Month: November 2020

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Grand Canyon. The photo that I’m using (My own from a visit.) is seen directly below.

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

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.

I have made great progress for this week’s cycle. The central cliffs have been heavily revised, with muted colors and a bit of rocky texture to them. The distant rear of the scene has also received a revision, now appearing in a color lighter than the closer rocks.

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.

Much to the consternation of the Trump campaign, the Fox News decision desk called Arizona for the Biden-Harris ticket on Election night. But it wasn’t until Thursday night, nine days later, that the rest of the networks followed suit. While the results are not certified, the margin of victory will almost surely be over 11,000 votes, reminiscent of the 10,704 by which Donald Trump carried Michigan in 2016.

This is only the second time since Harry Truman’s victory in 1948 that the Democrats have carried Arizona. In 1996, Bill Clinton won took it by 31,000 votes, but he was assisted by a strong performance by center-right Reform Party challenger H. Ross Perot who hurt Republican nominee Bob Dole by peeling off 112,000 votes. By Friday, Trump had won North Carolina and Biden had taken Georgia, although an audit is being conducted that must be completed by Wednesday, November 18 before final certification on the 20^th.

It’s highly significant that Arizona went blue in 2020. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and birthed the modern conservative movement with his failed presidential campaign that year. For four decades, Arizona’s conservatism was personified by John McCain who held office in Arizona and Washington from 1983 until his death in 2018. Yet, the state not only chose Biden-Harris over Trump-Pence, with the election of Democrat Mark Kelly to McCain’s Senate seat, it now has two Democratic senators for the first time since the 1950s.

In this respect, it resembles Colorado, Virginia and Nevada, all of which have voted Democratic in the last four presidential elections, and all of which are now represented by two Democratic senators.

Virginia, which Biden carried by 10 points, and Colorado, which Biden carried by 13.5 points, are no longer particularly competitive at the presidential level. But Nevada is a different matter. Barack Obama carried it easily in 2008, by a margin of 121,000 votes, and more narrowly in 2012 by 68,000. In 2016, Hillary Clinton squeaked by with a mere 27,000, and Biden improved on that slightly with a 35,000 vote margin.

It will matter greatly whether Arizona remains competitive, like Nevada, or marches off into safe-blue territory like Virginia and Colorado.

One important factor in determining this is whether or not the Democratic and Republican parties continue to diverge based on educational attainment. According to U.S. News & World Report’s 2020 rankings, Nevada ranks 48^th in K-12 education, based primarily on test scores and graduation rates. Arizona ranks 44^th, while Virginia ranks 8^th and Colorado comes in fourteenth. On the other hand, all three states rank in the top half in higher education, which, in the Trump Era seems to be the most meaningful predictor of political behavior.

Education isn’t everything, however. Despite being 49^th overall and dead last in the U.S. News K-12 rankings, New Mexico rejected Trump by eight points in 2016 and 10.5 points in 2020. The difference in the Land of Enchantment may come down to racial demographics. At 49 percent, it has a much larger Latinx population than Arizona (31 percent) or Nevada (28 percent). New Mexico also has the largest Native American population by percentage, excepting Alaska, in the United States.

On the flip side are North and South Dakota, both of which have Latinx populations under four percent and which as recently as 2004 were represented by four Democrats in the Senate. Today, both governorships and all four Senate seats are held by Republicans and it’s difficult to envision any Democrat winning a statewide election there anytime soon. The booming natural gas industry in the Dakotas has damaged the Democratic Party’s brand because legislation to address climate change is seen as a threat to jobs.

Similarly, there could be issue-driven reasons why Arizona stays put as a purple state, moves back to the right, or continues its path to the left. That might be the best hope for the Republicans, because with the growth of the professional class in the suburbs and the growing Latinx population, demographics suggest a continued blue drift.

