Month: October 2018

The president is fortunate that few people will be thinking about his craven and traitorous performance in Helsinki when they go to the polls, and I don’t think the Mueller investigation will be weighing too heavily on their minds, either. That’s a shame.

But I’m not surprised the president suddenly wants to talk about anything other than his connections to Russia or the many former employees of his who are now cooperating witnesses. Still, he seems to require a meeting with Vladimir Putin from time to time in exactly the same way an informant occasionally needs to meet with his intelligence officer.

As soon as the midterm elections are over, the Mueller team will begin unveiling much of what they have uncovered in the previous two months after turning Paul Manafort, and that means Putin and Trump need to be of one mind.

It wouldn’t be prudent to meet before the people vote, but it would be reckless to wait until after they need to respond to the new revelations.

So, this was as predictable as the sun rising in the East.

White House national security adviser John Bolton said Tuesday that President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin plan to meet in Paris, days after November’s midterm elections.

Bolton, following a one-on-one meeting with Putin in Moscow, confirmed that the Russian president suggested the leaders meet to continue discussions between the two, adding that they agreed to the date of Nov. 11 in Paris, which coincides with the Armistice Day commemoration.

“I said yes, in fact, that President Trump would look forward to meeting with him in Paris,” Bolton, who has been in Moscow for two days of high-level talks, told reporters at a press conference Tuesday.

Trump will get his instructions, just as he did in their private meetings in Germany, Vietnam and Finland.

In Germany, they colluded on the so-called Russian adoptions story in anticipation of the Trump Tower story breaking. In Vietnam, Trump announced that Putin was innocent because he had convincingly denied his involvement. In Finland, Trump took Putin’s side against his own intelligence community.  In Paris, they will have new talking points and a new strategy to deal with the forthcoming Mueller report.

This time, hopefully, an incoming Democratic Congress can probe this nakedly conspiratorial relationship so that it doesn’t fall down the memory hole of the American people like the previous examples did.

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, I spent a lot of time thinking about how Trump won by running up huge margins in rural areas–what it meant, what the Democrats could or should do about it, what it said about the people in those communities. Much of the Democratic base was so incensed that anyone could vote for Trump after all the credible accusations of sexual assault and his overtly racist campaign that they were convinced for both moral and political reasons that the party should write off the sticks entirely and pursue a suburban strategy to compensate.

On a visceral level, that’s how I felt, too. I was wounded by the election results and I was angry and in an unforgiving mood. But I also felt deep down that it would be wrong to take an approach of separation and disengagement. On the moral level, I don’t think a party that seeks to represent the less fortunate and more vulnerable can ever write off any community, let alone communities struggling with poverty, job loss, and a drug epidemic. On a political level, I doubted that we’d get an even trade even if the suburban strategy worked because it would give the Republicans a built-in advantage in the U.S. House of Representatives and especially in state legislatures. And on the level of pure alarm, I felt that populist rural rage that is channeled exclusively through right-wing channels leads to fascism and human rights abuses. I did not think it moral, savvy or wise to concede rural areas to Trumpism.

Only days after the election, on November 10, 2016, these ideas of mine started to spawn and I wrote a piece called Avoiding the Southification of the North. Later on, I wrote a cover story for the Washington Monthly on How to Win Rural Voters Without Losing Liberal Values. In our upcoming issue of the magazine, we have a great piece that touches on the same themes: The Democrats of Trump Country, written by Daniel Block.

The idea behind Block’s article is something I had recommended in much of my writing on this topic, both as a sensible strategy and as a moral argument.  The media are always writing about the people who live in Trump Country as a kind endlessly fascinating anthropological study.  But even in the reddest counties in the country, there are still a lot of people who voted for Hillary Clinton. What about them? What do they think has gone wrong for the Democrats? What do they think the national party and its spokespeople are doing that makes their jobs more difficult, or easier?  Mr. Block set out for rural Virginia to find out.

One thing that surprised him was something that would not have surprised me, because I wrote about it in that post-election Southification blog-post. He didn’t realize how important intimidation and social coercion are in the Republicans’ success in these areas. In some communities, being a Democrat is so socially and morally suspect that it can damage your career or business, cost you friends and opportunities, or even the condemnation of your preacher and congregation. To be honest, the same can be said for Republicans living in places like Philadelphia or Manhattan. What worried me when I saw the 2016 election results was that I saw evidence of this phenomenon, which has been a way of life in the South since the Civil War, spreading to the northern Midwest. I saw it as outright dangerous to allow this to happen, and as moral cowardice to consent to it by choice.

When a community slips beyond a certain point there is no longer a political conversation going on, but just a war of them against someone else from somewhere else. A county where Obama carried 40 percent of the vote was still having a debate, but the same county giving Clinton 20 percent was a different kind of thing altogether. And if anyone was going to roll back the tide, it would have to be the people in those communities who remained active Democrats despite all the pressures to leave or go underground.

