Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.
Dwight Garner's review is getting a lot of praise which I can only put down to the NYT halo effect. There are no real insights here and the wit is mainly Maureen Dowd style pop culture jokes ("With or without you, Bono."). This is not the second coming of Dorothy Parker.
It does, however, raise the question how do you review something completely without interest or value without, in a sense, dignifying it with your response? This video by Bob Chipman is probably the best approach to the problem I've seen. The most notable part starts at 2:47 but you should take a few minutes and watch the whole thing.
I think that this misses just how much restraint there actually has been. Dr. Oz was born in the United States but did his military service in Turkey to retain citizenship. Note that the attacks on Dr. Oz have been all about his living in New Jersey despite the dual citizenship issue being right there.
Nor is this concern unique to Dr. Oz. Ted Cruz felt it necessary to renounce his Canadian citizenship due to being a US senator. Rishi Sunak, a UK politician running for leader, returned his US Green Card after he joined the cabinet. Yet this has been a very understated vision. Instead the focus has been on the person in question not being resident in the state.
To address the Ilhan Omar point: if she chose to run as a senator in North Dakota, because there was a promising opening there, without relocating then I am quite sure that people would ask whether that made her a good representative for a state in which she has no personal stake. Or consider Michael Ignatieff -- a former leader of the Canadian liberal party. He left Canada for the UK as a young college graduate and ended up at Harvard University. After 27 years abroad, he returned to the University of Toronto and then became the head of the Liberal Party. He was promptly beaten in the subsequent election, it being a very bad outcome, resigned, and then, two years later, he went back to the US. His lack of time in Canada was a big deal:
Ignatieff was also subject to scathing attack ads by the Conservative Party, slamming him as "Just visiting" Canada for the sake of political advancement
So one should be prepared for these issues when running for political office.
Has it been done well? Yes, look at Hilary Clinton. After her husband finished as president, they were inevitably going to move somewhere. They picked New York, where she decided to run as a senator. She bought a house in New York in 1999 that remains a primary residence to this day. She visited the entire state as a way of showing her interest in it and directly engaged the outsider issue. This was a white person born in Chicago who did her university work in New England.
So, I think that this is a reasonable and common line of attack. Politicians for the senate are elected, so far as I can tell, on: a) Party loyalty, b) Policy positions, and c) Are they a good fit to represent the people of a state. The questions being asked now are really relevant and Dr. Oz needed to act like Clinton and get ahead of the issues (by a couple of years) by carefully planning his argument for how he makes a good representative. Also, when there is a weak point, you should lean into the other issues but I don't see a lot of policy that he is well suited to go after. His website says things like:
Dr. Oz seeks to rebuild the middle layers of society – institutions like family and community – that have been hollowed out by failed policies, narrow thinking, and toxic culture wars. He knows that no government can substitute for the dignity of work, the security of health care, and the spiritual support of our family
Worthy goals but what about Dr. Oz makes him uniquely suited to helping the middle layers of society? The recent grocery store video looked like an out of touch rich guy. Now maybe this is unfair but these issues continue to enhance the representation piece, without any comment on his background (for the record, he was born in Ohio).
So I think the effectiveness of this line of attack is due to a lack of careful pre-emption and that this is just a really basic point that candidates need to think carefully about.
This is a follow-up to Monday's repost "The GOP needs the crazies more than the crazies need the GOP. " The whole piece is relevant, but in terms of this discussion, here's the money shot.
Probably since 2008 and certainly since 2012, pretty much every nontrivial faction of the GOP has held veto power which means the question is no longer who has it, but who is willing to use it. The Tea Party was the first to realize this. Now the alt-right has caught on to the dynamic as well.
I see your point, but given that the 2 parties have approximately equal support (OK, maybe the D's have 51% and the R's 49%, but it varies from election to election and they're both close to 50%), doesn't your argument apply to the Democrats as well? Indeed, wouldn't it apply to both parties most of the time for the past few decades? I agree there's something new in recent years with the crazies and the Republican party, but I can't see how it could be simple math.
Let's see if I can shore up my claim.
Sometimes 50 x 100% > 100 x 50%. Sometimes it's not.
Though I'm tempted to push back a little bit more, we can let the equal support stand for the sake of argument, but what exactly do we mean by the term? Are we talking about a hypothetical voter in an election where everyone participates or are we talking about actual voters who show up at the polls? And if so, which polls?
One of the great insights of the conservative movement was that most elected offices were undervalued. For instance, it was in many ways better to control the majority of state legislatures than it was to control the White House. Therefore, a substantial block of voters who will make it to the polls for every single election and reliably pick members of your party are especially valuable, valuable enough to justify losing a few other members to keep the loyal ones happy.
