Month: October 2020

Maybe I am a fool to be hopeful about Joe Biden winning Texas, but the more I look at the early voting, the more optimistic I get. The best source I’ve seen for this is the Texas Tribune, which is a really underrated resource. Based on their information, it’s clear why the state has become a toss-up, and it’s almost hard to believe that Trump can really be ahead there, considering the youth vote, the shift in the suburbs, and number of new registrants voting, and the turnout in the big cities, particularly Houston.

Trump has to hope turnout in the Valley remains low (Kamala Harris visited the region on Friday) and that he gets both huge Election Day turnout and enormous support in the rural areas. Even if the president ekes out a narrow victory, GOP strength in Texas will be isolated, and that’s going to be reflected in the legislature.

To make a comeback, the Republicans will need to win back suburban support, because if they don’t this will be the last election cycle in which they’ll be competitive. The Lone Star State has changed forever.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be starting a new painting. It is a Grand Canyon photo that I took several years ago. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 9×9 inch canvas panel.

I started my sketch using my usual grind, duplicating the grid I made over a copy of the photo itself. I have added some preliminary paint.

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.

Jacob Bogage and Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post report on rampant Republican cheating in the 2020 presidential election.

“Over the past five days, the on-time rate for ballots in 17 postal districts representing 10 battleground states and 151 electoral votes was 89.1 percent — 5.9 percentage points lower than the national average. By that measure, more than 1 in 10 ballots are arriving outside the Postal Service’s one-to-three-day delivery window for first-class mail.”

“Those delays loom large over the election: 28 states will not accept ballots that arrive after Election Day, even if they are postmarked before.”

Try to imagine the harm that is done when someone votes twice in an election and gets away with it. Or, maybe, they vote when they weren’t entitled to vote, either because they’re not properly registered or they’re not a citizen. Maybe they vote in the wrong precinct. Or, they could fill out an absentee ballot of their deceased mother. They are many ways people can attempt to commit voter fraud, but they usually result in a single additional vote being counted, and there are only a handful of elections that have ever been decided by one vote. Yet, to avoid these small-level threats to our elections, all of which are illegal and come at a high risk of prosecution in return for no plausible benefit, we now have all manner of Republican obstacles to voting. We have voter ID laws. We have states reducing how many drop-boxes are available for ballots. We have arbitrary cut-offs for accepting mail ballots, even when they’re postmarked on or before Election Day.

All this does is reduce how many total votes are counted, and the changes are designed to disproportionately harm Democratic candidates. This is all bad enough, but now the administration has deliberately sabotaged the delivery of mail ballots and had the Supreme Court intervene in some states to say late-arriving ballots cannot be counted. This can disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters, perhaps more. And it’s all being done because Democrats are more responsible about avoiding the spread of COVID-19, and so are more likely to vote by mail.

This is cheating and it should be illegal. If the Democrats none the less win this election and get control of the White House and Congress, they must make this illegal. If the Democrats lose elections because of this, God help the country because this will not stand.

Hi photo lovers.

It’s been a while. I have begun venturing out a bit more when I can socially distance. Usually I like to go to the urban trails along the riverfront in my city for power walks. Fortunately the weather is much more inviting now. Some days I really don’t slow down for photos. Some days I do. Peak foliage is a bit tricky any more. I used to be able to predict it here. It’s either a week later than a decade ago, or not at all. The photo I selected is one that suggests we might have more color in store this upcoming weekend or next week. Hard to say. With a cool breeze most days, I can take a brisk walk and enjoy the scenery.

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 almost two years. It seems to serve me well, for now, but I know that the lives of these devices are limited. Most of my family seems to be gravitating toward iPhones, so I suspect I may eventually have to succumb and go to the Dark Side of The Force. In a recessionary environment, my default is to avoid major purchases for as long as possible. So, unless something really goes wrong with my current phone, I’ll stick to the status quo for as long as possible. Keep in mind that my last Samsung kept going for over four years (the last year was a bit touch and go). Once I do have to make a new smart phone purchase, the camera feature is the one I consider most important. So any advice on such matters is always appreciated. Occasionally I get to use my old 35 mm, but one of my daughters seems to have commandeered it. So it goes.

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.

