Tuesday, September 3, 2024

The Impact of X-Rays -- what fast looked like


Hand mit Ringen (Hand with Rings): print of Wilhelm Röntgen's first "medical" X-ray, of his wife's hand, taken on 22 December 1895 and presented to Ludwig Zehnder of the Physik Institut, University of Freiburg, on 1 January 1896

Conventional wisdom has it that our modern pace of technological change is so fast that someone from 100 years or so ago would find it incomprehensible. I don't buy that for at least a couple of reasons. First, we have a tendency to forget just how long some technologies are taking to get here (do you have any idea how long autonomous vehicles have been just around the corner?). Second, we tend to grossly underestimate how quickly many technologies of the past were disseminated.

For the canonical example of rapid adoption, check out the following excerpts from the Wikipedia article on the history of the x-ray starting with Röntgen's breakthrough, followed by some excerpts from Scientific American. Pay close attention to the timeline and keep in mind, this is how people reacted to a technology so new and unexpected that it bordered on unimaginable.

[Emphasis added for dates throughout.]

 On 8 November 1895, German physics professor Wilhelm Röntgen stumbled on X-rays while experimenting with Lenard tubes and Crookes tubes and began studying them. He wrote an initial report "On a new kind of ray: A preliminary communication" and on 28 December 1895, submitted it to Würzburg's Physical-Medical Society journal.

...

The discovery of X-rays generated significant interest. Röntgen's biographer Otto Glasser estimated that, in 1896 alone, as many as 49 essays and 1044 articles about the new rays were published.[25] This was probably a conservative estimate, if one considers that nearly every paper around the world extensively reported about the new discovery, with a magazine such as Science dedicating as many as 23 articles to it in that year alone.

...

Röntgen immediately noticed X-rays could have medical applications. Along with his 28 December Physical-Medical Society submission, he sent a letter to physicians he knew around Europe (1 January 1896).[29] News (and the creation of "shadowgrams") spread rapidly with Scottish electrical engineer Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton being the first after Röntgen to create an X-ray (of a hand). Through February, there were 46 experimenters taking up the technique in North America alone.[29]

The first use of X-rays under clinical conditions was by John Hall-Edwards in Birmingham, England on 11 January 1896, when he radiographed a needle stuck in the hand of an associate. On 14 February 1896, Hall-Edwards was also the first to use X-rays in a surgical operation.[30]

Images by James Green, from "Sciagraphs of British Batrachians and Reptiles" (1897), featuring (from left) Rana esculenta (now Pelophylax lessonae), Lacerta vivipara (now Zootoca vivipara), and Lacerta agilis

In early 1896, several weeks after Röntgen's discovery, Ivan Romanovich Tarkhanov irradiated frogs and insects with X-rays, concluding that the rays "not only photograph, but also affect the living function".[31] At around the same time, the zoological illustrator James Green began to use X-rays to examine fragile specimens. George Albert Boulenger first mentioned this work in a paper he delivered before the Zoological Society of London in May 1896. The book Sciagraphs of British Batrachians and Reptiles (sciagraph is an obsolete name for an X-ray photograph), by Green and James H. Gardiner, with a foreword by Boulenger, was published in 1897.[32][33]

The first medical X-ray made in the United States was obtained using a discharge tube of Pului's design. In January 1896, on reading of Röntgen's discovery, Frank Austin of Dartmouth College tested all of the discharge tubes in the physics laboratory and found that only the Pului tube produced X-rays. This was a result of Pului's inclusion of an oblique "target" of mica, used for holding samples of fluorescent material, within the tube. On 3 February 1896, Gilman Frost, professor of medicine at the college, and his brother Edwin Frost, professor of physics, exposed the wrist of Eddie McCarthy, whom Gilman had treated some weeks earlier for a fracture, to the X-rays and collected the resulting image of the broken bone on gelatin photographic plates obtained from Howard Langill, a local photographer also interested in Röntgen's work.

 

 

 

 

 Scientific American, 25 July 1896.


 


 


 Scientific American, 7 August 1897

 


 

 

 


And to get a feel for the impact on the popular imagination.

People have always complained about the establishment press, but increasingly the calls are coming from inside the house.

Obviously, this is anecdotal, based largely on the sample of journalists and bloggers I follow online and whom they choose to quote and repost, but within that limited field of vision, a divide has opened substantially, particularly since Biden stepped out of the race.

