Monthly Archives: September 2020

The saddest thing about any man is that he be ignorant, and the most exciting thing is that he knows.

Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, King of Wessex from 871 to c. 886 CE and King of the Anglo-Saxons from c. 886 to 899 CE.

Noted in an episode of Tasting History.

Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) had a brief period in which right-wing punditry celebrated Florida’s relatively low Covid-19 infection rate earlier this year. Then, tragically, his state leapt to the top of the infection lists, and his refusal to follow expert advice, and the possibility that numbers were being manipulated, exposed him as another Republican incompetent, despite his Harvard Law School degree.

But he’s not letting that stop him from trying to prop up his political patron, President Trump. Florida is easily one of the most competitive States this cycle, as it is often is, and with the black community an anchor for the Biden campaign, Republicans are frantic to split it. One tactic is the attempt to put rapper Republican Kanye West on the ballot in a number of states. But another is  DeSantis’ nomination of immigrant Jamaican American Judge Renatha Francis to the Florida Supreme Court, which would make her the only black immigrant woman on the Court. There’s only one little problem with his nomination, which is part of the ploy:

The court ruled on Aug. 27 that Francis is not qualified because she has not been a member of the Florida Bar for 10 years, a constitutional requirement, and concluded that the governor violated the Constitution by attempting to prospectively appoint someone who was not eligible to hold the job. Francis will not have been a member of the Florida Bar for 10 years until Sept. 24 and only then is she eligible to serve on the state’s highest court. He appointed her on May 26. [Miami Herald]

So will DeSantis appoint someone else from the list of judges he’s constrained to select from, a list that mysteriously and improperly had Francis’ name on it?

The high stakes legal battle continued into this week as the court gave the governor until Wednesday to answer why it should not order him to immediately appoint someone who was qualified. The governor had asked the court to reconsider the ruling but the court rejected that request and, in a unanimous ruling late Tuesday, said that the petitioner, state Rep. Geraldine Thompson, could amend her lawsuit to recommend a remedy for the governor to choose another candidate.

Rep Thompson may have saved the State from costly embarrassment. Suppose Francis had been made a Supreme Court Justice, began participating in decisions – and then someone else sued, citing Francis’ ineligibility, when a decision went the wrong way?

What happens to those decisions?

What happens to Judge Francis? Is this a sophisticated attempt to oust her from her current position?

But Thompson, herself Black, has put her fellow Black Democrat community leaders in a bind, because they badly want that seat:

Francis, who is Black, also attended [DeSantis’ tiz-fit], surrounded by Black legislators and local elected officials from Broward County, most of them Democrats. They used the event to urge Thompson, of Windemere, to withdraw the lawsuit.

“Given the current setup of the court’s position, we risk losing the chance to have a Black justice on the Supreme Court,’’ said state Rep. Dotie Joseph, a North Miami Democrat and a lawyer. “Please drop this lawsuit. And instead, direct our energies on bringing forth real reform on things that we can agree on, like criminal justice reform in light of the Black Lives Matter movement.“

No, no, no! I sympathize with their position, but they shouldn’t be advocating for breaking the law. At this point, DeSantis is holding a hammer and these leaders need to decide which finger they least want to keep, because he’s going to crush one of them.

I suggest they stop urging Thompson to withdraw her suit and accept that Judge Francis is not yet qualified for the Florida Supreme Court. In the face of dubious Republican behaviors, having a reputation for being law-abiding is not a bad rep at all. Communicate to the community members the importance of following the law, and to remember, when entering the ballot booth, that it was DeSantis that tried to lure the Black Democrats into committing a crime, and not allow that to split the community.

And then, in 2022, go out and win the gubernatorial election. Elections have consequences, and this is one of them. Stop barking for an illegal position and remember that DeSantis is Trump’s closest political ally, and thus, by Clyburn’s Dictum, no friend to the Black community. And don’t let this carrot, this poisoned apple, this ploy, lure people into voting Trump just because they didn’t get their Judge onto the Supreme Court. It would be only a symbolic victory, and this nation cannot stand another symbolic victory.

Another anti-Trump ad:

South Carolinians have voted for Lindsey before, but this is the first time they truly know who he is.

DISCLAIMER: This video contains imagery not suitable for all viewers. pic.twitter.com/G2WzxmxCDJ

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) September 9, 2020

It’s hard to know what to say, other than Yeah, that’s excellent, because it’s simply so sublimely accurate..