There are a lot of examples but the first that comes to mind is white evangelicals.
Back in October 2014, pollster Robert Jones pointed out that white evangelicals were declining as a percentage of the U.S. population, even in the South – which could have been bad news for Republicans who count on loyal support from white evangelical voters. Starting in November 2014, Jones predicted, evangelical population decline could start tipping close races to Democrats in Bible Belt states like Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, and North Carolina. But Election Day on November 4th proved Jones wrong. White evangelicals turned out at high rates and played a major role in handing Republicans decisive victories in Senate races across the country. White evangelicals may be declining as a percentage of the population, but because they flock to the polls when Democratic constituencies often stay home, they still rule the midterms.
The group is shrinking (they now make up just under 15% of the population), but the reliability of their support has made them indispensable to the GOP, and recently they have come to realize the power they wield. They, along with other factions, have started demanding that the party make costly concessions. In its current incarnation, this dynamic started with the Tea Party.
By comparison, we haven't seen anything that like with the Democrats for a long time. I think you'd have to go back before the Clinton administration to find examples of factions using the "I'll take ball and go home!" tactic to force the party into taking massively unpopular positions (at least not on the level we've seen on the other side). That doesn't mean there haven't attempts but none have gone anywhere.
One possible explanation is that the Democrats tend to rely more on the soft support of large groups (young people, non-white voters). These voters will be more likely to stay home if you take a toxic position and can fill in the hole with with higher turn-out if a fringe group bolts.
“Consumers should never attempt to create their own test scenarios or use real people, and especially children, to test the performance of vehicle technology,” @NHTSAgov says after Tesla owners post videos putting FSD to the test with child pedestrians. https://t.co/z054vjWdqi
Video of the test was released earlier this week and shows a Tesla Model
3 repeatedly striking a small, stationary dummy directly in front of
the car while supposedly operating on Tesla's controversially named Full Self-Driving Beta software. However, clips from the video led some online publications to instead call the test a "smear campaign" under the notion that FSD was not actually engaged, and after further evidence emerged that FSD was engaged
during the test, Tesla fans and FSD users began filming their own
experiments to see what happened—with mixed results. One noted Tesla
devotee even staged a public call for people to volunteer their own children to stand in front of his Tesla and prove it'll stop in time.
So will a self-driving Tesla run over a child? Amid the noise, the answer seems to be a resounding "maybe," which is just as bad as "yes" in this case. Here's where things stand.
To understand why this test is so controversial, it's important to start with the funding behind it.
O'Dowd's test clearly shows the Model 3 slamming into the dummy three
times, but its stitched-together footage showing the infotainment
screen doesn't match up with how the car would actually look when FSD
Beta is engaged. There is no Autopilot icon, the prediction line remains
gray, and the speed doesn't match up with the reproducibility steps
published by The Dawn Project. Electrek took this as evidence that FSD Beta was not engaged and published an article condemning the test.
Tesla fans began to reference this article as proof that the test was flawed. Even Elon Musk joined in on sharing the article, tweeting it at The Guardian while calling the test a "scam video."
Later,
raw footage was published that showed the view from inside the cabin,
and it appeared to show a UI on the central screen that would indicate
FSD was in fact engaged. Furthermore, Art Haynie—the driver who
conducted the test on behalf of The Dawn Project—signed an affidavit
claiming that FSD Beta was active at the time of the test.
Regardless,
this discrepancy then caused some people to go into full-on defense
mode and re-enact tests themselves in an attempt to disprove the
findings published by The Dawn Project.
Some people began setting
up their own stationary mannequins on residential streets. They
attempted to recreate the test results and published videos showing the
vehicle avoiding the mannequin without hitting it. Others were able to
replicate the findings as their own vehicles slammed into their homemade dummies. And yes, there's that guy on Twitter who asked for volunteers to have their children run in front of his own Tesla to prove it'll stop in time.
We've known for a while that FSD would sometimes try to steer into pedestrians, cyclists, pylons and especially stationary vehicles. There are endless videos on YouTube and Twitter (at least until Musk buys it) of test drivers having to disengage the system to prevent disaster, but the footage of Tesla mowing down statues in the shape of small children very much struck a nerve, particularly after the more honest attempts at debunking started producing more videos in the same vein.
The most popular defense has been that Tesla's AI is smart enough to tell the difference between a small child and a mannequin without any real chance of error. This argument has been made most visibly by the Whole Mars Catalog. More than "that guy on Twitter," the site has an unofficial but very close relationship with Musk and Twitter, which makes these latest threads all the more bizarre.