Do you care what happens to Fox News if Donald Trump loses the election? Once you think about this question for a minute or two, it kind of becomes obvious that you should. On the one hand, we already have the Tea Party experience from 2009 to help us imagine the future under a Biden presidency. On the other, there’s this:

One way or another, Trump is almost certain to attempt to maintain some kind of a media presence when he leaves office, so Fox probably will have to contend with him — whether it’s as a contributor on its own airwaves or a competitor.

[Rupert] Murdoch has stopped speaking as frequently as he once did with Trump, but his associates say that those conversations probably will pick up again after Nov. 3, when Trump will either be a second-term president or a free agent on the media circuit.

“Maybe Rupert can just back the truck up and pay Trump to appear on Fox’s air at will,” [Jonathan] Klein,  [a former president of CNN], said. “Trump might prefer that to the rigors of having to actually run an actual business.”

I grew up in New Jersey and have the attitude to prove it, but my parents were raised in Iowa City and Kalamazoo, and they have a Midwestern sensibility. I understood this from an early age. Midwesterners prize politeness and decorum in ways that make little sense in the Mid-Atlantic. That’s one reason I was surprised that Donald Trump’s act sold so well there in 2016. But perhaps his personality lacked staying power in the region, as his support there seems to be collapsing in spectacular fashion. The evidence is everywhere, starting with a highly-rated and stunning new ABC News/The Washington Post poll out of Wisconsin that shows him down by a whopping 17 points. Nathaniel Rakich of FiveThirtyEight provides more examples:

• RABA Research was out with a poll yesterday showing Biden at 50 percent and Trump at 46 percent in Iowa. Last week, the A+ pollsters Monmouth University and Siena College/The New York Times Upshotfound similar margins. Iowa, remember, is a fairly red state that Trump carried by 9 points in 2016. And for the first time, our forecast now gives Biden a better chance than Trump of winning the state, although it’s still basically a coin flip (Biden’s odds are 51 in 100).
• Yesterday, Gravis Marketing released a survey of Minnesota in which Biden led Trump by 14 points. Biden’s chances of winning Minnesotahave now reached an all-time high of 94 in 100.
• On Sunday, we also got a Gravis poll of Michigan that gave Biden a 13-point lead. That’s on top of last week’s Fox News poll of Michigan showing Biden 12 points ahead. And this morning, ABC News/Washington Post also released a Michigan poll giving Biden a smaller 7-point lead. Overall, our forecast gives Biden a 94 in 100 chance of winning the Wolverine State.

There’s evidence of erosion in Trump’s support in other regions and states, but nothing on this level. Rakich attributes the drop to a surge of COVID-19 cases in the Midwest, and I believe that definitely is playing a role. But I also think it’s attributable to a personality mismatch. Trump is still holding steady with white non-college voters in the South, for example, but he’s losing their devotion in places like Ohio and Iowa. Racial attitudes probably play a part, as the Midwest defections began in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests. Evidently, Trump’s response played fine in the South but cost him dearly in the North.

On November 10, 2016, I wrote Avoiding the Southification of the North as a warning that Trump could transfer southern white racial attitudes and political behaviors to the Rust Belt, which I considered a tragic possibility, so I take this recent polling as a tremendously encouraging sign that perhaps he failed.

On Monday morning, Reps. Nita Lowey and Eliot Engel of New York, both Democrats, issued a press release accusing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of inappropriate political activity and made a promise. “Whether it’s before Secretary Pompeo’s departure or afterwards,” the two wrote, “the truth about this administration’s corruption will come out.”

Their statement referred to an investigation by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) into possible Hatch Act violations, including Pompeo’s decision to deliver a speech from Jerusalem to the Republican National Convention and his promise to publicly release emails to and from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton before Election Day.

The OSC shouldn’t be confused with Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel investigation that explored the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia during the 2016 campaign. The OSC is a permanent government agency responsible for monitoring the merit system in federal employment, which it does by protecting whistleblowers and preventing politicization in hiring, retention, and promotion.

It’s a difficult mission in any administration and especially this one, for obvious reasons. It will become positively harrowing should the president win reelection and execute his plans to revamp the civil service in his image. On October 22, Trump issued an executive order which removes civil service protections from federal employees whose work involves “confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, and policy-advocating positions,” thereby making it possible to fire them without cause or the ability to appeal.  This caused the resignation of Ronald Sanders, a member of the Federal Salary Council, an advisory group in the executive branch which works to assure government salaries remain competitive with the private sector. In his letter of resignation, Sanders described Trump’s order as “nothing more than a smokescreen for what is clearly an attempt to require the political loyalty of those who advise the President, or failing that, to enable their removal with little if any due process.”

