Monthly Archives: April 2018

Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy has a short essay on denying the vote to felons:

First, note that the Constitution never secures a right to vote, the way it secures a right to free speech or a right to keep and bear arms. It leaves the matter to each state, and provides that, even in federal elections, who may vote shall be determined by whom each state allows to vote in state elections. Of course, various amendments have barred the government from discriminating based on race, sex, payment of poll tax, and age (over 18); but no constitutional text goes beyond that.

The Supreme Court has interpreted the Equal Protection Clause, in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, as generally requiring “strict scrutiny” of laws that discriminate in voting (including when they use criteria that would be allowed in other contexts). But right there in section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment is a provision that expressly contemplates states’ denying people the right to vote based on criminal record.

But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State. [Emphasis added.]

It hadn’t occurred to me wonder if we really had a Federally secured right to vote, so this is interesting.

Kevin Drum talks about his fellow progressives in the context of the rather rude remarks delivered by Michelle Wolf at the White House Correspondents dinner:

I’ll skip over whether this was funny. It depends on your taste in comics, I suppose. And Wolf is right: Sanders really does lie a lot. A lot. So I can’t say that I personally care if she was offended. Plenty of people, however, thought Wolf’s bit was really rude, and the liberal response has generally been: Have you heard what Donald Trump says??? That’s a thousand times worse!

This is what gets me about my fellow lefties sometimes. Are we really this clueless about how most human beings react to stuff like this? Namely that normal human beings draw a big distinction between saying mean things generally at a rally and saying mean things aimed at a specific person in that person’s presence.

That’s not so hard, is it? Why do we pretend not to know it? We do this an awful lot, too. Maybe we need to get out more.

I’ve talked about this before, but it bears repeating for any progressives who happen to be readers of this blog: figure out a better communications style. Scorn is fairly described as kindergarten level. Maybe try a little sympathy once in a while.

It’s what makes The Daily Kos so hard to read.

I admit it, your hat is better than mine.

Reviewing foreign films is always a chancy practice, as I do not have an in-depth appreciation of the culture in which the film was developed. So reviewing Padmaavat (2018), an Indian film, has filled me with some hesitancy.

Padmaavat, set in 1303 and based on an epic allegorical poem, is superficially concerned with the lust burning in the heart of the newly crowed and insane Sultan Allaudin of Delhi for the woman reputed to be the most beautiful in the world, Padmaavati, Queen of Chittor, a kingdom independent of India. Allaudin has seized the seat of the Sultan from his uncle, who he lured to a city Allaudin has captured in the soon-to-be-late Sultan’s name, and there, killed.

His opponents will be the King and second Queen of Chittor, Ratan Singh and Padmaavati, respectively, who meet in the customary manner when he visits her father’s kingdom: she shoots him with a bow and arrow while hunting. His heart thus ensorcelled, they are soon married.

When Allaudin learns of Padmaavati and her famed beauty, he and the recently exiled and embittered guru of Chittor plot how Allaudin may meet and take the queen. For six months, they besiege Chittor Fort to little effect, but as provisions run low for those in the Fort, and the besiegers themselves, encamped in the Indian heat, grow faint, the invader hits upon a new stratagem: to use Indian custom to invite himself into the Fort for a religious festival. Once there, he glimpses the Queen, barely enough to discern her eyes, but that’s enough to inflame his foolhardiness. He invites Ratan to his camp as a return courtesy, and accepts when Ratan requires the besieging army to vacate the area.

In the midst of the dust storm which arises the next day, Ratan is captured by Allaudin, and a message sent to Padmaavati: come to Delhi, or lose Ratan. Padmaavati is no fool, and sets her own conditions: Before Allaudin shall see her, she shall see Ratan and see him free, she will bring 400 handmaidens with her, and she demands the head of the exiled guru, the last of which amuses all in Allaudin’s court – until Allaudin assents to all the demands. Padmaavati’s next communication with Allaudin is the severed head of the guru.

Once in Delhi, Padmaavati engineers a daring escape from Allaudin, freshly injured by an usurpation attempt, but their failure to kill Allaudin results in a new besiegement of Chittor Fort. Ratan falls in one-on-one combat with Allaudin, and Chittor Fort falls to improved technology and superior manpower. But before Allaudin can capture Padmaavati, much less even glimpse her, she, and all the ladies of the royal household, commit self-immolation, thus denying Allaudin his prize.