Just so we all
have the full picture here: it's not just that these people want to
endanger children for social media stunts posing as "self-driving
testing," they will initiate an insurrection against the government if
their right to do so is infringed https://t.co/i2LxcsrKxG
I'd definitely address gerrymandering if I were writing this today. I don't have a good answer for why I didn't back then.
Of course, the crazies have grown in number and in lunacy and have grown more dangerous. Now a plurality and possibly a plurality of one of the two major parties holds demonstrable delusions among their core political beliefs.
If the crazies leave, the Republicans cease to have a viable party.
The GOP needs the crazies more than the crazies need the GOP.
The following is not really a voting paradox, but it is kind of in the
neighborhood. You have three stockholders for a company. A holds 48% of
the shares, B holds 49%, and C holds 3%. Assuming that any decision
needs to be approved by people holding a majority, who has the most
power? The slightly counterintuitive answer is no one. Each shareholder
is equal since an alliance of any two will produce a majority.
Now let's generalize the idea somewhat. Let's say you have N
shareholders whom you have brought together to form a majority. Some of
the members of your alliance have a large number of shares, some have
very few, but even the one with the smallest stake has enough that if he
or she drops out, you will be below 50%. In this scenario, every member
of the alliance has equal veto power.
I apologize for the really, really basic fun-with-math explanation, but
this principle has become increasingly fundamental in 21st-century
politics. At the risk of oversimplifying, elections come down to my
number of supporters times my turnout percentage versus your number
supporters times your turnout percentage. Arguably the fundamental piece
of the conservative movement has been to focus on ways to maximize
Republican turnout while suppressing democratic turnout. (Yes, I'm
leaving a lot out but bear with me.)
There are at least a couple of obvious inherent dangers in this
approach. The first is that there is an upper bound for turnout
percentage. This is especially worrisome when the number of your
supporters is decreasing. Sen. Lindsey Graham was alluding to this when
he observed that they weren't making enough new old white men to keep
the GOP strategy going.
There is, however, another danger which can potentially be even worse.
When you need nearly 100% of your supporters to show up to the polls in
order to win, you create a situation where virtually every faction of
your base has veto power. One somewhat perverse advantage of the large
base/low turnout model is that groups of supporters can be
interchangeable. You have lots of situations where you can alienate a
small segment but more than make up for it elsewhere. In and of itself,
this allows for a great deal of flexibility, but the really important
part is the power dynamic. You have to represent a large constituency in
order to wield veto power.
Probably since 2008 and certainly since 2012, pretty much every
nontrivial faction of the GOP has held veto power which means the
question is no longer who has it, but who is willing to use it. The Tea
Party was the first to realize this. Now the alt-right has caught on to
the dynamic as well.
Even with increasingly aggressive and shameless voter suppression techniques,
Republicans tend to get fewer votes. It is true that they have, through
smart strategy and tactics, managed to get an extraordinary number of
offices out of those votes, but it is a precarious situation. We can
debate how many people really believe in shadowy Jewish banker conspiracies or Martian slave labor camps,
but it is almost certainly a large enough group to sway some close
elections if the crazies collectively decided to go home or, worse yet,
opt for a third party.
Before we get to Vance, here's a bit of relevant personal history. My grandparents on my father's side had a family farm in the Rio Grande Valley. On my mother's side, my grandparents started out as sharecroppers until World War II gave my Grandfather the opportunity to find work as a carpenter.
I was born in Texas, but when I was five, my family moved to a small town in the Ozarks and I stayed in the region until I was in my thirties. I taught high school and college there before making the jump to the corporate world and the East Coast before ending up in California.
I mention this to give you some idea why the transparent fraud of J.D. Vance pissed me off so much, and why I'm so angry with the national press and particularly (as always) the NYT for their role in the sham.
2022 has been a rough year for conventional wisdom which means a rough year for the NYT and journalists like Weisman. Not only was his framing inappropriate; it was wildly off base. Vance has taken what was supposed to be a safe seat and made it into a tight (an for the GOP, expensive) race.
But it's not just Vance's competence as a candidate that the press got wrong; it was his sham persona, and no publication bought into the lie more than the New York Times.
Take a look at Jennifer Senior's 2016 review of Hillbilly Elegy.
But his profile is misleading. His people — hillbillies, rednecks, white trash, choose your epithet (or term of affection, depending on your point of view) [These terms are in no way interchangeable -- MP] — didn’t step off the Mayflower and become part of America’s ascendant class. “Poverty is the family tradition,” he writes. His ancestors and kin were sharecroppers, coal miners, machinists, millworkers — all low-paying, body-wearying occupations that over the years have vanished or offered diminished security.