What Block discovered in rural Virginia is encouraging and you should read the whole piece. The area he focuses on is a little different than the ones I was worried about because it’s more conservatively Christian and more loyal to Trump than the areas of Pennsylvania and the upper Midwest that moved sharply to the right in the Obama years. Nonetheless, the Democrats, though as badly outnumbered as ever, are getting organized and coming out of the darkness with increasing frequency.

Just as Trump won statewide elections by running up the score in places he was always destined to win, the Democrats can win statewide elections by holding his numbers down in those places. That’s what Obama did twice, and the Democrats need to find a way to do it again. To find out how they’re going about it, don’t ask Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi. To find out, check out our cover story.

But first…a definition of “Dem Fairytale.”  My own term; my own definition. Take it or leave it.

Beginning with the Clinton I presidency, continued by the Obama presidency and pretty much ended in any practical way by the Clinton II “public position/private position/deplorables/GET RID OF BERNIE!!” debacle, the Dem Fairytale’s lifespan was as follows.

We’re on your side!!!

You.

The people!!!

Those other guys?

Those Republicans?

They only represent the rich.

Vote for us!!!

We’re the good guys!!!

But of course…as is plain to see now by anyone who is not totally blinded by the leftiness and neocentrist media…they were owned by the same corporatist forces that owned their supposed “opposition.”

The controllers’ position?

Simple.

Vote for Tweedledum or Tweedledee, fools. We really don’t give a fuck. It’s all a win/win proposition for us!!!

Thus Clinton I’s NAFTA bullshit and his PermaWar efforts.

Thus Obama’s bailout of the very financial interests that were guilty of causing the 2008 economic breakdown and his own PermaWar/PermaGov actions both internationally and…at the very least in terms of universal surveillance…domestically.

But Trump broke the political duopoly mold, at which point many elected Republicans swore fealty to him in sheer self-interest while the rest of the rotten bunch formed an alliance with their erstwhile partners in the UniParty scam to get the fuck rid of him as soon as possible.

Which tactic also…so far, at least…doesn’t seem to have worked very well. I mean…he’s still there isn’t he? In the White House? Dominating the headlines, pro and con? He’s still packing the house at his rallies, right? Whatever jive polls to which you may subscribe aren’t showing his numbers seriously tanking, are they? As Booman has so plainly illustrated in his last several posts, that so-called “Blue Wave” that the leftiness media so gleefully hyped is looking extremely suspect in terms of its height, depth and carrying weight, isn’t it?

So…following a midterm election that probably doesn’t pan out to make any truly effective difference in the legislative governing numbers (Like say…taking the House and the Senate?), what are the prospects for the ongoing success or failure for the Democratic Party as a real “party of the people” instead of a hyped-up controllers’ party?

Read on.
Door Number One:

How the Mueller fairy tale ends (<http://theweek.com/articles/802798/how-mueller-fairy-tale-ends>)

Perhaps the best argument I have seen in favor of repealing President Trump’s pointless tax cuts is the superabundance of disposable income American liberals apparently spend on things like Robert Mueller bobble-head dolls, “Mueller is Coming” and “It’s Mueller time” T-shirts, Mueller “prayer” candles, and even children’s books featuring a super-buff bare-chested but tie-wearing Mueller lookalike hero. Turning the affectless head of a special counsel investigation into some kind of badass comic-book character who is going to rescue America from the nefarious clutches of — I wish I were making this up — “President Ronald Plump” could not be more childish. Goodness knows how many adults really believe all this stuff.

I feel bad for them, in the way that I feel bad for kids who are about to discover that the Tooth Fairy is fake. After 17 months of appending compound adjectives (“Russia-linked,” “Kremlin-backed”) to the names of an increasingly obscure cast of characters accused of things like sending spam emails and holding pointless meetings that went nowhere, it looks like we are finally getting close to the end of the Mueller probe. A report in Politico suggests that what skeptics have argued for more than a year and a half is true: namely, that Mueller and his team have not found any smoking-gun evidence of “collusion” between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Russian government because no such collusion took place.

It’s going to be a letdown. Not only is it likely that the final report will not reveal that the president has been a KGB agent since the late ’80s, as at least one mainstream liberal columnist fantasized. It is also possible that it will never even be released to the public, at least not in full. Unless they are granted permission to review them under various conditions that will be imposed by the Department of Justice, not even members of Congress will be able to read Mueller’s findings. For reasons that have as much to do with Mueller’s own personality and style as they do with the sensitive nature of the material, the text itself is unlikely to be the sweeping anti-Trump manifesto that the president’s fiercest liberal critics are longing for. There is every reason to believe that it will be a straightforward, minimally expansive document that does not volunteer information that is not absolutely relevant to the main findings.

