Our annual Toys-for-Tots post

A good Christmas can do a lot to take the edge off of a bad year both for children and their parents (and a lot of families are having a bad year). It's the season to pick up a few toys, drop them by the fire station and make some people feel good about themselves during what can be one of the toughest times of the year.

If you're new to the Toys-for-Tots concept, here are the rules I normally use when shopping:

The gifts should be nice enough to sit alone under a tree. The child who gets nothing else should still feel that he or she had a special Christmas. A large stuffed animal, a big metal truck, a large can of Legos with enough pieces to keep up with an active imagination. You can get any of these for around twenty or thirty bucks at Wal-Mart or Costco;*

Shop smart. The better the deals the more toys can go in your cart;

No batteries. (I'm a strong believer in kid power);**

Speaking of kid power, it's impossible to be sedentary while playing with a basketball;

No toys that need lots of accessories;

For games, you're generally better off going with a classic;

No movie or TV show tie-ins. (This one's kind of a personal quirk and I will make some exceptions like Sesame Street);

Look for something durable. These will have to last;

For smaller children, you really can't beat Fisher Price and PlaySkool. Both companies have mastered the art of coming up with cleverly designed toys that children love and that will stand up to generations of energetic and creative play.

*I previously used Target here, but their selection has been dropping over the past few years and it's gotten more difficult to find toys that meet my criteria.

** I'd like to soften this position just bit. It's okay for a toy to use batteries, just not to need them. Fisher Price and PlaySkool have both gotten into the habit of adding lights and sounds to classic toys, but when the batteries die, the toys live on, still powered by the energy of children at play.

"As God as my witness..." is my second favorite Thanksgiving episode line [Repost]

If you watch this and you could swear you remember Johnny and Mr. Carlson discussing Pink Floyd, you're not imagining things. Hulu uses the DVD edit which cuts out almost all of the copyrighted music. [The original link has gone dead, but I was able to find the relevant clip.]

As for my favorite line, it comes from the Buffy episode "Pangs" and it requires a bit of a set up (which is a pain because it makes it next to impossible to work into a conversation).

Buffy's luckless friend Xander had accidentally violated a native American grave yard and, in addition to freeing a vengeful spirit, was been cursed with all of the diseases Europeans brought to the Americas.

Spike: I just can't take all this mamby-pamby boo-hooing about the bloody Indians.
Willow: Uh, the preferred term is...
Spike: You won. All right? You came in and you killed them and you took their land. That's what conquering nations do. It's what Caesar did, and he's not goin' around saying, "I came, I conquered, I felt really bad about it." The history of the world is not people making friends. You had better weapons, and you massacred them. End of story.
Buffy: Well, I think the Spaniards actually did a lot of - Not that I don't like Spaniards.
Spike: Listen to you. How you gonna fight anyone with that attitude?
Willow: We don't wanna fight anyone.
Buffy: I just wanna have Thanksgiving.
Spike: Heh heh. Yeah... Good luck.
Willow: Well, if we could talk to him...
Spike: You exterminated his race. What could you possibly say that would make him feel better? It's kill or be killed here. Take your bloody pick.
Xander: Maybe it's the syphilis talking, but, some of that made sense.

In LA, we're dreaming of a white Thanksgiving

From the Los Angeles Times:

A “broad swath of precipitation” is expected to blanket Los Angeles County and surrounding areas starting early Wednesday, said Kathy Hoxsie, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. The heaviest rain and snow are predicted to fall on Wednesday from the morning to the afternoon. Lighter showers are forecast for Thursday and Friday and could extend into the weekend. Rainfall estimates for this week’s storm call for about 1 to 2 inches for the coast and valleys, and 1.5 to 3 inches for the foothills and at lower elevations of the mountains. A foot or more of snow is possible at higher elevations.

Snow levels are expected to plummet from 4,000 feet on Wednesday to about 2,500 feet by Thursday. This means the 5 Freeway over the Grapevine, along with Highway 14 and Highway 33, will likely see a significant dusting of powder — and with it, the seemingly inevitable traffic snarl, said David Sweet, also a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. 

 For you Easterners out there, the highest elevation in the city is around five thousand feet while the highest point in LA County around ten thousand. A snow level of  2,500 feet will cover a good chunk of land.