People on both sides of the divide are at least nominally supporting the Democrats – – at this point it is difficult to find anyone in the establishment press arguing that another Trump presidency would be acceptable – – but while those on one side are greatly pleased by the way the handoff has gone, the other side is curiously upset by recent events and often seems, deliberately or not, to be clearly biased against the Harris campaign. As a result, differences in approaches are growing more stark and both sides are getting increasingly annoyed. Those who are happy with the new status quo are losing patience. Those on the other side are getting more and more defensive.

As Josh Marshall puts it.

I've explained this before. But in addition to a lot of frivolous and biased journalism the real root of a lot of what you see in the elite press isn't bias precisely. Certainly it's not that the reporters are right wingers or Trumpers. It's something different but insidious.

If anything, the faction that seems to be rooting against Kamala dominates the establishment press with the epicenter being, of course, the New York Times, but what's unusual this time is how many establishment figures are making their criticisms public.

Mark Jacob Ex-editor at Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times







"A stack of turned phrases don’t add up to an argument or a point." Doesn't that describe every Dowd column?

This Wolfer's clip shows how fed up people like him are with the way these issues are being covered.

 

 Matthew Cooper  Executive Editor—Digital, Washington @Monthly, Alum: @Time, @Newsweek, @CondeNast, @NewRepublic

Kai Ryssdal, host of Marketplace.

 



It's safe to say this guy had to be pretty pissed to go after public radio.

Not so bold but in some ways more significant is the veiled criticism coming from actual NYT writers. This goes right up to the line of publicly criticizing the paper, and with the exception of Paul Krugman (who is very much a special case), that is the one rule you do not break.

 From  Paul Campos

I should have mentioned that Edsall includes this not too subtle dig against his own employer:

“Yet, Wilentz writes, “many of even the most influential news sources hold to the fiction Trump and his party are waging a presidential campaign instead of a continuing coup, a staggering failure to recognize Trump’s stated agenda.”

 


Monday, September 2, 2024

It's Labor Day, so we're taking time off and running a repost

 

 


Look for the Union Label

The ILGWU sponsored a contest among its members in the 1970s for an advertising jingle to advocate buying ILGWU-made garments. The winner was Look for the union label.[9][10] The Union's "Look for the Union Label" song went as follows:

    Look for the union label
    When you are buying a coat, dress, or blouse,
    Remember somewhere our union's sewing,
    Our wages going to feed the kids and run the house,
    We work hard, but who's complaining?
    Thanks to the ILG, we're paying our way,
    So always look for the union label,
    It says we're able to make it in the USA!

The commercial featuring the famous song was parodied on a late-1970s episode of Saturday Night Live in a fake commercial for The Dope Growers Union and on the March 19, 1977, episode (#10.22) of The Carol Burnett Show. It was also parodied in the South Park episode "Freak Strike" (2002).















Friday, August 30, 2024

Twelve years ago at the blog – – we were talking about mega fires and saying basically the same things we are today

Things have gotten a little better with prescribed burns, but not nearly enough. 

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Megafires, incentives and the inactivity bias

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.

 _________________________


PS A couple of days earlier, we ran a link to another All Things Considered story which included this truly disturbing graphic. 




Thursday, August 29, 2024

Just took a look at "The Urbanist Case for a New Community in Solano County"... and they got nothing

[This project appears to have stalled, but don't worry, there are plenty of other plans for badly placed, car-dependent exurbs waiting in the wings.]

Don't get me wrong. This document has lots of ideas, some impractical, some with a horrible real-life track record, some silly, and yes, some genuinely good, but when it comes to the primary obstacles to achieving the various high sounding goals, it has nothing. At least nothing with a snowball's chance in hell of working.

I may take a deeper dive one of these days, but for now let's focus on the exurb problem (there are others but that's the big one). The proposed city is perfectly situated for car dependence, lacking any rail service and far enough from major population and employment centers (San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento, Stockton) to rule out any form of transportation other than automobiles, but close enough that almost everyone will be willing to make the drive.

The fundamental contradiction of a green exurb is never really addressed, but the way the author skirts the issues suggests that it's on their mind; they just don't want to talk about it.