We start hitting likely embellishments right off the bat. The part of Kentucky Vance's grandparents came from does not and probably did not produce the kinds of cash crops associated with sharecropping. It's possible that Vance's family moved there from more productive land, or it might be he was just adding a flourish to his tale of humble origins.
Mr. Vance was raised in Middletown, Ohio, a now-decaying steel town filled with Kentucky transplants, which at one point included his Mamaw and Papaw — in newscaster English, that’s grandma and grandpa — who moved there shortly after World War II. Though the couple eventually managed to achieve the material comforts of a middle-class life (house, car), they brought their Appalachian values and habits with them. Some were wonderfully positive, like loyalty and love of country. But others, like a tendency toward violence and verbal abuse, were inimical to family life.
Just to emphasize this point, J.D. Vance was born in the suburbs and never lived in
rural America (no, summer vacations don't count). His mother was born in
those same suburbs. Middletown is a lower middle-class suburb located between Cincinnati and Dayton. While hardly prosperous, it is better off than some of the surrounding area, For instance, the percent of the population below the poverty line in 2020 (back when Vance was living there) was around 9%, roughly half that of nearby Dayton.
As for violence being inimical to family life, Vance is on the record as saying women should stay with abusive husbands for the sake of the children, so maybe that's more his thing.
Papaw was forever coming home drunk. Mamaw, “a violent nondrunk,” was forever tormenting him, whether by serving him artfully arranged plates of garbage for dinner or dousing him with gasoline. All this guerrilla warfare affected their children. Mr. Vance’s mother was an empress of instability — violent, feckless, prone to hysteria. A long stint in rehab couldn’t shake her addiction to prescription narcotics (she’d later move on to heroin). She spun through more boyfriends than this reader could count and at least five husbands.
The only reason Mr. Vance made it out in one piece is because his grandparents eventually reconciled, becoming his unofficial guardians. (He also spent a terrifically affirming four years in the Marines.) Mamaw was especially encouraging. She was tough as snakeskin, foul-mouthed as a mobster and filled with love. In a town where many children don’t finish high school, she raised a grandson who managed to graduate from Ohio State University and Yale Law School, defying skyscraping odds.
Have to stop for just a minute and say something about those "skyscraping odds." Besides being purple prose, it was also badly inaccurate.
Ohio State is a good school but it is not (to its credit) particularly exclusive with an acceptance rate of 68%. Furthermore, Vance went to OSU by way of the military, meaning he had a tremendous support network to help him get into college.Vance graduated summa cum laude, so he was clearly hard-working and academically talented, but suburban kid raised by his grandparents graduates high school, joins the Marines, gets into a good university, goes on to get an ivy league law degree is not particularly inspiring.
I've taught high school in the Delta and in Watts and I can point you to lots of kids who genuinely defied the odds to get where they are. Putting Vance in that group is offensive.
It's also worth noting that Vance got his opportunities primarily through the GI Bill and the land-grant college system, two landmark progressive programs that Vance's mentor, employer, and political backer Peter Thiel would beat to death with a tire iron given the chance.
“Hillbilly Elegy,” in my mind, divides into two components: the family stories Mr. Vance tells — most of which are no doubt better experienced on the page than they were in real life — and the questions he raises. Chief among them: How much should he hold his hillbilly kin responsible for their own misfortunes?
...
Time and again, Mr. Vance preaches a message of tough love and
personal responsibility. He has no patience with an old acquaintance who
told him he quit his job because he hated waking up early, only to take
to Facebook to blame the “Obama economy.” Or with a former co-worker at
a tile warehouse who missed work once a week though his girlfriend was
pregnant.
Just to recap. Vance is a Thiel disciple with a history of romanticizing and possibly embellishing his stories. Perhaps we should take that into account when reading his unlikely sounding anecdotes.
Squint, and you’ll note the incendiary nature of Mr.
Vance’s argument. It’s always treacherous business to blame a group for
its own misfortunes. Certainly, an outsider cannot say what Mr. Vance is
saying to his kin and kind. But he can — just as President Obama can
say to fellow African-Americans, “brothers should pull up their pants,” as he did on MTV.
Except that Obama is an African-American while Vance is a venture capitalist from the suburbs doing hillbilly cosplay.
None of it mattered, not the sham persona, not the embellished bio, not the association with and dependency on a far-right billionaire so extreme he publicly called women's suffrage a bad idea. Journalists across the country immediately fell in love.