For me, the most important part of the story is how Allaudin comes to ignore every law and rule and custom of civilization in his insane urge to satisfy his desires. From his wife, a sadly undeveloped role, who he wins from his uncle through rapine, to the seat of his uncle himself, to the use of an entire army to destroy a fort and a people just to slake a lust conceived with little reason, except, perhaps, that having satisfied all his more tangible lusts, now he needs new ones. He is a man dedicated to himself, and only to himself.

But his contrast also suffers a bitter fate, for twice Ratan has the chance to destroy his enemy, and twice does not. Once, as a guest in his own home, it certainly makes sense to follow custom and not kill that guest for little reason, for if one develops a reputation for extinguishing unarmed guests, you’re marked as a barbarian. But his second opportunity, just released from Allaudin’s prison, is refused because Allaudin is badly wounded from an attempted assassination. Ratan believes it’s bad form to take advantage of Allaudin, although I suspect pride and rage have something to do with it as well. In any case, his adherence to custom results in the deaths of himself, his Queen, his army, and his people. It’s an implicit question of just what one should do with the person who believes the rules do not apply to themselves, and attracts a lot of support through his charisma – a question relevant to both India and the United States.

As a movie, it’s a lush, sensual movie, filmed to a high standard: excellent acting, stages (or at least it does not appear to be filmed on location), authentic clothing, a story which kept us in its grip. A few roles could have been fleshed out better, but there is a limit on how far that can go, and the principle roles are very well done indeed, from upright Ratan, enraged Padmaavati, to the outright insane Sultan Allaudin of Delhi.

If you have a taste for long, foreign films, this is a great choice, even if the ending is a downer for Americans.

Recommended.

Erick Erickson, who it turns out did not, as I said earlier, found RedState, but was an early and prominent editor at same, discusses the consequences of being a conservative Trump critic:

We got harassed in church and stopped going for a while. A woman in a Bible study told my wife she wanted to slap me across the face My seminary got calls from people demanding I be expelled. And on and on it went. When I nearly died in 2016, I got notes from people upset I was still alive. When I announced my wife had an incurable form of lung cancer, some cheered. All were directed from supposedly evangelical Trump supporters convinced God was punishing me for not siding with his chosen one. For a while, given the nature of what we were getting in the mail, my kids had to stop checking it.

He must be the evil genius. After all, he has your little white dog.

Black is white in Game Night (2018). If you’re playing charades, then don’t misbelieve. But if the older, far more successful brother in the sweet Stingray Corvette shows up, watch out, because, well,

Denzel isn’t Denzel.

And, no, those two won’t be getting together. So much for that traditional story trope. Part of the charm of this movie is its recognition and playful destruction of certain story tropes which were designed to bring surprise to a plot, but have, through repeated use, become decayed zombies, a form of drearily predictable and, often, non-functional barnacles on a plot.

Which is not to say this is a particularly memorable story. It is more a light bit of enjoyable fluff, the Oreo of movies, a sweet pair of cookies filled with some marshmallow fluff. It delights for the moment, but in the next moment it’s gone, forgotten in the hurly burly of the day. Did I have any Oreos today? Why, I can’t remember, for it did nothing of real note.

Except make me laugh out loud.

Looks like even the NRA isn’t extreme enough for some people. In a letter from Senator Tina Smith (D-MN), she mentions NAGR:

I received an interesting thing in the mail recently — a survey from the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR). They bill themselves as a “conservative alternative” to the NRA.

From the NAGR web-site:

With our rapidly expanding membership of 4.5 million grassroots activists, the National Association for Gun Rights has led the charge to halt the radical anti-gun agenda across the nation. Accepting NO COMPROMISE on the issue of gun control, NAGR works tirelessly to hold politicians accountable for their anti-gun views, and has made great strides in protecting and preserving the Second Amendment. But our effectiveness in the battle against the gun grabbers depends entirely on the support of gun rights supporters like you.