We realize that the California Forever proposal is a big change in the thinking of many urbanists, who equate ”greenfield” with ”sprawl” - low-density, auto-oriented development. We know, most greenfield development is sprawl, even when developers use words like walkable. But there are exceptions. Seaside, FL was a greenfield development, but it’s not sprawl [Remind me to talk about Seaside, Florida as an example of planned urban development. We'll have a lot of fun with that one. – – MP] . And the plan we have put forward is not ”sprawl” either - it’s medium-density, high-quality urbanism. And again, the plan even has a legally binding minimum density standard to make sure we hold ourselves accountable to our walkability goals. We are literally prohibiting ourselves from building sprawl.

We are dealing with a narrow and rather interesting definition sprawl here, and one that doesn't apply to some fairly notable examples. When we talk about a city like Alpharetta being a case of urban sprawl, we are referring to the distance between it and Atlanta. The fact that Alpharetta's downtown is fairly dense isn't all that relevant. Whenever someone use the word walkable, it begs the question walk to where? If the vast majority of jobs, shops, universities, restaurants, bars and entertainment venues are accessible only by car, the fact that you can stroll down to the neighborhood Coffee Bean doesn't actually mean a hell of a lot.

Another place where the author almost hits on the issue of car dependency is in the section on parking. [Emphasis in the original.]
A smart parking strategy. Parking minimums for new buildings in this community are set at zero. While homeowners can build parking garages if they wish, we will provide shared community parking garages - some located at the edge of the community, some located at carefully selected locations throughout the city. We have given careful thought to the design of the garages, with seamless transfers to public transit at each location. We will also operate a robust car-sharing program, providing access to a car without the hassle and expense of having to own one. All of this translates into some important objectives for us: reduced cost of construction so we can deliver homes more people can afford; reduced cost of transportation for households; reduced urban footprint devoted to storing cars. We understand that people are going to need to drive sometimes, as they do in the rest of the region. The mode split for external trips will probably mirror infill development in the Bay Area. [Remember, unlike the Bay Area, this development has no rail whatsoever. -- MP] But the California Forever city plan will encourage less car use for internal trips, with all the benefits this creates for people’s health, social connections, and the environment.

If you want to keep your bearings during this discussion, here's the one fact you have to keep your eye on: while you may (and the "may" is doing a great deal of work there) have lots of appealing options for internal trips, most of those will be under 5 miles. You basically have one option external trips and most of those will be more than 50 miles, and as mentioned before, the vast majority of jobs, stores, restaurants, colleges, museums, nightclubs, and entertainment venues will require external trips, at least for years to come.

The virtues of car sharing have been greatly overhyped, but you can at least make a case for the approach in major urban areas. In an exurb, it is completely unworkable. It's difficult to imagine bus lines running frequently and for long enough hours for people to get by on them solely. Rail service would require entirely new track to be laid and is, at a bare minimum, more than a decade away. Even if things go exactly as planned (and there are any number of reasons to think that they won't) it is difficult to imagine a substantial number of people choosing to live in a place like this without a car.

There are rules-based approaches that might reduce car ownership and force people to make use of other options. You could limit households to only one car. You could ban private garages. You could move all public garages to the outskirts of town. You could greatly increase parking fees. You could make not having a car at all a condition for subsidized housing. I'm not saying any of those would be good ideas, but they represent the kind of thing you would need to do to get people to go without cars in this situation. Unfortunately, there is a strong recurring libertarian thread running through these proposals. If you give people living in an exurb the freedom to choose their mode of transportation, you're not going to like their choices.

Wednesday, August 28, 2024

Nobody mansplains like the NYT

Hey look everybody! The paper that told us that Trump crushing DeSantis in the polls was actually good news for DeSantis, Dobbs wouldn't be that big of a deal, and that it was a mistake for the Democrats to go all in on Harris has some political advice for us.


It's important to note that the convention going this well makes the NYT editorial board look really bad and it's possible this might have colored the deputy opinion editor's take.

Flash-forward to this week. If the Democratic convention’s message for America had to fit on a bumper sticker, it would read, “Harris is joy.” The word has gone from being a nice descriptor of Democratic energy to being a rhetorical two-by-four thumped on voters’ heads. Don’t get me wrong — there are many worse things than joy — but I cringed a little in the convention hall Tuesday night when Bill Clinton said Kamala Harris would be “the president of joy.” “Joy” is the new “fetch” from “Mean Girls”: Democrats are bent on making the word happen.


As for Democrats being "bent on making the word happen," it seems like Patrick may be using the wrong tense, at least if we believe the New York Times.