Of course, Trump will leave the stage soon. His politics, and particularly his long-running feud with McCain, whose wife Cindy endorsed Biden, have been the biggest factors in Arizona’s short-term political movement. His feud with Mormon political figures such as former Sen. Jeff Flake probably hurt. too. Flake declined to run for another term rather than face Trump-loyal voters in the Republican primary. If Trump  runs again in 2024, the Arizona GOP won’t be able to put these problems fully behind them, so I’m guessing they’d prefer to see Trump pursue some non-political career once he leaves office.

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. Our peak hit roughly a week ago. And like that, one moment there was a blaze of yellow, orange, and red leaves, and the next moment, nothing. I selected a close-up this go-around.

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.

The best reason to charge someone with a crime is because they’ve broken the law, injured others, and need to be held accountable and prevented from doing more damage. Donald Trump checks all those boxes, but there’s one more very important reason why he should be prosecuted: he intends to run for president again in 2024.

Trump has been spending his days largely on the phone, calling advisers, allies and friends. The president has been “trying to find people who will give him good news,” one adviser said.

Still, Trump has indicated in some of these conversations that he understands Biden will take over the presidency on Jan. 20, Inauguration Day. Rather than talking about a second term, Trump has been matter-of-factly discussing a possible 2024 campaign — an indication that he knows his time as president is coming to an end, at least for now.

“I’m just going to run in 2024. I’m just going to run again,” Trump has been saying, according to a senior administration official who has spoken with him this week.

Welcome to Progress Pond Total Landscaping. While we make America rake again, we’ll throw in some entertainment as well.

I haven’t really had any segments from comedians in a bit, so now seem like as good a time as any to do that. Remember that John Oliver fellow? He had a few things to say about the comings and goings of election week. Humor mixed in with a few stark reminders of where we are and what we will recon with moving forward in the near future:

Seth Meyers had a few things to say on his A Closer Look segment:

Stephen Colbert has his say as well:

Sarah Cooper talks about her act a bit and how she got blocked by Herr Combover on Twitter:

Alright. The bar is open. The jukebox really does work. Drop on by.

In the meantime, although we have reason to celebrate, the next weeks and months will not be easy. The transition from one administration to another is going to be far from seamless, and we have a pandemic that is raging out of control, and will only get worse for the foreseeable future. Be careful out there.

Cheers!

Matt Taibbi, the Rolling Stone journalist turned Substack entrepreneur, had an immediate post-election take on the 2020 presidential election: Donald Trump may have lost but he provided gave the GOP a roadmap to become the working man’s party. Citing both dubious exit polls and actual precinct data, Taibbi argued that Trump had overperformed with blacks, Latinos, and even the LGBTQ community, and he approvingly quoted a tweet by Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, saying, “We are a working class party now. That’s the future.”

We are a working class party now. That’s the future

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) November 4, 2020

Whether or not this is solid analysis, Donald Trump’s legislative legacy wasn’t populist. It was conventionally Republican. Consider the provision in his 2017 tax bill that incentivizes investment-fund and family-office managers to buy private airplanes. Accounting Today explains such aircraft, “avoid both what originally would have been a capital gains tax bill on their carried interest, and what would have been ordinary taxes on their management fees.”

This provision was eagerly seized upon by former asset management executive, Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, who rushed out and bought a 2010 Bombardier Challenger 300 at an estimated cost of $10 million. The aircraft  became an issue in her primary against Trump ally and former Rep. Doug Collins who attacked her as a moderate and idle rich.

The private jet exploit is a workaround to avoid new caps on deducting business losses, a section of Trump’s tax bill that the Joint Committee on Taxation laughably argued would generate $150 billion in revenue over the next ten years. The reality is quite different, as people like Loeffler now pay fewer taxes and get a free plane in the bargain.

Collins’s attack on Loeffler didn’t work, of course. He won only 20 percent of the vote in Georgia’s unique all-party primary. Loeffler received  26 percent and qualified for a January 5 runoff election against Democrat Raphael Warnock, the pastor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta who came in first place with 33 percent.

