Month: October 2021

I don’t know who will win Virginia’s gubernatorial election on Tuesday. The latest Washington Post-Schar School poll shows Democrat Terry McAuliffe with a one-point lead over Republican Glenn Youngkin.  An earlier Fox News poll had Youngkin ahead by eight points. In a winner-take-all election, no one gets much credit for coming close but it looks like Youngkin must be doing something right. The momentum is on his side, and even if he ultimately falls a little short this should worry everyone. That’s because he’s running a very Trumpian campaign based on The Big Lie, election audits and Critical Race Theory.

I agree with Jackie Calmes who writes in the Los Angeles Times that Youngkin’s “cynicism is galling. And it’s the opposite of what the Republican Party — and the nation — needs.”

Youngkin can’t believe much of what he says. A Harvard Business School graduate and former private-equity CEO, he brings to mind other Ivy League Republicans who are conning voters by their Trumpian talk, like Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas.

As a former Republican state legislator said of Youngkin to the New York Times: “Whether he believes in this Trump stuff or if he’s trafficking in it, I don’t know. But if he doesn’t really believe this stuff and is just trafficking in it, that’s worse than believing it.”

It’s not unusual for the party in the White House to see a drop-off in voter enthusiasm in off-year elections, and the news out of Washington DC has been largely about Democratic infighting rather than Republican obstruction, so Youngkin’s strong standing in the polls has more than one explanation. But his dishonest demagoguery isn’t tanking his campaign. The signs suggest that he’s found a good political formula.

If Youngkin wins, it will say a lot about the typical American swing voter, and it won’t be good news. Even if he doesn’t win, if he performs significantly better than recent statewide Republican campaigns in Virginia, we should expect his strategy to become a template for other GOP candidates running in bluish states.

I also need to add that Virginia typically reports the vote in the Democratic-leaning north last, which means Youngkin will likely be ahead in the count for a long time on Tuesday night even if he eventually falls behind. That’s a perfect recipe for a repeat of the 2020 presidential election, where Trump was initially ahead in several states that he ultimately lost. That will feed the conspiracists’ theories that the election was stolen. So, even a narrow McAuliffe win could create more erosion of trust in our elections.

It seems that no good outcome is on offer Tuesday, but it certainly will be best if McAuliffe wins, and wins as convincingly as possible.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of Bodiam Castle in the UK. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 8×10 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 several changes for this week’s cycle. The castle walls have been repainted including the shadows. Below, the water has been revised with the start of many reflections to come. More for next week.

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.

Marty’s feeling under the weather, Nancy’s still nursing a broken wrist, and I spent all day taking the first of two tests I need to pass to be certified as a high school teacher. There’s no heavy lifting going on here today, so instead how’s about some Halloween videos. Y’all already know the Monster Mash, so we’ll start there and then hit a few others you might not have heard.

That’s about enough for me and my poor weary brain. I’m sure y’all have more to add (as if you’re home on a Friday night). Thanks for bearing with us as we take a much needed self-care day.

Over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, Scott Lemieux highlights some NY Magazine (paywall) reporting on the impact of Bidenomics:

[I]t rendered employers more desperate for hired help to keep pace with rising demand. Second, it enabled workers to accrue a cushion of personal savings — and therefore the power to hold out for more-favorable employment opportunities without risking hunger or eviction. In July 2021, America’s unemployment rate was roughly two points higher than it had been on the eve of the pandemic, yet the median worker’s checking-account balance was higher than it had been before COVID.

The result is an exceptionally tight labor market. In August, the U.S. had more job openings than at any time in history. Employers that had refused to interview “unskilled” workers started “offering gift cards to applicants who show up for interviews, along with sign-on and retention bonuses, and sometimes immediate employment before drug screenings and background checks,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

On a related note, Slate reports that after years (decades) of being ghosted by potential employers, job seekers are now returning the favor—and HR doesn’t like it one little bit.

In today’s topsy-turvy job market, a strange new thing is happening. Employers are increasingly grumbling about job seekers “ghosting” them. These job candidates just don’t show up for their scheduled interviews. And in some cases, new hires accept a job only to disappear…

Employers, unsurprisingly, do not like this. It’s rude, they say, and unprofessional. And sure, it is. But employers have been doing this to workers for years, and their hand-wringing didn’t start until the tables were turned.