Lots to comment on here, starting with that wheezing old reporter's cliché of a first sentence, and ending with that equally hackneyed last one.

This is a winnable race for Harris, but she hasn’t won it yet. Far from it. She hasn’t been tested — really tested — since Biden stepped aside. She hasn’t given a single interview or news conference to face hard questions. But it’s really the debates that will be her test. Her advisers think she might get away with doing just one against Trump. I think they underestimate her challenge in earning voters’ trust. She needs to start proving herself outside her comfort zone.


That part about talking to reporters isn't quite true (if it were a DNC quote being fact checked by the NYT or WP, it would've been labeled a falsehood, but that's a subject for a different thread). Worse yet (and more than a little sexist) is the "comfort zone" framing, suggesting that she's acting out of fear rather than focusing on the strategy that has succeeded beyond anyone's expectations.

I shouldn't have to say this but, the former Atty. Gen. of the largest state in the union (not to mention former district attorney of San Francisco and successful candidate for the U.S. Senate) has faced lots of tough questions from the press. As for debates being outside of Harris's comfort zone, go back and read what was written at the time about her performance in the primary debates. 

Harris's performance in the debate received praise from many in the media, with some journalists referring to her as the unofficial winner. Morning Consult and FiveThirtyEight worked together on polling that reported that Harris's support among Democrats went from about 8% before the debate to almost 17% after the debate. Harris raised $2 million in donations in the first 24 hours after the debate, which is the highest amount of money that her campaign had raised in a 24-hour period to that date. President Donald Trump criticized Harris, saying she was given "too much credit" for her debate with Biden.

When you also take into account Harris's years as a prosecutor and as a senator (particularly in Senate hearings), Healy's advice comes off as embarrassingly patronizing at best and grossly misogynistic at worst.

Just as a reminder, Harris is doing remarkably well on pretty much every front. Her polls are trending upwards. Fundraising is going great. Crowd size and other measures of enthusiasm are exceptional. Her running mate is crushing the other guy. So far, her execution has been close to flawless.

By comparison, the New York Times' approved narrative that the Democrats needed to dump Kamala and tear the party apart with a ThunderDome convention looks even more stupid in retrospect than it did at the time. It takes an extraordinary level of clueless arrogance to give advice under those circumstances, but that's pretty much on brand for the paper of record.

P.S. In case the name sounds familiar...

 P.P.S. And you'll be happy to know there's more.

Tuesday, August 27, 2024

Trump, Kennedy, and autism: all the news that's fit to print (and doesn't make us uncomfortable)

 Picking up from yesterday's post, the sane-washing of the Trump-Kennedy alliance continues.

 

Of all that was said at Friday's Arizona rally, this might have been the most newsworthy.

DJT :

"That is why today I am repeating my pledge to establish a panel of top experts, working with Bobby, to investigate what is causing the decades-long increase in chronic health problems and childhood diseases, including auto-immune disorders, autism, obesity, infertility, and more."

 

Coming at this from a conspiracy theorist/pseudoscience crank worldview, the one word that should set off immediate alarm bells is "autism." The headline pretty much writes itself: "Trump announces autism committee headed by Robert F Kennedy Junior."

If you had to list the remaining terms in order of tinfoil hat appeal, they would be infertility, autoimmune disorders, and at a distant fourth, obesity. A reporter covering the speech might also feel compelled to add that the causes which RFK Junior has proposed in the past include not just vaccines but also chemtrails, Wi-Fi, and 5G.

If you've been following our thread on the New York Times you can probably guess what's coming. Here's how the NYT covered that quote in the third paragraph from the end of the article on Kennedy endorsing Trump:

Earlier in the day in Phoenix, at his speech announcing the suspension of his campaign, Mr. Kennedy said Mr. Trump had offered him a role in a second Trump administration, dealing with health care and food and drug policy. In Glendale, Mr. Trump said that, if elected to a second term, a panel of experts “working with Bobby” would investigate obesity rates and other chronic health issues in the United States.

We know from countless memoirs and internal accounts not to mention the evidence of our own eyes that the New York Times is terrified of the appearance of liberal bias and that the paper's culture is one of never admitting you're wrong. Unfortunately, the NYT has been wrong a lot over the past nine years and there's no way of owning up without appearing to side with the Democrats against the Republicans.