Of course, the real action is a ways north of here.

Dangerous winds in the Sierra toppled a semitrailer truck, downed power lines and closed a stretch of highway in Southern California on Monday ahead of a winter storm expected to bring up to 2 feet of snow to mountain tops around Lake Tahoe. U.S. Highway 6 was closed due to downed power lines south of Yosemite National Park near Bishop. A wind gust of 94 mph was reported Monday morning at Mammoth Lakes Airport.

Tuesday Tweets

There was a brief period twenty-plus years ago when graphing calculators made some pedagogical sense, but that period is long over.

I used this calculator in high school in the mid-1990s and recently bought a nearly identical one, for a nearly identical price, for my son. It's absurd. https://t.co/WuyGoRlPgv

— Peter A. Shulman 📚 (@pashulman) November 25, 2019

Talking Points Memo has become, unsurprisingly, my go-to site for impeachment analysis.  

Adam Schiff Seems to Agree https://t.co/gNcQOFGVsP

— Talking Points Memo (@TPM) November 24, 2019

The relationship between Trump and the GOP is another thread we'll be returning to. 

Rick Perry 2015: “Let no one be mistaken - Donald Trump's candidacy is a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised and discarded.”

Rick Perry now: https://t.co/Q0dtbfUNzk

— Adam Rubenstein (@RubensteinAdam) November 25, 2019

All the GOP Senators are on board with the "Ukraine did it" Trump/Putin/GRU conspiracy theory. https://t.co/y6FXYX6Sdc

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 24, 2019

The punchlines just write themselves.

Elon Musk has said he intends to send colonists to Mars within the next five to ten years. https://t.co/WGJSo7Oiy1

— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) November 22, 2019

And to close.

‘Civilization advances by extending number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges – strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.’
A.N. Whitehead pic.twitter.com/TZ6D1HDq4s

— Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) November 24, 2019

Worst moral hazard argument ever (and that's a competitive field)

One of the more amusing subnarratives (in a schadenfreude way)  of the impeachment story has been the efforts of what we might call the Brooksian wing of reality-based conservatives. In contrast with the Rubin wing, which is perfectly willing to let the chip fall...

Will never vote for any R who does not support impeachment and removal. That means practically none of the current generation. So be it.

— Jennifer Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) November
 21, 2019

... the Brooksians also acknowledge the obvious with Trump but then look for a way of playing things out that minimizes the damage to the GOP and the larger conservative agenda. This usually involves arguing against impeachment, since as previously argued,  the trial represents a no win scenario for the GOP.

Jim Gergaghty of the National Review does, however, deserve credit for being the first to make the case against impeachment on moral hazard grounds.

Removing President Trump from office would say to the American people, “Don’t worry if you make a choice that turns out bad. We will save you from the consequences of your actions.” If you want the American people to exercise better judgment in future elections, you need to make them live with the consequences of their bad decisions. The lesson of a successful impeachment of Trump would be that Americans should vote for whoever they want and not worry about electing a seriously flawed president, because if he ever got too bad, Congress would step in and take him out. The narrative is clear: The will of the people matters, until the stakes get really high, and then the grown-ups will step in, reverse decisions, and put out the fires.

A couple of thoughtful video essays by Bob Chipman

To be a good popular art commentator in 2019 you have to have a deep understanding of nerd culture combined with strong critical detachment. It is difficult to find writers who can manage both at once and I don't think anyone does it better than Chipman.

When your opponents face a no-win scenario, it's in your interest to see that they finish the game

Picking this up from Tuesday...

One of the reasons the impeachment is such a dilemma for the GOP is that it requires officials to take a position that will piss off either a majority of the country or a key block of the Republican base that is personally loyal not to the party but to Trump. If the first group really does exceed 70% and the second stays above some threshold (let's call it 15%), the situation can become almost impossible to navigate.

51 percent of Americans in New ABC/Ipsos poll want Trump impeached and removed from office.

57 percent of Americans want him impeached.

70 percent believe he did something wrong. https://t.co/tSvzM1AR0F

— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) November 18, 2019

One of the main implications of this is that the saner conservatives out there have done these calculations and that's why they are desperately looking for a way out. The corresponding implication on the other side of the aisle is that, regardless of how the vote goes, it's in the Democrats' best interest to not only have it, but to make it as public and binding as possible.