Hard to say if they’re more conservative than the NRA. Actually, it’s a little difficult to cite this as a conservative position – gun control has long been a traditional position in the United States, only having changed in the last twenty years or so. At one time, the NRA supported sensible positions. The transformation to an absolutist position on gun rights is a recent phenomenon, not particularly of a conservative stripe.

Still, it looks like another ideological purity race, doesn’t it? Which organization can embrace a more absolutist position on gun rights, all in a land of limited rights. All I can think is the folks running NAGR are just a bunch of power-hungry boys, given the extreme positions of the NRA. Perhaps NAGR is why the NRA has taken such ridiculous positions. Another lesson in the foolishness of absolute rights begins to come into focus.

The results of our recent warmth interacting with our heavy snows results in a nice pic:

The craters are almost certainly drips from the unguttered room above.

Or blast zones from very small rockets that only land under eaves.

In response to the review of The Young Tiger, a reader writes:

I think you should watch the movie Cherry 2000 and review it for our reading pleasure.

I’ve actually seen the first 15 or 20 minutes of that, maybe two months ago. Couldn’t hack it. Terrible stuff.

But I must admit to a growing irritation with imputations of requirements to the wrong entity. For instance, this White House press release on the recent meeting between President Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Abe:

They also reaffirmed that North Korea needs to abandon all weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs.

I realize it’s possible to suggest there’s an unwritten addition to the sentence, in order to gain our approval and buy-in to the agreement. But I remain irritated, as such assumptions are at least open, if not prone, to error. I’d much rather see a direct declarative:

The President and the Prime Minister require North Korea abandon all weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs before we can be signatories to any agreement concerning the Korean Peninsula.

It properly denotes who’s driving this requirement and, stylistically, is simply superior.

But maybe I’m just crabby.

It’s been my observation over the years that the Kung-Fu genre of movies has at least three sub-genres. First, there are the old faux-historical stories, dating anywhere from some unstated ancient time to the end of the last Chinese emperor’s reign, or perhaps a few years into the warlords’ era. Second, there are those movies that are “contemporary,” by which I mean they are set in the same period as they were made, and treat the issues of the day in Taiwan or perhaps Hong Kong (this is before Hong Kong was absorbed by China at the end of the British treaty). And, finally, there is the modern era of movies, which take advantage of modern cinema technology to introduce new generations to the stories, and have taken advantage of this opportunity to, mostly, rework the stories into something more appealing than those stories populating the first two genres. While all genres can have a certain sense of magical realism, it’s stronger in this third sub-genre, as evidenced by, say, Kung Fu Hustle (2004).

The Young Tiger (1973) falls firmly into the second category. Set in 1970s Taipei, I think, Chien Chien, a promising kung-fu student, accepts a challenge from a stranger on the behalf of his teacher, and bests the young man. The next time he sees the challenger, he is being beaten up by a gang, and before Chien can save him, the stranger dies. Chien is knocked unconscious, and the gang frames him for the murder.

The balance of the movie involves his avoidance of the police while weathering the disapproval of his mother, with some romancing of the girlfriend. In his spare moments, he works on tracking down the gang, and each time the gang assaults him, he picks off a few more. The scene in which the gang, in two cars, tries to run  him down as he wheels along in his scooter/ice cream cart is particularly memorable, both for its odd tableau and for how painfully long they stretched it out.

Eventually, the big boss (we know he’s the boss because he keeps shouting at his diminishing minion force You fools!) decides to direct the assault himself, but Chien, who appears to be a close relation to the Energizer Bunny, proves to be too much for the mob boss, and boots him into the pool of shame just as the police show up.

It suffers from many of the shortcomings typical of movies of the second category: awful dialogue, dubious stories, bad cinematography. I’m less certain if the mannerisms of these movies – the short-tempers, forced laughs, and a few others – are part of Chinese stagecraft, a product of Chinese culture, or just bad bad acting.

In any case, I found it difficult to keep my attention on this one. Don’t waste your time on it.

Long-time readers know that I occasionally have speculated that the GOP will slowly shrink, not only as a matter of demographics (it’s base being composed mostly of older white males), but due to the mechanics of “purity.” Those who are insufficiently loyal to the current set of principles, or in more primitive circumstances The Leader, are eventually tossed out of the Party. Then the cycle repeats, because that’s how you ensure power – when you’re a paranoid power-monger. Hell, it happened to a friend of mine twenty or thirty years ago, tossed out of the Minnesota Independent-Republicans for being insufficiently conservative.