There’s actually nothing working class about Loeffler. She was appointed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in December 2019 to replace Sen. Johnny Isakson who retired mid-term. The populist right furiously opposed Kemp’s choice of Loeffler, strongly preferring Collins, an opinion vocally shared by Trump who was still complaining about the decision in April. Yet, Kemp believed Loeffler was a better choice to defend the seat, arguing as Politico reported, that she’d “help the party appeal to suburban women who’ve been abandoning the GOP in droves since Trump’s election.” Her immense personal wealth and willingness to self-fund her campaign were also an important considerations for the governor.

It hasn’t worked that way so far. In the other Georgia Senate race, incumbent Republican David Perdue won 2,457,778 votes–a 49.7 percent plurality of the vote and 208,486 more votes than Loeffler and Collins received combined. Moreover, Loeffler didn’t fare well in the Atlanta suburbs, pulling only 30 percent in Fayette County, and getting 25 and 22 percent in Cobb and Gwinnett counties, respectively.

Her disappointing performance isn’t a surprise. She was embroiled in controversy not long after she was sworn in as senator in January. On April 6, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Loeffler had used insider knowledge on the COVID-19 outbreak to sell shares in companies that stood to lose from a pandemic and buy shares in companies that stood to gain. The trades began on January 24, the same day Loeffler received a private briefing on the coronavirus as a member of the Senate Health Labor Education & Pensions Committee.

But if Loeffler, whose husband Jeffrey Sprecher is the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, specializes in purchasing millions in equities and has a private plane, that doesn’t mean she can’t pretend to be a populist. Squeezed by a challenge from Collins on her flank, she began running an advertisement claiming she is “more conservative than Attila the Hun” and, as the Associated Press reported, boasted that she had the endorsement of QAnon congressional candidate and soon-to-be congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler stepped out of a Humvee on a foggy morning in northwest Georgia wearing an American flag trucker hat to accept the endorsement of a congressional candidate who has expressed support for baseless QAnon conspiracy theories and made disparaging comments about Black people, Muslims and Jews.

Loeffler smiled and nodded as Marjorie Taylor Greene praised her as “the most conservative Republican” running in Georgia’s multi-candidate special election for the U.S. Senate seat Loeffler was appointed to 10 months ago.

“What impressed me with Kelly is I found out that she believes a lot of the same things that I believe,” Greene said at the Oct. 15 event.

It’s unclear whether Loeffler will convince a majority of Georgians to elect her, but her panders to the right didn’t inspire suburban women and won’t be of much help in winning over undecided voters in the middle. The outcome will tell us a lot about the future of the Republican Party. Will it be a party for QAnon supporters or a party for asset management executives who fly around in private jets pretending to be QAnon supporters?

Choosing a cabinet is a complicated task for a new president, and it’s easy to screw up. No one (excepting Donald Trump) gets to be president without a lot of support from within their party, and there are folks who need to be rewarded with important jobs. Similarly, it’s normal for a party to be somewhat fractured after a contested primary season, and one way to patch things back up is to offer key positions to former opponents or their supporters from different ideological wings. Neither of these approaches is optimal for getting the best people for the job. Even worse is selecting someone from the opposite party as a gesture at bipartisanship and national unity.

The most important thing to remember about cabinet positions is they head huge bureaucracies, and while a lot of the day-to-day work can be handled by deputies, it’s important that job applicants have some experience and capacity to lead large organizations. The next most important consideration is character. You don’t want someone who will embarrass you or cause scandal, and you definitely don’t want anyone who will put their own agenda and ambitions over your own. Relatedly, there are limits to how much ideological deviancy you should tolerate. If someone isn’t going to follow your vision for governance, that’s bad, but if they’re going to pursue something strongly at odds, that’s potentially disastrous. It’s also an idiotic way to devote your precious resources.

When I think about Biden’s coming cabinet, there are a couple of choices that check so many boxes that they make perfect sense. Senator Doug Jones, for example, would make an excellent Attorney General. He’s worked at the Justice Department before, he’s a star on civil rights, he has high character, and he seems in step with Biden’s overall platform. He also needs a job, having just been defeated in his bid for reelection. Finally, he’s easily confirmable and provides a little red state flavor to what will probably be a very blue state administration.