The recent release of the tapes Bob Woodward made of his conversations with President Trump concerning the Covid-19 pandemic are sparking quite the uproar, an uproar to which I could not pay much attention to yesterday. Heather Cox Richardson has provided a lovely summary of the tapes and its impact, though. I particularly liked this:

When this story broke, Trump immediately tried to reassure his base by releasing yet more names of people he would consider for any new Supreme Court seats (the list is now more than 40 people long), and told reporters that perhaps he had misled Americans because he is “a cheerleader for this country.” Trump defenders were left trying to find someone to blame for the recorded interviews. Apparently, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham helped to persuade Trump to talk to the famous journalist and tonight, Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson blamed Graham for the debacle, implying he had deliberately undercut the president.

I wonder if Carlson made Graham’s rival for the South Carolina Senate seat Graham currently occupies, Cal Cunningham (D-SC), very happy. There’s nothing better than seeing your political enemies rending each other, and while, in a sane world, Carlson’s influence would be negative, today he’s going to have an impact on the Trumpian base. While the presence of Trump’s name on the ticket in South Carolina will alleviate the impact, assuming the base is still irresponsibly in “I don’t care!” mode, Carlson will still have an impact.

In other words, my second favorite lickspittle may have a hard time time climbing out of this hole.

Rumor has it, gentlemen, that she’ll rip out our eyeballs in the middle of the night if we don’t give her what she wants, so, wot’s wot and let’s do as she says.

Radioactive (2019) is a fictionalized biography of famed scientist Dr. Marie Curie that portrays Dr. Curie as being, in my opinion, mildly autistic. It opens with the Polish immigrant, currently Marie Skłodowska and unmarried, is finding her scientific resources limited, and tries, in her eclectic way, to wangle more of those resources for her work. As she receives rejection by a sexist scientific community, she meets Pierre Curie. He admits to fascination with her work and herself.

We’re off, then, on a whirlwind tour of their romance, their work, and their lives. Nothing is explored particularly deeply, but in a way this is a relief; deep dives sometimes end up drowning the audience. This biography is intent on spanning her life, loves, and challenges from her early career until her premature death from the cancer caused by her Nobel-award winning work on radiation. Whether it’s fighting for her share of the awards, or sleeping with her assistant after the death of her husband, it’s all here.

It can be hard to see into the head of an obsessed person, particularly those obsessed with science, and so it is here. You will not find fainting maidens or crusading lionesses – but you will find one woman ready to ignore anyone who doesn’t stand forth to help her on her quest for knowledge. Her attitude is the one that can be frightening, especially if you see it in a loved one, because it’s the sort of thing that may lead to Pyrrhic victories.

It’s not badly done, it’s just that I didn’t really connect with the story, being a lazy slob and all.

As this dreary day comes to a close, here’s a splash of color from my Arts Editors’ lone sunflower:

The two biggest countries in the world seem to be nerving themselves for another shove-about:

India and China accused each other Tuesday of firing warning shots during a confrontation the day before at their disputed border in a marked escalation of tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbors.

It was the first time in decades that both sides said shots were fired at the frontier, where long-standing, mutual protocols prohibit the use of firearms. [WaPo]

Two nuclear armed powers with a lot of pride at stake – and a lot of people to potentially throw into a war. But the next paragraph is where the red flag really went for me:

On Lawfare, Paul Rosenzweig cogitates on the problems of perpetually “acting” heads of agencies in the Federal Government in the face of President Trump’s extensive use of same. I’m not sure he has severe enough consequences for an ill-behaved President:

-Reform of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act to prevent perpetual “acting” appointments. Vacancies happen. Not every political position within the executive branch is filled all the time. And the Senate confirmation process for political appointees is not always expedient. As a result, through the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1988 (FVRA), Congress provided general authority enabling the president to temporarily fill vacancies in high-level federal government positions. The law also establishes rules for the appointment of such temporary officers. When not superseded by other statutes, the act specifies whom the president can appoint to fill a vacancy and how long that individual can serve.