The fantasy of a piece of paper that would explain away the painful reality that a buffoonish television host beat a former secretary of state and senator in the 2016 presidential election simply by running a better campaign is not coming true.

—snip—

We are now a mere 469 days away from Democrats’ 2020 Iowa caucuses. It is time for them to give up on fairy tales and find a candidate who can actually beat this guy.

Behind Door Number One lies the Democrats’ 2020 Iowa caucuses and those that follow.

Hmmmm…

And who do you suppose…given the current state of things…will control those caucuses and the monies spent on various campaigns to secure the nomination?

Yup.

The DNC Gatekeepers/Doorkeepers…basically the same people who foisted HRC on us a scant 2 years ago. Please see my February 2017 post (Still front paged on this site!!!) “Perez now chairman of DNC. Oh Well…There Goes THAT Idea!!!” (<http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2017/2/26/02638/3076>) They may make a cosmetic change once again…probably more identity politics, if that’s even possible…but the good ol’ DemRat boys and girls who gave us Trump by failing to provide a scintilla of honesty in the party will still be in power unless something changes drastically and soon in the Democratic Party apparatus. Bet on it.

Or…

Door Number Two: (And I am not in any way implying here that the following particular example promises to be a game breaker, I am simply saying that people like him are appearing all over the Democratic Party’s candidate list these days…Ocasio-Lopez, Beto, Randy Bryce etc. People who are running against the Republicans and the DNC-chosen DemRats.)

Ojeda: Out of Appalachia pain, a tough-as-nails Democrat emerges. (<https://www.yahoo.com/news/ojeda-appalachia-pain-tough-nails-democrat-emerges-021152477.html>)

Part GI Joe, part steadfast advocate for West Virginia’s working poor, Richard Ojeda is pursuing the near-impossible: flipping one of America’s most conservative congressional districts and reclaiming corners of Trump country for Democrats.

Impoverished Appalachia is a culturally conservative bastion on edge, ground zero in an opioid abuse crisis that has devastated families, and where wages are stagnant, health care costs are rising and the coal industry is gasping for air.

Two weeks before midterm elections that will determine which party controls Congress, tough-talking Ojeda is urging voters in West Virginia’s third district to swallow a dose of the economic populism he preaches.

“I have no problems making some noise when they’re not doing right by the working-class citizens of this state,” Ojeda told AFP in a recent interview in Huntington, where his insurgent campaign is based.

“We’ve been absolutely duped and abused for far too long.”

Something about the campaign, which he likens to a “combat deployment,” is resonating; polls show him narrowly trailing his Republican opponent for the open US House seat, Carol Miller.

Ojeda’s no-fuss campaign attire is a beige pullover, khakis and combat boots. At a political roundtable at Marshall University, he clashes with a Republican delegate over abortion legislation.

After 24 years in the military with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, the muscular 47-year-old father pulls no punches when it comes to lambasting Republicans including Trump, for whom he voted in 2016.

Trump, campaigning for Republican foot soldiers during a rally in Wheeling, West Virginia, branded Ojeda “stone cold crazy.”

Ojeda’s response? Bring it on.

But he reserves his harshest criticism for those in his own party, which had dominated West Virginia politics for decades until Republicans snatched the legislature in 2014.

Two years later, Trump won Ojeda’s district by nearly 50 percentage points, among the largest margins in the country.

“The reason why the Democratic Party lost power was because the Democrats sucked,” Ojeda said.

“That’s the truth. We have people that were in office for 30, 40 years,” he said, pointing to establishment politicians “sticking their hand in the cookie jar.”

—snip—

“We got kids that go to bed hungry at night, we got elderly people cutting their meds in half, we got an opium epidemic ripping apart our community and that has killed thousands of our people, and we don’t have nobody that’s got the guts to stand up against big pharma,” he said.

Ojeda decided to act, and ran for state senate in 2016. Weeks before the election he was nearly murdered when a man struck him in the head with a metal object.

Ojeda recovered, and won.

Shortly before marching in a homecoming parade, he fielded calls from fans, including one who told Ojeda he would volunteer for his campaign if he ran for president.

Ojeda insists that for now, his focus is on helping West Virginians.

“At the end of the day, if nobody steps up, I’m not scared at all,” he said about a run for higher office. “I have no problems doing that.”

Hunter King, an 18-year-old son of a coal miner, says he will likely cast his first-ever ballot in November, for Ojeda.

“He’s the person who has made me feel most like I have a voice,” King said.

