featured post. A few related things didn't make it into that article.

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John McWhorter's analysis of why Trump mispronounces "Kamala" is interesting. He relates it to previous generations of American mainlanders calling the 50th state “Ha-WHY-a” and its capital "Honolula", or misnaming foreign foods "raviola" and "guacamala".

The Trumpian attitude toward Harris’s Indian name reanimates an old American trope. Instead of opening up to a foreign word and even exploring it a little, Trump is treating it as an alien presence in need of assimilation, telling it to conform to whatever he decides it should be.

This willfully blasé attitude toward the word’s pronunciation has the effect of othering it, and Harris by extension. A name with no set pronunciation is alien, exotic, unplaceable — and therefore not who we are. It’s a subtle dig that aims in the same direction as Trump’s false rumor that Barack Obama wasn’t American.

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A subtle detail in a scene from the recent movie American Fiction sums up something important about race in America. The main character, Thelonius "Monk" Ellison, is a Black author who doesn't want to be defined by his blackness. (He wants to write literature, not Black literature.)

Early in the movie, he is coming out of an airport while talking on the phone to his agent about his unwillingness to write the stereotypic "Black novel" the market wants from him. "You know," he says, "I don't even believe in race."

"Unfortunately," his agent replies, "other people do." And as he says that, a cab drives past Monk to pick up a White man.

A question White conservatives ask constantly is "Why do Blacks (or Democrats or liberals) make everything about race?" That scene is the answer: Black people may try to forget about race, but the world will remind them.

and the rising Iran/Israel friction

I don't claim to understand this, so I'll point you to The Economist's article.

and Venezuela

Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro allowed an election, appeared to lose it, and has announced victory. Now he's cracking down on protesters and opposition politicians.

and J. D. Vance continues to embarrass Republicans

Outrageous things Vance has said continue to surface. In a 2021 interview on the Dear Ohio podcast of Spectrum News 1, while he was running in the Ohio Republican primary for the Senate seat he now holds, Vance was asked "Should a woman be forced to carry a child to term, after she has been a victim of incest or rape?" He replied:

I think the question betrays a certain presumption that's wrong. It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society. The question really, to me, is about the baby.

In other words, a woman should be forced to carry her rapist's baby, but that's an inconvenience. It's not the important thing about the situation. Also, this requirement makes rape a viable reproductive strategy for men, but that's not important either.

I noticed something in that interview that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere: Vance repeatedly uses the word normal in a way that I find creepy. The first question is why he wanted to run for the Senate, and Vance says

I think normal people in this country, people who want to live a good life, who just want to raise their families, they deserve somebody who fights for them.

Normal comes up several times throughout the interview, and it always refers to people like Vance himself. I find myself wondering what percentage of the country Vance considers normal.

Another clip that has resurfaced was his opinion of Simone Biles after she withdrew from the 2020 Olympics for mental health reasons.

What I find so weird about this, and it reflects on the media more than it does on Simone Biles, is that we’ve tried to turn a very tragic moment — Simone Biles quitting the Olympic team — into this act of heroism. And I think it reflects pretty poorly on our sort of therapeutic society that we try to praise people not for moments of strength, not for moments of heroism, but for their weakest moments

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Peter Thiel is the tech billionaire who made Vance. The WaPo summarizes their relationship:

Thiel made him wealthy, setting him up to invest in companies that became popular with the MAGA set. He shepherded Vance’s entry into politics, bankrolling, alongside other Silicon Valley donors, his successful bid for the U.S. Senate in 2022.

An amazing clip is circulating on social media, in which Thiel compares present-day America to pre-Nazi Germany, but without any sense of alarm about it.

Liberalism is exhausted. One suspects that democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted. And we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton Window.