David Brooks got where he is by telling often fabricated anecdotes with a veneer of pop sociology that confirmed his target audience's preconceptions about the class system. Vance took the act to the next level, adding "first-hand" observations and substituting tough love for Brook's "more to be pitied than censured" shtick when discussing the lower classes. Vance also seemed to offer special insight into the rise of Trump, something that had caught the pundit class completely off guard.
The mainstream press swallowed the obvious fraud because they wanted to believe it.
I feel bad about associating Hee Haw with Vance, so I picked out a few clips to balance things out.
1. The counter-intuitive take is usually wrong. That's why we have it. If the intuitive was wrong most of the time, natural selection would have removed intuition from the gene pool long ago.
In 2015 and early 2016, armies of political pundits and data journalists assured us that counter-intuitively being consistently ahead in the polls was bad news for a candidate. In 2022, lots of those same experts are arguing that being raided by the FBI in a corruption case is good news for a politician (or at least bad news for his opposition.
Counter-intuitive takes can be right. but they make for poor default positions.
2. At this point, speculating about the nature of the documents or the details behind the raid is one of the least productive ways you can spend your time. The ratio of words to facts is already way to high.
3. All those articles and op-ed pieces about the GOP moving past Trump conveniently assumed he would let them. A large chunk of the party is personally loyal to Trump and at any time, he can turn them against the Republicans. As he has been for almost seven years, Trump remains the man with the grenade.
4. The more frightened Trump becomes, the more he will demand that Republicans and the conservative establishment leap to his defense. Of course, the things that he is currently afraid of have the potential to make him politically toxic in the near future.
5. The Republican response has basically broken down into two camps: the first goes on Fox and threatens retaliation; the second burrows deep into the ground. No one in the GOP believes it is safe to attack or even distance yourself from Trump. Chaney is a cautionary tale.
6. Some parallels to the Dobbs decision. The Republicans worked to make that story about the leak not the contents of the decision. In this case to make it about the raid and not the crimes being investigated. In the first case, the strategy initially worked with the press but the public didn't buy it. We'll see how this one plays out.
It’s official: Most Californians who filed their taxes in 2020 will get one-time payments totaling about $9.5 billion from the state starting in October to help offset rising inflation.
The Franchise Tax Board has set up a web page with some of the details and a calculator where people can estimate their payment.
The Legislature passed an election-year bill, AB192, authorizing the payments with zero votes against it, and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it Thursday as part of his budget package.
The bill called these payments Better for Families
Refunds, but the tax board is calling them Middle Class Tax Refunds,
even though couples making up to $500,000 in 2020 adjusted gross income
and individuals making up to $250,000 are eligible.
We shouldn't have to say this but handing out stimulus checks is the worst thing you can do in a period of high inflation. It did, however, make for a nice photo-op.
I had planned on doing a post on the hot new genre of "the GOP is abandoning Trump" stories, which long-time readers will recognize as a reboot of the once popular "Trump will never get the nomination" genre. Today's events somehow manage to both undercut and confirm critique I had in mind. On one hand, this could mark the beginning of the end for DJT's political career. On the other, it reminds us that the GOP is still very much Trump's party.
1) The idea the FBI launched a raid on a former president would have been approved and monitored at the highest level of the Justice Department; hard to even imagine how high the bar of probable cause must've been for the Bureau to initiate such a politically sensitive search....
2) A search warrant means an independent federal judge ALSO signed off on the probable cause and, independently, believes evidence there was likely a crime committed AND that more evidence would be found at Mar-a-Lago. That's huge too.
3) The fact the search apparently didn't leak until basically when word came from Donald Trump himself shows the FBI and the Justice Department conducted this search by the book and a high degree of integrity. No leaks? Impressive. Surely only a small team knew inside DOJ....
4) Taken together, this is one of the most significant, sensitive, and politically explosive actions the US Justice Department and FBI has ever taken—one of a tiny handful of times it's ever investigated a president.
Bottom line: The FBI & DOJ must've known they had the goods.
per @marceelias
HUGE POINTt:the records provision they're investigating carries the
penalty that someone convicted "shall forfeit his office and be
disqualified from holding any office under the United States." So this
could be the whole enchilada in terms of DOJ resolution.
Nope, can't
impose qualifications on holding the presidency by statute—the
qualifications are set out in the Constitution. The search for "one
weird trick" to banish Trump from politics will have to continue. https://t.co/w4x0oswjyW
Sources confirm to @SaraMurray and @KristenhCNN that the FBI search on Mar a Lago was related to the handling of presidential documents, including classified documents, that may have been brought to MAL.
This will in no way dampen the claims of persecution.
