Thursday, September 12, 2024

Reactions from the Day after

I won't spend a lot of time on the establishment press reaction. For the most part, it is too disconnected from reality, too reluctant to face up to what we are seeing, to be of any value.

Take a minute to read this answer from Trump, keeping in mind that, though the moderator tried to steer him back to the immigration bill, this was a response to Harris pointing out that people have been observed leaving his rallies.

FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: First let me respond as to the rallies. She said people start leaving. People don't go to her rallies. There's no reason to go. And the people that do go, she's busing them in and paying them to be there. And then showing them in a different light. So, she can't talk about that. People don't leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics. That's because people want to take their country back. Our country is being lost. We're a failing nation. And it happened three and a half years ago. And what, what's going on here, you're going to end up in World War 3, just to go into another subject. What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country. And look at what's happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don't want to talk -- not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don't want to talk about it because they're so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating -- they're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country. And it's a shame. As far as rallies are concerned, as far -- the reason they go is they like what I say. They want to bring our country back. They want to make America great again. It's a very simple phrase. Make America great again. She's destroying this country. And if she becomes president, this country doesn't have a chance of success. Not only success. We'll end up being Venezuela on steroids.
Any analysis that fails to capture how bizarre Trump's statements were is a gross misrepresentation.

This isn't to say the establishment press was uniformly bad. There were multiple high points.

This observation from NPR's Domenico Montanaro was excellent.


Chait did a good job putting the Haitian rumor in context.

The term presidential has always been elastic, and in the Trump era, its meaning has been stretched out like a pair of pants worn around for a week by a man 20 pounds too heavy for them. Yet, even by the distended contemporary standards, Trump’s claim about the dogs was weird, ridiculous, and the opposite of presidential.

There is poetic justice here. Trump is the victim of the sealed-off information ecosystem that produced and sustained his political career.

The conservative movement was built on the premise that the main organs of knowledge — journalism, academia, science — are hopelessly and even consciously biased toward liberalism. In response to this belief, the right constructed its own bubble in which only a claim originating from within the movement can be taken as true. Julian Sanchez once called this “epistemic closure,” meaning that its beliefs were not open to correction from outside sources.

The lie that migrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, is a classic example of that method in operation. The story originated from white-supremacist sites online, which relentlessly promote the idea that non-white immigrants are dirty and dangerous. It quickly worked its way from the far right into mainstream conservative channels. Republicans seemed to think the idea gave them a potent meme.

 

CNN's Daniel Dale is consistently good.

And the Philadelphia Inquirer put things bluntly.

Silver, who we've been hard on lately, made an excellent point.


Too often, though, the news and analyses read like Pitchbot bits, so lets go to the source


The reactions on the right were also informative.


 

Though there was way too much horserace speculation, the electoral significance of one exchange seems to of gotten little attention. When Donald Trump refused to say whether he wanted Ukraine to win and Kamala Harris suggested that Putin would set his sights on Poland if Ukraine fell, she specifically directed the message to Polish Americans living in Pennsylvania. There are quite a few of them, almost 6% of the population, and there are substantially higher percentages in Wisconsin and Michigan. We have no way of knowing how likely Polish Americans are to be influenced by the specter of Russian aggression back in Europe, but we are talking about nontrivial numbers in at least three swing states.

On a related note, some of the most interesting reactions came from people on Russian payrolls, either here...



Or in Russia itself.


There is shock and dismay on Russian state television, since Moscow’s true preferred candidate Donald Trump was no match for Vice President Kamala Harris in Tuesday’s debate. Now, Putin’s top propagandists are eating crow, having walked into a trap of their own creation, after weeks of dismissing Harris as a weak, feeble-minded contender.

In the run-up to this presidential debate, Russian state TV propagandists constantly predicted that the “charismatic” Trump—previously described as “our Donald”—would resoundingly defeat his opponent. They’ve consistently described Harris as a stupid, inexperienced newcomer, who simply cannot function without a teleprompter, even citing ridiculous conspiracy theories from the likes of Alex Jones to assert that the Vice President has a severe “performance anxiety” and would show up to the debate high on drugs.

