Mark Byron

The Crotch-Grabbing "Christian" President

This is what has been going through my mind this morning. If you're a pro-Clinton Christian, you're not having to sweat the issues of the weekend, but most of the American wing of the Body of Christ are having to work this one through.

(1) If the capital-C church stayed home on Election Day, Clinton would almost surely win, since she holds a wide advantage among non-churchgoers (71% per this 538 piece; the metric is not going to any religious services, but including service-going non-Christians to that bucket wouldn't move the needle much).

(2) Barring a unlikely meltdown in the next month by the Clinton campaign that would make statement 1 false, Trump will win with the aid of church-going Christians, since he is losing the unchurched vote.

(3) Thus, the Church, broadly defined, will have put a dishonest, abusive, sexually depraved, bullying lout in the White House.

That's not a great witness. The world would know we as the American Church put him there, with all that entails. Not only that, but the folks that we're hoping to come to the Lord will know that.

True, Bill and Hillary are no prize. Saying that they're even worse that Trump doesn't change statement 3.

Is that worth stopping Hillary via electing Trump?

If enough people say "Enough" and pledge to at least abstain on the presidential vote (if you like the Libertarians or Constitution Party, or have another good alternative on the ballot like Evan McMullin, feel free to cast a protest vote), Trump may be forced to step down. The replacement candidate will have a better shot of being Clinton, for Trump seems to be electorally beyond repair right now.

If Trump decides to soldier on and try to win despite what's transpired this weekend, the Church with a large C might be better served abstaining and dealing with a President Clinton with a clear conscience then dealing with a President Trump with a tainted one. In the civil war that is likely to come if Clinton is as bad as feared (another post forthcoming there), honesty and integrity will be as effective as the billions of bullets in the civilian arsenal. 

If Trump wins, the Church will have signed off on a crotch-grabbing (to bowdlerize things a bit) Commander in Chief. Stew on that one a bit. 

An Apology to Alley Cats

Back in May shortly after the GOP race was decided, I did this piece which came to the following conclusion.

Thus, my informed reaction would be to get a clothes pin, stick it over my nose, and vote for the skunky GOP nominee as a modest improvement over the alternative. Trump would seem poised to do less damage than Clinton when the system as a whole is taken into account.

With 20/20 hindsight, I should have let my gut take the lead over a realpolitik head. This was the opener of said post-

OK. The Donald is an uncouth bully with the morals of an alley cat with a platform more flexible than Betty Spaghetti. What else am I leaving out? Oh, an unhealthy dose of nativism and a bad authoritarian streak.

Anything else?  OK, that will do for now.

Turns out I defamed alley cats.

Donald Trump bragged in vulgar terms about kissing, groping and trying to have sex with women during a 2005 conversation caught on a hot microphone, saying that “when you’re a star, they let you do it,” according to a video obtained by The Washington Post.

Jonah Goldberg, an early #NeverTrump guy, had this close to his piece on the issue-

Either way, this video is not an aberration. It is not a special circumstance. It’s him. There’s no pivot in him. There’s no “presidential” switch to flip. He’s Donald Trump all the way down. And he will humiliate and debase his defenders so long as they feel the need to defend this indefensible man.

I hope I haven't been defending him per se, but I have seen him as the lesser of two political evils. Even though he might be slightly better on policy than Clinton, he is too evil to be trusted with the White House or my vote. 

A thought came to me just now. We have women as heads-of-government in both German and the UK. Would either PM May or Chancellor Merkel want to be in the same city, let alone the same room, with him at this point?

Erick Erickson, of Red State fame, had an interesting piece in the Washington Post a week or two ago. He's another NeverTrump guy and devout evangelical (even going to seminary as of late), and made the case that Trump would do more damage to the Church from within by having believers making common cause with his toxic morality than Clinton would do from without via using governmental powers to punish taking orthodox theological stands on a number of issues.

When I see Christians defining deviancy down to justify a political decision, I see a real problem for the church. When I see Christians saying we have license to choose bad men because God chose bad men, I see the sparks of apostasy. Many of my friends have turned themselves over to the anger Trump displays. I see friends on Twitter in meltdown, tweeting profanity at others, spending their time on radio attacking friends by name for refusing to yield. That is not healthy. But not only is it not healthy, it reeks of desperation.

That essay has been on my mind since reading it last month. This weekend news was the tipping point that put me in the #NeverTrump camp. We still have a month to the election and Trump might go against type, show some wisdom and drop out of the race, allowing a wiser and better person to have the Republican party banner.

Even though ballots have already been sent out and some people (including my folks) have already voted absentee, the ballot is for Electoral College electors rather than the nominees directly, so a change at the top is still feasible if novel. May that be so.

What Are You For?

There are times that we seem to be reflexively against certain things that we forget to remember what we are for. A related problem defending our side from foes is more important from advancing the virtues of our side.

Current presidential politics is a low-hanging fruit on this front. Conservatives don't like leftists and like leftist elites even less, so anyone who dislikes leftist elites and the causes they sponsor (globalism, multiculturalism, open borders, big government) must be doing something right. 

If the anti-liberal critic is doing so out of a self-centered clannishness that distrusts people who don't look and sound like you and wants small government not for the greater good but for a greater bank account, they might have a common enemy but they might not be all that good of an ally.

Trump has done well bashing the people conservatives, especially ones with an ethnocentric streak, love to hate. This works two ways, as liberals will bash certain real and perceived oppressors out of custom as much out of making positive change. A good liberal will happily bash big corporations on their iPhone sold to them by the biggest corporation on the planet (at least based on market cap).

A good case of enemy-bashing showed up this morning, as Drudge was belittling dire warnings over Hurricane Matthew by NOAA as some sort of global-warming marketing scheme. On climate change, NOAA can err on the side of being a pro-AGW apologist, but their day job of predicting the weather they do fairly well, they're one government entity that is rather effective.

However, if you come from a knee-jerk government-hater perspective, you reflexively scoff that anything good could come out of Nazareth, er, the government. Yes, it can. Does government over regulate and mess things up at times? Yep, but some government functions do their job and earn their paychecks rather well. 

Matthew seems to have stayed just out to sea, sparing the Florida coast (and parts inland) a direct hit from the eye-wall and full storm surge for now. However, had the storm veered a bit to the west, it would have been a different story, and given the margin for error on weather-forecasting, you need to note the killer possibilities and breathe a sigh of relief if if isn't quite as bad as feared.

 

 

Jack Ryan Lives

CIA guy with a stint on Wall Street turned congressional aid turned...presidential candidate? Sounds like a Tom Clancy character.

Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, for that's the capsule resume of Never-Trump-personified Evan McMullin. Wharton MBA with a BYU undergrad, conservative with a soft spot for refugees, a Central Casting hero.

Minor problem; he's missed the filing deadline for half the states. He might be able to make a dent in the states he badgers his way onto the ballot, but it seems like it's a month late and a few million short.

Places like Nebraska (with NeverTrump Sen. Sasse), Utah and Texas where Trump did poorly in the primaries could be flipped away from casino-red..if he's on the ballot. Sorry, write-in candidates won't work, since you'd have to write-in a slate of electors and few states even let you try.

Who Matters?-Part I-Blue Collar Blues

It seems that we have a nasty feedback loop in regards to black male youth as of late. There are a number of issues that need multiple posts to unpack.

The last quarter-century or so has seen a devaluation of blue-collar labor, as a combination of automation reducing the need for factory jobs and streamlined shipping logistics making it easier for foreign goods to get to the US and decrease the pricing power of US labor. This paragraph from an otherwise-valid piece on America's strengths hit askew with me-

Eighty-six percent of all international transactions are made in dollars. The dollar is the most important hard currency in circulation and the shelter currency in turbulent times, such as today. The unemployment index, about 4.7 percent, is one of the lowest of the developed world and, while it's true that industrial jobs have been destroyed, they have been replaced by more placid and creative forms of earning a living in the service sector and the so-called information economy.

For blue-collar guys, that's cold comfort. Service-sector jobs are not all that well-paying and are often female-oriented. Anecdotally, I've seen a the waiter-to-waitress ratio increase in the last decade or so as there are fewer entry-level jobs in manufacturing, construction and other blue-collar areas. To the extent that some anti-black bias crops up, black male youth would have to counter both a pro-female bias and an black-guys-as-ganstas stereotype to get service-sector jobs.

The information economy is a bastion of whiteness, with Asians seemingly outnumbering blacks. Poorer folks are going to have less exposure to computers in general and an urban culture that looks down its nose at academic learning would make it difficult for an inner-city black kid to worm their way into a tech job. Not impossible, but harder.

Folks that aren't overly interested in academics have a lot fewer options than their grandparents did. They're increasingly on the outside looking in, with dwindling job prospects and increasing frustration. Blue collar whites are actually seeing mortality increasing due to the stresses of an economy sliding away from them. That's a good chunk of the Trump vote, especially when you add in some lower-level professional positions that are poorly served by classic laissez-faire econ or progressive doctrine that is big on handouts and light on creating blue-collar opportunities.