When Trump and his monkeys screech about tonight’s news, somebody should remind them that HE APPOINTED THE FBI DIRECTOR who approved the Mar-a-Lago raid.
This (below)
is an intimidation tactic. They want the name of the person who
authorized the FBI raid because they want to send a mob after them as a
way of warning other government officials not to go after Trump. pic.twitter.com/ktkFipjPcy
If I'm the regular Fox anchors who are on vacation right now, I'm hiring someone to taste my food as soon as I get back to the office. This young substitute host has a lean and hungry look.
Removing fascists always carries the risk of a violent reaction. This is not an argument for not removing them.
Pretty much every Trump/Q forum I'm on is wishcasting Ron DeSantis sending Florida police to somehow intercept federal law enforcement around Mar a Lago.
Others are saying they're waiting for Trump's permission.
Trump supporters are REALLY excited about the idea of a civil war. Some of the responses to today’s FBI raid:
“I already bought my ammo” “Civil war! Pick up arms, people!” “Civil War 2.0 just kicked off.” “Let’s do the war.” “One step closer to a kinetic civil war.”
A couple of weeks ago, I finally ran a post questioning the apparent conventional wisdom among progressive politicians and pundits about not making Republican attacks on Social Security a major campaign issue.
Fast forward to 2022. Republicans are talking about cutting,
privatizing, or killing Social Security with an openness they hadn't
shown in at least twenty years. Trump himself lost interest in the topic
long ago. But among the pundit class and much of the Democratic
establishment, a few six-year old statements had permanently inoculated
not just Trump, but the entire GOP on this issue.
What's
remarkable here is not just the convergence but the certainty. A large
part of the Republican Party is pissing on the third rail of American
politics and yet no influential Democrats thought it was worth pulling
the switch just in case the power was on.
If attacks on Social
Security have eroded seniors' support for the GOP, they have done so
almost entirely on their own. Progressives seldom mention the issue.
AARP has been uncharacteristically quiet on the matter. Talking Points
Memo, probably the best progressive political news and analysis site has
dropped it entirely as far as I can tell.
...
Even in Florida, which has a lot of seniors,
Val Demings is all but silent on the topic, despite the fact that her
opponent and his fellow senator are both on the record as wanting to cut
or kill the program.
There's no conspiracy here, no hidden
agenda. These people simply believe with a great deal of confidence that
while pushing back against Republican attacks on Medicare and
particularly Social Security might be the right thing to do, it is not a
winning political strategy.
If there were any doubt
in the Democratic establishment's mind, hedging the bet would be cheap,
easy and pretty much risk free. A few campaign ads, some viral videos, a
couple of lines in stump speeches, a bullet point in campaign
websites, raising the subject in interviews.
The most bizarre
part of this is that for decades, one of the unassailable truths of
American politics was that attacking Social Security and Medicare was
bad for Republicans and defending them was good for Democrats, and yet,
in the space of a few years for no particularly good reason, the
political establishment became absolutely certain of the exact opposite.
In most presidential elections starting in 1984, there were questions about which candidate would be better on Social Security. They were not all by the same organization, so the wording varied. Most of the variations were minor (e. g. "handling" vs. "dealing with"), but in 1988 and 1992 they asked about "protecting the Social Security system" and in 2016 they asked about "Social Security and Medicare." I calculated the difference between the percent naming the Democratic candidate and the percent naming the Republican. The Democrat was always ahead, which is why I call the figure "Republican disadvantage."
In 2016, Trump trailed Clinton by 50-42%, giving an 8% gap, which was just about average--unfortunately the question wasn't asked in 2020. Reagan in 1984 stands out as an unusually large gap, which is plausible because in one of his Presidential campaigns (I think it was his first, in 1976) he suggested that maybe Social Security should be privatized and got a lot of negative publicity. Aside from that, there's no trend, and the ups and downs don't show any obvious pattern and are small enough so that they could be sampling error. So there's not evidence that Trump changed anything--the Democrats consistently have an advantage on the issue. This isn't really surprising--even someone who doesn't pay much attention to politics can tell that if forced to make a choice between tax increases and spending cuts, Republicans would be more likely to go for spending cuts and Democrats would be more likely to go for tax increases.
Now it appears things may be shifting. Outside of the NYT, there is no bastion of conventional wisdom more recognized than the Washington Post, so when columnist Helaine Olen argues that "Republicans ... are ... handing Democrats an issue almost as politically potent as abortion rights," the establishment is likely to listen.