I think I'm pretty much in line with Josh Marshall on this (which is generally a good place to be).

The Democrats’ job is to lay out the evidence in a public setting and get elected Republicans to sign on the dotted line that this is presidential behavior they accept and applaud. That won’t be difficult. They have one last chance to change their answer. Democrats real job is to clarify and publicize that that is their answer.

Another example of Left/Right convergence

One of these days, I’m going to write a big bomb-throwing post proposing that political scientists should completely abandon the use of the left-right spectrum in serious research. It is an innately multivariate concept that cannot be reduced to a scalar. Attempts to create an operational definition have ranged from inadequate to disastrous. On top of all that, since everyone thinks they know what “left” and “right” mean, any use of the terms in a supposedly scientific context inevitably produces more confusion than illumination.

One of the indications that a Euclidean framework won’t work is the existence of beliefs and positions that tend to attract people from the extremes of both the left and the right. We’ve already discussed conspiracy theories and alternative medicine. Perhaps we should add certain segments of anti-war movements.

I’m not talking about strange bedfellow scenarios like the one that temporarily aligned the left with the reactionaries against FDR liberals. This is something more paradoxical, where people supposedly on opposite ends of the spectrum gravitate to the same point not out of convenience or strategic alignment (such as the apocalyptic evangelical wing’s support of Israel).

This isn’t to say that there aren’t differences between the anti-war movement on the left and on the right, but I suspect when you start going through the crowd at a Gabbard rally, it might not be easy to tell which direction a given supporter came from.

From Fresh Air:

GROSS: So Enoch is anti-Semitic, racist and promotes those thoughts on his blog and podcast. Did he support Donald Trump during the election? Does he support President Trump now? Did he play any role in promoting Trump?

MARANTZ: Yeah. So he and the rest of the alt-right definitely supported Trump during the campaign and saw him as the best they were ever going to get from a plausible presidential candidate. I mean, they saw him as someone who would give voice to their kind of white identity movement in a tacit way but still in a way that sounded very clear to them.

After he became president, he started to alienate them by being erratic and inconsistent - also by being a little too hawkish. A lot of these people came out of anti-war organizing, either from the left or the right or both. So when he started dropping bombs on Syria, a lot of the alt-right stopped being Trump supporters. And then also when he failed to build the wall and failed to enact what they wanted, which was essentially a proto-white nationalist agenda, he lost a lot of their support, too.

But a lot of them - you know, in a way the anti-Semitism, it's not just a kind of purely irrational - I mean, it's obviously irrational, but it doesn't come out of nowhere. A lot of it for them comes out of what they perceive as libertarian or anti-war politics.

GROSS: So if Trump were to run again, do you think he'd have the support of Mike Enoch or other people that you've written about in the book?

MARANTZ: Yeah, it's a really good question. A lot of them have moved on to other people like Tulsi Gabbard. A lot of people in my book are really into Tulsi these days.

Tuesday Tweets

Lots of topics I need to revisit one of these days.



Describing your own paper's work as "deeply reported" is so New York Times.

Today we published a deeply reported story about how Elizabeth Warren got to “yes” on Medicare for all, an idea that was never a driving issue for her but will be a major factor in whether she wins the Democratic nomination or ultimately the presidency. https://t.co/8zdJXiQEi4

— Patrick Healy (@patrickhealynyt) November 17, 2019

One of the reasons the impeachment is such a dilemma for the GOP is that it requires officials to take a position that will piss off either a majority of the country or a key block of the Republican base that is personally loyal not to the party but to Trump. If the first group really does exceed 70% and the second stays above some threshold (let's call it 15%), the situation can become almost impossible to navigate.

51 percent of Americans in New ABC/Ipsos poll want Trump impeached and removed from office.

57 percent of Americans want him impeached.

70 percent believe he did something wrong. https://t.co/tSvzM1AR0F

— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) November 18, 2019

As always, the question here is just how much of this Netflix Original does Netflix actually own.

People are chuckling that Roma is on Criterion but:
1. Not everyone has Netflix
2. Netflix may not be around forever
3. Like all streaming services Netflix makes things available and can take things away at their discretion

— Jesse Hawken (@jessehawken) November 15, 2019

Deval Patrick jumping in & Mayor Pete surging will force the Dem establishment to finally address a question that goes to the very heart of its identity: Bain or McKinsey?

