Month: May 2020

I’ve already written that concern about Elizabeth Warren’s Senate seat is not a good reason to oppose her being Joe Biden’s running mate, so I’m disappointed to see Harry Enten of CNN make it a central argument against her. First, the Massachusetts legislature can easily change the law so that Governor Charlie Baker cannot choose a Republican replacement. Second, even if they don’t do this, current Massachusetts will assure that a special election is held by the beginning of June at the latest. There’s a small risk that the Republicans could begin Biden’s term with control of the Senate if the elections result in 50-50 tie. There’s also a small chance that the Baker’s interim replacement could win the Special Election, as Scott Brown did after Teddy Kennedy died. These are small risks that can be avoided completely if Massachusetts Democrats play hardball, and they should be willing to do so if it means that Warren might become vice-president.

Enten also argues that Warren is useless to Biden because she’s very unpopular and doesn’t do anything to help Biden where he is weak (among young voters and Hispanics, for example). Meanwhile, Biden is already crushing it with progressives and suburban women, so he doesn’t need a boost.

It’s useful to disabuse people of some of their lazy assumptions, so I welcome Enten’s argument that Biden is already doing very well on the left, but for much the same reason I don’t like the rest of his piece. Much like it’s a flawed assumption to think Biden needs to shore up his left flank, it’s erroneous to think that Warren only has potential appeal to the far left, or only to suburban women.

Enten is on stronger ground when he points out that Warren has traditionally run weaker than expected campaigns even in victory, and that she has high negatives. If that reveals some flaw in her skills as a retail politician, it could be a real cause for concern. But she has other skills that most of the alternatives either lack or have in less abundance. She is extremely well-versed in policy and excellent at explaining things–attributes that helped Bill Clinton immensely both as a candidate and a president. She’s a willing attack dog who is fearless in talking to the press and in taking on partisan and press criticism. She’s also got a populist streak that transcends any pinched Cambridge liberalism and fits nicely with Biden’s Average Joe appeal. She has some administrative experience, too, as the creator of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. She meets the test of being prepared, and that is (or should be) the most important thing.

If research reveals that Warren could cost Biden the election, he should strike her off his list, but otherwise she is an extremely solid choice who has tremendous upside as a governing partner. There are certainly other good choices, but an argument can be made against each and every one of them that is at least as compelling as the one Enten makes against Warren.

 

 

For the second night in a row, protests against the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police have broken out and resulted in widespread disorder, property damage, injuries and even death. Too many things have come together at once, and the country has finally succumbed to an accumulation of stresses and indignities.

We can start with the main thing, which is a constant drip-drip-drip of black and brown folks losing their lives at the hands of cops who then face minimal accountability. Then we have a president who has done nothing but insult minorities and embrace white nationalism for the last four years. Add in forty million people losing their jobs overnight with a nation living under fear in a global health pandemic that most impacts blacks and people living in dense urban communities. Finally, add in some nice weather that incentivizes already stir-crazy people to disregard basic health advice and abandon social distancing.

This all created a tinderbox, and now our cities are revolting against civilian authority. There are credible reports that white nationalists and even some rogue police officers have been acting as provocateurs, seeing a political advantage for the right in creating a white backlash against the disorder and disrespect.

Trump was clearly heading for a humiliating political defeat at the beginning of last week. Now things are not so clear. Now there’s a debate about whether the non-urban parts of the country will respond the same way they did to the riots during Lyndon Johnson’s president and seek protection from the right, or they’ll turn even harder against Trump because he’s in charge and they’re even more desperate for change. One thing is clear if nothing else. The demographics of the country are different today than they were in 1968.

But if this is a revolt against Trumpism, it’s also a revolt against Democratic leadership. The mayors of these cities are all Democrats, and the same is true of most of the governors and attorneys general. If they’re unable to reestablish order, the party will pay a heavy price.

This spasm of protest isn’t politically strategic in any traditional red/blue sense, but more of a rejection that either side is likely to produce satisfactory answers. Anyone who thinks they can easily turn it to the advantage of their side of the political divide is being too optimistic.

As for Minneapolis, they have not handled this well. Waiting until their city was ablaze to arrest the main cop (and only the main cop) responsible for George Floyd’s murder sent the message that riots are both necessary and effective, but still not sufficient. This contributed to riots breaking out all across the country on Friday night.

Since order must be restored, the sympathies will quickly turn back to the police if the rioting persists. That’s not only what Trump is hoping for, but it’s possibly his only hope of being reelected.