Black middle-aged folks, who saw old-school racism up-close as kids, are more jaded about the economy and thus less surprised when things went south for Joe Shoprat be Joe black or write. That downturn in white health hasn't quite hit them.

Their kids have a different mix to deal with. They have less opportunities for blue-collar jobs and have to overcome a system of struggling schools and a pop culture glorifying bohemian attitudes and being against book learning almost as much as Boka Haram. Throw in a overall culture that treats a traditional family as merely one option among many and a welfare system that discourages marriage and makes Uncle Sam a better provider than an underemployed Joe Shoprat, and the deck seems more stacked than a game of Three-Card Monte for a young black guy who's not on a college-prep track.

Sadly, it's likely to only get worse. I was re-reading a 2004 post of mine, and this passage struck me as a bit dated-

People look down their noses at telemarketers, convenience-store clerks, fast-food cashiers who ask you whether you want to supersize it, Wally-World associates and a lot of other low-wage, low-prestige jobs. Half of the population's going to be below the median, both in pay and in prestige. What we need to work on is to create a thriving society where the average keeps going up.

Someone's going to have to pick up the trash, man the school cafeteria, drive the trucks and stock the grocery-store shelves. Hopefully, those people will move on to better things, but let's respect those who are there and the businesses who hire them.

That might not be true circa 2030. Self-driving cars are being beta-tested and trucks won't be that far behind. Robotic inventory-helpers are also on Google's drawing board; I've not heard of robotic trash collectors, but teaching a robot to grab and dump a standardized trash can on the curb would seem like a logical extension of current tech.

I recall the Memphis sanitation strike of 1968; MLK was in town going to bat for black workers when he was assassinated. The slogan of the black trash collectors was "I am a man." By the 60th anniversary of that strike in 2028, they might be a robot instead, immune to the desire to strike for better working conditions.

That will be discouraging to blue-collar folks if and when it comes. Telling them to take STEM classes and get with the program has echoes of "Let them eat cake."

 

Trump's Rarely Pensive

That's not his style, as his MO is to be often wrong but never in doubt. However, he did go counter to type and picked Indiana governor Mike Pence as his running mate today. It won't help him too much with winning theocons, as he's urged a ceasefire in the culture war in the past and quickly caved to economic pressures when a state RFRA bill became too hot to handle last year. However, he's well liked in small-l libertarian circles and should add some gravitas to the ticket, having a beltway veteran; Pence was a congressman with a budget-hawk streak for a dozen years before getting elected governor in 2012.

The Hillary camp cranked the rhetorical heat to 11, casting Pence as the most extreme nominee in a generation. From a legislative standpoint, she has a case. My first response was to assume the generations were those of fruit flies, since Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan are pretty conservative. However, Pence had a 99 career ACU rating while Ryan has a 89.2. Looking at the Heritage Action card, Pence scored a 80% for their inaugural 2011-12 stretch, so he's more Tea Party/movement conservative than establishment.

This isn't a swing-state pick, for if Trump needs help winning Indiana, he's in major trouble nationwide. What Trump does need is to keep conservatives at home and not lose votes to Gary Johnson's Libertarian ticket or not voting at all as a protest. Nominating a small-l libertarian will minimize the folks pulling the Libertarian lever or writing in the Sweet Meteor of Death.

A sound pick. He's not not my first choice, but he was the best of the short-list (with Sessions, Christie and Gingrich being the most posited alternatives) rumored this summer. I'm torn between a pox-on-both-houses non-vote or getting an industrial-strength clothes-pin to hold my nose with and voting Trump

The Police's Great Responsibility

It's not a good news cycle as of late. Life goes on in Midland rather normally, with most local issues being of a low-key nature, like whether the downtown area is getting a bit too gentrified/elitist along with a slow-motion bifurcation between the mall quadrant on the upscale north side of town and a Saginaw Road stretch that is downscaling with payday loans, pawn shops and auto-parts stores replacing more middle-brow establishment.

However, the national news is of another matter. A couple of cases of (at first blush) trigger-happy cops killing black guys in Minnesota and Louisiana have kicked Black Lives Matter-style sentiments into overdrive this week. I'll put the Dallas shootings off as a second forthcoming post, for that calls for a separate, albeit related, analysis.

Both of the recent suspect fatalities seem to be the work of imprudent police officers. I have to stress the seem, since the supporters of the fallen guys are free to spin and cast the officers in an unfavorable light, while the police are often tight-lipped while getting all the facts and letting the legal process move forward without grandstanding.

In MN, the case smells quite a bit of Driving While Black, with a black couple pulled over for a broken taillight in a (I assume) white suburb. I recall getting pulled over for a blown headlight last summer, but as a conventional-looking white guy in the middle of nowhere on US-2 in the UP, I wasn't worried about what an officer might do; the biggest worry was whether I was going too fast and on the verge of my first ticket in a quarter-century (I wasn't, thanks to cruise control).

Discussing a concealed-carry permit seems to have escalated into the cops firing on the guy. The guy had no criminal past and was clean enough to get said CCR approved, but he's a casualty of a somewhat trigger-happy cop. At least that's the conventional wisdom at this point, as BLM folks and libertarians like VodkaPundit (the source of the link) err on the side of being skeptical of the police.

The Baton Rouge case seems to have had somewhat trigger-happy cops as well, turning fear of a possible gun into a violent episode where there seems to be little threat eminent. There was also possibly an element of assumption of trouble, as Mr Sterling seemed to have a legitimate if unconventional business selling CDs out of his car. That type of informal business transaction seems to be open to having cops wonder whether the CDs were legitimately acquired and whether some less-legal business was also going on merely using the CDs as a front.

There seems to be a lot of informal economic activity in the South from my days living in FL and KY, more so than in Michigan. Casual labor, food trucks, roadside stands and flea-markets are more common. There seems to be a bit of a class factor in my vision of those as things that are not part of my suburban-style upscale upbringing, having a Third-world feel to them. Could that snobbishness and the viewing of cop shows where such informal institutions were criminal fronts factor in to assuming the worse of Mr Sterling?

Again, I'm working on very incomplete information, spun in the favor of the deceased.

The Spiderman line, "with great power comes great responsibility"  comes to mind. Police have the authority to capture folks and use force when needed and get the benefit of the doubt when force is used. You don't want to handcuff police and have suspects turn themselves in when they feel like it, but you also don't want them to have a "shoot first and have the police union and the usual suspects on the right back you up" attitude.

In the two cases that kicked-off the BLM era, the Michael Brown Ferguson case and the Eric Garner NYC case, the officers were ultimately not convicted. Force was over-applied in both cases, but were seen as tragic mistakes rather than manslaughter or murder.

In Ferguson, the officer kept firing a notch longer than seemed to be needed as Brown was fleeing (better to let him go for the moment in 20/20 hindsight), but was part of defending himself from a suspect that was attacking him. In the Garner case, the "I can't breathe" cries could have been seen in the heat of the moment as the self-serving exaggeration of a perp you were trying to tackle. In 20-20 hindsight, it proved to be very true, as Garner died of asthma-aggravated asphyxiation. Responsibility

We don't know quite yet if there are similar back-stories in the two new BLM cases; the Ferguson cops looked worse than they did a few days after the incident, as Brown was being pursued for shoplifting and was less than the college-bound angel he was cast as by his supporters. Garner was being arrested for selling bootleg cigarettes sold without the high NY cigarette taxes; you can make a libertarian case that he shouldn't have needed to be arrested for depriving the state of tax money, but he was breaking the law.

The two recent dead black men seem to have done nothing criminal and nothing that warranted getting a weapon pulled on them. That makes these cases, at first blush, more troubling than Brown and Garner, who at least warranted the attention of police for illegal activity. If we have cops being too trigger-happy and possibly with biases against blacks and/or informal economic activity, then some reflection and retraining of our police is called for. 

Judging the Judgement of Judge-Judgers

The case against the Trump U trial's presiding Judge Curiel, using Jeffrey Lord's American Spectator piece, is basically that he's pro-Hispanic and liberal. Does that mean that, from the bench, that he would stack the deck against Anglos and conservatives? If that's the case, then we should have evidence from his work as a judge (rather than off-bench pro-Chicano and anti-traditional-sexual morality musings) that the guy is bad news for Anglos.

That would be the fear, but Trump isn't likely the first un-liberal Anglo to be before his court. In addition, the Trump U case before him isn't political per se. The question at hand, as I understand it, is whether customers/"students" of the program were offered stuff that was never delivered. A liberal jurist might have a slight bias towards consumers and against an alleged corporate fraudster, but the case wouldn't play too much differently if it was Elon Musk U or Mark Cuban U over-promising and under-delivering.

However, the case doesn't seem to have a Chicano-Anglo angle outside of the political stances of the plaintiff. As far as I know, Trump U was (if I can have a little poetic licence) selling instruction on The Art of The Deal without any wetback-bashing thrown in.

If Curiel does stack the deck against Trump, appellate courts and the court of public opinion will account for that. An appeals court should reverse any clearly biased moves and cheap shots from slanted rulings will make Trump be able to play the victim and get what passes for a sympathy vote.