The coverage of the U.S. presidential race on Russian state TV was jam packed with compilations of Harris laughing or select quotes they repeatedly claimed no one could understand. Many of their clips came straight from Fox News, in which various hosts roundly mocked Harris and praised Trump.

On the night of the debate, this approach was still in use. During the broadcast of the show At Dawn on the Solovyov Live channel, immediately preceding the airing of the debate, host Kristina Busarova said that an “experienced politician” like Trump would most certainly steamroll Harris, describing the Vice President as “not smart and not savvy.” As she watched translated clips of the debate live on-air, Busarova looked deflated and confused.

Likewise, hosts and pundits on Russian state television struggled to explain the disparity between the way Kamala Harris was smeared in their relentlessly dismissive coverage, and the way she performed during the debate.

...

Despite their disappointment, Putin’s propagandists did find a bright spot for Moscow in the devastatingly disappointing debate. Trump’s refusal to say that he wants Ukraine to win in its battle against Russia’s invasion seemed to make them feel warm and fuzzy. Solovyov asked Simes to elaborate as to how Trump is planning to quickly end the war between Russia and Ukraine. Trump’s former adviser said that the ex-president would simply tell Ukraine to concede to Putin’s demands, and cut off all U.S. aid if the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky refuses to do so.

 
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Wednesday, September 11, 2024

September 9th, 2024... the day the New York Times found out Donald Trump was running for president

 September 9th, 2024... the day the New York Times found out Donald Trump was running for president

Well, that was unexpected.

In the span of 24 hours, the New York Times posted more substantial criticism of Donald Trump than they have over the past three months.

Here's a good write up from Cheryl Rofer of Lawyers Guns and Money. (Rofer has become the essential LGM blogger. Definitely a follow.)

If this had been one or two articles or if the jump in tone had been less dramatic, it wouldn't demand explanation, but this is a big jump and it caught lots of people's attention.

 


I suspect the most obvious and likely explanation is that the pressure finally got to upper management. The criticism was no longer something they could dismiss as sour grapes from Democrats who wanted the New York Times to be the Fox News of the left. Questions about what was going on at the paper had become to widespread and the people behind them, such as Margaret Sullivan, too respectable.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the very establishment public radio program On the Media ran this segment two days before the sudden course correction.

The Media Are Going Easy On Trump and Russia is Going All In On Right-Wing Media

At a town hall event hosted by Fox, Donald Trump shared a number of falsehoods, and appeared to confuse who he was running against. On this week’s On the Media, how mainstream outlets fail to hold the Republican candidate accountable. Plus, meet the right-wing American pundits who’ve received payouts from the Kremlin.

[01:00] Host Brooke Gladstone speaks with Daniel Drezner, professor of International Politics at Tufts University. Drezner discusses how the political press continues to struggle to cover Trump, and his campaign against Vice President Kamala Harris. 

[12:34] Host Brooke Gladstone interviews Dan Froomkin, editor of presswatchers.org. Froomkin explains why fact checkers at legacy outlets are too often adding to political confusion.

 

I don't want to make this sound like a road to Damascus moment. The New York Times still has entrenched institutional problems and even its recent efforts at moving beyond false balance and sane washing have been somewhat mixed.

This excellent MSNBC clip (well worth your time) explains how even in a supposedly hard-hitting article, the reporter effectively rewrites Trump's statements so that something that was nonsensical appears to be a bad but not absurd policy suggestion.

What's worse, we are already seeing some definite signs of backsliding in the past few hours, particularly with respect to the paper's coverage of the debate.

But let's look on the bright side and celebrate what progress we can find at the moment including this quote from Michelle Goldberg which, in addition to being apt and direct, also comes close to criticizing her paper's official position, something that only one or two of her peers have the guts to do.



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Tuesday, September 10, 2024

How did a debate that hasn't happened yet become the biggest story of the month?



 

News, analysis, and speculation about a debate that hasn't happened yet has become THE political story of the past few days despite there being nothing interesting or informative to say before the actual event. At best we get some indirect relevance like the NYT article above that hits on Trump's misogyny. Mostly though we get trivia...