For years I’ve fielded questions from job seekers frustrated at being ghosted by job interviewers. They would take time off from work, maybe buy a new suit, spend time interviewing—often doing second, third, and even fourth rounds of interviews—and then never hear from the employer again. They’d politely inquire about the status of their application and just get silence back. Or they would make time for a phone interview—scheduled at the employer’s behest—and the call would never come. When they’d try to get in touch about rescheduling … crickets. It’s been so endemic that I’ve long advised job seekers to expect never to hear back from employers, and to simply see it as an unavoidable part of job searching.

But now that the situation is finally reversed, oh the schadenfreude!

Schadenfreude indeed! There’s a truly enjoyable Reddit thread on this very topic—especially if you’re one of the millions of American workers who’s applied for a job, jumped through a dozen different hoops, and didn’t get so much as a basic “we received your application” in response. I’m one of them and stories like these resonate strongly with me.

About 5 or 6 years ago I had a job offer. I accepted. I followed up repeatedly, but was ghosted.

2 months later, I receive an interview offer from the same company. I showed up hoping to find out what happened. When the interview started, I showed the offer email I’d received. The interviewer was not surprised.

I was sent to do the onboarding paperwork at the job site. They said they’d contact me with start date/time. I was ghosted again.

I ended up accepting a different job and began working there. About a month later, I received a call from that first place asking when I was coming to work. I told them what happened.

“Thanks for wasting our time.” Click.

Sure. I wasted your time.

[…]

I made it to the panel interview part of hiring with a large auto manufacturer to work in their technology department. This was during their HQ relocation from California to Texas. After the panel interview, the HR recruiter and I had a call discussing salary and benefits, but was not finalized at that time. Was told would continue on after the panel had completed their interviews.

After reaching out multiple times email and phone, I realized I was ghosted, accepted it and moved on.

Over the next 6 months to a year, I recieved multiple contacts through LinkedIn from other recruiters and headhunters trying to fill this position that I was a “perfect” candidate for. If they only knew…I ignored them all as I had moved on. Just this last month I recieved communication from this company’s own HR/recruiting platform asking if I was interested in a job posting.

[…]

I did a zoom interview for a job over a month ago with the manager and new regional manager that decided to stay hidden which was fucking weird. They asked me the regular bullshit, and the new regional manager’s contribution was to ask me what fucking super hero I want to be. I agree to take the job, and now we’re doing a background.

Fast forward well over a month and I cleared my background check, but obviously I took another job because they fucking ghosted me. The idea that these dipshits think they have carte blanche with prospective employees is beyond laughable. I feel sorry for whatever sucker takes that job.

[…]

This is my company. It took 2 months of them searching for another person to help our team with the insane volume of work before I decided to see what the fuck was posted on the job search platforms. On LinkedIn it showed that over 800! people had applied. When I went to my boss and ask him wtf is going on he simply shrugged with a “we’re having interviews but no one clicks with us yet”. Bs, I later found out that they were offering lower than industry standard wages, and that candidates simply declined such offers (it took 7 months to fill the position).

And so on and so forth. Back when I was still blogging at my place, I had an entire category titled “Great Cover Letters That Don’t Get Jobs.” I have written hundreds of them. When I was on unemployment in Tennessee, I had to send out something like 3 letters/week for work just to keep getting my measly $250/week or whatever they were paying. The vast majority got no response at all, although I did get a few rejections—issued MORE THAN A YEAR after I’d applied. On one occasion, I was called in to interview for a position that I learned, mid-interview, didn’t even exist—they just wanted to see if my personality was a good fit if, by chance, they were hiring at a later date. If I had a nickel for every time I didn’t get so much as an automated acknowledgement for a job application, I’d be able to buy a yacht (or at least have a substantial pile of nickels).

All of these letters took HOURS to research and write. I’d target the letters to the position/employer, and then tailor my résumé accordingly, only to get ghosted or otherwise ignored despite my work history and qualifications. I know for a fact that that’s SOP for most businesses. For example, when I worked at the University of Pennsylvania, I learned the ONLY reason HR even posted “open jobs” was for the appearance of living up to EOE guidelines; in reality they had already chosen who they were hiring (usually an internal candidate), but kept up the front anyway. One of the reasons I went into teaching was that it meant I’d have a guaranteed job—because, for real, I can’t write those letters anymore. I just can’t. It simply got to the point where I’d see an opportunity show up in my email, and I’d just freeze up. I can’t call it a panic attack, exactly—more like an ennui attack. Am I really going to sit here and write another one of these fucking things? And then both upload my résumé AND then paste it in line by line, as required [if you haven’t had to search for a job recently, you’ll be delighted to learn this time-wasting redundancy is a real thing]. And then complete the pointless psychological test to see if I’m the right personality for the company? And then agree to piss in a cup if they require it, even though it’s just a shitty data entry job? And then send it out to some anonymous “HR Manager,” because they specifically say “no calls?” And then send a follow-up letter a few weeks later, and never receive a response to that either? Am I going to do this AGAIN?