Enacted in 1939, the Hatch Act limits employees of the Executive Branch from engaging in partisan political activity. The OSC guides federal workers on how to stay in compliance with the Act, but it also protects them from top-down pressure to carry out partisan directives.

Once fully implemented, Trump’s new order would place “policymakers” outside the reach of the Hatch Act and the OSC’s protection.

As things stand, the president and vice-president are explicitly exempt from the Act, as are Senate-confirmed policy-making officers, like the Secretary of State. Their staffs, however, are not exempt, which is why the OSC sent a letter to President Trump in June 2019 recommending that his adviser, Kellyanne Conway, be terminated for repeatedly taking shots at the president’s political opponents.

The OSC has no enforcement mechanism, but unlike Inspectors General, they cannot be fired by the president. This means they can be ignored but not silenced like State Department Inspector General Steve Linick who, the New York Times reported, was terminated in May after he began an investigation of Pompeo’s“potential misuse of department resources and his effort to push arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.” Linick’s replacement, Stephen Ackard, abruptly resigned without explanation in early August.

In practice, the Hatch Act is very much a real law for rank-and-file federal workers. The OSC’s Merit System Protection Board disciplines and even terminates employees who violate the Act. The statute has almost no effect against higher-ranking individuals like Conway, however, because department heads or the White House can simply refuse to enforce the OSC’s recommendations.

Secretary Pompeo has egregiously violated the spirit of the Hatch Act, and his staff may have broken the law in helping him plan and carry out partisan activities or use department resources for partisan purposes. As Lowey and Engel indicated in their press release, the State Department has defied congressional subpoenas by refusing to turn over the transcripts of partisan speeches Pompeo has delivered in the course of his official duties.

If there is a day of reckoning for Pompeo, it will come after his departure. It will come after Lowey and Engel’s departures as well. The 83-year-old Lowey is retiring after a 22-year congressional career that saw her become the first woman to chair the powerful House Appropriations Committee. Engel, also elected in 1988, was defeated by progressive primary challenger Jamaal Bowman earlier this year. For a few more weeks, Engel will chair the House Foreign Relation Committee, which oversees the State Department’s operations. It will be up to his successor and Lowey’s  to seek accountability and needed reforms.

The Trump administration defies oversight by ignoring Congressional subpoenas, firing internal watchdogs, and flouting OSC directives. It’s now working to politicize the federal workforce. But under a Biden administration, this abuse of power will be exposed to sunlight. Whether or not this results in criminal charges, it will begin a process of repair.

Lowey and Engel won’t directly participate in that process, but they’re right to note that the truth will eventually come out. When it does, Congress will have to replace easily discarded norms with actual guardrails, and add penalties where laws already exist, so future administrations cannot so easily disregard the law.

Hi y’all. This is the last Wednesday before the election, and hopefully by the next Wednesday we’ll be in a mood to celebrate. In the meantime, I want to give you a bit of a reminder of why I started this series back when this blog was still known as Booman Tribune. Part of it is simply that I love music, and YouTube made it extremely easy to post any of a number of favorite songs, performances, etc. The other, and perhaps more important part has to do with the aftermath of the 2016 election, which is when I started this series. I was witness to, and no doubt participated in some very heated discussions about the meaning of that election cycle and what it meant to be liberal/progressive/leftist etc. The impression I had, correctly or incorrectly, was that some of the language of the alt-right had filtered into the sort of center-left circles (of which this blog is one) with regard to issues concerning how to prioritize racial/ethnic inequality, with some fairly loud voices seeming to privilege the white working class as the primary focus. As someone who is aware if how many of our problems are intersectional in nature, and that we’d really lose something by ignoring the very diversity that we’d once embraced as a broader liberal/progressive community, I felt the need for some pushback. So, I put up the first cafe/lounge late in 2016 and saw what happened. It served as both an “up yours” for some detractors and a warm embrace and gentle reminder of what makes our liberal and progressive communities here and abroad so beautiful. In the intervening nearly four years (with a few breaks here and there) I’ve shared music from a variety of genres, eras, and cultures. Some weeks were clearly themed. Some I sort of improvised as I put something together. Some folks took the call and responded with their own videos. As someone who lives by a saying that “vision is part revelation and revolution: it is the call and the resonse”, I enjoy those moments especially. That saying is one I coined, based on some liner notes to a William Parker LP. His words were a bit more eloquent at making the same point.