To get around this, either consciously or as some form of coping with cognitive dissonance, the journalists (or at least the editors) of the paper have repeatedly misrepresented the news. Their coverage has largely consisted of misleading headlines, buried stories, groundless speculation, and deceptively selective editing of quotes. The result has sometimes significantly overlapped what we're getting from Fox news, albeit stuffier and more pretentious.

For very different reasons, both conservative media and the establishment press are both trying to downplay the craziness of the Trump campaign. That's a very dangerous alliance for democracy.

 

Monday, August 26, 2024

Trump, Kennedy and the NYT -- making the “All Else Equal” Fallacy when things are really, really not equal

[This appeared in a slightly more skeletal form as a Twitter thread early Sunday morning.] 

The “All Else Equal” Fallacy: Assuming that everything else is held constant, even when it’s not gonna be.

We will see how this pans out, but I think most of the mainstream media is badly misreading the implications of RFK Junior's announcement. Josh Marshall and some other outsiders get it, but the NYT et al. are likely to be at least one step behind on this yet again. The standard analyses we've been seeing are based on some big (and I suspect unlikely) assumptions. If these assumptions are wrong, and we are already seeing some indications that they are, then their conclusions, while not necessarily wrong, have no support.

What we have here is a variant or perhaps a first cousin of the all other things being equal fallacy. Specifically in this case it is the idea that you can gauge the impact (or even most of the impact) on the race just by looking at the 4% currently supporting Kennedy.


If Kennedy had quietly dropped out of the race, privately informing all of his supporters (no, I don't know how that would work either) rather than making a high-profile announcement and if no one other than those supporters had noticed, then the straightforward analysis being done by political analysts would make sense, but that had already not happened by the time these analyses were being performed. Kennedy and Trump made sure that this was big news, The remaining 96% of voters are watching this show and paying close attention, particularly in tho GOP. This changes messaging and strategy on both sides and (as you'll see in a minute) policy on the Republican side. All other things are never equal.

Both MAGA and the Trump campaign are making a very big deal of this.



 

From a story I had to go looking for on the NYT (they are definitely pushing this as another "no big deal" story):

Conservative sites, more than a dozen of which prominently featured the news on their home pages, saw the news as a win for Mr. Trump. They argued that Mr. Kennedy’s decision could reshape the race by turning Mr. Kennedy’s supporters into Mr. Trump’s, and by shifting the attention of Americans away from this week’s Democratic National Convention.

...

Though polling suggests Mr. Kennedy’s decision is unlikely to significantly shift the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and Mr. Trump, many conservative commentators said the decision could swing the contest. Ben Shapiro, the editor in chief of The Daily Wire, said in a livestream after Mr. Kennedy suspended his campaign that the announcement, which was made during a speech in Phoenix, could “dwarf” the positive impact of the Democratic National Convention for Ms. Harris.

The Washington Examiner, a conservative news site, published multiple news articles on Friday that argued an endorsement from Mr. Kennedy would boost Mr. Trump’s campaign.

Haisten Willis, the site’s White House reporter, wrote that the decision “eliminates the third-party threat to the G.O.P. and could push momentum back in Trump’s favor as polls show a tight race against Harris.”

In an opinion essay titled “R.F.K. Jr. and Trump Offer a Good Fit” published on the site on Friday, the writer Brady Leonard said that Mr. Kennedy’s endorsement offered an alliance that not only helped Mr. Trump’s odds in the election, but also made sense ideologically.

The article was very he said/she said. Notably, it only cited two organizations on the left and one of those was Slate.

As far as I can tell, other than a brief reference to Trump "embracing" Kennedy, the NYT hasn't published anything about how this is already affecting the campaign and Trump's platform, which is pretty big news to sleep on.

DJT Friday:

"That is why today I am repeating my pledge to establish a panel of top experts, working with Bobby, to investigate what is causing the decades-long increase in chronic health problems and childhood diseases, including auto-immune disorders, autism, obesity, infertility, and more."

And this.


To understand the impact this announcement is having on MAGA, you have to imagine the emotional roller coaster they have been on the past couple of months. After the debate, they thought they had the election sewn up. After the assassination attempt they thought they had a divinely ordained landslide on their hands. From their perspective, the past month has been an absolute gut punch. Just as they were about to hit their post-convention peak, the world turned upside down on them. Suddenly everything was breaking for the Democrats and against them. Fox news people were clearly getting worried. Supporters were starting to panic.

