Monthly Archives: August 2020

On National Review Fred Bauer sort of reviews Democracy for Realists (Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels), wherein the authors try to suggest what has worked before, politically speaking, should work again. Bauer’s summary caught my eye:

Achen and Bartels point to some evidence that partisan rationalizations and misperceptions can be found even more frequently among citizens who are politically engaged than among those who are not. A similar point might also apply to negative polarization. Many of the most prominent theories for why the 2016 election was illegitimate have been formulated and promoted by entrenched political actors. The current culture war is — like many other culture wars — an elite-driven phenomenon. Partly as a struggle within elite ranks, those with significant cultural and political perches have often given fuel to inherent factional tensions.

Which reminds me of Turchin’s observation that the wars characterizing the disintegrative phase of empires’ secular cycles are the preserve of the elite, and are often bloody, cruel businesses as the members of the bloated elite fight to stay in the top few percent of society by imposing their view of reality on society. The described descents into barbarity are both dismaying and salutary.

Stable democratic governance depends on patience, compromise, and the acceptance of loss. If members of a losing faction nevertheless remain invested in the institutions of a given democratic order, they will accept momentary losses as a way of shoring up those institutions over a longer term — and creating the possibility of victory in the future. Meanwhile, to secure democratic stability, a winning coalition must also accept the possibility of loss in the future. This in part means resisting the temptation to transform existing civil institutions into a mere apparatus of a partisan machine and abiding by certain constraints on power (such as longstanding protections for minority parties). Those norms are, of course, in tension with the politics of apocalypse and emergency that has become so fashionable.

I find it fascinating that Bauer manages to write this paragraph without once noting in his article that Biden, early in the campaign, tried to come across as a classic compromiser – and was excoriated for his sins, such as they were. I suspect Bauer would prefer to not highlight the more rigid, yet decadent nature of what passes for conservatism these days. (I should note that Klobuchar also worked to highlight her bi-partisan efforts; I’m not sure about the other candidates.)

If social identity plays an important role in elections, it might also have a bearing on the stability of the democratic process. Securing some of the virtues of democracy might involve citizens seeing themselves not only as members of a given faction but also as participants in a common democratic order.

Identity politics, the bugaboo of Andrew Sullivan (that’s a fascinating piece by Sullivan, and should be read by those with the patience to do so – I know I didn’t fully understand it, but felt wiser for the moments spent), may turn out to be the reversion of the rational reasoning mode of thought that became dominant, or at least popular, during the Renaissance, and has served us well since, to the tribal approach to life. Much like the many parties to war before and after the Renaissance, the adherence to an invariant, sometimes irrelevant characteristic, and the sacrifice of personal dissension for the sense of belonging to that group, seems to lead to indissoluble confrontations.

But a facet of the discussion that went unmentioned in Bauer’s review, and perhaps in the book, is hubris, or its flip-side: the willingness to admit that we don’t know. I know I’ve mentioned this a time or two before, but it strikes me that it’s important to realize that sometimes we don’t know, and compromise is a way forward between competing views which, properly designed, will allow analysis of the result without having put our entire leg into the possibly shark-infested wading pool. For example, the failure of the 2017 tax reform bill to achieve its goals – at least in the judgment of third party analysts – suggest the Republicans have far too much certainty about the Laffer Curve, or, to change the wording, that taxes are always too high. A rational group would look at that failure, and the same failure in Kansas, and reform their view.

Will the GOP? I don’t think so – or only after a few key members are ejected, retire, or die off.

Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare reacts to a leaked report that DHS (Department of Homeland Security) has assigned intelligence analysts to him – both the clownish and sober parts:

Bizarrely, the reports describe me as a “source,” as though I am publishing my Twitter feed to provide information to DHS I&A. But no, @benjaminwittes was not meeting with anyone from DHS in a garage. Nor was my Twitter feed specifically providing information to DHS I&A; rather, I was taking information from it and making that information public. Both reports describe me as “a social media user” and “a new source whose information has not been validated.” My name is not redacted or withheld in the report although at one point, that of the then-head of DHS I&A is masked; instead of including his name, Bryan Murphy, it quotes my tweet as saying “And to (Identified Acting Undersecretary): I have read, and I acknowledge receipt.”

The reports are cleared for dissemination to “All Field Ops” and say they are “releasable to the governments of Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, and New Zealand.” So the document is at least cleared for release to state and local law enforcement and to foreign governments; to what extent it has been actively disseminated I do not know. There are certainly more efficient ways to read my tweets in New Zealand.