But it’s not just the right that needs to get the message. People aren’t looking for the status quo ante and it’s not going to be enough to promise to go back to a time before Trump.

Meanwhile, the total disregard for social distancing involved in these protests will almost assuredly result in a spike in Covid-19 cases in our cities, making it harder for the country to resume normal economic activities. This will make Trump look like a fool, but it will also keep everyone under the kind of stress that caused this convulsion in the first place.

The stakes were already sky-high in this election year, but now they’re astronomical.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuingg with the painting of Crumwold Hall, in the Hudson Valley, New York. I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on an 8×10 inch canvas
board.The photo that I am using is seen directly below.

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

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

Changes for this week’s cycle include some paint for the great lawn and the heavily revised central portion of the structure. The house now has a bit of a cubist feel but I will be adding some details. I am happy with the progress to date.

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.

Going back all the way to Max Cleland’s defeat in 2002, I’ve been convinced that Georgia Republicans run the dirtiest elections in the country. Yet, I think 2018 took the cake:

It was a stunning accusation: Two days before the 2018 election for Georgia governor, Republican Brian Kemp used his power as secretary of state to open an investigation into what he called a “failed hacking attempt” of voter registration systems involving the Democratic Party.

But newly released case files from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation reveal that there was no such hacking attempt.The evidence from the closed investigation indicates that Kemp’s office mistook planned security tests and a warning about potential election security holes for malicious hacking.Kemp then wrongly accused his political opponents just before Election Day — a high-profile salvo that drew national media attention in one of the most closely watched races of 2018.“The investigation by the GBI revealed no evidence of damage to (the secretary of state’s office’s) network or computers, and no evidence of theft, damage, or loss of data,” according to a March 2 memo from a senior assistant attorney general recommending that the case be closed.

As Secretary of State, Brian Kemp purged over 600,000 people off the voting rolls in 2017 and then allowed a backlog of 50,000 voter registration applications to go unprocessed before the election while wrongly denying 300,000 duly registered people their right to vote. And he still barely won.

Georgia should be very competitive in 2020, with Biden polling even or ahead is some recent polls and two competitive Senate races on tap. But I know it won’t be a fair fight with Governor Kemp overseeing the process.

With so many bad things going on simultaneously, it’s easy for things to go unnoticed or be forgotten. Earlier in May, State Department inspector general Steve Linick was fired by President Trump. This was done at the request of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The initial suspicion was that Pompeo didn’t appreciate being investigated for using an employee as a personal servant for himself and his wife. But it was later revealed that Mr. Linick “was in the final stages of an investigation into whether the administration had acted illegally when officials declared the emergency” with respect to Iran to justify an arms sale to Saudi Arabia. Specifically, Linick was trying to establish whether this bit of jujutsu passed constitutional muster.

Republicans and Democrats were enraged last year when the administration declared an emergency over Iran to bypass Congress and move forward with an $8 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations…

…Bipartisan outrage erupted in Congress last year over the United States’ relationship with Saudi Arabia after the administration’s tepid response to the death of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist and Virginia resident. Lawmakers have also blamed the administration for aggravating the Yemen crisis and for the killing of civilians there in the five-year civil war, which has helped create the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis.

But each time lawmakers have tried to curtail Washington’s relationship with Riyadh, Mr. Trump has intervened. The president used his first veto to reject legislation that would have ended the United States’ military involvement in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and he later vetoed a bipartisan measure blocking the sale of billions of dollars of munitions to the kingdom.

I guess it’s a judgment call whether a president can circumvent a congressional hold on an arms sale by disingenuously citing the threat of a separate country. But the administration is apparently preparing a repeat performance:

The new proposal would effectively build off the sale pushed through over Congress’s objections last year, sending an additional 7,500 precision-guided missiles from Raytheon to Riyadh on top of the 60,000 bombs Saudi officials bought last summer, according to a congressional aide who described it on the condition of anonymity because it had not yet been officially turned over to Congress. As of December, roughly a third of those munitions had been delivered.

Perhaps more significant, it would allow Raytheon to expand an already approved relationship with the Saudis to build high-tech bomb parts in Saudi Arabia.