Then comes RFK Jr. and suddenly Trump world has someone to pin their hopes on.

Ms. Trump was being accurate if you replace "American people" with "Republicans." From their viewpoint, it was an enormous party thrown by the popular kids mainly to make fun of the losers. Now everything was about to change.

Conservative hacks immediately jumped on the bandwagon.


 

 




NY Post


 

Then came this.

It didn't actually suggest a Trump/Kennedy ticket, but it got people thinking. The idea of Kennedy replacing Vance was met mockery from non-MAGA Twitter.


 

Not sure where the third party stuff comes from.

As the weekend stretched on, the tone of the jokes changed.


As far as I can tell, no one of any standing in Trump world explicitly suggested the switch, but the way they talked about Kennedy had to make Vance a bit nervous or at least unappreciated. It didn't help that JD Vance seemed to disappear into another dimension the moment he stepped out of that doughnut shop.


Vance's job is probably in no danger but it looks like both his dignity and his role have shrunk even more.



While Trump is promising to make RFK Jr a central figure in the campaign and in his promised administration.

Lots of talk about a cabinet position and some of the calls are coming from inside the house.

How will this play out for the Trump campaign? I'm inclined to say badly but, of course, I don't really know. I do know that the messaging and the policy stances of the Trump campaign have changed radically over the past seventy-two hours and those changes are likely to have a substantial impact (in some direction) considerably greater than whatever fraction of 4% the analysts at the NYT,  538 and the rest are talking about.

One last note. It's after midnight on Monday. I just checked the NYT.


They are already late to this story, but based on past history, when they catch up, they'll claim they were the first ones here.

Friday, August 23, 2024

“The Kamala Harris Problem”

This seems like a good time to remind ourselves that for the past four years the standard narrative has been that Kamala Harris is hopelessly inept both as a politician and as an office holder, not to mention being a little weird (what is it about the wired earbuds?). Lots of very famous and successful members of the media told us this again and again and are now looking for ways to distance themselves from statements that have become comically absurd. (Ezra Klein already busy at work on his revisionism tour.)

In a more sane world, reputations would take a hit and publications would publish mea culpas. In the world we live in, the best that we can hope for is that most of these journalists will move on and not bear too much of a grudge against the people who made them look bad.


Then.


From the Atlantic.

Ease and confidence have not been the prevailing themes of Harris’s vice presidency. Her first year on the job was defined by rhetorical blunders, staff turnover, political missteps, and a poor sense among even her allies of what, exactly, constituted her portfolio. Within months of taking office, President Joe Biden was forced to confront a public perception that Harris didn’t measure up; ultimately, the White House issued a statement insisting that Biden did, in fact, rely on his vice president as a governing partner. But Harris’s reputation has never quite recovered.
Now




Then
Ross Douthat: It’s a mistake to go all in on Harris, obviously, because she’s still the exceptionally weak candidate whose weaknesses made President Biden so loath to quit the field for her. [Anyone who thinks Ross Douthat has special insights into these decision making processes please raise your hand and slap yourself with it. -- MP] Potential rivals like Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan are throwing away an unusual opportunity because they imagine some future opening for themselves — in 2028 and beyond — that may never materialize. And the party clearly has an interest in having a better-situated nominee: A swing-state governor who isn’t tied directly to an unpopular administration would be a much, much better choice for a high-stakes but still winnable race than a liberal Californian machine politician with zero track record of winning over moderate to conservative voters.



Now




Obama '12 Campaign Manager. Frmr WH Dep. Chief Staff. 

 

Then [Follow the link to see Stevens clean Silver's clock.]


Now

Kamala Harris Gave the Best Acceptance Speech I’ve Ever Seen

By Jonathan Chait

Josh Marshall Now

First, on the speech … rock solid. I doubt her advisors and press people thought it could have gone much better. At the beginning I thought it might be understated somehow. Not bad at all, but understated, a bit quieter than we expect from these speeches. But as it progressed I realized she was developing an emotional audience, in person and on television. This came through later in the speech when she ranged from intense to boisterous to categorical. It worked with a mixture of intensity and authenticity. There’s no point in my doing more interpreting of the speech. It hit every point and hit every one well. The most telling comments were those from Republican commentators who couldn’t find their way around saying that it was a strong speech before, of course, reassuring listeners that Harris is obviously terrible and they agree with her about nothing.