—snip—

If an appreciable number of these types of Dem candidates win…despite the possible overall results of the midterms, Blue Wave or no Blue Wave…perhaps the Democratic party will be forced to either switch to a more truly “people’s party” orientation or just give up the ghost to an increasingly Trump-dominated Republican Party.

We shall see in about two weeks.

Won’t we.

Let us pray.

Or continue to be preyed upon.

Bet on that as well.

Later…

AG

P.S. I recently heard a radio ad on a sports talk station…Trump country about 80% of the time, even in the NYC area…that was aimed precisely at disaffected, working class Republicans. A guy who sounds like John Wayne on steroids identifies himself as a veteran military officer with recent combat postings. He starts talking about how badly many of his men have been harmed by by “payday lenders”…you know, the payday hustle with huge interest rates? Then he pivots to how well he “knows Bob Stefanowski”…the Republican candidate for governor in Connecticut…and how deeply disappointed he was when he found out that Stefanowski ran a payday lending company. He follows with a blurb in favor of the Dem candidate, Ned Lamont and then Lamont himself says that he “authorized this spot.”

Very effective, I think. I don’t know that much about Lamont, but somebody involved in his campaign has their finger on the pulse of Trump-type voters.

Encouraging.

I observed that “Mass shootings, hurricanes, and Syria dominated the news last year, so it’s no surprise they dominate the nominations and I plan on writing about all the nominees about them.”   I’ve written about nominees covering hurricanes and mass shootings, so it’s time to return to the News and Documenatary Emmy Awards and examine the 11 nominees with 17 nominations among them that reported on the Syrian Civil War.*

Syria has been such a dominant story that I have mentioned at least one nominee covering it in every entry about the News and Documentary Emmy Award nominees so far, beginning with Putin and Trump-Russia at the Emmy Awards.  There, I noted that “‘The Wounds of War’ and ‘Cries from Syria’ are probably the toughest competition, as both have four nominations each, tied for the most nominations for any single entry with ‘Charlottesville: Race and Terror’ by Vice News Tonight.”  Since my preference is to work my way down from the nominees with the most nominations, I am beginning today’s examination with “Cries from Syria,” breaking the tie because the list of nominees mentions it first.

I’m an environmentalist, so I begin by recycling what I already wrote about “Cries from Syria,” starting with this passage from a review in  The Hollywood Reporter that I quoted in The most honored political documentaries of 2017 examine crime, injustice, and the Syrian Civil War.

No less than three documentaries about Syria premiered in Sundance this year. Director Matthew Heineman’s City of Ghosts looked at the citizen journalists reporting from Raqqa, the de facto capital of ISIS in Syria. Last Men in Aleppo, from Feras Fayyad, looked at the so-called White Helmets in Aleppo, a group that goes in after every air raid in the Syrian city under siege to help save victims from the rubble. Both documentaries had a rather narrow focus that allowed them to explore the human impact and dimensions of a small part of the conflict.

Evgeny Afineevsky, who directed Cries From Syria, does the opposite, packing an overview of the entire six years of the complex conflict into a film of just under two hours in an approach that’s strongly reminiscent of his Oscar- and Emmy-nominated film Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom. Essentially a primer for those who haven’t watched or read the news from a reputable source since 2011, this compact and more than occasionally gruesome item is especially strong for its first three chapters, before it tackles the Syrian refugee crisis in too superficial and sentimental a manner.

That review calls for the movie’s trailer from HBO Documenary Films.

I can see why it was the fourth most honored documentary of 2017 as of the end of last year, tied with “Chasing Coral.”  The trailer alone shows a well-made and gripping film.

I already looked at its competition for Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary in ‘Abacus,’ ‘Edith and Eddie,’ ‘Heroin(e),’ and ‘Last Men in Aleppo’ — Oscar nominees at the 2018 News and Documentary Emmy Awards.

Joining “Last Men in Aleppo” as nominees for Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary are “Beware the Slenderman” and “Cries From Syria” from HBO, “National Bird” from “Independent Lens” on PBS, and fellow “POV” on PBS candidate “Almost Sunrise.”  “Cries from Syria” also earned nominations for Outstanding Writing, Outstanding Research, and Outstanding Music & Sound, so it has a better chance of winning a statuette than “Last Men in Aleppo.”

Four of the five nominees in this category have a direct or indirect relationship to the Syrian Civil War, with both “Cries from Syria” and “Last Men in Aleppo” being about the conflict itself, while “National Bird” examines U.S. drone warfare, some of which takes place in Syria as part of the fight against ISIS/Daesh, and the effect it has had on the veterans who have waged it.  “Almost Sunrise” looks at the issue even more indirectly, as described in IMDB.

The epic journey of two friends, ex-soldiers, who battle the moral injuries of war, and the temptation to escape through suicide, as they walk across America. Step by step, Tom Voss and Anthony Anderson confront the demons that haunt them, while discovering the power of community and spirituality to heal them.