The rest of the document is quite literally just the tweet, which is both described and included in a screenshot, along with an image of the document it reported and an image of my Twitter header. …

And if all that sounds really dumb, well, that’s because it is.

Given the amateur hour character of the Trump Administration, this is unsurprising. It appears someone was told to be authoritarian and played the buffoon card, instead. Maybe their playing cards did not include the authoritarian card. But Wittes doesn’t just laugh at it:

And yet again, it’s worth asking: if this is okay, what else is fair game for dissemination to intelligence partners?

I personally love that government officials are sending around my tweets. They should all do it more. But for this intelligence report to get filed, dumb as it is, a lot of things have to go wrong. People have to either believe that my tweets on DHS’s internal documents are meaningfully connected to some homeland security mission. They have to believe that they are doing something other than monitoring purely First Amendment protected activity—or, worse, they have to not care that they’re doing exactly that. And they have to believe that their partner agencies and governments have a legitimate interest, one reasonably connected to some lawful mission, in seeing such material—which they plainly do not.

If all this could go wrong with my two tweets, where else are similar abuses taking place less stupidly and more menacingly—and how much more harmful have the abuses been in those other situations?

The fact that Wittes was notified via a leak indicates there’s self-knowledge in DHS that this is, in fact, an abuse. That’s good.

But it also indicates parts of the government have become infected with personnel – Americans – that think rules apply to others, not to them. This, ironically, is the conservative nightmare when liberals are in power; are they willing to vociferously object when it happens when Trump is in power?

Recent reports of the Census Bureau ending its count early have been circulating, and Steve Benen is worried:

I can appreciate why Census concerns may seem obscure and unimportant, but developments like these have the potential to be enormously consequential. Not only does Census data help drive federal funding decisions, these same results are used to determine how states divvy up congressional power on Capitol Hill.

The more the Trump administration curtails counting of immigrants and communities of color, the more the deck will be stacked against them.

It’s that last sentence in the first paragraph that caught my eye. Yes, Census undercounts are a problem, since the white community may appear to be a larger percentage of the population than in reality, but these same results are used to determine how states divvy up congressional power on Capitol Hill. So here’s the thing:

Many of these immigrants live in current Republican strongholds.

What if this undercount deprives Texas, or Alabama, or Florida of a Representative – or even two?

And then the conservative political movement is potentially further hindered, depending on how district lines are redrawn.

Trump & Minions really need to start thinking more than half a move ahead. Quarterly thinking simply does not work well in a government setting. Hell, it doesn’t even work well in a private sector setting, only many CEOs don’t seem to understand that.

Conservative pundit Erick Erickson keeps sending those emails, trying to solicit business for his subscription service where, presumably, he rants and raves about theology and the American political system. His latest is his attempt to discredit the Republican NeverTrumpers who’ve emerged as nothing more than mercenary creatures who, finding themselves shut out of the Trump orbit, have flung themselves against him.

This is a little hard to credit in the case of The Lincoln Project’s George Conway, as his wife, Kellyanne Conway, is a Trump senior advisor, his Wikipedia page suggests he was considered for several senior positions in the Administration, and he’s widely considered to have impeccable Republican credentials.

But let’s stipulate to it, just because it’s useful to let him have his broad generalization. Here’s what caught my eye:

I really don’t care if someone wants to vote against Trump or run vanity ads in the DC market solely designed to troll him. But there are two parties in America, one of which is okay with killing kids and one that generally is opposed. None of us should be surprised that the ones who privately mocked the pro-lifers from within the party will now be so public in their disdain.

And what Erickson cannot do – because it would vitiate his position on the Hill of Moral Superiority – is take the next step and begin the crucial analysis: the party that is generally opposed to killing kids (hah – so wrong on so many levels, but I gotta stay focused) happens to support the most corrupt President in modern history, and does so with great enthusiasm.

Great enthusiasm. Supported by 80-some percent of Republicans. Sometimes even into the 90s.

Even if I let him have a hypothetical position that Trump is helping save ‘kids’, there are many other Republicans, presumably far less corrupt – presumably – that he could support. We could return to that all-hype incredibly deep Republican bench (to paraphrase a few credulous pundits) from 2015, with names like Rubio, Kasich, Cruz, Carson, and more than ten others – all, it turned out, such lightweights that only helium equaled their lack of gravitas, but, still, the Republican Party could kick Trump out and turn to one of them, instead.