And in some cases, misreported trivia.

While the press wasted countless hours on this, here are political stories which are receiving little oxygen despite being far more consequential.

1. Russia -- Some of the most important pundits and social media figures in the conservative movement were revealed to be on the Russian payroll, part of a massive effort to influence the 2024 election in favor of Trump. Much of the press, particularly the NYT, treated this as a 24-hour story. Briefly of interest then quickly dropped. 

2. Egypt/Trump bribery investigation.

3. Surprise gender reassignment surgeries -- Trump has not added these pizzagate-level crazy accusations to his stump speech, combining QAnon style conspiracy theories with raging transphobia.

4. "Bloody" mass deportations -- Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric and imagery is far more extreme, violent, and overtly racist that it was in 2016.

 5. Trump's cognitive decline. 

6.  Increasingly outrageous maneuvers to keep abortion off the ballot.

 

 

7. This


and if we have to play the what's-really-going-on-in-the-campaign game...

8. Quiet quitting -- in a tight race, one of the candidates has scaled back rallies and swing state appearances and when questioned about this has either avoided the question or given completely nonsensical answers.

 

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Monday, September 9, 2024

"What did you do at school today, Jimmy?"

Just to recap, Donald Trump said this at the Moms4Liberty event.

Trump: But, eh, the transgender thing is incredible. Think of it, your kid goes to school and he comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child. And you know many of these childs [sic] fifteen years later say, “What the hell happened? Who did this to me?”

 This was an addled and exaggerated version of the rhetoric M4L has been pushing ...

 
 

... so it appeared that a confused Trump was just trying to repeat what his hosts had told him.

Now it seems to be part of the standard stump speech

As far as I can tell, the Independent is the only paper  that considered Trump's rants about Jimmy's operations worthy of more than passing mention.

Trump falsely claims children being forced into gender transition ops at school in rambling fantasy-filled rally speech by Gustaf Kilander

Donald Trump falsely claimed yet again that children are the subject of “brutal” gender operations at schools across the US.

“Kamala supports states being able to take minor children and perform sex change operations, take them away from their parents, perform sex change operations, and send them back home,” Trump said in Mosinee, Wisconsin on Saturday afternoon.

“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation,” he added. “Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?”

 For comparison, here was the headline in the NYT:

Trump Lays Out Vision for Bending the Federal Government to His Will

While the tone of the article is critical (considerably above average for the paper), it captures none of the craziness, treating most of the speech as actual policy suggestions, albeit rambling and ill-considered.

CNN did the same:


Though Meidas Touch clearly has an agenda, they do a better job capturing just how bizarre these events are.

 

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Friday, September 6, 2024

This may not be 1964 but it's certainly not 2008

Probably because it is so recent, 2008 seems to be most people's favorite go to comparison for the current election, but other than crowd sizes, it's a really poor analog. For a historical analogy to work, the significant relationships have to match up, particularly the causal relationships. 

Consider the fundamental components of the race.

1. Barack Obama was one of the most charismatic politicians of the past 50 years. The only other two I would put on his level are Reagan and Clinton. (Trump certainly has something, but I suspect his cult leader hold on MAGA has more to do with him being the perfect candidate for a generation of Republican voters kept in a constant state of anger and anxiety by conservative media than it does on personal charisma. That is also consistent with his losing the popular vote twice.)

2. Obama was still very much a new face 16 years ago. Before his convention speech in 2004, he was virtually unknown. The day after that speech, a lot of people, myself included, called up acquaintances and told them "I think I just saw the first black president of the United States." That newness was a key part of the Obama persona.

3. Republicans were the incumbents and were saddled with the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. This was very much top of mind for voters that November.

4. You can't seriously discuss a presidential election without looking at both candidates. John McCain was a formidable candidate who came into the race with considerable appeal across party lines. Although less charismatic than his opponent, he did have above average stage presence. He was also, despite some notable flaws, a man of great character.


Now let's look at this year.

1.  &  2. Kamala Harris is a very good politician. Nate Silver and almost everybody at the New York Times editorial board needs to admit they were wrong on this one and apologize both to Harris and to their readers. The longer they wait, the more embarrassing it's going to be for them.