“Almost Sunrise” even more directly examines the suffering of veterans.

The odd film out is “Beware the Slenderman,” which is about the horror figure from urban legend.  I might look at that for Halloween.  Right now, there is enough real-life horror to write about.

Speaking of which, it’s time to continue being a good environmentalist and recycle what I wrote about the nominees for Outstanding Writing: “‘Putin’s Revenge’ faces a less tough field for Outstanding Writing, ‘Alma’ and ‘The Wounds of War’ from 60 Minutes, fellow ‘Frontline’ episode ‘The Divided States of America,’ and ‘Cries from Syria’…”  Outstanding Writing may be a less tough field than Best Documentary, for which “Putin’s Revenge” is also nominated, but both “Cries from Syria” and “The Wounds of War” have four nominations at these awards and I think one of them may have a better chance than “Putin’s Revenge.”

“Cries from Syria” and “The Wounds of War” are also in direct competition for Outstanding Research along with “Let It Fall: Los Angeles: 1982-1992,” also nominated for Outstanding Historical Documentary, “Frontline” episode “Iraq Uncovered,” also nominated for Outstanding Investigative Documentary, and “The Vietnam War: A Film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick,” also nominated for Outstanding Promotional Announcement as well as being a four-time nominee at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards, making it the only program nominated at both editions of the Emmy Awards for which it was eligible.  My intuition tells me that “The Vietnam War” has the inside track for this award simply because of Ken Burns’ history, pun intended.

The final category for which “Cries from Syria” earned a nomination is Outstanding Music & Sound, which I already wrote about in ‘Chasing Coral’ versus ‘Yosemite’ — two nominees for Outstanding Nature Documentary both examine climate change.  Time to recycle!

For their third nominated category, both “Chasing Coral” and “Yosemite” are competing for Outstanding Music & Sound along with the HBO Documentary Films “Cries From Syria” and “The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble” and the “Independent Lens” episode “Tower.”  The most formidable overall are “Cries from Syria,” which also has nominations for Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary, Outstanding Writing, and Outstanding Research, and “Tower,” about the first mass school shooting in U.S. history at the University of Texas, which earned a nomination for Outstanding Historical Documentary as well…However, I suspect “The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble” might be the fiercest competitor for Outstanding Music & Sound; it also earned nominations for Outstanding Arts & Culture Documentary and Outstanding Editing: Documentary.

Since I’ve already examined two of the categories in which “60 Minutes” has been nominated for “The Wounds of War,” it’s time to look at the rest, beginning with Outstanding Video Journalism: News, which I covered in ‘Charlottesville: Race and Terror’ tied for most nominations at the News and Documentary Emmy Awards.

“Charlottesville: Race and Terror” finally runs into one of the other entries with four nominations in the field for Outstanding Video Journalism: News, where it is competing against “60 Minutes: The Wounds of War,” which is about the Syrian Civil War.  That makes for an intriguing match-up.  The other nominees in this category include “BBC World News America: Fight For Raqqa – Darren Conway,” CNN’s “Global Warning: Arctic Melt,” and “Vox Borders,” none of which have other nominations.  Yeah, I think this contest is between Charlottesville and Syria.

“BBC World News America: Fight For Raqqa – Darren Conway” is the other nominee about the Syrian Civil War, but I would be surprised if it won.

The final category for which “The Wounds of War” earned a nomination is Best Story in a Newsmagazine, where it is competing against fellow “60 Minutes” segment “Investigating the Opioid Epidemic: The Whistleblower and Too Big to Prosecute” produced in cooperation with The Washington Post, the “Fault Lines” report “Heroin’s Children” from Al Jazeera International USA, another nominee about the opioid epidemic with two other nominations for Outstanding Science, Medical and Environmental Report and Outstanding Editing: News, and two episodes of “Frontline,” “Battle for Iraq” and “Inside Yemen.”  The former also has a nomination for Outstanding Continuing Coverage of a News Story, while this is the only nomination for the latter.  Based on its total number of nominations, I think “The Wounds of War” is the favorite, but it is facing stiff competition for the trophy, particularly from “Heroin’s Children.”

Follow over the jump for the rest of the nominees covering the Syrian Civil War.
Two of the nominees for Outstanding Continuing Coverage of a News Story in a Newscast honor reports about the Syrian Civil War, “CBS News: Inside the Battle for Raqqa” and “CNN International: Fall of ISIS in Iraq and Syria.”  Joining them are “World News Tonight with David Muir and Nightline: The Rohingya” and two episodes of “VICE News Tonight, “Battle for Marawi,” which is about the fight against ISIS/Daesh in the Philippines, and “Libya,” in which the Sith Jihad plays a supporting role.  All of these are related, as even the Rohingya are being unfairly labeled as Islamic terrorists.  None of these have other nominations, so I have no idea how to handicap them.