Before passing that on, I felt obligated to search for the context. I found it here: an hour-and-a-half dialog with Tyler Cohen, who I don't recognize. I haven't looked at the whole thing, but the immediate context of the quote is a little better than it sounds. They're discussing the German philosopher Carl Schmitt (who I also don't recognize). He accurately predicted the fall of democracy in Germany, but "things went very haywire" (according the Thiel) when he got "somewhat entangled with the Nazis". Thiel describes that entanglement as "bad judgment".

So Thiel's not openly espousing fascism in that quote, but I still can't be comfortable electing the protege of someone who suspects democracy is exhausted. And my overall feeling is: God save us from billionaires who want to raise questions "very far outside the Overton Window".

and the horse race

Who you think is ahead right now depends on which polling average you trust. They are all close, and they all show Harris gaining. RCP has Trump ahead 0.8% in a two-way race, down from 1.9% last week. In a five-way race (including RFK Jr., Jill Stein, and Cornell West), Harris is ahead by 0.2%. Nate Silver's average has Harris up 1.4%; Trump was ahead by 0.4% a week ago. I could go on, but you get the idea.

Like everybody else, I'm wondering who Harris will pick as VP. But I don't see much point in writing about it, because I'm sure the decision is already made and we'll find out soon enough.

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One striking thing about Donald Trump is that so many of the Trump administration veterans who know him best oppose his candidacy: Mike Pence, John Kelly, Jim Mattis, and many others.

The same observation extends to his family. His niece Mary has long been a critic, and recently her brother Fred has told negative stories about Donald in a book. Here, Mary defends Fred against an attack by their cousin Eric.

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Being accused of being weird has gotten under MAGA skins in a way that fascist and racist never did. And yet they keep acting weird.

Normal Americans find inspiration in the Olympics, and cheer for the great athletes who represent us: Simone Biles, Katy Ledecky, LeBron James, and many others. But Trumpers have a weirder reason to pay attention to the Olympics: They need something to get outraged about.

Look at what has gone viral in MAGA-Land: Anger at female Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who defeated her Italian opponent in 46 seconds. Khelif was identified as female at birth and has never professed to be anything else, but she was disqualified from the 2023 world championships after the amount of testosterone in her blood exceeded some limit. The Olympics has different standards, which she fulfilled. She does not physically stand out from other women boxers, and is not the favorite to win the gold medal in her weight category.

But to Trump and his minions, Khelif is "trans". Trump posted a video of Khelif's bout with the comment:

I WILL KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS!

In his Atlanta rally Saturday night (where the crowd was noticeably smaller and less energetic than the one Harris drew to the same arena a few days before), he lied outright about Khelif.

It was a person that transitioned. He was a good male boxer.

If having more testosterone than the average woman makes you a man, then all those low-T men -- you must have seen the TV commercials for supplements -- are actually women.

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More weirdness is the way that Trump cheers any bad news for America. Today, he's glorying in the stock market plunge -- even though the market is still much higher than when he left office. At the end of the day, check the value of your 401(k), and reflect on how happy Donald Trump is about your loss.

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For reasons that defy explanation, Trump has been going after Georgia's popular Republican Governor Brian Kemp, both on Truth Social and during his Atlanta rally Saturday night. But here's the line that really slays me:

He should be seeking UNITY, not Retribution

Look back at my article on his convention speech, which was billed as a "unity" speech. The only unity Trump recognizes is submission to him.

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It's too soon to tell yet how big a deal the Trump/Egypt bribe story will be.

and let's close with something tasty

I promise not to mix politics and the closing very often, but here's something I want to pass on. In one of the featured posts, I linked to a video from Kamala Harris' 2020 primary campaign where she made masala dosa with actress Mindy Kaling, who is also Indian-American.

It turns out that was a regular thing in her campaign, and not restricted to Indian people or Indian food: She'd go meet with supporters and cook something. "Cooking With Kamala" is a 7-video series on her YouTube channel. In this one, she visits the chair of her Iowa campaign and teaches her how to make apples with bacon. Kamala attributes the recipe to her mother, who must have picked it up after she came to America. (In the Mindy video, she says her grandmother was a strict vegetarian.)