The Trump administration has exploited this authority to avoid the Senate confirmation process while placing preferred individuals in key positions. The Department of Homeland Security has not seen a confirmed secretary for more than 500 days (the longest such vacancy in American history). Instead, three acting secretaries have led the wayward agency and the president has only recently announced his intent to nominate a full-time leader. Similarly, the Defense Department was run by an acting head for 203 days. And the director of national intelligence position was filled by an acting official for 188 days, most recently by Richard Grenell, a Trump loyalist with little intelligence experience. In a particularly egregious case, the administration rearranged the line of succession in the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to install Ken Cuccinelli as acting director of USCIS under the FVRA, a move that the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled unlawful.

The FVRA should be modified in at least two ways. First, current law allows the president to appoint anyone holding a Senate-confirmed position in the executive branch as the new acting official of any agency. The law should be modified to make clear that no individual may be appointed to serve as acting head of an agency if his or her senatorial confirmation is for a position in a different agency. Second, the law should deny salary funding to any appointee after a fixed period of time. Other measures (such as limits on the qualifications of who may serve in a temporary position) may also be appropriate.

Frankly, denying salary to a maliciously motivated “acting” appointment is little more than using a peashooter on a charging elephant. Even if you’re good enough to catch the elephant in the eye, it doesn’t matter.

In other words, there’s little here to slow down a person who is independently wealthy, or a President whose allies, or the President themselves, is willing to financially support that person – and it’s not hard to see that happening in this instance. A reliable rubber stamp can be hard to find.

But the real problem here is that the focus of punishment is on the person who is leading the Agency without approval, not the origin of the wrong-doing, the President. Punishment, if it must come, must be inflicted on a President who refuses to run the government in line with “best practices”, and who may, in fact, be a malevolent actor.

I’m not sure what that punishment might be, unfortunately. I have no doubt that President Trump either suffers from mental illness or is unduly constrained by foreign forces, and that differentiates him, I believe, from every single prior President – which, in combination with an absolutely subservient and groveling GOP, is why we’ve never seen this problem before.

I suspect that, without actual change to the Constitution, punishing the President with anything less than impeachment & conviction will not pass muster with the SCOTUS, and that’s understandable. But it may prove to be a terrible strain on America if we ever have to go through this again, because, frankly, Rosenzweig’s suggestion, while headed the right way, is not going to make much headway.

But through no fault of the Democrats.

President Donald Trump launched an unprecedented public attack against the leadership of the US military on Monday, accusing them of waging wars to boost the profits of defense manufacturing companies.

“I’m not saying the military’s in love with me — the soldiers are, the top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy,” Trump told reporters at a White House news conference.

Trump’s extraordinary comments come as several defense officials tell CNN relations between the President and Pentagon leadership are becoming increasingly strained. [CNN/Politics]

It’s about the last thing most Republicans – even some of those who are Trump cultists – are willing to espouse, after support for abortion; they have steadfastly been the Party of War for as long as I can remember.

And if the Republicans were to actually take advantage of this misstep by Trump, they could perhaps save their bacon in the upcoming elections. Oh, they won’t regain the House, but they might possibly retain the Senate.

All they need is for Senate Majority Leader McConnell (R-KY) to call Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and ask her to deliver Articles of Impeachment to the Senate as rapidly as possible, secretly notify Chief Justice Roberts that proceedings are imminent, and convict Trump in a day.

That might convince Independents that Republicans really aren’t a pack of third-rate politicians. Which is bullshit, of course, but the average American voter won’t realize that.

But will they have the balls to do it? No. Briefly, Trump is their product, and their rejection of their own product is still a step too far for most Senate Republicans. Senators Romney and, possibly, Murkowsi might vote for conviction, but too many of the rest cannot repudiate the processes which put them in the Senate.

So this latest incident will piss off the military a bit more, and then be forgotten.

I’d love to replicate this study in Minneapolis/St. Paul:

Billboards advertising unhealthy food are concentrated in poorerareas and areas with a higher proportion of overweight children in Liverpool, UK. These findings may also apply across the country.

Using a combination of artificial intelligence and street-view images, Mark Green and his colleagues at the University of Liverpool mapped the content and geographical location of more than 10,000 outdoor adverts in the city. …

He cycled on Liverpool’s streets between 14 and 18 January, wearing a 360-degree camera that was programmed to take images twice a second.