Both the Syrian Civil War and the Rohingya appear as nominees for Outstanding Hard News Feature Story in a Newscast, which I already wrote about in Putin and Trump-Russia at the Emmy Awards.

ABC’s “Nightline” also had an episode about Vladimir Putin nominated for a News & Documentary Emmy Award, “Putin’s Power: A Journey Inside Russia,” which is being considered for Outstanding Hard News Feature Story in a Newscast…The other nominees for Outstanding Hard News Feature Story in a Newscast include “Battle for Raqqa” from BBC World News America, “Syria: Gasping for Life in Khan Sheikhoun” from CNN International, “Retaking Raqqa” from Nightline, and “The Unwanted” from ABC’s World News Tonight.  I have no idea which might win, but I can see there are lots of nominees about Syria.

I have changed my mind about which nominee I think will win, as “The Unwanted,” the other nominee examining the plight of the Rohingya, is also nominated for Best Story in a Newscast, while the other nominees for Outstanding Hard News Feature Story in a Newscast have no other nominations.

The “BBC World News America” report “The Escape From Raqqa” is the only nominee for Outstanding Investigative Report in a Newscast I didn’t mention in ‘Charlottesville: Race and Terror’ tied for most nominations at the News and Documentary Emmy Awards, the rest being “Charlottesville: Race and Terror,” “Anderson Cooper 360°: Kids for Sale,” “CBS This Morning: U.S. Air Force Academy Sexual Assault,” and “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer: Libya Slave Auction.”  Out of all of them, I think “Charlottesville: Race and Terror” has the best shot at winning.

I have one last category to recycle, from Coverage of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria nominated for News and Documentary Emmy Awards, which I repurposed for 14 nominations for 12 reports about Las Vegas Massacre and other mass shootings at the News and Documentary Emmy Awards.

The Washington Post…earned a News & Documentary Emmy nomination for Outstanding Breaking News Coverage for its coverage of the 2017 Hurricane Season…The [other] nominees for Outstanding Breaking News Coverage include CNN’s Worldwide Hurricane Coverage, so this category includes two nominees that covered the hurricane season.  The rest consist of ABC News: The Las Vegas Massacre[,]…CNN’s coverage of the Fall of Raqqa and the Manchester Concert Attack.  As I wrote, mass shootings, hurricanes, and Syria dominated the news, so they’re dominating the news nominations.

With this entry, I have one last topic to examine, the opioid crisis.  Stay tuned.

With my background doing community organizing for the dreaded ACORN, I have some experience dealing with people who tell you they simply don’t vote and don’t have any intention of voting.  So, there was a lot I found familiar in Gabriel Pogrund and Jenna Johnson’s article on voter apathy in Monday’s Washington Post.

The hardest argument to overcome is the insistence that one vote won’t make a difference. Sure, we can pull out a political almanac and point to a few elections that were decided by a coin flip. There was an example just last year in Virginia that actually changed which party controlled the House of Delegates. In that case, they drew a name out of a hat rather than flipping a coin, but the point remains the same: sometimes a single vote really does matter.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that these rare examples make for extremely unpersuasive arguments if you’re looking to overcome resistance to going to a polling place and casting a vote.  In my experience, it’s far more effective to concede the point and then make a different argument about how people actually influence elections.

Some people learn better visually, and fortunately I remember an advertisement from my youth in the 1970’s that demonstrates my argument very well.  I did not remember that a very young Heather Locklear was the pitchwoman until I went and dug up the commercial on YouTube. Here she is explaining how you can get more people to use Fabergé Organics Shampoo.

Elections are almost never won and lost based on whether or not one person decided to cast a vote, but meaningful political change rarely happens through the act of a single person either. The problem is that too many people think that their influence is limited to a single choice of whether to vote or not, and they correctly assess that this amounts to virtually no influence at all.

When I grew frustrated with our government after the decision to invade Iraq, I didn’t think it would change anything for me to vote, but I did think it might change things if I organized an army of people to register thousands of people to vote. My efforts padded John Kerry’s margin in Pennsylvania and may have even changed the results of a downticket election. But I can’t measure my influence only by that. I inspired other people to dedicate themselves to organizing work and taught them how to do it well, and it’s impossible to measure what kind of positive change may have resulted from that. The people I touched went on to touch other people, and so on, and so on.

When you explain things this way to apathetic people, the success rate goes up markedly, and your chances of convincing them to fill out that voter registration card go way up.

For one thing, you’re respecting their point of view rather than shaming them or treating them like they’re stupid or unsophisticated. For another, you’re showing them a new way of looking at things in which they are not so powerless and impotent. If they have an open mind, it can be empowering.