Senator Amy Klobuchar, however, strikes me as a very bad pick. She’s being considered for not only Attorney General but also Secretary of Agriculture. On the legal front, she was basically ruled out as a possible running mate in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing, precisely because she’d served as a prosecutor in Minnesota at a time when the police were avoiding accountability. More importantly, she’s known for mistreating her staff, and that’s not the kind of thing that recommends someone to head up a major agency, whether it’s the Justice Department or the Department of Agriculture.

I don’t really have strong opinions about who Biden should pick to run the Pentagon or the State and Treasury departments, but I want his choices to meet my basic test. All things being equal, I’d love for progressives to get these jobs, but just because I tend to agree with them doesn’t mean they’re a better choice if they’re not team players or have no idea how to run an organization that employs tens of thousands of people.

I don’t really see Bernie Sanders as a natural cabinet head, for example, but I’d rather he serve at Veterans’ Affairs than anywhere else because I know he’s knowledgeable about the veterans’ health system and committed to protecting and improving it. If he wants to put his nose to the grindstone and work, that’s a good place for him. If he’d prefer to push Biden to the left on economic issues, he’s probably best left out of the cabinet, for both his and Biden’s sakes.

Biden will want a diverse cabinet, and he’ll have plenty of qualified candidates to choose from. He can’t totally avoid normal considerations about uniting the party or rewarding people who worked to put him in office, but if he stays focused on finding people who will do a good job, he’ll have a good cabinet, no matter its ideological makeup.

Political scientist and resident American Enterprise Institute scholar Norm Ornstein warned in the USA Today on Sunday that though our “long national nightmare” that is the Trump presidency “is finally nearing an end… the brutal reality is” that we need to “get ready for another national nightmare now that Joe Biden is the president-elect.”

Specifically, Ornstein meant that we are entering the presidential transition, but this time with the incumbent unwilling to concede defeat. We shouldn’t expect a smooth transition. The congressional scholar’s prediction began to come true immediately, as numerous news outlets reported that General Services Administration (GSA) administrator Emily Murphy is refusing to sign a rather important piece of paper.

It’s called an “ascertainment,” and it’s little more than a semi-formal recognition that the challengers have won the election. It’s unfair to expect Murphy to recognize Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s victory before Donald Trump and Mike Pence do so, but her inaction has immediate and potentially immense consequences.

Without the ascertainment, the incoming administration is hamstrung in their ability to plan and organize for taking the reins on January 20. As Ornstein explains, there are well-established norms about how a transition is supposed to unfold:

America is unique among established democracies in many ways, among them the extraordinary length of time from an election to the actual transfer of power. Parliamentary systems that have a change in administration make the change overnight. We take 2 1/2 months. That period leaves the losing president in charge, with all his powers, while the winning president-elect prepares to take office.

In modern times, this is a complicated process, as the winner creates a large series of “landing teams,” groups of experts and former officials for each agency, department and office that interact with the existing government executives, career and appointed, to discuss policy history, take possession of key documents necessary to understand what the agency has done and why, and plan for a new agenda with a new team.

There are laws on presidential transitions that provide some protection for an incoming administration, including providing office space and support, and access to agencies. But the ability to have a smooth and productive transition depends heavily on norms.

The Washington Post reports that the Trump administration has no intention of instructing Murphy to sign the ascertainment that would allow this process to begin.

By declaring the “apparent winner” of a presidential election, the GSA administrator releases computer systems and money for salaries and administrative support for the mammoth undertaking of setting up a new government — $9.9 million this year.

Transition officials get government email addresses. They get office space at every federal agency. They can begin to work with the Office of Government Ethics to process financial disclosure and conflict-of-interest forms for their nominees.

This isn’t the first controversy to attend to Murphy’s time as head of the GSA. Congressional Democrats have been highly critical of how she’s handled two matters related to the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC. The first is related to the lease on the hotel, and the second to the long-planned relocation of FBI headquarters.