What I did not foresee, even though it was bloody obvious, is that this would also happen with the associated organizations. RedState is a long-time, almost legendary conservative collective blog founded long edited by Erick Erickson, who is now with The Resurgent. Today, CNN is reporting a drastic cut in its staff by current owner Salem Media. Who took it in the neck?

Multiple sources told CNNMoney that they believed conservative critics of President Trump were the writers targeted for removal.

“Insufficiently partisan” was the phrase one writer used in a RedState group chat.

“They fired everybody who was insufficiently supportive of Trump,” one of the sources who spoke with CNNMoney said, adding, “how do you define being ‘sufficiently supportive’ of Trump?”

But if it was about politics, it was also about money.

I include the last paragraph to be thorough, although money may not have been a reason so much as an excuse. I expect there will excuses given about removing the deadweight, budgets, and that sort of thing. For me, a couple of thoughts come to mind.

First, if they do use those excuses, they may be sincere, but they’re also signs of failure and doom for RedState, because it’s a signal of the application of a business model to a profoundly non-business entity. Politics is not a business, it’s about winning the right to govern, and then governing effectively. I’ve been through this before and shan’t bore my readers by repeating myself; new readers should find at least some enlightenment here, where I discuss the problems of moving societal sectors’ processes to foreign sectors, and why this generally doesn’t work. This may be the beginning of the end for RedState, if it doesn’t gain a leader (an editor or whatever they call it) who understands what it means to publish, rather than run a business.

Second, this is a signal of how the intellectual political environment of the GOP is slowly sterilizing itself. Intellectual subjects nearly always grow through conflict. In science, for instance, it’s competing hypotheses concerning reality that are measured for congruence with that reality. The reason that sounds nice and easy and clean is because science, ideally, takes an objective approach to these things.

Politics, governance, and that whole lot are not nearly that clean.

But to get on with my argument, a political environment without conflict is a limping movement, a beast that is fighting off a deadly poison^[1]. Those who fight the tide are, sometimes, those who are in the business of saving the organization from a major mistake. That is what the Never-Trumpers have been doing, for example. When the people who present reasoned arguments against the current momentum are removed from the arena, it becomes poorer because the other side then doesn’t have to work as hard to justify their side. Their arguments become weak, they are distracted by deadly self-interest, and soon they find themselves to be in a cesspool from which they daren’t leave, because, well, all the usual reasons – wealth, near-wealth, fear of poverty, and their friends – who they really don’t like – are part of the group.

The politics of purity simply means the group becomes smaller, the umbrella less effective. Ask every religious cult that has been afflicted with terms such as blasphemer, and then ask those who did the afflicting. Those who survive the perpetrators or the victims will agree that it was a terrible error which drove them apart – and made them weaker.

The United States has been strong precisely because it’s impure, even though its citizens sometimes hate that. The GOP is, in essence, engaging in anti-American activities, in spirit only, everytime they engage in purifying the movement.

¹Oddly enough, in software they say if you’re not fixing bugs in your product, it’s a dead product. Perhaps that’s irrelevant.

Steve Benen notes that Defense Secretary Mattis likes the Iran nuclear deal, also known as the JCPOA, and Israeli defense chief says the JCPOA is working. Then Steve recounts Trump’s reaction when he was told that the Iran nuclear deal is working:

As president, Trump went into “meltdown” mode when his own team has told him that the policy is actually working as intended, because the facts were simply inconceivable to him. He knows the policy is a disaster, so when reality pointed in a different direction, Trump found it necessary to reject reality.

I’m not sure Steve has Trump’s psychology down pat. I think that Trump’s greatest success was as a reality TV star. In such a setting, the most important thing to accomplish in order to be successful is to satisfy the audience’s expectations. Firing XYZ would accord with the audience’s expectations? Fine, “the Donald” fires him. The show was a hit and undoubtedly fed into his ego. This is important because anything that inflates the ego also acts as a training process. That is, if if it makes you feel good, then you repeat it and learn how to make it bigger and better. You become addicted to it. Holds true for mice in labs, holds true for humans. Especially tremendously insecure humans like Trump.