That said, in terms of charisma, Harris is simply not on the level of Obama, Clinton, or Reagan. This is not damning with faint praise – – that is the most exclusive of clubs – – but it is important to be clear about what is driving the Harris phenomenon. She is consistently solid in rallies and on the campaign trail, but not nearly exceptional enough to explain the phenomenal crowds and enthusiasm. In terms of star power, she is often outshone by the folksy charm of her running mate (which, it should be noted, does not seem to bother her in the slightest).

Harris is uniting and invigorating a party that desperately wanted to be united and invigorated. It is difficult to express how demoralized Democrats had gotten, ironically in large part because of what had gone right. It is one thing to see your party blamed for policy disasters particularly disasters due to bad luck rather than incompetence, but it absolutely sucks see your party have major, expectation-exceeding successes only to have them ignored or even framed as failures. Though the press has memory-holed much of this, if you go back and check what was being written at the time, the overwhelming consensus was that Biden would not be able to pull off a soft landing, the unification of NATO, holding off Russia in Ukraine, bringing together South Korea and Japan, jumpstarting American manufacturing, or getting substantial climate change legislation through congress plus at least one or two more I can't think of at the moment, but nothing seemed to count.

Part of the remarkable success of the handoff to Harris was the way it allowed Democrats to keep what they liked about the Biden presidency and yet still have a fresh and amazingly chaos-free start. No more old jokes or snide New York Times articles about cognitive decline (which have conspicuously disappeared now that the most obvious example is the Republican candidate). It is entirely possible that this couldn't have happened if Harris had been a fresh new face. Democrats were able to keep a candidate they had voted for explicitly in 2020 and implicitly in 2024 while shedding most of the baggage.

3. This year we're seeing lots of rather silly analyses about Kamala somehow making Trump the incumbent with the issue further confused by the GOP candidate being the previous president, but Harris is the incumbent in the same sense that Bush was in 1988 and Gore was in 2000, making the reaction to her all the more exceptional.

And putting aside all the vibecession bullshit, this is very much not 2008.



4. Perhaps the biggest difference between this campaign and that of 2008 is the opponent. With the possible exception of the despicable Matt Taibbi, I don't recall ever hearing anyone say "we can't have a man like that in the White House" about John McCain. Donald Trump gives this race an urgency and a moral clarity both because of his positions and his character. Harris and Walz have struck exactly the tone that Trump's opponents needed to hear, happy and optimistic while at the same time aggressive. This is proven and extraordinarily fortuitous combination.

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Thursday, September 5, 2024

Thursday Tweets -- In normal times, this would be a big deal.

It still might.

Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State September 4, 2024

As part of a series of coordinated actions across the U.S. Government, the Department of State is taking three steps today to counter Kremlin-backed media outlets’ malicious operations seeking to influence or interfere in the 2024 U.S. elections.

Moscow’s methods of targeting those it identifies as adversaries are well known – from its illegal and unwarranted invasion of sovereign nations to the unjust imprisonment of innocent persons, to cyberattacks and meddling in foreign elections, to conducting sham elections in Russian-controlled territories of Ukraine.

In addition, we now know that RT, formerly known as Russia Today, has moved beyond being simply a media organization. RT has contracted with a private company to pay unwitting Americans millions of dollars to carry the Kremlin’s message to influence the U.S. elections and undermine democracy. Moreover, RT’s leadership has direct, witting knowledge of this enterprise.

To counter Russia’s state-backed covert influence operations, the Department is acting to hinder malicious actors from using Kremlin-supported media as a cover to conduct such covert influence activities. The Department’s actions include introducing a new visa restriction policy, Foreign Missions Act determinations of RT’s parent company Rossiya Segodnya, and other subsidiaries RIA Novosti, RT, TV-Novosti, Sputnik and Ruptly, and announcing a Rewards for Justice offer.