You don't get to pick a political ally to preside over your case. You don't get to pick someone from an ethnic group that you like to be the judge, either. If they're biased against you or your ethnicity or your politics enough to make a dent in your case, you can make an argument to get a different judge named, but that doesn't seem to be the case here, at least not from Mr Lord's argument.

Here's Your Clothes-Pin: Vote Pepe Le Trump

OK. The Donald is an uncouth bully with the morals of an alley cat with a platform more flexible than Betty Spaghetti. What else am I leaving out? Oh, an unhealthy dose of nativism and a bad authoritarian streak.

Anything else?  OK, that will do for now.

That being said, he seems to have won the GOP race fair and square. His foes have ceded the field after last week's Indiana result, and only a technicality is likely to get in the way of his securing the nomination.

However, pulling that "the party decides" card would be a scorched earth tactic that would would result in a decade-plus of Democratic rule, given that Trump and his supporters would go third-party in all likelihood. A history of the Reform Party in Canada would be a good start for anyone thinking of going that route; the resulting split of the right-of-center vote gave the Liberals the run of Ottawa for a decade until the factions got back together.

At this point, you have three options. Trump, Clinton or some sort of protest vote, counting not voting at all in order not to encourage them as a protest vote.

If you like the status quo, then Clinton is your choice. You'll roughly get an Obama third term where the rule of law is merely a suggestion. You'll also have the fringe benefit of a first dude who makes the Donald look good; Trump at least has better taste in women and lies with more panache than either of the Clintons. 

However, I'm assuming most of the Peanut Gallery isn't thrilled with the status quo.

What protest vote do we choose? Constitution Party? They're Trump as a Baptist deacon, or maybe Catholic deacon, since Pat Buchanan fans like the CP. Too minarchist and too nativist for me to stomach.

Libertarian? Generally clueless on foreign policy and on a lot of moral issues, although the last few years have reminded us that government often doesn't wear the white hat. If they can get a renegade Republican to jump ship, they might have an outside shot at a few states, but the usual tin-foil-hat brigade among the capital-l Libertarians isn't much of an upgrade.

I think I'll pass on that protest vote, unless some much more viable options are presented between now and November.

That leaves us cycling back to Trump. For the moment, let's leave the style behind and look at the content.

We have a guy who is a businessman with an bachelors from Penn's Wharton school, one of the more respected business programs in the country. He has been a critter of the left for most of his life, donating to more Democrats than Republicans, but it's a good question whether that was fitting in with the east-coast elites that he was selling and renting real estate to or his personal beliefs.

So, on balance, he's somewhat of a limousine liberal with a nativist streak. That's an improvement or a wash when compared to a 70s feminist with an internationalist streak.

To the extent that Trump would apply business savvy to politics, it would be a positive step over more centralization of control by Washington in a Clinton administration. It likely won't be as full-bore Hayekian as conservatives would like, but it's the best offer on the table. Trump would at least tack somewhat right on economics compared to Clinton.

Trump's foreign policy leaves a bit to be desired, but so would Clinton's. Trump might look to start a trade war with China and would not likely be looking to decrease trade barriers, but a increasingly left-leaning Hillary Clinton is hostile to such deals as well, splitting with her husband who shepherded NAFTA and the WTO treaties through Congress in ways that a second Bush senior term wouldn't have been able to. Also, candidates tend to talk tougher about China than they actually govern, so I would expect Trump to take a bit off his rhetorical fastball in Sino-American relations.

Taking a tougher line on ISIS might be helpful. Trump seems primed to over-react and do any number of war crimes in dissuading jihadis from continuing their behavior, but one would assume that cooler heads would prevail, especially when Pentagon folks will note that they have to refuse illegal orders. On the flip-side, a Clinton policy would likely continue the Whack-a-Mole approach of being seen to be doing something without actually doing the hard work of putting "boots on the ground" to oust Daesh from their strongholds.

On immigration, Trump also leans towards overreacting, but the congressional power of the purse will rein that in a bit. Unless he's willing to self-finance his wall, he'll need to get Congress on board to get that done. Souped-up regulation to track down those folks overstaying their welcome and better compliance with labor regulations designed to check one's ability to work here legally would also require an OK from Congress.

A literal round-up of each and every illegal immigrant would require a round up of each and every American as well, so that everyone was accounted for and the ones that aren't good to stay are shuttled off, keeping only the "legit" folks. That's not going to happen, since that's even beyond the scope of the most nasty police states to pull off.

However, if Trump would overreact, rigor mortis would set in on the Clinton team, who has little interest in enforcing the law on that front.

The caricature of Trump as Hitler 2.0, running roughshod over the rule of law and common decency, is unlikely to happen without starting a civil war. The political system will reign in those excesses... I hope.

Thus, my informed reaction would be to get a clothes pin, stick it over my nose, and vote for the skunky GOP nominee as a modest improvement over the alternative. Trump would seem poised to do less damage than Clinton when the system as a whole is taken into account.

 

Blue Collar Traditionalists

We had another nativist victory in Austria earlier in the week, where their nativist Freedom Party's candidate came in first in the presidential election; he'll face a Green foe in the run-off, as the main center-right and center-left parties came up short.

The linked piece does a Q&A with an Austrian poli-sci prof, who makes this assessment along the way-

One factor behind the Freedom Party’s success is its status as an opposition party. It has attracted voters who aim to punish the current government for its performance. Without much government turnover, long-term party loyalties have frayed. For example, most blue-collar workers abandoned the Social Democrats and are now voting for the Freedom Party, making it, in effect, the new labor party.

The last German state elections had the same effect, where the nativist AfD was drawing votes from the left-of-center parties more than the center-right Christian Democrats.

There are some interesting applications for US politics. If The Donald does get the nomination, there might well be some blue-collar voters who are not social liberals who might warm to Trump. He's not an economic conservative despite being a billionaire, so he is less vulnerable to having the tool-of-big-business card played on him, especially when Hillary Clinton has just as many, if not more, corporate friends.

Where Trump resonates is with, as I've discussed before, blue-collar traditionalists

Blue-collar traditionalists don't have a natural home in either party. The usual mix of pro-business policies and social conservationism don't resonate overly well, but plays to patriotism and traditional culture do, especially when multiculturalism and hostility to traditional values become coins of the realm.

Since Trump hasn't tacked to the right on economics, he can have a shot at reaching some traditional Democratic voters in the general election. A more protectionist trade policy would help folks in manufacturing jobs that don't compete well with imports, and his immigration hawk persona will appeal to blue-collar Anglos, including some old-school blacks.

Blue-collar whites have become less and less of a Democratic strong suit in the last few decades. If a Republican can speak to the fears of globalism, secularism and open borders but not induce the fears of the safety net being scrapped, they could turn the US' main party of the right into "the new labor party" as well.

1237 or Bust

Quite a few folks that I respect are in the #Nevertrump universe, and I share the gut feeling that it flows from. However, I'm not quite there, at least for the general election. If minimizing the damage from a bad choice is the goal, he might be enough less worse than Hillary to have me refrain from a protest vote..might.

For the primary, I'm definitely there; he's ill-suited for the job.

Trump is on pace to come close to a majority of delegates, depending on how the last batch of primaries fare. However, a plurality of delegates isn't enough, unless you want to change the rules to enable that.

The guy with a plurality of delegates will have the inside track to win over enough delegates from other candidates and patch together a majority, but if a majority really doesn't like Mr Plurality, he won't win. That often happens in parliamentary systems where the party with the most seats can be on the outside looking in if everyone else hates the plurality party. Recently demoted Andrew Jackson had that happen to him in the 1824 election, where he got the most electoral votes but the number two and three candidates (Adams and Clay) pooled their support in the House to get JQ Adams elected. Jackson was steaming for four years and won the rematch in 1828.

Spain is dealing with that right now, where their main conservative party came in first, but can't get any of the centrist and leftist opposition parties to be junior partners. Things are so contentious that no working majority was come to and a second election is the likely result.

Things are about as contentious in the GOP. In Trumpese, Cruz's first name is Lyin'; well, Ted is his middle name on his birth certificate (Edward to be fully accurate). It's hard to see Trump taking no graciously or Cruz bowing out in the name of a unity ticket.

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We're in very uncharted territory with some interesting dynamics, including the spheres-of-influence deal letting Cruz have a clean shot in Indiana and Kasich given first billing in New Mexico and Oregon where a more moderate candidate has a better shot. Yes, that is "collusion", but the main difference between that and a candidate giving up on a state he's badly trailing in is that it was done publicly.

There isn't a rule against it, and if the game is to get to 1237, keeping your main foe from getting there first is part of the calculus. Trump hasn't exactly been all sweetness and light in his campaign and dirty pool is par for the course in his rhetoric; he doesn't have many friends in the process to collude with.

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There isn't a rule against naming a running mate in advance, either. It's unorthodox and a bit presumptuous, but conservative saint Ronald Reagan did that in 1976 when he was in Cruz's spot. He named a rather RINOey Richard Schweiker as his running mate as a bid to shore up his left flank and sway unpledged delegates away from Ford. That was before the convention, not in the tail-end of the primary season, so this move is more than a bit novel.