Two weeks ago, the FBI inadvertently published the name of a Saudi diplomat who helped two of the 9/11 hijackers while they were in the United States. It’s unlikely the man did this on his own initiative. Separately, the FBI reported that one of the gunman in the 2019 terrorist attack on a military base in Pensacola was sent here by the Saudis to train despite being in regular contact with al-Qaeda. Congress has already made it clear that they do not want any further involvement in Yemen’s civil war and that they want to halt arm sales to the Saudi kingdom.

President Trump has justified the continuance of these sales by arguing that they create jobs, but the new Raytheon deal is only creating jobs in Saudi Arabia. It’s unclear why the administration is so hellbent on defying Congress, but personal enrichment or bribery has to be considered a possible motive. The foreign service is strongly opposed to the sales at the senior level, and Kushner’s Middle East peace initiative is as dead as the dodo.

Congress can only stop the sales if they can override a presidential veto, which is unlikely, but they’ll still be premised on a phony state of emergency with Iran. It’s easy to see why the inspector general needed to be removed from the picture, but Congress should try to get their hands on the preliminary report he circulated within the State Department in March before the Covid-19 outbreak curtailed his investigation.

Hi photo lovers.

We are overdue for a new foto flog. I really haven’t been out the way I normally would be, so fresh images are just not a thing right now. The featured image is of some clouds before a severe storm came through a earlier in the week.

I am still using my same equipment, and am no professional. If you are an avid photographer, regardless of your skills and professional experience, you are in good company here. Booman Tribune was blessed with very talented photographers in the past. At Progress Pond, we seem to have a few talented photographers now, a few of whom seem to be lurking I suppose.

I have been using an LG v40 ThinQ for the last year. It seems to serve me well, now going on its second year. Occasionally I get to use my old 35 mm, but one of my daughters seems to have commandeered it. In the next year or two I will probably have to go through the whole smart phone purchasing process again. I never look forward to that. I am curious about the cameras on other smartphone models. I now have a daughter using an iPhone 8 (what we could afford). She seems happy with the photo quality. Always curious to get input on smartphone camera quality, as that is one of the variables that I weigh when I do purchase one of those contraptions.

This series of posts is in honor of a number of our ancestors. At one point, there were some seriously great photographers who graced Booman Tribune with their work. They are all now long gone. I am the one who carries the torch. I keep this going because I know that one day I too will be gone, and I really want the work that was started long ago to continue, rather than fade away with me. If I see that I am able to incite a few others to fill posts like these with photos, then I will be truly grateful. In the meantime, enjoy the photos, and I am sure between Booman and myself we can pass along quite a bit of knowledge about the photo flog series from its inception back during the Booman Tribune days.

Since this post usually runs only a day, I will likely keep it up for a while. Please share your work. I am convinced that us amateurs are extremely talented. You will get nothing but love and support here. I mean that. Also, when I say that you don’t have to be a photography pro, I mean that as well. I am an amateur. This is my hobby. This is my passion. I keep these posts going only because they are a passion. If they were not, I would have given up a long time ago. My preference is to never give up.

Peace.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit New York City, visits to the Empire State Building fell 95 percent and nearly 200 tenants asked to defer their April rent payment. Despite being largely vacant, the building’s energy usage only declined by 28 percent. So, what explains this?

Mostly, it’s “vampire energy” usage, which is basically a bunch of stuff that is plugged into a wall socket but isn’t actually doing anything. The Empire State Building is actually a model of energy efficiency, and it has reduced it’s overall consumption by 40 percent in recent years through a comprehensive plan that looks a wide array of methods and opportunities to reduce its carbon footprint. They even have a plan for vampire energy:

Some tenants also use an automated system to control power use. At night and on weekends, the system will shut off designated power outlets, preventing “vampire energy” consumption by devices that are left plugged in.

The building saves $4 million on energy costs over what it was paying a decade ago, but sitting empty for two months has provided them with more insight on how even greater efficiencies can be produced. A lot of it can be emulated by homeowners. Unless we’re Mitt Romney, we probably can’t install elevators that produce energy when they brake, but we can install better insulated windows and reflectors that keep more radiated heat in the house. If made available, we could all benefit from an automated system that cuts power to select devices that are not in use.

With any luck, the Empire State Building will become a model for large buildings across the planet and become a big part of the climate change solution, but homeowners can play their part, too.

If you look at the list of statewide officials in Pennsylvania, you’ll notice that they’re all Democrats. This obviously includes the governor and lieutenant governor, but also the attorney general, the secretary of state, the auditor general, and the treasurer. So, how did Hillary Clinton manage to lose the state?