Or even failed Indiana governor and current VP Mike Pence.

But, no. It’s not Erickson’s designated party of “baby-killers” who has embraced corruption, naked and barely denying it, invoking racist tropes and flaunting incompetence as if it were a virtue.

It’s his supposed party of pro-lifers with their arms and legs locked around Trump.

I’ll skip making accusations of hypocrisy, partly because I doubt Erickson will ever read this, and partly because there’s a deeper point to be made.

In logic and mathematics, there are various formal methodologies for what are called “proofs” – indisputable reasoning that makes a point. Many of us learned the basics of proofs in mathematics in our high schools, and I think most of us hated it. I rather enjoyed them, myself.

Among these approaches is reductio ad absurdum,

… the form of argument that attempts to establish a claim by showing that the opposite scenario would lead to absurdity or contradiction.

It’s not hard to recognize that Erickson and the Republican Party have reached an absurd position. Erickson, as one example, has contorted himself into a self-characterizationcaricature as an objective observer, even as he has propounded the view that anyone who condemns Trump suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), a vaguely defined term implying its victims hate Trump for irrational, illogical reasons.

Distrusting him for 20,000 lies should, according to Erickson, be filed under TDS. And that’s just a for instance.

Similarly, other Trump supporters embrace other absurd positions concerning Trump: the black community’s best friend, saved the economy from ruin, rebuilt the military, etc etc. And I’m so tired of hearing I just feel that Trump … someday I’ll just have a good shout at one. Hopefully, the Trump supporter will be on TV and I won’t get in trouble for it.

Since Erickson rests his support of Trump on the issue of abortion, it suggests that the key philosophical error of Erickson and the Republican Party is on the abortion issue, at least in its current configuration. I am going to start calling it the fatal litmus test of American democracy. That is, if you are a pro-choice candidate, then your competency, your positions on other issues, your integrity, all that matters to me, the Joe-regular vote, doesn’t matter to the anti-abortion voter. They tick off the “for abortion” box in their mind, swing over to the other column, and vote for the opponent.

Whoever and whatever that opponent may be.

Grossly incompetent, conspiracy theorist, crackpot, religious nut, chronic liar, freakin’ serial killer. All they have to do is embrace anti-abortion, have the gift of gab, and not piss too many people off.

The position leads to absurdity, and it suggests the avid anti-abortionist may not be on the side of the right. but on the side that leads to injustice and failure.

I suggest, in America, a secular democracy, that the use of the abortion issue as a litmus test is absurd and harmful. If you don’t like abortion, don’t have one. And using it as your litmus test is the essence of tomfoolery. There’s more to selecting our governing people than whether or not they support abortion rights.

And it’s being proven, in a rigorously logical way, right now.

Sacralize:

Imbue with or treat as having a sacred character or quality.
‘rural images that sacralize country life’ [Lexico/Oxford]

Noted in “Krugman Nails the GOP Hide to the Wall,” Dan K, The Daily Kos:

If we win this election, that will be the start of repudiating sacralized selfishness. No wonder Trump and the GOP are trying so hard to steal it.

A few more pics of the portulaca we planted earlier this spring.

Trump continues to sow confusion when it comes to the fate of TikTok:

After days of whiplash over the future of TikTok, President Donald Trump said he would allow an American company to acquire the short-form video app — with a catch.

Trump on Monday set September 15 as the deadline for TikTok to find a US buyer, failing which he said he will shut down the app in the country. In an unusual declaration, Trump also said any deal would have to include a “substantial amount of money” coming to the US Treasury.

“Right now they don’t have any rights unless we give it to them. So if we’re going to give them the rights, then … it has to come into this country,” Trump said. “It’s a great asset, but it’s not a great asset in the United States unless they have approval in the United States.” [CNN/Business]

Now he sounds like a fucking mob boss as well as someone whose fixation on money – immediate money – will easily be manipulated into decisions damaging to the United States.

Of course, he may simply be trying to maneuver the parties involved into doing what he wants them to do – give his popularity in the United States a boost, to wit. It doesn’t seem likely that this is even legal:

The President’s requirement that some of the money from the deal go to the US Treasury doesn’t have a basis in antitrust law, according to Gene Kimmelman, a former chief counsel for the US Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and currently a senior adviser to the policy group Public Knowledge.