The Carly Fiorina pick isn't of the same cloth as the Gipper's gambit. She was in the race herself, has broad appeal and appeal among broads. That latter pun notes that she would soften any "war against women" attack without having to play against Cruz's Southern Baptist preacher's kid persona.

She might be some help in California, her home base. Not everyone there likes her, as a few folks will have a grudge from HP layoffs, but she does bring a non-trivial fan base that can be helpful, especially when the fight is on a district-by-district basis as well as statewide. Extra operatives can't hurt...at least not too much.

As a general-election running mate, she seems to be a good choice. She's not held elective office, but has been the head of a large corporation, which gives her some executive experience. She's a better speaker than Cruz and gives him a female running mate without it looking like tokenism. Her run for the nomination and a few moments in the spotlight have seen her fare well in the campaign, just not well enough to be first choice for too many folks, but there are a lot of good and talented folks who could say that this year.

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Cruz has been playing the small-ball game of getting his supporters named as delegates even if they are pledged to Trump in the first ballot or longer. That's hardball politics and does create a disconnect between the primary result and the delegate makeup, but the rules often have their quirk; winner-take-all gave Trump all the pledged delegates in states where he won only a plurality, so having rules that limit the pledged delegates to being bound for a round or two is another quirk.

It also shows the lack of attention to detail of the Trump campaign. If Cruz is running circles around Trump in getting delegates in place, what would that bode for a President Trump keeping tabs of the details of the US government? You want folks to delegate and not to micromanage too much, but if the details are getting lost in the shuffle, some of the blame needs to flow to the boss.

 

Green MACRS and Other Tax Differences

The EU made an interesting rule change with an eye to giving a country-by-country income statement of sorts-

Companies active in the EU with a revenue of more than €750 million will need to publish seven pieces of information in every country in which they operate: 1) the nature of their activities; 2) the number of their employees; 3) their total net turnover; 4) the profit made before tax; 5) the amount of income tax due in each country; 6) the one actually paid; and 7) the accumulated earnings, which is the net profit of the company after distributions to the stakeholders.

Most of that would be common knowledge for the firm as a whole, but getting a country-by-country breakdown would be informative and not overly burdensome for firms (they should have the information already for in-house use, especially if they're billion-dollar or close-to-it firms)...but have a few flaws that makes things misleading.

In a political environment that is on edge over tax-avoidance and evasion after the "Panama Papers" pointed out quite a bit of both, a lot of hay will be made over the difference between bullet points five and six. However, that difference is often due to a difference between financial accounting rules and tax accounting rules.

For instance, if a car is expected to last ten years, you'll depreciate it 100%/10 years= 10% a year for the numbers that go on the annual report and the 10-K form sent to the SEC.

However, the MACRS system in US tax law would have you writing it off in five years and somewhat front-load even that, so that you write off 20% in the first year and 32% in the second. That will create 10% extra depreciation in year 1 and 22% extra in year 2, which will lower taxable income and lower your tax bill. The sped-up write-offs were put in place in the 1980s in order to encourage investment.

That will generate a deferred income tax asset on the balance sheet and a gap between taxes that "should have been owed" if we used the "straight-line" 10% a year figure versus the actual tax bill figured with the kicked-up depreciation. Nothing fishy there other than the US government giving business a head start on writing off new plant and equipment.

Also, using past losses to offset part or all of current profits can help create that difference as well.

That means that a lot of those differentials are merely using tax law, often in ways blessed by the government. That fact will likely get lost 

 

Convention Wisdom on the Left

We're in an odd lull in the nomination process, with the Democrats having a caucus today in Wyoming which Bernie Sanders is expected to win; he does well in Republican areas and college-towns, while downscale urban areas with lots of minorities favor Hillary Clinton. That makes Wyoming, a rather white and rural area, primed to feel the Bern.

Sanders is in an interesting spot, where he's not that far behind in committed delegates (1211-933 per Green Papers) but is in worse shape when unpledged "superdelegates" are factored in (1779-1120), since a quarter-century on the national stage has garnered the Clintons quite a few friends in high places (and quite a few enemies, but that's another post).

Those superdelegates (congressmen, senators, governors, state party leaders) could well shift away from Hillary if there was a good reason to do so. Sanders is doing better in national polls in general-election matchups than Clinton (In this Marist poll, Bernie was 11% better against Trump and 12% better against Cruz) but that could well be that casual voters might be looking at Sanders as a generic Democrat against out-there Republicans.

What could well sway superdelegates his way is any further damaging information out of Servergate. Sanders would need to average 58% of the vote the rest of the way to get to a majority of pledged delegates (4051 total pledged delegates, 2026 is a bare majority, 2026-933 now=1093 needed, which is 58% of the 1907 still to come). Note that the 58% figure gets to a majority of the pledged delegates.

If Sanders gets to that point once the dust settles, he would have something of a moral claim on the nomination; having the party elders go with the runner up would be awkward and possibly prompt some sort of third-party protest vote.

If he comes up a bit short of that majority, it would require some disastrous revelations from Servergate (an indictment or a recommendation of an indictment from the FBI that the Justice Department sits on in deference to their home girl) for the party elders to go for Sanders when Hillary had the majority of pledged delegates. 

So, Sanders has two ways of winning. He can either kick butt down the stretch and get to a majority of elected delegates and talk the superdelegates into honoring the voters' choices, or he can be turned to as a viable alternative to Clinton if she becomes severely damaged goods. It's possible that someone like Joe Biden could be turned to as a Clinton alternative, but that would really not sit well if Sanders has 48% or so of the pledged delegates.

Cleveland-Here Be Dragons

That was the line that would be used in old-timey maps for uncharted terrain. The summer's Republican convention in Cleveland is fixin' to be such territory as it seems likely that no one will have a majority of the delegates coming in, meaning that the delegates will have to hash out a winner after casting their first-round votes for their folks they're pledged to.

"Contested convention" is one term for that, while a "brokered" convention was the term of choice in days of yore back when party bosses controlled delegations and the bosses then horse-traded their way to a nominee in "smoke-filled rooms." However. we're well past (one would hope) those days. Not only will the rooms had no-smoking signs on them, but said bosses are things of the past.

Of course, the campaigns seeking to come out on top are having to plan for such contingencies, including figuring out how to keep track of just under 2500 delegates and how to coordinate efforts during a hectic convention. In a cyber-dense era with everyone and his uncle having smart phones and tablets, bandwidth will be at a premium in Cleveland, so campaigns are having to figure out workarounds for bandwidth brownouts.

Gathering and storing information on 2500 folks as well as possible alternatives, who's backing whom and who's persuadable is a daunting task. Having an accessible and updatable database of all that will earn IT guys their keep. Customer database concepts could be used, as well as state-convention software. Utah, where Mike Lee won his 2010 Senate nomination at a state convention against the wishes of the establishment, was noted as a test-case of how to use delegate software to coordinate things.

My title was inspired by this paragraph talking with veteran campaign manager Chris LaCivita

Added LaCivita: “I’m not trying to poo poo high technology, but if you spend all your time developing and war gaming and playing Dungeons and Dragons with the newest high-tech whiz-bang toy you’re going to lose the advantage and time."

Not only is he behind the curve with the D&D reference, he discounts the idea of preparing for the next war. War planners often fall prey to figuring out how to better fight the last war rather than how to fight the next one, since the dynamics of next battle will often have multiple different factors that weren't in the mix last time.

The last somewhat-contested convention was forty years ago, when D&D was trendy, the Internet was ARPANET, the DoD's research tool and PCs were the experimental province of übergeeks. A lot has changed since then, and a failure to beta-test/war game your strategies would have you working out the bugs on the fly at the convention.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime political season that has poli-sci geeks amazed and amused, as some of those long-shot scenarios that got poo-pooed in the past are coming to life. "No, there won't be a brokered convention" is the common cry in the fall of the year before when a scattered field has yet to reduce down to a winner. However, this year failed to fully reduce down, creating an evenly-split 2.5-man race that is on a collision course with that dreaded result.

In that case, having a first-response team ready to deal with that collision is called for. If there be dragons where we're going, we need to be loaded for dragon.

This is a Job for Super Prez

Any president's critics can have a field day with presidential trips and vacations, noting the costs, the huge entourages and (as a 21st-century twist) the carbon footprint. Such snark gets doubled if some sort of crisis happens while the president is on the move-"Why isn't he in the White House overseeing the crisis at hand rather than [fill in low-priority minutia of the trip]" 

This week, it got redoubled with the president in Cuba. No, it wasn't Obama's finest hour, and I'll leave it at that for the moment. However, anything short of Obama kicking Raul Castro in the short and curlies and going for a take-down would have been seen as feckless catering to fellow leftists to his ardent critics. 

The representative sample comes from Dr. Krauthammer-"...he does this ideological holiday trip in Cuba while the world burns." Pray-tell what was he supposed to do in Washington that couldn't have been done on a secure phone elsewhere?