— Ilyana Kuziemko (@ikuziemko) November 13, 2019

We knew it was bad, but perhaps not this bad.

The Hill Announces That It Is Reviewing Old John Solomon Columns https://t.co/2Ud14v36bw via @TPM

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 18, 2019

3/ when they moved Solomon from the news side to the opinion side, reasoning that it was less of a problem if his reports were bogus if he was listed as an opinion writer. This really is the most damning part. That move shows they were fully aware of the problems.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 18, 2019

"Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, said of one of Solomon's stories, 'I think all the key elements were false.' Pressed further on the matter ... Vindman said, 'I haven't looked at the article in quite some time, but you know, his grammar might have been right.'" https://t.co/jAdGsJiBEV

— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) November 19, 2019

Leon G. "Lee" Cooperman (born April 25, 1943) is an American billionaire investor and hedge fund manager. He is the chairman and CEO of Omega Advisors, a New York-based investment advisory firm managing over $3.3 billion in assets under management, the majority consisting of his personal wealth.

In September 2016 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Cooperman and Omega Advisors with insider trading, more specifically for "trading stocks, bonds and call options of Atlas Pipeline Partners in July 2010 on information he obtained from an executive at the company." Cooperman's firm agreed to a $4.9 million settlement with the SEC in May 2017 but admitted no wrong-doing.

Cooperman through his Omega Charitable Partnership, along with Anthony Melchiorre owns American Media, Inc. (AMI), publishers of the National Enquirer, since August 2014

NEW: Leon Cooperman has responded to Elizabeth Warren's ad. "She’s disgraceful. She doesn’t know who the f--- she’s tweeting. I gave away more in the year then she has in her whole f----ing lifetime” he just told me. https://t.co/8g6VEY3sVl

— Brian Schwartz (@schwartzbCNBC) November 13, 2019

For all the talk about "extraordinaire elite generosity", it's important to keep in mind the reality of US billionaires philanthropy:

Forbes 400 total wealth: ~$2.5 trillion
Annual charitable giving by the top 400: ~$10 billion

= 0.4% of their wealth. Like a tiny wealth tax

— Gabriel Zucman (@gabriel_zucman) November 14, 2019

Remember earlier in the post when we were talking about supporters being personally loyal to Trump?

the audio here really makes it. i'm not going to ruin it for you, just hit play https://t.co/m1BPYFYWg4

— Brendan Karet 🚮 (@bad_takes) November 14, 2019

One of the more encouraging recent developments in journalism has been people in the industry finally starting to listen to Sullivan.

Another big journalism org answers @sulliview's plea that journalists do their jobs this week. (The answer is "Nope.") https://t.co/QgTGIYdeAl

— Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor) November 14, 2019

SF remains the go to example, despite not being even vaguely analogous to the cities in question.

I wrote this week's @wcp cover story on the future of D.C housing. Can the city avoid the fate of San Francisco? Will it? https://t.co/4dQ8D7wbtp

— Rachel Cohen (@rmc031) November 14, 2019

“Historically, journals were the way to disseminate science. Now, with publishers like APA, once published, their primary function is to prevent most people from getting access to the research.”

I think its time for something different. https://t.co/wMFZbJyulg

— Ed Fuller (@EdFuller_PSU) November 14, 2019

The sad part is that Steyer might not end up being the most clueless and self-indulgent billionaire to run for president this year.

Tom Steyer has accounted for over 67% of *all* TV ad spending by 2020 candidates in the race, through this week, per CMAG data. Steyer has aired over $46.4 million of TV ads in 2019 so far.

— David Wright (@DavidWright_CNN) November 14, 2019

Fun with Political Trivia

This picks up on a recent thread (telling which one might be too much of a clue). The ones and zeros represent a trait of Democratic candidates from 1964 to 2004. Take a look and think about it for a moment. Here's a hint, the trait is something associated with each man well before he ran for president.

Johnson           1
Humphrey       0
McGovern       0      
Carter              1           
Mondale          0           
Dukakis           0           
Clinton            1                 
Gore                1                      
Kerry               0


As you might have guessed, the relationship between this trait and the popular vote didn't hold in the previous or following elections. The trait is not at all obscure. It was well known at the time and figured prominently into their political personas, This is not a trick question.