“This is quite unusual, this is out of the norm,” Kimmelman said. “It’s actually quite hard to understand what the president is actually talking about here. … It’s not unheard of for transactions to have broader geopolitical implications between countries, but it’s quite remarkable to think about some kind of money being on the table in connection with a transaction.”

I’m surprised Trump didn’t suggest that a large donation to the Trump Foundation would help smooth the deal.

Oh, yeah, that’s right – the Trump Foundation has been shut down for admitted (by Trump family members) violations of charity law.

Getting back to the topic at hand, which is Trump’s state of mind – maybe I didn’t stray too far – my best guess is that the President is trying to keep this particular controversy, manufactured as it may be, in front of the public, blotting out the glaring sun that is the Administration’s incompetency at managing the Covid-19 crisis.

Look for more sound & fury, and a lack of light, over the next few days.

Steve Benen is worried about November 3rd mail-in voting:

Much of the country is also dealing with a shortage of poll workers, especially among seniors who are acutely at risk for the coronavirus. What’s more, because so many voters are unfamiliar with the vote-by-mail process, there’s a very real threat of widespread errors, leading to ballots that go uncounted.

It seems to me this is an opportunity for the non-partisan organizations to step in and help. Gather up all these seniors that are hesitant concerning mail-in ballots into a convenient room, add an expert, and have said expert lead them through the process, step by step. It doesn’t matter if the seniors are for Trump or Biden, just help them through verbal instruction.

When everyone’s done and has their sealed envelope ready for the mailman, go to the nearest mail slot or blue box[1] and each voter puts it in. The expert doesn’t see who voted how, the voters, being properly socially distanced, hopefully didn’t try to copy answers, and all’s well.

A chance to perform a civic duty, it is.

A reader points out my error concerning generation and consumption of energy in 2019:

Electricity generation and energy consumption are not the same thing. The latter includes transportation and other uses, I’ll bet.

Gah. I thought I compared the titles of the two graphics and they were the same, but obviously they are not. I was wr- … wr- … wr – …

In case you were not keeping up with the TikTok social media saga, WaPo has a near-tutorial on it:

President Trump’s promise this week to bar the popular, Chinese-owned TikTok from operating in the United States is the latest move in his increasingly hostile posture toward Beijing that echoes a broader, anti-China stance within the Republican Party ahead of the November elections.

In essentially every reference to the novel coronavirus and the disease it causes, covid-19, Trump has derided it as the “China virus,” faulting the country for being unable to contain it as it spread beyond its borders and led to more than 17.6 million cases worldwide. When he floated a potential TikTok ban in a television interview last month, Trump indicated it was in retaliation for China’s role in the pandemic.

Curious about the two strategies that Trump can pursue? TikTok was acquired by Chinese company ByteDance, both of which had an American presence, and it seems that there’s a law that mergers subject to American jurisdiction that have a national interest component maybe retroactively refused permission, essentially forcing the sale of TikTok to a more acceptable entity.

Or TikTok can simply be banned, as Professor Chesney explains on Lawfare:

4. But there’s also much talk about a simple “ban” on TikTok. Is that just wishful thinking by parents, or is that a thing the President can do?

Yes, it’s a real thing, thanks to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). But it’s complicated.

IEEPA is another example of Congress delegating to the executive branch an aspect of its constitutional control over foreign commerce. Think of it as a general pre-delegation of authority to impose embargoes as well as more-targeted sanctions against foreign entities—backed by criminal law sanctions—for a broadly-defined array of circumstances in which the president determines that U.S. national interests are at stake. (For a deep-ish dive into IEEPA, check out Episode 133 of the National Security Law Podcast). When the president wants to use this authority, he first must issue a public proclamation of a “national emergency” on a particular situation or subject, under the National Emergencies Act. This opens the door to using IEEPA itself. Under IEEPA, the president (or the executive branch entity acting on the president’s behalf through a further delegation) can investigate, regulate or simply prohibit—that is, ban—an array of activities involving a sanctioned entity (including payments, notably) and can freeze the assets of that entity (thereby prohibiting all dealings with the foreign entity’s interests in those assets). Sometimes this authority is exercised by the president only to the extent of creating a specific sanctions regime, with the actual sanctioning of particular entities to be done at a later date (if it is done at all). At other times, the creation of the sanctions regime is accompanied by at least an initial set of designations of specific entities.