One of the takeaways of the recent bombing is that Belgian and European security can't keep up with the amount of suspected terrorists. The response to that would be to somehow both fund and recruit a whole crop of investigators and intelligence folks to close that gap, but that's something that isn't going to happen at the snap of Super Prez's fingers. It would require getting authorization from Congress (unless you want him freelancing on this one), getting cooperation from European officials if we're doing police work for them, and lastly hiring the people needed to get the job done.

Oh, and that assumes that you would actually want to do that. Keeping that level of tabs on European Muslims seems to run counter to Obama's leftist DNA. If the world is burning, a president who wants to get a stick and some marshmallows for some s'mores isn't going to help, wherever he might be.

 

Cruzing-While-Muslim?

This Ted Cruz Facebook post was not well received by folks at the BBC. He was riffing on this morning's Brussels bombings and jihadism writ large. Here's the money section, with the one that got the Beeb hot and bothered in italics 

We will do what we can to help them fight this scourge, and redouble our efforts to make sure it does not happen here.

We need to immediately halt the flow of refugees from countries with a significant al Qaida or ISIS presence.

We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.

We need to secure the southern border to prevent terrorist infiltration.

And we need to execute a coherent campaign to utterly destroy ISIS.

Geez. That's a good starting point for that anti-ISIS platform statement I was talking about earlier this afternoon. I'd be open to some well-screened asylum-seekers, but then my bleeding heart doesn't quite want to heal.

I think that problem sentence has the underlying thought of "we need to keep tabs on radical mosques and their attendees as well as keep tabs on radical individuals in mainstream mosques." However, that's not what it said.

"Patrol and secure" sounds like a reflexive response to gang warfare, keeping squad cars on the streets and erring on the side of driving-while-gangsta stops; that also translates to "driving-while-black" in some quarters. Since we don't have much of a problem (that I know of) of Muslim gangs doing street-crime with drive-by shootings, patrolling would merely find people looking like devout Muslims on the street.

When Eileen and I were out to lunch at Olive Garden the other day, there was a table across the room with four Arab-looking women, two of which had scarves over their heads; not full-metal hijabs, but something you'd read as "wanting to look modest." Would Officer Cruz want to talk to them, or would he skip them and wait for someone more blatantly Salafi-looking.?

Arabs and other South-Asian looking-folks often get "flying while Muslim" treatment in the airport (I've had mundane Muslim-Americans in class over the years, and they did tell personal stories of that treatment), so this would seemingly translate to doing "driving while Muslim" profiling, which could well backfire, driving a few disgruntled devout Muslims into radicalism without stopping much illegal activity.

The long-term approach would not be stopping Arab guys with beards or gals with scarves, but to being on speaking terms with imams around town and keeping tabs on gun shops and bomb-equipment locations (tightening Rush's "bomb-show loophole" a bit). One hopes that's what Cruz was after, for as-written, it just seems to be a recipe for driving-while-Muslim stops.

The Art of the Beale-Part II-Writing (the Platform) on the Wall

In my first installment, I looked at Trump riding in the same political ecology as Ross Perot did a quarter-century ago. Rocky's question, to reprise was

I wonder how the frustration of the constituents can be a) defined and b) communicated, then c) transformed? Are we looking at a revised GOP or even a new Party?

How the Trumpeters are dealt with depends on how far The Donald goes this year. The leader in the clubhouse on that last question is "a revised GOP"  How that goes down depends upon three general possibilities. 

(1) Trump loses a "brokered" convention; it's mathematically possible for Cruz to win pre-Cleveland, but not by much, so barring something catastrophic happening (Trump has been Teflon Don on the gaffe front so far, so good luck with that), stopping Trump will need a trip to Cleveland.

(2) Trump wins the nomination, either outright or at the convention, then loses to the Democratic nominee (Hillary if she isn't forced to drop out due to legal issues) in November.

(3) Trump gets elected president, and we get at least four years of President Trump.

The first option has a lot of pitfalls, the first of which is the prospect of Trump taking his ball and going third-party. However, Trump would have a hard time getting on some ballots if he waits until the California primary day on June 7th. Texas has its filing deadline on May 9th while North Carolina has its deadline June 9th. Those would be two states Trump would want to win in November or, if he's in a scorched-earth mode, want to mess with the GOP nominee in. 

However, the others states have deadlines late enough in June to make a third-party run feasible. There's also the possibility of borrowing an existing party's line rather than having to do ballot-access wholesale, but the available ones are poor fits; Constitution is too Religious Right to be a good fit, Libertarians wouldn't like Trump's autocratic streak and the remnants of the Reform Party are so weak that what little ballot-access they have might not be worth it.

How would the GOP keep Trump and his fans in the tent, both for November and for the long haul?

You could start by adopting the new insurgents' pet issues. One of the features of a convention is the party platform, largely laid out by the prospective nominee's team but often including "Platform fights" over a plank or two at the convention proper.

That would start with a hawkish plank on immigration, including the building of a wall on the southern border, better application of E-Verify or something like it to catch folks using false SS# to get jobs and better tracking of legal immigrants who overstay their welcome. Done right, it can placate both Trump's fans and more moderate folks who don't want to see a "papers, please" police state for non-Anglo-looking folks. Actually having the House come up with a prototype bill covering those issues would be a good start and have something concrete to point to rather than a theoretical item forgotten once everyone leaves Cleveland.  

It also wouldn't be too hard to include in the immigration package tighter screening of immigrants from radical-Islam hotbeds. For instance, the wife of the San Bernadino shooting duo had a social-media trail as a jihad-fan, but only your standard watch-lists were looked at by the immigration folks, which didn't include her; running those traps might catch a few folks who have gotten through in the past without throwing up any First Amendment red-flags. That would placate that Islamophobic streak in the Trumpeters as well as be a sound procedure for everyone this side of CAIR.

Some anti-ISIS boilerplate would be called for, whether or not we're in Trump-suck-up mode or not.

Secondly, you could put in new blood at the RNC, ones that aren't wedded to the status quo. If Trump fans dislike the party establishment, the party chair is a good place to start. The current chair, Reince Priebus, has a track-record of working with both Tea Partiers and establishment folks, not unlike fellow Cheesehead Paul Ryan.

However, his background as a corporate lawyer before heading first the Wisconsin GOP and the national GOP makes him a card-carrying establishmentarian. His term doesn't end until early 2017, so making a change at the convention would require Priebus stepping aside ahead of time; finding him a nice lobbying/corporate law job to land into would be one way to grease the skids.

Those two moves would have the wholehearted support of the Cruz camp, for Cruz is no fan of amnesty and open borders and no fan of the party bosses.

A third move would be to put a Trumpeter in as VP nominee. Trump himself would be a questionable choice for a running mate for Cruz or whomever emerges from Lake Erie in July. A Cruz-Christie ticket might work, giving a northeastern moderate who's hawkish on national security (and a Trump backer) to balance out Señor Rafael E. Cruz from Texas.

What doesn't get touched on here is trade. That was the one part of the Perot platform that was not co-opted by the GOP in the mid-90s. That's one that will be fighting words with the old-school party establishment, for they have a preferential option towards Corporate America, and CA likes free-trade by and large, unless they are in a non-competitive industry. Also, the libertarian streak in the GOP like free-trade, as it lowers prices and keeps US businesses honest without tariffs and quotas to protect them.

Keeping the nationalists/protectionists happy would require some rhetoric on China, talking about protecting the international shipping and air-travel rights in the Sea of Japan, critiquing the currency-games played by Beijing, and critiquing some unaccountable agencies in the proposed deals with the Pacific Rim and the EU. That could be done with a Trump-Cruz coalition as well, although it would be hard to put into actionable language.

Putting the writing on the southern Wall, presenting the RNC chair's head on a silver platter, nominating a Trumpeter for VP and criticing China and some of the too-globalized trade deals might be enough to do the job if Trump falls short of the majority. None of the above things are too outside the realm of modern conservative thought and make a nod to the roused rabble the establishment doesn't have a clue about.

 

 

 

Classy on the Way Out

Marco Rubio gave one of, if not the, best concession speeches I can remember. He got his butt kicked in FL by about 20% by Donald Trump; he didn't run that bad of a campaign, but between not fitting the zeitgeist and his "gang of eight" immigration misstep, it wasn't quite happening this go-round.

A positive message wasn't selling that well, as fear sells better than hope right now, especially after the last time we were in this spot, a articulate young senator pitched hope and change and delivered stagnation and deterioration, unless you were gay or were working-poor needing medical care.

As he noted, this wasn't his year. That is, unless a deadlocked convention turns to him as a viable alternative to Trump, Cruz and Kasich.

Kasich is winning OH as we speak by about 12% when I came upstairs to blog. He can continue on as an moderate alternative to Cruz and Trump, carrying quite a bit of Rubio's hopefulness.

As one of the Fox commentators noted, as I did earlier on, Rubio would be an early favorite for the nomination for governor in 2018 were he interested. At 44, he has a lot of time to further develop a resume and impress folks in a different milieu that wasn't quite as angry and anti-political experience. 