So here you are, reading this preamble and wondering, when are we getting some music? It’s coming. Let’s start with a documentary entitled What Ever Happened to Hazel Scott?:

She was a talented pianist and vocalist who had a very promising career that was cut short in the US around 1950 thanks to HUAC. Her story is one that deserves telling over and over. And I hope it is a stark reminder of what happens when that fascist impulse rears its ugly head. Normally, as a courtesy I don’t link to Daily Kos, but since I got this video from a diary about her, it is only fair that I give credit where credit is due. We live in a time that certainly parallels the paranoia of the McCarthy era, and we have an election coming up that will hopefully be the beginning of the end of our current sorry era.

Here’s Alicia Keys giving a nod to Hazel Scott before moving on to some other music that inspired her:

While we’re at it, why not just enjoy Hazel Scott playing two pianos:

Okay. The bar is open. So is the jukebox. Remember to vote if you haven’t already. Vote early, and depending on your state, probably best to vote in person at this point. The GOP deserves to be taken to the woodshed. This is our chance.

Cheers!

Mark McKinnon began his career working as a campaign and media strategist for Texas Democrats before befriending George W. Bush, switching sides, and helping “43” win two presidential races. Now he’s the co-creator, co-executive producer, and co-host of Showtime‘s The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth. After interviewing polling expert Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report for the latest episode of The Circus, McKinnon, with years of experience, “came away with the sense that Trump is not just toast, but burnt toast. To use a poker metaphor: In the last election, Trump won by pulling an inside straight. This time he’ll need nothing short of a royal flush—by pulling an ace from his sleeve.”

It’s possible McKinnon is wrong, but despite a lot of uncertainties, the preponderance of the evidence suggests that he’s right. Trump is burnt toast.

The biggest wildcard is the COVID-19 pandemic which has unsettled both election laws and voter behavior, with results that are hard to predict. Many states have greatly expanded early voting options, including excuse-free absentee voting. Democrats, more heedful of medical advice and social distancing, are voting early, particularly by mail, at a much higher rate than Republicans. This has built the Dems a healthy lead in the votes already cast which is a huge advantage. A vote already counted is one less you have to drag to the polls on Nov. 3

The Republicans comfort themselves with the pleasing notion that they’ll have a correspondingly higher share of in-person voters. Maybe. But the COVID-19 infection rate is growing to an all-time high, which may depress the Election Day vote and foil their hopes of catching up.

It’s not just early voting results that suggest that President Trump is way behind.. One week out from Election Day, FiveThirtyEight and JHKForecasts both give Joe Biden an 88 percent chance of winning the presidency, while The Economist puts the odds at 96 percent. It seems that the only thing that can save Trump now is a huge polling error.

Sure, one way the polls could be wrong is if a lot of Democratic votes simply aren’t counted because of various legal machinations. With the Supreme Court issuing a 5-3 ruling on Monday disallowing late-arriving mail ballots in Wisconsin, and 326,695 ballots still outstanding, Democrats have a legitimate concern that the Republicans could get an illegitimate victory in the Badger State. Yet, there aren’t many more states that have deadline extensions for the Supreme Court to adjudicate. While tossed Democratic ballots could confound the pollsters, so too could a pandemic-related drop-off in Election Day Republican votes.

What seems to be a very high turnout is good news for Democrats in a number of ways. Consider the turnout models the pollsters are using. Harry Enten of CNN, says that robust early voting patterns are consistent with the polls showing Biden with a solid lead.

High overall turnout is often thought to benefit the Democrats, and a FiveThirtyEight model estimates that a record 154 million Americans will cast a vote in 2020. Whether this helps Biden or not, it’s likely to make the polls more accurate. As Enten explains, “A lot of problems in polling can come from trying to figure out which voters are more likely to actually turn out and vote…If turnout is higher, the likely voter universe has a better chance of matching the registered voter universe.”

What about the youth vote?

If the pollster’s likely voter models are still off, it could be due to the youth vote. Young voters are underrepresented in the early vote, but that’s to be expected. U.S. Census Bureau data say only 43 percent of voters aged 18-24 turned out in 2016, even as overall participation was 61 percent. Polling models generally reflect this expectation, so lagging youth numbers are not an obvious reason to doubt the forecasts.