The
most recent to join the fray is Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). He announced
earlier this week that he believes Social Security should be up for a
congressional reauthorization vote every single year. “If you qualify for an entitlement, you get it no matter what the cost,” he huffed on a podcast.
The nerve of those entitled seniors. They paid faithfully into a program and expect a check. Imagine that!
This ups the ante from Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who opened the Social Security floodgates
earlier this year when he proposed putting all government programs —
including Social Security and Medicare — up for renewal every five
years. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) immediately
declared it dead on arrival, but that hasn’t stopped some Republicans
such as Johnson from expressing their approval.
...
It’s almost as though these Republicans can’t stop themselves from acting on the hope that when it comes to Social Security, the majority of voters won’t take them seriously, even as the GOP base laps their message up. But, in an age when increasing numbers of Americans are going to need a Social Security check to get by in retirement, that seems like a risky bet.
One of the recurring themes of my conversations with Joseph is this
country's growing disinterest, bordering on antipathy, in getting things
done. (If you think I'm bad, you ought to get him started.) From
building a badly needed piece of infrastructure to addressing global
warming, we seem to focus most of our energy on finding reasons for
inactivity.
NPR's excellent series on wildfires has a good example.
If you weigh the costs and risks of prescribed burns against the costs
and risks of letting current trends continue, the case for action is
overwhelming, but we continued to let the situation get worse.
Add climate change to the mix (another situation we've shown lots of interest in discussing and little in solving), and we may have reached the point where there are no good solutions, only less terrible ones.
I remark just how lush his forest is, how the Ponderosa pines almost
reach out and touch one another. He doesn't take it as a compliment.
"They're a plague," he says. "On this forest, it's averaging about 900
trees per acre. Historically it was probably about 40. Here in the
national forest, what we're facing is a tree epidemic."
Armstrong has rubbed some people the wrong way with talk like that. But
he says forest this dense is dangerous. "We're standing here on the edge
of what is known as the Santa Fe Municipal Watershed," he explains.
"Imagine a huge bathtub" — a natural bathtub sitting in the mountains
around Santa Fe. When it rains, the water flows down into reservoirs.
That's where the state capital gets most of its water.
Trees help slow down the flow, but big wildfires take out the trees.
They even burn the soils. "They convert from something that's like a
sponge to Saran Wrap," Armstrong says. "In the aftermath of a wildfire
within this watershed, that would flood like the Rio Grande, for
heaven's sakes; that would come down a wall of water, and debris and ash
and tree trunks, and create devastation in downtown Santa Fe. Suddenly,
they find that the entire mountain is in their backyard."
Armstrong supports trimming smaller trees with machines and chain saws.
But that costs hundreds of dollars per acre. The service now lets some
natural fires — ones started by lightning, for example — burn within
prescribed limits. Or they start "prescribed" burns when conditions are
safe. These clear out smaller trees and undergrowth to keep them from
fueling megafires. Armstrong has done that here.
But people didn't like the smoke, and when an intentional fire gets out
of control, people sue. And there's been widespread drought in recent
years. These are some of the reasons the Forest Service has reduced the
use of prescribed fires.
Some insurrectionist trivia for you: Roger Stone reportedly introduced Alex Jones to Trump and arranged for Jones to interview Trump on Infowars during his 2016 campaign. Stone also once called Jones “the single most important voice in the alternative conservative media”.
Six weeks ago,
lead on all TV / radio newscasts, and most major news outlets, was "pain
at the pump" of gas prices. Was allegedly central economic, political,
cultural issue
Fun facts: In
the first six months of the 1981-82 recession, we lost 1,046k jobs, in
the first six months of the 1990-01 recession we lost 690k jobs, in 2001
we lost 761k jobs, in 2007-09, we lost 705k jobs. In 2022 we gained
2,740k jobs.
But where would the politics desks of most major newspapers have been through this past year, without this "everyone knows it's happening" organizing concept ?
idea: a
gameshow called Imposter Syndrome where you take 10 senior developers
and tell them that one of them is actually just a sales guy who's been
taught to say DevOps buzzwords. to win, they have to figure out who the
fake dev is. the trick: there is no sales guy
I sometimes think about the fact that about 2% of VC funding goes to female founders and about 1.2% goes to Black founders yet some funds have clearly run out of even mediocre ideas to fund let alone good ones. This is a Money Ball opportunity for some VC fund. I’ll do it someday pic.twitter.com/eufAB9IqOB
VCs poured $5B into scooter startups over the years but missed one crucial lesson from Uber & Lyft. Ride share companies offload ownership & maintenance of cars to drivers. This boosts their financials.