This is something I dealt with for YEARS. So yes, I really DO enjoy a nice cupful of HR tears

I work in the public sector and we are seeing plenty of candidates disappearing. Although we have worked on pay the last few years, we are not competitive. Our governing body became very used to the job market conditions during the recession and for several years after where the employer had all the leverage. They are only now beginning to realize how the roles have reversed.

For example, we have been trying to fill one of our entry-level positions for the last year:

First go-around: no qualified applicants

Second go-around: four qualified applicants, only two showed for interviews. Offered the job to both and they declined.

Third time’s the charm, right: We hired somebody and on their third day they didn’t show up to work. Never contacted us and wouldn’t return our calls.

Now we’re in the middle of try number four. We have a conditional offer but the candidate has pushed the start date back twice. We’ll see.

Oh boohoohoo, cry me a river—because (via Slate) “given how many jobs I took the time and resources to apply to, research and show up for an interview who then never bothered to thank me for my time or let me know they filled the position, I can’t even summon up a little bit of empathy for this.”

Is it fair or nice or professional for prospective employees to ghost potential employers? Probably not—but it’s also sauce for the gander. And, it may not even be deliberate—as one of the people interviewed by Slate asked, “If it’s unprofessional and rude to ghost someone in business communications, then why have employers been doing just this for years? It seems perfectly rational to conclude that since they have been ghosting applicants for years, therefore ghosting is normal and acceptable in business.”

And that’s the bottom line, isn’t it? If potential employer X isn’t willing to tell potential employee Y that they’re not qualified/not hired/better luck next time, why should potential employee Y tell potential employer X they’re not interested in the job or found something else.

Employers decided it was a poor use of time to answer every applicant. Those looking for work shouldn’t be excoriated for engaging in the same time-saving behavior. Give people respect and they’ll give you respect back

Two things can be true at the same time. Our nation’s police departments, large and small, can be rife with cultural problems and discriminatory practices while the strong plurality of Americans would prefer to see an increase in funding for police rather than a decrease. Clearly, the idea of dedicating fewer resources to policing is not a politically popular response to racially lopsided law enforcement brutality and other disparate and systemic problems in the system of justice.

Changing the culture of policing is a long-term project, but at least for the larger departments with the biggest budgets, I think we should start talking about changing the job description of a police officer rather than spending fewer resources.

There will always be a place for the neighborhood cop. It’s important for police to have a deep knowledge and established relationships with the communities they’re charged with keeping safe. But it would be a good idea to have specialized teams on call to deal with different kinds of crimes. We already have this with homicide detectives and SWAT teams, for example, but what if we also had teams specifically trained in domestic disputes and substance abuse?

There are usually specialists who are trained to deal with hostage situations or someone threatening to jump off a building, Someone like that should be on call to respond to a person having some kind of psychological break, perhaps because they’ve stopped taking their medication. I hear a lot of the importance of training cops to deescalate situations, but maybe it’s better to train just a few cops really well in this than to train them all inadequately.

A better way of putting it is that we are asking police officers to do too much. They deal with potentially lethal problems, but also with petty theft. They’ll help get your cat out of a tree, but they’re also grappling with organized crime.

In some ways it’s easy to understand the problem when we talk about the challenges our armed forces have encountered during our failed nation-building efforts during the War on Terror. Soldiers are often asked to do things they’re simply not trained to do, and then we get angry when they have moral failings or simply do a poor job. If you want someone to direct traffic in downtown Baghdad, you don’t need or even want an infantry soldier. I don’t know why you want a beat cop dealing with someone having a psychotic episode on streets of Philadelphia. If someone is very good at recovering stolen property, they probably shouldn’t be working on missing persons. A cop who is trained in deescalating domestic disputes talents are wasting on noise complaints.

I know all kinds of objections can be raised. Response times, for example, could be unacceptably reduced if the cops have to wait until a specialized team is available. But there are ways to manage these things. For one, responding cops can be trained to stabilize a situation and call for specialized help according to clearly defined criteria.