Voting Referendum

From XKCD Highly recommend the ExplainXKCD for this one).

Plus a bonus cartoon

"This strategy is cynical enough when the victim is something like Toys ‘R’ Us; it’s a societal crisis when it comes for journalism."

Glad to see that the New York Times ran this important op-ed by former Deadspin editor Barry Petchesky (as excerpted by Lawyers, Guns and Money), but you have to wonder how things might have been different if the NYT had stood with Gawker when these crimes against journalism first started rather than handing over a spot on their opinion page to noted women's suffrage critic, Peter Thiel.

    Why would anyone buy Deadspin to change Deadspin? It’s hard to understand why Great Hill Partners demanded that we “stick to sports” — especially at a time when the site was driving the conversation in sports coverage and had the highest traffic in its history — until you realize that this was most likely their plan.It’s the private equity model: Purchase an asset, strip it of everything of value, then turn around and sell the brand to someone else before they realize that what made the brand valuable in the first place has been lost and can never be recovered (the low-quality, un-bylined articles sweatily posted to the site after the mass resignations bear this out).

    This strategy is cynical enough when the victim is something like Toys ‘R’ Us; it’s a societal crisis when it comes for journalism.

    And come for journalism it has. In recent years, we’ve seen the deaths (and to varying degrees, the troubled rebirths) of the likes of Newsweek, The Denver Post, LA Weekly, Playboy and just last month, the granddaddy of all sports media, Sports Illustrated.It plays out the same way each time: The new owners come in, slash staff and costs and turn a once-proud publication into a content mill churning out bland and unimportant stories that no one wants or needs to read.

    It’s going to keep happening, faster than new outlets can rise up to replace the gutted old. For every refreshing new outlet, two will be zombified. Corners will be sanded down. Bitter pills puréed to a beige pap. Everything you liked about the web will be replaced with what the largest number of people like, or at least tolerate enough to click on and sit through three seconds of an autoplay ad. Unique voices will be muted, or drowned out altogether.

"Yes, $100 million is certainly likely to buy a whole lot of indifference."

That quote alone is worth the price of admission, but it's worth your time to read the rest of this latest example of the increasingly absurd world of executive compensation from the always reliable Joe Nocera.

Everyone Gets Paid in CBS-Viacom Except Shareholders

Is it just me, or does the $100 million “severance” being paid to Joe Ianniello, the acting chief executive officer of CBS Corp., stink to high heaven? For starters, you can make a pretty compelling Elizabeth Warren-esque argument that handing a $100 million “severance” to someone who is not, in fact, leaving the company is exactly why income inequality has become such a hot-button issue.

But let’s be old school about this. Let’s focus on the shareholders and how this is their money that’s being handed to Ianniello. It is also an unpleasant reminder of how the father-daughter combo of Sumner and Shari Redstone seemingly can’t resist throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at executives who have not done much for their stockholders.
...

Which brings us back to Ianniello. Although he has been acting CEO only since Moonves departed late last year, Ianniello has also been the recipient of the Redstones’ largesse: Between 2016 and 2018, as the company’s chief operating officer, his compensation averaged $27 million a year, according to Bloomberg. The stock? It dropped from the low 70s to the mid-40s during those three years. This is what’s known as “pay for pulse.”

So why did Shari Redstone feel the need to hand Ianniello an additional $100 million? The reasons are twofold. First, Redstone is recombining Viacom and CBS. She doesn’t want Ianniello to leave — at least not right away — but she also isn’t going to make him the top dog. Second, for legal reasons, she can’t ramrod this deal through by herself, even though she is the controlling shareholder. She needs the CBS board and senior management to support the bid.

“You need Joe to get the merger done,” Robin Ferracone, the CEO of executive compensation consulting firm Farient Advisors, told Bloomberg. “So you need to make him indifferent to whether he’s going to lose his job or not.”

Yes, $100 million is certainly likely to buy a whole lot of indifference. Then again, $10 million probably could have achieved the same result. And in any case, if Shari Redstone needs $100 million to, er, persuade one of her executives to support her merger plan, maybe that suggests the merger’s success is not exactly a slam dunk.