HBO Max may be the best service but WB is possibly the worst run studio. The business is idiot proof largely because smart people like Ted Turner bought up valuable catalogs. If that IP hadn't been acquired (or had been allowed to go into the public domain)...
HBO Max is widely acknowledged to be the best streaming service. And now the execs who bought it are on the verge of dismantling it, simply because they feel like it. Mergers give just a few wealthy people MASSIVE control over what we watch, with disasterous results.
Very quick addition to our political implications of Dobbs thread. Just to recap...
In May, we argued that the conventional wisdom was underestimating the disconnect between state level views on abortion in the willingness of Republicans to push the most extreme laws imaginable (the Alaska Paradox)
Kansas is pro-choice, but just barely. By comparison, Oklahoma is moderately pro-choice and Ohio is solidly pro-choice.
In both of those states, the legislatures pushed through extreme anti-abortion laws, recently enough that we don't know how they will play with voters. In Kansas, however...
Kansas voters overwhelmingly shot down an amendment that would have
stripped their constitution of its state Supreme Court-interpreted
abortion protections Tuesday, a surprising outcome on the heels of a
wave of last-minute enthusiasm from those furious at the Supreme Court’s
decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
For observers looking to Kansas as a bellwether, the first state to put abortion to a vote since the Dobbs decision, the election may prove a compelling data point given the built-in advantages to the pro-amendment side.
...
More than 60 percent of voters had rejected the amendment when
networks, including NBC and CNN, began to call the race shortly before
11 p.m. ET. Roughly 78 percent of the vote had been counted. Preliminary
results suggested that Tuesday’s turnout had come close to doubling
2018’s primary turnout.
Slate's Mark Joseph Stern:
Remember that Republicans scheduled the Kansas abortion referendum for the primary rather than the general election because there are many more registered Republicans in the state than Democrats and unaffiliateds can’t vote in primary races. Abortion rights still won handily.
An
increasingly popular conspiracy theory falsely centers around the
existence of “med beds,” a fabled medical instrument that does
everything from reversing aging to regrowing missing limbs. The theory
has grown in popularity among followers of far-right movements like
QAnon, some of whom claim to be urgently awaiting a med bed to treat
severe health conditions.
...
Some QAnon sects have made med beds central to their conspiratorial claims. A Dallas-based group, which follows the Q influencer Michael “Negative 48” Protzman, has promoted med beds,
in part because the devices address a plot hole in another conspiracy
theory. The group falsely believes that John F. Kennedy is still alive
and youthful, and attributes his remarkable longevity to the curative
powers of med beds.
Romana Didulo,
a QAnon-adjacent conspiracy leader who claims to be the rightful
“queen” of Canada, has also hyped med beds. The devices “will be made
available for FREE to all Canadians” following her revolution, she wrote
in an August post. Followers of YamatoQ, a Japan-based QAnon movement, have also latched onto med bed theories, even making their own attempted version of the device with copper wires.
Some
conspiracy theorists believe Trump is aware of med beds, and can
release them to the public. Delays in the prophesied technology (like
one frustrated Q fan noted in an open letter to Trump last year) have led some to speculate that Trump is reserving the devices for the most critical cases, and for military members.
Companies selling self-described “med beds” often stop short of conspiracy theorists’ most unlikely claims.
Tesla
BioHealing doesn’t claim that its “medbed generators” can regrow
missing body parts—and its med beds are not even beds, but metal
canisters designed to be placed under a mattress. Nevertheless, the
Delaware-based company recommends its products for a spectrum of
conditions, ranging from “mild” (including asthma and autism) to
“severe” (including “terminal cancers”).
Reached for comment about
Tesla BioHealing’s benefits for people with “severe” conditions, CEO
James Liu told The Daily Beast that the devices delivered “life force
energy” to those patients.
This is strange. It's almost as if what scientists and forestry professionals have been telling us for the past 50 years about active stewardship and controlled burns was exactly right.
The two fires started just 17 miles apart in the rugged terrain of California’s western Sierra Nevada — but their outcomes couldn’t have been more different.
The Washburn fire, which ignited July 7 along a forested trail in Yosemite National Park, was nearly contained, with no damage to structures or to the famed Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias.
But the Oak fire, which sparked almost two weeks later in the foothills near Midpines, confounded firefighters as it exploded to four times the size of Washburn and forced thousands to flee as it destroyed at least 106 homes. At times, the wildfire’s smoke plume could be seen from space.
Experts attribute the difference to variations in weather, vegetation and topography. The management history of each landscape also played a role: Yosemite boasts decades of active stewardship, including prescribed burns, while areas outside the park bear a legacy of industrial logging and fire suppression.