He'd also make someone a good VP, if the wounds from this winter aren't too fresh come summer.

 

Cultural But Not Religious

You mow down 77 liberals and you're complaining about being in solitary? He even throws in a seig-heil for good measure. Not that I want to see Anders Behring Breivik harmed in prison, but he's lucky to be Norwegian where they don't have the death penalty.

He's been come to mind in the last few months as anti-immigrant fervor has his Europe and the US. Part of the logic of fearing non-European immigrants in both Europe and the US was that they don't fit into Christian territory. Even if the folks feeling that aren't all that devoutly or spiritually Christian, that's their cultural roots. Breivik is the Reductio ad Absurdum poster boy for that attitude, mowing down liberals for abetting the degrading of European culture.

Breivik cast himself as a "cultural Christian" a while back, appreciating western culture but noting that he was atheist. That would seem to describe a lot of the AfD backers in Germany as well, albeit without quite the murderous side-effects. Trump's defence of Christianity has quite a bit of that cultural-but-not-spiritual vibe to it, although your mileage may very.

It's important while we defend the faith, we don't confuse that with the culture, the country, or the continent that we live in. "Defending the faith" doesn't mean making fun of non-believers or mowing them down wholesale (or retail, for that matter); that only shows what we don't like rather than showing them what we do want to emulate.

Income Voters

The mindsets of bond investors versus stock investors came to mind as I was pondering the current political climate.

Bond investors have a limited upside; the best they can do is get their interest checks and their principal back. That gives them a limited upside and a more drastic downside. Bondholders and stockholders can both lose their investment, but stockholders have (in theory) an unlimited upside, giving stockholders a higher tolerance for risk than bondholders; bondholders often put covenant clauses in bonds limiting the financial risk the company can subject them to.

Blue collar voters are more like bond investors. They have a limited upside to their income barring going to school or starting a business, but can be devastated by economic downturns or added economic competition, be it from imports pressuring the business they work for or immigration creating direct competition for their labor. That's going to make them risk-averse on economic change, anti-immigration and anti-imports. Their precarious economic position has them cast as the Precariat by some sociologists.

That's not the mindset of your typical white-collar Republican leader. They'll be pro-free trade, pro-economic growth and not all that worried about immigration. Thus, we have a disconnect between the blue-collar conservative and the GOP establishment, just like bondholders and stockholders have in the corporate world.

That's also not the mindset of your typical white-collar Democratic leader. They have a shot at appealing to this block with stronger union rights giving unionized folks a better negotiating position (along with more donations to their cause) and a higher level of skepticism of free trade. However, their party bosses have a different set of priorities and often a different spiritual and cultural world-view that's not threatened by globalization and immigration.

In the political world, there aren't many good analogs to bond covenants keeping the party bosses from ignoring folks with different risk-tolerance sets. A sense of patriotism and traditionalism on moral issues and on guns can placate the GOP-leaning folks, but it doesn't address the core economic anxiety they have.

The Donald appeals to that blue-collar conservative, being anti-immigration and a free-trade skeptic. He can also appeal to patriotism (Make America great again) and at least a tribal-level defence of "Christian" values. He's not all that conservative outside of being patriotic and nativist, but neither are his core fans, who have little upside in a libertarian vision of America.

The German elections of Sunday show an interesting variant of that. German patriotism has been a dirty word post-Hitler and the Church isn't all that strong, so their mainstream conservative parties don't have the "God, the flag and guns" shtick to work with nearly as much as their US counterparts do. That will leave blue-collar folks, especially in eastern Germany where the DDR days nuked Christianity, natural leftists... 

.... Unless a leftist faith in European integration, globalisation and xenophilia runs counter to the fears of their precariat. Thus, you saw the anti-immigration AfD drawing more from the left than the right.

There's more than a knee-jerk redneckism in Trump voters, and folks dismiss it at their peril. Those voters often have different economic and cultural priorities than elites in both parties, ones the elites would rather not address. 

Riding in Carson's Volkswagen

Ben Carson endorsing The Donald is a bit of head-scratcher, but they have a common faith in America. Carson was big on a "we the people" shtick and of course, we have Trump's tag line of making America great again. They both have something of knee-jerk distrust of Muslims and a somewhat ethnocentric view of the world; Carson might have escaped some scrutiny in that one doesn't expect a black guy to be ethnocentric, since only whites are fair game for a racism rap.

He is a successful businessman who has built a recognizable global brand that no one can question. His experience as a businessman is exactly what we need to move our economic engine in the right direction and empower those who have been left out of the American dream for far too long.

With our support, I am sure that we can help restore America’s values and faith.

Actually, others question the brand quite a bit, Ben, noting that his last decade or so has been littered with flops save his TV-show.

Carson sees Trump as restoring "America's values and faith" and empowering blue-collar folks to get to "the American dream." The latter is mainly materialistic and the values and faith that Trump will help with is rather sketchy, since his personal values leave a lot to be desired, showing more of the works of the flesh than the fruit of the Spirit.

Trump and Carson seem to have a faith in the American tribe. Carson's "we the people" kicks off the preamble to the Constitution, but when viewed in a tribal light, "the people" has echoes of the volk in Nazi lore. If I can detach their less-savory parts and just look at the volk for a moment, they nearly deified the volk and based their ideology on defending it from being watered down and asserting it's superiority. That move to idolize your country and its people is nearly universal, puffing up Us and looking down at Them.

American Christians, especially ones on the right, can get into a God and Country vibe, but getting them equated makes for a mild deification of America. That drives them to pledge fealty to a flag when God is the one that we should give our primary allegiance to. If you internalize that God-and-Country, we start to hop into a rhetorical Volkswagen and puff the US up and look down upon the rest of the world, especially parts that are significantly different than the US.

That, and a bit of political naivete, seem to be driving Carson's choice. 

The Center-Right's Last Rights?

Now that we've done our detective work on what put the Rubio campaign on life support, let's see if they're any hope left.

Next Tuesday is a good day to die, as Sioux and Klingon warriors would say, for both Rubio and Kasich have must-win races in their home states of Florida and Ohio.

Kasich is in better position, with the three polls RCP uses having him 3%, 3% and 6% back of Fearless Leader. Since Trump tends to lose votes between polls and the polling place, that puts Kasich drafting Trump's back bumper going into the final lap. Kasich hasn't won a state yet, so it would be hard to justify going on if you can't win your home state.

That goes for Rubio as well, but the polls have him drawing to an inside straight at one of Trump's casinos. The Monmouth poll having him down only 8% was encouraging, but two other polls have come out having him 20%+ behind, with the RCP average settling in at 40-24 Trump. Unless there is some strategic voting by Kasich and Cruz fans (and with Cruz doubling-down on his FL presence, the latter doesn't seem likely), it's going to be hard to make up that level of deficit.

We'd have to have some really bad over polling for Trump, late-deciders going for Rubio and a touch of strategic voting (Kasich fans, pay me back for my vote for your guy in MI and vote for mine in FL) to pull that one off. That behind-the-back Hail Mary is possible, but not the least bit likely.

If only one of Rubio and Kasich wins next week, the other is gone. Rubio has been able to win Minnesota and Puerto Rico, thin gruel to move forward after losing your home state. Kasich hasn't won anything but newspaper endorsements so far, so it he puts the 0 in Ohio, he'd be in a poor position to go forward.

If they both lose, it should boil down to a Trump-Cruz race. However, the establishment has to change their Depends every time they think of that. Thus, they'll be a market to folks who don't like to take Cruzes and want to bid one-no Trump; my seat-of-the-pants guess is that there's a 15-20% market for one of those two even if they both lose.

Rubio isn't likely to be that guy. He still has a political future; if he wants a stab at governor in 2018, he'd be the favorite and he'd have to be on the VP short list, so he might be well-served to pack it in after a FL loss and look forward to the rest of his political career.

Kasich doesn't have as much of a future beyond this race. He's term-limited after this current term and wouldn't be a cinch to win a Senate primary if he wanted to continue his career after 2018. Someone needs to change the Depends of the establishment, so I could see him staying in. I could also see him bowing out gracefully and setting up that Trump-Cruz cage match. 

Mr. Scarlet in the Conservatory with a Knife

"Has Donald Trump killed off Marco Rubio?" asks the BBC. I don't think it was he who did the deed.

Rubio had a lousy night yesterday. He's running as a hybrid, part movement conservative and part thoughtful establishmentarian. When you do that multiple-things-to-most-people routine, you run the risk of losing market share for more focused brands.

The Rubio-Trump crossover vote is fairly light. So it wasn't Colonel Mustard (that's what goes on a hot dog) that killed him off.

As the title suggests, the leading suspect is Mr. Scarlet, Ted Cruz, the red-state favorite; yes, he used to be Miss Scarlet, but since the most noted "tranny" is a Republican, we can take some liberties and do some gender-bending in the other direction. Folks who like their conservatism straight without a chaser are going for Cruz, cutting into Rubio's market share. 