The camera collected more than 26,600 street-level images. To analyse them, the researchers first used an existing machine-learning algorithm that was trained to isolate advertisements from the surrounding environment. [NewScientist]

Although whether there’s data on the neighborhoods of overweight children around here is not known to me.

The unequal exposure to junk food advertising may result from the least deprived areas in Liverpool being leafy suburbs with few billboards, says Green. This trend is likely to be repeated in other cities. The team also found a concentration of food, gambling and alcohol ads around university student areas.

One of the challenges of data analysis is discovering if a trend is due to deliberate human choice, or other realities.

An interesting advance in materials science:

A new artificial material effectively cannot be cut, holding out the promise of lightweight but cut-proof bike locks, security doors and protective clothing.

Its inventors embedded ceramic spheres in aluminium foam to create a material that couldn’t be cut with angle grinders, power drills or water jet cutters. They dubbed it Proteus after the shape-shifting Greek god, for the way the material metamorphosised in different ways to defend against attacks. [NewScientist]

OK, so you can’t cut it. How does it hold up to a blowtorch?

From the European Southern Observatory:

First ever image of a multi-planet system around a Sun-like star.

First ever image of a multi-planet system around a Sun-like star (uncropped, with annotations)

I’ve never seen so much unintended height differential between characters!

Manhandled (1949) is a mediocre whodunit that does a credible job on the front end and then wastes it on the back end. Author and cash-strapped husband Alton has been bothered for weeks with a dream that he’s beating his wife, a rich socialite, to death with a bottle of perfume. He takes his problem to a psychiatrist, who urgently contacts the wife for an interview. She shows up in the company of an architect, who is designing a beach house for her; she has little time for the absurd dream.

But the psychiatrist’s assistant has a rather loose, flappy mouth, telling her wannabe boyfriend, a former police officer who was removed from the force and is now a private detective, about this unusual case, and mentioning the expensive diamonds the woman wore to the appointment. This smarmy ex-cop takes advantage of her to snatch her keys to the office and make a copy of them.

The next morning, the wife is dead, bludgeoned to death in her apartment with, yes, a bottle of expensive perfume. And the ex-cop is fencing her jewels.

Who did it? Unfortunately, people are exonerated far too easily. The husband, a dislikable character, took sleeping pills and couldn’t have done it; the maid and butler confirm that and have their own alibis; the architect, who is honestly a nobody, is also quickly proven to be elsewhere.

Which leaves the assistant and the ex-cop.

There’s a lot missing here. Some characters seem to exist without histories or futures. The husband might be an author, but will he ever publish another book? And why the dream? The architect, who seems unaffected by the murder? The insurance agent, who pops up out of nowhere and gets in the police’s way? The police? The ex-cop?

The psychiatrist?

The mysteries are somewhat fun to figure out, but there’s a lack of connection to the characters that keep this movie on the B-list. It’s not awful, and when one of the characters is purposefully crushed by a car against a wall in a back alley, it’s almost surreal. Some of it is clever, but in the end, it just doesn’t click.

A nature show with a drunk narrator.

I’ve been suggesting for years that the Republican Party, because of the use of the internal RINO! (Republican In Name Only, as in cries of) tactic to drive out members who are moderate or stand in the way of the ambitious, will eventually lose enough members that the party will become irrelevant, even extinct. It’s like a cancer, cancerous cells killing off healthy cells through deprivation of resources, all in their frantic race to survive forever. Thus, as the host dies, ends the cancer, and so, too, with the Republicans.

And, perhaps, some Republicans are beginning to realize it.

… some Republicans are privately fretting about their own lot, worried that the extremes of their party will drive them into extinction.

“I hope these trends reverse, but I don’t see them reversing without very principled and strong leadership emerging from those who have the responsibility to step forward and say enough is enough,” said former congressman Charles W. Boustany Jr. (R-La.), who said his onetime colleagues appear to be “cowed into silence” instead of pushing back on the direction the party is going.

Admittedly, the provenance of the plural pronoun is somewhat ambiguous, but whether it points at the GOP composite entity, or the “moderate” Republicans, many of whom were the far-right radicals just a few short years ago, it’s much the same thing: a death sentence, not yet executed but direly threatening the inhabitants of the famed epistemic bubble, a bubble which cuts them off from communications and judgments from the outside world. That glass wall, so easily pierced, keeps them from realizing how perverse they’ve become – and how this appears to be ending for them over the next few years.