Every vote is equal, so it’s possible to come up with a variety of explanations. The two most popular, which are often combined, are that blacks didn’t turn out for her and her support in small towns and rural areas absolutely collapsed. The first of these explanations is somewhat true, but its impact is also exaggerated because Clinton made up for a drop in black turnout by doing better than Obama among urban whites. She wound up netting about the same number of votes out of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh as Obama. The second explanation is definitely true. Clinton was slaughtered in low-population counties, and it wiped out her advantage everywhere else. But there’s a third explanation that is almost always overlooked.

Clinton lost Pennsylvania because she didn’t do better in the suburbs. The reason people don’t seize on this explanation is because she did better in the suburbs than any Democrat before her. For this reason, people will say that her suburban strategy actually worked but was swamped by Trump’s rural strategy, and that’s accurate. But I contend that any Democrat not named Clinton would have done significantly better in 2016 in the Pennsylvania suburbs and carried the state as a result.

The reason I say this is because the Philadelphia suburbs are historically one of the strongest Republican areas in the country. Since Trump became president, the Democrats have taken political control in the ring of counties around the city for the first time since the Civil War. Bill Clinton actually made good progress in the suburbs and really began the process of flipping them, but there are a lot of people there who voted against him twice and who spent the 1990s thinking of the Clintons as their political enemies. By 2008, a lot of these folks had had enough of the southification of the GOP and the ineptitude of the Bush administration, and Obama won their support. It didn’t hurt that he’d defeated Hillary Clinton in the primaries. Yet, in 2016, there were still enough folks who simply could not cast a ballot for a Clinton that it dragged down her numbers. Some didn’t vote and some cast a ballot for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein. Many simply held their nose and voted for Trump, including some who never for a moment thought he’d actually win. They weren’t supporting him as much as registering their disgust with their choices. A healthy chunk of these folks became Obama/Trump voters.

This effect doesn’t pop out of the numbers when you examine them, but it was real, and it won’t apply in 2020. In fact, the reverse will be the case, because Joe Biden is almost an honorary senator in the Philly suburbs. The Delaware border is about 13 miles south of my Chester County home and Wilmington and Philadelphia are really a shared media market. People here know and like Biden, and they know he’s a Pennsylvania native. He set up his campaign headquarters in Philly prior to the COVID-19 outbreak.

This is why it makes a lot of sense for the organization Republican Voters Against Trump to focus on the suburbs.

Now, a new effort called Republican Voters Against Trump is hoping to chip away at Mr. Trump’s support from white, college-educated Republican voters in the suburbs, hoping a more surgical approach will help to elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., his expected Democratic opponent.

The new group is set to begin a $10 million digital and television advertising campaign that will use personal stories of conservative voters giving voice to their deep — and sometimes brand-new — dissatisfaction with the president.

The effort is aimed at suburban voters in general, particularly men, but it should work at least as well around Philadelphia as it works anyplace else.

After almost three years of conducting focus groups and intensive research on messages that would work with persuadable voters, the founders have created a cache of 100 testimonial videos, most shot on smartphones, with voters explaining why they are making the sometimes painful choice to break with their political party.

Some of the videos are hardly rousing endorsements for Mr. Biden. In one testimonial, Wayne from Dallas says to the camera, “I could not bring myself to vote for Hillary, so I voted for President Trump.” But he said he believed the president had “gotten worse” and that “everything he’s done has been to enrich himself.” With a note of resignation, he says: “I will not be voting for him here in 2020. I suppose I’ll be voting for Biden.”

The idea is to give permission to folks who want to vote against Trump but still have values that align more with the historic Republican Party. The easiest targets are the Obama/Trump voters. They already voted for Biden at least once, if not twice. The harder targets are the ones that stuck with the GOP through the last three cycles but have now begun to waver.

The effort is led by Sarah Longwell, along with Bill Kristol and some other prominent lifelong Republicans. Ms. Longwell understands my thesis:

“People who have been Republicans their entire lives aren’t super excited about voting for a Democrat,” she said. “The way they talk about it is more in sorrow than enthusiasm.”

But she said a Biden candidacy, and the lack of a well-known third-party candidate where voters can park their ballots, had created a bigger opportunity to persuade Republican voters to switch parties than there was in 2016.

“You can’t overstate what the Clintons represent for Republicans,” Ms. Longwell said. “Donald Trump’s corruption was offset by what they saw as her corruption.”