The other suspect is Professor Plum, John Kasich, he of a purple swing state. His late surge put a monkey wrench into Rubio's plan. Once Rubio had run off Bush and Christie, he was supposed to have the "establishment lane" to himself, but then Plum/Kasich snuck up and bopped him in the head from behind after he had been stabbed in by Mr. Scarlet.

The conservative stabbed him in the conservatory, staggering him and the moderate applied a monkey wrench in the ballroom. So, it's both Mr. Scarlet in the conservatory with a knife and then Professor Plum in the ballroom with a wrench.

Elementary, my dear homeboy. Oh, but we still have a very faint pulse. We may not need that body bag quite yet.

Bernie's Republican-looking MI Map

Yesterday's results in Michigan were interesting, especially on the Democratic side. Hillary had most of her county wins along the I-75 corridor, winning Saginaw, Genesee (Flint), Oakland and Macomb (northern Detroit suburbs), and Wayne (Detroit). That's the Ferrous Oxide Corridor and with higher black population by and large save Macomb, capital of the Reagan Democrats; Macomb likely has a block of older voters and not as much of a college-educated crowd, which plays away from Sanders.

Lansing and Grand Rapids have non-trivial black populations, but they're not as blue-collar as our I-75 cohort. Ingham county would of course include East Lansing (which was likely Berning) and Grand Rapids is generally one of the more-thriving outstate bigish cities.

That gives Sanders a map that looks like a Republican one in a general election other than college counties like Ingham and Ann Arbor's Washtenaw who are generally Democratic. 

I was expecting Clinton to make a comeback as the second-half of the returns came in, which tend to first come in from outstate, then hitting Detroit hard in the last third to come in. If Republicans are leading close to 60-40 with the first few percent it, it will be a long night for them. Since Hillary has owned the black vote by and large, I was expecting Wayne county to save Hillary's bacon, but it only came in 60-38 Clinton.

________________

On the Republican side, the junior senator from Texas seems to have changed his surname to Van Cruz, for he cleaned up in New Holland region; six of his nine counties were in that greater Grand Rapids area that is the closest thing MI has to a Bible belt.

Midland was a seventh. We're the sixth wealthiest county, with only three Detroit suburban/exurban counties and two resort counties on Lake Michigan beating it out. That would tend to blunt the blue-collar, nativist vibe of Trump; we have more Asians than blacks here, with Hispanics being the largest minority, edging out Asians by 2.5%-2.4%.

That might explain how Trump was held to 34% here, although I was a bit surprised at Cruz's 34%. We did have a Tea Party guy win our state-house seat, so there is a conservative presence even if the local GOP is more in the Chamber of Commerce moderate mode.

Kasich only one two college counties, Washtenaw and Kalamazoo (WMU), and the latter was a 28-27-27 nail-biter.

The 88% Solution

I'm blogging my way through my decision in tomorrow's Michigan primary. Of the four folks still on the course, Marco Rubio is my first choice. He pretty much hits where I'm at in modern politics, and even where he makes mistakes, they're mistakes I could see myself making (or did make, like on the Arab Spring and on immigration, although I'm just a lowly blogger rather than a senator).

However, Rubio is bringing up the rear in Michigan, showing up at 11.4% in RCP's averages, with a 8% and 9% showing on the two freshest polls. With a 4% margin of error, it's about a 10-1 shot for him to crack 15% and get delegates. Rubio has some hope in Florida as a new poll has him only down 38-30 to Trump. With a week to go and some momentum picking up, he's got a shot to win his home state, albeit only about a 20% chance of doing so.

Godspeed, Marco, but it ain't happening tomorrow here, sadly.

Derailing the Tronald Dump Truck is the first priority at this point (I'm invoking Thumper's Rule and moving on), and a Rubio vote has just become very likely to be a protest vote, with the delegates Rubio would have won spread between the other three. I'd rather not have Trump have half of my vote in delegates if I can help it.

That leaves me with Cruz and Kasich: I walked through things Kasich earlier today.

You have a Southern Baptist PK in Cruz who symbolically announced at Liberty University, casting himself as an heir to Jerry Falwell, Sr. Jerry 2.0 wound up backing Trump after that; so much for that symbolism. The Baptist in this Bapticostal appreciates Cruz strong, thinking-man's faith and trusts that he's going to toe a conservative line, so much so that the ACU uses his voting record as an answer key for their ratings.

However, there seems to be a tendency in the Baptist circles I've hung out in (a fairly even GARB-SBC split with a few short-term other Baptist) to translate a rock-solid faith to politics, assuming that you're on a mission from God even on issues that don't have clear theological responses to them. Cruz seems to have a non-trivial dose of that bug.

His take on the shutdown of last year was troubling. As a senator, he could take a "principled stand" against Obamacare and let less strident Republicans cut a deal after a while. If he's the President, he either has to get a majority of the House and 60 votes in the Senate (assuming that's still the cloture rule) to back down to his wishes or two thirds of both houses give him the middle-digit salute and override a veto. On nominations, they can't do any overriding, since he has to nominate someone first.

I'm not worried about Cruz stumbling into WW3. I'm worried about trashing the country as collateral damage of a game of veto chicken; if you tie in a game of chicken, you have a head-on crash and everyone loses.

Kasich isn't a big culture warrior, although he'll be supportive on that front. He might be too quick to cut deals and invoke the preferential option a bit too much. However, I'm more comfortable with a slightly-too-statist deal than a prolonged shutdown that does more than give federal workers a long weekend.  Prolong it long enough and a collapse of the country into autonomous states or coalitions of states might be a result; that might be needed down the line, but not by political miscalculation. Also, since I'm more centrist on economics than Cruz is, I'm less dismayed over a larger-than-optimal budget. 

I was revisiting this post from last fall on applying Clausewitz to budget showdowns. i didn't name Cruz directly in that post, but he's one of the usual suspects of folks on the verge of seeing politics as war by other means. Just war theory heads off some wars as not worth fighting if the evil you're trying to avoid isn't as bad as the damage you're causing to subdue it.

Strident folks often overestimate their ability to win a battle of wills. Conservatives tend to downplay the collateral damage of government being shut down, forgetting the good that a lot of programs do achieve. Combine those two and we see unwinnable political battles fought or battles that have more damage than benefit.

On balance, Cruz would make a good president. As president, I think he'd take a bit of his stridency fastball and be more of a deal-maker; Reagan knew when to cut a deal that wasn't as radical as his wish-list was, and I'd expect Cruz to move somewhat in that direction.

However, I'm a bit risk-averse. I'll take 88% of a loaf (Kasich's career ACU rating) and run rather than risk a big crash going for the whole loaf. There are some things that going to the mat for is called for, but not as much as your movement conservatives seems to be itching for these days. I'll err on the dreaded compassionate-conservative side tomorrow, hoping for something a little more market-oriented to pop loose later after I'm done voting tomorrow.

Preferential Options Don't Trade on the CBOE

The biggest critique of Kasich's faith is when he uses it from a economically-liberal vantage point. Evangelical conservative David French took issue with this line of Kasich's-

I had a conversation with one of the members of the legislature the other day. I said, ‘I respect the fact that you believe in small government. I do, too. I also know that you’re a person of faith.

Now, when you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small. But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer.

The big bone of contention for French was for Kasich getting Ohio to go along with accepting federal funding to expand Medicaid as part of "Obamacare" and to do so quoting scripture from a liberal perspective 

The ACA is a Rube Goldberg mess that started with a noble goal of getting health care coverage to the working-poor, but did multiple contortions to try to appear to be "revenue-neutral", messing up the private insurance system in the process.

However, we're stuck with it as long as that old man (a day older than I) has his keister in the Oval Office. What Kasich was largely faced with is the question "Should we accept federal help getting health care to the working poor?" Obamacare was going down with or without Ohio's consent on Medicaid expansion, leaving the Medicaid expansion part as the primary marginal decision for a state government.

The parallel question, shorn of the pork-barrel effect of free-money from Washington is "should the Federal government be paying for health care for the working poor in the first place?" Modern conservatives tend to want the Federal government to deliver the mail, protect our shores and stay the hell out of everything else (to borrow from WI governor Lee Dreyfus), so the reflex response on the right to the question is "Hell, no!"

However, I don't recall any Biblical commands to maximize GDP.

My core theology of economics (if I can grab a 2003 post) has two aspects; (1) we're supposed to help the poor and (2) we're selfish sinful critters save the Holy Spirit's intervention. Free markets are a good way to harness greed in a productive way in that sinful world, but a certain amount of government is beneficial in both pursuing the general public good and helping the needy. That begs for "limited government" but exactly how limited is an open question.

Should that include covering most of the health-care tab for folks making under $25K/year or so? You can make a case for that, especially if shorn from an Obamacare context. A Catholic-style preferential option towards the poor would be poised to answer in the affirmative. That's one that has a number of scriptures to back it up, although the scriptures on caring for the poor adress voluntary charity rather than the forced-charity of taxes.

However, we also need to take into account that the taxes and regulations needed to get it done damage to the economy and that the good generated needs to weighed against the damage done in the process of doing the good works. That type of marginal utility analysis is more art than science and has a lot of room for debate.