Republicans, however, aren’t technically moving right as much as they are becoming more Trump-like and embracing controversial positions. This summer, each primary appeared to be a race to convince voters who was closer to Trump, who supported him first or who loves him most.

Whether or not they had reasoned positions, first comes their allegiance to Trump and the bubble. Outside is chaos, inside is order. Trump and his incompetence, his barstool blowhard-ism, is the clarion call for those whose views on important issues are often incoherent, and cannot understand why they’ve not been accorded respect and power before now.

Well, reality has already slapped them across the face, once, but not as hard as I’d think 180,000+ dead would be. We’ve seen certain senior Republicans advance the view that the pandemic toll is really only 9,000, the number of death certificates that list Covid-19 as the sole cause of death. It’s trivial enough to refute: a “co-morbidity” such as diabetes does not consign them to a short lifetime. I have a friend who’s been diabetic for 40+ years. But if he caught Covid-19, he might be dead within a week.

Those Republicans should resign in embarrassment.

But that’s how they try to avoid the reality that they are unequal to the task of government: confusion, mendacity, distraction. Welcome to the bubble.

Vote Biden, and vote early.

When the ornamental grass is getting hairy.

Soon to be flattened by … snow.

Some random shots over the last couple of weeks.

Best I could do with a smartphone.

Here’s an orb weaver that I surprised at the back faucet.

I don’t think he’s smiling.

I rather like this bee supping on our garlic chives. Came out well.

Emily Atkin of Heated notes how the real danger missed by all of us drama addicts in the wake of Hurricane Laura:

People in Southwest Louisiana are suffering in the wake of Hurricane Laura, the strongest storm to ever hit the state, and the fifth-strongest storm to ever hit the country.

Though not as catastrophic as expected, the Category 4 storm killed at least 16 people, and insured losses are estimated to be between $8 billion and $12 billion. That’s staggering considering Laura’s path avoided major population centers like New Orleans and Houston. …

Living in a city with these conditions would be dangerous on its own, particularly for poor, elderly, or sick populations. But Southwest Louisiana residents have also had another dangerous condition to deal with since the storm passed: relentless extreme heat. Since Hurricane Laura hit, a relentless heat wave has been choking the region. That extreme and potentially deadly heat continues today [August 31], according to the National Weather Service.

It’s not hyberbole to call this deadly. More Americans die each year from the effects of heat and heat-related illness than any other form of severe weather, according to the National Weather Service. The heat index in Laura-plagued regions could reach up to 112 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday, the NWS’s advisory said. It added: “Hot temperatures and high humidity may cause heat illnesses, especially where power outages have occurred.”

How to highlight heatwaves? Up here in Minnesota, anything over 90° gets the the local meteorologists barking, acting as if we’re a bunch of wilting dandelions, and that can be true when we also get hit by a wave of moisture, such as, say, from a Gulf of Mexico hurricane. This summer we’ve seen a number of days with abnormally high dewpoints, days that reminded me of childhood visits to Gulfport, Mississippi.

But Atkins is also reporting on a proposal to name heatwaves. No doubt a lot of people will be skeptical, right up until they discover that a lot of people are talking about how they lost their parents to Heatwave Doug. Names will function as a marker and a warning to those in affected areas – and reminders that heat is a result of anthropogenic climate change.

So, add together the wreckage in the trail of the Iowa derecho, and the wildfires in California, and right now we seem to be silently reeling.

In case you’ve recently heard of the South Atlantic Anomaly, and was wondering if it’s a precursor to the rumored flip of the Earth’s magnetic poles, well, sorry to  disappoint your inner drama queen, but probably not:

“Our study provides the first long term analysis of the magnetic field in this region dating back millions of years,” Yael Engbers, lead author of the study, said in a statement. “It reveals that the anomaly in the magnetic field in the South Atlantic is not a one-off, similar anomalies existed eight to 11 million years ago.”

Researchers studied rocks from 34 volcanic eruptions that occurred at Saint Helena between 8 and 11 million years ago. When volcanic rocks cool down, small grains of iron-oxide in them get magnetized, preserving the direction and strength of the Earth’s magnetic field at that time and place.

Earth’s magnetic field lines run from south to north. The geomagnetic records from the rocks show that the magnetic field at Saint Helena has pointed in different directions during past eruptions. This suggests that the magnetic field in this region has been unstable for millions of years.