Now he’s in a new reality TV role, and the audience, trained by a conservative media that puts politics over national security, expects him to say that the Iran nuclear deal is bad, won’t work, and needs to be dismantled.

It’s not that he “knows the policy is a disaster,” as Steve says, it’s that his audience, the GOP base, wants it to be wrong. It’s another Obama project, and because the GOP base, nevermind its conservative media handlers, can no longer be mature enough to admit that the political opposition can occasionally be right on anything, it must be a disaster. They were inflamed by the Republican leadership when the infamous letter from the Senate was written, they’ve been trained into thinking the deal is a bad thing, and Trump has simply ridden that wave.

But now the reality TV star is running into, ummm, reality. The Israelis are starting to admit that the JCPOA works. His own Defense Secretary says it’s well structured. Any ordinary politician might have the balls to admit that they were wrong and that it is successful. But Trump has sold himself as the politician who’s never wrong. Worse yet, his instincts are telling him that his survival depends on his keeping his audience satisfied. It’s a narrative that speaks to their need to believe they’re still on top of the world, that those damn experts and those allied with them with their damn patronizing liberal attitudes are wrong, and the man without a plan has it all right.

Trump cannot jeopardize that. Not even because he’ll lose his base – but because he fears he’ll lose all that positive reinforcement.

And so we’ll see the self-destructive behaviors of the addict.

A friend in chat, talking about a peregrine falcon sitting on a fence in his yard:

I’m sure it kept an eye on me while drinking some coffee.

And do falcons take cream in their coffee?

Out in the local fast food joint’s parking lot:

Amir Ali on Take Care is taking care to remind Chief Justice Roberts of how one bad decision can define a court:

In the short, five-year period that Harlan Fiske Stone presided as Chief Justice, the Supreme Court contributed several decisions that continue to shape the judiciary and American life. For instance, Stone himself authored International Shoe Co. v. Washington, a seminal decision known to every first-year law student and which judges still apply every day to determine which people or corporations they have jurisdiction over. Yet, today, no one could feel secure discussing the Stone Court without acknowledging its deepest mistake, Korematsu v. United States, in which it acquiesced to President Roosevelt’s internment of tens of thousands of Japanese Americans.

And thus, concerning the travel ban argued yesterday at the Court:

We also know this is a similar evil because the President told us so. When Trump was asked how he could justify banning Muslims from the U.S., he repeatedly and openly cited the internment of Japanese Americans with approval. “What I’m doing is no different than F.D.R.’s solution for Germans, Italians, Japanese, many years ago,” he said.

All of this should make clear that it’s not President Trump’s legacy at stake. Regardless of what the Supreme Court says, everyone knows what President Trump stands for—if he has been one thing, it’s transparent.

It’s the legacy of the Robert’s Court on the line. The Stone, Fuller, and Taney Courts all should have known they were in the wrong at the time they decided their respective failures. But the Roberts Court has perhaps the clearest warning of any—the President’s own invocation of decisions that are already viewed as the Supreme Court’s darkest.

If the Roberts Court acquiesces, history will remember it—perhaps over all else.

Amir may be stretching a point, but nevertheless I think his focus on Chief Justice Roberts’ concern for legacy may turn out to be the key if the Court rules against the travel ban.

After another frenetic day, perhaps this will be calming.

Gastral drumming:

We have known since the 1960s that several species of wasp perform “gastral drumming” from time to time – banging their abdomens against their nest walls in a series of short bursts.

The scientists who first reported this behaviour thought it may be a signal that the wasps were hungry. Meanwhile, other researchers suggested the wasps might be telling nestmates about food sources. Such “recruitment” behaviour is common in social animals, from house sparrows to naked mole rats. [“Wasps drum with their stomachs to tell each other about food,” Richard Kemeny, NewScientist (14 April 2018)]

As Jonathan Chait in New York reports:

While many reporters have described President Trump’s aggrieved psychology, his phone call this morning on Fox & Friends gave outsiders unfiltered access to the sorts of rants he routinely imposes upon his staff. In the interview, Trump’s sense of persecution was so acute he was barely able to concentrate on an open invitation to tout his own success, the thing he does best. Asked to grade his presidency to date, Trump began by denouncing the “phony cloud” placed over his head by the deep state, briefly regained his balance to give himself an A+, and then returned to the calumnies inflicted upon him by his enemies in the media and the justice system. “A horrible group of deep-seated people,” he insisted, “are coming up with all sorts of phony charges against me and they’re not bringing up real charges against the other side.” Trump’s belief that his enemies, not he himself, should be the subject of legal investigation overwhelmed even his ability to boast about his great success.