These kinds of reforms aren’t easily applicable to small police departments, obviously. If you only have a sheriff and two deputies, they’ll have to be able to manage as best they can all the various types of situations that come up in the line of duty. But even a medium-sized police force would benefit from divvying up responsibilities as much as possible. I’d like to see the police take on a more constructive role in dealing with addiction-related crime. Getting people into treatment should be a priority, and the departments should employ people who have deep experience in the world of recovery.

If we re-envision what a police officer does and move away from our current do-it-all model, we’ll attract a different kind of officer and wind up with a different culture. So much of the violence we see from police originates from officers who are not well-equipped to deal threatening situations. And a lot of crime goes unchallenged simply because it doesn’t rise to the level that it merits the attention and resources of the departments. We wind up with deadly incidents that should have been resolved peaceably and people going to jail who should have been taken to get psychiatric care or to a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility. Meanwhile, basic police services like dealing with property damage or theft are unsatisfactory.

The people want good policing which is why they generally want to give the police more money, not less. But the problem may be that we need to focus on changing the job description of a police officer. They might need to have a lot of different job descriptions and a lot fewer responsibilities. This certainly seems to have more political promise than defunding, and that’s actually a prerequisite for successful change.

Hi everyone:

Here’s a classic – originally written by Jackson Browne and performed by Nico. For some, her voice was an acquired taste. Personally, I would have loved to have seen her in concert. She really wasn’t touring in the US by the time I was old enough to go to gigs. Then she passed away in a bicycle accident in the late 1980s.

Hang in there, everyone.

I’ve never figured out a way that Bernie Sanders can prevail over Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in their battle to frame President Biden’s Build Back Better bill. Sanders has just insisted that the legislation include an expansion of Medicare (including hearing, vision and dental) which Manchin opposes, and provisions to lower the price of prescription drugs, which Sinema opposes. I fully agree with Sanders’ positions on both issues, but he’s not going to cajole or pressure his way to victory here, so I really wonder what he’s trying to accomplish.

Biden is supportive of these provisions, too, but he’s already admitted that the Medicare expansion isn’t going to make the cut. He’s really the only one with the clout to make an impression on Manchin and Sinema, and if he’s been unsuccessful, I don’t think Sanders is going to do any better. When he was a candidate for president, Sanders continuously argued that he could pass his platform through Congress by creating a groundswell (revolution) of public support. That was always horse-hockey, as the present situation makes abundantly clear.

The job now is to make the best deal that can be made and then sell it as the substantial achievement it really is instead of painting the whole effort as a major letdown. There are still major areas where strong negotiating can make a difference, but drawing a red line on parts of the bill that have next to no chance isn’t going to result in better results. If Sanders is actually serious, he’s considering spiking the whole effort and that would be an enormous disaster for progressives.

I am tired of nonsense. I’m tired of virtue signaling. I want this bill wrapped up, and I want progressives focused on what they can still get, not what they can’t.

Can’t we just push this over the end line and begin selling all the very real good things in the bill?

There’s something baffling in Bill Scher’s piece on eliminating the “silent filibuster,” but it takes a bit of (painful) explaining to understand. Still, I think the effort is worth it because it touches on the larger debate on how to govern in the face of a determined minority opposition.

I think the best way to approach the filibuster is to understand two basic ideas or traditions in the U.S. Senate. The first is that there’s no natural limit on how long a senator, once recognized on the floor, can speak. The way this is controlled is by agreements between the majority and minority leader that lay out the overall time for debate on a particular issue. Once the Senate adopts a topic (bill or resolution), both parties will get a certain amount of time which will then be divvied up to individual senators at the discretion of each party’s floor managers. But these arrangements, while negotiated between the party leaders, are then subject to a “unanimous consent” vote. If any senator doesn’t agree to limit debate, then the agreement is not operative.

The “unanimous consent” provision is the most important Senate tradition. Since nothing can happen without all 100 senators consenting, a variety of rules have developed to manage how the chamber can still function. The most well-known of these pertain to the filibuster. For purposes of brevity, I won’t go into too much detail on the early history of the filibuster and will just focus on the mechanics.

The basic idea is that there needs to be a way to overcome the objection of a single senator. We often think about this in a needlessly complex manner. For example, there could be two senators who are objecting, or two dozen, or even fifty. But the requirement is only one to deny unanimous consent.