Yet, an Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School national survey of 18 to 29 year-olds released Monday found that young voters are just as enthused about voting in 2020 as they were during Barack Obama’s initial run for the presidency in 2008. This group prefers Biden to Trump by an eye-popping 63 to 25 percent margin, so if they turn out late at higher than expected numbers, the pollsters are underestimating Biden’s strength.

In looking for hidden factors that could help Trump exceed expectations, David Siders of Politico noted “Republican registration has ticked up in key states at the same time Democratic field operations were in hibernation” due to concerns about the pandemic. The result is a boost of white, non-college educated voters in the states that put Trump over the top in 2016: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.

Does the uptick in white working class voter registration spell doom for Democrats?

Sure there’s reason to worry. Non-college whites are essential to the GOP base. Republican registration drives naturally focus on demographics and regions where they have a big advantage. With Democrats largely shelving their door-knocking and other in-person efforts, and Republicans boosting their base, the new registrations skew toward white working class and rural voters.

Here’s the catch: New registrants are notoriously unreliable voters. They require a dedicated Get-Out-the-Vote effort to mobilize, so it’s possible that pollsters are underestimating the level of turnout Trump will get from these folks. It may take a lot of money (which the Trump campaign is short on) and effort (which is hard to gin up in the time of COVID).

Another factor that could help Trump and should concern Democrats is higher than expected support from black and Latino men, which has been detected in enough different polls now to be considered a real thing. It’s the key reason the latest New York Times/Siena poll of Texas projects Trump will win there. But, if the pollsters are already factoring this in, it’s not clear how it could help Trump do better than projected.

The Democrats’ understandably remain concerned. Voter suppression could cost them, either through long lines or delayed mail delivery that results in Supreme Court-supported trashing of legitimate ballots. There could be pressure from Trump and the Republicans to stop the counting before it is completed. But Democrats shouldn’t be too worried that the polls are off, at least as a measure of voter intentions.

If anything, it’s Trump who should worry. If the youth vote turns out at rate commensurate with their declared enthusiasm, this will swamp any benefit he gets out of Republican registration drives. The Democrats have a big advantage in votes already cast, so the uptick in COVID-19 cases is likely to dissuade more Republicans than Democrats from risking in-person voting on Election Day. And huge overall turnout usually benefits the Democrats and also makes it less probable that the likely voter universe is different from the actual voter universe.

If you’re still in doubt that Trump is burnt toast, consider where the candidates are spending the last week campaigning. Biden is visiting Georgia and Iowa, while his running mate Kamala Harris campaigns in Texas. Meanwhile, Trump is going to Nebraska and Arizona while Pence will visit North and South Carolina. In short, Democrats have a shot at painting the map blue and Republicans are defensively trying to preserve their red bastions.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Walter Whetsell is a Republican operative who worked on Rick Perry’s 2016 presidential campaign.  Before that, he created West Main Street Values PAC for Senator Lindsey Graham’s 2014 successful reelection bid.  He is the founder of Starboard Communications, a public relations and marketing outfit based in South Carolina.

Now I want you to look at the recent polls out of South Carolina and see if you notice anything.

You can go back a little further and see that that there have been eight polls of the race between Graham and Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison done in October, and six of them have the race either tied or within two points. Excluding the Starboard Communications polls, four of the last six surveys have Harrison in the lead and the other has a tie.

To be sure, the exception is the highly-rated New York Times/Siena poll and they found Graham up by six in an October 15 release. My point isn’t that Harrison is definitely in the lead. My point is that there’s no information about Starboard Communications in the polling averages except that they have a B/C rating from FiveThirtyEight. There’s nothing to let you know that the pollster ran a super PAC for Graham the last time he was up for election. And Starboard isn’t just a little off from the consensus of polls. They’re a substantial outlier, and yet FiveThirtyEight lists their survey as carrying the most weight in their projection, which currently gives Graham a 79 percent chance of winning. That’s mainly because they’re the most recent poll, and their overall grade isn’t too bad. But doing mostly honest polling to get a decent grade is precisely what allows them to inject a last second poll for Graham that strongly moves the average of polls projection.

If Graham were actually anywhere near nine points ahead, and if he really thought he had a 79 percent chance of winning, he wouldn’t have just agreed to do one more debate with Harrison on the Friday night before the election.