 Josh Marshall Now talking about Then.

The final part of the story is rooted in official Washington’s view of Harris. To put it baldly, most elite DC journalists treated Harris with a kind of breezy disdain that could scarcely rise to the level of contempt. For the first year of her vice presidency there was an ongoing series of critical reports about issues in the Office of the Vice President, staff drama, mean bossism, general turmoil. I don’t know how much reality there was to those reports. But they set a dismal tone. You’ll remember that when Ezra Klein and others got together the calls for a Thunderdome convention, Klein referred delicately and painedly to “the Kamala Harris problem,” a problem so obvious that it scarcely required explanation: how to usher her out of the way for others from the vaunted Democratic bench.

I’m not trying to pick on Klein here. I’ve done enough of that. I note this simply because it was such a deep conventional wisdom that it hardly required explanation. Everyone in that world knew what he meant. That certainly figures into this, and in both directions. It is not only that there is this great appetite to find out just what it is Harris must be doing wrong. That backstory must have left Harris just utterly uninterested in what these folks have to say. They treated her as something between a punchline and a nonentity and now she’s the odds-on favorite, if only by a small margin, to be the next President. Why should she care?

Kamala Harris has been succeeding in spite of the press, and I guarantee you it's driving some of them crazy.

Thursday, August 22, 2024

"Being with you today was truly amazing." sounds like courtin' talk to me

Distorted headline stories were so last Thursday. The hot new trend with the cool kids today is seeing who can come up with the most ludicrous fact check from the DNC.








This kind of "fact-checking" is an artifact of the collision between Trump's politics of lying and elite media's business-model-driven bothsidesism. The two things are obviously categorically different. But the need to jam them into one model creates nonsense like this.

Josh Marshall


CNN's Daniel Dale was probably the only journalist on the fact-checking beat who is likely to come out of this week with his reputation enhanced.



One of the best takes came from Judd Legum, available in either tweet thread or post form.

From  The fact-checking industrial complex

But the Washington Post and other major media outlets do not view fact-checking only as a vehicle to scrutinize false claims. They also view it as an opportunity to demonstrate that they are unbiased and treat both sides — Republicans and Democrats — equally. This is where the trouble starts. 

Last night, President Joe Biden and many other speakers addressed the Democratic National Convention (DNC). Without a doubt, Biden and other Democrats said some misleading things. For example, Biden claimed that he was "removing every lead pipe from schools and homes so every child can drink clean water." Biden did secure $15 billion for that task through the Inflation Reduction Act, but removing all lead pipes will likely cost a total of $45 billion

But, from a factual standpoint, there is no comparison between Trump and Biden's speeches. Trump is completely unmoored from the facts. Biden gets things wrong but much less frequently than Trump. 

Nevertheless, the fact-checking industry has attempted to prove its objectivity by producing similar pieces for the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. This requires some sleight of hand. Kessler's fact check on the night Trump spoke to the RNC was limited exclusively to Trump. Other noted fabulists on the agenda, including Tucker Carlson, Franklin Graham, Alina Habba, and Eric Trump, were ignored. Kessler's fact check of Biden's speech to the DNC included all other speakers on Monday evening. 

Even so, Kessler was required to stretch the concept of fact-checking to absurdity — sometimes mangling facts himself — to fill out his fact check for the first night of the DNC. For example, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's claim that Vice President Kamala Harris "won’t be sending love letters to dictators." As Kessler notes, Clinton was referring to 2018 comments by Trump claiming that he "fell in love" with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un through letters. "We fell in love, okay?" Trump said. "No, really, he wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love.” Kessler, however, dings Clinton. He says that "[t]here is no evidence that Trump sent such letters" and "Clinton is making a bit of a leap to suggest that Trump has written 'love letters' to dictators." According to Kessler, "[w]e do not know what Trump wrote to Kim — or other dictators, for that matter."

Kessler's fact-check is not only pedantic, it is false. Bob Woodward, the legendary Washington Post reporter who still holds the title of "associate editor" at the paper, reported on 27 letters exchanged between Trump and Kim in his book "Rage" — including letters sent from Trump to Kim. "Like you, I have no doubt that a great result will be accomplished between our two countries, and that the only two leaders who can do it are you and me," Trump wrote to Kim on December 28, 2018. On June 30, 2019, Trump told Kim in a letter that "[b]eing with you today was truly amazing." Trump included a copy of the front page of the New York Times, which featured images of Trump with Kim, adding, "[t]hese images are great memories for me and capture the unique friendship that you and I have developed."