I don’t blame you if you’re not a lawyer and skipped all that, but, yes, TikTok can be banned from US commerce. Professor Chesney also explains the first option – forcing a sale – as well.

The interesting part is this, from the WaPo article:

Earlier in the day, the president had been considering an order that would force China’s ByteDance to sell off the U.S. portion of TikTok over national security concerns, but Trump later emphasized to reporters traveling with him that he did not support a deal to let a U.S. company buy TikTok’s U.S. operations.

Microsoft is still the leading contender to purchase TikTok if a deal goes through, according to people familiar with the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

I suspect the matter is more delicate than the WaPo article suggests.

Trump is currently nettled concerning China because he views, wrongly or not, the Covid-19 pandemic as their fault. The WaPo article says as much.

If TikTok is forced to sell, a sale could be into a competitive market. That is, there may be several bidders for the TikTok entity, forcing the price so high that the current owners, ByteDance of China, would make out like bandits. That might lead to propaganda from China about Trump’s “assistance” in securing such a huge profit, which would be a lovely return volley in this tennis match. Trump would lose face^[1] inside China as well as within the United States – he’ll be seen as being outfoxed by the Chinese.

I also included the paragraph on Microsoft being a prime bidder because Microsoft sits on a pile of cash, and if Microsoft did buy TikTok, that would bring Microsoft into the social media market. And Facebook might not like that. While Facebook has, of late, interfered with right wing propaganda, by and large they remain one of the largest purveyors of right wing propaganda in the social media space. On balance, Trump or his allies may not wish to alarm Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, by presenting him with a well-funded competitor with a long history of success. The Zuck might suddenly implement more stringent filters on right wing propaganda, and that would not work in Trump’s favor.

In order to avoid all of that, a simple ban on doing business must instead be used. It doesn’t stop a sale in and of itself, but it does decrease the urgency. And a sale might be banned, even if it was done on fallacious grounds.

I suspect the Trump Administration is trying to perform a highwire act in which the lead aerial performer has proven himself dreadfully inadequate in the past. Can they pull this one off?

¹ Wait, Trump still has face to lose?

Deicide:

Deicide is the killing (or the killer) of a god. The concept may be used for any act of killing a god, including a life-death-rebirth deity who is killed and then resurrected. [Wikipedia]

I’ve used it here and here.

Dammit, I really need to POOP!

For a modern take on the ancient gladiators of yore, Guns Akimbo (2019) isn’t a bad take on the emptiness that supposedly afflicts every new generation. Miles is its embodiment, a meek programmer at a company that creates kids’ games in order to “suck money out of the wallets of their parents.”

Then he stumbles into a game for adults, games that are a lot tougher.

A lot bloodier.

Rather … final.

And Miles is a pacifist vegetarian.

But when a psychotic is firing guns at you, and you find yourself with guns in your hands, there’s not a lot of choice, no matter how long or far Miles is willing to take the old Dr. Who dictum And lots of running! Discovering that pacifism has little traction against the irrationality that permeates the cosmos in which he finds himself, it eventually becomes clear that the creatures who stand in his way are but the rocks in the wall up which he must clamber to find … God. The God that has ordered his gladiatorial self into an especially bloody Hell (and one that moves very slowly, at that!), purely to collect wealth from those creatures of the original realm who may, themselves, inadvertently cross over.

Because this God wants to infect our world with his sensibilities, one might say.

So what can one say about a person who traverses the moral spectrum from pacifism to … deicide? Is this a story arc or what?!

It’s a little bit too whiney, but more than willing to subvert expectations and make jokes about genitalia guaranteed to leave the guys clutching their crotches. Guns Akimbo starts out wobbly, but, as my Arts Editor said, It didn’t suck nearly as much as I thought it would.

But it’s not as funny as it wishes it were. The humor, if you will, comes from the entire package, and will be found only through gritted teeth.

A lovely mocking has occurred:

Regarding an increase in pedestrian fatalities as ride hailing services have become available, a reader writes:

I think you need to provide some evidence that the number of vehicle trips has increased with ride hailing, and even better, that the increase matches the curve for increased accidents. My bet is that it does not, and that instead, we are actually seeing an increase in accidents per mile driven or per trip.