In the late 19th-Century, as the federal government’s responsibilities grew, the Senate’s schedule became very hectic, and delaying tactics more potent. While increasingly vexing, it wasn’t until 1917 that, “with frustration mounting and at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson, senators adopted a rule (Senate Rule 22) that allowed the Senate to invoke cloture and limit debate with a two-thirds majority vote.”

In 1975, the cloture requirement was dropped from two-thirds to three-fifths (or 60 votes in the current 100-member Senate). But the basic outlines of Rule XXII remain intact. Cloture is a complex multi-stepped procedure but it should be understood as a way of overcoming the two above-mentioned Senate traditions: you can’t make a senator shut up and you need unanimous consent to do anything.

Armed with this understanding, you can see how cloture can defeat a filibuster. In fact, looking at it this way you can more properly understand what a filibuster is and is not.

A filibuster occurs when there’s a lack of unanimous consent. This means that the Senate Majority and Minority Leaders cannot craft an agreement to limit debate. In other words, they can’t make objecting senators shut up. In fact, without unanimous consent, they can’t even begin debate on a bill, let alone end it. Naturally, if the Minority Leader himself is not on board, that assures a lack of unanimous consent.

Cloture is a procedure whereby a supermajority of senators can get around these limitations. Presently, if three-fifths of the body agrees, then a bill can be recognized and debate on the bill can be limited, thereby assuring that it can get a vote on final passage.

Now, it’s important to understand that a rule change made in 1970 fundamentally changed how the filibuster works. It used to be that the Senate could only consider one bill at a time. This meant that if a senator wanted to object to a bill, he or she would thereby hold up all other Senate business, including legislation they (or their allies) might support. This created a key constraint on how often senators objected to the consideration of bills, and also put limitations on how sustainable those objections could be, but it also made filibusters very disruptive to the Senate calendar.

By 1970, there was bipartisan agreement that the work of the Senate should not be susceptible to this kind of obstruction, so when then-Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana proposed a procedural alteration allowing for a two-track system, he was granted unanimous consent for the change. The two-track system made is possible for the Senate to consider more than one bill, so if one bill was going through the cloture process, work on other business could still proceed.

The adoption of the two-track system is often described as the starting point for the “silent” filibuster. The reason is very simple. Since the obstructed bill is now set aside while other bills are considered, it’s easy to forget about it. There’s no need for a senator to stand up on the floor and talk incessantly about why the bill should not get a vote because the bill is no longer under active consideration. The costs of objecting are thereby greatly reduced and coalitions of objectors are much easier to sustain.

The adoption of the two-track system wasn’t a rule change per se because it was adopted informally through unanimous consent. This means that present-Majority Leader Chuck Schumer could theoretically do away with two-track without using the nuclear option to change the Senate rules. The idea has been raised that Schumer could just “waive” the two-track rule on his own authority and do away with the “silent” filibuster, and Scher devotes his column to explaining why this might have unintended consequences and not work out particularly well.

Maybe I’m missing something, but there seems to be a rather glaring problem with the whole premise here.

The premise is that reforms to the filibuster ordinarily would require a rule change, and even using the nuclear option, Schumer would need at least 50 votes, plus the support of Vice-President Kamala Harris to break a 50-50 tie. Since there are at least a few Democrats who won’t go along with this plan, the only way Schumer can do anything meaningful is to scrap the two-track procedural change, which is possible for him because it isn’t actually a rule.

But remember that the two-track system was adopted with unanimous consent. That means all 100 senators consented to the change. The nuclear option is actually far easier since it only requires a 51-50 majority. It’s unclear to me how Schumer could scrap two-track on his own authority without getting unanimous consent.

I suppose he could simply stop using it, although this is an unappealing option. Under the terms of two-track, he still needs the consent of the minority leader to set aside one bill and move onto another, but this is usually forthcoming because the minority leader doesn’t want to take the blame for grinding all Senate business to a halt. If Schumer were to eschew the use of two-track while it was still technically available to him, he would become the one responsible for obstructing his own calendar.

Even if there weren’t a problem with the premise, the reform would be of dubious utility. Scher is correct that the original motivation for adopting two-track is still operative. If the Senate went back to only being able to consider one bill at a time, it would be much harder to get its work done. There would be fewer filibusters, surely, because the costs of obstruction would go up. But there would still be filibusters, especially in our more partisan political environment, and they would have a crippling effect.