...

There were additional fact-checks in the Washington Post's live blog of the DNC. It included this analysis from national reporter Amy Gardner:

But Gardner's own logic, Biden's assertion is absolutely true. Trump has said he will accept the results if it is a "fair and legal and good election." And, as Gardner notes, he also has said that Democrats can only beat him by cheating. Therefore, if he loses, Trump will not accept the result, just as Biden said.

Wednesday, August 21, 2024

Big Shows, Little Shows

I went back and forth over posting this. It is one of those topics where pundits and their poor relations, bloggers, tend to read in too much. I was also concerned that, since the establishment press seem to be ignoring the story, the smaller and more partisan sources I was left with might not be giving me a true picture. As more data points came in, however, I came around to the idea that there is something worth paying attention to hear.

Unserious people spend too much time focused on spectacle and anecdote, but I think serious people sometimes spend too little. Something can be a good show and also an important story. As for the latter, the vast majority of the information we have to work with consists of anecdotes. If you can't get a handle on anecdotal reasoning, about the best you can shoot for is overeducated idiot.

Now let's cautiously talk about campaign events and crowd sizes.

I've never paid a lot of attention to political conventions so maybe I'm missing an obvious counterexample, but the Harris campaign is doing something that would seem to be highly unusual, and they are doing so in a way deliberately designed to get into Donald Trump's head.



Just so there is no confusion, the Milwaukee rally is going on during the DNC roll call.



Donald Trump had originally announced that he would largely step back from campaigning until after the end of the Democratic convention. He then did a 180 and announced a series of appearances in swing states. They have not been getting good notices. 



Edith Olmsted The New Republic

Donald Trump delivered a strangely low-energy speech on Monday at a factory in York, Pennsylvania.

While the crowd at Precision Custom Components started off cheering at the former president’s compliments about Pennsylvania and promises to bolster American manufacturing, any initial enthusiasm appeared to wane as Trump proceeded through his remarks in a monotone reading voice.

“Kamala puts America last, I put America first,” Trump said, sounding completely dejected. He frowned as the crowd cheered.





Vance was also on the road.


And just a reminder, this...
... was not the main show for the Democrats Tuesday.

Like I said, we don't want to read too much into this, but we shouldn't read too little into it either. While crowd size and candidate affect are not reliable measures, they can be leading indicators, particularly when paired with things like voter registration, small dollar donations, and trends in polling. Perhaps more importantly, in politics perceptions have a way of becoming reality, or at least of pushing reality aside. For the past month, perception has been far kinder to Harris then to Trump.

Tuesday, August 20, 2024

When prophecy fails repeatedly

In case you don't keep up with these things, for the past couple of weeks, there have been various theories floating around MAGA social media about the Democratic national convention, specifically about Harris or Walz being forced off the ticket.

As is often the case, the most over-the-top version came from Trump himself




Of course, this didn't help.

 Most aren't sure what's going to happen but they know it'll be big.

("Newsmax Host, bestselling author and host of The Todd Starnes Radio Show - weekdays at noon.  http://ToddStarnes.com. Fox News alum" -- we don't just quote any rando off the street here at West Coast Stat Views.)




All of this is happening against a background of conservative media news reports about how frightened and desperate the Democrats are.


Technically, we can't say for certain these theories are wrong until the end of the convention, but assuming that Joe doesn't force his way onto the stage on the last day of the convention and that the buildup were seen for coach Tim is not some incredibly elaborate head fake, this will join the long list of failed prophecies that have popped up in MAGA world since November 2024. (Who can forget the second coming of JFK jr.?) I don't think there's any way of knowing how many Trump supporters actually believe all of the craziness. I suspect it's a small but nontrivial minority, but that's just a guess.

From what I've observed (and from the experience of growing up and still having contacts in rural Arkansas), most Trump supporters have consciously or unconsciously made a bargain with themselves. There are certain aspects of the man that trouble them but they have pushed these to the back of the minds and think about them as little as possible. Though a few may enjoy going along with the cosplay, these people are not part of the cult. There is a point where they will stop supporting Trump. Whether or not a significant number reach that point in the next seventy-seven days is a question for the social scientists in the audience.