Earth’s magnetic field changes in strength and direction over time. It is believed that these fluctuations may eventually trigger a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field. However, given that the magnetic field at the region of the South Atlantic Anomaly has been unstable for several million years, it is not likely associated with any such impending reversal, according to the statement. [Space.com]

Yeah, I had my hopes up, too, but it appears that this is not the big signal we were hoping for.

Oh, you weren’t hoping for it? Terribly sorry. I hope I haven’t upset you.

Much.

(I should write a Fringe Play some day, just to get all this smart-alecky dialogue out of my head. See, my drain-plug is stuck and it’s building up over time … or was it space … or maybe Kentucky …)

From NewScientist (18 July 2020, but recently received):

Making an artificial intelligence less biased makes it less accurate, according to conventional wisdom, but that may not be true. A new way of testing AIs could help us build algorithms that are both fairer and more effective.

Excuse me, but isn’t bias a cause of inaccuracy?

Years and years ago, when I first heard about Kaggle, a then-independent web site for developing data science / machine learning skills, I enjoyed messing about. Without formal training or the free time to work on algorithms, I never did much more than play with their Titanic survivor challenge, but it was fun.

Nowadays, I get mail like this:

The Connectivity Map, a project within the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, together with the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH) brings this challenge to you with the goal to improve existing algorithms for drug development by looking at a cell’s Mechanism of Action (MoA).

In this competition, you will have access to a unique dataset that combines gene expression and cell viability data. The data is based on a new technology that measures human cells’ responses to drugs in a pool of 100 different cell types. If successful, you’ll develop an algorithm to predict a compound’s MoA given its cellular signature; thus helping scientists advance the drug discovery process.

Prizes
$30,000 – Total prize pool

Maybe I’m profoundly ignorant, but, quite honestly, improving or replacing those algorithms could lead to millions or even billions of dollars in profits, years down the road.

And a $30,000 prize pool seems cheap in comparison.

I think it’d be far more fair if Kaggle, or the sponsors of the competition, guaranteed the winners a part of the action. Probably some percentage of revenue generated by their work, if that’s measurable.

Although, honestly, it also sounds like a wellspring of lawsuits.

But the entire competition, as it sits now, feels like a scam.

For those following the side show, Kanye West’s Presidential Campaign has suffered two legal reversals, in Virginia and Arizona, but for differing reasons. First, Virginia:

A Circuit Court judge ordered state officials to remove independent presidential candidate Kanye West from the Virginia ballot Thursday, granting an emergency order sought by two voters who said they were duped into helping the rapper-entrepreneur qualify for the ballot.

Circuit Court Judge Joi Jeter Taylor made the ruling in a lawsuit filed this week by Matthan Wilson and Bryan Wright, who sued state elections officials for putting West on the ballot but faced their only opposition from West, whose attorney petitioned to intervene in the case. [WaPo]

In other words, West supporters cheated in order to get the required signatures. A bit mundane, compared to Arizona:

West has already qualified to appear on the ballot in several states, including Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Tennessee and Utah. He didn’t qualify in Ohio, Montana, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and other states, though he has filed lawsuits challenging some of those decisions.

Earlier this week, Arizona resident Rasean Clayton filed a lawsuit for West to be barred from appearing on the ballot. The lawsuit accused the rapper of serving as an election spoiler and argued that state law barred him from running as an independent candidate because West is a registered Republican. …

Despite those claims, Clayton’s attorneys said West remains a registered Republican. They also said nearly all of West’s electors — who would cast electoral college votes if he were to win — were Republicans until they changed registrations to independent on Monday and Tuesday. [azcentral]

Not only dishonesty, but an interesting accusation of being an election spoiler. This is a legal thing? No statute is cited, of course. On the other hand, having two Republicans running for President on the same ballot does sound dubious.

Especially if they were both marked as Republicans.

I keep wondering if the Republican Trump cult strategists understand the hand grenade they’re playing with here, giving moderate Republicans an alternative to voting for Trump. Sure, I know it’s all a fantasy for little old me^[1] to think I know better than professional, if incompetent, strategists, but I can’t help but put myself into a moderate Republican’s shoes, envision the ballot in front of me – and mark it for West rather than Trump.