I think we should seek solutions elsewhere. The basic idea should be that a determined majority can get a vote eventually, provided that they’re willing to ride out the process and associated costs in time. It all comes back to the two underlying traditions: you can’t make a senator shut up and you need unanimous consent to do anything. Without these traditions, all of this other nonsense goes away and the majority can do what it wants, just like it can in the U.S. House of Representatives or any parliamentary body.

Assuming there’s some value in bicameralism, and it’s a popular feature in our states and in many representative systems, there’s no need to abolish the Senate necessarily, although it should be weighted in a representative fashion–not one in which Wyoming and California have the same number of votes. But if we’re going to have a Senate–and it’s not going anywhere–we should at least have one that can function. It would function better if there were a natural limit on how long and how many times a senator can speak on a particular motion or bill. It also seems unreasonable to have a unanimous consent requirement. One senator out of a hundred should not be empowered to hold up all business.

Of course, it’s highly unlikely that my reform ideas will be adopted, but the truth is that all the other solutions are made necessary by the shortcomings of these two traditions. Everything revolves around managing the problems they create.

A return to the “talking” filibuster could help if it’s done the right way. I don’t think this would involve getting rid of two-track. Instead, there should just be a provision that a vote will happen when the objectors stop talking. There shouldn’t be a three-fifths requirement at all, but instead just an assumption that the bill will be considered when debate has been exhausted. The majority will not want to put up with protracted delays too often, so they’ll only be willing to ride out a determined filibuster on their highest priority items, and the minority will have a sustained period to explain their objections.

It could be that the Senate will come close to a solution like this by using some kind of sliding scale, where cutting off debate becomes progressively easier in small steps. But, regardless, eliminating two-track is probably not something Schumer can just do, and it’s not a great solution in any case.

Matt Yglesias makes two important points in his Washington Post column. The first is that the best way to assess a political idea’s popularity is to stress test it. Progressives love to argue that their ideas poll very well with the public, but too often this is based on surveys that don’t have partisan arguments in opposition. In the real world, the Republicans have a big megaphone and tons of money, and all legislative proposals have to run that gauntlet.

The progressive data and analytics firm Blue Rose Research recently set out to rigorously assess the popularity of a wide range of progressive policy proposals. Blue Rose wanted to move beyond traditional issue polling (where almost anything tends to look popular because respondents like to answer “yes” to pollsters) by asking questions that feature explicit partisan framing and counterarguments. In this environment, lots of cherished Biden initiatives such as the expanded child tax credit fare poorly. But other progressive ideas like adding dental and vision benefits to Medicare do well. The single best-scoring item on the agenda, as measured by Blue Rose, is letting the federal government bargain down the price of prescription drugs.

We know raising the minimum wage is popular not just because it does well in the Blue Rose Research surveys but because it keeps winning in voter referendums, including in deep red states like Missouri. Other policies may appear popular until they’re actually tested on the ballot.

The second key point that Yglesias makes is that there’s a big difference between the kinds of objections Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema are making to President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. Both are kind of nonsensically complaining about the cost of the bill, although polling does suggest that the public worries quite a bit about deficit spending and debt. Beyond that, though, Manchin’s complaints fall into two logical categories. Either he’s advocating for industries that disproportionately affect his home state, like the coal industry, or he’s reflecting the social conservatism of his home state, by insisting on the Hyde Amendment, for example. In general, he’s supportive of higher taxes on corporations and high income individuals, and that’s popular in polling of all types.

By contrast, Sinema opposes higher taxes on corporations and the rich, as well as provisions that would lower the cost of prescription drugs. These are the two issues that poll best in red areas. They also don’t affect her state in any disproportionate way, so it’s not a matter of her taking unpopular positions that are nonetheless in tune with Arizona’s unique politics.

Yglesias argues that Manchin provides a model for Democrats who want to compete in Republican-leaning areas, while Sinema offers nothing of any value whatsoever. I think this is basically correct, although Manchin could probably be more of an economic populist and less of a deficit hawk, provided he chose his issues with care. Sinema’s main advantage is simply having a reputation for independence. But when we drill down on the details, the places where she exerts her independence, like opposing a hike in the minimum wage, lower prescription drug prices, and fairer taxes, all seem like sure losers. She’ll get some benefit for being mavericky in a vague sense, but that’s not much of a model for others to follow.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of Bodiam Castle in the UK. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 8×10 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 added paint to various white areas of the castle. Below, the water has received some green paint. Above, the sky has been repainted. The clouds will be revised again as we go along.

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.