Today’s announcement highlights the lengths some foreign governments go to undermine American democratic institutions. But these foreign governments should also know that we will not tolerate foreign malign actors intentionally interfering and undermining free and fair elections. The United States will continue to both expose those state-sponsored actors who attempt to undermine our democratic institutions and hold them accountable for those actions.


https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/crime/2024/09/04/indictment-russians-tennessee-company-tenet/75074263007/ 

 

An indictment unsealed Wednesday alleges a Tennessee content creation company was the tool a team of Russian propagandists used to infiltrate U.S. audiences with Kremlin-backed messaging.

Two Russian nationals who worked for Russia Today, a Russian state-controlled media outlet, were indicted on accusations they funneled nearly $10 million to a Tennessee-based online content creation company to publish English-language videos on social media sites like TikTok, Instagram, X and YouTube. The company's more than 2,000 videos posted in the last 10 months have been viewed more than 16 million times just on YouTube, according to the indictment.

The indictment, unsealed in the federal court for the Southern District of New York, doesn't identify the Tennessee company, but descriptions in the indictment match those of Tennessee-based Tenet Media.

The indictment states the company described itself on its website as "a network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues." Tennessee-based company Tenet Media has the same message on its homepage. The indictment states the Tennessee-based company was incorporated around Jan. 19, 2022, which matches records from the Tennessee Secretary of State's Office. The indictment says the company applied to the Tennessee Department of State to conduct business on May 22, 2023.

Tennessean reporters have submitted a message seeking comment in the submission form on Tenet Media's website and emailed requests for comment to commentators listed on Tenet Media's website.




By my count we're at three to five black swans so far this election so we've all gotten a bit jaded but this does have potential and it's already apparently shaking some people up.




On a possibly related note.








Lots of major GOP and MAGA figures are linked with Tenet indirectly...


 

or directly.










This was originally going to be a multi-topic tweet ending on a light note. When the big news of the day provided me with too much material, I decided to save the rest for later but keep the bird where he was because I thought we could all use it. 

There's no intentional metaphor here but I'm sure you can come up with one.



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Wednesday, September 4, 2024

If today's New York Times were reviewing Our American Cousin, they wouldn't mention the assassination

Something is wrong with the paper of record.

The Republican candidate for president in what appears to be a very close race just said this.

Trump: But, eh, the transgender thing is incredible. Think of it, your kid goes to school and he comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child. And you know many of these childs [sic] fifteen years later say, “What the hell happened? Who did this to me?”

Listen for yourself.


You would think that this would be newsworthy in terms of hate and fear mongering, but even more so because it means the party's nominee is either spreading outrageous lies or is delusional or both. You would probably expect it to be the lede, but this is how the New York Times account of the event in question opened:

Conservative Moms, Charmed by Trump, Would Rather Avoid His Misogyny by Shawn McCreesh

It didn’t look like a typical Trump rally.

There were trays of mini-cupcakes and macarons. There were squadrons of helicopter moms buzzed off white wine. The excited women were wandering around the basement of a Marriott in downtown Washington, waiting for former President Donald J. Trump to show.

It was the Joyful Warriors summit thrown by a bunch of agitated parents known as the Moms for Liberty, a conservative activist group that was founded during the Covid pandemic. The group, which has more than 130,000 members across the country, has become quite influential in Republican politics.

[Brief side note: Moms for Liberty has been labeled an extremist anti-government group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The group's homophobic agenda gained an added level of irony when one of the co-founders step down after news broke of multiple menage a trois's with her husband and another woman. McCreesh was so determined to downplay their extremism that the paper had to issue a correction.  Not relevant for this post, but fun to know.]

The NYT didn't just bury the lede; it omitted it entirely. Sadly, most of the mainstream press followed suit, but the article in the paper record was one of the worst for its cutesy details and particularly aggressive sane-washing. The omission was even more bizarre given the amount of time the article spends reporting other comments that Trump made about transgender issues. What they reported on was certainly offensive, but nowhere near as bad as what they left out.

At least one New York Times opinion writer was willing to speak up about this (though you'll notice even Bouie, who is one of the paper's boldest and most independent voices, doesn't call out his employer by name). h/t LGM:

 

And just to make the story even more perfect.
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Tuesday, September 3, 2024

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.”

 


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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).















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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. 




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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.

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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.

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