The Trump campaign will do what they can to raise doubts about Biden’s character, and they’ll have plenty of ammunition left over from Biden’s Democratic opponents in the primaries. They may chip away at his support from the far left, which makes flipping some more suburban Republicans a potentially key factor.

The safest bet for Biden to carry a state like Pennsylvania is to make some inroads in rural counties so he doesn’t lose them by thirty or forty or fifty points, like Hillary did. He’ll also want to do what he can to boost urban turnout so he can bank the maximum advantage there. But just as important is winning the suburbs by margins never seen before, and that’s why the Republican Voters Against Trump strategy makes so much sense.

A big part of growing up in the 1970’s involved learning about what had happened in the 1960’s and thinking, “I’m glad things are not like that anymore!” Some of this was an illusion, as many things had not in fact changed. Others were temporary, like a little reprieve before the Reagan Revolution started to roll back the tide. And still others had more persistence, but fell to successive blows from conservative courts and folks like Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush and especially Donald Trump.

The 1960’s aren’t over. They’re back.

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1265486362674900994

The editorial board of the Trump-supporting Washington Examiner has condemned the president’s attacks on Joe Scarborough, arguing that “observers might even someday look back at this incident as the instant when things began to unravel.” I laughed derisively when I read that, but it’s probably true that there will be people who say this. In itself, the Scarborough incident is nothing new or particularly noteworthy. Accusing a former Republican congressman and impeachment manager at Bill Clinton’s Senate trial of murder is not categorically different from accusing Ted Cruz’s father of involvement in the assassination of a president. Making baseless accusations against his critics is on page one of Trump’s playbook. I don’t think there’s anything game-changing about this story at all, but it coincides in time with a major downturn in the president’s fortunes. It’s quite possible that in retrospect, the two things will look causally related.

For one thing, the Washington Examiner is not alone. The New York Post and the Wall Street Journal have also published editorials blasting Trump over his actions with Scarborough. Why these staunchly pro-Trump editorial boards have chosen this incident as their bridge-too-far is anybody’s guess, but they’ve both put their foot down. Everywhere we look, there are surprising breaks with the president. On Tuesday night, Sean Hannity of Fox News took the extraordinary step of chastising his listeners for following Trump’s example and not wearing masks or observing social distancing guidelines: “If you can’t social distance, please wear the mask. Do it for your mom, your dad, your grandma, your grandpa.” Also, on Tuesday, Twitter humiliated it’s most valuable patron by adding a disclaimer to a Trump tweet explaining his claims about vote-by-mail are untrue.

This is all happening at the same time that fresh compelling evidence is piling up that Trump is headed for defeat and that he’s going to drag the Republican Party down with him. A Firehouse Strategies-0ptimus poll out on Wednesday has Joe Biden leading nationally 54-43 percent, and state polling looks just as bad. Another survey says Trump is trailing in Arizona, while a Tuesday poll showed him leading by a spare three points in Utah. The congressional preference shows the Democrats up by eight points, which is higher than their 2018 midterm advantage and leads Nathan Gonzales of Roll Call to write, “Democrats at this point in the cycle look more likely to gain seats than to lose their majority.”

Politico reports that Trump’s 2016 braintrust has already staged an intervention:

David Bossie and Corey Lewandowski, two key allies and former political advisers to Donald Trump, went to the White House last week to issue him a warning: The president was slipping badly in swing states, and he needed to do something to fix it.

Three days later, the Trump campaign’s political directors in Arizona and Florida — states the president won in 2016 but where surveys show him lagging — were summoned to the White House Roosevelt Room. The officials offered a detailed rundown of his organization in the battlegrounds and tried to reassure the president that he was on firm ground.

We’ve arrived at the 100,000 victim threshold in the the Covid-19 pandemic, and while blue areas are trending down, the South is trending up. If that trend continues, Trump’s push to quickly reopen the country will look like a lethal mistake even in his political strongholds.

In a normal political cycle, we’d now be in a climate where Republicans are too concerned about November to give any ammunition to the Democrats by questioning their leader. Instead, the exact opposite seems to be happening, with some of Trump’s most dependable defenders suddenly challenging him. His unsubstantiated murder accusations against a MSNBC morning host are not the explanation or last straw, but this is happening at a time that definitely looks like an inflection point in the president’s fortunes.

There will be people who say that Joe Scarborough cost Trump the election, even if they don’t know what they’re talking about.