Or perhaps that’s the entire point to the exercise. Anyone check for links from Kanye West to The Lincoln Project?

¹ OK, so I’m 6′ 3″ and 230 pounds. Work with me here!

Company of the Day: Troubled clothing store Old Navy:

On Tuesday, Old Navy announced it will pay its store employees to work the polls on Election Day. The company, which has 50,000-plus employees, said it is working with Civic Alliance, a nonpartisan coalition of businesses, and Power the Polls, an organization aimed at recruiting 250,000 poll workers “to ensure polling sites stay open and operate efficiently across the country” on Election Day. [Business Insider]

They are not unique, as other companies such as Tory Burch are also paying their employees to work at the polls. However, it’s worth noting for two reasons:

1. Old Navy, in particular, has been in trouble for a few years, so this can be considered to be a promotional move on their part.
2. But, since Republican Party fortunes are generally considered to be in an inverse relationship to the number of votes cast, this can also be considered a repudiation of President Trump and, generally, Republican policies. Without access to the boardrooms of these companies, it’s hard to say exactly what upsets the directors and executives of these companies, but candidates include the incompetency exhibited by the Republican, specific policies, such as deregulation, a general dismay at the business atmosphere engendered by Republican leadership, or even the mercantilistic preferences that have appeared from time to time.

We’ve seen other rebuffs of the Republicans, as a number of spacious sports venues have been made available as polling locations, particularly in states where vote by mail may be suspect. While those moves have, in part, been prompted by their employees that are their lifeblood, i.e., the players, in the Old Navy case the employees don’t have that kind of leverage.

Which makes this more impressive.

I’ve been thinking we’re seeing the disintegrative phase of the American Empire, as President Trump’s clash with the Democrats and, in actual deed, reality, appears to align with Professor’s observation that the disintegrative phase of historical empires includes internecine warfare in the ruling class. Perhaps the corporate world has recognized that leadership by a group determined to hold onto power, as evidenced by rampant gerrymandering, voter suppression, and Trump’s own conflict with reality^[1], will not lead to continued prosperity, but into an uncertain future inherent in having third-raters leading government.

And, by moves such as these, we can evade, or at least delay, that expected internecine warfare. I suppose it’ll depend on how the great American Political Middle responds to extremists on both ends of the spectrum. My ideal ending? A whole lot of white supremacists, boogaloo boys, and allied groups stripped of their weapons and sitting in jail, and, for the extremist left, those who are violent – not many, but there will be a few – jailed, while the intellectual extreme left defanged through debate and fortitude by the liberals and rational conservatives.

Gotta love my fantasies. Why have bad ones?

¹ If I have to give examples of any of this, my reader needs to get caught up on the news on their own time.

Republican strategist Michael Steel doesn’t get it:

This is clearly not the campaign the president wanted to run. Trump’s initial strategy, before the pandemic set in, was clear. Look at his 2020 Super Bowl ad, which seems like a quaint relic from a bygone age. Titled, “Stronger, Safer, More Prosperous,” it lays out the administration’s then-impressive economic record (‘best wage growth in a decade’ ‘sinking unemployment’).

When the president followed good conservative public policy (like tax reform and cutting red tape), the results were excellent. It’s also worth looking back at the ad his team ran during the World Series last fall, which said, “He’s no Mr. Nice Guy, but sometimes it takes a Donald Trump to change Washington.” [The Dispatch]

“If it wasn’t for Covid-19” is the message behind Steele’s post, “then Republican religious tenets would have won the day!”

But it’s simply not true. 20,000 lies would remain to be explained away, and for the stickler who notes that some of those lies are connected to Covid-19 and thus should be excluded, the first 18,000 more or less guarantee that even without Covid-19, the lies would have kept coming. He is what he is.

Their adherence to the Laffer Curve, a primary religious tenet, was proven to be unwise by the mountainous deficits run by the Federal government after the 2017 tax reforms were passed into law.

Source: St. Louis Fed

This long time strategist, who may be seen as instrumental in building a culture which permits a Donald Trump to become President, clearly doesn’t understand that in order to avoid a repeat of the current four-year fiasco, it’s necessary to understand that the entire party, including himself, must take the blame and investigate how to adjust to become, once again, a responsible governance party – and not a party that merely seeks to win and reap the treasure that supposedly comes with it.