Sorry, dumb Leader, those of your opponents who needed investigation have been investigated and either cleared or dealt with, except for McCabe, who’s still in process. Now it’s your turn, and you keep giving off clues like other people give off halitosis.

I really wish I could write with conviction that this is the beginning of the end of the amateur movement, but I think there’ll be too many excuses made, too many conspiracy theories constructed, for Trump supporters to come face to face with their own failing – their failure to properly vet Trump, and accept that he is not suited for the Presidency. From literally hundreds of lies (“crime has never been so high!”), to empty boasting (saving jobs), invocations of xenophobia (Mexican rapists), his willingness to say anything that would make the current audience happy (“clean coal”), to promises that he could not keep, or if he could keep them would ruin the Nation (ludicrous military boosts in spending), it was clear, starting in the primaries, that he was completely unsuitable and, worse, unwilling to do the work necessary to become suitable.

But I fear the Trump supporters will mostly go to their graves convinced that the President was railroaded, because that’s how this will be presented to them and, because it fits with their preconceptions, they’ll not further investigate, as they should.

He’ll probably turn into some damn martyr, and we’ll run into “believers” from time to time.

And, in the meantime, another test faces the American loyalists in the Federal government, denying Trump what he childishly wants – direct control of the Department of Justice. I wish everyone from Sessions on down the good judgment to tell the asshole No.

And maybe Ryan will get off his fat government ass and start impeachment. While I sympathize with Comey’s view that the voters should just boost Trump, and by implication all of his adherents, out of government, I worry that it’ll take too long.

A few nights ago – maybe last week – Colbert on The Late Show said something along the lines of  “Trump choking Sessions in a hot air balloon wearing a bridal dress,” and all I could think was … well, courtesy of my Arts Editor:

It seems weirdly apropos.

For those who worry about SCOTUS becoming more and more conservative as Neil Gorsuch, IJ, joins the court, the news from Empirical SCOTUS is not what you may expect to hear:

Gorsuch joined the Court at a unique time. While there is much discussion about how this Court could be the moving towards the right, especially if Justice Kennedy (or any of the more liberal justices) retires with a Republican President at the helm, other statistics show the Court at the present is actually more ideologically liberal than it has been in years.  According to the Martin-Quinn (MQ) Scores, the ideological metric commonly used to measure the relative positions of Supreme Court justices, at the end of last term the Court was the only one in recent memory with five primarily liberal justices and four predominately conservative justices (scores greater than zero denote conservatives while less than zero denote liberals).  The justices scores at the end of the 2016 term, Gorsuch’s first partial term on the Court, look as follows:

Source: Empirical SCOTUS

It’s interesting that Kennedy is inclining towards the liberal side of the spectrum, although of course the entire political spectrum analogy sometimes is a poor measurement of any single person, and in his case a poor predictor of future performance.

But for pure surprise, my money is on Roberts. He’s the guy with the biggest sense of legacy, and thus most likely to ignore expectations.

Dioecious:

FOUR palm trees have been spotted changing from male to female for the first time.

While many plants have male and female sex organs, palm trees were thought to be either male or female, or “dioecious”. [“Palm trees have been spotted changing sex for the first time,” NewScientist (14 April 2018)]

I was reading about the latest jaw-dropping admission of corruption from a government official, as detailed here in The New York Times:

Mick Mulvaney, the interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told banking industry executives on Tuesday that they should press lawmakers hard to pursue their agenda, and revealed that, as a congressman, he would meet only with lobbyists if they had contributed to his campaign.

“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” Mr. Mulvaney, a former Republican lawmaker from South Carolina, told 1,300 bankers and lending industry officials at an American Bankers Association conference in Washington. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

At the top of the hierarchy, he added, were his constituents. “If you came from back home and sat in my lobby, I talked to you without exception, regardless of the financial contributions,” said Mr. Mulvaney, who received nearly $63,000 from payday lenders for his congressional campaigns.