But this is also good advice for people who always vote. You can make so much more of a difference than that. If you convince two people to vote and they convince two people to vote, pretty soon a lot of people are using Fabergé Organics Shampoo. And isn’t that what we all want?

The set of all elections decided by a single vote is very small, but the set of elections decided by fifty votes is quite large. And we don’t cast a single vote on Election Day. We cast several votes for several offices and ballot initiatives, so if you can start a process that boosts turnout by dozens of votes, your chances of making a difference aren’t all that bad.

And, even if your efforts seems like they came to nothing, that won’t be the case because there will be an exponential ripple effect as greater citizen engagement begets greater citizen engagement.

So, listen to Heather Locklear. She knew what she was talking about.

I wrote a brief piece over the weekend warning that indications that we’ll have unusually high turnout in the midterm elections do not necessarily portend a good night for the Democrats. And some of the commentary I received was instructive.

“Stop the Chicken Littling already. If early signs look bad obviously that’s bad. But now even when they look good it still must be bad. All of these posts predicting doom really do no good.”

“Do you ever see a post like this on a conservative site? Nope. They don’t help anyone.”

“Thanks. I was looking for something to turn this day into another day of dread. I needed to feel that sinking feeling on Sunday, just like every other day. Jesus, man.”

“This constant state of doom, gloom and despair is the thing that most exasperates me about Democrats. People don’t vote if they think their vote won’t make a difference. Convince them that nothing will ever get better and you’re convincing them to stay home. So snap out of it! There’s a reason Republicans spend so much time trying to purge voters from the rolls…High turnout is great news for Democrats, and this looks like a banner year.”

You’ll notice a couple of people simply rejected my analysis, insisting that high turnout is necessarily good for the Democrats. Analysts are familiar with this kind of non-responsive response, and that’s not what I think is interesting here.

What I want to focus on is how these responses work on the emotions of the analyst. This is criticism and it’s somewhat harsh. I’m not helping the cause. I’m making things worse. I represent a fatal flaw of the left. I’m discouraging people and creating apathy.

People generally want to be liked, and if not liked then at least respected. Writers and analysts generally want to be read and to give their audience something that pleases them and makes them want to come back. Hopefully, you can see how a simple reward/punishment calculus could lead me to be gun-shy about giving out any kind of warnings to my audience in the future.

This is how a group delusion gets created. When an audience demands good news, that audience gets more of what they want and less of what they don’t want.

It’s a cruel thing for analysts because they’ll hammer me today for telling them to temper their optimism and get to work, but they’ll blast all the rose-colored analysts later if Election Day doesn’t go as well as they predicted it would.

They tell themselves that they want to get good predictive value, but they then stray from that and ascribe to the analyst the power to actually influence that which they analyze. My job suddenly isn’t to tell them where things stand and where they might be headed, but to avoid sowing discouragement and apathy.

In this particular piece, I am least sharing that latter conceit to the extent that I’m telling people it’s not too late to make a difference. Obviously, I am hoping that some people will be spurred to action and that this will improve the end result. I’m not selling resignation and am actively railing against those who spend elections as spectators and then put all their energy into being critics.

But I’m still wearing an analyst’s hat rather than the hat of a cheerleader.

What I did on Sunday is only what they could have read on Monday. I explained that high turnout typically favors the Democrats because they have a higher percentage of low-propensity voters, but that this year things might not work out that way for a couple of reasons. First, the president’s party typically does poorly in midterm elections because they’re less motivated to vote. Therefore, if things are going well for the opposition, we should expect a lot of the majority party’s voters to stay home. If they don’t, the typical enthusiasm advantage disappears.  Second, for a true wave to develop, we need this effect to be very pronounced in Trump-supporting states and districts, but if we’re getting something close to presidential turnout, then the red areas will be won by red candidates and the blue areas will be won by blue candidates. That should be enough to win the Democrats the House, but not by blowout margins. And it would probably doom some Democratic candidates for Senate running for reelection in states Trump carried by huge margins.

This is a warning that high turnout will not automatically translate to a good night for the left when the numbers come in, but it isn’t all doom and gloom.  It’s part dispassionate analysis and part argument against overconfidence and complacency. If that’s a fatal flaw on my part, so be it.

Maybe I’m just looking for trouble, but I’m getting a sick feeling about these midterms. Even the ostensibly good news, that turnout looks like it will be through the roof, has me worried. And that’s for a fairly simple reason. The Dems are, more often than not, breaking the historic norm and doing better with likely voters than registered ones, which means that higher turnout won’t necessarily favor them in the ways we would expect it to.