From the study summary:

Ride-hailing services also seem to have increased a number of driving-related costs, including vehicle miles traveled, gasoline consumption, and traffic congestion, as measured by annual hours on the road. These increases likely are derived in part from the number of ride-hailing vehicles on the road. Drivers are subsidized by their companies to remain on the road even during lulls in demand. An increase in ride hailing was also associated with a dip in the use of public transportation in large metro areas, suggesting that some riders substitute ride-hailing services for public transportation.

However, they provide neither numbers nor graph. It’s unsurprising that, whichever metric is best to use, it has increased: drivers and their companies want revenue, and you won’t get it sitting at home or in a bar.

A reader responds to the news that spiky neural networks perform better if periodically fed noise, thought to be the equivalent of sleep:

I think the researchers are on to something there. We know that we have perceptual flaws, especially visual. But we also know that it works nearly perfectly most of the time, filling in the missing gaps of the blind spot, etc. in near real time. Sleep may be just the thing that allows our systems to continue working at near optimum.

It’s not entirely clear how, at least to me, although I speculate that it fuzzes out the need for precision which would otherwise become too demanding for real world interactions.

But what do I know? I’ve never worked with a neuromorphic processor, and probably never will.

What can it ever be? NewScientist (20 June 2020, paywall) has the answer:

A team led by Goetz Laible at AgResearch, a government-owned research institute in New Zealand, wanted to find out if it could make cetuximab [a bowel cancer drug] at higher volumes more cheaply – by genetically engineering goats to produce the protein in their milk.

First, the researchers inserted genes into goat embryos that carried instructions on how to make cetuximab in the mammary glands. Female goats were then impregnated with the embryos and their genetically modified offspring were born five months later.

The offspring were all female and once they began lactating, they were able to produce about 10 grams of cetuximab in each litre of their milk. Since goats produce about 800 litres of milk every year, this means that each could manufacture multiple kilograms of cetuximab in a year.

“It’s a lot more economic to make cetuximab in animals because their mammary glands can produce large amounts of proteins,” says Laible. The genetic modification didn’t appear to affect the goats’ health, he adds.

Clever – and you can eat the factory once it’s exhausted, too. Purity and efficacy of the produced drug still need to be evaluated, but it sounds really cool, especially if it’s a heritable trait and doesn’t upset the goats.

Over the last week some more Senate campaign polls have been released, which I’ve been gathering up for one big post.

NBC News/Marist, via The Detroit News, has found that in Arizona, Kelly (D) leads appointed incumbent McSally (R) 53% to 41%. That 12 point lead is well outside the margin of error of 4.1 points. Public Policy Polling has similar results of 51% to 42%, CNN gives Kelly a 50-43 point lead, and Morning Consult gives Kelly a huge lead of 16 points, 52 percent to 36 percent. That last one sounds like an outlier.

NBC News is reporting another NBC News/Marist poll finds Democratic Senate candidate Cal Cunningham leads GOP Sen. Thom Tillis by 9 points, with the backing of 50 percent of voters, compared to Tillis’ 41 percent. Public Policy Polling has Cunningham up by 8 points, 48% to 40%. Morning Consult has a similar lead for Cunningham, 46-37%. It’d be more comforting to see Cunningham solidly break the 50% barrier.

In Maine, Public Policy Polling has the least loyal GOP Senator, Susan Collins, still behind State Rep and Speaker of the House Sara Gideon (D), 42%-47%; a Colby College poll gives Gideon a 44-39% lead. In past elections, Collins has won her seat by comfortable 20-30 point margins, so this is an unfamiliar position for Collins. Her current TrumpScore of 67.5%, the lowest of all GOP Senators, doesn’t cover up the fact that she voted against conviction in the impeachment trial of the President, asserting “I believe that the president has learned from this case.” Her lack of judgment and her vote to confirm Justice Kavanaugh appears to be coming back to haunt her.

OnTheIssues: John James.

Michigan’s Senator Gary Peters (D) retains a 10 point lead over challenger John James (R), according to a Fox News Poll, while Morning Consult suggests a larger lead, 49 percent to 35 percent., and CNN gives Peters a big 54-38% lead. Recent reports indicate the Trump campaign, down 49-41 in the Fox News poll, has withdrawn from the state. Will this help or hurt James, a businessman and former Army Ranger Army veteran who is Ranger-qualified (this is not the same as being an Army ranger – my mistake)? It’s not clear to me that James is a Trump devotee; his front campaign page does not mention the President, and OnTheIssue’s analysis of the scant data available on James (he’s never held elective office) suggests he’s not a hard right conservative. So far, it does not appear the independents of Michigan have found him appealing. It may be that James has chosen a poor time to be a Republican candidate. Running for a top legislative position without prior experience may also be working against him, as the Amateur ethic finally appears to be flaming out.