"Many years ago, on Monday" -- More Tuesday Tweets

Many years ago, on Monday, Democrats were gripped with panic about how the NYT/Siena showed they could never win again.

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) November 6, 2019

Some experts attribute the slowdown in VC investment in the early ‘20s to a number of entrepreneurs accidentally exploding themselves inside self-made Batsuits https://t.co/HpwBOc8xti

— dylan matthews (@dylanmatt) November 10, 2019

So much to argue with here, but let's start by what it says about a business to claim that it can only be viable if it's a monopoly.
Uber needs to buy Lyft to survive, and finally make profits https://t.co/yj3C0tB1oT

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) November 11, 2019

"It amounts to what we might call Schrodinger's Bus, a situation in which a foundational instability is created by people simultaneously being on the team and under the bus depending on the context and which side of Pennsylvania Avenue you're looking from."

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 10, 2019

We've been arguing for a while that LGBT attitudes in red states are more complex and are evolving more rapidly than outsiders realize. 

As a gay man originally from Kentucky, I never thought I'd see the day a candidate who supports marriage equality would be elected KY-GOV. I rallied in 2004 against the state's proposed ban on marriage equality, which was approved by voters that year to my horror.

— Joshua Crawford (@JoshCrawfordNE) November 6, 2019

"Decades of research have shown that engaged parents and a stable family are far more important than schools and teachers to a child’s academic achievement..." https://t.co/ogcFiBJ6v6

— Barry Ritholtz (@ritholtz) November 10, 2019

Keep in mind that for years the NYT's leading science writer was the climate change skeptic, John Tierney.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) November 10, 2019

So much to argue with here, but let's start by what it says about a business to claim that it can only be viable if it's a monopoly.
Uber needs to buy Lyft to survive, and finally make profits https://t.co/yj3C0tB1oT

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) November 11, 2019

It's interesting that this method allows us to define multiplication without using any numbers! 🔨✖️🥕 https://t.co/4f4KGOykOL

— Luis Batalha 🇵🇹🇺🇸 (@luismbat) November 11, 2019

A bit of perspective on 2016

This piece by Tina Nguyen came out shortly after the election and most of the numbers are familiar to those who have been following the story closely, but recently we've seen the return of the unstoppable Trump myth, back up by the claim that the Republicans hold an enormous advantage in the Electoral College.

Before we all get caught up in the hysteria, it's good to be reminded just how thin the margin was.

You Could Fit All the Voters Who Cost Clinton the Election in a Mid-size Football Stadium

While nearly 138 million Americans voted in the presidential election, the stunning electoral victory of Donald Trump came down to upsets in just a handful of states that Hillary Clinton was expected to win. It has been cold comfort for Democrats that Clinton won the popular vote—at the last count, she was up by about 2.5 million votes, and climbing, as ballots continue to be counted. Even more distressing is the tiny margin by which Clinton lost Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—three states that were supposed to be her firewall in the Rust Belt, but that ultimately tipped the electoral college map decisively in Trump’s favor.

Trump’s margin of victory in those three states? Just 79,316 votes.

This latest number comes from Decision Desk’s final tally of Pennsylvania’s votes, where Trump won 2,961,875 votes to Clinton’s 2,915,440, a difference of 46,435 votes. Add that to the official results out of Wisconsin, where Clinton lost by 22,177 votes, and Michigan, which she lost by 10,704 votes, and there you have it: 0.057 percent of total voters cost Clinton the presidency.

It is not entirely unusual for the electoral college to be lost by such a slim margin. In 2000, Al Gore lost Florida (and therefore the election) by 1,754 votes, triggering a painfully drawn out recount drama that only ended with a Supreme Court ruling. And in 2004, John Kerry lost to George W. Bush by losing Ohio by a little over 118,000 votes. But it is worth considering just how few voters ultimately set the country on its current, arguably terrifying course. The 79,316 people who voted for Trump in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—all states that Democrats carried since 1992—is less than the entire student body of Penn State (97,494 students), or only slightly more than the number of people who attended Desert Trip, the Baby Boomer-friendly music festival colloquially known as “Oldchella.” If you put all these voters in the Rose Bowl, there would be slightly over 13,000 seats left over. There are more people living in Nampa, Idaho, a city you have never heard of.