The Trump hotel is located on the site of the Old Post Office Building, a government-owned building overseen by GSA and leased to the Trump Organization in 2013. In January 2019, the GSA’s inspector general issued a 47-page report  which found that the hotel lease should have been canceled once Trump became president. By failing to take this action, the Inspector General wrote, GSA lawyers had ignored obvious constitutional concerns and legal precedents, chiefly concerning the Emoluments Clause and risk of foreign actors patronizing the hotel to curry favor with the administration. More recently, Murphy faced tough congressional questioning about what standards apply to a possible sale of the lease, and whether or not the Trump Organization can sell it to a foreign power or entity.

Relatedly, in 2017, the GSA abruptly canceled the relocation of FBI headquarters to Maryland, a plan that had been in the works for 12 years and already cost $20 million. Suspicion immediately arose that Trump opposed the move because the vacated headquarters, located nearby the Trump International Hotel, would then be developed with new retail space and a competing hotel. The decision was made with no advance notice to Congress, and the explanation about avoiding possible cost overruns made no sense, since rebuilding the headquarters at the same location was projected to be far more expensive, as well as tremendously disruptive to the Bureau’s operations.

Yet, if Murphy has hardly been a stranger to scrutiny and criticism, she’s truly in the hot seat now. The Biden administration cannot truly get started until she signs that ascertainment, so she needs to decide if she’s more loyal to Trump or to the country. If she doesn’t feel she can do the right thing without authorization, she should resign.

Anyone who has been around these parts since I began blogging in March 2005 surely knows how I feel about George W. Bush, but I’m grateful to him today for doing something that really shouldn’t remarkable. He issued a simple statement that both recognized Joe Biden as the President-Elect and congratulated him and Kamala Harris on their victory.

“I just talked to the President-elect of the United States, Joe Biden. I extended my warm congratulations and thanked him for the patriotic message he delivered last night. I also called Kamala Harris to congratulate her on her historic election to the vice presidency. Though we have political differences, I know Joe Biden to be a good man, who has won his opportunity to lead and unify our country. The President-elect reiterated that while he ran as a Democrat, he will govern for all Americans.”

I’d also note that Bush cooperated with the incoming Obama administration at the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009, ensuring that there was a very smooth transition of government. There were many ways in which Dubya’s administration was a truly radical departure from everything that come before it, but there were certain institutional things for which it still had respect. The hand-off of power was one of them.

Trump has a way of making Bush look normal. Bush was not normal, at all. But that just makes me more gratified to see him do the right thing in this instance.

 

When you spend four years of your life fighting for something and then you suddenly get it, it’s hard to know how to feel or what to do next. I’ve been waging war on Republicans for two decades now, but getting Trump out of office was a much higher stakes enterprise. Absolutely everything was on the line. Losing wasn’t something the world would recover from. For me, I would have had to find some other way to resist than writing, which also meant I’d need a new way to make a living.

The tension I’ve been under was so immense, I don’t think even I understand it. It’s been close to a life or death thing for me, so Election Night was excruciating as I waited for hopeful returns to show up.

Throughout this election cycle, I’ve endeavored to mix dispassionate analysis with advocacy for what I thought would best insure against possible disaster. On both counts, that led me to argue that Joe Biden could and would be the next president. I knew we needed Pennsylvania, and I knew he was the best bet to carry it. I’m skeptical that any of the eleventy billion other candidates could have accomplished it, but I won’t be argumentative on that point. I’m just grateful that I was right that Biden would get it done.

I wasn’t thrilled with the Kamala Harris pick on a strictly risk/benefit basis, but I’m ecstatic it worked out. It’s such a great feeling for a woman to finally reach such a high office, and she’ll be an inspiration to women and girls everywhere, in every country.

Whether Biden is a successful president or not, he and his clan are good people and they’ll make everybody better people, too. That’s what we need. That, above all, is what needed to change.

I’m just happy right now. Happy like someone who lived through a car wreck which should have been fatal.

One of my closest childhood friends died in a car wreck the Tuesday before the election, and I’m mourning his death fiercely. I know how chancy life can be, and we just dodged a bullet that would have ended our country and set the whole world on the precipice of chaos.

I’m going to relish this for a bit before I worry about what comes next.