There is no question of amateurs in Colorado, where former Gov Hickenlooper (D) is leading incumbent Senator Gardner (R) 48-42%, according to Morning Consult. At the beginning of the campaign season – the day after the November 2018 election, I think – Gardner was considered to be one of the most vulnerable Republican incumbents, so his showing against a popular former Governor is actually fairly credible. His TrumpScore is 89.1%, but it’s worth noting that’s over two Congresses; in the current Congress, it’s a much lower 82.9%. He may not be competitive with Senator Collins of Maine in disloyalty to the President, and he did not vote for conviction in the Trump Impeachment proceedings, but claims of independence from Trump cannot quite be dismissed out of hand. Trump is not mentioned on the front page of Gardner’s Senate Campaign page, either. Gardner is one of the most likely incumbents to score a come-from-behind win, even in relatively liberal Colorado, but he has some climbing to do, and has to hope Hickenlooper stumbles.

In Georgia, incumbent Senator Perdue (R) has a lead over challenger Jon Ossoff (D), an investigative journalist with no elective offices to his credit, but it’s not a big lead, according to Morning Consult: 45 percent to 42 percent, which is just within the margin of error. Ossoff does have a history of big fund-raising, which may make for a hair-raising campaign over the next 90-odd days. Perdue’s colleague, appointed incumbent Senator Loeffler (R), faces a special election in the form of a jungle primary, and the only news I’ve seen is that Loeffler’s taking a lot of flak from fellow Republican Rep Doug Collins, a Trump favorite. While Loeffler is unlikely to win reelection, a Collins replacement would be no better.

In South Carolina, ALG Research, for LindseyMustGo.com, finds incumbent Senator Graham (R) ahead of challenger Jaime Harrison, 49-45%. I’m taking this opportunity to extend my condolences to Senator Graham in his loss in the Trump Lickspittle contest, as I believe former Senator and AG Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, through his pledges of allegiance to the disdainful President Trump, must be declared the victor.

Right here in Minnesota, despite the frantic warning emails from incumbent Senator Tina Smith (D) that challenger and former Rep Jason Lewis (R) is within striking distance, Public Policy Polling gives Senator Smith a comfortable 48%-39% lead. This is in line with the special election Smith won in 2018 as the appointed incumbent, beating hockey name Karin Housley by 11 points, and there’s little reason to believe that Lewis will close the distance before election day.

New Hampshire’s incumbent Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D) doesn’t yet have a definitive Republican opponent, but a recent University of New Hampshire poll suggests it may not matter – she holds double-digit leads and more than 50% support over both of her most likely opponents. In my original coverage of this seat, I suggested this might be a race to watch, but it appears Shaheen has matters well in hand.

Finally, the Senate is seen as a critical piece of political landscape by both parties, and Senator McConnell (R), Majority Leader, doesn’t much care for President Trump’s feelings, according to this CNN report:

Sen. Mitch McConnell is allowing Republican Senate candidates to do whatever it takes to salvage their campaigns ahead of what Republicans increasingly fear could be a devastating election for their party.

In recent weeks, the Senate majority leader has become so concerned over Republicans losing control of the Senate that he has signaled to vulnerable GOP senators in tough races that they could distance themselves from the President if they feel it is necessary, according to multiple senior Republicans including a source close to McConnell.

As the CNN report notes, this will be a tightrope for GOP candidates, whether incumbents or challengers. So long as President Trump retains his popularity, he will be a potent intra-party force, so for those Senators who are perceived to have abandoned him – and that’s an exceedingly short rope – they may find themselves under attack prior to and after the election, win or lose. See former Senator Sessions (R-AL) for a graphic lesson in consequences for a former Trump favorite, who discovered that loyalty to nation coming before loyalty to Trump is not tolerated by Trump – or his base, as Sessions lost the primary to regain his old Senate seat to political novice Tommy Tuberville, and lost badly.

Trump’s base is not composed of politically savvy people, so their basis of assessment is not an informed knowledge of the issues, but simply the view put forward by Trump. When a Republican Senator disagrees, he’s considered a traitor to the Cause. Alternative views need not apply in the Party of RINO-ism. Intolerance is an increasingly strong rule within the Republican Party, and many are discovering that intolerance is an unpleasant way to live when you’re on the wrong end of the spear.