Modern conservative thought has a preferential option for low taxes and a free market. That makes Kasich's invoking that other preferential option (although not by name) sound somewhat sanctimonious to a modern conservative. It may well be sanctimonious and a bit of a Liberal Theocrat to borrow from French's title, but religious conservatives are used to having those terms tossed at them unfairly on a regular (probably daily for a public conservative) basis.

If you're doing your best to follow God's will and follow His word, you're going to get flak, sometimes friendly fire from fellow believers. I'm not sure if I would have made the same decision as Kasich, but I can see the logic behind it and respect it.

Every Other Monday Morning Quarterback

Actually, Monday lunch, but I'm flashing my unexpired poetic licence. That's when John Kasich's bi-weekly Bible study meets, providing the title of a 2010 spiritual memoir Every Other Monday. I only learned about this a few minutes ago while doing a "Kasich church" Google crawl.

It turns out that he grew up Catholic, moved away from the Church as a young adult only to come back about 20 years ago after his parents died. He's since set up shop in a conservative Anglican faction, the Anglican Church in North America, one of those who have parted ways with the Episcopalian Church over its theological liberalism.

Homosexual issues are often given as the rationale for the split, but the split was more about a steady drift towards a more antinomian (no rules) and more universalist (all dogs go to heaven) take on theology within Episcopal circles; the acceptance of same-sex activity and SSM therein is just the part that is visible to the general public who only pays attention when things butt up against the political sphere.

A slow tral through some spiritual musings shows a reasonably devout churchman with an evangelical-style faith. He's not a culture warrior and seems to tries to exhibit the Fruit of the Spirit more than pick fights. The fact that he showed up at a gay friend's wedding isn't a great seller with me (I wouldn't want to endorse the idea by being there even if I would otherwise be supportive of friends who were making questionable choices while politely questioning their choice) the rest of the spiritual back-story seems solid enough if light on theological details.

Love, peacefulness, gentleness and self-control aren't selling too well in 2016. Kasich's "can't we all just get along" shtick might be his gut style along with being an attempt to counter-program the "talk, talk, talk, SCREAM" (as his ad puts it) of his primary foes.

I need to come back to how it applies to Obamacare, for I'm hitting run-on post status real fast.

 

Penny-Kasich For Your Thoughts?

I'm having to play catch-up on John Kasich's post-congressional life. He mostly showed on my radar in the mid-90s as a budget hawk, authoring a package of budget reforms in 1993 with moderate Democrat Tim Penny (he went on to run for governor of MN as a third-party candidate in 2002). The Grey Lady didn't like it at the time and probably still wouldn't.

His stay in Washington was fairly mainstream conservative, finishing with a ACU career rating of 88.3. That would put him in the class as an establishment conservative, as Mitch McConnell has a career rating of 90 and Dan Coates has a career 89. They didn't have things like Heritage Action's rankings of activist-versus-establishment votes that far back, but Kasich seemed to fit into that framework from what I remember of the late 20th century. Ted Cruz batted 100 and Rubio got a 96, so if you want a down the line conservative, Kasich is off the reservation a bit but not too much.

One bone of contention of populists right and left is his stint with Lehman Brothers in the 00s before they went bankrupt courtesy of some bad "bets" on insuring mortgage securities from default. That's not your typical role of an investment bank, who generally serves as a middle-man between corporations looking to sell stocks and bonds and investors looking to buy new debt and stock issues, buying the new issues from the company selling it to their investors at a market price, making their money off of the commissions on the deals.

Kasich seems to have served in that more-traditional investment-banking function, being a deal-maker in their Columbus office. 

Kasich's former colleagues at Lehman have described him as a facilitator, forging relationships and working with Lehman teams on initial public offerings, debt offerings and other deals in areas including manufacturing, media and technology.

So, it would seem that Kasich had little input on the mortgage insurance ("credit default swaps" was the dirty word of 2008's debacle, a new financial critter in the dreaded "Derivative" bucket; the pricing models got acid tested to destruction in 2008, causing firms that would normally know better to loose their shirts) that did Lehman in. It did give him some hands-on experience on the mesoeconomics that corporate finance sits in; that's considered a bug rather than a feature on the left and the populist right, but it gives Kasich some business expertise that his two senatorial foes lack.

Another issue that gave me pause as the campaign progressed was a moderate take on same-sex marriage. While being opposed to it politically, he went to a gay friend's wedding and opted not to take a civil-disobedience tack when the Supreme Court made its pro-SSM decision. He had this line from an August debate

"Because somebody doesn't think the way I do, [it] doesn't mean that I can't care about them or can't love them," Kasich replied when asked how he would explain his views on marriage to one of his daughters if she were gay. "So if one of my daughters happened to be that, of course I would love them and I would accept them."

There's nothing wrong with that; in fact, it's laudable. Note that he didn't say that he would think their sexual choices were a good idea.

I don't have any gay friends (that I know of, at least) but I would have to politely pass on going to their wedding. Kasich going to one isn't a great selling point, but not quite disqualifying.

There are two things I want to riff on a bit later after my afternoon errands are done; looking at Kasich's take on Obamacare and contrasting Kasich's faith walk with Ted Cruz's.

Crossover Moves

I just figured out that the Democrats in Michigan have switched how they do their delegate-selection. In the past, the national party has frowned upon open primaries being used, mandating that they be ignored in favor of caucuses.

2004 and 2000 were caucuses while 2008 used the primary, but 2012 was back to a caucus, switching back to a primary this year. 1992 was a close primary on both sides, while 1988, 1984 (I remember voting for Hart in a conference room at the county courthouse in Midland) and 1980 were primaries.

Thus Michigan's open primary was a non-binding "beauty contest" in much of the recent past, freeing Democrats to raid ("cross-over" if you're being polite) the Republican primary without losing their choice on the issue, since they could vote in the Republican primary and still caucus (more like a party-run primary than the long-meeting form common in Iowa) later on. I did that as a youngster when my family and I were Democrats; I can still picture sitting at my dorm desk at Eastern Michigan, slightly guiltily casting my absentee ballot for Bush 41 in 1980.

This year, the Democrats are using the primary as well. I wondered why they were holding a Democratic debate in Flint yesterday; the locale is fitting given the lead issues and a desire to make Snyder look bad, but the timing was odd given that the primary has been just a beauty contest in the past. 

Not this year. That will limit the amount of Democrats that can cross over, since most of them would rather have a say in the Hillary-Bernie fight. 

There are two schools of thought in cross-overs. One is to vote for the candidate that's most appealing, which would probably be Kasich or Rubio for most Democrats, with a few with a more redneck streak might like Trump's style. That was my line of thought when voting for Bush; I was something of a neoliberal at the time that preferred a centrist take than Reagan's conservative take, even though I would wind up appreciating his foreign policy and stands on moral issues.

The other would be to vote for the guy who's easiest to beat. With a few exceptions, Trump underperforms the other GOP hopefuls in poling, so a few crossover folks might be voting for Trump as the easiest target in November.

I'm still figuring out who I'm going to be voting for tomorrow. Rubio looks like he's not going to break the 15% barrier to get delegates, so I'm having to decide between Kasich and Cruz, who are almost equidistant to my ideology. More on that in a bit.

Signs of the Coming Apocalypse, GOP version

It seems like all investigators are nationalized since there are no private dicks anymore.

The above link is not suitable for Sunday School, but it's a sad sign as to where this campaign has headed. Let me quote myself from a FB thread just now-

A quarter-century ago it was edgy to be talking "boxers or briefs" with Bill Clinton. Now the delegate leader of the prudish party is calling foes a part of the female anatomy along with the above meme started (if memory serves) by an otherwise good Roman Catholic boy.

Marco Rubio is the "Catholic boy" in question, for he joked about Trump's small hands and implied other things might be small as well. Or course, Trump doubled down on the bawdiness rather than letting it slide, making things above his neckline more in question than what's below his waistline. 

That non-chipmunk-friendly shtick was part of Rubio's switch to bad cop last week. Leon Wolf over at Red State likens it to a kamikaze mission that sunk his campaign in the process of damaging Trump's.

Many voters who were horrified by Trump’s response were equally horrified by Rubio’s behavior that provoked it. In much the same way that Chris Christie exposed Rubio at a critical point in the campaign, only to see his own personal standing suffer as a result, Rubio has had the same thing happen to him with respect to Donald Trump.

Granted, I don’t think that Rubio had any sort of altruistic motive in doing what he did; I am quite sure he did it with the intent to win. But at the end of the day it had the salutary effect of allowing Cruz to present himself as the adult in the room and I think is quite a bit responsible for the fact that this is now a surprisingly tight race between Trump and Cruz.

If Cruz ends up winning this thing, he should send Marco Rubio a nice postcard or a thank you note or something.

With Rubio polling fourth in Michigan on the edge of the 15% cutoff for delegates, I'm weighing Cruz and Kasich alternatives, leaning towards Kasich while weighing whether he's too rinoey to support; I'm roughly equidistant between the two ideologically.