When one party has a solid intensity advantage, it’s not a plus for a lot of low-intensity voters to show up. Still, there are plenty of good signs for the Democrats if you choose to focus on them. The intensity level of blacks, Latinos and young voters is trending up rather sharply, and early voting looks robust, which is almost certainly creating initial leads for the Dems. As long as they still have some voters left on Election Day, these built-in leads could form the basis for some big upsets.

But, to demonstrate my angst again, seeing presidential level early voting gives me less confidence than ever in the polling companies’ turnout models. I’ve never had less faith in polling than I have this cycle, and it’s not just a hangover from 2016. I can see that the models are wrong already, so I have no expectation that the polls are anywhere close to accurate.

It looks like Trump’s base is going to come out in force, and that’s not normal for.a president’s party in a midterm. It’s going to blunt the Democrats advantages and take some seats off the table that looked very winnable.

This isn’t an election to be a spectator. Contact your local party and get involved so you don’t feel like a worthless piece of crap on election night.

Steve King is as racist as they come, but he’ll probably get reelected because at least he isn’t a Democrat. The people of Iowa’s 4th District should be ashamed. Many of them have grandparents or parents who fought Nazis in World War Two. Some of them even died in the effort. And they don’t care about electing a Nazi sympathizer to represent them in Congress.

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Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the eastern shore Virginia Gothic house. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below. I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 6×6 inch canvas.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

Work on the house continues.  The roof is now gray and the preliminary shadows appear within the porch.  Limited but noticeable progress.  I will try and move this along for next week’s cycle but at least things are going in the right direction.

 
The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

 

Nate Silver is struggling to understand what it portends that the Democrats have accumulated an unprecedented money advantage in terms of candidate fundraising. He’s worried that his election forecast may be off, and not necessarily by underestimating the Democrats’ chances in the midterms.

It’s obviously not a bad thing for Democrats to be well-funded but the question is whether that’s being factored too heavily into the forecasts. Republicans have a lot of outside groups contributing generously to candidates who don’t have a ton of money to spend themselves, so it’s not safe to assume that Republicans who don’t have a lot of cash on hand are necessarily going to be that badly outspent.

The fact that money is flooding Democrats’ coffers certainly indicates a high level of engagement on the left, but it’s not really showing up in other measurements. When you compare likely-voter versus registered-voter polls, there’s no indication that either party should expect a significant advantage in turnout.

Silver speculates that new online fundraising tools and better fundraising pitches could be making it a lot easier to raise money without it really saying a lot about the quality of candidates or their campaigns, and that could easily lead to the money metric being overvalued in his forecast model.

One thing Silver doesn’t really get into is how this money might be spent down the home stretch. He’s more focused on what the numbers mean right now. Does it mean that the Democrats are more motivated than the polls suggest? Does it mean that he’s tweaking the polls in the wrong direction? Perhaps he’s overrating the incumbency advantage in a cycle where loads of Republican incumbents have a financial disadvantage.

But another question he might ask is a little different. Rather than focusing on whether the polls are right or wrong at the moment or whether his model is making the right adjustments based on fundamentals, perhaps he should be open to the possibility that the surge has not yet fully developed. In this scenario, the Democrats will close very strong and outperform this week’s polls precisely because they have more money to spend in the homestretch. They don’t have to choose between advertisements and field work, for example, but can do plenty of both.

It’s well established that incumbents have a big innate advantage in elections, but we have to wonder how that typically manifests itself. Usually, it means that they have an easy time raising money, that they don’t have to spend it raising their name recognition, that it’s difficult and expensive for challengers to redefine them, that they already have an established and experienced political team, and that at least a plurality of their constituents have already cast a ballot for them at least once.

Most of those advantages seem to be missing or muted in this cycle, which could leave a lot of Republicans struggling with the downsides of incumbency without getting the normal bonuses. Congress is very unpopular and the country is restless and in turmoil, which means that this is likely a change election. Other things being equal, the electorate may be much more inclined than usual to “throw the bums out,” which could be costly for a Democrat or two, but will mainly work to the disadvantage of the GOP.

Silver is right to wonder what the financial numbers mean, because the Dems seem to be raising lots of money irrespective of how talented or attractive or viable their candidates might be, and that means that getting a lot of donations doesn’t really indicate that a particular candidate is doing an especially good job. But it does mean that they won’t have the same disadvantages that challengers normally face.

I don’t know if the Democrats will outperform Silver’s models, because that depends a lot on how he tweaks the top-line results. It’s more realistic, I think, to believe that the Democrats will outperform the polls themselves, or that they’ll use their money in the last weeks to create a turnout advantage that isn’t showing up yet in the polling screens.

It could turn out that the money indicates a lot of passion from the most politically engaged, but it won’t translate into added votes.

One thing is certain, and that’s that the Democrats wouldn’t trade places with the Republicans.