And Trump’s decisions down this stretch run will help decide Senate races. I’m not talking campaign, but simply governance decisions. He’s not built a good base in this area, as his abdication of responsibility has served him ill, as has his denial that the coronavirus was a threat for a very long time. He could come back, though, if he began acting responsibly. Has he started that after that “change in tone” day when he admitted things will get worse before they get better?

Conservative theological pundit Erick Erickson’s mail to non-subscribers suggests bewilderment at the President’s actions:

If the President would pour himself into fighting the virus and give people confidence that he is focused on it, that would buy him time to focus on the economy after calming people down. Polling consistently shows the public prefers President Trump to handle the economy. That same polling shows consistently the public is way more worried about the virus and wants to see that the President is fighting it. Right now, all they seem to see are mixed messages and trolling.

All of this is enough to make one wonder if the President even really wants to win. If he does, why is he online trolling his opponents with claims of delaying the election instead of bunkering down and acting like the man in the arena in charge and command of a national fight against a deadly virus?

There are less than 100 days and a lot at stake. The winners will shape the state legislative and congressional lines for a decade. This is bigger than the presidency. Does the President care?

So long as Erickson does not accept that this President is mentally ill, and the conservative movement is pathologically stricken with religious nonsense and hubristic certainty, he’ll find the President’s actions frustrating and confusing.

I think the President wants to win, but he doesn’t understand how. His perception of the world is that it doesn’t change. After all, he got away with lying and cheating for decades as a real estate developer, and acting is much the same. It worked the first time as a candidate, why not the second?

But the electorate has watched and learned, per polling results. We’ll see just what they’ve learned come election day – or perhaps a couple of weeks later, when all the counting is done. I hope we’re done with this spasm of amateurs, whether they’re CEOs or religious nutcases, as well as arrogant, frantic ideologues, whose false idols (sorry, sorry, that was a stretch) have betrayed them in times of crisis and even times of calm – think the 2017 tax reform bill which did nothing for us, despite GOP predictions.

And Trump doesn’t get it – he doesn’t get that the environment has changed. Hell, the GOP didn’t even create a new platform for this President election cycle, they just crossed out 2016 and wrote in 2020, at Trump’s direction. Change? Change is evil, not to mention uncomfortable.

Deny it.

If you think 2020 can’t get any worse, Dr. Tony Phillips notes a recent study that indicates that a Solar Minimum, which the Sun is enmeshed in currently, doesn’t mean the Sun can’t experience a monstrous case of the hiccups:

“In late October 1903, one of the strongest solar storms in modern history hit Earth,” say the lead authors of the study, Hisashi Hayakawa (Osaka University, Japan) and Paulo Ribeiro (Coimbra University, Portugal). “The timing of the storm interestingly parallels where we are now–near Solar Minimum just after a weak solar cycle.”

The 1903 event wasn’t always recognized as a great storm. Hayakawa and colleagues took an interest in it because of what happened when the storm hit. In magnetic observatories around the world, pens scrabbling across paper chart recorders literally flew offscale, overwhelmed by the disturbance. That’s the kind of thing superstorms do.
So, the researchers began to scour historical records for clues, and they found four magnetic observatories in Portugal, India, Mexico and China where the readings were whole. Using those data they calculated the size of the storm.

“It was big,” says Hayakawa. “The 1903 storm ranks 6th in the list of known geomagnetic storms since 1850, just below the extreme storm of March 1989, which blacked out the province of Quebec.”

Today’s solar face, from which sunspots are virtually absent. A red herring, I presume.

Communications were scrambled – in 1903, meaning telegraph operators were unable to easily communicate with each other. Telephones became unworkable: In Chicago, voltages in telephone lines spiked to 675 volts–“enough to kill a man” according to headlines in the Chicago Sunday Tribune. That was annoying and maybe disturbing back then. Today? We might experience country-wide electrical grid failures, satellites providing critical services might be irremediably damaged, during the worst of it, the Internet might disappear – and provide a reason to dismiss Elon Musk’s irritating, to astronomers, scheme to use satellites for the Internet.

Perhaps Phillips is a bit of a drama queen, but the changes of this sort of thing happening are non-zero. Just as were Trump’s chances of becoming President – barely non-zero.