It’s not even clear he gets it.

I shan’t guess his name, as he – or she – might have a lawyer.

And it finally came to me. “Draining” was used merely in a newspeak sense. It’s been redefined as “getting as much as I can.” So the draining the swamp rhetoric which Trump used over and over and over to presumably attract moral, fiscally conservative voters was actually a siren song to all the, well, alligators are actually not what comes to mind. Think lamprey. Yep, that thing off to the right. Yep, every time Trump cried Drain the swamp! he was actually calling all those lamprey-like creatures to come to him, where he could give suckle.

Ugh, this analogy got downright ugly in a hurry. The sad part is that it’s not even in jest. If you think Mulvaney is an exception, you need to read up on EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who appears to be even worse than Mulvaney.

Returning to this dormant thread, the concern was that the latest in a series of technological revolutions might not follow the general pattern, which is that each eats up a certain category of jobs, by automating them, but more are created than are lost, making for a net gain – and a lucrative one at that. Well, the early returns are in, as NewScientist (14 April 2018) reports:

People’s fears have been stoked by headlines warning of the robot takeover. A 2013 study by the University of Oxford, for example, suggested robots are set to replace as much as 47 per cent of the US workforce and 35 per cent of the UK’s.

But far from this apocalyptic scenario, automation resulted in an overall increase in jobs of between 1.5 and 1.8 per cent in Germany between 2011 and 2016. While robots claimed 5 per cent of jobs, more new ones were created. What’s more, most of these tended to pay better than those that had been lost.

Like I said, early returns. As AI continues to improve, as sager heads predict, perhaps the trend will fade and we will soon be praising our robot overlords.

But, so far, not so much.

The AZ-8 special election was last night, and naive Republicans are indulging in a sigh of relief as the Republican, Debbie Lesko, defeated Democrat Hiral Tipirneni by about 5 points.

The smart ones are appalled, even panicky. As Steve Benen notes,

Arizona’s 8th congressional district is a heavily Republican area. Donald Trump won here by 21 points in his presidential race, and GOP voters enjoy a 17-point registration advantage. In yesterday’s special election. Republicans ran an experienced state lawmaker, while Democrats ran a first-time candidate. Common sense suggested the race wouldn’t be close.

No doubt the Democrats were energized and the Republicans … lethargic? Or repulsed by their own party? Hard to say.

Meanwhile, The Texas Tribune reports the Republican Governor of Texas is scheduling a special election to replace Brent Farenthold (R), who resigned from his TX-27 amidst sexual harassment and financial scandals:

Gov. Greg Abbott got the go-ahead Monday from Attorney General Ken Paxton to suspend state law so the governor can call a special election to replace former U.S. Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Corpus Christi, as soon as possible.

Responding to a request from Abbott submitted Thursday, Paxton issued a nonbinding opinion saying a court would agree Abbott could set aside the election rules under a part of Texas law that lets the governor suspend certain statutes if they interfere with disaster recovery. Abbott said last week he wanted Farenthold’s former constituents to have new representation “as quickly as possible” because the Coastal Bend-area’s Congressional District 27 is still reeling from Hurricane Harvey.

As noted in an earlier post, Farenthold was the Texas representative who benefited the most from the most recent redistricting in Texas, and in fact the same Tribune article notes that SCOTUS will be hearing an appeal from the State against a lower court ruling that the redistricting amounted to illegal gerrymandering.

In any case, this election, if it does occur, is another opportunity for the Democrats to frighten the Republicans. While an excellent showing by the Democratic nominee in a TX-27 contest would be inspirational for Democratic challengers nationwide, it would also serve as a warning to the Republicans. In normal circumstances, a warning could be used to correct problems. However, these are not normal days, what with the Republicans are weighed down by the President’s exceptionally poor record, as well as the party’s many failures in Congress, and the party’s transition from a center-right governing party to a fringe-right party of extremists who just happen to have the world’s finest political marketing machine.

Quite honestly, that seems to be about all they have going for them now, and it’s nothing to scoff at. See my review of The Persuaders.